Tami Simon:
Welcome to the Point of Insight. Imagine a black night sky, and in it, a point — a tiny star. And now this part gets a little weird: imagine that light pulls you, like a beacon, up and through itself. You land someplace new, somewhere you’ve never been, a different way of being. That’s a Point of Insight.
When I was a young person, some of my earliest close friends were books by Hermann Hesse, which gives you an indicator of how alone I felt in the questions in my heart. As I was reading one of those books, Siddhartha, I met the river. Siddhartha sits by the river and listens to its sound at a certain point, and hears in it timelessness, impermanence, the bubbling of water in motion.
And at that moment, I knew that this point of insight — the bubbling sound of water — was not only a mirror to my true nature, but something I didn’t want to just enter into, but be: to experience life as a river, and myself as part of that river.
Recently, I was having a terrific few days. I had seen lots of whales here in Vancouver — oh my God, always a miracle. Things were just working for me. It was like a few magic days. I was getting ready to go out of town. I was in my car, and there was my parking space, right in front of the dry cleaner. I went in and said, “I need this by tomorrow — is that possible, maybe?” “Yes, of course.” I got back in the car and kind of patted myself on the back and said, “Wow, you’re really in a flow state. This feels great.”
And I kid you not — within about two minutes after I made this self-congratulatory declaration, there were sirens behind me, pulling me over on the highway, onto the shoulder. The police officer came up and said, “We were able to identify your license plate, and it appears your insurance is out of date. You don’t have any car insurance, and you’re driving your car.” I said, “That’s not possible — how could that be possible? Of course I paid my car insurance.” Well — he looked it all up. “No, you haven’t.” And then I thought, well, of course it’s possible the insurance is out of date. I’d been gone for three months. Did they notify my wife? Did she forget to pay it? Did she forward it to me? Who knows.
Anyway, he said, “Here’s the deal — you’re not moving from this spot on the side of the highway, regardless of the fact that you have a dog in the backseat that you were taking to a vet appointment. Doesn’t matter. It’s illegal for you to drive. It’s dangerous for you to drive. There’s an office about a mile and a half away — you can walk there, on the highway, with your dog, and that way you can get your insurance up to date and pay them. Good luck. I’m going to leave.”
Okay — state interruptus. Here’s the big boulder in the middle of the river, the big log, whatever — I paused. I kind of saw the humor in it too, and I thought, you should really be careful when you get into self-congratulatory modes of thinking. It never works out for you, Tami.
Anyway, I called the insurance broker I work with. They took my credit card over the phone, and believe it or not, within ten minutes I was driving again — in quite a sober state of mind.
This question of how we deal with challenges and obstacles when they arise is a huge one. Eckhart Tolle, who’s someone we work closely with at Sounds True, actually answers a question that many people ask him at the retreats and events where he takes questions from the audience. People say, “How do you know if you’re making progress on the spiritual path?” It’s a good question — I think a lot of us have that question. And the answer he’s been offering is: how do you handle challenges, disappointments, and hardships when they arise? How you handle those hardships is a sign of where you are on the spiritual path. Do you handle them with calm resourcefulness, or crazy freak-out? I like to think of that, because it points me in the direction of calm resourcefulness when I feel like crazy freak-out.
Being a river — returning to that river state — that’s a point of insight.
Recently, I’ve been hosting a new community with Caroline Myss, bestselling author and medical intuitive. It’s called Spiritual Homebase. The very first practice she gave us was: think of one of the greatest challenges you’re having in your life right now — something current, something real — and take a moment to look at it through the lens of fear, and then through the lens of faith, and tell the story of how it turns out through the lens of faith. I think that’s a tremendous reflection and exercise. Believe it or not, I end up doing that many times a week these days. Through the lens of faith, there’s this return to that flow state — that river state.
When it comes to seeing through the eyes of faith, not falling into our fears around the challenges we face, I think of two people I’ve had the privilege of interviewing in the past year — tremendously, I’ll say it, God-loving, supremely creative, prolifically creative individuals: Rob Bell and Liz Gilbert.
In my discussion with Rob, I was talking to him about the creative risks he continues to take in his life — leaving a hugely successful megachurch where he was the lead pastor, because it no longer fit for him; being a New York Times bestselling nonfiction writer and then deciding he’s going to write plays and fiction, whether they sell or they don’t sell; playing in a band, whether fifty people come or five thousand people come.
And I said, “Rob, how do you do it? You keep taking all these risks.” That’s really what I wanted to know — how do you do it? Because so many of us aren’t looking at the river — the creative flow through us — through the eyes of faith. We’re afraid.
And I said, “Rob, how do you do it?” And he said, “Here’s the thing, Tami — you keep thinking the choice is between risk and safety. But first of all, how safe is safety? How safe is it, really? Everything is filled with uncertainty. But secondly, what about the risk of not doing it? Have you thought about that? The risk of stagnation, the risk of not feeling fulfilled, the risk of not feeling expressed as a person, the risk of dying disappointed and filled with regrets.”
The more he talked, the more I thought: wow, it’s really risky not to take a risk. I’d better start taking more of the risks that are alive in me — more of the rushing river in me that wants to come out and be here.
Then I was talking to Liz Gilbert. Her new book actually has the word “river” in the title — it’s called All the Way to the River. Such a prolific and talented writer. She writes in this book about her relationship with, and the passing of, her partner and best friend, Rayya — and how she accompanied her all the way to this true state of being.
She writes in the book about her own journey with love addiction, and how at a certain point she had a conversation with God. In that conversation, God said to her, “There are two doors. You can continue to go through door number one — what you’ve always done, and get the results you’ve always gotten. Or you can come with me through door number two. There’s a question mark on the door. It’s unknown and uncertain.” Do what you’ve always done and get what you’ve always gotten, or go into the unknown.
Of course, we know Liz Gilbert went through door number two, and the tremendous courage it takes to do so — and how much courage it takes to enter the river. The river of change, the river of unknownness, the river of possibility, the river of our own greatest expression — being.
Interestingly, in some schools of Buddhism, they talk about one of the early levels of awakening — I would say, awakening to this impermanent, flowing, river state. They call it being a “stream-enterer.” You’ve entered the stream — the stream of awakening.
And that’s the invitation here: the sound that you hear, the sound of the river. That’s the invitation of this Point of Insight. Enter the river.
The Sounds True Podcast Network.
