The transforming despair of being utterly helpless
Question from the Internet:
“What do you do when you don’t see a solution, and you need to solve a problem right away?”
The state you describe, when we are facing a problem, we can’t solve it and reach total despair, as a result, is a very good state. Such a state can propel us “out of ourselves”.
We have tried everything we could with the intellect, abilities and tools we had at our disposal and came up with nothing. Since we have an all-powerful, irrepressible ego in us that simply cannot accept defeat, such a desperate state pushes us beyond our so-far known abilities and limits.
Many times this opens up possibilities and ideas we did not think about before, as if capturing new possibilities “out of thin air”, renewing and innovating things that seemed impossible before.
But let’s say even this does not happen, and we remain in that desperate, total failure state for a long time. Then our ego accepts a certain level of humiliation, and swallowing pride; we turn to others for help. Then with the help of others, through teamwork, by sharing ideas and abilities, we might find a solution.
Our personal ego needs to make some compromises, but we can find solace in the collective ego, being proud of ourselves in finding solutions.
But what happens if even such a collective effort and teamwork can’t bring proper solutions and we all find ourselves in an unsolvable crisis? What if all of us find ourselves in total, collective despair and the need to find a collective solution to our problems become more important than anything else in life?
What happens when even our collective ego is ready to subjugate itself and accept any help we can get since we clearly see and viscerally feel that without that solution, we are lost, and life has no meaning anymore?
Such collective despair, such a collective subjugation, and the temporary capitulation of our personal and collective egos open a channel toward nature’s all-encompassing system and its infinite knowledge base, databank. This natural database and infinite wisdom are constantly around us, but when we revel in our own abilities and the ego triumphs, we simply ignore this natural wisdom and the treasure chest of blueprints.
But in that state of absolute and collective despair, our minds and emotions open up and become sensitive to everything nature’s infinitely wise and capable system has to offer. This is how we find true and perfect solutions to the greatest and most challenging problems we face.
As long as our prideful, self-serving and self-justifying egos operate and control us, everything we do is egocentric, subjective and artificial. As a result, we keep destroying and failing but continue making the same stupidity and mistakes again and again. We need to arrive at total despair of our own abilities; we need to reach that absolute capitulation of our personal and collective egos when it is absolutely clear that nothing else to do remains, and we would rather disappear from existence than continue for one more moment in life.
Then we open that channel towards nature and receive the needed solutions.
Now we can reach such a unique breakthrough as a result of growing and finally intolerable physical suffering — as we are doing right now — or we can do this purposefully, consciously through a unique method until we reach an “inner despair” and breakthrough between us without the need of physical suffering.