From Grumble to Humble

It was "one of those mornings" when I swung my feet from under the blankets onto the cold floor. I found myself grumbling about just about everything--it was cold, my arms hurt, I worried about money, I despised the errands I had to run, and damn it, I'm GRUMPY!

I made a point of going extra slow, in some sort of protest to myself and the Universe about irritating minutia, that, later, wouldn't amount to a hill of beans. And the fact I was grumpy about THAT, made me grumpier. I just was having a hard time snapping out of the polarized mind-warp I found myself in.

Coffee. That'll do it. I made a pot, and sat down at the computer with the steaming cup o'cheer, still irritable, but far off in the distance I could see a glimmer of better moods ahead.

I skeptically decided to listen to a meditation I received in my email inbox from Emmanuel Dagher, entitled, "Activating Your Money Magnet"--I could feel weird resentments and more grumpiness rising up, but I went ahead and listened to the 20-minute meditation.

It was actually not bad. Mainly, and thankfully so, Mr. Dagher focussed on the essentials: self-love, honor, and respect. I sat, sipping my coffee and listening, and there was, finally, a shift, and I snapped into non-duality, leaving the grouchy-grumpies behind.

Mr. Dagher pointed out that "everything that happens to us is for the good". As Pollyanna as that sounds on the surface (especially when you're pointing a grumpy finger at the Universe), from a cosmic perspective it is truth. It is too easy to pick up the thread of habituated monkey mind thinkity-think and the "fake facts" of discomforts, pain, and worries on top of completely baseless fears, that we lose track of this basic truth.

The love of and in our life starts with the self. If we don't love ourselves, we literally cannot love our life, and thus the things, people, circumstances and events within it. To love self is to honor self, and this can be a hard one.

How often is it that you make what seems to be a "mistake", only to find out later it was actually not a mistake, or by the making of it, you discovered something valuable you didn't know before. There really are no mistakes. Sure, there are mis-calculations, errors of judgement and such, but these are only so because of our perspective.

From a cosmic view, everything that happens is exactly what is needed for a higher expression, or frequency of existence. We get glimpses of this "greater world", and yet have difficulty with the navigation to it, as though the vision of it requires physical movement or doing. This is not necessary. This greater world is the world where you love and honor yourself.

Go ahead. Imagine your life where you always love and honor yourself. You feel pain, you drop something, you injure yourself--all these are opportunities to honor the process of the experience. These things deepen the experience of self, and result in greater compassion for your life and the lives of others who may be having a much tougher time of it. By honoring life and our place in it, we can feel gratitude, and that gratitude faces us towards the cosmic gateway of a greater life, and a higher world for all.

I finished my coffee, and rose from my chair, only to knock the empty cup off the desk on to the floor, intact. I paused to honor the event, and smiled.

The Art of Non-Duality

I keep coming back to this "non-duality" concept, because it is so much at the crux of creation, and indeed, why we as infinite creators continually choose to participate in such an extreme form of duality.

It is a dramatic world of opposites, contrasts, and all the messy grey areas in between. Don't we have something better to do than to get all tangled up in this morass? Well, no. You see, by experiencing and being these extreme states of opposites, we come to know ourselves as infinite beings. By the sheer contrast of the non-being and solidness represented by life here on Planet Rock, it reveals to us our infiniteness.

Most of what we experience is what we are subconsciously co-creating with all these other infinite creators. It doesn't seem like we are creating the universe of our lives because most of what is being created is what we subconsciously agreed to be a part of coming into this life. As we "wake up", or become aware of this fact, we can then start making conscious choices about what we prefer to experience.

What it takes to wake us up, though, is usually a carnival ride of torturous swings from one extreme to the other. We are seemingly tossed back and forth from dark to light, hard to soft, easy to difficult, and everything in between. The bewildering input of contrasts assaulting our senses seems to be more of an attack against us, throwing us into defense mode.

Is it any wonder that most of us just put our heads down and take the path of least resistance, complying and compromising our own preferences in the hope of "getting by", "fitting in", and fergawdsakes not rocking the boat. It seems easier, or at least a whole lot less threatening to find a somewhat comfortable niche, and dig in, hoping to avoid any real revelation of the infiniteness of who we are, and the crushing responsibility of our own creations.

With the advent of the the planetary information web (the Internet), and the inevitable development and involvement in "social media", or what I call selective hive minds, we can compartment and validate our own value systems, creating our own self-bubbles that shut out dissenting views or emotional conflict. This serves to amplify our responses when we stick our heads up every once in a while and are bombarded by the seeming insanity of an opposite world assaulting us. We either quickly duck back into our comfort zones, or take up arms to attack those opposing our niches we've become so attached to--mostly in self-defense.

