Are you out wandering, lost in The Desert?
The Desert is a sort hopeless-bordering-on-hopeful state where nothing is happening despite everything that you're putting into making it happen. Everything is going in - effort, time, money, creativity - and nothing is coming out on the other end.
Nothing works.
When you're deep enough in the desert, even turning around and going back the way you came isn't an option! It's just you, in the middle of it all, with nothing but a compass. You know that you're generally heading North but... I mean you can trust your compass, right? Is it broken? I sure hope it's not broken...
How long does one stay in the desert? It's unknown.
How do you get out of the desert? Also unknown.
What are you supposed to do? Unknown as well.
In the desert, essentially nothing is known.
Everything that you think you know is taken from you.
All forms of control that you thought you had,
Are starkly shown to be nothing but superstitions.
So let this article be a companion guide for you if you're out there, alone.
From one wanderer to another.
Solitaire-Unravelling
When I was 13 I first saw a music video released by a a numetal band called Mushroomhead called Solitaire-Unravelling. It featured a man pushing a large wooden wheel through a desert until he got old, curled over and died. The lyrics they sang were:
Condemned man, Convicted man
Could not save my life,
Cut it strand by strand
Hearing this rocked me to my core, even though I couldn't understand why or what those words really meant.
What I've come to realize is that this song was told by a person who was lost in the desert but didn't understand the greater context of what they were passing through. They thought that desert was the end of the story!
And for good reason too: the desert just goes on, and on, and on. It goes on as long as it has to. And the purpose of the desert is to strip away everything from you that's false. It strips away your insincerity, your manipulation, your denial.
This is why grounding yourself in non-dual awareness is so helpful. Prior to non-dual awareness we believe that we ARE the outer layers of the personality that are being stripped away.
That's what our friends Mushrooomhead are referring to here; "could not save my life, cut it strand by strand." This is the deep hopelessness associated with wandering the desert, if you don't know who you truly are.
When you see who you are beyond your conditioning, then there's more of an allowance for the false aspects of your personality to unravel and fall away.
Hope and Hopelessness
In a strange way, hope is counterproductive to our endeavours of reaching beyond the Desert.
Can you develop the discipline to NOT chase the mirage?
The lesson of the desert is that you may not exit until the purpose of it has been totally fulfilled. What is the purpose of the Desert? I'll get to that shortly. But first we need to see why hope actually moves us in the wrong direction.
In the Desert, we tend to oscillate between hope and hopelessness. Hope is a high - "Okay I think I got it now" - and hopelessness is a low - "Nope, I'm right back to where I started." Hope is something that we attempt to keep alive as a way of giving us a reason to move forward. But the longer you spend in the desert, the less tenable hope becomes.
We fight against hopelessness, but over time we run out of energy for the fight.
And then what we think that means, is that when we finally run out of our last bit of energy, then we succumb to hopelessness for good. This is incredibly scary, and so instead of allowing this to happen, we approach it without ever actually touching it. We flirt more and more closely with hopelessness, but still carry a little kernel of hope somewhere in the most protected areas of our heart.
This is what you end up with - getting 90% of the way to total hopelessness, and then 99%, and then 99.9% and then 99.99%, on and on forever.
Never quite stepping beyond.
But the deep irony here is that if we were to truly succumb to the hopelessness, if we were to truly move into it, we'd discover that it's not some sort of end state where all is lost - but it's actual a portal through which we're reborn!
We call this portal Surrender.
Surrender
The purpose of the Desert is surrender.
You can't be a true vessel of God if you're wandering around thinking that you're in control of everything that's going on.
So therefore we make the final leap beyond hope and hopelessness into a surrendered state.
Surrender doesn't mean to just roll over and die, surrender means that you truly give up your idea that you're in control or even that you know what's going on. Once this is surrendered, then you're simply left with the work that you're here to do.
The deep acceptance that comes from surrender is: I'll get there when I get there, and not a moment sooner.
In surrender there's a distinct sense of This is it. No more trying to get beyond this, just letting this be it. Making ourselves comfortable in it. Letting it be good enough for us. Even practicing gratitude toward it.
The ego will of course fight back every step of the way, but the ego's only directive is to be in control. Surrender is the opposite of control.
From surrender we continue to show up. We do what we're here to do. We offer our best work, oftentimes with great intensity. And we trust that all is happening according to its own timing.
Your only job is to experience it
You don't have to like it, you don't have to be enthusiastic about it.
All you need to do is just show up for it.
What else can we do when we're in the desert except take the next step?
All control is stripped away, along with all illusions, all of your superstitions, all of your expectations. Let them fall away. Emerge into this moment new, authentic, real.
There's no way to speed up our journey into the desert, but ironically, our willingness to slow all the way down is what makes it go faster.
Go figure!
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