What If Nothing Could Go Wrong?

Imagine it were so. Life is all happening perfectly. How does that feel? Can you imagine the feeling in your body, in your mind, in your spirit, if nothing could ever go wrong? Are you able to relax into that possibility? Can you feel the peace inherent in that? The relief?

Or does the ego-mind insist on the absurdity of the question and move to quickly dismiss it? Does it have a long list ready of all of the things that can definitely go wrong? I know it likes to run right to things like “What about a child with cancer?” or maybe the climate crisis, or all the things that are really wrong in politics. What about war, let’s not forget about war! Oppression, genocide, disease, so many things can go wrong, can’t they? Infinite things! The world is a mess, it always has been and it always will be! The ego-mind may even have an angry response to the very notion of that question: “How could you ask that? Don’t you know what kind of suffering is happening in the world right now?”

The ego-mind finds it impossible to accept things the way they are. But if we are able for a moment, even as an exercise, to suspend the ego’s insistence that the world be a certain way, and postpone its continuous judgment on all that it sees as wrong, we might find that what we are left with is a state of peace. It’s in the classic Zen question, “What, in this moment, is lacking?” which is designed to point us back to the completeness and peace found in the present moment. And isn’t that what we all want, to live in peace? When people die, our greatest wish is that they “rest in peace.” But what if we don’t have to die to rest in peace? 

To live in peace, to rest in peace, does not mean that the circumstances of one’s life are all glorious, easy, and free from any challenges. It doesn’t mean that we’ve fixed everything that we think needs fixing. It means something closer to what the revered spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti, said to a roomful of students. Eckhart Tolle tells the story in his book A New Earth:

"At one of his talks in the later part of his life, he surprised his audience by asking, 'Do you want to know my secret?' Everyone became very alert. Many people in the audience had been coming to listen to him for twenty or thirty years and still failed to grasp the essence of his teaching. Finally, after all these years, the master would give them the key to understanding. 'This is my secret,' he said. 'I don't mind what happens.'" 

If we don’t mind what happens, then nothing can go wrong. If we don’t mind what happens, we can live, and rest, in peace.

But how can we “not mind what happens?” That sounds like an impossible ask, doesn’t it? With all the things that are going on in the world, how could we possibly not mind what happens? It might even feel irresponsible to us, to not mind what’s happening. We need to do something about all this, don’t we? Or again, there may even be outrage at the very suggestion. “Don’t you know what’s happening out there?” 

For starters, yes, we all know what is going on out there. These are tumultuous times to say the least. But what if, rather than being caught up in it and knocked around by it, fighting and resisting it, we took this opportunity to find a peaceful place to rest in the midst of all of this chaos? I’m not suggesting we do this by avoiding, denying, downplaying, rationalizing away, or spiritually bypassing the events that are transpiring in our lives or in the world. In fact, this is an invitation to do quite the opposite.

This peace, this place of rest, can be found through radical acceptance. Radical acceptance means seeing what is happening, as it is, without judging it. It’s the possibility of allowing life to be life without saying, “No, it shouldn’t be happening this way.” It is the essence of the Zen Buddhist practice of keeping a “don’t know mind.” It invites us to maintain openness and approach things with curiosity. 

We don’t need to know why things are happening the way they are happening. We don’t need to judge them as good or bad, right or wrong. Life is far bigger than any one person’s conception of it. Things are as they are. What if we simply let them be? This is an invitation to practice neutrality. It’s an invitation to stop resisting life. It is an invitation to see that maybe, just maybe, life is unfolding perfectly, even if on the surface it looks like an absolute mess. It’s an invitation to trust the process.

The ego-mind will scoff at these suggestions. To the ego-mind, this is ridiculous. Not knowing, not judging, and accepting things as they are can feel not only difficult but outright impossible. After all, doesn’t life constantly provide us with endless evidence that things can and do go wrong all the time? The ego believes this in such a fundamental way that questioning it might feel completely absurd.

The ego-mind has its own ideas about how things should be. It’s filled with innumerable shoulds and shouldn’ts about how life is properly and ideally supposed to work. But you might notice that there is no agreement on this. Different egos have different ideas, all convinced that their way is the correct way. If we take a step back, we can see the madness in this, the conflict and the suffering it causes, and yet, most of the time, we still cling to the idea that our way is the best way, and ours is the correct view. The ego-mind is rooted in insane thinking like this, certain that it is the most sane of all.

