Surrender

The goal of religion is in many ways to get us to get over ourselves and get over are own ego and put our trust in something bigger than ourselves. It's been said that in the west our egos are too big, too tough, too hard to break though, like the rich man who turned away from Christ. The wealth we accumulate only pads our ego, making it harder to break.

For those on the right handed path, living in community, being humble with others, leads to diminishing ego, caring about others in the village leads to God in many ways.

For those of us on the left handed path our egos are broken in travel, during lonely nights during hard times, yet also when things work out when we never expected them to. Look back at your own journey so far, can't it be miraculous sometimes, doesn't it speak to something larger, whether it was the kindness of strangers or luck in stumbling across something immensely beautiful?

I think of the man who picked me up hitch hiking in the middle of no where Ireland and brought me all the way to Galway, at least at hour's drive. Or a jazz club in the basement of a bar in Paris that I stumbled across while following folks from the hostel I was staying in, where Parisians sang jazz standards at an open mic, or the sunset over the bayous of Louisiana, a place I never expected to live. In our journeys, if we don't let them lead us someplace we weren't expecting, someplace we never planning, often in absolute contrast to our best plans, then we never get to truly experience, we never get to be led, we spend our lives in our heads, and not out in the world. We have to overcome ourselves almost before we can do anything.