GIVING THANKS

If there is just one thing you could do to transform your life, it would be giving thanks.

Thank you for the solitude I am enjoying to write this. Thank you for the warmth I am in. Thank you for the quiet all around me. Thank you for the food we eat. May all beings be as well fed. Thank you for providing for our material needs abundantly. May all beings be as well cared for. Thank you for Al Anon meetings. Thank you for community and commitment. Thank you for honesty. Thank you for the world beyond what we can know with our physical senses. Thank you for inspiration, that breathes through physical people to enable them to create what was not there before. Thank you for joy, that liberates us from all anxiety, dealing with it as the desert sun to a raindrop. May we be subsumed by joy. May we lose our personalities in it.

Whatever you pay attention to increases. What would you increase? Whatever it is, you can pay conscious, loving attention to it by giving thanks.

Would you increase co-operation? Give thanks each time you see, hear of, observe, think of, or remember any instance of it. We are so grateful for this example of co-operation (or love, or peace, whatever you want to increase). May we always be taught through inspiring examples like this. May we forever remember the feeling state of this beautiful example of co-operation.

You will clothe yourself in co-operation this way. You will become and attract co-operation.

Giving thanks brings abundance

Is it solitude you want? Give extravagant thanks for each moment of solitude you get. Solitude is very close to peace.

I give thanks for the solitude I am experiencing right now, and I give thanks for all the activities that can be enjoyed in solitude: thought, meditation, yoga, reading, writing, playing, painting. I give thanks for all the beautiful moments of solitude I have enjoyed until now. Thank you for sending these wonderful gifts my way. My soul gives thanks.

If the only prayer you ever say in your life is thank you, it will be enough.

Meister Eckhart

UNDERSTAND THIS: STOP TRYING TO UNDERSTAND

I don’t understand anything in life. The older I get, the less I understand.

Stop trying to make sense of it, to give it a meaning. You are constantly trying to do this. Whenever you get sad, or depressed, or overwhelmed by the happenings of life, it’s because you can’t make a meaning out of them.

Would you stare at a vat of bubbling mud and try to impart meaning to its random splats? Of course you would not. There is no sense in studying what is random and ephemeral.

Image by Janice De Santis

Give up trying to fix narratives on the happenings of the world. Give up pretending you know the reasons for anything. You don’t. Reasons don’t even exist where there is no cause and effect. One thing does not cause another thing, as you think. Rather do they co-exist, as everything co-exists. It is you who have linked them with your act of thinking.

This is what we mean when we say you created the world you observe. Mind preceded this world, as it must precede all worlds. This world you observe is what you gave birth to, by your allowing, by your linking of ideas.

Who is it who observes the world you made? Who sees it with physical eyes, who interprets it through the physical body?

It can only be you. Your act of observing changes the world you observe. Each appearance molds itself to you, who called it forth with your desires, beliefs, words, and feeling states. This is an interactive universe, friends, and it starts with Mind.

You could spend your time minutely studying the little results of what your previous thinking allowed to come forth. You could wonder why someone is an alcoholic, or why no one wants to change the way you want them to, or why these people are so lazy. You could think obsessively about the happenings of the world and try to impart meaning to your partial view of them.

Or you could give up this boring, hopeless task, leave it to someone else; it never needed to be done anyway. Trying to understand a problem keeps you in the problem. Forget the little results and turn your mind to prime movers.

If I have created this world I see by my thinking, let me at once absolve it. This means forgive everything about it that I don’t like.

Forgive, as if it never happened. Spend no more time on it.

And into this giant, newly-created vacuum, let me now choose what ideas I would like to spend time on, and create. Let me take out images of peace. Let me see all beings laying down their arms, making a huge pile of weaponry, beyond all use now, and destroying the pile, as if it never existed. And let me see them now turning unto agriculture, and nurturing the earth, and feeding the hungry.

May the earth be healed

REAL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU?

