Hell & Heaven: Revisited, Productively?

eschaden
1 day ago
2 min read

Someone said this morning in meditation group, Hell is "This isn't it." Heaven is "What is this?" And my mind was like, “OMG! Yes!”

I am in a new fresh hell every time I say to myself about anything, “THIS ISN’T IT!” I think I know, I think it should be different. I think it should be other than it is and I am immediately delivered to a place of sadness, despair and pain. However, if I can be curious, and ask myself as hard things arise, as they will in this life, “what is this?” I am immediately relieved from the bondage of thinking that I know things and I become teachable and reachable...

I think our world today is in a crisis of curiosity. I think we humans have become so overwhelmed with all the choices, things to do, options, ideas, perspectives, workloads, connections that we have done the only logical thing to do: close the gates. Stop the curiosity because that feels like the only way we can filter what gets into us and thereby make life feel like it is more manageable.

It is a fallacy of the highest order, this idea that knowing rather than being curious is a good living strategy...it is actually choosing to die a little each day rather than live. However, curiosity opens our lives, hearts and minds immediately allowing for anything at all to become possible. And that just makes me hopeful.

If I don’t know about me, then I likely don’t know about you and so long as I don’t know things, then there are things to learn, to experience, to grow towards, to enjoy, to deepen into. However, if I am forever mired in “THIS ISN’T IT!” I am in a hell of my own creation forever.

I try everyday to begin my day with the following mantra:

I do not know what will happen today

I really think that I want to know what will happen today

And because of this, I am going to think that I know some things

However, I can’t know and that is ok

It is safe to open up to the present moment experience

It is fun to not know

I am ok not knowing

And in all of that lack of knowing, a curiosity about myself and you and life and all the wonders of living, opens up to me

And without this open curiosity, my life is truncated and limited in so very many ways.

Today, let me be open to what is so that I may inquire, what is this over and over and over...

Again, still...