When Everything Has Failed You

You have grown up

With so many messages.

 

Tenets,

Quotes,

Aphorisms,

Old wives tails,

Fantasies,

Popularized propaganda,

Bumper stickers.

 

Don’t worry, be happy.

Do your best.

Work hard and you will get it.

Put your mind to it and you will succeed.

Do unto others.

Give others the benefit of the doubt.

On and on and on.

 

How many of these bumper stickers

Have actually worked.

 

How many of these bumper stickers

From society,

From experts,

From talking heads,

From spirituality,

From best-seller books

Have ACTUALLY WORKED.

 

When you have practiced your final hour of meditation,

Done your final minute of mindfulness,

Burned your last stick of incense,

Written your last sentence in your gratitude journal,

Spoken your last positive aphorism,

Performed your last hack . . .

And you STILL have not found what you have always been seeking . . .

 

What will you do then.

 

That ‘then’

Is actually Now.

 

But you probably still have an appetite

For several more thousand hacks.

Many more lifetimes of prescriptions,

And shenanigans.

 

What are you going to do,

In 5 years, or a hundred thousand lifetimes,

When everything you have tried

Has failed you.

 

When all the promises

Have been turned out to be empty.

 

When all the best-selling authors

Have run out of their tricks.

 

When all the spiritualists

Have no new wooh-wooh technique.

 

What will you do

When you have meditated your brain into mush,

Mindfulness’d your psyche into vapor,

Aphorism’d your lips into stone . . .

 

What will you do,

When a million lifetimes from now,

You discover

That it was all a scam.

 

That it was all lies

Dressed in lovely wrapping paper.

 

That the best-selling books

Turned out to be fantasy novels.

 

That the bearded mystic

Was spewing lovely spiritual nonsense.

 

When everything has failed you,

What will you do then.

 

When the books have rotted away.

When the motivational speakers’ mouths have gone dry.

When the guru’s sermons have ended.

And when everything you thought was good,

And proper,

And helpful,

And nice . . .

 

Turned out to be

An entertainment.

 

On that day,

You will have to become Serious.

 

On that day,

You will dismiss every prescription On Sight.

 

On that day,

Will you realize that you have wasted

Millions and millions and millions

Of lifetimes.

 

On that day,

And only on that day,

You will at last be Ready

For The Truth.

 

 

Namaste.