He was successful by every standard, he was a judge, he was well respected,
you know, “yes, sir, no, sir, your honor”, all of that kind of thing,
and yet his question as he died was, “what if my whole life has been wrong?”
My uncle Bill, who was a schoolteacher in Hayward, California,
handed me a collection of writing by Leo Tolstoy. And the collection of writings was
called, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, and that was the lead story,
it's about 170 pages or so, it's pretty good, just like a small novella.
So I was about eight or nine days and I was just a young kid teenager,
and finally I picked it up and I started to read it.
And it's the story of a of a judge in Moscow, and he had this young
man who was a judge named Ivan Ilyich, and he would go back and forth to work every day,
and he was doing everything that he was programmed to do,
the morning of his life, you know, he was programmed on ambition,
on achieving things, on accumulating things and he hated everything about what he was doing
throughout the story. He not only hated what
he was doing, but he hated his wife because she's the one that got him
into this in the first place and he felt she was responsible
for him not fulfilling a different destiny altogether.
So the last paragraph of the short story, he's lying there
holding his wife's hand and he looks up into her eyes,
and the and the last message of that story is,
he says to her, “what if my whole life has been wrong?”
And then he died, closed his eyes. And I was 19 years old and I took out a notebook
and I wrote a note to myself, it said, “Dear Wayne, don't die
with your music still in you”. “Don't die with your music still in you”.
And this idea of not dying with your music still in you
and realizing that you can be, he was successful by every standard,
he was a judge, he was well respected,
you know, “yes, sir, no, sir, your honor”, all of that kind of thing.
And yet his question as he died was, “what if my whole life has been wrong?”
And that question gives me chills even today, even as I say that,
because I would never look into anybody's eyes and my last words would never be that because
my life hasn't been wrong, because I managed to make the shift.
You know, with that moment, that one moment that I just described,
well, I've had that same kind of moment, that vivid, surprising, benevolent and
an enduring kind of thing, I had the very same thing when I left a position
as a safe place, as a tenured professor with a guaranteed job and a certain
amount of income and benefits and everything that goes with
working for somebody else, and I had a similar experience and I just
was able to just walk away from it and take the risk to do so.
As we move into the meaning phase of our life, the afternoon of our life,
we are taking the ideas and the constructs and the rules
and the guidelines and the provisions that we learned in the morning of our life,
which is focused exclusively on ambition and getting ahead and getting more
and being better than everybody else, we take those same kind of contracts
into the afternoon of our life when meaning is far superior to ambition.
But as he says in here, we end up living a lie,
and the lie is because what was true for us in the morning,
which is I have to get ahead, I have to win,
I have to be the most successful and so on in the afternoon have become a lie,
but we don't know how to move into the meaning phase of our life
and we can find our meaning by trusting in our nature,
by recognizing that I am here to do more than just accumulate
and be better than somebody else, in fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with it.
One of my great teachers early in my life was Abraham Maslow,
and I remember him saying very specifically that if you want to become self actualized,
if you want to live a life of meaning, the first thing you have to
do is become independent of the good opinion of other people,
the first thing you have to do. And the second thing is to become
detached from the outcome. Those were the two,
the top two criteria for highly functioning people.
Independent of the good opinion of other people, which is exactly the opposite
of what we learned in the ambition phase of our life.
And detachment from outcome, which is the other opposite.
Instead of, like we don't go out there to try to make,
to do something to make a lot of money, detachment from outcome it's
like you don't do it because of how much money you're going to make,
you do it because there's something inside of you here that is telling you,
“this is what you're here for, this is what you have to create,
this is what your purpose is, you're going to make the world a better place,
you're going to fulfill a destiny, a darma that you signed up for
before you even entered your mother's womb”. I mean, that's the kind of thing that you begin to
feel inside of yourself so that you're moving into that stage
but you want to move into what Jung calls the afternoon of your life,
you want to move into it armed with a whole collection of
practices and beliefs and guidelines that work for you rather than work against you,
so that you're not trying to feel fulfilled and meaningful and purposeful in your life,
by setting goals, by trying to get ahead of the other guy,
by trying to win, by worrying about how much money you're going to make,
by worrying about whether it's going to be liked, by whether other people like it.
And that's just goes back to, you know, the ego says, “it's all about your reputation”,
so learn to get people to like you, it's why people have such a problem
with politics and political people, because they're consistently out there just trying
whatever group they're talking to, to get them to agree with them
and then they say something different and something different
and there's no meaning and power in that. Because the ego, according to,
most of the spiritual teachers, you know, including Patanjali,
is just called, it's the false self. This idea that you are what
you have and what you do and what other people think of you
and that you're separate from everybody else and separate from God,
that's just false. You know, it's like you're living under,
that's the Jung quote where he says, “what was true in the morning will
have at evening have become a lie”. And you're literally living a lie,
trying to fulfill a destiny that has been imposed upon you by all of these,
by society, by the right people and so on, but in here there's music
that you came here to play and you know you came here to play that music.
Intention, the field of intention is asking you to play that music
and to take the risks and to do whatever it is that that is required of you.
This is just all long habituated thought systems that we if we challenge them and begin to see that
they're not even true, they're all lies. So it's like we're living by,
we live in a in a in a world in which all things are possible,
in which, you, there's no accidents, there can be no accidents,
there's an organizing intelligence that supports everything in this universe
and we live as if who we are is this little microscopic separate thing who's
always got to do things a certain way and fit in a certain way,
and not none of that, none of that is true.