When we are unsure, unsteady, what can we stand upon? In all the ups and downs of life, what is steady, where is that on which we can depend? What has meaning when everything seems meaningless?
The concept of positive disillusionment can help as a framework for understanding the often painful experience of seeing through the stories the world offers about how to live in order to be happy. This disillusionment can happen through a direct seeing, but more commonly it happens through loss, betrayal, or disappointment: when a time comes when what we thought we could depend on, what we thought would work out or lead to permanent fulfillment, is stripped away or turns out to be an empty promise.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that even when aspects of life bring joy and temporary fulfillment, the inner longing will not be satisfied by outer things like money, so-called success, popularity, a big house, a promotion at work. These and other things may be worth achieving, may even be helpful depending upon your life situation, but their satisfaction only goes so far. The world is constantly messaging that if you buy this, do that, or make yourself into a certain type of person, your life will be fulfilled, your problems will be solved, and whatever is “wrong” with you will be fixed. But in positive disillusionment, you see that those are false promises.
We actually do have an inner compass, and it points beyond any of that, heading towards what is actually true. That’s why we are not satisfied with anything less. In positive disillusionment, once we go through the grief or anger or even the despair involved in the process of letting go of what we thought we could hold onto, we can begin to find what we can truly stand on. What we can stand on regardless of gains and losses, sorrows and joys, ups and downs. When we see a mirage for what it is, that’s when we can start to find our way to something real.
Deeper than all the circumstances of life, including our moods and thought patterns, which also are circum-stances—“circum” means “around,” and “stance” means “stands”—is that which stands within us instead of around us. Circumstances—including moods and thoughts—only stand around us. The key is recognizing the implication of this: the implication that there is something else, a place around which those circumstances revolve, a center in the midst of the circle of circumstance.
Our thoughts are not that center point, they are part of the surround—regardless what the thoughts may say. The body is also part of the surround, something felt and observed, not the center point. And our feelings are felt by us, they are not the center from which we feel. So then the question is, what is the place from which all the surround is seen and felt? What or where is that place that searches for meaning, the place that already senses the nature of meaning and therefore searches for it?
Now we begin to get a sense of something—not a thing per se, not an object outside ourselves—that we can sense as if beneath the waves of surface conditions. A place at the center of ever-swirling circumstance. And even if we only have a vague sense, it is a starting point. What is the actual I AM at the deepest point beneath the waves? What is that place that has a kind of knowing that is deeper than what we think, feel or see? What is the actual I AM that is not dependent on the circle of circumstances?
We don’t need to have the answer to that question in order to see the vitally important implications of the question itself. We don’t need to have the answer in order to begin to feel into the understanding, the inner sense, that there is something besides the surround, something besides mere circumstance, loss and gain, pleasure and pain, emotional ups and downs.
This understanding—this standing under the waves of circumstance—is the beginning of something to stand upon. It is the beginning of an inner knowing that grows with exploration, with excavation, that grows with the quest to find not just an explanation, not just a mental construct, concept or definition, but an actuality. No longer trying to stand on shifting circumstances—and all circumstances shift sooner or later—we now have the beginnings of a sense of that which is beyond all circumstances. We now have a place to stand.
© 2021 Shanti Natania Grace
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