The Veil

(3-Minute Read) What’s your veil? What keeps you from seeing further into reality? Is an attachment to someone restricting your freedom? Or a religion keeping you deluded?

Is alcohol, or another drug- maybe a prescribed one – dulling your sensitivity ? Maybe it’s positive psychology, pep talks and self-help gurus that have you blindly affirming, chasing your goals unconsciously. Or is your day-to-day bump and grind so deeply ingrained that you simply don’t have the time, or the inclination, to look deeper.

What is it that keeps you from going crazy in this insane world? Wait… do you even realise that there is insanity?  Do you know that your happy facade might implode if you stopped and really examined things? Don’t say it wouldn’t, unless you’ve tried breaking the facade and looking behind the veil. What drives you to keep living your life, without collapsing into a heap of existential meaninglessness?

Rat races

Are you aware that absolutely everything you spend your time doing or believing, is aimed solely at keeping you from breaking down? Our lives are rat races, games of survival of the fittest, where the aim is to beat the opposition in order to boost our egos and keep our masks intact.

If you stop, you’re in trouble. We all are.

Why?

Because the false self builds identities and insensitivity to keep us going. Because when we stop and look beyond the veil, the suffering and pain is too much to bear. The experience of our failures and faults is devastating to everything we spend our lives trying to create. The full illumination of our sick world cripples us with sorrow and compassion.

When you get a peep through the veil, a troubling question arises: what is the meaning of this sick world, this short and painful existence of an isolated self? This question is deeply upsetting to ‘normal’ life, because it lays out the human condition, raw and festering. And we have no answer. We have no replacement for the identity we clung to.

So we draw back and stay content in our delusion again, we stay secure behind whatever veil has come to keep us from confronting that disturbing question.

Living a good life

Ah, but doing good and spending my time in the right ways gives me peace, you argue. I find meaning in my life by keeping busy with worthwhile activities.

But spending your time doing the ‘right’ things only gives you a sensory experience of meaning.

It does not address the existential question, what is the meaning of it all?

So in a way, spending my time ‘right’ is like thickening the veil of delusion. It’s like keeping the attention distracted so the trick is missed.

We can live busy, fruitful and successful lives, all the while keeping ourselves docile and drugged, trying to avoid the real angst that is unavoidable and unsolvable. In fact, the most successful ones in this world are often most adept at reinforcing the delusion – most adept at thickening their own particular veils.

A lifetime of delusion

We can, and very often do, spend entire lifetimes never asking the existential question: what is the meaning of it all?

And those that do ask, and suffer under the weight of this agonisingly unanswerable question, we cast aside as unsuccessful, antisocial, depressed, heretical or simply weak-livered. They are the poor, the weak in spirit. They have not found the way to live right, because they have not thickened their veil and deluded themselves into happiness.

Ancient wisdom holds: blessed are the poor in spirit, for it is harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

I’ve seen it too many times. The rich – the ones with a good veil – are unprepared for the most inevitable thing in life. Their death. I’ve seen devout religious believers on their death bed clinging to this life, unable to accept their imminent departure from it.

And I’ve seen those that are ready to go. Their’s is the kingdom of heaven. In their eyes I see true peace. The peace that comes from looking beyond the veil, accepting the pain of detaching from delusion, and breaking through to light on the other side.

I don’t know what they see. But whatever it is, we should be preparing to see it too. After all, there’s no escaping death.

We should be preparing by spending time staring through the veil of things that keep us busy. We must sit as often as possible contemplating life and death, pain and suffering, and, in deep humility, our flawed and intrinsically selfish human condition. In this meditation, we should open ourselves completely to the possibility of nothingness – the possibility that it is all really and truly meaningless. We should authentically accept the unbearable sadness, with powerful waves of compassion and sorrow washing over us.

Grace

If you are willing to do this, a strange thing happens. A peace and love will graciously come over you. In the silence, staring into the cloud of unknowing behind the veil, an altogether different sense of existence will dawn upon you, usually only for a brief moment. I can only use the language of people who have experienced it before to describe it:

non-dualism

or

mystical union

or

true self

or

universal love

or

God.

Those are the words used by the wise to describe the experience that follows the darkness of lost identity.

But they too can become a veil, something we simply attach to again to give our egos the identities they constantly demand.

Forget the words and language. Forget everything. Just let go. Sit in the silence of not naming – of not knowing.

And wait on the grace of the all-peaceful, all-loving mystery beyond the veil to come upon you.

Then you will be free. Free of your veil, and free of the pain you thought you could not bear.

And when you rise from your silence, you will be energised to live every moment in full joy and gratitude, courageous and indifferent to self, ready to follow and serve, in humble acceptance of your smallness in the awe of the mystery of this unknown existence.

For a while you will have dropped your veil… until it rises to delude you again. You will have tasted truth. You will have prepared yourself a little for the ultimate truth – the new light that comes, to stay for good, when your turn comes to die.