In my personal explorations, I've sought out and talked with many
highly educated people, with many self-taught people, indeed I've
talked with many wise people, some great teachers, a few professors,
and one or two gurus. I was intrigued by what they had. To me it seemed
as if they had something I didn't, which I coveted. It seemed as if
they knew a secret, the secret I didn't know which, if I only
knew it, would reveal something that would make my life more liveable,
something which would imbue my life with a higher quality, something
which would make my life not so complicated and laborious. Whatever
secret they had (and I was certain they had one), I wanted
it. So to discover their secret, I listened to them, I imitated what
they did, I read what they read, I talked to whomever they talked to, I
ate what they ate, I traveled to where they traveled, I
practiced what they
practiced.
And I still didn't discover their secret. In spite of that, I remained
convinced they had one.
Then I talked with
Werner.
And after talking with
Werner
ie after
being around
Werner,
something extraordinary, something unbelievable happened: I'd finally
figured it out: I'd realized there's no secret! Oh ... my
...
God
(cue that old country song about looking for love in all the wrong
places ...). There's no secret. Oh ... my ...
God.
This is it! And after all that time investing all that energy in search
of the secret ie after all that time wanting to know the secret, it
turns out there is none. Wow.
After centuries and more (millennia possibly, depending on your culture
and ancestry) of trying to figure it / life / all of it out, and after
just as long trying to figure each of ourselves out, after
all the group sessions, after all the therapy sessions, after all the
prayers,
after all the books, after all the gurus, the trips, the highs
(and the lows), after all the time invested in looking for the inside
edge (perhaps that's better restated as the homophonic
"insight edge"), after all our visits to the confessional
and all our time in synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, convents,
seeking, searching, looking for
God,
the meaning of life, and the secret to finding them, after all that, it
turns out a) she's not coming, and b) there's none: there's no meaning,
there's no secret, this is it - exactly this way, exactly
not that way, just like this, not like that.
There's nothing to figure out. There's no meaning after all, and it's
not significant! This is it. I mean ... who woulda thunk?
What a plot twist.
"But
Laurence"
you say, "surely there's a secret ... ?" (and that's a very
big, playful "surely"). OK, I'll play:
here is
the secret:
there is none. That's the secret: there is no secret.
No fooling! When you get that (I mean when you
really get it), it's simply jaw-dropping,
staggering in its simplicity - that is, if you can even
begin to let it in, and deal with it. All the meaning and all the
significance we heap onto being alive like we heap chocolate sauce and
sprinkles on our sundaes, serves no purpose other than to effectively
obscure that for which we were hoping in the first place: an epiphany
revealing the secret. But this is it, this experience (not
any other one) - exactly the way it is, without changing anything,
without fixing anything, without adding anything. This ...
is ... IT! There's nothing missing.
There's nothing to get.
The such-ness of it, the thus-ness of it ... it's so
deceptively, so blindingly, so
stoopidly
obvious. Getting it ie
the moment when you finally
let it in,
is like the time you couldn't find your reading glasses (we've all had
a moment like this): you looked here, you looked there, you looked
everywhere, upstairs, downstairs, in all the rooms, between the couch
cushions, in the car ... only to discover they were perched on your
nose the whole time. They were there all the time. There was nothing to
get. That's the secret: there's no secret! This is what it
looks like - exactly like this. This is what it feels like. Exactly
like this. Here's the
mystery:
being human, we're sure this cannot be it, that there must be something
else, something more, and there must be some secret to get it. But
there isn't. This is it. There's no secret. We're free.