Some years ago, I had an experience, as we magicians do, of some form of the Divine showing up one night and having a chat with me about the nature of reality. I won’t go over the whole encounter here; I’ll leave that for another time, though I have spoken about it previously. The short version is that in the days previous, I had been posing a question to the universe and demanding an answer because, honestly, I was finding life very hard to deal with, and was really struggling.
I wanted to know Why is life like this?
Why is there such pain? Why is there such deep sorrow? Why is there so much struggle? You know, why does living feel like this?
The answer I got, in very plain terms, was because that is the nature of the place in which we find ourself.
And the more I thought about it over the following days and weeks, the more it started to sound to me like something the Buddha was pointing at two and a half thousand years ago when he said that life is Dukkha.
Now Dukkha has many translations, and all of them are terrible, by all accounts. I don’t know, I don’t speak the language, but people who can speak it all seem to say that all the translations into English are a bit terrible, a bit naff, and just don’t point to the exact thing. But the word usually gets translated into “life is suffering”, “life is struggle”, “life is stress”—or, if you’re feeling blunt about it, “life is shit!”.
But the actual root of the word is something about the axle on a wheel being slightly off-centre. Things here aren’t rolling smoothly. There’s something a bit wonkly about it all.
Alan Watts says Dukkha is the opposite of Sukha, which means sweet, so there’s a bitterness baked into it too. A constant, always-pervading sense that things just aren’t the way we want them to be. If only they could be slightly different, then everything would be much better.
And the Buddha’s diagnosis is that the struggle comes from the clinging. We desire things to be different from what they are, and it’s the desire itself that causes the pain. The way out, then, is to stop desiring. Which is the great catch-22 of it all, because the desire to stop desiring is, obviously, a desire. Hence, Buddha’s middle way, of not going all the way into either extreme.
But the thing that Divinity (or whatever it was, my own mind, God himself, irrelevant, same thing anyway) was really getting at is that this is the nature of this place. This is what this place is meant to be. The struggle, the happiness, the bliss, the sadness, all of it, is what this place does. Looking for a reason behind that is a bit like asking why rain rains. Because that’s what rain does. Why does the sun shine? Because that’s the nature of the sun.
And while that’s not fully satisfactory as an answer, it’s enough for me for the moment.
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There’s a bigger thing tucked underneath all this, though, and I only really noticed it through talking to a friend. He’d discovered something about himself, which was that he had a deep-seated idea lying around in the back of his mind that, at some point in his life, he was going to get everything he ever wanted. That everything would all work out for him. That everything would all fall into place and all his desires would eventually be met, somewhere up ahead in the future.
But then I realised that I have exactly the same thing. I have that same program running in the background constantly in my mind, too!
There’s this deep sense in me that at some point, all of my problems are going to be solved! That at some point, I’ll get everything into its right box. I’ll sort out my relationships, my work, my health, my Magical practice, my traumas and conditioning, all of it! I will, at some point, get it all fixed!
But then I went, “Oh, fuck no, I won’t! That is clearly not going to happen!”
Because, as the Buddha told us, life is Dukkha. It’s not going to be perfect. The nature of this place in which we find ourself is to always be a bit off.
Which brings us to that famous John Lennon line: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans”, which has become uncomfortably true for me because there’s still, even now, an expectation in me that my real life hasn’t really started. It will start when I have all my ducks in a row, all my drama sorted out, all the work on myself done, and my life in perfect balance.
And that’s even after Divinity turning up to tell me: no, that’s not the deal. The nature of this place is to never be quite harmonious. It’s polarity. Joy and sadness aren’t two separate things so much as the same pendulum swinging; it’s just a dualistic illusion that they’re two separate things. And that even if I ever get my current to-do list finished, there’s always going to be something else that needs taking care of, something else that will need fixing or solved, and that’s the nature of this place.
***
This isn’t just on a personal level; just look at it on a world scale. There’s always a looming apocalypse. Always some crisis that needs fixing, always the one big problem standing between us and the good life. If we could just cure poverty, just stop the war, or just fix the climate, then everything would be great, and we could all go home and get back to our actual, real lives. Back to the thing we’re supposedly meant to be doing, rather than having all these bothersome problems that have to be dealt with.
I was born in 1977, which makes me Gen X, which is, of course, the best generation, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I’ve personally survived an absolute shit pile of Looming Apocalypses. The terror of nuclear war in the 80s genuinely ruined a good chunk of my childhood; I spent it convinced a bomb was going to land on me at any moment. It absolutely devastated me as a kid. Terrified me. Of course, that didn’t happen; the Cold War ended… ostensibly.
Then, before I could catch my breath, the first Gulf War began, right as I was heading into secondary school, which also felt like it might be the end of the world. I had watched a documentary called “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” as a kid, which is about Nostradamus, and this Gulf War seemed to be fulfilling his prophecies about World War III.
