Category: Miracle Moments (Page 7 of 10)

Q: (Paraphrasing) Do I need to understand that desire, hunger, passion, or lust is a “dream” I need to wake up from?  If my salvation is up to me, I am screwed because I simply wish to eat when hungry regardless of how many times I tell my body “it’s a dream, you are not hungry”.  I need not feel guilty from the listening to my body.

I would say don’t replace one identity with another. You will only learn what you are ready to learn. You are experiencing all that you must in the way that you must. You can choose (yes, you have the choice) to be completely aware or to be completely unconscious. Neither is wrong!

If you are hungry, you may choose to eat or be free of the desire. If you want to enjoy Christmas, so be it. If you wish to be free of considering Christmas as any different from any other day, so be it. Don’t, for one minute, submit to the idiocy of others who deem to tell you what is proper, what is right, as if they somehow know better. They are free to tell you whatever they wish, but you are free to listen to whatever you wish. And I use the word “idiocy” to describe the notion that anyone on this forum or elsewhere can somehow instruct you on the “right” way to live or be.

I rarely read this forum or engage in discussions here. I find the “commune” sense contrary to my purpose of the moment. Something drew me to read this passage at this time, and to respond. I don’t question it, it just is. As you will be, or as any of us will be. Once the “Being” becomes united in community it fails to be anything other than the collective identity. I simply cannot see the act of replacing the Bible with another guide any better than living a lie.

God will tell you what you need when you are ready, and it might not be in this lifetime. The fact that you are questioning this is a sign that perhaps you are ready to seek the source. If so, follow your path. If not, follow your path. Or not.

One last thing. Believing that “none of this is real” because you read it in a New Age book means nothing. You must find this out for yourself in order to make your choice. Until then, it may ALL be real…or it may not. A book will not get it done for you, you must discover the path, walk the path, and then emerge from the destination as you were meant to. The inane meanderings of others who protest that “none of this is real” are part of the dream, or not, depending on your perspective. They may know it not to be “real” or know it to be a “dream”, but few have actually experienced the dream, or peeled away the layers to find the illusion. The book itself may be a guide to such enlightenment, or it may be nothing more than a way to distinguish those who know from those who are.

©2009 Thomas P. Grasso All Rights Reserved

“Healing is the physical manifestation of love from the universe.  It is the nature of all things to heal, the truth of all things to love, and the essence of all things to experience what love is not in order to see all that love is.” ~Tom Grasso

Storms rage and kill.  Man is killing man and nature with equal abandon.  Bullets fly and bombs drop, children are being blown to bits not for their security, but for the feeling of security that others halfway across the world will have as they board their planes, ride their trains, and gather for their entertainment.  The oceans are laden with the vestige of man’s hate for his own planet, an example of human self loathing created somewhere between his quest for fire and his quest for easy forgiveness.  You see it all, you view it in totality as another polar bear dies and another glaciers shrinks in evidence of the capitulation of man to his ego, the replacement of man created in the image of God with God created in the image of man.  As you view the destruction with a tear running down your cheek and a cause in your heart you are left to ask one question.

“WHY?”

We often fail to see the beauty in things we consider “bad”.  It appears that we replace our emotions with our thoughts, our feelings with our judgments.  We replace God with ego, and ignore the communication we have with God in favor of the communication we have with ego.  In this replacement, it appears we have lost contact with the Infinite Perfection because we have concentrated on communicating with the Infinite Imperfection.  When we communicate with Perfection, we see that there is no such thing as bad outside of our ego.  There is no such thing as evil outside of our imperfect need for it.  It is when we can not only understand “why” but see the purpose of the “bad”, we then lose the judgment of something as “bad”.  This unique state of awareness allows acceptance of all things as necessary.  We replace all things “good” and all things “bad” with all things that simply “are”.

