Quest Magazine

By Lance Hardie

Those are the odds. Approximately three hundred thousand sperm cells take off from the starting gate. With few exceptions, only one will unite with the egg cell at the end of the tunnel. And the one that wins over the other 299,999 may very well be an inferior individual.

Let's face it: with odds like that, there is bound to be a better one in the bunch. As a metaphor, here is an argument for the randomness of achievement. You may accept, more or less as a religious belief, the propaganda notions that education, hard work, influential friends, a favorable horoscope, or a bit of good luck now and then is the magic formula for success. In reality there is no evidence to support this superstition. All analyses of how successful people achieve their ends are made up after the fact, and there are no scientific studies to show the effects of following particular systems.

Taking all individuals as a whole, there are no consistently successful ways of achieving anything—business prowess, musical genius, athletic performance, good teeth, healthy hair, freedom from warts, or the impregnation of an egg. You are pretty much on your own. And, when all is said and done, prayer might work as well as anything. As with almost everything in life, there are no guarantees.

Now, having said that, let me give you a few rules guaranteed to guarantee nothing beyond the feeling that, whether there is a God, or even a small "g" god, or a goddess with any size "G," less stress is better than more, and sleeping well at night is better than not. If it were part of a workshop or even as the title of a best-selling self-help package (you know—the book, the tapes, the video, the newsletter, maybe even a hotline) the following list might carry a timely, catchy name like "Lance Hardie's Thirteen Steps to a Vibrant, Joyful Life with No Effort, No Exercises, and No Responsibilities." Well, something like that—maybe shorter. In reality, what follows is not quite a list, and certainly not a series of steps, which, if it were, would never add up to thirteen. Consider it more like a set of partial views of a whole body that cannot be seen all at once. If this were a cubist painting, you might turn it sideways to look at it, or stand on your head. Which is not a bad idea in itself when you want to look at your situation in a new light.

• Always tell the truth as soon as you know it—to yourself and to everyone else.

• Make commitments only to yourself, then keep them. If you must make commitments to others, deliver on time. If you can't, say so as soon as you know it.

• Learn from the great sages about the world, about human nature, about self-knowledge. It will save you much pain and suffering, not to say time. The great sages are not hard to find. They are on the shelves of most bookstores and libraries. And of course on the Internet.

• Learn from experience, then let the past go. Don't punish yourself. If you insist on punishing yourself, others will join you.

• No one owns you. Do what you love. If you believe you can't, you believe someone owns you. That's called slavery. From time to time you may try to run away. It's a sure way to create suffering.

• You have a natural rhythm and a natural style. When you fight them you deform yourself. If you deform yourself long enough you will end up hating yourself.

• To thrive in society, adapt gracefully to the foolishness of others. This is not to contradict the previous item, only to say that if you don't want to make enemies out of the fools it's better not to rattle their cages.

• Accept no guilt for being yourself. It's okay to say no.

• Most people can't read your mind. When you need something, ask for it.

• Exception: most people can read your mind when you lie.

While most of this little homily may seem quite sensible to you, if not simple-minded, there is a good chance your nervous system won't be ready to carry out all of it when you are just out of high school. You have to live in the world for some time—with the near-nuts and the out-and-out crazies—just to get your bearing. The world of work and relationship and money will give you plenty to chew on for years. You have to make mistakes, which is another way of saying you have to suffer. The great secret to learn is that some things are likely to fail because the odds are against you—and you're standing at the wrong angle. While it may seem simple enough, some of us take longer than others to figure out that it's better not to bet against the house.

At some point in your life you reach an age at which you can stand to read the words of the great sages. Then you realize you are not alone—someone has been there before, and it's a great relief to discover that. No, they didn't have faxes and frequent-flyer miles, and it doesn't matter because that's just window-dressing. The virtues and the vices, the principles and the nonsense—all that stays the same because we are all still just barely out of monkeyhood. And, for all we know, not even very permanently.

