The Way of Acceptance

One of the reasons we turn away from the moment and the peace and joy that reside there is that we are programmed to reject life as it is. We want life on our own terms, but it can never be that way. Even if the ego could have life on its own terms, which it does briefly and occasionally, it would soon want more or different or better than that. The ego doesn’t accept life, which is one reason it doesn’t want to give it attention.

The ego would rather give attention to its fantasies, dreams, memories, and even fears than to the actual reality of any moment, which in addition to being imperfect (from the ego’s point of view), is impossible to control or predict. This unpredictability and lack of control is deeply disturbing to the ego. Touching the Real makes the ego very uncomfortable because it is faced with the truth—that it’s not the one making life happen. As long as the ego remains in its made-up reality, it can play at being king. It pretends that it can make life go its way. It denies the obvious reality and chooses to believe what it wants to about reality.

Accepting whatever is happening—whatever it is—brings us into alignment with our true Self and into a state of real happiness, peace, and contentment. This is immediately uncomfortable for the ego, so this doesn’t usually last long. The egoic mind finds fault with even peace, declaring it boring, and drums up a problem to think about and solve. If you agree with its assessment of the moment, then you are back in identification with it instead of with the Self. Fortunately, acceptance can bring you right back into the moment. Once you are aware of this, acceptance can be used as a doorway to the Self.

Acceptance is synonymous with love. Love accepts. You could say that that is the definition of love. So when you accept what is happening, you land in Love’s territory. However, to stay there, you have to keep accepting what is happening, and that’s challenging because the mind comes into nearly every moment with a reason to leave it. You must say no to the mind again and again before its hold is loosened. The more you say no to it, the weaker it gets; while the more you say yes to it, the stronger it gets. This takes diligence, commitment, and choice, and you are the only one who can make this commitment and this choice.

Accepting what is happening is not as difficult as you may think. You only have to accept what is happening in this moment, not in every moment throughout time. The ego has difficulty accepting what is happening in the moment because it spins a negative story about what this means for future moments. For instance, if you are feeling sick, it causes you to suffer over this by telling you how awful this will be and what a negative impact it will have on your life. The stories it spins are all lies. It never predicts the future accurately.

Accepting what is happening in the moment is also not as difficult as you may think because accepting it doesn’t mean you have to like it. All you have to do is accept that you don’t like what is happening, if that is the case. Accepting this moment just means that you are willing to let it be the way it is. After all, what other choice do you have, since it is the way it is? The only other choice is to argue with it, complain about it, try to ignore it, or try to change it, which is what the ego does in nearly every moment. This is a recipe for suffering, and it doesn’t change what is happening; it only makes it unpleasant. By allowing whatever is happening to be happening, you align yourself with life rather than oppose it, and that makes every moment, regardless of what is happening, peaceful.

When the moment is okay just the way it is and your energy is not taken up in opposing it, you can really be present to it. What you discover is that every moment has much more to it than what you like or don’t like about it. It’s rich with complexity, dimension, and beauty. The egoic mind paints the moment as black or white, good or bad. It has a simplistic view of what is happening according to its likes and dislikes, but the moment is not simple in the least. It’s interestingly changeable, unpredictable, and intelligent. Who knows what will happen next? You never know. From the perspective of the Self, life’s unpredictability is delicious, exciting, and fascinating. This is what you feel too when you are in acceptance.

The Self accepts. So when you are accepting, you are expressing the Self; and when you experience acceptance from others, you are experiencing the Self. Think of all the times in one day you are either accepting or experiencing acceptance from others. Every time this happens, the divine Self is showing up in your life. Love is everywhere in the form of acceptance: You accept the sky, you accept gravity, you accept your breathing, you accept the color of the trees, you accept the silence between sounds, you accept the space between objects—you accept the majority of what is. This is you loving life and allowing it to be the way that it is.

The mind interrupts this peace, this love, by telling you something is not right, not good, not desirable: That dog shouldn’t be barking, the sun shouldn’t be so hot, the air shouldn’t be so windy. If you agree with the mind, you suffer. If you don’t agree with the mind, you stay aligned with the Self, in allowing whatever is to be the way that it is.

The egoic mind will tell you that accepting life means you won’t ever do anything. It tries to scare you out of acceptance by making it equal to passivity, laziness, and a lack of discrimination, which it deem dangerous to survival. Acceptance is dangerous to the ego’s survival, but it’s not dangerous to survival. It is a more effective strategy for survival than anything the ego can offer. Acceptance is love, and love connects us with everything because it connects us with who we really are, which is everything. What could be more beneficial to survival than being connected to everything and knowing that you are everything? Is there any reason that You, as the Divine, would not take care of yourself, as the creation? You are being taken care of and so is everyone else. The ego not only can’t take credit for your survival, it has interfered more than it has helped.

Something else besides the ego is living your life, and the more you allow it to, the more it will take over. The divine Self has been living through you and expressing itself through you as much as you have allowed it to. Every person is an expression of the Self to a greater or lesser extent. The Self is moving, speaking, doing, creating, laughing, playing, and working through each of us to the extent that we allow it to, but it’s there in everyone. If you want to have an experience of the Divine, you are having it! And so is everyone else.

You are not separate from the Divine. The ego is the sense that you are a separate person and the Divine is something apart from that, but that is just an idea. The ego is just the idea “I exist as a separate entity.” It isn’t true. You are the Divine in disguise as a human being. The more you come to see that you are not who you think you are, the more you will experience who you really are and who everyone else really is. The Divine is everywhere.