"Do not seek perfection in a changing world. Instead, perfect your love." Buddha (563 BCE - 483 BCE)
Rumi, as usual, said it best.
“Not until faithfulness turns into betrayal
and betrayal turns into trust
Can any human being
find part of the truth.”
If you want to find some pure, untouched place in the world where the troubles of our times and the struggles of being human do not appear, where everyone is kind, loving, always honest, respectful and no one ever gets hurt and where you can be totally safe, you will not only look in vain but you will bring your childish fantasies of this Utopia with you and burden those in every place you find with your disappointments that they didn't live up to them.
Every person you meet and fall for ends up becoming a disappointment to you - they let you down because they weren't perfect, they have their flaws. Each new person you meet, you think, "This might be them! Finally, I've met someone who is different! They're not like all the others." And then the betrayal.
Every time, the words escape our lips, "You are not what I had hoped you would be."
Every ashram becomes a sham. Every new job is full of flaws. Every indigenous community a heartbreak. Every spiritual teacher a fraud. Every new potential and actual lover a discouraging disaster. Every new, would-be-friend and ally full of unbearable contradictions. Every time, the words escape our lips, "You are not what I had hoped you would be." And, of course, the whole thing is heartbreaking.
And so reality, the way the world is and the people in it are, becomes a constant betrayal. But the betrayal is a necessary one. It's the betrayal that asks us to stop being children about the whole thing complaining that this world isn't what we hoped it would be.
"What is it that you wanted to be before the world made you into this?"
You'll make the world wrong for being the way it is and take the current state of reality as a personal affront to yourself and people like you. But, if you want a better tomorrow and you're willing to meet the world as it is and are willing to do the impossibly hard work of loving it by learning the deeper story of how it came to be the way it is, if you're willing to ask every troubling thing you come across, "What is it that you wanted to be before the world made you into this?" then things may begin to change.
If you're willing to take a stand to stop behaviour you witness that is hurting others without giving into the easy urge to punish, destroy, banish or vilify them in order to 'purify' the community - then things might begin to change.
The world in which we find ourselves is deeply troubled and troubling. It is a dangerous time and an endangered one. And the trouble and danger live within us too. There is the simple, pure and light-filled and fictional world of 'Supposed To' and then there is this is the real, messy, complicated world in which we live - full of beauty and terror. And this world is not in the way of our getting to the better tomorrow that we want. It is the way... If approached well. If approached poorly, it isn't.
The world is waiting for our hopes to die and for our genuine, loving labour to begin.
As Stephen Jenkinson put it, "Awakening is not what you've been told. You don't get on the other side of what's been blocking you from awakening - it puts you in the presence of it."
But then, the question remains, what do we do when we find ourselves in the presence of it?
As the modern meme goes, “Many things broke my heart that fixed my vision.” These heartbreaks give us a new chance to see more clearly and to re-affirm our citizenship in the way things are and burn our passport to the fantasy world of ‘how things oughta be’.
Our continued condemnation of this world is what keeps it the way it is. The world is waiting for our hopes to die and for our genuine, loving labour to begin. It's waiting for us to stop waiting for this better tomorrow to be delivered to us and for us to start fashioning it. It's waiting to be redeemed instead of discarded because it isn't perfect enough to meet our impossible, adolescent standards.
When we turn others into a hope-fulfillment vehicle the first casualty of that is the other person. It dehumanizes others to turn them into tools for us to use or food for us to eat. They were not put into this world for us to have our expectations met. When they fail to do something we tell ourselves that they should do (or do something we tell ourselves they shouldn't have), that doesn't mean they have failed - it means they were given an impossible task and were crushed by the weight of it. Our incessant hopes, demands and expectations of others are harmful to the very others we claim to admire and love so deeply.
None of this means that real harm isn't done. Of course, that's there too. But, let's all think a bigger thought than, "I'm disappointed" and ask ourselves how it came to be this way that so much harm is being done so often and that the bar for our conduct with each other has become so low. None of this is a call for no standards of conduct and 'anything goes'. It's being willing to wonder, "Why is it that anything seems to go? Why does this harmful behaviour keep appearing? Why do I stay silent? Do I have a role in this continuing to happen and how did that begin?" and then wondering what our role might be in bringing some sort of wholeness back to the community without making anyone wrong.