All travesties and tragedies have a purpose.  They allow the opportunity for action, for the “soul” purpose to be.  There are no tragedies greater than any other except in our minds.  There are no actions better than the others except in our own minds.  There is no healing more miraculous than any other except in our own minds.  There is no deed more splendid than any other except in our minds.  The mind is where we as God create, where the physical manifestation of Being and ego becomes what is.  The mind is the bridge between Spirit and body, between God and man, where That Which Is Risen gives That Which Gives Rise to the ability to create That Which Is.  In this dynamic, we often stop at the mind instead of going beyond it to seek what is providing the mind its purpose.

So the answer to “why” is because all things are a matter of the necessity of experience.  All things “bad” that happen are opportunities for “good” to exist.  All things “good” that happen exist only because “bad” exists equally.  This is true in every case where either exists; one is because the other is.  Because of this certainty, neither is truly good or bad, they are equals in the light devoid of ego.

So it seems that in this physical universe we will always experience the essence of love in times of hate because that is the way it must be.
 
©2009 Thomas P Grasso All Rights Reserved

I have been laying awake for the last hour, struggling within myself not to be attached to my feelings of anger and sadness for what you have done. I have attempted to meditate, reviewed the blessing of my life and basically did all I could do to let these feelings pass except write this to you. I wish to let it out of me now in order that the light it is exposed to shall end such attachment. So here I sit alone in the darkness allowing my spirit to write absent of any thought to guide it from this abyss. Such honesty may prove painful, but necessary, on this path to more enlightened moments. My sadness is only compounded in my seeming need to write that which could prove so painful to others.

You have stolen too much from me, and as I regress back into a feeling of anger over what you have done I realize that it is truly just sadness disguised in a more soluble form of emotion to me. You have beaten tears out of me, you have lied anger into me, and you have stolen from me all I could have been. That is certainly not true of this moment, I am as I must be, but you must realize that what YOU are has offered little to this world beyond children stolen from their essence and driven into lonely darkness. Such a legacy left by someone who I wish could feel the selfless love around her is truly something that wreaks such painful havoc such as the desperate sadness I feel at this moment.

You have lied, and in your lies you have taken much more than you have given from the souls of those who, through birth, lay committed to your care and love. You remain this moment so selfish of love and unselfish of hate that you spread that hate like a disease around you. You have belittled your daughter into a life of such servitude that the truth smells so foul she must run from it. You have created in your world a reality so devoid of truth that any semblance of it has been removed, often with reasons just as fabricated as the lies that created them. You have driven your son into a life of ended despair that caused him to offer similar pain to the ones he loves the most. You have not been the light; that beacon of love that the ships you send into the world may find direction. No, you have been the bastion of darkness that causes those ships to run aground, stuck in the mud as helpless vessels of the pure hatred you have born into them.

You have poisoned me, and in such a condition we spread that poison to others who you have also rejected in your failed reality. You have caused me to reject a grandmother whose only fault was to not be part of the ingredient to your affliction. You caused me to hardly know a grandfather whose only memory I have was one of patient, caring love. You have stolen years from a father and his son, and in doing so created such pain that both seemed to have relived over and over again the only attachments to joy they could find from each other. This is just a small tasting of the poison you have shared with the world around you, a world who neither deserved such a fate nor asked for it.

Today, however, you failed. I have found my father, and understand in my short conversation with him that we share a bit more than just a bloodline. We share what you have created, your masterpiece of pain that left a aged man with a trembling voice and a younger version of him with tears in his eyes. Today you failed to beat every tear from my eyes. No, I shared a few with the world around me as an antidote to the poison you have fed it, and I left it a hope for continued health tomorrow.

