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15 November 2022
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Simple and Profound
Thoughts
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Acceptance
is a letting-go process. You let go of your
wishes
and demands that life can be different. It's a
conscious choice.
Gary
Emery
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Modern people are frantically trying to earn enough
to buy things they're too busy to enjoy.
Frank A. Clark
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If you bring five
percent more awareness to your work tomorrow,
or to your most important relationship, what might you do
differently? Are you willing to find out?
Nathaniel
Branden
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All my experience of the
world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question
is the generous side and the merciful side.
Anna Brownell Jameson
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Breaking
Old Agreements: Freedom
Don
Miguel Ruiz
Everyone talks about freedom. All around the world
different people, different races, different countries are
fighting for freedom. But what is freedom? In
America we speak of living in a free country. But
are we really free? Are we free to be who we really
are? The answer is no, we are not free. True
freedom has to do with the human spirit--it is the freedom
to be who we really are.
Who stops us from being free? We blame the
government, we blame the weather, we blame our parents, we
blame religion, we blame God. Who really stops us
from being free? We stop ourselves? What does
it really mean to be free? Sometimes we get married
and say that we lose our freedom, then we get divorced and
we are still not free. What stops us? Why
can't we be ourselves?
We have memories of long ago, when we used to be free and
we loved being free, but we have forgotten what freedom
really means.
If we see a child who is two or three, perhaps four years
old, we find a free human. Why is this human
free? Because this human does whatever he or she
wants to do. The human is completely wild.
Just like a flower, a tree, or an animal that has not been
domesticated--wild!
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And if
we observe humans who are two years old, we find that most
of the time these humans have a big smile on their face
and they're having fun. They are exploring the
world. They are not afraid to play. They are
afraid when they are hurt, when they are hungry, when some
of their needs are not met, but they don't worry about the
past, don't care about the future, and only live in the
present moment.
Very young children are not afraid to express what they
feel. They are so loving that if they perceive love,
they melt into love. They are not afraid to love at
all. That is the description of a normal human
being. As children we are not afraid of the future
or ashamed of the past. Our normal human tendency is
to enjoy life, to play, to explore, to be happy, and to
love.
But, what has happened with the adult humans? Why
are we so different? Why are we not wild? From
the point of view of the Victim we can say that something
sad happened to us, and from the point of view of the
warrior we can say that what has happened to us is
normal. What has happened is that we have the Book
of Law, the big Judge and the Victim who rule our
lives. We are no longer free because the Judge, the
Victim, and the belief system don't allow us to be who we
really are. Once our minds have been programmed with
all that garbage, we are no longer happy.
This chain of training from human to human, from
generation to generation, is perfectly normal in human
society. You don't need to blame your parents for
teaching you to be like them. What else could they
teach you but what they know? They did the best they
could, and if they abused you, it was due to their own
domestication, their own fears, their own beliefs.
They had no control over the programming they received, so
they couldn't have behaved any differently.
There is no need to blame your parents or anyone who
abused you in your life, including yourself. But it
is time to stop the abuse. It is time to free
yourself of the tyranny of the Judge by changing the
foundation of your own agreements. It is time to be
free from the role of the Victim.
The real you is still a little child who never grew
up. Sometimes the little child comes out when you
are having fun or playing, when you feel happy, when you
are painting, or writing poetry, or playing the piano, or
expressing yourself in some way. These are the
happiest moments of your life--when the real you comes
out, when you don't care about the past and you don't
worry about the future. You are childlike.
But there is something that changes all that: we
call them responsibilities. The Judge says,
"Wait a second, you are responsible, you have things
to do, you have to work, you have to go to school, you
have to earn a living." All these
responsibilities come to mind. Our face changes and
becomes serious again. If you watch children when
they are playing adults, you will see their little faces
change. "Let's pretend I'm a lawyer," and
right away their faces change; the adult face takes
over. We go to court and that is the face we
see--and that is what we are. We are still children,
but we have lost our freedom.
The freedom we are looking for is the freedom to be
ourselves, to express ourselves. But if we look at
our lives we will see that most of the time we do things
just to please others, just to be accepted by others,
rather than living our lives to please ourselves.
That is what has happened to our freedom. And we see
in society and all the societies around the world, that
for every thousand people, nine hundred and ninety-nine
are completely domesticated.
The worst part is that most of us are not even aware that
we are not free. There is something inside that
whispers to us that we are not free, but we do not
understand what it is, and why we are not free. . . .
The first step toward personal freedom is awareness.
We need to be aware that we are not free in order to be
free. We need to be aware of what the problem is in
order to solve the problem.
