“You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.”

Joseph Campbell

I got off the plane, vibrating.

On my way back from retreat in California, I had spent the flight between SFO and MSP immersed in Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, a Netflix special with Bill Moyer that, while comically underwhelming in production value, contains a truly remarkable presentation of content. It was that content that had me buzzing.

For most of my life I'd had this vague hunch that, since most religions seemed to rhyme with one another (that is, contain much of the same content, even through their differences), that even though the individual tribes fought one another to the death more often than not, and even though any religious person would disagree with the assessment, there ought to be some core truth that guided them all. It seemed to me inevitable, or at least likely, that each religion started with the same truth, but then over history man got in the way and bastardized that truth to suit his various ends, distinguishing each religion from the others in the process. From my Western viewpoint, this assessment was I'm sure helped along by my understanding of the Abrahamic Tradition, the accepted belief among Christianity, Islam and Judiasm that each stemmed from the same guy: Abraham.

So it seemed to me at the time that there had to be a core truth that had in effect caused each religion, some piece of wisdom so important that religions were founded to pass it down over generations, but that each religion had forgotten or obscured it over time in their own way, so caught up they were in their own "rightness."

Then I watched that Netflix special and Joseph Campbell opened the doors to that core truth for me for the first time (or at least the first time I was ready to hear it, as I've found is the way of wisdom). There was in fact a core truth, a core message that was present throughout all the major wisdom traditions and religions. This truth was beyond words, so there was no way for him to state it directly and instead he resorted to pointing at it from a number of perspectives, so that while it wasn't made explicit, you got the gist of it.

The essence of that core truth, such that I can explain it now, was the overwhelming importance of presence to the moment. Of letting go of all the mental constructs we create over and over again, and coming back to the awe-someness of the fact that we exist, and that anything exists. The various traditions, according to Campbell, were all gesturing in their own way at the importance of letting go of your interpretation of reality, or what reality should be, some solid thing created out of all your thinking, and instead connecting with what actually is. And then living there, in, and as, the Universe, rather than trapped inside the noise of your mental constructs (I want to say "as a part of the Universe" to help it go down easier, but that wouldn't be accurate). The practical way to do this being to stop thinking, planning, scheming, remembering, and everything else, to simply let go of it all. To live without reference points.

He did a much better job than I of explaining it, obviously, but having just come off a profound retreat in a monastery in the mountains, what I remember thinking getting off that plane was, "holy shit man, I get it."

I walked through the airport in a pink cloud of having gotten it. Me, Ryan Vaughn, had somehow stumbled on the secret that all these millions of people were missing. And it was so simple! What a feeling.

I stayed in that space for a good hour before it dawned on me that I had lost it long before. I'd sacrificed presence to the awe-someness of each moment through the very act of understanding the significance of that presence. I understood it (thanks to Joseph Campbell then, but again and again through so many teachers since then), but the price for that understanding was everything.

So I gave up my understanding, for the first of hopefully millions of times, at a urinal in MSP, and returned to the moment. To the amazing reality of the universe, of you, of me, and of now. Yes, even the now that happens in the restroom.

These days, I endeavor not to understand. I try to remember that I haven't learned anything. And anytime I think I do, or I have, I know I've lost the way.