Image by Janice de Santis

You set a great store by what you call the real world. “How will this help us in the real world?” you ask your teachers. “You need to live in the real world,” you exhort others. You think that everything of value to be had, exists there. If you only do, get, or become this or that, you will attain happiness.

But what is your real world?

Is it not only what you apprehend with your five physical senses? Is it not what you see with your body’s eyes, even though most of you do not see what is before you, but prefer to dwell in the past? Is it not only what you can hear with your physical ear, or taste, smell, or touch with your body? You are saying that nothing outside this world that your senses bring you, is real.

And why do you call it the real world? If this was all the world there was, what need would there be to give it an adjective? There would be no other world to distinguish it from. To call this the real world implies you know there is another world, which is placed somehow in opposition to this one.

What might this other world be like? Everything not available to the five physical senses would have a place there: faith, inspiration, love, invention, creation, joy, and guidance.

Friend, would you live without these?

Image by Janice de Santis

You can name which world you want, as the real world. Each one makes his choice. Is the real world this physical world of discord and suffering that you see all around you? Or is the real world a timeless state of endless creation, joy, and peace? Which would you have be the real world?

You get to choose, and choose again, every moment. When you choose each moment to live with God, evils are forgotten, superseded, left at the side of the road like useless old baggage. All stress, anxiety, and pain are gone, melted, dissipated, as you rise again, reconstituted in glory. Which world would you have be real?

It is only the mad little ego that bids you call the physical world “the real world”. But that which must be endlessly proclaiming its own reality, knows of its unreality. It protests too much. The ego knows its world is not real.

To pay attention to your physical world is like watching the constant, endless waves of the ocean, and studying their differences. That wave is shorter than the others. This one’s top is breaking off a little. A breath of wind has ruffled up another. You call it the real world but there is no meaning to be had in any of it.

What if instead you examined the world that your real world is set up to refute? Here in the physical world, everything is endlessly changing, waves upon a shore. There, is no time and no change. Here, things are imperfect and in constant need of fixing. There, is only perfection, and all is eternal.

Let all that is not helpful be swept away

HUMAN CONCERNS

I don’t want to have the concerns of a human. As soon as my mind starts to fill with human concerns, I feel distaste; I recoil. Did I come here just to worry about what career to have, or how to make more money, or who not to offend in planning a wedding, or how to get my brand better known?

But you are not a human

No. I did not come here for any of that. All of those, and any of the myriad little decisions, manufactured crises, smokescreens, and endless trivia that the ego tries to throw in my way to distract me, I am happy now to push off onto someone else. There is always someone to take it, and I am happy to delegate.

Do not have the concerns of a human. The ego wants you to keep believing this is who you are. This appears to be very easy for the ego to do, as many people as are entangled in its snares.

But you are not a human, friend; you are only choosing to have a human experience. Your human journey does not need to be frightening, although many of you choose to make it so. If you would but realize that none of this is you. Nothing that you choose to identify yourself with in the human dimension is you.

You are not your career, with all its attendant concerns, dramas, and satisfactions. It is but a tool you pick up to have certain experiences.

You are not your body, with all its tastes, needs, wants, and mechanical problems. This is only a vehicle you are choosing to use right now.

You are not your position in any society, hierarchy, or group. It is only a role you are choosing to evoke certain experiences. But it is not you. You have but picked it up for a while. Sooner or later, you will put it down.

You are not any of your possessions, all subject to worm and decay. In fifty years, how good will the most prized of your possessions be? All will be dilapidated, trashed, forgotten, dated and strange, along with the memory of the personality who clung onto them so tightly.

You are not any of your failures, shortcomings, weaknesses, all of what you think of as your imperfections, no matter how much you despise them. Neither are you any of your abilities or achievements, no matter how much you prize them. You are not a gold medal or an Oscar, a degree, trophy, award, or title of any kind. You are nothing that can be measured in numbers, or compared with anything else.

