This marks the death of running from fear

Image courtesy of Pixelens, Flickr Creative Commons

I’ve been reading a marvelous book by Peter Kinglsey called Reality and I wanted to share a passage with you. This might help you make meaning of your life. It might help you put all of your struggles into context.

Collectively, without even knowing what has happened, we have trained ourselves to turn our backs on the things that seem to threaten us most: to keep finding ways of postponing, avoiding, wishing them away. But the way of the initiate is to head straight towards them-is to penetrate and pass right through them until one comes out at the other side.

We spend most of our lives, without even realizing it, longing to go back to some Garden of Eden. But as early Christians understood, there can be no returning and even if there could, nothing would be worse for us.

We can complain for the rest of our days about how hard things are, with plenty of justification. but it was only because of what happened, through all this suffering,that we will be able to make our way back at last to where we really belong. and that means being prepared to take terrible risks.

We love taking things easy-will even spend the greater part of our available time working ourselves into the ground just so that we can sit around in a little comfort and security right at the end. But this is a fool’s game. We will have the shock of our lives when, sooner or later, we realize that what had seemed so perfectly safe is in fact the perfect illusion.

Everything we look to for safety or comfort: this is Love’s trick, and by refusing to take any true risks we end up ironically taking the most dangerous course there is, of placing all our trust in our deceiver.

We live in a ruthless universe. There is great beauty and there are absolutely no guarantees. Everything is masquerading as its opposite. And nothing could sound more unlikely but also be more unavoidable than Empedocles mysterious message- that love traps the soul while Strife sets it free. No message could be so plain and so concealed, so transparent and so ignored at the same time.

From pages 408-409 in Reality by Peter Kingsley. To buy the book, please go to http://peterkingsley.com.

When you try to run towards safety, towards the sure thing, towards, say, marriage and a house and 2.5 kids, or say, towards climbing the ladder in some job or some industry, or towards getting everything in your life to be absolutely perfect by always following the rules and never ever straying outside of the lines, if you try to look for safety or comfort in everything by never taking a risk, this, as Kingsley describes, is “a fool’s game.”

What’s the moral of this story? Take a risk! Dare to look beyond what you think you know for security and answers. Get a destiny card reading, and start to know yourself.

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