And as I look into my mind’s eye I see my own children, one who is left to tears over the thought of “Mr. and Mrs. Grasso” who were once her grandparents and the other two much luckier in having never met them, and I renew an oath to work to keep your poison from their hearts. I am so ravaged by the illness at times I am unsure of my abilities in this regard, but committed just the same to ending your cycle in me. I can only hope that the new memories and visions in my heart can replace those you have created. I pray the love and sanity I have found grow wildly in my soul to replace the scars and fear you have burrowed into it. I realize that I have this power to remove you like a tumor because only I can create you into anything other than a distant memory. That is where you belong – in the words of one of my favorite songs – “In My Rear View Mirror”.

You have created you the monster, but I keep it alive. It is high time I finish the exorcism, and in meeting the man who should have always been a part of my life I pray to do just that. I realize why you needed to remove him, he knew the truth and you needed to keep us from it. Rather than be the truth you created it, and in doing so turned a man who was nothing more than a good husband and father into a monster so much like you. I find it odd that your description of him – the monster you created – is actually a self-description, and I find it odd that as you sit still at night you don’t see that irony. It is YOU who sought removal of your self from the lives of your son and his family who could have so unselfishly loved you, and it was YOU who forced the removal of a man, my father, from his children while destroying all he worked for in the process.

And the song replays like a broken record along the time line of your life. Misery, tears, anger, hostility and separation follow in your wake as if you are a tornado spawned from hell and not satisfied until all beauty is removed from heaven above it. I wonder if the price was worth the trip, as it seems more long for you to be in their rear view mirrors than want you in the car with them.

I have forgiven the beatings you provided me…as from the same song they “made me wise”. I am not sure I have forgiven you the tears my daughter sheds at the very discussion of your selfishness. It would seem, given what I know of you, the reaction you craved. You get your importance from the misery of others, and if there is one piece of advice I offered my daughter at your expense it was to not give you such power. It is what you crave, what quenches your thirst, and to steal it away from you is the only way to slay the beast that lives in your soul. Perhaps when her tears no longer are created at the thought of you the forgiveness will be given me to share.

So now, I will walk this path given me in complete bliss at the opportunity it has brought. Time will tell how complete this path makes me, but I have confidence that I will be as I always am: where I need be. My only desire, if you can call it that, is that I walk the rest of my journey cured of the illness you have bequeathed me. I have found the antidote, love, I just need to perfect my taste for it. Such perfection will be the end of you.

In spite of all of this I still love you, my mother, and feel an immense degree of sadness over your condition. Perhaps that sadness is magnified by the fact that your condition is so easily cured, for I have found that the truth is truly a cure for all blights on the soul. I just wonder if you have not lived for so long in your fantasy that you can no longer see a different reality. Such sadness cannot be born long on a soul, take it from your son who has had to live it to some degree for much too long. So, despite my anger and sadness I will always have my arms prepared to open for you should you choose to find love and truth in your life. That seems to be proof enough to my spirit that I am truly finding cure of what you have made of it. And in that, I end this with a smile and a hopeful recognition of what fate can bestow.

Today while meditating I realized that I am the guilt I see in others…that I am the guilt I throw on the world. I live with the complete understanding that all of the guilt I carry inside of me is what has driven me not to trust and to see impending pain in all that those I love do. While seeing this realization, I am not sure how to expose it to revelation – to the awareness that ends such darkness. I am sure such tests shall present themselves to me, and in those tests I will see my reflection on the world.

I open my heart to change, my soul to awareness and my Being to Oneness. I seek to find God in me, God in you, and God in all around me. I cannot judge my past actions based on this realization, they are but an illusion created by my own illusions. Rather, I must forgive in order to seek forgiveness, I must be peace in order to find peace.

God, please help me in this challenge, please allow me to be.

Today was certainly a test…but not one you could “pass” or “fail”, just one you had to experience. It is just a test based on its own merit, one on which you could sit back and review and understand its place in the moment. A proverb stated “You hear and forget, you see and remember, you do and understand.” Today was a chance to understand.

Through the many challenges, I don’t think I could have handled them any differently than I did at those moments. I am still working on being the watcher, on seeing my mind rather than being my mind, so I was not prepared for the giant steps today would have me take. I caught glimpses, but the pull was just too strong.

