Monthly Archives: March 2015

THEY HAVE TO ASK

If everybody practiced this, there would be no unsolicited advice. That would be good. Unsolicited advice robs its recipients of the power of learning something for themselves, which is the only true learning. Those who welcome unsolicited advice are afraid of imagined evils. Let there be no unsolicited advice. Banish it from your repository of tools.

Say only what you are directed to say, what carries no ulterior motive since it seems not to come from you. Cultivate sacred space within yourself, so that you hear more.

They have to ask. Your example is stronger than any words. It is not necessary to editorialize on your example; just do. If you wish your example to be most powerful, know that talk about it chips away its power. Your silent, conscious example is your most powerful tool for good.

Example, the most powerful tool

This is the act of believing in free will. Nothing can exist without free will. If they did not choose it for themselves, it does not count. This means giving up all manipulations of other people. Give up trying to get anyone to do anything, no matter how much it is for his or her own good. They have to choose. (We are talking about grown adults here, not children who still need help navigating the physical world.)

Giving up manipulations is natural when you give up attachment to outcomes. Give up all pushing and pulling. Give up trying to arrange reality.

They have to ask. This works in any situation. Should you give your opinion? They have to ask. Should you offer them help? They have to ask. Would you give them directions? They have to ask. Would you tell them how you would do it? They have to ask. Do they want to know a better way? They have to ask.

Be silent and know. Create sacred space within, so that the answers have a place to come.

Wait until they ask

LESS TALK, MORE DO

It is not necessary to announce, to yourself or others, what you are going to do. The announcing takes time and energy that could be put towards doing.

Action expresses priorities

Gandhi

Neither do you need to make editorial comments to try to pound out a lesson to someone else. Just say what you are inner-directed to say. You never know what that will be. It might be nothing. Sometimes what you say will surprise you. It will have a wisdom that you could never have fashioned. You will never repeat yourself, if you are coming from spirit, being inner directed.

Those who know do not talk

Those who talk do not know

The Tao Te Ching

Forget about teaching other people nuggets of the conventional wisdom: get a degree and make more money, don’t marry someone of a different faith, practice makes perfect, money doesn’t grow on trees. This is futile, friends. Give it up.

The only way to teach, after all, is by loving example. What you instill forcefully into their minds, you deny them the experience of getting for themselves. Your prompting only decreases what they can learn on their own. You are standing in the way of the very thing you want.

The truth abides in silence

LIVE IN THE DAY

Live in the day: pay attention to the day you’re in. Watch the birds, listen to the fountain, hear the hairdryer, decide for five minutes to give up circular thinking, to put down those thoughts, beliefs and worries that you carry around with you all of the time.

Lay down your burden of thinking

Live in the day: pay attention to what your senses bring you instead. Is the sun warm on your back? Enjoy. Do you eat something you like? Give thanks. May all beings be as well fed as you are now. Can you let go of physical tension too, with each out breath? Do that now. You can always do one really intense yoga pose. Or stretch. Whatever. Drop all tension. It does you no good. It is a stone in your shoe that must be let go of immediately. It has no good to bring you.

Let habitual thoughts go

With them will also dissolve emotions, which are feeling-states that you use the world around you to evoke. “I am sad because a couple is splitting up.” “I am worried because someone is sad.”

When your mind is in the present and has let go of tension and habitual thoughts, there is nowhere for it to get fuel for negative feeling-states. You are in the blessed present, noticing all there is to notice, realizing that the peace and beauty, calm and quiet you are now experiencing, by your choice, is a glimmering brocade in the endless fabric of your life. Give thanks. May all beings be as peaceful.

Choosing the joys

Can you see that contemplation of the past and future are the source of all your negative feeling-states? From the past come blame and regret. From the future come anxiety and fear. You could not summon any of these if your mind was always in the present, choosing the joys, gifts and satisfactions you want in your life. Blame, regret, anxiety and fear would be no more.

CONTROL: GIVE IT UP

You must give up control of what you think of as your life. You have been trained to plan, organize, arrange, and be proactive. But if you truly want to be saved from endless anxiety, you must learn to put all planning by. Control is not for you.

Another name for this state of mind is acceptance. There is a divine plan for you, just as there is a divine plan for ice crystals in a snowflake. Perhaps you now realize how futile it would be for an ice crystal to wonder what its purpose is in life, or make a list of priorities, or worry about wasting time or being fat. An ice crystal stands out of its own way. Adopt the acceptance of an ice crystal.

A state of acceptance is a state of non-resistance. It occurs when you stop offering resistance to what you are observing, when you have given up all anxiety because you don’t have enough money, you’re disorganized, your mother is cold, someone else drinks, does drugs, is lazy, late, or whatever else you have decided to notice. Out of the infinity that is reality, you decide what to pay attention to. A state of non-resistance occurs when you decide to stop paying negative attention. If you give thanks for the exact same situations that cause you anxiety now, the energy around them will be transformed absolutely.

This is also a state of grace. It will feel very different in kind from your everyday reality, as though time had stopped. Where you are is all your reality. Time has no hold on you. Some call this the eternal present.

It is also what is meant by faith. Faith and anxiety cannot coexist. They cannot both be true. So, once you truly have decided to put by all anxiety and planning, faith must step in. When the storm has passed, there the sun is, where it always was.

Faith is complete lack of worries

DISAPPEARING TIME

Time is a great source of your unhappiness. You worry about someone not coming back on time, or not graduating on time, or they were late, or early, the baby didn’t walk in time, they weren’t here in time to eat with us. If, to these endless sources of distraction, you say, “There is no time but the perfect time”, or, “Everything happens at the appointed time”, then you shrug off one of the negative effects time was having on you. Time retracts its claws.

When time disappears you are very happy. You already know how this feels. When you are absorbed. When you are painting, playing the piano, planting, imagining, praying, meditating, there is no time but the endless, beloved present. Oh, that we could live there always!

And if we are always present in the present, what time is there? The past and the future, twin Pandora’s boxes containing all our ills, have melted away.

It becomes easier to let go of time when you acknowledge that you don’t know everything. Any situation you may be presently paying attention to, you cannot see everything about it. You do not know anyone’s motives. All you know are the motives and attributes you have ascribed to the people you see in the situation, according to whatever story you are telling of it. Why someone got divorced. Why someone else can’t stop talking. Why they can’t have a baby. Whatever the situation, you are only ever seeing your version of it.

You have all had that experience of being flummoxed by something that happened that you didn’t see coming. How could I have been so wrong? you wonder. How could I not have seen this? You spend much time looking for clues.

You would never have that flummoxed, blindsided feeling if you remembered that you don’t know everything about any situation. That would free you to say, “I never can see everything about a situation, so I’ll give up trying to categorize it. How can I help?”

Much time can be saved

TOTAL: IT MUST BE

What must be total? Everything that you want to exist. Can commitment that is not wholehearted be said to exist? Can love that is not unconditional, be said to be love at all? Is anything less than perfect faith any kind of faith at all?

Only what is total exists

What exists at one time, and not at another time, cannot be said to exist at all. Its seeming existence is only a trick played by time, a temporary distraction. What truly exists is independent of, outside of time.

Anything less than complete truth is not truth at all. If not all your words can be believed, then none can. Truth cannot be diced up. You will recognize it by its totality and lack of any opposite.

What is total and exists independently of time is also perfectly quiet. The truth does not need to announce itself; why should it? It is always there. What constantly announces itself does not really exist. Without your attention, it is nothing.

Let Me Maximize You

Transformational change: the least you need to know