“Let everything happen to you,” wrote Rilke, “Beauty and terror.”
It is not easy, this simple surrender. The courage and vulnerability it takes make it nothing less than an act of heroism. Most of our cowardices and cruelties, most of the suffering we endure and inflict, stem from what we are unwilling to feel, and there is nothing we cower from and rage against more than our own incoherence — that intolerable tension between the poles of our capacities, which Maya Angelou so poignantly addressed in one of the greatest poems ever written, urging us to “learn that we are neither devils nor divines.”
Maria Popova
This seems to resonate deeply with the origins of my Be Real Creative mantra. Back at the time in 2011, I perceived us as both our own “worst enemies” and our own “heroic liberators”. It really just depends upon our perception and how we perceive the world and ourselves.
What the Self-Transforming Mind realizes is that it’s all a grand play or a role-playing game. One in which we make believe that we are one or the other and thus we believe we are tormented or triumphant, when we are actually neither. It’s all an illusion, a game, that our ego creates to try to maintain its permanence and control on You. That being the larger, limitless You as a player that’s behind the you as a character.
And of course, the greater realization is that there is no “epic struggle” or “war” within you, even though we initially perceive it that way. Thus when you can surrender and just let go of this struggle and just “let everything happen to you,” that’s when you’re able to move beyond the illusionary game, yet also paradoxically begin to truly play with life, rather than against it.