There is no success, no failure. There is only commitment and persistence in the process. There are no real goals, no winning or losing, only engaging your imperatives. There is no frustration because you don’t expect to have control over yourself, even, much less a host of things around you.
However, living in the stream of your destiny does bring about an endpoint of ripeness. Nothing about this will be convenient, because the ripeness is not in your hands, and is totally independent of factors on this plane. Yes, of course your final crossing over to that Other Side will surely be the result of things done to your body here. Yes, you can foolishly disrupt the flow, and could go back to the prison, and even take your own life. That is not your destiny. You can only call it destiny when you are standing on your imperatives to meet that ripeness when it arrives.
The Other Side, your freedom, beckons you here in the prison. You must belong to it now, so that it claims you at ripeness, because any other path will miss that moment. Indeed, any other path cannot bring you to ripeness, only that final indignity of meaningless expiration. You would still be dead before it came, anyway.
If this Other Side calls to you, then we have before us the known clinical description of how to let it find you. It means dismissing all the things which make up the prison. Yes, until ripeness you have to acknowledge where you are, still in the prison, even as you belong to freedom. It’s the ultimate paradox we exist in this torn state primarily to let others see what they are missing.
They see someone who does not compete, but may well seem fully involved because it’s imperative. You finish the thing if it’s ripe, but can dismiss it all and stop right in the middle of anything for which there is no imperative to finish. Only if it serves destiny do you stay the course.
We cannot even say it’s a matter of being this or that, mostly because it’s not part of our understanding what we are, only what we must embrace. So the others see someone quite serene, at rest and internally free on that higher level. Your imperatives take from you the unquenchable urge to control, and you can afford to let others do and be what they think is demanded of them, regardless how it affects you. Sure, you can defend anything which your imperatives demand, but it’s never with anger. You can always let it go when the thing ripens. The tools of this level of existence — which is everything in it, attached to it — aren’t that important.
Ripeness comes often without warning, but you will know in that higher sense. If your mind has been taught to know its place, somewhere below that other faculty, it will know how to be told, and it will recognize the signal this or that thing is ripe. It has nothing to do with efficiency, rationality, cost in resources, or any measure which so chains those who still think the prison is freedom. So our minds are aware of these things, but they know it may not matter a whit against the imperatives. The sense of imperative declares when ripeness has come, and the mind obeys.
Plans, hopes and dreams of prisoners we recognize; with their sorrows and pains we empathize; but we don’t live there any more. We live on the Other Side, even before we reach it. We seek a destiny they cannot know, and a ripeness that takes us finally across to the Other Side.
(This ends the series. Permission is granted to copy any and all parts of this series of seven posts under the title “The Other Side”.)
I really like your style of writing. 🙂
Thank you.