Monday, August 23, 2010
Lifeletter #43--The Human Clown
One of the participants at my ‘Effortless Being’ retreat asked me to write this down for him. Since it’s about all of us, about our human condition, here it is.
One evening at the retreat they were showing a video of ‘Le Cirque de Soleil’ on a full size screen. This particular video had many long shots of the audience, so you could really get a feeling for what was going on with them. The first ninety minutes were the acrobats-probably some of the best acrobats in the world--tumbling, whirling, jumping and swooping around, like fantastic birds in flight. Their costumes were stunning, the music was amazing, and their performances were impeccable. It was beyond impeccable, it seemed almost superhuman. The audience sat, with heads craned and mouths open, oohing and aahing in wonder.
And then out came the clowns-each clown, in his or her own way, trying to duplicate the feats we had already witnessed. Their costumes were ridiculous, and their antics were absurd. They tripped over each other, pushed each other out of the way and down trap doors in the floor, and pranced around together like a bunch of complete lunatics.
What really got to me was the audience. They were all laughing ecstatically-laughing until they cried. The clowns were very good, and they just went on and on, new ones appearing out of a hole in the floor every few minutes. In the audience, total strangers were passing kleenex around, slapping themselves on the legs, and children were throwing themselves in their parents’ laps with total abandon and glee.
It became apparent to me that our laughter, this overflowing joy and freedom, was a spontaneous recognition of the human condition, even if that recognition was not conscious. Who can identify with the acrobats? Impossible, they are the perfect ones, the ones who never fall, who never make mistakes. But the clowns are us, stumbling around, falling flat on our faces, wondering what happened, and why we can’t be those perfect acrobats.
What a great relief it would be if we knew, from the beginning, that to be human is to be a kind of clown. How seriously we take ourselves, how hard we try to get everything right. Who taught us that we are so important, that every thought we think is so important? Why have we never learned to laugh at ourselves? To release our grip on our terrible self-preoccupation?
I remember when I was first learning how to speak in public, many years ago. It was in India, and the audiences I was speaking to were sometimes quite large. One day I asked my teacher for help. “What should I do?” I asked him, “when I first walk out in front of that huge sea of faces? It can be pretty scary.”
“It’s simple,” he told me, “All you have to do is remind yourself that you are no more significant than a spider.” You might regard this as a strange kind of comfort, but it was one of best things anyone ever said to me. It released me from my self-importance, and allowed me to be myself up there, without any fixed ideas of how I was supposed to be. Sometimes I would walk out in front of the audience, and just repeat that to myself, “I am no more significant than a spider.” I would feel my whole being expand, and relax into the ‘unbearable lightness of being.’ The lightness of being that knows that the harder I try to impress you, the less authentic will be our connection.
All of our defenses, the way we harden ourselves and try to protect our self-image, fall away when we no longer take ourselves seriously. Without a fixed and solid self-image, there is nothing to protect, nothing to defend. But we are trained, in some very powerful ways, to believe that there is no other way to be, that we need a solid and fixed identity, just to survive. How strange, when we were not born like that-we had to learn this whole constructed way of being. And now, we don’t even notice, unless we really take a good look, that our sense of self is a very fluid thing-it comes and goes, it rises and falls, and that’s the way it has always been.
Clowns can fall down and roll around without hurting themselves. When an acrobat falls, it’s a terrifying thing-they are so high off the ground. Our ideas of ourselves are like that-they keep us a long long way from the simple, authentic ground of our being. Who we are when we are not trying to be anyone special at all.
The lightness of being that a clown displays is full of humility. And that humility is transparent, open, with no need at all to put ourselves above or below another human being. That’s when love starts to flow, not when I think you are better than me, not when I secretly hold myself above you, but when we can both rest in the space of complete equality. We may not know how to get there, because all of our training is in the other direction, climbing up the ladder, needing to be better, terrified of being wrong, of making a fool of ourselves.
Here’s the good news: we don’t have to know how to reach the space of equality-it’s who we already are, right at the core of our being. Everybody knows it, if they are completely honest, that all of our pretensions are just a bunch of made-up stuff. Sometimes we carry these ideas, this made-up stuff around for a very long time. Until life brings us to a point where the burden of it is just too much, and something in us longs desperately to be real, to be authentic, to stop pretending.
All we need at this point is the willingness to open, to allow the rawness of what it is to be a human being to be here, without pushing it away. In that awkward, raw, deeply uncomfortable place, there is something so free, so beautiful, and so ordinary. We don’t even have to give it a name. It shines by itself.
Adya Shanti, a nondual teacher, has a picture of a clown, sitting by a pond, meditating. Deep in the water, shining back at him, is a reflection of the Buddha, his true nature. But you can turn the picture upside down and look at it the other way too. Then you see the Buddha, sitting by the pond meditating. And what looks out at him from the water is his true nature, the clown.
We could stumble into this freedom, this innocence any time. We could find this willingness to trust something that isn’t about how we appear, that isn’t about being together, and on top of life. Down underneath all of our efforting is this other thing: call it faith, or trust, or letting go.
Let this then, my small poem, like a new moon, slender and barely open, be the first prayer that opens me to faith. David Whyte
with love Shayla
