390 — We Are All Crucified. We Are All Resurrected
There is a deeper plotline, and that plotline runs beyond the boundary of one lifetime. There is a larger coherence. We know that Reality is good. We know that Reality is just.
Evolutionary Love Code:
All stories fail. Everyone is crucified. All stories begin again. Everyone is resurrected.
How many of us have failed?
All stories fail.
How many of us have failed?
I failed.
How many of us have failed? Just feel into that: How many of us have failed?
We fail at so much. We fail at so many more things than we succeed in, so often. And we often fail at the things that we thought, and were sure, are the major plotlines of our life.
Just feel into this for a second. Go back, if you can: you are fifteen years old; see if you — we, I, together — can access the plotline of our life, where we thought we would be.
With who?
And what would it look like?
And what would it feel like?
And what would our relationship be like?
And how we would be experiencing ourselves?
And would we have children or not have children?
Would we want to have this kind of life and this kind of vocation or not, that kind of vocation?
Where would we want to live?
What community would we want to be associated with or not associated with?
All of it. And then all of a sudden, we find ourselves at a certain point in our lives and we’re like, “Wow! We failed.” We failed.
Often, I wake up in the morning, and I say,
Oh my God! My life is such a failure on so many levels. So much of what I intended to do I didn’t do. So many of the directions that I intended to pursue I was not able to pursue. So many of the paths that I wanted to walk I was unable to walk. So many of the gifts that I wanted to give I was unable to give. So many of the transformations that I wanted to affect in my own interior using particular sets of technologies and tools, I was unable to use those sets of technologies and tools, and was unable to enact those transformations in the way that I would have thought that I wanted to.
In other words, we think our life has a plotline. The story is going in a particular way, and we say, “This is what the story looks like when it succeeds.”
And then we realize, “Wow! I failed at this, and I failed at that, and then I failed at this, and I failed at that, and I failed at that.”
All stories fail. We always lose the thread of the story.
It’s deep. Everyone is crucified. And if you think you haven’t been crucified, you’re lying to yourself. Everyone gets crucified.
Sometimes publicly.
Sometimes in a private betrayal.
Sometimes by those closest to us.
Sometimes by Reality itself that drives the nails in and doesn’t allow us to give our gift.
But we are all crucified. There is no one who’s not crucified. And we lose ourselves, the thread and the outline of our story. That’s Kafka’s great novel, The Trial, where K can’t track the outline of the story. Theseus has slayed the great beast, but he needs Ariadne to find the thread to lead him out of the labyrinth because he can’t find the plotline.
We have lost the plotline of our own stories.
It’s worse than failing. I’m not even sure what the plotline is. How did we get here? What are we doing?
There is a larger story, a deeper plotline
And then we gradually begin to realize —
that there is a larger story,
that there is a larger Eros,
that there is a larger vision,
there is a larger direction.
And that vision and that direction are weaving everything intimately. Sometimes we are even able to see perfectly the path we are on. It looks so different than we thought it should, but yet something important is happening.
There is a deeper current.
There is a deeper direction.
There is a deeper plotline, and that plotline runs beyond the boundary of one lifetime. It runs beyond the border of the chapters of my story that are played out in this, as Aristotle called it, the sublunar sphere.
There is a larger continuity of consciousness.
There is a larger integrity.
There is a larger coherence.
I know that life needs to be coherent. I know that life needs to be fair. Every child and every culture in the world knows life needs to be fair. There needs to be some sort of fairness in life. When it’s not fair, it’s a violation. There needs to be some sort of completion of the story, some sort of justice.
But actually, it’s not wrong to say that an enormous swath of human lives — the majority, possibly, probably — live in a fundamental unfairness that’s never resolved in one lifetime. The overwhelming majority of human lives live in a fundamental sense of crucifixion — nails driven in that are never extracted in this lifetime.
We know that Reality is good. We know that Reality is just. We know that there is a plotline because we know justice is real.
What does that tell us?
It tells, well, justice is real, fairness is real, Reality is just, but there is not justice and fairness or the completion of a story within one lifetime.
That’s Easter.
What that tells me is that my sense of Reality is too small. The Reality is not just my separate self and a particular drama, in a particular set of movements in one narrow lifetime. No, no, there is a wider story.
