One summer night when we were around 14, my best friend Kazimir and I were walking through a park in Montreal near where we lived. We noticed 20 or more people near us all looking upwards. We stopped, looked up, and saw this extraordinary, large, bright white, stationary object overhead. We all stared at it for several minutes. We had no idea what it was, but decided that nobody would believe our description, so we went home and never discussed it.
Roughly fifty years ago, while a university student working for the summer as an orderly in a large hospital, I was called to help clean up a mess. I arrived to find a tragicomedy unfolding. An elderly, apparently famous gentleman, dressed only in an untied, soiled Johnny shirt, was experiencing explosive diarrhea all over his private hospital room's bathroom. Several hospital staff were helplessly standing around, trying to keep him from slipping & falling into the mess. Only one person was quite beside herself - the gentleman's elderly wife. She was impeccably dressed in black, evening-at-the-opera attire, complete with all the jewellery, black gloves etc. The gentleman himself was impressively peaceful, gently trying to calm his completely distraught wife.
During that summer in the same hospital, I chatted with a young man who was about to have heart surgery the next day. He was friendly, cheerfully looking forward to enjoying the rest of his life post-op. I wished him well. The next day, I came by to visit, and found his bed made and empty. I asked about him, and was told he had died during surgery.
"Shit happens," no matter how obsessively we try to control ourselves, others & life in general. If we live long enough, we realize it's just a question of when. And yet we do have freedom, which depends on our perspective, which determines our response.
We can, and I fear many of us do, see each individual unwelcome event in our life as if it were some random or even intentional cruelty of chance, Nature or the Divine. We can keep count of these, and rationalize holding a grudge against the meaningless of life, cruelty of Nature, or malevolence of God. This is our noisy ego's last desperate, failed attempt to hang onto its own relevance. It is the ego / false self / separate self that goes through Kübler-Ross' 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression & acceptance.
While our wiser 'part' / Self is aware of the bigger picture and our intimate connection with everyone & everything, our Oneness.
"There’s a crucial 6th stage to the grieving process: meaning. ... we acknowledge that although for most of
us grief will lessen in intensity over time, it will never end. But if
we allow ourselves to move fully into this crucial & profound sixth
stage – meaning – it will allow us to transform grief into something else, something rich & fulfilling." David Kessler. “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.” Scribner, 2019.
But the ego does not give up pretending to be in complete control easily! One ploy is taking on the persona of "the liminoid ... when you start to take pride in the breakdowns, trouble & commotion of your life, because you think ... ‘it makes you windswept and interesting.’" Martin Shaw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpi06B0mvSI&list=PLb7eXq8MJBchKf73SDzbcMyD3i-mhjJsn&index=2
When all else fails, the ego's last act is to PROUDLY cling to anything: Charlton Heston, spokesperson for the National Rifle Association (NRA), "I'll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" and Dylan Thomas' call to the dying, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Our Self knows better, and we can hear our own wisdom when the ego isn't yelling.
But we require a lifetime of intentional training to recognize how thoroughly we have been conditioned by our stunningly shallow society to abandon our true nature and instead adopt a robotic level of self-centered left-hemisphere dominance.
The training, the practice we need is one by which we progressively remember our true nature, who we truly are, and integrate this more & more consistently, into daily life.
"Growing pains" are inevitable on any learning journey, especially a spiritual one which requires us to release compulsive self-centeredness. It's probably easier for an obese life-long 'couch potato' to become an elite athlete, than for the average person who considers him/herself open-minded and 'good' to become moderately spiritual.
These 2 very recent interviews shed useful light on this process :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkX-Dc6WRcs
https://batgap.com/jurgen-ziewe-2/