Awareness is always the first step because if you are not
aware, there is nothing you can change. If you are
not aware that your mind is full of wounds and emotional
poison, you cannot begin to clean and heal the wounds and
you will continue to suffer.
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Recognize
When You're Fighting Reality
Richard Carlson
After a lecture in Chicago one evening, I was speaking
to a forty-seven-year-old man from the audience who
had a twenty-year-old son. This nice man, named
William, was telling me how disappointed he was that
his son had decided not to attend college. He
said that it was "his dream" that his son
not make the same mistake he had.
William went on to say that he knew not going to
college was the worst decision he had ever made and
that he was certain his son would never recover if he
made the same mistake. I could see in this man's
eyes that he believed what he was saying, that his
pain was real, and that it was severe.
The fact of the matter was that William's son wasn't
going to college. It was obvious that nothing
this father could do or say was changing that
fact. The problem was that William was fighting
against certainty.
Learning to recognize when we are arguing with, or
struggling against, reality may be one of the smallest
shifts you can make in your attitude. But it may
also yield one of the most significant insights.
Very simply, recognizing when you're fighting reality
spells the difference between guaranteed misery and a
life filled with peace and contentment.
Think about what happens whenever any of us argue with
reality, when we resist what is. We might dwell
on how much we hate the fact that the new neighbor has
moved in down the street, or that the liberals or
conservatives are in charge of Congress (as the case
may be). The problem is that the neighbor has
moved in down the street, and the liberals or the
conservatives are in charge, just as William's son has
decided not to attend college. In any of these
cases, it's eye-opening to ask the question: how
is resisting concrete reality going to help? Or
to put it even more bluntly, is there any chance
whatsoever that fighting reality is going to make you
feel better? The answer is--and always will
be--no.
You can hate the truth, and you can talk about it and
resist it until you're blue in the face. You can
complain and look for sympathy, stomp your feet, feel
like a victim, and spend the rest of your life feeling
sad, depressed, angry, and resentful. But none
of this is going to change anything.
Being aware of the difference between what we can
control and what we can't is critical for day-to-day
happiness. There is no point in banging our
heads against a wall. Once we understand what we
can't do, we can then make the most important
decisions about what we will do. Instead of
fighting with his son, for instance, William could
have simply shared his concerns and worked with him to
ensure that the decision to skip college did not
damage his future.
It's a subtle shift in your thinking to be able to
recognize when you're fighting reality, and the fact
is that most of us do it a great deal of the
time. But if you can make that slight change in
your awareness, you will save yourself a great deal of
agony and empower yourself and your decisions like
never before.
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Consider
the trees which allow the birds to perch and fly away
without either
inviting them to stay or desiring them
never to
depart. If your heart can be
like
this, you will be near to the way.
Zen
Buddhist teaching
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Not My Way
One of the most important
things that I've learned in life is just how much I used to think
that people should do things the ways that I think they should be
done. I've never been a control freak, per se, but I have
had (and still do have, to a certain extent) a set of expectations
about how other people should act in certain situations, and I've
often been a rather harsh judge of people when they don't meet
those expectations.
Some of those expectations are very realistic and justified, I
believe. For example, I have no problem with expecting other
people to follow speed limits to keep the road safe for all of
us. I think I'm justified in expecting people to respect the
rights of others to live in their own ways. When I teach a
subject that has very strict rules--a language, for example--I can
expect my students to know the proper way of saying certain things
if they expect a certain grade. With the big and important
things in life, it's often very clear that we are justified in
having expectations of others.
On the other hand, there are many things that I really don't have
the right to expect of others. If a person is faced with
making a decision and asks me for advice, I don't really have the
right to expect that person to follow my advice, and I'm only
disappointing myself if I feel hurt when the person doesn't.
Advice is simply advice--it's not an order or a mandate.
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Most of us crave
control. We think we'd find lasting happiness
if only others would do what we want. But wringing our hands
over their independence won't change anything. On the contrary,
addressing our own behavior, our own thinking, our own attitudes
can encourage the very behavior we tried to demand all along.
Karen Casey
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I very often
see parents who seem to think that their children
should see the world exactly as they do. They
"train" their kids to eat as they do, to
think as they do, to believe the same things they
believe. They want their children to adopt
their religious beliefs, to be loyal to the same
political party that they belong to, even to follow
the same careers that they've followed.
But these parents often are setting themselves up
for some very difficult times as their children
develop their own beliefs and start to march to the
beat of a different drummer. As a teacher,
I've often seen the problems that this kind of
approach can create. Young people are
conflicted, torn between the desire to do what truly
interests them and what truly interests their
parents. They want to please their parents,
but they're afraid that if they don't do what their
parents tell them they should do, their parents will
be disappointed in them. And of course,
different people respond to this sort of internal
conflict differently--some make themselves ill from
worrying, others act out their frustrations in ways
that are completely unrelated to the problems at
hand, and some withdraw into loneliness, isolation,
and even depression.
