My Unconditioner is Broken

 

Bliss

I was hiking in a canyon off the beaten path just after dawn when I decided to reach a ridge and see if I could spy Monument Valley from it. I waded and zigzagged through the sage and Mormon tea, finally using a box-shaped juniper as my guidepost. Out here in southeast Utah, false ridges can roll like waves and you never get to that vista point you might imagine is there just over the next rise. I’d been contemplating whether we get to heaven, whether there is even a paradise. Me, always gearing myself toward the next life, the next thing, missing the pots of gold right here along the way.

After the first false summit gave me a view of more red, sandy hills, the next one a couple hundred meters beyond opened up to Monument Valley in the distance, far across the San Juan River Canyon. The Sisters, a line of spires, stood in the amber of the new day, the megaliths blue-gray shadows, twigs poking up from the horizon beside a long, block of mesa. I counted 4 or 5 sticks in the sand, which would be massive edifices of sandstone if I stood beside them. In that ethereal light, waxy in the haze from the holocausts in Cali, there was a heavenly quality to my vision.

Standing here seemed an answer to my contemplations these last few weeks. You do arrive at your destination sometimes, and it can be everything you thought it might be.

We get to paradise because we’ve never left it. It’s here and now. I don’t need to wait for it in the future, or rummage around for it in my past. I can’t merit it through suffering or sacrifice or earn it through hard work. It’s a gift freely given. It’s the vision at the top of the hill. It’s always available to all of us, though we may reject it.

It’s not about ‘deserve’ or ‘worthy.’ And as I drove home from Red Canyon later that day, I thought that perhaps, because I couldn’t feel it in most moments, that I needed to snatch heaven from God, who withheld bliss to bestow it on a select few like a greedy miser. I believed that I needed to steal it like Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. It was why I came out to places like this; to have all for myself what was so precious, inaccessible, and of limited supply.  But if paradise were a zealously guarded treasure that God kept from us, and kept all for Itself, then it wouldn’t be worth stealing. Paradise wouldn’t be a worth a nickel.

All I need do is open myself to it, which is to open my heart and mind to what is right here, right now. It’s to make myself available to it. It’s to aware myself of my natural state.

But most moments, I don’t experience it. Don’t feel it. And I made up my mind as I drove home through the majestic gateway of Comb Ridge that I wouldn’t write about it until I experienced it and felt it in each and every moment. There I was again, putting conditions on it. Love gives itself freely to me without conditions. And since paradise presents itself without terms attached, I can only receive it without terms. That unconditioned, unconditional receiving is its only condition, which is no condition at all.

The condition I placed on joy was that I wouldn’t write about it until I felt it, until I experienced that pure bliss of which the Hindu mystics wrote. Otherwise, how would I know that the conclusions I came to about paradise were true: that it was a state and not a place, that it was here and not there, that’s now and not then.  I knew these things to be true, I thought that paradise was my natural state, but I didn’t feel the joy that came with knowing that. Maybe the old mystics didn’t feel those things either. Maybe they just concluded that you needed to open yourself to it in the present and then it would flood in. But maybe the mystics didn’t experience this bliss either, but only arrived at it as an idea, as an intellectual construct. And so, if I didn’t experience it right now, maybe it wasn’t a real thing. Why would I write about it if it wasn’t real?

But then an odd series of things happened. I came home and a bunch of friends either called or texted. I felt some measure of peace. I felt like a really belonged in the universe, a feeling I hadn’t had for months. I slept like a child.

The bliss of the mystics was simply the joy of the present moment. It wasn’t an exclusive joy that only they had access to. We could all claim it, if we chose it. Being human meant I wouldn’t necessarily feel pure joy every moment of each day. Instead, it might be a gradual thing, and come packaged in different experiences. In my case right now, it was a feeling of love and belonging experienced when others reached out to me. Paradise is simply being present to love’s constant presence.

Yet I’d erected obstacles to obstruct my view of paradise. I’d raised objections to love’s presence in my life. And they were all the things I noticed earlier:

They were time, and living in time, searching, longing for paradise as a hopeful expectation in the future. Always then and never now. I’d have to wait for it. Or I once had it in the past and if I could just go back and recreate that magic moment. Or rewrite some bad episode from the past so that it turned out better, leading to a better present. But that never did it either, because the past was gone, beyond my ability to edit out some traumatic segment on the tape of my life.  In either case, the past had slipped away while I was busy focusing on the future. And I missed joy because it was only in the present.

The barrier was earn, deserve, work for, suffer for, sacrifice to get it.  Always a form of purchase. I needed to toil to merit heaven, when always it was a gift I couldn’t make myself worthy to receive. So, I refused it because I couldn’t control it, and have it on my own terms, in the forms and formulas I’d found to be desirable. I needed to earn it through the currencies of work and sacrifice and suffering and time, Yet joy eluded me. Not because I was unworthy without those forms of payment, but because I’d never fallen from worthiness. I only thought I had. So, there was no way to earn what I already had in the bank. There was no way to deserve what had already been given and could never be taken away. Anything worthwhile in life is free, available to all, and irrevocable. Yet I thought heaven was special, to be enjoyed in special moments, in sacred places, by chosen people. Humanity’s fundamental ignorance is that it forgets we are all chosen.

The greatest mistake I ever made was to think that I could throw away paradise and replace it with something called hell. But who am I to do that? Who am I to think that I could possibly deny paradise? That would make me God, and God I am not. Maybe that’s the conceit, that I believe I’m as powerful as God, so I think I can actually throw away paradise. It wouldn’t be much of a real thing if it could be lost that easily. Who am I to think I could do all that? I’ve only fooled myself into believing that it’s possible to be exiled from heaven, because I chose power over joy. I’ll steal it from God, secure it for myself on my own terms. Yet God never withheld it from me. I deprive myself of it.

The obstacle to being present to love’s presence was thinking that I could snatch heaven away from a God jealous of its embrace by anyone other than Itself. But would such a God be worth having? Would you really want to live in  paradise with gates guarded by jealousy, with the damned pounding on the door? Such a heaven would be more like living in a walled fortress. It would be made by a selfish keep guarded by a god and not God.

And mostly, the obstacle was in the erection of conditions to my experience of happiness, which are simply barriers of protest I throw up against love’s presence. When they are of the future, I call them expectations. When they’re of space and time, they’re insurmountable because heaven is never there or then. It’s always only here and now. I can tell when I’ve created a condition by my language: I’ll be happy if… I’ll be happy there… I’ll be happy when…

Conditions are barriers. They wall out experience. Yet love is unconditional by its very nature. It gives itself without conditions, without expectations. And that which is given without conditions can only be received without conditions, or it’s not received at all.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within