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Returning to the Beginning

When the smoke cleared, the whirlwind of life had dropped me off exactly where she had picked me up. After forty years, I still lived just down the field from the house I had built when I moved to the woods to meditate. I was still meeting with people every morning and evening for services in the Temple, including the large Sunday morning gatherings started back in 1972. But the original ten acres the Temple sat on was now surrounded by nine hundred acres of rolling fields and beautiful forests over which life had made us steward. The foundations of my life had remained completely undisturbed throughout this entire dance with the Universal Flow.

The legal ordeal quickly became a distant memory, almost a dream. It had come and gone, just like everything else. I could clearly see that because I had inwardly surrendered each step of the way, no scars were left on my psyche. It had been like writing on water—the impressions only lasted while the events were actually taking place. Yet in the moment of actual experience, each twist and turn had reached deep inside me and forced me past foundational fears and personal boundaries. As long as I was willing to accept the purification power of life’s flow, I kept coming out on the other side a transformed person. How could I consider this a bad experience when it created such beauty and freedom within me? To the contrary, I stand in awe of all that has happened since I started this amazing experiment of acceptance and surrender.

One thing is for certain: he who left on this journey—never returned. The flow of life had served as sandpaper that, to a great extent, freed me of myself. Unable to unbind myself from the incessant pull of my psyche, in an act of sheer desperation, I had thrown myself into the arms of life. From that point forward, all I did was my very best to serve what was put in front of me and let go of what it stirred up within me. Joy and pain, success and failure, praise and blame—they all had pulled at what was so deeply rooted within me. The more I let go, the freer I became. It was not my responsibility to find what was binding me; that was life’s job. My responsibility was to willingly let go of whatever was brought up within me.

After seeing all I’d seen over the years, surrender to the flow of life was all that was left of me. No longer busy making other plans, I settled into the quiet life of increased solitude in which I once again found myself. It soon became obvious that life had provided me the ideal environment in which to write this book. The moment I sat down, the inspiration flowed in like a tidal wave. I began writing what I always knew I would have to write—what happened when I let go.

People often ask me how I look at things now that I’ve gone through the life-changing experiences of these past forty years. I tell them to read The Untethered Soul. How could I possibly explain the great freedom that comes from realizing to the depth of your being that life knows what it’s doing? Only direct experience can take you there. At some point there’s no more struggle, just the deep peace that comes from surrendering to a perfection that is beyond your comprehension. Eventually, even the mind stops resisting, and the heart loses the tendency to close. The joy, excitement, and freedom are simply too beautiful to give up. Once you are ready to let go of yourself, life becomes your friend, your teacher, your secret lover. When life’s way becomes your way, all the noise stops, and there is a great peace.

In eternal gratitude for all the experiences we call Life

MAS, March 2015