Of course, there are those who seem to accept the
conflict readily and to respond to it well. In
these cases, though, there are often problems later
when they realize that they haven't lived their
lives in their own unique ways at all, that they've
simply followed the rules and guidelines set down
for them by someone else.
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You have no control
over what the other person does.
You only have control over what you do.
A. J. Kitt
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Letting people
do things their own way isn't giving up on
them. If I know a young person who's about to
do something that I think may be harmful or
inappropriate, instead of telling them what they should
do, I try to make them aware of the possible
consequences. I may say something like,
"I know that you need to make your own
decisions and that's fine, but here are a few
possible things that can happen if you do
that." If they're about to buy something
that's far too expensive for them, I try to show
them how expensive the monthly payments are compared
to their monthly income. If they're about to
take a job that's going to work them very hard but
pay them very little, I let them know the effects of
such a job on one's normal, day-to-day life, things
like not being able to spend time with friends or to
do things with others on weekends.
But ultimately, I'm always sure to say, the decision
is theirs, and not mine. And my mind is clear
because at least I know that their decision is now
based on at least one other perspective, no matter
what they decide.
Sometimes the lines between giving direction and
telling how things should be are quite
blurred. In a college composition course,
there are certain things that need to be done, and
it's easy for me to say, "You have no thesis
statement here, and you really need one," for
that's one of the most important element of a
college paper. I can lower a grade because
one's missing because the requirements of the course
are quite clear.
In a creative writing course, on the other hand,
it's much more difficult to be as
straightforward--mostly because of the value that's
put on creativity. One of the important goals
of a creative writing course is to allow students to
stretch and explore boundaries and to do things that
are, well, creative. On the other hand, if
they're so "creative" that their readers
don't understand a word of what they've written,
then they aren't really writing effectively, and
someone needs to guide them in a direction that will
help them to create more effective prose or poetry
or drama. In this case, though, my goal as a
teacher is not to tell them how to do things, but to
help them uncover their own ways of doing
things. How can you as an individual make your
writing more accessible to more people? What
can you do to make your prose clearer, your poetry
more universal, your drama more approachable?
I don't need to make them write my way to make them
write effectively. There are plenty of
effective ways of writing, and it's more productive
of me--and more empowering for them--if I help them
to find their own ways rather than telling them to
adopt my way.
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Be
not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them
to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Thomas ŕ Kempis
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If a friend of
mine is having problems in a relationship, do I want
to tell them how I would deal with the problem, or
would it be better to help them to come up with ways
of dealing with it on their own? If a child is
creating a project for school, should I tell them
exactly how to do it? And if I don't and they
don't do very well on the project, does that prove
that I should have helped them? No--it's part
of that child's learning about life and living, and
if he or she really wants a better grade next time,
that child knows what's necessary to earn it.
We like to help people, of course. We like to
share our knowledge and talents and expertise in
order to make things easier for others. But
our goal while we're here on the planet shouldn't be
to get other people to see things our way or to do
things our way, for that would lead to a lack of
creativity and originality on their part, and
frustration and aggravation on our part.
Rather, asking some pointed questions on just how
that person wants to approach a goal or an issue can
help them to clarify their own ideas rather than
simply copying ours, and if I let another person do
something in his or her own way, then I'm helping
that person to grow and learn and expand as a human
being. And shouldn't that be our desire for
them, also?
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More
on expectations.
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The impression is that
love is something that happens to you like magic. That love is something others do for you, but that you cannot do
for
yourself. Love is not something you wait for. Love
doesn't just happen. Love is something you do. When you want love, give
love. Moment
to moment, you make the choice whether to give love and be loved.
Jennifer James
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Upon
the Sand
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
All love that has not friendship for its base
Is like a mansion built upon the sand.
Though brave its walls as any in the land,
And its tall turrets lift their heads in grace;
Though skilful and accomplished artists trace
Most beautiful designs on every hand,
And gleaming statues in dim niches stand,
And fountains play in some flow'r-hidden place:
Yet, when from the frowning east a sudden gust
Of adverse fate is blown, or sad rains fall,
Day in, day out, against its yielding wall,
Lo! the fair structure crumbles to the dust.
Love, to endure life's sorrow and earth's woe,
Needs friendship's solid mason-work below.
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My wish simply
is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and
our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this
means
that we must save ourselves from the products that we are
asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Wendell Berry
The Art of the Commonplace
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