Our attempts to love this world as it is (which is not the same as passively accepting or condoning it) and, in so doing, encourage the growth of a finer world that we may never get to enjoy ourselves... well, that may be the closest thing that any of us get to a genuine initiation into adulthood.
Our willingness to love this world and everyone in it, actively, passionately, fiercely is what allows it to become more whole and ourselves to become adults.
"The suffering is most intensified in the experience of betrayal, and betrayals, large and small, are an inevitable thing in intimacy. Anyone who doesn't seem to share your view of how things are or should be - like a friend who tells you a truth you don't want to hear or a spouse who won't go along with you - seems to betray you. Yet betrayal carries within it a way to great wisdom a well as a way to cynicism. There is a choice. While there is never a good reason to seek out betrayal, and left to our own devices we avoid it by almost any means necessary, there is no cause for alarm: betrayal is looking for each of us to relieve us of the humiliating, infantilizing burden of naiveté. Your breaking heart makes room for your soul's work to be done." - Stephen Jenkinson, Money & The Soul's Desires
This reminds me of a stanza from one of my favorite Rumi poems:
Not until faithfulness turns into betrayal
and betrayal turns into trust
Can any human being
find part of the truth.
It's a powerful statement, and the way I read it is similar to something I read from Carl Jung. I'm going to misquote it, but the jist is this:
When we travel to the bottom of our soul, there we will find the world made again.
We cannot avoid betrayal. I believe the most egregious form of this is how we betray ourselves.
We set people and situations up to affirm our world view. My take on it is that we inherit three major griefs in our lives. A grief of self, of others and of the world we live in.
For the purposes of a reply to your great article, I'll stick with the grief of others.
As much as we want to believe that we have a positive outlook on life, it's really bullshit. None of us do. Why would we need things like daily affirmations if we genuinely had a positive outlook on life. This isn't an indictment, and there is no shame/blame/guilt attached to it. It's an attempt to get to what Rumi ends with: Truth.
We have come to a core conclusion about other people.
People will let me down
People can't be trusted
People are self centered
People are arrogant
etc etc etc
And if we don't realize the truth of this, we filter every relationship through that grief and sooner or later they are going to fail the test. "See, you did let me down or you lied to me or you did something self centered."
We can't change that core grief, or at least I haven't found a way to. This is where the Jung quote comes in. Instead of "othering" our grief, or feeling betrayed by our betrayal (from self, others or the world), we have to travel into it. Befriend it and see what real magic it holds for us. Because those betrayals are the gateway to our deepest strengths and as Jung says, when we get there, the world is made whole again.
When we can look beyond the act, and see what we are really upset about is the story that we have made about the act then we begin to make allies with those betrayals or griefs. I look at those betrayals as lighthouses. When they come up it's an indicator that I need to pay close attention because what is happening is core to my growth, or my gifts. There are rocks ahead that you can crash on, so go carefully and really listen/look before you yank the wheel of the boat this way or that.
I totally agree that "this is the real, messy, complicated world in which we live." That's what makes it so damn beautiful, more so when we let the betrayal turn into truth.
Nice article!
Another wonderful article for pondering, Tad. The power of loving in the face of pain, suffering, and betrayal is immense. There's a tremendous learning for us all, and one of the key factors to include is the virtue of patience.
Our quick-fix/magic-pill society longs for instant results, and it takes tremendous courage to stay the course even when things aren't seeming to change. Yet, if we can bear it long enough with magnanimity (loftiness of spirit enabling one to bear trouble calmly, to disdain meanness and pettiness, and to display a noble generosity), love will be found.
As you said, even if not in our lifetime, we can move toward this for the sake of the evolution of humanity and the earth. There are many times I need to "grow up" and find love for the world beyond the cynicism that creeps in around my unmet expectations. Thank you for your inspiration, and the reminder of my own experience (a story for another time and place) that what you speak of is indeed possible when we place love at the fore.