Then we had Y2K, where the planes were going to fall out of the sky and Wall Street was going to detonate. And then later there was 9/11, the Mayan Calendar, Covid, the invasion of Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, and everything else. Even now, we still have the endless war in the Middle East that could tip into World War III at any moment—or maybe it already has. I’m sure from one side of it, it certainly feels like World War III. Perhaps Nostradamus was right when he said World War III started before 1999, it’s just that most of it is happening “over there”.
And we also have the climate crisis that’s going to finish us all off, anyway, if the fuel crisis doesn’t get us first. Or any of the other Looming Apocalypses like Ebola, Hantavirus, or our forthcoming AI overlords.
But after surviving enough of them, you start to wonder—maybe the Looming Apocalypse is the feature, not the bug. Maybe the ever-looming Apocalypse is part of whatever this place is. Go back two thousand years, and the apostles were certain the end was arriving in their lifetime, and every generation of Christians since has felt the same. Go back further, and you’ll find the same conviction. We always seem to be living in the end times.
For what it’s worth, I’m mostly climate-positive—I think we’ll probably sort it, the same way we sorted the ozone layer that was definitely going to kill us all. But that’s exactly the point. Even when we fix this latest crisis, there’s another one coming right behind it. There’s always going to be a Looming Apocalypse in your life and in the world.
That’s just the nature of the place in which we find ourself.
***
The metaphorical penny really dropped for me around a particular close relationship, where I caught myself waiting for it to become the relationship I wanted it to be rather than the relationship I actually had. I was pushing, prodding, moulding, and trying to make it malleable enough to turn into the version of it that was in my head, instead of just seeing it for what it actually was. I realised that there was no future point where it would suddenly become perfect and stays there. What I have now is the relationship. This is what it actually is. And I realised that it was a perfectly good relationship, but I was making myself unhappy because it wasn’t a perfect relationship or the ideal one I had in my head.
And that’s the whole thing, really.
To stress, though, it’s not that we shouldn’t try to improve, expand, create, move, express ourselves—of course we should. But the idea that there’s a finish line, some point up ahead where it’s all done, every relationship harmonious, every box ticked, everything achieved, that just isn’t the nature of this place. It’d be fairly boring if it were, mind you. You’d be sitting there going, well, that’s that, I’ve done everything, now what?
I don’t pretend this answers the hardest parts of my question to the Divine, though. The cruelty, the sadness, the genuine hardship, I still find all that hard to see the point of in a cosmic or divine way. From where I’m standing, it still often seems needlessly cruel to chalk it all up to “the universe trying to experience or know itself”. That said, I have, over the last number of years, accepted it all a bit more from the idea of Lila as it’s taught in Non-dual Shaiva Tantra, where all of these seemingly terrible things arise because all things must arise in order to play out limitless divine potential and divine self-expression. But just because it makes sense, or even that I believe it, doesn’t mean I like it.
I’ve had blissful experiences during meditation and the awakening and insight experiences that were extraordinary, but none of them has ever matched the depth of the despair I’ve felt at my lowest. Which should mean there’s an equivalent bliss out there that I just haven’t reached yet. So I’m open to that.
I want to be careful here. I’m not saying the nature of this place is to be only shitty. I’m saying its nature is to always have that slightly-off axle, and that there’s never going to be a moment where everything is perfect and finished. And possibly the reason it’s built that way is to keep nudging us toward creativity, movement, self-expression, expansion, and evolution. You can’t expand in a vacuum. You’re at your least creative when you’re stagnant.
So, here’s where I’ve landed on this, at least for now:
This is it. Right here, this moment, with all the Looming Apocalypses, all the unrequited inner wants and needs, all the broken things we’re working on, all our shitty relationships and all our brilliant ones, all the heart-expanding moments where you get touched by something divine or just see your kid happy—this, right now, is what it is. This is the nature of the place in which we find ourself whether we like it or not. And it will never not be like this.
And where you and I find ourselves right now is where we’re always going to be—right in the thick of it! On the front lines and in the trenches. This is our real lives.
And ya’ know, that actually may be a relief. It could take the pressure off a bit to solve it all.
So, the only real move is to stop clinging to how things could be and focus more on how things actually are, and surrender to that a little, while slowly trying to become okay with it. Which is what I’m trying to do. To be okay with the world always being a scary place, with a fresh new apocalypse always on the horizon, and see the divinity in that, too.
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This blog is based on a Vlog I did a number of years ago which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIuLlVG7bZM
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And that’s it for this time, I hope you got something good from it. If you’d like to chat about it, you can leave a comment below, or come find me on Bluesky, though I’m not terribly active over there.
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So, until next time,
MAY YOUR BEST DAYS BE AHEAD!
Tommie