This insightful painting, titled "Parasapient Tragedy," by Joseph Larkin, so beautifully renders a life gone to pieces. A glorious being of light is trapped in consensual reality, her worldview broken, her cast-off creative projects stillborn. The promise of her life, the one she expected to have, will soon die. She is forlorn and lacking the tools she needs to break free.

[www.josephlarkinart.com]

   This is how powerful I really am: it has taken a series of traumas in my life to keep me off-balance, undergoing decades of spiritual searching and internal work. This work could not have come to any fruition had I lived an easier life in which my power could have brought much "success" in this existence. It was necessary to break me of my addiction to judging self-worth by personal production. We are, after all, beings not doings.

    Success is the worst thing that can happen to someone. The awakening of the spirit requires the ego to die back. We are often stuck in the successful action, which prevents us from experimenting with new behaviors that could be even more enriching to our lives and the lives of others.

    The history of Hollywood is littered with the rusted wrecks of those who have achieved sudden stardom and could not handle it. Many of us, myself included, have never coped well with success, becoming egocentric. The power lavished upon the successful by adoring others usually corrupts.

    On the other hand, failure is the best teacher if we can step back and allow the ego a good bruising, resisting the impulse to find excuses or, worse, go into denial about our shortcomings.

    Perhaps you have heard the saying, "Be grateful to those who kill you for they give you the chance to be born again." In Buddhist teachings, one of the four demonic forces working against our enlightenment, skandha mara, is the tendency we have to "get back on the horse," to recreate ourselves just as we were before a tragedy has torn our lives to pieces, to try to be again who we think we are. Pema Chödrön, in her brilliant book, "When Things Fall Apart," advises us:

    "Skandha mara is how we react when the rug is pulled out from under us. ... We sail through space without a clue as to what's going to happen next. ... We had it all together, working nicely, when suddenly the atomic bomb dropped and shattered our world into a million pieces. We don't know what's going to happen next or even where we are. Then we re-create ourselves. We return to the solid ground of our self concept as quickly as possible....

    "Our whole world falls apart, and we've been given this great opportunity. However, we don't trust our basic wisdom mind enough to let it stay like that. Our habitual reaction is to want to get ourselves back -- even our anger, resentment, fear or bewilderment. So we re-create our solid, immovable personality as if we were Michelangelo chiseling ourselves out of marble.

    "This process doesn't have to be considered an obstacle or a problem. Even though it feels like an arrow or a sword, if we use it as an opportunity to become aware of how we try to re-create ourselves over and over again, it turns into a flower. We can allow ourselves to be inquisitive or open about what has just happened and what will happen next. Instead of struggling to regain our concept of who we are, we can touch in to that mind of simply not knowing, which is basic wisdom mind."

    As a culture, we are stuck in some successful actions. It is a valid meditation to find those areas of adhesion. I would like to propose that one of our sacred cows is democracy as it is currently practiced. Could there not be other ways of empowering people without the corruption that elections bring? We must find a way. For if we do not, we will destroy ourselves.

[See related essay in this blog, “The Essence of the Luminous Warrior.”]