It is what it is” she said—that’s your mantra.” My spiritual adviser was reacting to my sense of upset about the state my life and the world. I was unhappy at that time and I’m still unhappy but with a difference—the mantra is stripping away at decades of accumulated intellectual detritus I was not aware that I had. It is stripping away at my idea of a future and a past and even my “idea” of being in the present. Now, I’m in the present or I’m not and this stark reality and stark choice makes me sad I had hoped in my “old” age is what T.S. Eliot made fun of:
“Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
By being focused on “it is what it is” we are practicing humility and it is, as Eliot sagely understood through his own intense suffering, endless. There are several qualities that are important in coming into ourselves spiritually: 1) humility; 2) sincerity; 3) love & compassion. Having a correct metaphysical foundation or theology or having a deep understanding of reality all these are peripheral though, as we shall see they are essential to those who have begun the journey that can only start with inhabiting those three principles. Not that we need to be “humble” since it is “endless” so we can never “achieve it.” Not that we need to be completely “sincere” that too is realizable while we are on the path as we shall see. Not that we need to feel love & compassion perpetually because, like humility, these two are also without end, clearly. But our job is to carry these flags on the way we are meant to go so that we can find out where we are meant to go—they are lights in the darkness and all other apparent lights are often deceptive. Our struggle is always with the ego and these three qualities are flags and also swords in fighting the power of the ego which can, when it rules, us be the enemy or (as the Church Lady would say) Satan.
Everything we understand and work for begins with our subjective state of being—that within us that is what some call “the Witness” what the Vedanta calls “the Atman” and what my Christian tradition calls “the soul.” Early in my life I “received” the insight before I even read anything about spirituality that the part within me that is most uniquely who I am apart from conditioning, apart from my fears and ambitions, apart from my desires, is actually the part of me that is most universal. This was intuitively self-evident despite the fact I deeply distrusted my own intuition. At the same time I also had a clear vision that any kind of ultimate reality was not far away, but actually very, very close and could be easily seen just beyond a transparent curtain (I actually “saw” that curtain) that divided what I thought of as “me” and the ultimate reality. At the very same time I also switched to another vision and that was that this reality was plain as day only I couldn’t see it since it was right at the end of my nose. This was not a casual notion but occurred after a period of intense contemplation and dedication on my part to want to know the meaning of life, really out of desperation, when I think I was just about to turn 17. While I can’t say I ever forgot this I only thought about it in a general way at various times but only very recently have I been able to completely “feel” my state of mind at the time and recognize that, in some ways despite my obsessive search for meaning, I have, in a way, wasted my life in searching for “it” (tat) while I had the answer close at hand all this time. Now, at that age, I really had no intellectual understanding of that vision only that it was accompanied by a deep certainty that emerged from my intense state of mind which, as I look back now, was touchingly sincere and earnest.
As I got older I used my intellect to cushion my life and looked back at that time as a period of time when I was weak and miserable when, in fact, I had been way more awake than I had thought. Emotionally, I felt sorry for myself—I felt I was a failure as a human being, a fish out of water, lonely, isolated yet, actually, that state of consciousness was an opening I did not recognize and really could not have recognized as being as valuable as it was. My father harshly criticized my mystical tendencies and did what he could to discourage me since it was, for him (as I later realized), something that directly challenged everything he believed in and what he felt he represented, which was the heart of elite Western civilized life, i.e., making “objectivity” supreme over “subjectivity.” I knew instinctively that I could not swallow that notion and it was that, above all, that I resisted in his intellectual point of view because I saw directly what that notion had done to him and, later in life, I saw what it had done to others. We shall revisit this in a subsequent chapter.
It is what it is” is my mantra and I need it. In part it is in order to put in a kind of temporary order the set of ideas that, I believe, are essential to transmit to other people in some way. Often, when I express my ideas others see this as part of my need to feel “superior” to others since many people regard the expression of dissident ideas not approved by officials to be a result of ego and self-aggrandizement. In my view this is just par for the course and helps me to cultivate the three principles of humility, sincerity and compassion.
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