Writing about the illusory nature of problems can look like a denial, or outright ignorance, of what today appears to be a highly problematic state of the world. There is a battle going on, right? Many social media posts speak of love and mindfulness and peace. All well and good, but do they meet the demands of the visible unrest?

Do these mindfulness reminders create a restful moment of pause, or do they engender more anger as a striking lack of awareness? Seemingly irrelevant tropes in the face of powerful upheaval–akin to bringing a rubber knife to a gunfight?

Concepts of love, mindfulness, and peace are empty, and thus not a source of solace. We cannot talk or write or read about these ideas unless they are transformed and lived. Love is not the selective feeling of affection and connection to a delineated few. Mindfulness is not a scheduled respite, a moment or two taken out of time in the midst of conflict. Peace is not an impossible goal to be hoped for sometime in the future, and not really an agreement between two or more parties.

Peace is an allegiance to the calm that always can be found under or behind the storm. Not a break from it, but a dwelling as and in that calm. Mindfulness as a way of being. Ultimately, it becomes the realization of no-differences when the two or more are the illusion, the false segregation created by the split mind. The experiential realization of inseparability is love.

The hardest thing to accept right now is that the division is within, is projection. Anger and fear are the unavoidable manifestation of this inner conflict projected out there. Even if you don’t or can’t believe this premise, there is a close-enough proximation of being the equanimity in the midst of outbursts all around. See the power and the solace in the refusal to give in to the temptation of helpless fear or an over-wielding anger.

The need to be right is a powerful force. It is, however, a weak defense in this shadowy world of not really knowing, of honest uncertainty.

In those most disorienting moments of there-is-something-wrong-I-need-to-do-something distress, some response will and always does emerge in the space that is beyond fear and anger. It helps to realize we are not in charge, but simply vehicles of this greater intelligence. Simply allow the response, the doing/done, to emerge.

Let it come from the equanimity that comes from trust in this larger/largest Source. And it will be reflected, this trust, this returning, out there. You will then more often notice images like that of the young white girl jumping in front of the young black male as the police move towards him, or the National Guardsman who takes a knee in solidarity with the protestors. That is the unitive perception, instead of the fearful division.

That is why you are here. You are/I am the unbiased witness, like the sun, that does not discriminate where it alights. And fear and anger will dissipate, if only for a moment. And that is the moment that matters, that fearless space of clarity and inseparability.

And in the silence, the vastness, of the indiscriminating light, the response comes through you, not from you.

You don’t need to do anything in particular. Forget the particular, the perception of parts, of right and wrong. There are no parts in this Whole.

Why did Krishna tell Arjuna that he must fight, as he stood in the midst of the battlefield,? Is he not fighting the doubt he feels in seeing this world split in two? Where is the battlefield? The great divide, thus the great anguish?

“It was Vyasa’s (the author’s) genius to take the whole great Mahabharata epic and see it as metaphor for the perennial war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in every human heart.” ~

Bhagavad Gita