One in 300,000 is not very good odds, and that's not counting all the other times when impregnation doesn't even occur. I have a feeling that this number applies to more than just sperm. I have a feeling that many opportunities in nature and in human behavior have similarly large odds against particular results. Telling the truth and doing what you love may not increase your odds of success in the world of those near-nuts and out-and-out crazies unless you become a great actor who is really good at humoring their foolishness. Acting and humoring depend to a large extent on a mastery of timing. Unfortunately, not everyone who won the race against the other 299,999 can convert that kind of timing success into the other kind. How much work is worth doing in order to learn this great art has a lot to do with the question of how important it is to you. More critically, it has to do with how important it is to that part of you which is authentic. And it may take a lifetime or more to find that out.

Telling the truth and doing what you love puts you in the company of poets and prophets and other brave people whose success is not measured by the foolishness of the world. It is measured by the standards of their own strength and their own convictions, which are recognized by others like them. And sometimes they are even recognized by the world, on a ratio of about one in 300,000. If you are one of the unsung heroes, well, guess what—you may have to sing for yourself. Only be sure that your songs are of joy and of triumph. Because the last rule is "Never complain."

Lance Hardie is a freelance writer and public radio host in Arcata, California. A student of mythology, religion, and the classics, he is currently working on a collection of essays on those subjects.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

So wrote T. S. Eliot in the opening lines of his seminal poem The Waste Land (1922), which characterized the mood of an era. The lines are, of course, ironic. In our winter sleep, a time of deadness and dullness, we are like the Fisher King of the Grail legend. We have suffered the wound of mortality and have accepted the status quo of our somnolence as the norm of existence.

Then comes April, the beginning of spring, with its warm rains that stir life, awaken us from our amnesia, and sprout the lilacs. Being used to our winter torpor, we find the call to new life, to renewal, to resurrection, and to transformation a cruel intrusion. So we do not welcome April or its lilacs. We are like the little man in a William Steig cartoon from the New Yorker magazine many years ago: he is huddled in a cramped fetal position with a scowl on his face within a constricting crate, with no room to move—the title of the cartoon is "People are no damn good." As with Eliot's lines, there is irony in the cartoon, for the cramped fetal position is a prelude to inevitable birth and new life. However much we cling to our crate and scorn lilacs, spring and new birth will come.

Lilacs are interesting flowers, and even the word lilac is notable. We borrowed the name of the flower from French, which borrowed it from Arabic, which borrowed it from Persian, which borrowed it from Sanskrit. So the word lilac is another of those links that bind East and West and show a perpetual process of renewal and rebirth. But lilac is interesting for another reason too. The Sanskrit word that it comes from is nila, meaning "dark blue." And thereby hangs a tale.

Hindu myth tells that once a great flood covered the whole earth, in whose waters all things were lost, including the Elixir of Immortality. The Gods decided that they would have to churn the ocean to bring up all of the things hidden in its depths, including the precious Elixir. But how could they churn an entire ocean?

One of the Gods, Vishnu, incarnated as a turtle and dived into the ocean, while the other Gods rooted up a great mountain, which they set upon the turtle's back to use as a huge paddle to churn the waters. But the mountain-paddle was so large that the Gods could not turn it alone. So they had to call on the Demons for help. Around the mountain-paddle they coiled an enormous serpent. The Gods then took hold of one end of the serpent, and the Demons took hold of the other, and they alternately pulled its body, twisting the mountain back and forth on the shell of the turtle. And thus they churned the ocean.

Very soon things began to be churned out of the waters—all the things that had been lost in the great flood. And one of those things was a poison so virulent that it could kill all living beings. When it appeared, most of the Gods and Demons were aghast, but the God Shiva leapt forward and swallowed the poison to protect all the others. As he did so, the poison dyed his throat a dark blue, and so he came to be called "Nilakantha," meaning "blue-throated." So Shiva was the God of the Lilac Throat. And because of his action, all beings eventually got the Elixir of Immortality that they sought.

The myth of the Churning of the Ocean is a spring parable. If we want to recover our lost immortality, we have to stir up the stagnant waters of our being. And to do that, we need the assistance of both the Gods and the Demons within us. When we begin to work at finding the Elixir, we have to be prepared to encounter first the poison of mortality and to swallow it. The path to immortality is through death, the way to spring is through winter, and their passage is marked by lilacs and a blue throat.

