Little by little, the purpose of life for men and women has become directed to one thing: I want to get to the point in my life where there are no more disturbances.
The purpose of this life is not to avoid disturbance, or to find a disturbance-free existence! If you examine this, you can see the fact of it for yourself. Are you getting more relaxed in life when it comes to people and problems? Do you have more equanimity towards moments of disturbance? Or are you getting wound up tighter and tighter because you're finding yourself getting further away from reaching that point where nothing's going to disturb you?
What causes a moment where you feel "this isn't right?" You hear some news, or maybe you feel it when you open your eyes in the morning. Can you see how much time is spent feeling "this isn't right"?
Eventually a person accepts that constant pain of resisting everything. They just tolerate it. Are you going to spend the rest of your life like that where (and I'm being generous here) at least 60% is spent with an interior attitude of "this isn't right"? Or does something within you recognize that if there's a true purpose to this life, it can't be that? If we're ever going to find out for ourselves a purpose in life that is not the generator of this condition where all the things we look at lead to "this isn't right," then we're going to have to see life in a different way and find a different purpose for it.
So the first thing we must ask ourselves is: Does what is disturbing me exist apart from my goal of reaching a point where nothing disturbs me anymore? And the answer is "no." On the contrary, with all I've done to fulfill that goal, the more disturbed I am by everything!
Here you are, all the time disturbed, and your answer to every disturbance is to try to either quell the disturbance by resolving it through another plan, or to escape the disturbing situation. That's the answer that you, the human mind, has for the disturbance. But the good news is that there's a new answer: Something beautiful is trying to say to you, "Hey, maybe you have the wrong purpose. Maybe you're going about life wrong."
We need to understand that everything about this life, this world, is actually set up so that there is continual disturbance and continual deliverance from the disturbance. That's real life. You can see it in scale in nature. Real life is a continual influx of one order of energy into another. That passage of uninterrupted energy causes a disturbance in what it passes into, which instantaneously changes it into something else, allowing the passage of energy and a further transformation. The disturbance is the entrance of the energy. The deliverance is the transformation of that nature the energy has come into. And that's why there is no such thing as a life without disturbance, because without disturbance there would be no life.
Resistance is a natural feature of life, serving a natural purpose. Trees would never stand the way they do, flowers would never be able to open the way they do, energy would never be received, and nothing would be transformed without resistance. But for us, disturbance has a negative connotation. That part of us that resists resistance is an unnatural part of life. In other words, here I am, and something happens -- it could be the look on a person's face, or the passage of a certain energy moving through the earth of which I'm a part -- and in that split second, there is a disturbance. That which has come moves into "me" with my collection of ideas and images about the purpose of life. There's no problem with the movement, but the movement that strikes me disturbs me, doesn't it?
Life exists in a very beautiful balance, where something is always entering, something is always being changed, and something is always reconciling the movement. But when a disturbance comes to us, and we meet it with "this isn't right," our mind instantaneously starts to figure out what to do to resolve what has disturbed us. Then out of that instantaneous resistance, suddenly the mind is full of new plans, new purposes, a new self-definition since our old definition isn't working. After all, we're disturbed again!
But that moment of natural disturbance is a gift. Why? Because it is stirring the soul. It is showing the content of the nature that's there. It is revelatory because, for a split second, it opens up a person's awareness of the fact that within them is something set against the very movement of life itself. It resists every disturbance. But what happens if here comes a disturbance and without me resisting it, without me wishing it weren't so, without my attitude of "this isn't right," there's just pure disturbance? And I can't resolve it. I've spent my life trying to resolve what my mind says is the disturbance, but now I see the only problem has been my resistance to the resistance.
What I'm trying to help you do is to get your mind finally to start seeing the whole of itself, because that's the only way that a person ever learns what it means to participate in the full moment. Real courage is to allow yourself to be changed. When you no longer answer the disturbance with resistance to it, there's just the pure disturbance. And the pure disturbance belongs to a system that is already reconciling itself.
Again, look at nature. A tremendous storm comes along with opposing forces, and all the various systems involved are already reconciling themselves in the very movement of that storm. You want to know why your storms go on and on? Because you think you're not supposed to be in them! Doesn't this world offer an answer for every agitation? If it's not to medicate ourselves, it's to plan another trip, or to figure out how to get a better body, a new job, a new enemy, a new lover. And on and on it goes... all of which is futile. Because every one of those ideas come from a nature that when it gets disturbed, simply analyzes the event according to its own conditioning, and then figures out a way to escape the disturbance.
But life is supposed to have disturbance. Disturbance is half of life. It's half of it! And when the futility of resisting the disturbances gets really clear, then a person finally understands there's only one thing to do in the moment the disturbance comes. You surrender, which allows the disturbance to do what it's intended to do, which is to let you see what has been disturbed.
As you are now you never see what's been disturbed; you only see the disturbance. Resistance blinds you to what's actually taking place inside of you. Here comes the disturbance and you start to feel it. When something irritates you, your attention goes to the source of the irritation and develops a plan to end the problem. But when it gets abundantly clear that this moment of disturbance can only be met with allowing this disturbance to do what it's intended to do, then you have found the courage to be changed. As we are now our lives are predicated upon trying to change ourselves, change the other person, or change our conditions so we don't get disturbed the next time. Instead, we need to understand this very beautiful dynamic that takes place in all of life to let that disturbance be there without answering it from our past or an imagined future. We surrender as best we can so that this reconciling force can do its work within our very soul.
Then you become a participant in the birth of yourself, of your true nature, living and dying moment to moment because you're not resisting anymore. You're letting life do as it's intended to do, as God has created it, to produce this beautiful and continuous set of energies that come in, reveal, and transform.
Allow God's life to work upon you and through you. Learn what it means to just let the disturbance be there and don't resist it. If you won't resist the disturbance, then that which was disturbed, and that which is doing the disturbing, will go through a natural process of reconciliation. And at the end of that, you are a different human being because you've allowed God's hand into your heart and into your mind to shape you the way that you are intended to fulfill the true purpose of your life.
