2015-06-14

Life's Challenge - A Journal Musing

One of the most difficult, maybe THE most difficult challenge for people in modern society,
especially in modern society,
is the challenge of accepting their allotted place in life, in the sense of allowing the being of what is.
For example, if it is raining you cannot change what is happening,
but you can certainly change your attitude towards what is happening and thus remove your suffering it.

This is not to say that there is no possibility of changing to a totally different situation in life.
However, the challenge of accepting one's allotted place in life does include a much deeper understanding
of one's relationship to life. What are we in essence?

No matter what place one currently occupies in their experience of life,
it appears to be the most difficult challenge to realize that their control of life,
or more accurately,
to understand and accept that their control of life experience is a figment of imagination.

Nobody can control what is meant to be experienced.
To experience literally means “to go through”.
So the challenge is to go through the various challenges that life offers.

To confront those challenges is to miss-state and to misunderstand what this is all about.
One can only meet the challenges and learn from them,
or meet the challenges and flow with them to the outcome that life offers.

To 'fight' the challenge or try to make it conform to one's “personal” liking is to struggle,
and ultimately to suffer defeat of one's “personal self”,
and then to have to face the next challenge anyhow,
until we have mastered what needs to be learned.

Can we really understand this? Probably not with the limited potential and capacity
of the intellectual faculty which strictly relies on thought/mind.
However, we can come pretty close to an inward “knowing”
which translates as a feeling of confidence and trust (essentially the meaning of faith).
This trust and confidence in life feels more than personal. It feels like “home”.
The parable of the “Prodigal Son” comes to mind.

Back to the challenge. To let go. To allow the being of what is.
To feel such deep trust and confidence in the very life that we are experiencing
that one can let go of the idea that everything in life experience must be controlled,
or at the idea that one should plan out “their” life to the greatest “personal” advantage.

In the “letting go” resides the innate knowing that all will turn out,
and in fact already is and always was, as it should be.
One could say that this "letting go" is a surrender of "personal self"
to "ultimate reality Self", which is a win-win scenario.

Perhaps the first thing one might want to learn from experiencing life is that
there is nothing personal about life in a separate sense.
In other words it is not about you versus another person or persons.

However, Life is very personal in the sense that we are in It, all together as a unity,
not separated in any fragmented way. Life is holistic.
Fragmentation is only possible in the domain of thought and intellect.

All of this implies that total surrender to that which you already are in totality.
This is the ultimate message of life experience.

But what are we?
What are you?

That is the real challenge of life;
to find one's true place and understand the journey of life experience.+




2015-06-02

An Observation About Thought

Whatever we may think of now, is actually of no virtual value.
It is just a malleable thought.

We can and usually do give certain values (judgements)
to thought, and there are communally valued thoughts and ideas;
but all is subject to change.

All of this confirms that thought, as also any THING, has no inherent value
(i.e. no value in itself), other than the value that we attribute to it.

That is not to say that thoughts cannot sometimes be very useful,
but thought will always be subject to change.

The key in bringing some sanity to our life experience lays in seeing
that all human thought and perception is fallible, and thus
it is wise to remain open to a deeper meaning beyond the experiencing
of the world of thought and sensation.

In such cases true "value" and ''meaning" is not the result of thinking,
but may be interpreted and conveyed via thought, in which case the
interpretation may not translate well in terms of thought for various
reasons (which I may discuss on another occasion).