Monday, September 5, 2016

Live lightly, feel deeply...

live lightly My friend and remarkable artist and poet, Paul Bond, posted this on Facebook: "Aldous Huxley, the renowned 20th-century intellectual who wrote 'Brave New World', came to regret only one thing in life: how 'preposterously serious' he had been when he was younger.

"There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling... Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply."

Yeah, leave it to Huxley to pretty consistently blow my mind. He pulls apart two normally connected states: feeling light = feeling happy or frivolous; feeling deeply = feeling heavy. In fact, we even have the hippy vernacular, "That's heavy, man" in reacting to a spiritually deep, existential concept. And we pull back so as not to be sucked into the quicksands of our own life's ultimate meaning.

Huxley is suggesting to instead feel deeply the existential truth in the experience of life, without any need to heap loads of significance on it, or make it more important than anything else in this world.

If you've done any "manifesting" study, you know that usually the lightest of requests submitted to the Universe creates the fastest results. The Universe's responses, our body's needs, the consciousness of non-corporeal beings, God, even the thoughts of others, come into our awareness as whispers. We get used to a certain amplitude of cacophony in our modern society that seems to "drown out" these whispers and makes life seem "heavy" and isolated. We feel we need to work hard, slave away, keep our noses to the grindstone and only accept those obviously physical things as valid to our perceptions. The rest of the whispers lose their relevance.

deeply lightly Remember the butterfly flapping its wings causing an earthquake on the other side of the world? It's the leveling of the playing field between extreme amplitude and zero state--all is the same meaning, all is simply an effect. Everything is important, and yet nothing is, because it is all one system--one infinite connection of everything.

Perhaps it's a habit to only pay attention to big, loud, explosive experiences that rattle our senses and create flight or flight responses, when these types of experiences are the exception, not the rule. By keeping our filters turned up to protect ourselves from the intermittent drama-trauma of life, why not re-tune?

Take down the filters. Allow it all, feel it all, but skip lightly around and through it without caring or needing to somehow "do" something about it. The "doing" is not what is important. What is important is who you are being, because the Universe is responding only to how you are being, one way or the other. Why not lighten your life by being light? Be engaged with the vast and mysterious depths of life and yet enjoy the "unbearable lightness of being"?

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