There is a story greater than ours, unfolding in each present moment, inviting us to embrace it as our own. Here is a true story to illustrate this idea.
Under Paris is one of the largest catacombs in the world -- a hundred square miles of underground passages. Lamps for guided tours light up a small portion, while most of the rest remains in the dark. Two men got it into their heads that they wanted to go into the unexplored region of the catacombs, so with their flashlights they wandered down the unlit pathways. Eventually their flashlight batteries died, and they realized they didn't have the slightest inkling where they were.
They felt a soul-gripping, tremendous fear. Realizing that they were really lost, they had to do something they didn't even know they could do, which was to first subdue their fear. The only way out was to use their noses to follow the faintest movement of fresh air. They had to be that attuned to the difference in the quality of the air where they were standing, and where the air was fresher one step from there. This took tremendous attention, which meant they had to absolutely put their fear aside. And eventually they found their way up and out.
The reason I tell you this story is because it is a metaphor for what we must learn to do in unwanted moments. With acute awareness of our actual condition, we can call upon something that we didn't even know we could until a condition holds us captive -- until there is no way out using what we ordinarily call upon. The men in the story had to be very, very quiet to be able to catch the scent of fresh air. We must learn to be very, very quiet, but in a different kind of way.
When you are lost in the catacombs of your own darkened consciousness, it's possible to stop running from wall to wall, hoping to escape the negativity you are feeling. Understand that the reason you're feeling lost and frightened is because you have preferred your story, your plan, over the fact of this moment.
But feeling lost is an opportunity to see that your story doesn't work. There is an alternative to your story, always a greater moment than anything you could have ever hoped for if you just understood where to look for it. And it is not a story intended to take anything from you. It is a story that is intended to lift you up and out of the catacombs of your own present uncreative life.
When you run into some disturbance, the first thing to remember is that you have run into your own story. And if you run into your story, why would you look to your own story to get you out of it? When you run into your own story and realize you're not something you imagined yourself to be, and you feel that negativity, you can do something that occurs to almost no one: Not my will but Thy will be done. You can agree to the moment that seems to be punishing you instead of trying to punish the whole world (or yourself) to change the moment.
You have to put God to the test. It's no good if you don't. Either a room is prepared for you, or it's not. When you begin to understand that all the suffering you do over your story is unnecessary and can't produce the end of itself, then you can begin to do something that you have been intended to do all along... which is to wake up in the moment and whole-heartedly embrace it without trying to extract from it those things that determine whether your story is right, wrong, good, or bad. Because God's moment is sufficient unto itself. All that energy is right here and now, and all you have to do is accept it. But to do that, you have to let go of your story. When you accept God's story, when you accept the moment as it's written, then within that moment you have your moment, and you can understand much better from that perspective everything that you're entitled to and expected to do.
Experiment with it. See what happens. There will be thousands of moments where you suddenly run into the fact that you had written a different story. You can use the disturbance, the impact, the conflict to wake up and just welcome the moment as it is...
agree to it.