You are not your age, gender, sexual orientation, or time and place in which you live. Anything on earth that you choose to identify with, is less than who you really are. Know that all your earthly experiences are part of the human experience you came here to have. Turn them to their best and fullest purpose, take joy in them, but know that you are not earthly experiences.

Time spent in worrying about human concerns is time wasted. Leave that to someone else. There is One who will pick up all the human concerns you renounce, One who sees everything, and Who can bring all your concerns beautifully and easily to resolutions more peaceful and joyous than any you can now imagine.

You need do nothing

LIFE: WHAT IS IT FOR?

Every instant of life offers you the chance to choose for God, and to rely on His power instead of your own. Relying on your own has never brought you to rest or completion. But when you have chosen for God, it is His power that sustains you. Now do you not need to plot and plan, to go before and behind, to check up, make sure, be proactive, to be engaged in constant, stressful busyness.

After you have chosen for God, all burdens, large and small, will be lifted from you. You will see them for what they are, mistaken attempts to control, to bring about an outcome, to cause this, to prevent that. You remember how eagerly you picked each one up, how important it seemed. But there was never an end to any of them; each attempt at control led farther and deeper into a Gordian knot of misery that could never be untangled. This is how it ever is when the ego is in control. The ego has no vested interest in making things go well.

Send the ego away

Make the decision to live in harmony with the universal. Would you save yourself from grief, stress and worry of any kind? Or would you have a lifetime of it? The choice is this stark. But it is also easy.

My yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Matthew, 11:30

Would you not have rest after all your worries, your travails, your endless seeking? You think another partner will make you happy, or an exciting new job, or changes in your location, circumstances and appearance. Superficial things. You are seeking outside yourself.

If you believe happiness is anywhere but with God, you are condemned to a life of seeking without finding. All that is necessary is to bring the mind back to the eternal, where it already finds peace and joy.

All those situations that previously gave you worry, stress, or grief, will resolve seemingly of themselves, or fall away, or be transmuted into peace and joy.

Let your condition be joy

THE BODY: WHICH YOU ARE NOT

It is always better to pay less attention rather than more to bodily concerns: your hair, clothes, physique, shelter, food, income, beauty, youth, stamina, heart rate, appearance, and on and on. You do not need to judge your body against other bodies; you do not need to overindulge it with luxuries it does not need; you do not need to spend time trying to gratify it.

You can pay attention to your body, provide all its basic needs, keep it healthy and functioning well, be active with it and enjoy it. But do not let your sense of self reside there. Do not identify with the body. Do not let your life’s work be its needs and wants.

You are not your body

You do not need to serve your body. Shed your bodily concerns like so much unwanted old clutter. They are taking up too much space in your mind anyway, crowding every other thing out. Think how much space will be cleared when you let go of this self-identification with the body. It will be the transformation of a dank, dusty old closet to a bright, hopeful, sunny space.

Who would not want this?

An arum lily lifts its trumpet to its source, the sun

There is an inner beauty

You stand in your own way when you are slave to your bodily concerns. There is an inner beauty that transcends bodily beauty, as all baser metals give way to gold. Seek that beauty that is within. Enable it. Be its slave.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow

They toil not, neither do they spin

Luke, 12:27

Neither make yourself a slave of your shelter, always improving, or decorating, or berating, or lamenting the lack of one more thing. Give thanks for the shelter you have. May all beings be as well provided.

A lot of your evils: avarice, greed, desire for power, unbridled appetites, are the result of excessive zeal in procuring for yourselves. What if enough of you, as a species, were to renounce all self-procurement, let it go, know that there is enough food on the earth for everyone, that all the world is provided for?

Loose your hold

In your calm at knowing that all needs would always be beautifully answered, you would relax and loose your hold on the source of all supply. When you let go of your several strangleholds on this flow of energy, once it had shrugged you off like a snake easily slithering away, it would be free to increase the energy flow many-fold, and shower blessings upon your collective Self.

Let Me Maximize You

Transformational change: the least you need to know