So today I did, and I understand. I understand I am not ready to run yet, so I will continue to walk. I understand I simply cannot expect to get to the summit without many tries from the base of it first. And I can honestly say that I am happy to have seen this, to have done this, and to know that I can at least see what it is I am not yet prepared to accomplish.

I am also happy that I was able to collect these observations and not hold on to them. The reactions today are NOT me, they are my mind, and I certainly am becoming less my mind each and every day. I am not disappointed, I am not angry, I just am.

Find health, give peace, be love…

T

What is the ego? Well, there seem to be two simple answers.

The first one is anything that follows the simple phrase of Being “I am”. Whatever you can put after “I am” ceases to be about the inner self but rather the outward expression of your mind, a form of ego. It is you and your story, it is your identification, it is your need to be something other than what you truly are. It is the “apple in the garden”, the “original sin”, the wedge between Being (God) and you.

“I am ugly”.
“I am fat.”
“I am a Democrat.”
“I am right.”

None of these describe who you truly are, but rather are identification with the outward expression of thought. None of what comes after the “I am” is real…but rather the dust from which it will return.

The second answer is anything that comes after the phrase “you are”. It is what you identify others to be, not what they truly are. It is truth in your eyes only, a judgment that, as all judgments are, is faulty at its conception. It is what you use to either bind another to you or segregate them. They are either with you or like you or they are not. Whenever you follow “you are” with something, it is your own ego assigning the label.

“You are beautiful.”
“You are a loser.”
“You are mean.”
“You are wrong.”

Odd, but when you say to someone “you are beautiful”, it may have come after they have said “I am ugly.” See the fault of judgments? They are based in nothing real, nothing stable. We often might say to someone “you are a loser” right after we ourselves have failed to meet our version of identity in ourselves.

I will leave you with a story. If I was to ask you “what is a tree?”, what would your answer be? Common answers would say “Well, it is branches and leaves and bark and twigs and tissue and roots.” But is that really the tree? Collect the branches and leaves and bark and twigs and tissue and roots and put them in a bucket. Do you now have a tree?

The same thing can be said if I ask “what is a human being?” The common answer may be “Well, he is skin and bones and muscle and blood and water and organs and hair.” Is that really true? Collect some skin and bones and muscle and blood and water and organs and hair and put it in a bucket. Is what you have a person?

What makes the tree a tree and a person a person is not the form you can see. It is the indescribable force that resides beyond the form that not only makes us who we are, but binds us. It is the part of us made in the image of our Creator, the Being in the Human Being. It is the part of us we need to find as we look inward. It is the part of us that is God.

We all have our “cross to bear”…something (or some THINGS) that causes us despair or suffering in our lives. Sometimes these crosses not only cause us to fall, but cause others to suffer in our failing. I find the story of Jesus failing and Simon of Cyrene yet another example of the New Testament bearing the challenges of life into prose and example, and while I am not here to debate the veracity of the story, I am certainly understanding of its place in our lives.

I can personally speak of many things in my early life that led to tremendous failing later in it. There are literally an encyclopedia of instances and times that created my cross, that which I bore for most of my life. There are probably many examples in your own life you can site as a “cross”, and a few times when that cross just became too much to bear. In our weakness, we dropped the weight, fell to our knees exhausted and in utter despair. In other times, we stood weary and weak but defiant, finding our own method of dealing with the torture in our minds, our souls, our “being”. Some turn to drugs, some turn to suicide, some turn to continuous and unrelenting self-destructive behavior meant on “protecting” that self from the dirt below.

I have always found it odd that in my need for self protection and in the practice of self-destructive behavior to that end I seemed to only “wet the wood” of my cross. In that, I made it much heavier than it need be, and the cross itself was only too willing to accept my offering. Stranger yet, the more I “wet” the wood, the more I sought to defy it, as if I knew more that the weight suggested I did. I can only say today that as I stare at the scars on my knees, the bruises on my shoulders and the splinters on my back that I obviously knew far less than I believed. Each scar and bruise is a lesson learned (hopefully), each splinter an example of the futility of attachment, the suffering of ego.