There is a wider canvas upon which I am painting — the imprint of my soul.
There is a wider continuity of consciousness.
There is a deeper, more wondrous story.
That’s what the Hindus mean when they talk about these cycles of karma — cycle after cycle after cycle of karma. And the Buddhists, who kind of pretend to believe only in deep awareness and consciousness, they don’t believe that either. They sneak in reincarnation behind the scenes and say, “Ah, yeah, yeah, no, there is no personal self. None of that’s true. Ah, but you reincarnate and there’s some dimension of personal that reincarnates.” Huh? Isn’t that interesting? There is a larger story.
After crucifixion, there is always resurrection. That’s the nature of the story.
We are all crucified. All stories fail, but all stories begin again.
New chapters are written and there is always resurrection. There is never not. Winter is always followed by spring. Hope is a memory of the future.
Those strains in Buddhism that say that we enter this place with no hope — no, no, no.
Hope is the vision.
Hope is the possibility.
Hope is the possibility of possibility.
And hope springs again and again and again. Not because we are naive, not because we are pollyannaish, not because we are lost in a New Age fantasy, but because the actual structure and nature of Reality is the continuity of the story. It is the realization that Reality is a story.
It’s not just a fact. It’s a story. And the story has a plotline. And the plotline is only seen with the Eye of Value, which is the Eye of Eros — the Eye of ErosValue, where I begin to see and unfold, “Oh, this is my story. I thought that was my story. This is my story. I thought I was supposed to do it that way. I am supposed to do it this way.”
Life is a crazy paradox
My friends, we suffer intensely. We suffer intensely.
I just want to just say it directly: My friends, we suffer intensely. All of us. To be alive is to suffer. Buddha wasn’t completely wrong when he said life is suffering, but life is not only suffering.
Life is also ecstatic joy.
Life is also unbearable beauty.
Life is also a weave of Eros that’s dazzling, and a seduction of intimacy that allures us as we touch heaven again, and again, and again.
And life is hell, filled with pain, and disappointment, and betrayal, and contraction, and collapse. Don’t underestimate people’s ability to disappoint you. They can. Betrayal is always right around the corner, but so is unimaginable loyalty.
So is unimaginable integrity.
So are bonds of friendship, and Eros, and love that are the very raison d’etre that make all of manifestation worthy and worthwhile.
Life is a crazy paradox. That’s one of the principles of Homo amor.
Homo amor embraces paradox.
Homo amor is not afraid to have their heart broken.
We are not afraid to be heartbroken. We are heartbroken, and then our heart breaks open.
That’s Easter, and it’s a big deal. Can we just be together in this?
I just want to — if I can, with permission — all of us together around the world, we’ve all suffered. We’ve all suffered so much.
I just share with you the last image. I often wake up in the morning, overwhelmed by an intense sense of suffering. It takes me sometimes half an hour, forty five minutes to battle my way through the suffering.
Sometimes it’s my suffering.
Sometimes it's the suffering of people that I know.
Sometimes it’s suffering in Reality itself.
I have to just battle my way through the thickness of the suffering until I can see the glimmer of a light, a fragrance of possibility, and I can breathe it in, and it slowly, slowly, slowly expands my lungs. And I can taste the first drop of joy and follow those droplets into the day.
Suffering is intense. And so is joy. It’s why we say, my friends, that we live in a world of outrageous pain. We can’t look away. We have to be willing to let our hearts be broken. But then we know — that’s a Bob Marley saying, it’s our Easter song — it’s one heart, it’s one love. My heart is broken. That’s true. But there is nothing more whole than a broken heart. And that’s what Cohen means when he says it’s a holy and a broken hallelujah.
It’s like wow! Wow!
It’s so just good to be together — the crazy, simple, unimaginable joy of being together here on Easter and to be able to look at each other and say, all stories fail. We’re all crucified.
I get crucified a couple of times a week.
I get crucified by people I don’t even know, or barely know.
And all stories begin again, and the new chapters just literally waiting for me to take my quill, and dip it in the ink, and begin.
We are all resurrected.
We are all resurrected because it’s one love. It’s one heart. And she never stops beating, and the heart never closes. She just opens deeper and deeper and deeper.
Happy Easter everyone! Happy resurrection!
What a crazy, crazy delight to be with you. Cha!
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