Imagine our most common problems: sickness, poverty, and death; then violence, trauma, violation, oppression, and -isms. Imagine all of this, not to mention corruption, tyranny, dictatorships, terrorism, inhumane treatment, and harm to animals. Then there is climate change, pollution, trash, mass consumption. There is overpopulation and unwanted pregnancies, abortion and a woman’s right to choose. There are the basic human problems, lost love, lost relationship, lost looks, lost glory. There is existential pain—the pain and exhaustion of existence. There is some non-locatable sense of discontent and ennui.
There is shallow media, the constant barrage of technology, the dehumanizing experience from technology, the disconnection due to our phones. There is addiction and gangs and crime. There is the issue of growing food and pesticides, bees, and droughts. There is the threat of running out of fuel, nuclear meltdown, and people who do not see there is abundant solar energy.
There is legacy pain based on slavery, the patriarchy, and forms of religious hatred that justify persecution of people for their sexual expression. And, there are those who violate biblical laws with their sexual or gender expression. There is smoking and secondhand smoke. There are meteorites and earthquakes and tsunamis. There is illiteracy, lack of clean water, lack of access.
There are predators and con-men and those who would prey on the weak. There are those who pretend to be weak to get advantages they do not deserve. There are those who are starving and those who cannot lose weight no matter what they do. There are those who feel they do not belong.
There are those who are plagued by luxury problems, like what to do with all their money, the exhaustion of tending to the staff, and the problem of not being able to communicate that there is very real pain in these problems. There are parasites and houseflies and mosquitoes. There are those who love and embrace these issues and those who hate, despise, and fight against them.
There are those things we all agree are wrong and then there are some people who practice them, or even worse, exhibit some kind of illumination and incandescence when faced with these problems, who get a diagnosis and do not try to overcome it but be with it, who lose the one thing they loved and discover that they oddly now love everything, who smoke and seem to thoroughly enjoy it, who make their ennui the fuel for their art.
There are those who seek for gold inside of everything—the seed insight, the simple expression of natural law that must be known through experience and when experienced fully and truly, always reveals astonishing beauty. This beauty is not a protective beauty, because beauty is what it is precisely because it is ephemeral. It does not protect or aim to protect us from the difficulties of life. It does not even seek to change the wrongs, although there is a secret that reveals itself. Those regularly exposed to this beauty transmit it, and when people know there is regular and consistent access to beauty, they start creating.
As a result, the “wrongs”—that at one time looked like they needed a solution—fall away as desirable. If we do not know how to perceive beauty, we cannot aim toward the truth that is beautiful. We are blindly operating in the world, blind to the beauty that is here and blind to the way to be able to channel it. We do not need to tear down ugliness. It is a delusion created by delusion. We need only create beauty that makes the need for ugliness unnecessary, or even better—although this will likely be misunderstood—we need an eye that cannot see the ugliness and so draws forth more and more beauty.
What if we pulled back the lens and discovered that problems never have and never will stop? There are the same number of problems today as there always were. The goal of this experience was never to master it or “nail it” or bend it to our will, but to be with it and know it exactly as it is. What if the answer to all of our prayers was a simple acceptance of what is, as it is; not an endorsement and not a defeat but a true acceptance that this is how it is, this is where we are. These are all the good things and these are all the bad things and they are all occurring at the exact same time. What if we employed our fixing efforts into seeing efforts? If instead of saying, “This is a problem, how do we fix it?” we said, “This is a phenomenon, how do we come to know, understand, be informed by, and be moved by it? What does it want to show us about people, about ourselves, about life?” What if none of it is broken and all of it is broken at the same time and we get to all play together in order to discover? Just that. In order to discover, we create more interesting ways to play with what we have.
