What Am I Doing?

f you look closely enough, you will see that we live in a way that makes very little actually possible. You only have to have your eyes open for a very short time to be able to see this for yourself. We create prisons and then we live in them. Look deeply into the nature of your own experience. Look at the way you’re living your own life. Look at the way other people are living their own lives. It won’t be difficult to see the degree of compromise that so many of us are willing to tolerate in the way that we live. If we want to be free, then we have to come to the end of a fundamentally divided relationship to life. The kind of compromise that most of us seem happy to live with is the expression of the very division that has to come to an end if any radical change is to occur. But who has the courage? Who would dare to come to the end of compromise? Who is truly willing to no longer live a life of division? If we want to be free we have to be willing to question everything. We have to be willing to question all of our fixed ideas. We have to be willing to look directly into how and why we are living in the way that we are. Because if we are serious, the life that we are now living has become a powerful expression of love and beauty. If it has not, then there are simple reasons why. If you are truly serious, you have to ask yourself, “What am I doing?” Everything can be revealed in asking this ­simple question: “What am I doing? What am I really doing?” This question can enable you to come to terms with the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be a human being. Within a very short time you can find out how selfish or unselfish you really are. You can find out how interested in true love you really are. This question can help you find out what your relationship to life is in a way that has the potential, if you’re ready for it, to set you free. There are very few human beings who truly want to be free more than anything else. There are very few human beings who are more interested in what is true than they are in how they feel. Those few who are, will succeed. Anyone who is that sincere about this, who is willing to let everything else in life come second, will find their way through to the other side. Something extraordinary will happen. That which is sacred will engulf them. If they fold their hands in prayer, their prayer will have a power that others’ does not. If they meditate, their meditation will become profound. If an undivided relationship to life is more important to us than anything else, then our own life will eventually become a living reflection of that which is undivided. Usually when we ask ourselves the question “What am I doing?” what is discovered is not as pleasing as we would like it to be. Often we find that we are more self-centered than we had previously imagined. Through asking ourselves this question in a sincere way, the veil of pretense and self-deception will be lifted and we will come face-to-face with the truth of our own condition. It is only in that kind of stark reflection that we can see for ourselves, maybe for the very first time, how far we have to be willing to go for radical transformation to occur. The reason it is so important to ask ourselves this question is that it is possible for a human being to believe many things about themselves that are not true. If we’re sincere about coming to the end of a divided relationship to life, then everything has to be seen for what it is. The question “What am I doing?” has the power to reveal the truth about our relationship to life. This simple question can help bring us to a state of real maturity, a place where we are no longer able to lie to ourselves in the way that so many of us are more than willing to do. Not willing to compromise means no longer being able to live with the pretense that things are other than they actually are. So sincerity about the quest for Liberation means that we are ready and willing to face into a kind of raw vulnerability that previously was perceived to be literally unbearable. And in that vulnerability all fear, confusion and ambivalence can be faced in a very direct and powerful way. Indeed, the courage to dive this deep makes it pos­sible for everything to change. It can be the beginning of an avalanche, an earthquake, an upheaval from which nothing will remain the same. If we are sincere we have to be willing to burn in the fire of our own destruction. We have to be willing to see things as they are. Finally we have to be unable to compromise and willing to express a fearless interest in the Truth. Then we will be ready to burn while we’re alive and see what will come.