In Paul Lowe's masterful metaphor, our personalities, our egos, our minds, are like...an ant, in the Sahara Desert, talking to a grain of sand and saying, "I don't like you." And thinking it's important.
The mind is caught, literally, in dualities: right and wrong, good and bad, for and against, black and white, me and you, like and dislike. Yet this is the part of the whole that executes, too. It executes, but it knows nothing.
Far beneath it somewhere, but vastly more intelligent, is what could be called the inner system or inner guide, the energy that just knows without thinking. Or we could call it the ungraspable mystery that comes from inside and is also outside. And it has no ambition to get somewhere because it's non-existent, it's nothing, and it's also everywhere.
But it knows and will lead us, spontaneously, if we let it. It knows when to be with someone and when to leave, when to buy the house or not or if or where. It'll tell you, if you listen.
To hear it, we have to slow down and listen.
The more we listen, the more we get in touch with reality as it is. The more we listen the more we're willing to just be there with it, with no resistance to it. We're willing to be receptive to how it is right now.
There's a world of difference, in how we feel, in how we look, in our clothes and our aura and everything, between complaining and judging about how things are, and just being with them without energizing them.
Thoughts and feelings appear in the mind, that's what minds do. But we don't have to energize them. We don't have to attach to them, do anything with them, or act on them. Just as we let everything externally be as it is, we're willing for everything internally to be as it is too.
And it's a parade of like and dislike, for and against, joyful and sad, should and shouldn't, on and on. We can just be present with all that without trying to change it.
The more we listen, the more choiceless we become. Choiceless. We may have preferences, like chocolate at the ice cream stand, but we hold them lightly. "Choices," "preferences," seem to happen, but all is held lightly, like watching leaves floating down a river or watching a parade.
Again the true story of the Zen monk whose sublime reputation was ruined because he was falsely accused of fathering a child. "Is that so?" he responded. When told he must bring up the child, he said "Is that so?" and accepted the child. And when the young mother admitted the false claim and the townspeople rushed to apologize, he said again, "Is that so?"
No resistance.
The goal isn't to be blissful or joyful all the time, some kind of joy-bunny. The goal is to be with what is, present with what is, even falling in love with what is. Paradoxically, when we do this, we're in bliss.
But not a bliss that "feels good." It doesn't feel good or bad; it's beyond all that. It just is whatever it is.
When we follow our inner voice, the mind and its thoughts and feelings can say all sorts of things:
(You're going to crash and burn!) "Is that so?" (Nobody will love you ever again!) "Is that so?" (You're going to die in six months from cancer!) "Is that so?"
The mind is always looking for security and safety; that's its job. It was designed by nature to do that. And it may have been necessary at one time. But we're moving to a different level now.
Notice how when you follow your inner voice—and let the mind be, without rejecting it or energizing it—you feel more alive, lighter, younger. And notice how when you don't follow it, you feel dead inside, like you're just going through the motions of life.
When we follow that inner voice, we don't know where it's going. That's why the mind is scared to let that happen, because it always wants to know where it's going. But truly, you can't know.
When something happens that we don't like, we have a choice. We can either resist and complain and contract, or we can say, "I would have preferred it another way, but this is how it is. This is how it is now. How am I going to be with it?"
When we listen, we seem to be closer to Source, though there's never a nanometer of separation from Source, because we are that. For the same reason, we can't ever lose our inner guide, because we are that. It's always there.
When we're listening, choiceless, letting the river flow, we're lighter, more relaxed. Something inside opens, lightens, becomes more receptive, more surrendered, more alive, more deeply in love.
—jim sloman, 7/27/01 for Jul 27
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