Watchfulness

Putting our life in God's hands does not mean that we hand Him our wish list for life, but rather that we make His life our wish. When God's will becomes our sole wish in life, then whatever happens to us not only fulfills our wish, but we realize it has always been our wish right from the start.

Our lives are nothing but a series of invitations, a series of moments in which we run into what we don't know. And in this experience of our own limitations, something good and natural takes place. In its constant stirring and seeking, life feeds back to us the boundaries determined by our present understanding.

The two great commandments -- that we should love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves -- are the necessary germinating forces that ultimately give flower to the potential for a human soul to not just reflect what the Divine has made, but to actually participate in the process.

As we're about to discover, the little phrase, "I see myself," describes a single action that has the power to change the heart of whoever is willing to embrace its practice. But, before we examine the exercise, let's take a closer look at what it means to "see ourselves" -- as we are -- especially when someone else has failed to please us.

We are created to know ourselves not by what we think about, but to know ourselves within God's ever-present, perfectly changing Life. The challenge for us is that we are habituated to thinking about ourselves and deriving a sensation of ourselves based upon the images that we consider.

Most of us hold the unquestioned belief that our hearts and minds are at peace before one of life's "waves" washes in to disturb us. But if we take away the prejudice of self-pleasing images -- and add the ease with which we are disturbed by unwanted moments -- we have good cause to suspect something entirely different about ourselves. Could a truer view of what takes place in such times of...

No moment can be different than it is. We can't change a moment that comes. The moment (and its content) appears from within us, before us, and we are relegated to being able to see it but not to change the very thing that we're looking at as it appears. So that whether we like it or not actually means nothing.

The next time you run into some familiar blockage or begin to feel unsuited to face some new and difficult personal challenge, don't do what you've always done before. Don't try to think your way around it. You no longer want a way around your troubles because what goes around, comes around! What you want is to grow beyond the level of that disturbance. And to do that, you must not act from it.

Have you ever heard within you, not necessarily in words, something to the effect of "Oh no, not this again!"? Perhaps we're looking at the latest flame of our heart and we see a fire in his or her eyes, but it's not because they are looking at us. In that moment we no longer see the moment unfold as it is, but rather we stand there transfixed -- experiencing the moment as we are; and we are not really present!

All of our life experiences have been trying to teach us a certain grand lesson: Liberation from our captive condition (whatever that may be in the moment) cannot come by further deliberating it. We can see the wisdom in doing nothing toward our own troubled thoughts and feelings when we realize that the only way not to be dragged under by these negative states is to stay...

From this day forward, be a careful observer of the moving pictures in your own mind. Learn to watch all the various scenes without casting yourself as any of the players on the screen. Remember, nothing you see in that darkened theater is who you really are.

Learn to be actively passive as you observe the nature that either accepts or rejects the moment. Be watchful of the tendency to instantaneously identify with your thoughts, opinions, expectations, and then begin to realize that there is another way in which you can meet life.