It was only when I could offer my cross to someone willing to bear it with me that I could see the absolute idiocy of attachment to the pain of the past. We all can site a dozen examples of pain in our past we hold on to today. I have heard from friends who have suffered so intensely, not because of the pain itself, but because of their attachment to it.They can’t let go of it, and they use it as a reason or cause for any assortment of issues they have today. Still, when we pass off the lumber to someone we love, we find it utterly torturous to have them deal with the suffering our attachment to pain has caused. In some, this creates unmatched suffering and a dysfunction, to others it causes an awareness of the lunacy such attachment creates.

I can say that when I shared my cross, the suffering it created caused me to seek to shed it completely. That was the purpose of the sharing it seems, to light shed on the idiocy of holding onto it, to finally seek and end to the suffering and my attachment to it.

In our lives, we have many “soldiers” who will whip us into carrying our cross with false strength. They will continually use the “whip” of whatever power they have over use to push us forward, usually to the destination of their choosing. If we fail to reach their assigned destination, they use the power of their “whip” to complete the torture. Our cross (or our attachment to it) becomes their control over us, and we allow it because we ourselves have no identity without the cross we bear. If we also have an attachment to the soldier, we will not only carry the cross of our lives but also learn to love the whip in their hand. We see what they consider the necessary destination as our ultimate goal, that in somehow pleasing them by the sweat and blood of our brow we will find pleasure ourselves.

In this the soldier can be those we “love” or who “love” us. It can be mentors, husbands, wives, teachers, parents, siblings, or even just a best friend. The whip can be sexual in nature, or the return of love, or the idea that “forever” is more solidified. It can also be just a positive reaction, an feigned acceptance (acceptance can never be earned, it is always there). Perhaps in this metaphor we can see the relativity of this analogy in our own lives. If we can see it, we can become aware of it, and in the awareness such unhealthy darkness cannot survive.

There are times when our actions while carrying the cross cause other to suffer in our midst. Our own “Simons” bear the weight of our cross for us and in this suffer along with us. Some are pressed into service, like the guy at the bar we beat up for no real good reason, or the family we gave the finger to when the cut us off in traffic. Others volunteer (although some not knowingly) when they enter into a relationship with us. Regardless of the reason for their “assistance”, they are scarred nonetheless, hampered in the shared splinters and binding bruises. It seems as if their joining in our suffering only “wets the wood”, makes our cross all the heavier for their effort. We not only have to deal with the original carpenter of the cross, but now we have to deal with the guilt of putting them through pain on our behalf.

In this action and reaction, it seems perfectly acceptable for anger to be the method of reaction and guilt the continuance of the anger. In our Simons seeking change in us, they may use a variety of means to see this happen. We owe them somehow, or at the very least we find them seeking freedom from the memory. They, in turn, create their own little cross out of the splinters we leave them from ours. What seems worst, as we relinquish the control the cross has over us, it seems as if they cannot, they need to hold onto that cross as if it is the only thing between them and certain death. They become more than just our helpers, our partners, but now they become the soldiers destined to see us to THEIR destination.

I liken this event to getting water from a stone. You turn the spigot, nothing comes out, and you curse the stone. You do this for weeks and curse the stone each day for its failure. Suddenly, just as you seek to be finished with the stone, it produces a torrent. Do you still curse it? Or do you appreciate that it finally is doing as you need it to do. Sure, it took its time, but is it where you want it to be or are you where it WAS? Perhaps your lips are still cracked from thirst, but you seek to curse the stone for being a STONE…a strange occurrence at best. You seek to tie your condition to it, rather than understanding that things were as they were intended to be.

