Policing The Universe

Below is one of my favorite inspired writings of modern times, where every line had me nodding in recognition, muttering yes, yes. It is from poet and teacher James McCrae and his simple yet profound Instructions Before Visiting Earth.

INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE VISITING EARTH

In the event that you wake up
and find your soul separated from source
and manifest into material form,
don’t panic.
Your condition is only temporary.

You have been selected for the
opportunity of human incarnation.

This 3D simulation is designed
to break up the monotony of eternity
by giving you a fully immersive
experience as a distinct ego identity.

Your body will serve
as your physical avatar as you
navigate a dense and dramatic reality.
There will be many distractions
causing you to forget your true nature
and origin. You will experience
a range of emotions, from joy
to loneliness to despair.

But remember – no matter
what trials and traumas you encounter,
your soul remains perfectly safe.

At times you may feel lost or afraid.
This is totally normal.
If you ever need guidance,
simply slow down your busy mind
and bring your awareness
to the quiet place
inside yourself.

On this planet, nothing is permanent.
People and things will come and go.
You will fall in love and form sentimental attachments
only to lose everything you hold dear.

So cling to nothing too tightly, even yourself,
and when it’s time to let go, let go with grace,
for nothing is owned, only borrowed.

As you walk among
the people on the planet,
try to be a good guest.
Tread lightly. Remember
that you are only visiting.
Don’t make a mess.
Listen more than you speak.
Give more than you take.

Don’t keep your soft heart
locked inside a glass cage,
protected from wear and tear.

You’ll never make it out alive
and time passes quickly.
So come back with some battle scars
and good stories to tell.

It was an ordinary morning several years ago, the ritual of coffee with my husband, when Jai Ram paused with some kind of inspired download and said, oh wow, there will never be any sort of utopia on this plane of existence, because the whole plane is built upon yin and yang.

From there we started talking about how there will always be war, there will always be inequality, there will always be disease, there will always be disenfranchisement, there will always be the remarkable extremes of separation, the dance of unfairness.

It was a strange combination of feeling both unnerved alongside an enormous aha, because when you think about it, aren’t most of our actions, our paths, somehow interlaced with a desire to fix, to fix the world, fix ourselves, fix people, fix situations, a sort of bag of remedies we carry across our shoulders, hoping to make all of those things woven into the yin and yang somehow dissolve? Perhaps the reason for this existence is not to fix from the one who perceives the need to change the outer, but to observe, and to consider whether we are willing to accept what may be the greatest gift anyone could be given, the gift of paradox. To accept that there will always be war, poverty, hunger, strife, and still walk on the soil of this seemingly awful existence without the urging to fix but rather to serve.

Even though this coffee revelation was several years ago, I remain fascinated at the unsettling nature of this game of impermanence. It parallels McCrae’s instruction to slow down the busy mind, something our morning practices have beautifully provided. You could say that one morning moment began to gently erase a script I had so long memorized, of rights and wrongs. I don’t think it is any secret that my pursuit to fix and make better, to try to prevent for future generations the wrongs I had experienced, has been a rather cliched nobility. And yet without traveling that road of fixing and making better, would I have ever really arrived at the back of the cave of it, to recognize and ask, now what? Because if the intention all along has been a sincere form of use me, then what aspects of me need to get out of the way or untethered?

And the genuine willingness to untether and follow McCrae’s instructions comes with its own unique and potent gift, a deepening of the gift of paradox, a seeing of just how pervasive it is. Nothing sits outside the shedding of the role of the fixer. It shows up in the way I write to you here, in the way I deliver talks, in the coursework I teach, and in the way I witness the battling out of old arguments among others, among institutions and theological principles, in the generational patterning of pining away at some mythology of a golden era.

And I notice what rises in the tightly clinging version of me, the prickliness of an arrogance that thinks somehow my assessment is better than another’s path. This witnessing becomes its own practice, where I look at that prickliness and come to terms with the fact that maybe I don’t know. Maybe they’re right. What is it I need to know in this moment other than to listen more than I speak, as McCrae reminds, and in that listening, feel the still point within grow more expansive?

Most times it feels wildly strange to give up policing the universe. It is remarkable to notice the amount of energy costumed in irritation, at fighting, forcing, and attempting to out clever some position every single day, and then to notice the fear that people will misread this as non-action or not caring, when it is actually the entire opposite. The hands have not stopped working. The global education work still happens, the development, the programming, the fundraising, the planes still get boarded, the service continues. What has stopped is the fixer that used to fuel it. Quite honestly, I look at my former modes of advocacy and feel a sort of sorrow in that, sorrow in the fact that I really didn’t do anything much more than match the energy of the thing I was condemning, straining to match a gallery of ‘shoulds’ in my mind. But I continue to see. through a perpetual parting of the clouds, an understanding that nothing I am experiencing is special or unique. It is but a timeless act of that yin yang that asks, now that you see the objective is not to fix but to witness, will you still be willing to serve?

And now when walking into the metaphoric lion’s dens of human conflicts, will I be less armed and more willingly naked? What might happen if all I do is listen? What might happen if, instead of giving some intellectual discourse on what is right, I surrender my speech? What would happen if I stopped placing responsibility on anything out there, be it platforms or people or organizations, in order to preserve some type of sacrosanct built on principles that are subtly baked with ingredients of rightness and superiority?

And most personally for my path, what changes occur within the motivation or call of a spiritual path, if it is not to make better? What is the motivation of helping, when we become aware there is no endpoint, and that by defining ourselves as the helper we are simultaneously creating a form of othering, someone in need of helping? If there is no utopia, if the cycle of separation will always breed this inhumanity, what is the reason for getting up in the morning? What keeps us from dissolving into nihilism or despair?

Maybe the whole reason for doing this thing in a human body lives inside a single word, perturbation. To become perturbed, to be disrupted, to get shaken, some by disease, some by loss, some by dark nights where everything is overturned. Each disruption whispering the same discovery, that what we are walking around in is a fabrication, and then asking whether we are willing to walk around in it anyway. Such exquisite paradox.

The only way anything here begins to make sense, the only thing that begins the untethering and unwrapping of this cycle of suffering, is in the practice itself, in entering into the capsule of a single day, not trying to fix the madding crowd, but to see if I can be still in the midst of the unresolved, of the conflict, of the disappointment, of the physical aches, of the insolvency. And it isn’t so much a question of can I. Of course there is that within that can.

But will I remember.

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Instructions Before Visiting Earth is shared here in full with gratitude to James McCrae. Find him and follow his work at jamesmccrae.substack.com.