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.
The real power behind faith is found in the Light within us that shows us what's true, and what's not, about who and what we are in reality.
Truthful self-seeing is the beginning of having an authentic life... one in which we learn that the initial bitterness of self-truthfulness is the front-runner of our ultimate spiritual betterment.
Your awareness of troubled thoughts and feelings roaming through you is the power that keeps their harmful and self-limiting influences from having control over you.
"Know thyself" is perhaps the oldest, wisest, deepest, and most succinct spiritual instruction ever given. In fact, it is our nature to know ourselves.
This world of ours, and all that transpires here, is a school for our spiritual education. Like any institution of higher learning, it has teachers, lessons, and many levels of learning; all serve to make possible the revelation and eventual realization of a timeless love that both creates and maintains the cosmos themselves. Our heartaches -- whatever their nature -- are heralds of this high...