There eventually arises a desire to "rise above it all", to transcend the hive minds, and get beyond all the conflict of this Opposite World. This is Nature's way of squeezing our consciousness into present time awareness, and drives us to be mindful and non-judgmental about everything around us. It's the only way out, really, and even though it's difficult, it's certainly preferable to living in a hole in defense mode.

Our lives then become a series of self-awarenesses about our automatic responses developed in self-defense to assaults on our personal values and ego attachments. The door has opened, and now we cannot go back--what is seen cannot be un-seen, and leads to more awareness and more clarity. At some point, there is a reckoning, and in a slow flash we start to see this conflicted world as the birthing of something greater, something inherently beautiful in its becoming--a world where polarities merge into a continuum of necessities, much like the birthing process where writhings of pain morph into the beauty of a new life.

It all needs to be there. It's all happening because it's supposed to happen. All the suffering, pain, agony, joy, glory, and poignancy coalesces into one immense, amazing and glorius birthing event. There are no longer opposites, but spectrums of being--none better or worse, or righter or more wrong than the other. Without the one there cannot be the other, and both are required for what is being wondrously created.

It becomes a matter of dropping all our requirements of what "should be", un-creating all the evaluations, judgments and conclusions about what we see and experience "out there". And by doing so, "out there" becomes "in here", and at last we have a shot at truly creating the glorious world we've always known is possible.

Installing Grace

I awoke the other night, and a small voice kept saying, "Gently now. Very gently now. You are safe. Be gentle to yourself." Immediately, my body relaxed and went into a profound state of peace and gratitude. As I rose to go to the bathroom, I felt subtle energies of peace and compassion helping me to stand, all the while saying, "Be gentle. Be peace. You are safe."

I've had many of these "energy visitations" in the past, but this one has persisted and has seemed to be filtering through all the layers of my being and physicality. My chronic pains of this 65 year old have seemed to fade some, replaced by this steady mantra of a Gentle Campaign.

This has taken me into a new area of self-inquiry. We are all so acculturated with concepts of waging war on what we do not want or like, that to fully embody such an idea as gentle peace, seems like giving up. Yet, just the opposite is true. Once we give up the war, peace and grace can at last come to rest upon us, and we wonder why we were so all-fired forcible about things.

Especially, as a man, we are socialized to "aggressively pursue our objectives". We are taught that the "manly" way is to "attack" a problem and "make a solution happen". The irony is that just as much can be "accomplished" through non-forcible means, with less expenditure of energy and less risk of self-diminishment should we fail.

All this fighting for "success" ends up taking a toll on the body, which is remarkably resilient, yet still subject to the wear and tear of war. All this pushing and forcing puts the body in a constant state of "flight or flight", and results in inflammatory responses, and eventual wasting.

For the last several months, when I ask the body, What do you need? It has consistently responded with, "REST". I did what I could to shift my lifestyle to allow for more sleep, but that wasn't it. The body was actually trying to tell me to be peaceful and gentle with it. Under stressful conditions, such as financial threats (in my case), there is a constant sort of forcing of attention on solution objectives, spending stressful times juggling accounts and forcibly pondering solutions. This sort of operating basis actually hurts the body, keeping it from repair and rejuvenation.

I have come to see that gentle, certain intent trumps high-energy, forcible intent. Both acheive the objective, yet the former does it much more lovingly within the context of a healing space. Gratitude is the over-arching theme, as opposed to the unforgiving battleground of overcoming survival threats.

In David Hawkins' book, Power vs. Force, he points out that there is true power only in grace. And that Grace is a sort of loving, nurturing background energy within which all things come into being. It is only the illusion of individuality and disconnectedness that creates the conditions of fear and separation. By giving up this illusion and embracing this field of Grace, we reconnect not only to our own expression, but with our humanness and our fellow humans.

The I Ching has a hexagram, "The Gentle (Penetrating Wind)". This hexagram refers to the power of wind to reduce mountains to hills, and rocks to dust. "The dark principle, in itself rigid and immovable, is dissolved by the penetrating light principle, to which it subordinates itself in gentleness. In nature, it is the wind that disperses the gathered clouds, leaving the sky clear and serene. In human life it is penetrating clarity of [perception] that thwarts all dark hidden motives. In the life of the community it is the powerful influence of a great personality that uncovers and breaks up those intrigues which shun the light of day." (Richard Wilhelm)

So I've laid down my battle gear in favor of garbs of light. It's much more comfortable, and the body gives thanks.