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One must first picture an ancient Mayan temple rising up from the jungle. Its edges are crumbling, but the stairs are still intact enough so that the climb can be made with only a minimum of danger.

Rebecca and I found ourselves atop such a structure only a couple of days ago, gazing out over an endless expanse of jungle.

At the top of this temple was a small portal which led into a darkened hallway. Indeed, peering in, the hallway was pitch black. Quite eagerly, I fished about in my pack and retrieved the flashlight I had brought along just in case we stumbled upon such a darkened passage. I stepped inside, clicked it on, and experienced something quite strange. The flashlight did not light the darkness at all!

Were the batteries dead? No. When I looked into the flashlight’s bulbs, they were as bright as ever. But by some strange twist of nature (or perhaps due to old Mayan magics?), the beam illuminated nothing.

It took only a moment for me to realize why. My eyes swiftly adjusted, and it became plain that it wasn’t actually very dark in the passage at all. Indeed, I could have comfortably read a book in the light. But coming from outside, where the bright sun was reflecting off the near-white stones of the ruins, my eyes had perceived the passage as being totally dark.

Perhaps this is the time to create some superficial parable about light and darkness, but I’ve something a bit more practical in mind. Because what happened in this situation is that my senses gave me an (apparently) very clear ‘fact’, and because of that fact, I made a very physical decision (to expend energy getting out the flashlight and turning it on).

We do this all the time in life. It seems both necessary and natural. Our senses give us information which we take as ‘fact’, and we spend our life energy attempting to deal with these problems. This seems straightforward.

But if we use awareness, we’ll find that our problems don’t have much to do with the ‘outer world’, and have quite a bit to do with our perceptions.

We get angry with people, we rail against the injustices of the world, and we get frustrated with our own behavior. What we’re failing to see is that we are reacting to unexamined perceptions. We take the ‘fact’ of observed darkness, and react to it.

In the case of the darkened ruins, it was easy to see the ‘truth’ behind the apparent perceptions. The actual amount of light became apparent after only a few seconds. But our usual life perceptions are more clever at deceiving us, and we can spend years (or even a whole lifetime) thinking that ‘reality’ is a certain way, when all we’re really seeing is our skewed perception of things.

The marvelous thing about awareness is that it works all by itself. I didn’t have to concentrate on anything or force my eyes to adjust to the darkness. They did it all by themselves. In our regular lives, it’s just the same — if we allow our awareness to actually be aware, we’d be amazed at what we’d discover. Unfortunately, we’re not apt to do that. We believe that anything worthwhile in life must be worked for and forced, and we’ve all gotten in the habit of forcing our ideas onto our awareness.

So a friend calls us up and yells at us over the phone. We are incapable of the ultimate compassion that would result if we could see the situation just as it is, and instead we start forcing our ideas. Who does Mary think she is? She doesn’t have the right to yell at me! It’s not my fault! If she wasn’t so stubborn/blind/ignorant/fearful/stressed out/selfish, she wouldn’t be such a nasty person!

Seeing what’s actually there takes a special sort of relaxedness. Our awareness is expert at this, and knows precisely what I’m talking about. Our ideas, however, will all too eagerly get in the way.

Imagine that I entered the dark passageway, turned on the light, and when the beam didn’t do anything, I turned the light right into my eyes. I would have been assured, then, that the light was on and working. Then I might have shone the flashlight back out into the darkness, and my eyes, blinded by the brightness, once again would have found the passage dark and the flashlight’s beam ineffective. Panicked, I might have shone the flashlight into my eyes again to see if it was working. I could have replayed this cycle over and over again, lost in my ignorance, sure that the solution to the problem could be found in the power of the flashlight — in my power to force the light to come.

This is what it means to be reborn over and over again into new incarnations, never escaping from karma, never escaping our self-created illusion. Grasping again and again at solutions we’re sure will work, only to find that the basic problems of life never go away. If you came into the passage and saw me flashing the light over and over into my eyes, you might have thought me crazy, especially if you saw that it was, indeed, light enough in the passageway already, and that I was creating my own problem over and over again. You might tell me to relax, that everything was alright, and that all I had to do was turn off my flashlight and stop trying so hard. But how would you do that if I was absolutely convinced that it was dark, and that the only way to light the dark was with the beam of my light?

Why is life difficult? Why is there pain and suffering? Why is there stress, and doubt, and death?

These questions arise because we’re not seeing what’s right in front of us. We’re lost in the dream of our idea-creating minds, which decide ‘how the world is’. But we don’t need to decide how the world is. It’s readily apparent, right now, right in front of us, right here. By seeing this, we can cease to create the problems that we’re habitually creating, and discover the amazing world that’s been right here, all along.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Awakening and Reality. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.