The good news is that you can’t go wrong

The bad news is that you can spend a long time feeling that you have gone wrong

In fact, it is rather worse than that. This long time is not spent just feeling that you have gone wrong in the past but more that you are going wrong, actively, now, in the moment. During this period, one feels that something in life is not quite right and that one has done something wrong and is doing something wrong. If only one could do it right, then life would be perfect. This is the ego mind in action; the controlling mind, the mind that wants to believe that it is in control. Of course, to feed this feeling of being in control there needs to be the belief that one can change one’s life experience for the better by doing the right things. In this belief is the agony. For this belief to be present, there must also be the belief that we are doing something wrong. This feeling of wrongdoing is the source of our anguish.   

All these beliefs, buried deep in our unconscious, are what keeps us in an unenlightened state. This feeling that enlightenment itself will come when we are doing the right thing, this feeling is in itself unenlightenment. Only when this whole belief structure has crumbled away does enlightenment shine out of us. We could say that enlightenment comes in that moment but even that is misleading. Enlightenment is a light within waiting to burst forth. The dust that is covering it is the controlling mind. Remember, by controlling mind, it is not meant that the mind is actually in control but rather that the mind believes itself to be in control, or at least capable of being in control. Allow that belief to drop away and then you will see: with it will go all your self-doubt, all your doubt about existence, a great trust will come in its place. Also, this feeling that you are doing something wrong will disappear and with that disappearance will come a great benediction.

Deeper even than the belief that you are doing something wrong is the belief that you are wrong, in some fundamental, existential way. During the long period of agony, a part of us is believing ourself to be imperfect, somehow invalid, inadequate, unlovable, incomplete. To get to these deeper beliefs we must first get beyond the feeling of being in control, or rather the need to feel in control. It is in itself a madness, for we are not in control. It is an illusion to feel that we are in control. So all that is lost is an illusion. But how we love our illusions, and we cling to this one dearly, this feeling that we are somehow in control. Let go, let go of this and you too will realise that you can’t go wrong, that you never have gone wrong, that you never will go wrong. In fact, the whole concept of wrongness will melt away like the morning haze as the sun burns off that mist. So too will your feelings of wrongness disappear – inwardly, outwardly, wherever this sense of wrongness is currently coming into your life, you will feel it evaporate and there will no longer be even the question of wrongness.