When we are fully identified with the ego-mind and its ongoing “correct” narrative, we are more or less doomed to suffer under it. For starters, the ego-mind believes it is separate, and when we feel separate, unease arises in us. There goes our peace. It is replaced with a searching, a seeking- for something, anything- to help us feel better, to make us feel whole again. This can be food, drugs, sex, spiritual practice, scrolling on our phones, or having the correct opinions - whatever keeps that fear and discomfort at bay and produces a feeling of safety and control. We all do our best to manage this sense of something missing, but as long as we are identified with the ego-mind, we will continually be subject to the ever-changing circumstances of how the ego is doing. We’ll experience high-highs, low-lows, and everything in between. What we will not experience is peace and stability.

So where is the steady ground that we can stand on? How can we not mind what happens? How can we stop resisting life? How can we rest in peace before we, ya know, rest in peace?

To find this, we need to look beyond the ego-mind, into the mystery of being. This is also called the background of awareness, being, source, essence, and spirit, amongst other names. It has absolutely nothing to do with the mind, with thoughts, or with opinions. It is the still, silent witness watching the ego-mind and all of its shenanigans without a care in the world. It is the part of us that exists in total acceptance of what is. 

The great teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj explained it this way:
“You are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way.” 

He also described it: “You are the pure awareness that illuminates consciousness and its infinite content.”

All of the great teachers and awakened ones speak about this aspect of being that is timeless, formless, motionless, silent, spacious, and aware. It is paradoxically empty and full, overflowing with joy, and radiating unconditional love. It is present, luminous, curious, and clear. It is the aspect of us that wasn’t born and doesn’t die. It is mysterious, unknowable, unnameable, and indescribable (and here I am like a sucker trying to describe it).  

This mysterious unknowable being holds everything - body, thoughts, feelings, the whole universe actually, including every aspect of what we think of as the person we are- and it merely witnesses. It is open, nonjudgmental, and finds it all interesting. It doesn’t matter if the ego-mind likes or dislikes what is happening to it - it finds that interesting, too. It is connected to all being, and there is nothing apart from it. It knows that we are embodied to play, to learn, to grow, to forget, and to remember. It experiences life as a celebration of life. It knows that nothing can go wrong. 

For something to go wrong, there has to be a master plan, a way it’s supposed to go. But from being’s point of view, there is no way it’s supposed to go, because there is nowhere to go. All is perfect, whole, and complete already. There is nothing but Oneness, and how could Oneness go anywhere or do anything? There would have to be two for that to happen. 

And yet here we find ourselves, somehow, inexplicably in a dreamworld, dreaming that there are two - subject and object, this and that. In this apparent dreamworld, there appears to be many apparently separate things. Here we can appear to experience something other than the unified whole. But, as you may have guessed from this description, it is all only an appearance. 

Much as we are convinced that our dreams at night are real while we are dreaming them, we also seem to be hypnotized into the reality our ego-mind presents to us. We seem to experience movement, vibration, sound, emotion, play, growth, bodies, hard, soft, violence, loss, deception, decay, and on and on we could go. We appear to experience countless things. We appear to experience us. It seems real, but is nothing more than divine play.

I felt moved to offer this reminder now because from what I am seeing, we are taking this play very seriously. We have moved away from our childlike nature of play and curiosity, and into deep seriousness and profound suffering. We’re convinced it’s really real, and the stakes are super high. And that’s okay. Still nothing has gone wrong. Suffering is perhaps a strange form of play, but in the grand scheme of things, it is still play. We are learning through suffering. Ram Dass liked to say “Suffering is grace” because it paradoxically serves to awaken us and bring us back to the truth of ourselves. Sooner or later. Usually later when we have suffered so much we can’t take it anymore. Maybe we’re collectively hitting that point right now. 

It seems to me that these ultra-serious times we are living in are also serving as a wake up call to move back into communion with this deeper level of being, the one that knows that nothing can go wrong. Adyashanti calls it, “The part of you that is okay even when you’re not okay.” 

I can’t tell you how to get there, because you are already there. It’s who and what you are. You’ve never left, and in fact, you can never leave. How could Oneness leave itself when it’s all there is? Only in a dream. That’s all that’s happening here. Oneness is playing a game of two and resisting the discovery of itself. The mind can never accept or comprehend this, and might be working overtime to dismiss this as you read it. But something in us, that deeper mystery of being can hear what I am saying, and may soften or let some of that contracted ‘me’ energy go. May it be so.

This is the spirit in which I am sharing this with you, dear reader. There is nothing to do here but consider, “What if nothing could go wrong?” More than anything I wish that you may find the place in yourself, that still silent place, where you feel the truth of this, and rest in peace all of your days.