We bow our heads because thoughts become too heavy. Simple as that. I sit at the kitchen table feeling the weight of the world in my head. I would surrender but thinking remains seductive. As if the next thought will arrive with a payload.

In this world, duality holds sway and the body is a reflection of that. What lies ahead for me? I think gloomily. What should I do with myself today? Who have I loved this lifetime? Thoughts come at us from outside, sometimes being so painful they win. It is then that we are close to surrender. But surrender is just another thought.

Surrender is a tempting word, but how often have you been able to do it? I end up knuckling under to the desire of the moment, but that is hardly surrender in the saintly sense. I surrendered to boredom yesterday, filling the hours with sweets and TV.

Thinking takes us nowhere. Never has. Never will. Oh, we are taught logically as we move through our educations, never realizing that logic is enmeshed in the opposites, as are we. The first step on the inner way is to see that we are doomed as we presently are. No one is coming to save us.

No matter how many platitudes are posted online, human sorrows will cut deeper. There is simply no way out except through death. And we as human beings are totally resistant to that idea. We never dream that death and birth go together and that as we die, we live again in a higher form. Oh, Jesus said that again and again, but it has yet to sink in.

This is paragraph number six, but who is counting? 99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer, as the old song goes. But the counting is insane and the cost is your life. What will it take to leave the herd and go off alone with your sorrow?

I cannot say that the Christ has ever come to me as I sit in darkness, but I have said “Let there be light. Help me.” And I am still here. And now and then it feels okay, just okay. Not joyous, not blissful, but a little better than the hells I have known. Someone is looking out for me as I slog through the battlefield of the mind. One day a full surrender will be made, but not by me. I will go home in good company, in the company of the One who sent me here.

This essay is a bunch of paragraphs that seem to be negative, but are they really? Isn’t truth the path to goodness? You tell me. I am no teacher and you are no student. We are in this together and alone. Perhaps the third force will allow us to see that we can never be anything but the One.

Vicki Woodyard