From Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: “To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is not dependent upon things being a certain way, good or bad. Watch any animal and let it teach you acceptance of what is. Observe its surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being.”

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Lets meditate on this together. I remember a movie suddenly, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I’ve forgotten the movie but I remember the name. I don’t know why I bring this title up, it must be the “unbearable” because Tolle is describing the “lightness of being,” which is good, unbearably good. So this idea of the Good being unbearable is ironic, I think. Why would that which is so good and desirable be “unbearable.” Unbearable means I can’t carry this weight, even though it is every so light. The Unbearable Lightness…is a Zen Koan, in a way that unites two opposite idea as one, unbearably light, means that the light is so heavy that you can’t carry it. The unbearable lightness is the acceptance of What IS…and what is…is Life…this unbearable lightness.

Perhaps that is why we avoid life and what is because we don’t think we can bear it. What would I have to give up in order to offer no resistance to life? I will have to give up the unbearable weight of my separate sense of self that is resisting life. Yes…that is what’s unbearable, my own isolated exiled sense of self. But I avoid giving that up because I project the pain of my own weight onto life itself, something outside of me. Yes, that is what is unbearable, the thought of giving up my own weight.

 It is the heavy weight of my own self that is the pain of being, this heavy sense of past and history and guilty personality, yes the whole catastrophe is unbearable….but I bear this pain because I believe the pain of giving it up will be the unbearable pain…so I choose bearable heaviness instead of the unbearable lightness of being free.