There's a Well of Joy in the Center of Your Desert of Despair - The Little Prince Series

Spiritual Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

What is the purpose of the “crash in the desert” that seems to have to happen in our life if we are ever to enter into the bliss that Eckhart Tolle describes in his books?

I’m talking about the abiding peace and exhilarating joy that Jesus knew and invited us to experience.

The purpose of life descending into a mess, sending us into an emotional tailspin, is to expose what Eckhart calls our pain-body.

All our life long, we’ve been dogged by a mass of hurt that’s accumulated within us. It’s the root of our sadness, our anger, our anxiety—the root of our sense of life, and especially of ourselves, as disappointing.

It’s when the crashed pilot and his friend from the skies, the Little Prince, can go on no longer—when the water has run out and the pilot is feverish—that they come upon a well.

Of all things, this village-style well is in the middle of the Sahara! How can that be?

What we have here is a powerful picture in words—a picture of our lives.

The life-giving water of the well and the desolation of the desert stand in stark contrast. The imagery is telling us that it’s in the middle of our pain—indeed, at the heart of our desperation—that we find the bliss we seek.

What the well symbolizes is our ability to silence the pain-body, along with its drama.

A friend in England writes that, years ago, he had come to think of himself as a “failed person.”

Then he read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and saw that this poor sense of self-esteem was nothing but his pain-body, not his real self at all.

Getting into bed the other night, he experienced a flashback to an incident that caused anger to arise. “Dear heart,” he whispered to himself.

You see, he now knew himself to be dear, not a failed person. He made the choice to go with the new sense of himself that had arisen in him.

That’s what turning the pulley and dropping the bucket down into the well, to pull up water that glistens in the light of the dawning of a new day, represents.

Your pain-body will try to convince you that you are a failure. It will at the very least rob you of the joy and peace that alone make life fulfilling. This is what St Paul meant by “sin that dwells in the members of our body.” He was asserting that though we may have a pain-body, it isn’t at all our true being.

The moment our pain-body sounds off, so too can we whisper, “Dear heart!” Then, in the barrenness of the desert, we spontaneously experience the arising of the bliss that’s within us—a bliss that has never gone away from the day we entered the world, only been lost from sight.

As I commented in today’s The Compassionate Eye blog, it gives a whole new meaning to the words of the beloved hymn Amazing Grace: “I once was blind, but now I see.”