Peace and Struggle
I wonder why it is so difficult for us to realize the essence of peace within ourselves. I have been exploring this question over the past year when visiting different spiritual and philosophical centers and ashrams. When talking with the swamis, roshis, and teachers, I realized that the obstacle toward this realization of peace comes down to one thing–the idea that struggle is necessary for the realization of peace. To a person, they put forth, with great certainty, that the only path to peace is through struggle. I cannot agree that their approach is a valid one. Yet it is not a matter of mere disagreement. It goes much deeper.
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I have seen that the attachment to struggle is not entirely a spiritual or philosophical question. It is also a question of cultural conditioning. So, let’s take a look at human behavior in Western Culture. When I say Western Culture, I don’t mean just what happens in the Western World. The ideas of the West have permeated Eastern Culture as well, such as, in India and China.
The concept of the individual in Western Culture is based on the belief that each human being is a separate individual that calls herself or himself, “I.” This self-centered, egocentric “I” clings to something that is evermore present in contemporary society: Identity.
If one is so focused on oneself as a particular identity or identifies with a particular group that is separate from all others with their particular identity, the inevitable result is conflict. We begin to believe that our identity is better than or less than the other person’s or group’s identity. Then we have to defend or promote our identity to feel whole. When this behavior becomes the dominant way in which we relate to one another we are always involved in a struggle with no time or inclination to look inward and see what is beyond this narrow ego identity. This struggle becomes so ingrained in our minds that we also become engaged in a constant conflict with ourselves. ” I have to have more. I have to try harder. I have to do more. I’m not good enough.” All of these thoughts then become the mantra of the mind and all we are left with is the old tune of struggle, struggle, struggle.
However, there is another way of being that we can discover in the ancient texts such as the Upanishads of India and the Tao te Ching of China. The Aitareya Upanishad states, “We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.” In other words, we create the delusion of struggle and begin to define ourselves by it. But there is another way of being. Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao te Ching, wrote the following 2,500 years ago. “Other people have a purpose. I alone don’t know. I drift like a wave on the ocean. I blow, aimless as the wind.” These words can be absolutely frightening to the Western mind. It runs counter to everything that Western thought proposes in its philosophies, theologies, and morality. According to the channels of Western thought, you must have a purpose. You have to know that what you know is right. To drift and be aimless is immoral. You must work, achieve, and establish your identity. But is that not a sad and misconceived prescription for one’s life? To live your life under this dark shadow of struggle is to live in stress, anxiety, and fear. And it can be downright depressing.
We cannot find the peace within ourselves through struggle. For example, when you are nervous or upset about something and someone says to you, in a raised voice, “Why don’t you just relax!” Well, we all know that doesn’t work. But to “Drift like a wave on the ocean.” What does that mean? If you could magically subtract the neediness, the greed, the anger, the worry, and the stress from your life, if you could expunge the false idea that you are a separate being that needs to struggle against other separate beings what would that look like?
First you might look beyond this illusion that striving and struggling are necessary for peace and greater awareness. You might ask yourself, what exists beyond struggle? In other words, who are you when you are not struggling? You are certainly not the image or idea of yourself that you have adopted to present to the world. When you are alone and quiet and by some miracle, your mind becomes still, if only for a moment, you are coming closer to peace, to the real you, like a “wave in the ocean.” For a moment the ego has fallen away. When you first wake up in the morning, in that moment before you remember the ego identity that you have adopted to protect and project yourself in the world, in the moment of waking before you remember all your problems, you are becoming closer to the peace, the real you. When you find, in a passing moment, not wanting or needing anything, you are closer to the peace, to the real you, just being alive amidst an alive world-your true identity. If you could just let yourself be in those moments, how would that feel?
Essentially, you are no different than a tree. Many of you may find this statement absurd. “I’m me. I’m not a tree,” might be the reaction. But in essence, you are like a tree. A tree does not worry about its image, its ego, or its identity. It just is. It photosynthesizes the life rays of the sun. It sprouts buds in the spring and leaves in early summer. It moves with the wind without resistance. It drops its leaves in the autumn and rests, dormant, in the winter. No fuss. No muss.
Can you be in your life with the ease of a tree? Can you move through your life without struggle? Can you imagine two trees arguing with one another over who has the prettiest leaves? Why do so many of us struggle to have the prettiest house, the fanciest car, the biggest bank account, the highest achieving children, the cutest dog, the best souffle? Because we do not see ourselves as we really are and resist being who we really are with the greatest effort, and we continue to struggle.
I expect many of you could present a logical argument as to how everything I have written here is patently untrue. But therein rests the trouble. Logic is not life. It is a construction of the mind. Nature is not logical. A tree is nature. You are nature. When we admire a beautiful sunset, it is a phenomenon of nature. You are a phenomenon of nature. If you believe you are a separate being looking at the sunset, as if you were some mechanized creature standing apart from everything else in the universe, you have not discovered your true identity as an integral part of everything that is.
You are not separate. You are not mechanized. When you realize this and feel it in your heart, you will no longer have to struggle. You find that striving and struggling just gets in the way. Without struggle you see that the essence of you is peace. When struggle falls away peace reveals itself. Peace is not something that you get. It is who you are, already, without effort, without striving, and without struggle. When you realize the peace that you are, you begin to move easily through your life like a “wave on the ocean.”
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Open Space, Open Mind 