A Fragment of Good

April 13.

It's quiet this morning. It is raining. For me, this usually creates an atmosphere of nourishment that is in some inexplicable way fundamental to the disposition of the soul.

I'm interested in inhabiting this wholeness of life which is not of me, but flows into me from an unknown source.

Yesterday was filled with the ordinary good of daily living. The virus is still lurking in the background, but although it may have power over life and death, it does not have power over the ordinary good of the day. 

Nor will it ever.

The bees had a mild, sunny day in which to explore their new home, and they exulted in it. My son & I built a planting box for raised-bed gardening. My wife & I baked tarts and bread. There were moments of improvisation. Every moment is, in the end, a moment of improvisation.

One thing I have to improvise with throughout the day is my negativity. I'm reminded of the story of the three Billy goats gruff, who have to contend with the ogre under the bridge. I have this negative part lurking under every situation that I have to navigate. It pops up as relentlessly and stupidly as the gear in a piece of clockwork. The gear has many different teeth, all with a singular aim. Each one seems determined to grind the situation down to some lower level where I’m tempted to complain, see things in an evil way, blame others, take satisfaction in the distress and anguish of other people. This part has no intelligence; but it has ill intent.

I suppose all of us has a machine of this kind in us somewhere; one wonders where it comes from. What point is there to this negativity? I don't know. I could explain it in terms of polarities that produce energy for us to use, and so on. There are a lot of metaphysical perspectives one might bring to bear on the subject. Yet in the end, what it always amounts to is me seeing myself as some distressingly negative commentary on a person, a situation, or the world arises in me. 

The commentary never seems to be a part of me or what I am as a person or as a soul; it always seems to come as some outside force, a voice that tells me to think something bad. Fortunately, this voice has little power to create the impulse for actual action in me; it never has. The things that it manages to tempt to me to do are usually rather petty. Perhaps this is OK; as long, I think to myself, as I can avoid the serious sins, perhaps I can be forgiven the little ones.

Yet this doesn't seem good enough. A life filled with petty infractions is just as demeaning and reprehensible, in the end, as one spent committing huge sins. It isn't the scale of the activity that concerns me, it's the attitude. What is this worm that gnaws at the root of our Being? I can deny it; yet it persists.

There is one way in which I see it helping. It reminds me constantly of my smallness, of how tiny I am and how little real spiritual power I have. In this way, it’s a servant.

This type of inward action is in contradiction to the contemporary world of perpetual spiritual empowerment, in which (I suppose, maybe I've got this, like so many other things, wrong) I am supposed to be ever more in love with myself, think of how powerful and great I am, affirm everything about me. I'm supposed to be capable, heroic, etc. We live in the age of the spirituality of ME. This idea has an irony that shines forth from its heart in ways that seem to be overlooked as everyone rushes towards it.

The situation reminds me of Paramhansa Yogananda, who said that we should cast ourselves in the role of a hero in our own life. It sounds great, but I now realize that – after spending a lifetime doing something like this, no matter how pathetically – the hero always has some deep flaw that has to be overcome. Perhaps it’s this apparently tiny but objectively indestructible gear of negativity that turns in me –and maybe there is no way to overcome it. This is a stimulating factor that constantly reminds me of how little I have really achieved over the course of 64 years, and how much is left to be done.

It engenders, in other words, humility.

In Christianity, as in Buddhism, abandonment and surrender of life and ego is a central tenet. (See Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 89.) This action has to be engaged in without metaphysical presumptions, because evidently even the metaphysical presumptions must go. All the masters’ metaphysical presumptions seem to agree on this point. (Oops.) The action of surrender needs to be comprehensive—unto, so to speak, death. There needs to be a perpetual inner action, one that is always present, one which one gives everything else up and just inhabits the moment quite simply. The negativity is in there, as well. It’s the truth of the moment that matters.

So in abandoning, I abandon my negativity along with my other qualities. I have permission to leave that behind me instead of allowing it to soil me. It may be an action I have to engage in 10,000 times a day; I don't know. In every moment I move past it even one step, some good has been done. And, I must confess, in the midst of all these ideas about abandonment, detachment, and surrender, desire will still exist. 

I do desire to do some good in this day. One can throw all the noble metaphysical ideas one wants to at the world and its creatures and how we should leave them behind; yet if we throw out the wish to do some good and leave that behind as well, the baby has gone out with the bathwater. It’s my responsibility and my duty to have a wish to do some good. It may be very little good; but even a tiny amount of good is better than none.

That good needs to be, in my experience, an objective good; something that is not for myself but for others. If the only good I can do is to not inflict my relentless inner negativity on others, that is already perhaps a much greater good than I can understand.

For this reason alone, I find it worthy to practice self observation, to see myself, and to pay attention to how I am in the present moment. 

If this is the only thing that comes of it, already, it’s a good thing on its way to greater ones. In and of itself, of course, it’s a very small action, an inflection imparting character — but all greater good is built by tiny fragments of good which get together and acknowledge one another.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.