One way of looking at things is that there are only two choices in life, to curse things or to bless them. Life will be however it is. If we curse it, we're miserable, and if we bless it, just as it is, we're in heaven.
Jesus nailed it many years ago when he said that the kingdom of heaven is within us.
He also said, "When thine eye be single, then will thy body be full of light."
When all the dualities are seen to be mutually dependent on each other, the game of choosing between dualities—between light and dark, right and wrong, enlightened and unenlightened, up and down, on and on—is, more or less, abandoned.
All the judgments about how it's supposed to be—become more and more flimsy. Things are supposed to be however they are.
Yet, paradoxically, that doesn't mean that we don't do whatever we can. We do whatever we can to contribute to the flowering of the earth, all the while knowing that in some strange way—that only the heart really understands—that the world is already perfect in each moment.
And we are most definitely included in that. We too are perfect just as we are. And the whole situation of life is somehow perfect just as it is, right in the middle of its beauty and tragedy. The heart understands this perfectly.
When we bless life, each other, ourselves, our situation, we suddenly get swallowed up into the mists of the divine, expressing something we don't and can't truly understand, a mystery too deep to comprehend, and yet available, present, here when we listen.
That listening is key. We can listen all day long, and the beautiful thing is that it knows. It just knows.
The night before my Mom died, my sister and I left the hospital room about 1am. We fell into bed exhausted about 2:30am. About 8:30am I suddenly woke up and got a clear message to go to the hospital. But I was so exhausted that I fell back to sleep, and got to the hospital around 11am, after learning that my Mom had died around 9:40am.
That inner guide—or whatever we want to call it—knew. "I," "me," the thoughts and rationalizations in my mind—didn't know. It's always that way.
That inner system will always tell us—if we listen. It'll tell us everything we ever need to know. If we listen.
Listen...can we hear the rain drops falling, endlessly falling, in the heart?
—jim sloman, for 7/12/01
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