01
Check everything in light of your emotional/psychological (Where does that line lie?} balance, integrity, harmony and stability. You know when you are on the beam and when you are off it. When you are balanced, inner with outer, and when you are not. When you are integrated, harmonized, stable, at-one with yourself and the moment-- in the perfect position to take what comes and do what needs to be done with it. And when you are not. What are the balancing, integrating, harmonizing, stabilizing factors at work in your life? What are the unbalancing, disintegrating, disharmonious, destabilizing factors at work in your life? Is silence vibrantly, vitally, present? Are your conflicts/contradictions/ opposites/polarities clearly identified and in a steady state of equilibrium-- well-within your normal range of tolerance-- and at an acceptable stress level? Are you able to pay the right bills? Is your future relatively secure? Can you count on things being the way you need them to be, day in and day out? What needs to be done to move toward balance/integrity/harmony/stability and away from destabilization? This is your core problem. Get this resolved, and you are ready for anything. Once your base is secure, and you are grounded/anchored upon the fundamental requirements for life, and can pay the right bills, you are set to step into the day, every day. Until then, "you are like a fiddler on the roof." The single most important thing you can do to introduce balance/integrity/harmony/stability into your life is to make silence vibrantly, vitally, present in a central kind of way. Live from the silence. Be guided by the silence. Be always attentive to the silence, at-one with the silence, alive with the silence, and you will move toward balance, etc. and away from imbalance, etc. This is called returning to your original nature.
–0–
02
We live too loudly to listen. Noise is everywhere. We are never noise-free. Never quiet. Never silent. What does living noisily keep us from thinking about? Keep us from facing? Keep us from having to deal with? Because we don't know how to deal with it? What to do about it? What is at the bottom of all our striving? What pushes us into the noise that keeps us from breathing? We live looking for action. What kind of action? Any kind of action! In the meantime, we will settle for sex, drugs and alcohol, though not necessarily in that order. That will keep us reasonably sane until the right kind of action sweeps us away. We have no idea what that would be, but we live seeking it to get away from what's at the bottom of our discontent. What's at the bottom of our discontent? Go there. Find out. Enter The Silence seeking the nature of your discontent. Don't leave until you find it. Disclosure alert: Once you find it, you will never leave The Silence. It will be your home for life. You won't be able to live without it. It will be for you life enabling life.
–0–
03
Everything in our life has worked together to be where we are, here and now. That is all we can say about what happens to us, it works together with all the rest to get us where we are. If we look for direction, meaning, and purpose in all of this, we will be imposing our desire for meaningful structure that is important and exists only in our head. Life just is. No reason. No purpose. No meaning beyond what we imagine and impose. We make things meaningful (to us) by the way we respond to what happens to us. We are the ones who determine what is meaningful or not. We are the conductor, the choreographer, the director seeing meaning in the thread that runs through our life. "Because of that, THIS!" we proclaim. Well, yeah. But. "THIS" did not bring that forth. It was not for "THIS" that that happened. That "just happened," and here is "THIS." Which is just happening. Anything we make of it is all our doing. We make up the story we tell ourselves, the narrative we spin about what happens to us and how it all works together to produce our life. What happens to us produces us and our life because we respond to it the way we do. But nothing makes us respond the way we do. In this sense, we produce our life more than it is produced by what happens to us. How free are we to be different than we are? How different can/could we be? We will never know, and the question is moot. What matters is what we do next in response to what is happening now and what will happen next. And so, we are led, moment by moment, situation by situation, to wherever we will be when we get there. All of which is to say, it is important that we do our best to make our best possible response to whatever happens, moment to moment, situation by situation-- because what we do will lead to what's next all along the way.
