On finding refuge

Sometimes, we reach a point with ourselves when it’s clear we’ve come to the end of the road. Many situations and events push us toward moments like this. But if there is one word or phrase that encapsulates what I’m speaking of, then it is: being completely lost.

It’s a state that is closely related to the experience of loss, which may take many different forms, but always leaves us feeling like we have no freedom, that we are bound. Bound to our sorrows and sufferings, to who we think ‘we’ are and to our life stories. And being truly lost is perhaps just coming to see that maybe there is nothing we can really do about it.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I feel, and have done for a long time, that I’m never going to be ‘good with people’. What this means for me is that I won’t ever find approval and acceptance from others no matter what I do. This belief has had debilitating consequences for me throughout my life. It’s so subtly but firmly lodged in me that I’ve said and done things before I knew it all because I’m viscerally and terribly scared of being rejected. Of somehow being abandoned, and therefore, of being deemed worthless, bereft of meaning.

There is more. This matter of being lost doesn’t just manifest itself in key patterns or feelings of the kind just mentioned. It is essentially the whole of our lives. All our preoccupations and obsessions seem to be nothing but pointers to the ways in which we lose ourselves. This is lost as the very experience of existing as human beings.

So, does this state of affairs imply that there is no way out for us, that there is nothing but bondage? Although it may feel like that in the throes of our incomprehension, in the agonies of our dukkha, as the Buddha called it, something unexpected does get revealed through the act of simply acknowledging that we are indeed utterly and truly lost.

This admission to ourselves facilitates access to something that is much larger, vaster and deeper than what ‘we’ are at any moment. A reality that we are not aware of in our usual mode of living becomes recognisable when we are open to existing without coordinates. Or we might say that we are finally ready to find refuge in the midst of our bewilderment.

One of the most celebrated lines on taking refuge is the very last teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, when the Lord asks Arjuna to cast off all dharmas or duties, all ways of thinking, knowing and doing, and take refuge in him alone. The two words that follow this declaration (‘ma shuchah’) are really core to what refuge feels like. Krishna asks Arjuna not to worry, not to grieve. He will take him in.

But why would the Gita wait till the very end to give us this lesson? Krishna, it seems, must exhaust all of Arjuna’s questions, which are, on the face of it, questions to do with whether or not he must fight the war, but are in fact his struggle with loss as we are discussing it. It is only when Arjuna has faced all of himself, as it were, and surrendered his need to do something or anything at all to fix his predicament, is he ready for the state of taking refuge, for sharanagati.

The teaching, it would seem, is given only when we see that all seeking and questioning is incomplete without giving up our identity as separate entities, as independent minds who can resolve things on our own. That is when it becomes clear to us that we have no choice but to take refuge in not knowing. Or the Truth, or the Self, or God, or Dharma… there are many ways of describing it.

I’ve come to see refuge as going back to the Mother – she who creates and sustains, who cares and contains, she who lives in our hearts as fullness and love, who is running the show anyway and is now signalling that it’s time to wind up the act that one thought one was running.

To find refuge then feels like a rescue. A return to just being. To peace and deep contentment. Maybe in the final reckoning, to be lost is nothing but to be found!