I went hiking in the mountains north of here a few days ago, and it was a very long walk. For miles I walked through the trees and brush, mostly in places where there are no paths and the wanderer is forced to make his own. Some of the underbrush was quite thick, and I plowed my way through as best I could. I began the journey with a goal of going someplace, but that had long since been lost under the weight of the sultry southern summer, which settled on my shoulders like a damp woolen blanket.
Hours into the journey I was very fatigued, quite lost, and I could feel the first pangs of desperation setting in. Why had I attempted this journey at all? What good is it to be on a journey if you cannot remember the destination, let alone find a path that leads to it? I was thinking these thoughts while fighting my way through a particularly thick section of underbrush, when I suddenly stumbled into a small clearing. Beams of sunlight dappled a pine straw floor, and it felt like someone had turned the switch on a giant fan above the trees. The cool breeze quickly began to dry the flood of sweat cascading off my face and forehead. Weird to suddenly find this kind of breeze on a day as dead as this one had been, I thought.
I stopped in the middle of the clearing to breathe the cool air and to let it wash over me. The clearing was only about 20 feet across: an oasis in a forest that was otherwise almost black with denseness. As I continued to fill my lungs with the sweet air flowing from some unseen place above, in the corner of my eye I glimpsed a movement.
Normally this would have startled me, but at that moment I simply turned my attention deliberately in the direction of the movement, and saw, less than ten feet away, a very old, white-haired man, sitting on an ancient tree carcass. It was clear that he had been watching me the entire time, yet I had not seen him at all until now.
“You look like you need to rest for a while,” he said, motioning to the other side of the stump he was sitting on. Again, my nature is to be distrusting of people, so I thought it was strange that I felt myself involuntarily begin to move in his direction. I walked over and sat down.
“Nice day for a walk, even if you don’t exactly know where you’re going,” he remarked. I was too tired and glad to be off my feet to notice the last part of his comment.
But I felt in that clearing an aura of wisdom and kindness, and the only thing I knew for sure was that it did not emanate from me. Thinking back on it now, I guess I had noticed that aura immediately. It explains why I never felt the least bit worried or anxious. Ghosts do follow me around those hills, but clearly (I thought), this man is not a ghost.
I don’t normally warm quickly to conversations with total strangers, either. But he had spoken to me, and now we sat together in silence. I was still winded, but I could feel my strength returning. I was trying to figure out what to say to him, when suddenly the thought occurred to me that it might be good to continue with him the philosophical conversation that I had been having with myself for at least the last couple of hours of my walk. After all, is it not cathartic, and possibly therapeutic, to occasionally engage a perfect stranger in a very deep conversation? And isn’t it only after we get to know people that we begin to perceive the need to deceive them? I decided to take advantage of the moment.
And so I asked him the question that had been rolling around in my mind during my struggle with the forest: “How are we humans to deal with rejection?” I asked. I paused for a moment before realizing that he was waiting for me to finish the thought.
So I continued: “After all, is not the very thought of being rejected one of the most painful things imaginable? Is it not true that, to be rejected is to be forced to deal, somehow, with the possibility that we fell short or were not good enough to be loved by the one who rejected us?”
And once he was certain that I was finished talking and was ready to listen, he spoke as follows:
“You want to know how to respond to rejection. Well, I am old, and I have spent quite a lot of my life contemplating these types of questions. I can answer you, or at least give you my opinion, but I am going to have to impose a condition before I do.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“Agree that everything I say could be completely wrong.”
“Well I’m skeptical anyway, so I’ll probably think everything you say IS completely wrong. So that is an easy agreement for me to make. Now, tell me what you think.”
And he spoke thus: “How about this as a possibility: love those who reject you.”
Wow, how guru-like in its simplicity, I thought. And I was immediately skeptical.
He continued: “But please don’t think I’m saying you should love anyone, much less those who reject you. I’m just saying that it is theoretically possible. Maybe you will not choose to attempt that just yet. After all, we are works in progress or we wouldn’t be struggling here. But maybe you will recognize that, as humans, it should be our goal to love like that.”
“So you’re saying it is a goal, but not necessarily a goal that we should feel disappointed if we don’t achieve?” I asked him.
He continued without really answering the question.