Perhaps we should just learn to love the stone for being a stone and a well for being a well. Accept them, and should the stone provide water for you love it just the same. It would seem that in keeping anger towards it for what it did yesterday, we seek to hold on to the attachment we created in our anger towards it. We create a cross that we simply do not wish to relinquish, and in that creation a bit of insanity uniquely ours. We become insane, a slave to pain and ego that will only seek to repeat itself over and over again!

At the end, perhaps we just need to love. We need to love those we are in love with today. We need to see them as they are, not as we would like them to be or how the WERE. We need to open our hearts and arms not to our vision of perfection we expect the other to be, but in an unselfish love that seeks to accept, not to pass judgments. Can we forgive? Can we live for today in a way that makes yesterday a forgotten moment and tomorrow unexpected? The answers to those questions will not just seek to create peace in our own lives, but growth to loving relationships that never fail.

Still, if we seek to “choose” we have failed in our quest already. Don’t choose, just BE. Don’t think, just BE. Don’t talk, just DO. And best of all, don’t question, just LOVE. These all happen simultaneously in acceptance and Being, and they are without effort or “work”. Be still, and these will happen. Learn to find the silence that allows the noise to be. Happiness abounds from this point forward.

This will be long, so take your Ridalin or Aderol NOW! You have had your warning!!

During a recent life challenge, I faced the rather difficult task of understanding the relationship we share with our past, and was left clearly dominated by a need to become aware of how the path behind us can influence the path ahead of us. I would like to share some of the awareness discovered.

It caused me to ask the question: “does beating oneself up over the past continue the attachment to it?”. It was a rhetorical question at first, but seemed born of the recent struggle and the awareness that was created by it. I love struggle and suffering, it truly is the best teacher.

First, let me share with you my understanding of thought. Most of us cling to thought as the mechanism by which we grow, understand, live, make decisions, and basically function. I work to take thought in a much different way (yes, even struggle to reach this destination), and use my life experiences to basically formulate an awareness of thought…and understanding of it that shapes how I approach it, use it and, ultimately, discard it.

Thought, in my understanding, is the noise of the mind. It creates a perception of reality that can enhance the ego’s control of that reality. I clouds sound decision making, it magnifies ego, it stands in the way of progress. It simply keeps us from our selves, and from fully enjoying our existence. I certainly can get more into thought and ego if asked, but I have no need to challenge conventional thought in this post, but rather offer this as a basis for explaining the difference in thought and awareness as it relates to my understanding. A mouth full to say the least, some things of spirit just are not easily described with things of form. I guess one way to simply put it is that thought is the explanation of understanding, awareness is the creation of it without thought.

So, in the process of understanding attachment to past and how it controls our present, I needed to have an awareness of the circumstance at hand. This awareness requires an honesty for which thought cannot face. It takes seeing your self in a way that egoic thought will not allow, it takes tears, it takes sweat, and ultimately it takes a devotion to spirit that eliminates the presence of ego. It takes quiet, it takes stillness, it takes the complete absence of thought.

And now the painful part, an honesty for which there is no return. Things on here may be changed to protect others, but ultimately nothing will be changed to protect me, the person or the ego. So, here goes.

I have a propensity to not only have trust issues, but to cause them. I simply make bad decisions or do things that just aren’t worthy of trust. My ego takes over, thinks, and then acts in accordance with its perception of reality. Then it changes things to make that perception fit, regardless of how honest or truthful that perception is. My self, that part of me left when ego is stripped away, suffers at the hands of this. The ego jumps for joy while the self cries bitter tears. It is the paradox of a person that is the essence of “beating oneself up”, a continual battle between that which is all about form, pleasure and materialism and the self which wants no part of it.

In short, I am a liar…in ego that is simply what I am. This difficult awareness comes at a price but is worth the investment. The only way to end an ego is to shine light on it, and awareness is that light. Ego is a darkness that cannot survive even the slightest beam of light. You just need be willing to turn the light on, which is really the most difficult part.

