Allowing things to play out according to their own drift and flow, while applying a light touch to influence direction and reduce impact, is the age-old secret of parenthood, as demonstrated in the black-and-white television classic, "Father Knows Best," and suggested in the first edition of the Tao Te Ching, on page after page.

Taking a disinterested interest in the outcome time after time produces a better outcome than "pushing the river" and insisting on My Way Now!

Integrity is the solid ground of being.
Every natural thing is just what it is.
The Buddha is celebrated as "one thus come."
Like a new-born baby.
Popeye the Sailor Man's theme was "I yam what I yam!"
It is the most important thing to be.

Integrity, Sincerity, Authenticity.
The Holy Trinity of human behavior.
And the goal is to be that spontaneously, automatically,
in response to the circumstances as they unfold before us.

Why is that difficult?

We are not individuals born to have what we want and do as we please. We are Psychic wonders living to express and enjoy the amazing experience of being one with all living things in a universe where life is a miracle able to reflect on and realize the awe of being self-reflective forms of energy--and we waste our time and our life striving to have our way at at the expense of everyone else.

We have only contempt for our opportunity, and toss the contemplation of who we are and what we have been given aside, in the pursuit of wealth and power in order to gloat over who we are on our way to death. 

We are born to be stupid and ruthless then die. May we at least have the wherewithal to die ashamed and appalled, having lived only to deserve a Wailing Wall for our failure to be worthy of life through our few generations of being alive. Who will join me in saying "Amen"?

                           Addendum 
        Here follows an interesting addition to the above:

If one were to do an internet search for "The most Godlike place in the world," They would get a reply on the order of, "That is too subjective to answer," then they would get a list: Vatican City, Jerusalem, Mecca...

And if one were to ask for the most Godlike people in the world" they would get a list of powerful people throughout history.

I am shocked awake by Google's idea of Godlike. It would never occur to me as being powerful, like Superman. I am thinking, "kind, gentle, meek and mild, compassionate, generous, considerate." All of which fits right in with the way today's post began. We are godless because we don't know who God is/would be. That's one for the books! Geez.

Our psyche (Unconscious) is a "very present help in time of trouble." Carl Jung thought that we participate in a Personal Unconscious and in a Collective Unconscious, across the species, and that dreams can be sourced from either the personal Unconscious or the Collective Unconscious.

The Psyche is a mystery at the edge of physical reality. We can experience psychic occurrences but we struggle to find words to explain what we experience, and cannot begin to understand how our sense of things beyond explaining works.

Intuition is a psychic experience that we all are familiar with. Synchronicity is a common encounter. The "Uh-Oh" feeling when we walk into a room, or a restaurant, and know we better walk out of there NOW, is another.

Alan Watts thought that people who lived out of their "inherent intuition" were thought of by their friends as "being lucky."

We can deepen our connection with our psyche by spending time regularly and frequently simply sitting in emptiness, stillness and silence (One thing, not three) and opening ourselves to what we perceive/realize/experience there.

By attending our dreams and exploring them as a mirror-like reflection of what is going on in our life here, now.

I dreamed last night that I found the Elder Wand and used it to become fluent in seventeen foreign languages. I took that to be a reflection of my current interest in the psyche as a magic wand of sorts, and learning its language is synonymous with being fluent in really all the foreign languages there are. I took the dream as psychic encouragement to continue exploring the world just beyond this world of concrete and steel.

The contents of the Bible were not closed until late in the fourth century. That gave the Church of Rome 397 years to get the script right in having the Bible say what the Church needed it to say, namely, “You all are sinners and are going straight to hell if you don’t do what the Church tells you to do!” That, and the fact that there never was a Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve (Where do the dinosaurs come in?) Original Sin, Need for Redemption, etc., X’s out the need for Jesus to die to redeem us. We have all been scammed. Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son says all that needs to be said about heaven and hell. The Prodigal’s father welcomed his son just as he was with, “Get out of here with your litany of confession in the search for forgiveness! There is no place for that here! For you once were lost and now are found! We’re dead, but now you are alive! And that is what greets everyone at Heaven’s Gate.

According to Martin Palmer's translation of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, "The path that can be discerned as a path is not a reliable path." We can find the path that is a reliable path only in hindsight. No guides are helpful along the way that is the way, or they are helpful if we use their guidance to direct us away from the direction they suggest we follow.

Jesus talked about blind guides, and Palmer would have us hold all would-be guides as suspect. Which puts us in the position of having to trust ourselves in learning to read the signs and choose the way. Experience will come in handy in that knowing the ways not to go will shrink our available choices and give us things to not consider. From there, it will be a matter of learning to hear, listen to and trust our intuition, our "sixth sense," our "inner eye," and sit in emptiness, stillness and silence waiting to see what arises/emerges/appears there to suggest options for us to consider in "letting the Force be with us," here and now along the way. 

Doing what is called for here, now, in each situation as it arises, all our life long, is all there is to it. No? Why is that hard?

We maintain/sustain our balance and harmony by remaining grounded/centered/focused in a way of life and being that nothing can knock us off of. It is the way of "Peaceful abiding here, now," in each moment that comes along, looking for what is called for in each situation as it arises, and doing what needs to be done there, when, where, and how it needs to be done with the gifts of our original nature, our innate virtues (the things we do best and enjoy doing most, our inherent imagination, our intrinsic intuition, and our psychic affinity with that which has always been called God.

We are all one with God in this way. There is no God other than the God at the center of our psyche. This the God Jesus was speaking of when he said, "When you have seen me, you have seen the Father." We are all one with God at the center of our psyche. We don't have to believe this for it to be so. We know it to be so by dropping into emptiness, stillness and silence and waiting for confirmation.

And rising to do what is called for, when, where and how it is called for--using the gifts available to each of us from the psyche we share in common with all people.

This the truth of how things are apart from all theology, doctrine, beliefs, creeds, religion, faith throughout the cosmos and across time and space. This is who we are. It only takes listening in the silence to know it is so. And then what? We do what is called for in each situation as it arises all our life long.

PS. If you don't think God is snug in our psyche from the beginning, ask yourself what came first the Bible or the Church?  

The Church came first! The Church made up the Bible! And the God everybody talks about is the God of the Bible which the Church put there. But the God beyond theology, creeds, doctrine, etc. was already in our psyche from the start.

Sit with it long enough and you will know it is so.

The flowers of spring do their thing where they are whether anyone is there to notice and rave or not. Spring flowers don't depend on anything going their way to do what they do best. Doing their best is what they are here for, anyway, nevertheless, even so, no matter what. And I was there to witness that, and to bear witness of it long after the event had disappeared into those annals of time.

Because they are reminders to me of what I am to be about. I am a spring flower called to do my best in the time and place allotted for my life. I don't get to pick my life, choose my point of origin, and my parents, and my socio-economic niche. I wake up and here I am. Am I going to do my thing or not? Maybe because the lighting isn't quite what I had in mind, or the weather is too humid, or whatever...

We are to be our best here, now because this is where we are, and this is where we have to do it if it is to ever be done. And it would be such a tragedy if it were never done.