8. You've tried to change yourself, now try seeing "what is"

You may have noticed that my discussion of turning dating disappointment into dating adventure has nothing to do with changing yourself. It’s really all about seeing life clearly. There are a couple of examples used by spiritual masters to help explain this. You may have heard them. One is the story of the snake and the rope.

A man is walking a path in a land where there are dangerous snakes. It’s near dusk and he rounds a corner to see a snake in the middle of the path. He can’t get around it and he can’t get home without going past. So he gets a long stick and pokes gingerly at the snake, hoping to move it. No luck. It doesn’t move. He prods a little harder while his heart races in fear. After a few minutes it hits him: The snake isn’t a snake, it’s a rope.

Instantly his fear is gone and he just walks over the rope and heads home. No change was necessary, he just saw the reality or the truth of the situation instead of believing what he thought was true.

The other story is about a mirage. We’ve all seen them on an asphalt highway. They look like a shimmering pool ahead, but when we get there we realize it was just an illusion created by the heat. If we’d never seen a mirage before and we needed water we’d only make one trip there to find water wouldn’t we? After that, no matter how real the pool looked, we’d never grab a bucket and head to the mirage for water again. We’d realize that what we thought was true, wasn’t. We wouldn’t have to make any physical or psychological changes, we’d simply operate very simply on the truth that we’d seen.

In life clear seeing works the same way. When we really stop to question and investigate we realize that life is just the way it is. We don’t argue with most of it. We have no problem with the way gravity works, or that water is wet and fire burns. Trees add leaves in the spring and shed them in the fall. No problem. Earthquakes and floods happen. Though they can be painful we don’t shake our fists at nature. We simply see that nature does what it does.

When it comes to our so-called personal lives, however, we want to rule. So we argue with reality. We never win, because it’s always just the way it is anyway. But we seem not to notice that, and continue to resist and fight. Someone says something to us that we label as rude and we think: They shouldn’t speak to me that way. Aren’t we all part of nature too, human nature? Isn’t that the way nature appeared just then? You had no control over it, and they did speak to you that way. It’s the reality of life. People sometimes speak rudely to others. Compare it to this: The wind blew your hat off. You probably wouldn’t say, “The wind shouldn’t have done that.” It happened. It’s just what is. You pick up your hat and move on.

Back to the person who spoke to you: They said what they did, and you have no more control over that than the wind. Poke a little deeper (the snake) and you might realize you’re the one who put the word “rude” on their words. Later you find they were in a hurry and didn’t mean to be rude at all. Yet you created your own mirage. The person was never rude (no water there) in the first place. It all started with your own thoughts.

This world is obviously operating on some principle of Intelligent Energy and we’re not in charge. Does it make you happy to rail against what someone thinks about you or says to you? Or does it make sense to see that the wind blows when it does and people say and do what they do? When we think “we” know how life should be we’re going to hurt a lot. When we see life as it really is, and stop adding our stories of how it should be it gets easy. All it takes is some questioning - poking the snake to realize it’s only a rope.