“The inevitability of human drama…”

This is my favorite line from the completely underrated and spiritually brilliant movie “I Heart Huckabees.”

It seems to me that everybody wants to sell us a better life and the spiritual marketplace is no different. It sells like hotcakes. People make millions and millions promising that they will help us connect with God so we can fix our lives. And that should be a red flag because God is definitely not for sale.

The point of your connection with the Life That Never Goes Away is not to fix your life in space and time. How could it be? That would give rise to the insidious and destructive lie that if you are experiencing major drama then somehow that means you aren’t connected, not doing something right, not meditating or praying hard enough. Hmmmm. Suspicious. Once again a recipe for shame and unworthiness, which are the signatures of the False Self and not the Divine reality of the heart. Hello ego!

Let’s look at the lives of some pretty awake human beings. Jesus, for instance, if we take him to be an icon of connection with the Divine, certainly did not escape human drama. He was persecuted as a rebel by the state, as a heretic by the church, and hounded across the ancient near east until being executed by a kangaroo court. The Dalai Lama, to take a modern icon, is the spiritual head of a people displaced from their homeland by an occupying force that seeks to destroy their spiritual life. Ummmmm….

Drama. Drama. Drama.

There is no version of the world that does not come together and fall apart. It is so seductive to believe in that parental Divine Presence that will fix everything for us if we figure out the “right” way to be spiritual. A bit too convenient that God is just like your mom and dad, right? It doesn’t work like that. The world of space and time is a world of drama, a world where there is a great struggle between order and chaos. It is perfect that way.

The perfection of the world lies in the fact that our liberation cannot come from it. Nobody can win the game of keeping all the balls in the air all the time. So we are compelled to go deeper in our search for peace. We are guided to look past the manifest reality in order to find true stability.

Once we find it then we can experience what Joseph Campbell calls the “rapture of being alive.” We can wake up and remember to play.

Today I invite you to play, to not take the world so seriously, to not fall prey to the lie that the Great Love is here to fix the problems of the world. Accept the inevitability of human drama and relax knowing that you can be connected with All That Is regardless if your world is coming together and falling apart.

And maybe watch I Heart Huckabees 😉