“Empathy is part of the key to understanding how to do it. Take the example of Jesus Christ. Not only was he rejected, but he was betrayed by his closest allies and then murdered. Yet he loved them all: through the rejection, through the betrayal, and even during his crucifixion he loved them. How was that possible? The only way is that he must have had the ability to put himself right there, into the persona of those who rejected and murdered him—and each of us since who have symbolically done the same thing. He understood, if you will, that it was nothing personal—that it was our own pain and fear that led us to reject, betray, and then murder him.”
Wow, this got deep in a hurry, I thought. But it wasn’t so bad, either. He continued, to the best of my recollection, something along the following lines:
“But please don’t think that, by merely theorizing, I would purport to advise any one person as to what their individual decision in these matters should be. Part of it is that I don’t think the dynamics of the human interaction are as important as acceptance of the fact of rejection itself, and the experience of the legitimate pain involved in the realization and acceptance. But even if you choose to not love (and, again, you are perfectly free to make that choice), I am presumptuous enough to suggest forgiveness as a good first step.”
“How’d you figure this stuff out, anyway?” I asked him. “Are you a religious man?”
“I’m hardly religious. In fact, the pious would probably deem me a non-believer or a pagan. I do, however, believe in the metaphors of religion. They can be great teachers.”
“I have had many children,” he continued, “so I had to learn to teach. And I tried to teach my children that the most important thing to accomplish during a lifetime is to identify the broken parts of the personality, and work to fix them. Otherwise, there is no point to existence. Some wise men, much wiser than I, have reminded us that “life is difficult.” But then they didn’t go much further in an effort to explain why life is difficult, or that it inevitably should be.”
My mind became stuck for a moment on his rather matter-of-fact declaration that “life is difficult.” Yes, I thought, there is no doubt about the truth of that statement. But in my experience, most people seem surprised that it is. Indeed, (I thought), if people lived expecting life to be difficult, they would not be so overwhelmed by its difficulties. Instead of being surprised, they would be expectant. Instead of being overwhelmed, they would be prepared. And during the times of relative ease and peace, they would be thankful for the respite—yet vigilant for the inevitable arrival of the wrecking ball.
And as I finished that thought, I noticed the old man staring at me. “I’m sorry,” I said to him. “I got stuck on something you said.”
“Yes, life is difficult,” he responded. “Isn’t it funny how the most profound truths are also some of the simplest ones?”
“Yes,” I replied. “So, we know that life is difficult, but why…why does it have to be?”
His reply, as I remember it, went something like this:
“Life is difficult because we are imperfect. And ‘imperfect’ is really too nice a word, so I like to use the term ‘broken.’ We are here, enduring lives filled with various degrees of difficulty, or ‘pain’ if you will, because we are broken. And existence here, in human form, is the best way for us to dissect ourselves, discover our flaws and imperfections, fix them, and thus move back in the direction of perfection from whence we came.”
“’From whence we came’?” I asked. “You talk like we were perfect at some time before.”
“Perfection is the Unity that we once were,” he answered. “Somehow, we all became splintered from Unity and from each other. Our own splintered personalities are both metaphors for, and the result of, the initial separation. That separation is symbolized in Christian teaching by the fall of man from god by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. We were split apart from Unity and from each other, and here we are, with a mandate to fix our flaws. Fixing those flaws is the only path back to Unity and perfection. But fixing those flaws also involves pain. Thus, ‘life is difficult.’”
“What is the alternative to Unity?” I asked.
He responded: “The simple answer is: Hell.”
He must have seen me recoil slightly. Fire-and-brimstone sermons delivered by impassioned Southern Baptist preachers still echoed through the Sunday mornings of my mind—even now, many years later. Those sermons scared me into salvation at an age when I was too young to have any inkling of what it meant. So, eager to avoid eternal damnation and the endless physical torture it would entail, down the aisle of my small church I walked to embrace Jesus as my Lord and Savior, even though I hadn’t the foggiest notion, at the time, of what the whole thing meant.
The old man interrupted my thought again: “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. The ‘hell’ I’m talking about is not some endless burning lake of fire, deployed by the devout to scare folks into believing.”
To which I responded: “If you believe something because you’re scared to believe anything else, that’s not much of a belief anyway, is it?” I’d been thinking that for a long time—years. “Maybe you should find a different word than ‘hell’ though, especially down here in the South,” I suggested.
“You’re probably right. But my version of hell may be worse than yours.”
That made me nervous. What torture could be worse than a burning for eternity in a lake of fire?
