Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. Today I was thinking

about the fact that I have not done nearly as many things as I think I should. Not in life, but not even in my house.

Like we moved here about six months ago, seven months ago. And there are things that are wrong that have not been put right. Today I spent part of the time taking out these really gnarly looking screws out of the wall. They've been sitting there for six months staring at me like fangs. And all I had to do was take them out. But I didn't get around to it until today. It's not like I didn't have time. There was plenty of time in the winter when I was snowed in,

just staring at those fangs out of the wall. I just wasn't ready to get it going.

Well, I was thinking about how comforting it is to sing the Beatles song, Let It Be. And how, if you don't know that song,

if you've been hiding under a rock somewhere, it's whenever Paul McCartney apparently found himself

in times of trouble, Mother Mary would come to him and whisper words of wisdom, which were always, let it be. Nothing else.

She doesn't go on in the chorus to say, and by the way, here's how you get, here's how you attain

enlightenment. Nope, just let it be. That's all she says. And all over the world, people are going,

oh my God, thank you. Let it be. That is a really, that I can live with that. And a lot of the

enlightened ones tell us the same thing, like Krishna Morty, the Indian teacher who was enlightened at age

like 15 or something they said. And I don't know how they measure these things. But after he'd been

teaching for like 50 years about his constant state of bliss,

he said, I will tell you my secret. And everybody, like, crowded around because he'd never said

this before. And he said, here's my secret. I don't mind what happens. Like, I don't care what's

happening. I'm okay with it. It's not like he wasn't standing up for peace and love

and justice and truth, but in the moment, whatever was, he didn't fight it. And there are so many

people who give us the same message, right? And yet we also get messages from our upbringing,

from our, you know, I'm always raving about Western culture that says, don't let it be.

Be better. Do things more. Work harder. Make it happen. After Ram Dass, who started out as Richard Alpert at Harvard and became an acolyte of spiritual masters.

And everybody at Harvard said he'd gone crazy.

And I would hear this at Harvard when I was there.

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