Placebo

The universe has no meaning or purpose other than its own playfulness. It is like a sugar pill, a placebo - harmless, yet full of energy, and whatever potency we imagine it might possess. Most of our conflicts, and much of the stress we cause each other, will dissolve when we grok this simple truth instead of resisting it. The cosmos is a placebo, and placebos work.

Here is radical freedom: we get to superimpose any story we like upon the world. Just as we attribute healing properties to a sugar pill, we attribute to the dance of creation the meaning we choose, healing ourselves by telling our story about the world. The story makes us feel good, makes our life seem more meaningful, until we finally, very gently, let go of storytelling. Then we permit ourselves to feel good without a story. True joy needs no story. Joy simply is.

It's a lot less scary, less exhausting, when we relax into this wholeness, this holiness, which is the perception that the universe is just a celebration of energy, dancing in itself, renewing itself each moment, without "meaning" anything. The task of living gets simpler because we quit insisting that others adopt our story, our religion, our politics, our diet, our taste in books, movies, ice cream...

Almost miraculously, the energy shifts from negative to positive as we remember that another person's story is valid for them, just as ours is valid for us, and all our stories are but co-entangled threads in one vast tapestry of human hope.

It isn't our stories that create conflict, but the insistence that your story must be mine, or mine must be yours. People inherently do not want to tell violent, hopeless, negative stories. They love to tell stories of courage, creativity, self-renewal, and beauty. But if I rob you of your own story, and insist that only mine is true, then I force you to tell a story of resistance, retribution, retaliation, war, which is simply your reaction to my need to be right.

Let me tell my story, as you tell yours. But let us ever be ready to meet in Rumi's field, out beyond stories, in a chaos of Spring flowers, under a riot of stars, in a cosmos that needs no meaning but its own perfectly wild and Wordless energy.


Photo from my back yard taken by my daughter Abby