Speirs lays it down at 1:32.. the same applies for the “war” of meditation.
The sooner we can embrace and accept our own death, or the inevitability of existence, the sooner we can put down the false self that is holding us back, trying to protect or manipulate the world to create a certain outcome. As Anthony De Mello said, “enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable”.
But hope keeps us clinging, it keeps the wheel of the mind turning.. “maybe tomorrow, maybe just around that corner”, maybe we’ll be the special ones, the ones that cheat death. Cooperation with the inevitable removes the struggle, because it removes the entity who is struggling. That is why its called ‘dying before you die’.
The mind wants to keep swimming, its chasing after something – anything – to keep the machine moving. The nature of separation is that it wants to find wholeness.. it is incomplete. And it searches for it by trying to add more to itself – money, sex, spiritual knowledge, etc. – in an effort to fill the gap. But the chase, the effort, the expectation, the hope.. is the barrier to begin with. You are already whole, only you have been conditioned and pushed into a dream of partiality, forgetting your true nature.
What is necessary, then, is not an attempt to add more to your ‘self’, only to remove and unlearn this dream of struggle, of hoping for some salvation from a self-created limitation. If you can truly surrender and cooperate with existence, then the “war” is already over, you have already won. Then you can function as you are meant to function – without hesitation, without fear, in perfect equanimity.
As Dante correctly warned us: “abandon all hope, ye who enter here”.
Jeff Nirenberg 