Once I could see that I am a liar in ego, awareness began to delve into the aspects of this darkness. Now, keep in mind that awareness is not thinking, it is the absence of thought, so one does not pass judgment on what is happening at this moment. Awareness took me back to the pain of my youth, the need to be something so different in order to find the acceptance of others. Awareness shed light on seeing just how untrustworthy my parents were, how lies got them through life. I could see my ego creating the persona that would get me through the day. I could see that need to dominate my surroundings, whether cheating on a girlfriend to break any attachment to emotion, or having sex with a random woman in order to feel accepted, or hurting someone I loved very much because I just could not trust them, the things my ego did while in control simply sickened my self.

Worst of all, there were a handful of people who I honestly loved, people who I counted as those who I would die for if able. I realized that I was completely unable to share this because of my immature attachment to ego. In fact, I turned my back on these people rather than take them in. I feared this feeling, I feared its ownership of the “me” I knew. This “way” began when I was a young child and continued up to the day my wife tearfully told me that this “way” was killing her. At that moment, she turned a light on in me, made me become painfully aware of the “me” that needed to be exposed. At that moment, my self took over for a change, and I understood that my self needed to expose these things that were not only hurting her, but others I love, and yes, even me. The conflict had turned a corner.

That’s not to say it was over, man it is far from over even though this event took place years ago. My ego continues to lash out seeking its survival. This takes me to the recent life challenge. It simply was about the past, and how it effects the present. I began questioning whether I wanted to live in the past anymore, whether I wanted to have it control my life. I began to wonder if the “me” people got to know and expect was controlling the “me” I am at this moment. It is a conflict to say the least, it is a nasty battle between now and then, self and ego, light and darkness. But it is a necessary one.

And now to the understanding I have of the initial question. Let me first say that there is no right or wrong answer because ultimately the answer will depend upon where you are at this very moment. If am two blocks behind you in the journey of life, there is simply no way I can see the beauty you see, and you simply cannot see what I am seeing at that moment. But in this understanding is the understanding of the present, this very moment, and the fact that this moment is the purpose of being.

At this moment, I release the past the best I can. I must have no attachment to it, for it is an egoic perception of reality. Perception is a tricky thing, and I often liken it to the circumstance of the moment. To someone who is full and healthy, eating a Big Mac may seem grotesque…but give that same person a circumstance of starvation and they would eat that Big Mac off the dirty sidewalk. It’s the moment that is purpose, it is the moment that matters, and it is the moment for which we need to exist.

With this understanding, I become aware of reactions (ego) that are based on the past. They are harmful even if they appear to be good. In this moment there is no past, there is no need to relive it, there is no need to demand its attention or even offer it attention. The past ruins the present by its very existence, and the only way to firmly be in this moment is to relinquish the hold the past has on it.

No, there are no exceptions. And no, this is not to say that lessons learned in the past are not to be used this moment. They just must not own the moment. As a child learns that fire is painful, we now later due to this past experience not to stick our hand in the fire, but we do not use this painful experience to not enjoy a fire’s warmth. Yes, there is a difference, and it is up to you and where you are at this moment to figure out where that difference is.

I heard a story once that pretty much sums it up. If you have abused a dog as a puppy, and see it 10 years later it may bite you, but it certainly hasn’t thought about it for each of those 10 years. And it probably won’t think about it again once you leave the room to get your stitches. The dog has learned from the past, but it certainly does not live in it or for it. And I believe the dog will not be beating itself up for biting the abuser after the event is over.

We must learn from the dog…that this moment is not about the last one, it is about this one. It is the only one we are guaranteed, it is eternity. Enjoy it, allow it to be, and simply embrace all that it offers. Love those you love, open up, and just be. Such freedom is beautiful, and the stillness is deafening. No, it’s not easy, but if you love it is a must.

Peace