By Betty Bland

Originally printed in the MAY-JUNE 2006 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bland, Betty. "Viewpoint: Follow the Flow." Quest  94.3 (MAY-JUNE 2006):44-45.

Each of us is like a magnet in the way we repeatedly attract similar people and circumstances. Just as soon as one bad relationship ends, another takes its place. When we escape negative issues in employment one place, we find the same in another. You can often discover how well a new resident will like a town by their answer to the question, "How did you like where you just came from?" Wherever we go, we carry a kind of attraction for similar outcomes. Karma and habitual attitudes follow us like the cloud of dust seen over Pigpen, the Peanuts cartoon character who never takes a bath. Sometimes, it may seem that we have a sign over our head that says, "Hit me!" or "Sock it to me!" as on the old Laugh In show.

This principle goes both ways; positive people and circumstances are also drawn to us. However, we tend not to notice the serendipitous events, because we generally do not question the good times, only the bad. When things go well, we may enjoy ourselves so much that we don't feel the urge to analyze or philosophize. Yet, because life has its own flow and cyclical nature, it is wise to pay attention whatever the experience.

It is not necessarily that we draw all adversity directly to ourselves, or that we deserve every bad thing that happens—hereby indicating our unworthiness. Rather, it is a complex concatenation of causes and potentialities that flow together—like a dance, or those metal filings. In the subtle realms of connectivity, our higher self, perhaps in conjunction with the Lords of Karma, attracts to our personality those elements of experience which draw us toward our potentiality. Sometimes, it may be a shock that acts as a wake-up call to redirect our energies; sometimes, disappointments or pain deepen our connections with the inner realities; while at other times, serendipitous happenings catapult us into a whole new arena of growth and service.

However it might manifest, the purposefulness of random events unfolds for the student of life. Madame Blavatsky spoke of this phenomenon by referencing a Roman legend. Once when Rome was threatened by attack, a lone goose cried out, perhaps in its sleep, and woke the entire flock. The cries of the disturbed birds alerted the sentries and thereby saved Rome.

Has it never struck you, that if the nightmare of a dreaming goose, causing the whole slumbering flock to awake and cackle— could save Rome, that your cackle too, may also produce as unexpected results? . . . But don't you know, that the building of a nest by a swallow, the tumbling of a dirt-grimed urchin down the back stair, or the chaff of your nursery maid with the butcher's boy, may alter the face of nations, as much as can the downfall of a Napoleon? Yea, verily so; for the links within links and the concatenations of this Nidanic* Universe are past our understanding. 

(* Nidanas, or the concatenation of causes and effects, in the Eastern philosophy.)

(Collected Works, vol. 12, 384-5)

None of this cause and relationship is static or linear. Every attitude and action we take blends with all the potential circumstances emerging from everyone around us, and creates a new set of possibilities. As we learn and grow beyond the circumstances of yesterday, the whole pattern can dissolve and shift, so that what was once an insurmountable problem can dissolve like a mist in the midday sun.

The fluidity of what seemed to be unshakably set circumstances has often proven true in my own experience. My once-dreaded boss who seemed to delight in setting me up for certain stumbles, if not total failure, faded into the background as I gained my own strength in dealing with her. As soon as I had fully conquered the situation in myself, I was promoted away from what had seemed like an interminable ordeal.

Another time it seemed that crumbling finances would bring down my house of cards. But as I faced each issue and worked my way through it, what had looked like a certain brick wall faded into a pathway—a little rocky, but a pathway, none the less. By conquering the difficulty within myself, the actual outer circumstances metamorphosed into something that could be handled.

I have become strongly convinced that all of life is a gigantic synchronistic flow for the purpose of spiritual unfoldment, which is somehow orchestrated by our higher selves, in harmony with the greater power beyond our ken. Whatever is drawn to us is not at all related to the wishes of our personality. In fact, it very often seems to be the opposite. But it is in line with creating the possibilities for us to become all that we can be.

By paying attention to this directivity in our lives, we can discover our true nature and calling. In this discovery lies the possibility that we can find joy in following the flow, instead of feeling torn and tossed. We can actively cooperate with the magnetic pull of the universe toward growth, evolution, and wholeness.