“Hell,” he said, “in my way of thinking, involves a permanent separation from Unity. And people get there by making a series of conscious decisions, over many years, to avoid recognizing and fixing the broken parts of their personalities. People know that they are broken, at least at first. But they go to great lengths to deny it to themselves and others. That denial, and the deception that quickly becomes necessary to maintain it, are the first steps along the road that leads, eventually, to hell. The layers of deceit build up over time, until eventually the person achieves a state of perfect denial—a state where they no longer have the ability to recognize that they are broken, let alone attempt to heal. That person has arrived in hell.”
The air hung heavy in the clearing. The great invisible fan was dead. Neither of us spoke again for a long time. The darkness of a great shadow began to invade the clearing as the sun receded. The bleached tree carcass on which we sat picked up the last reflections of the day’s light, and for a moment we sat suspended together over a vast, unseen river. Then, at once: nothing but darkness and a cacophony of crickets and cicadas.
Finally he spoke again: “We are all broken in one or more ways.”
“How do you know this?” I asked him.
“Because we are here.”
“But don’t you think some people have problems that are too great for them to ever be able to solve?” I asked him.
And he said:
“Most of us have only one serious soul-depth issue, per lifetime, that we are here to deal with and fix. A few have more, but many will never have the courage to face and deal with the first one, let alone others. I don’t think Unity (the Unity that lives inside us and is us, collectively) is so crass and insensitive as to send us here and give us more than we should be able to deal with.”
“You give this Unity thing a lot of credit, don’t you?” I asked him. “If Unity is the same thing as God, I know a lot of people who believe that God is an apathetic, lassaiz-faire, absentee landlord.”
“These people have a lot to learn about love,” he responded.
“What about love?” I asked him.
“Love involves courage. Great love involves great courage.”
“What are we to do about ourselves, then?” I wanted to know.
He spoke: “First, strive to get to a place in your life where you can achieve complete honesty with everyone you know and interact with. To do that is to act with great courage. The deceit that you have been willing to engage in—which you found at first extremely difficult because it seemed antithetical to your core values—will become easier the longer you allow yourself to continue with it by rationalizing it. After all, rationalization is, itself, nothing more than an insidious form of self-deceit.
“You are separating yourself from Unity by being deceitful in any way, ever.
“And if you continue to do it, you will get to the point where you are unable to practice anything but deceit, and you will lose your way. You will, in fact, lose the ability to discern the difference between the truth and a lie. I have known people like that. They created their own hell and then barricaded themselves within it—a complete, and possibly irrevocable, separation from Unity.”
“Why do you think so many people are confused about love?” I asked him.
“One reason is that most people do not understand that love, as we experience it here, is not quid pro quo. In fact, love is quite frequently quid pro nihilum: sometimes one person in a truly loving relationship will be the receiver of great love and the giver of none. It is both a mathematical certainty and a cosmic reality that quid pro quo is impossible.
“But even if they are not that one-sided, loving relationships usually do involve an ebb and flow over time. At times, one will be the primary giver; at other times the other will assume that role.”
He continued: “But realize this in regard to any relationship: you will never find any person, other than yourself, who will be able to fill the emptiness inside you. No one but you can fix you. And if you keep looking for and depending on others to do it—to ‘complete you’ or whatever those people talk about who have been watching and mistaking for reality too many poisonous Hollywood fairy tales—you choose the path of no learning, great pain, and possible irreversible separation from Unity.”
“So you are saying that relationships are good, but not necessary?”
Again, he answered without answering: “You arrived naked and crying on this lost, lonely, burnt, spinning sphere with everything you need to fix you. You have every tool you need to get to that place inside yourself where you are able to both love and be loved as unconditionally as is possible within the chrysalis of existence in the flesh.
“But also know that there are those with whom you will interact, who made a cosmic decision eons ago to help you in your path to perfection. Their decision was simply to love you. And they knew that their decision to love you would bring them earthly pain. Be on the lookout for these souls as they come to you. See them for who they are. Understand and appreciate what they were willing to do because they decided to love you.
“Conversely, also understand that, when you experience pain, you are simply living the path you decided for yourself, long ago. One of the covenants in a great cosmic agreement you made with another soul, whom you decided to love, was the acceptance and experience of pain. So experience that pain, not as if it were a great crushing weight or an impossible dilemma, but as simply another emotion to be experienced for its own intrinsic value, in much the same way you experience the emotions of joy, happiness, and all the others.”
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Emptiness and Light 
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