Free A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough by Wayne Muller

they harbor a deep, dark toxin or possess a despicable soul; their punishment—the abuse—was deserved, and their current worth is without real merit. These people can often feel, even when successful in their life, work, or family, that they are impostors. If the world ever really knew the whole, inner, ugly truth about who they truly are, all their success, safety, and security would be instantly taken from them.
    Yet Jesus’ teaching did not come with any fine print. There were no disclaimers or exclusions; nowhere did he add, “Butonly if you went to church and saved lives and cured cancer and never sinned and solved world hunger and ended global warming.” Jesus was (as was his habit) clear, unambiguous, to the point. As a child of Spirit, you are simply this: the light of the world. You carry within you a spark of divine fire.
    The Buddha also taught that we have within us this very same wholeness, what he called an innate, natural perfection. The God of the Hebrews declared that the most essential truths of life and spirit were inscribed on their very hearts; and the prophet Elijah demonstrated that we carry an intuitive inner knowing, a still, small voice of the divine in the quiet recesses of our soul. Many Native Americans speak of some manifestation of the Great Spirit, who infuses all beings with this same vitally sacred life force. For Hindus, the Atman , or soul of the world, is everywhere in all things, all beings.
    But for all this universally gifted teaching, showered upon us from all directions for millennia, how many of us, when we awake and rise from our bed in the morning, truly experience any intimate, familiar sensation of some divine light or hidden wholeness? How many of us, as we quit our bed and place our feet on the earth to go about our good and necessary work, drink deep from some authentic feeling, beneath language, some cellular knowing, that we are, this moment, more than sufficient—that we are the light of the world?
    Many of us, when we read words like these, easily dismiss them as spiritual platitudes. We have heard all this holy talk before, and however inspirational it may sound, it just doesn’t ring true for us. It doesn’t feel accurate and cannot possibly apply to the person I know myself to be.
    We may wish to believe that one day perhaps these things may be true about us—after we have fixed our defects and healed our emotional scars, when we eliminate any inner confusion or destructive habits and clear up any lingering uncertainty in our heart’s ability to love or be loved. Yet all these “bad” qualities are so thoroughly human, so desperately ordinary, things all of us carry and share as members of the human family. These parts of ourselves that we insist as naming as shortcomings are, in fact, not defects at all, but rather essential conditions for being honestly present, with ourselves and others, in all our flawed abundance.
    There is a geological term, isostasy, which is defined as the tendency of something to rise, once whatever has been pushing it down is removed. While it is intended to describe the way the earth, rocks, and mountains remain in balance across the planet, it is useful to know that even the earth itself rises when any pressure or obstacle is removed or worn away.
    What if we, too, are governed by these same laws? When we finally allow a space of stillness in which the relentless noises, pressures, and responsibilities of our days can gradually fall away, something ancient, wise, and true within us actually begins to rise; we awaken, we grow larger, we claim our full stature. We are liberated from those relentless downward forces, and our undeniable, inner hidden wholeness, sensing the promise of freedom, sun, and sky, breaks ground and bears us upward.
    What if we actually believed that this hidden wholeness were really true? What if, as an experiment, if only for one day, we lived as if we believed that there lived in us some reliable strength,