At the deepest level there is no separate somebody around that is making choices; it's all just happening by Itself, and so there are no choices to make since there exists no separate doer/chooser/somebody to make them.
But there's a level at which the appearance is there that we create our lives through our mind, and this article is about that. It's helpful to gain some insight in this dimension. It helps to "calm the nerves," as the French say.
The story about how we create the experience of our lives with our minds could begin this way:
We could say that the more strongly we attach to our thoughts and stories and beliefs, the more misery we tend to feel. And conversely, the more we treat our thoughts and stories and beliefs with lightness, the more joy we tend to feel.
Ultimately, the joy of this sense of exquisite suchness or its lack, or we could say this sense of exquisite surrender or its lack, has to do with the ungraspable.
The more we bow to the ungraspable, the more we surrender to the perfection and beauty of life in its duality, the more joy we tend to feel.
In that sense (and in metaphor only), it's easy to tell how close someone is to source—just listen. If what they say has a lot of complaining and judging, they're far from source.
Now of course we have to stop here and say that nothing can ever be far from source, since all things are always that and cannot be otherwise, so again, all of this is a metaphor only. But to continue...
So if someone is complaining a lot, judging a lot, condemning a lot, in this metaphor we could say that they're far from the ungraspable because they're not feeling its exquisite suchness.
If someone is flat, in this metaphor we could say that they're closer to source, but still somewhat away.
If someone is feeling gratitude and expressing appreciation, we could say that in a sense they're closer to the mystery and its incomparable beauty.
But again, it's just a metaphor since nothing whatever is ever away from the absolute. The wave cannot help being the water of the ocean.
And yet the metaphor contains a truth too. When our heart is filled with appreciation we feel the "closeness" of the infinite in a way that we do not when we're complaining.
Interestingly enough, it doesn't matter what we're complaining about or what we're feeling appreciative about. The effect is the same.
—jim sloman, 7/17/01 for Jul 17
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