Whatever difficulties you may find in life, they lodge in your heart. What you have to do is extrude difficulties from your heart. Whatever may go on in the surface of life, so long as you see them as difficulties, the thoughts of difficulties disturb your heart, your innocent heart. So when your heart is immersed in suffering of one kind or another, no matter how big or how little, your heart carries the burden of it.
You realize, the burden is a result of a thought of yours. The burden is not in the situation. It is in your thoughts about the situation. The burden is in what your thoughts make of the situation. It may seem that your thoughts have walked in uninvited, yet you have ventured something like this: “What am I to make of this?†This question opens the door to your suffering.
The true answer is: “You are to make nothing of this.â€
Are you truly to make something of a passing thing?
You see degrees, however. “This situation is serious,†you say. The situation is, indeed, what you say it is.
What if I were to tell you that you don’t have to take suffering upon yourself? It is not cool, beloveds. It is not necessary nor is it cool.
Even what are called tragedies do not have to be looked at tragically. It has been as if you have been given a book to follow. It is a book of suffering. This book lists categories of offense and their accepted responses. You think the lists of acceptable responses are to be followed. And so your suffering has been prescribed to you.
Do not think I make little of your emotional pain. I do not dismiss it. Your suffering is real. Whether your loss is of income or a loved one, its impact upon you is real. You didn’t make it up, yet you may take it as a given. It feels to you that your whole world has dropped out from under you. Seems like, yet seeming and what is real are not always the same. Whatever has occurred, it is not the end of the world, and it is not the end of your life. It may well be the end of your life as you know it. Whatever occurred is also a part of life. What occurs in life is not meant to trample you. It is not to stomp on you. Whatever has occurred, you will weather it. You will survive it. You will move on.
You are dependent upon so many things because you believe you are. You believe you must be. You correlate too many things. You name your job as your lifeline. You name your loved ones as essential to your well-being.
You have decided that some things are not to happen, even though you know very well that they do happen. Jobs are lost. Accidents happen. Living and life in the world are impermanent. It has always been so. And, yet, nevertheless, you insist that it be permanent. You are permanent. Your life force, if We may call it that, is permanent. Your soul is permanent. Love is permanent. Otherwise, everything is impermanent. Even so you fight change even as it cannot be fought.
Time exists only in the world. You live by it, and yet you protest it. You insist that your life and the characters and situations in your life stay the same, unless it happens that you want to change some aspects of what life hands you.
You wanted something, and you didn’t get it. You had something, and it was taken away from you in one way or another. You didn’t want something, and it visited you.
There are no surprises in life, and yet you are shocked. Then you indict life and accuse it of criminality. Then your mind sacrifices your beautiful heart, and your mind calls itself justified.
