There is no where to get to – the journey is all there ever is.   There are those who will tell you that you must have a destination.  I believe that if we are focused on a destination, we may become caught up in trying to get there and miss something – or everything – along the way.

Have you ever been on a trip with someone and wanted to stop for something whimsical and spontaneous?  “Honey, stop at those caves.  They look interesting.”  And the reply is on the order of “We have a schedule to keep” or “We can’t stop now”?  While knowing what you want or where you are going is necessary to achieve or reach the end, this is not a book about the end result.  Let’s face it, on any voyage, you may know where you are going, but you have no idea what it will look like, how it will feel, what it will be like when you get there.

The truth is that the journey is your life.  There is nothing but your movement through time and events and circumstance and your experience of these.  That’s all there is.  When experience stops, you are dead.  The end, in this case, is death.

This is what is meant by “there is nowhere to get to”.

BEING WILLING and BEING OPEN

There is nothing more important than willingness. Without willingness, no desire will ever be met.  We begin with being willing.

Being willing to what you may ask.  Good, ask.  What are you willing to be, do and have?  You may begin with asking yourself what or how you are being doing having now.  Does the answer inspire you?

I spent 24 years as a drug addict.  The first thing that created change in my life was my willingness to change.  It sounds simple and you may equate it with desire.  Yet being willing brings something completely new to the table.  Inside of willing there is desire and there is also hope. 

Willingness implies a state of readiness that is absent in desire.  Desire, akin to want, can be seen as a state of recognition that something is not present.  Desire without willingness is being in a state of lack.  It is simply a want.  There is nothing wrong implied in willingness.  Want implies that something is missing – that there is incompletion.  Willingness does not infer that you are not already whole; in fact, it is a component of wholeness.

Being willing to accept change means being open to the being-doing-having of change, both as a process and as a continually new product.  When I became willing to stop being addicted to drugs, I had no idea what it would be like not to use drugs.  I had no idea what I would do to stop and to stay stopped; and when I had stopped, what I would do with my time.  I had no clue – and I was willing and open to the complete area of what I did not know.

This is what scares us – what we do not know.  I do not mean the intellectual memory or cognitive process of understanding.  I mean that unknown or unrecognized area that can be described as “the void”.  That empty space where we no longer know ourselves.  The way of being where we have given up our concept of self.  This takes something.  And this is the willing that I am talking about here.  Being open to the concept that you are not how you think you are.  It is not set in stone. The collection of roles that we play and how we play them do not define us.  They are helpful perhaps in navigating the tasks of completing daily chores, but they only exist in the world of getting done, of finishing things.

Being willing and being open demand that we shed the cocoon of who we think we are and who we think others think we are.  Most of us go through life seeing ourselves the way that we think others see us.  This begins when we are very young.  We see ourselves as we think our parents and the other adults who are important in our world see us.  If we think we have done something that will make our parents or family or teacher proud of us, we are proud of ourselves.  This is not the same as actually being proud of ourselves.  It is being proud of ourselves by proxy.  It is not our choice to be proud of ourselves – we are dependent on someone else to give us permission.

This follows us through the years and we lose our self-concept of self.  Some of us lose our concept of self so completely that we fall into codependent relationships (code for addiction), substance abuse (code for addiction), abusive relationships (code for addiction), obsessions with food (code for addiction), obsessions with achieving (code for addiction), etc…  These are all just ways that we have seeking that same outside validation or permission to feel good; much like the way we learned when we were young.

To be open and willing means not judging what we find and we discover ourselves.  After all, it is not fixed, it is not permanent.  We are not finite. To say “I am this way” is to believe a lie.  The lie is that you are this way and not that way.  It is not true except that you have made it true because you believe it to be and therefore you create it daily.  What if you gave all those opinions of yourself up – threw them into the wind.  Who would you be?  You cannot know.  To think you know means that you have not thrown all the opinions and judgments of who you already are to the wind as we said.  To not know who you are is to live in the mystery of what it means to be.  This is where the juice of life runs down your chin.  This is what it means to be alive.

To not know who you are is to surrender your concept of self.  This requires acknowledging that you have a concept of self. When you do this, when you examine this idea of what you are, you are confronting your ego.  The ego is a wonderful tool in the world of getting things done.  It is not very useful in a world of self-discovery.  The ego will tell you “But I am this way.  I have always been this way and everything is okay.  I’m alive still.  I am fine this way.”  To live like you do not know frightens the ego.  The ego must know.

Your ego is there to protect you.  It is a tool to survive – to get through this circumstance, situation, event.  From circumstance to situation to event, we survive our life.  Life is does not have to be about surviving, it is about living.  This is what the ego does not understand because to the ego, we survive our life.  We cannot truly live our life if we already know – there would never be anything new.

I noticed in high school that I had not learned anything truly new for a long time.  There were plenty of different ways to use the skills I had been taught in elementary school and to build on them, but there was nothing new.  Scientists will tell you that almost all of what we think is memory.  If it is memory, it cannot be new.

This is because the ego, in its concern for our survival, uses comparison to the past to judge each situation in our life and to dictate a response to the situation.  We are living in a memory.  It is no wonder that our experiences follow predictable paths.  Predictable is good in a world of survival.

If we are willing to live in a world where we do not know and we are open to discovery, the ego will fight us.  That is okay.  This is the job of the ego.  There is nothing bad or wrong with the ego’s concern for our survival.  When we acknowledge and accept that we only think we are this way or that way, that it is only a memory of how we were yesterday and means nothing about how we can be today, we open a door.  We can see that we are not really who we think we are.  We can be new.