Staying Creative with useful understandings of how everything works.
Mirrors – Here’s a good one. Everything “outside” of me is a mirror for, hmmm … me. That’s its purpose – to be a mirror for me so I can learn to see what is really going on. The mirror is everything I take in through the 5 senses (eyes, ears, skin, nose and tongue) and it, “the outside” will let me know how I am doing in relationship to myself “ the inside”. That’s because I do not deal with mere data. I deal with information. Information is data in relationship … in relationship to other data, to other information, to what I hold onto (believe to be true) about the past and what I expect from or fear about my future. Guess who makes up the information, the relationships? I do. Most of the information I make up is to support my self image. I once had a Professor, who wrote in the column of one of the papers I had written for him…”You will always find what you seek”. I didn’t get it right away, but it is blindingly clear that until I wake up and see Buddha Reality, I will have on blinders to everything that I do not want to find and I will find only what supports my thesis. It's one of the first traps that researchers fall into - being selective about the data they collect and the relationships they form between the data.
The “world” is my mirror. If I am feeling bad it is not the world feeling bad, it is me and my relationship to the world (what I am making up about it) – how I am processing all that data that is leading my emotional state into feeling bad. Look in the mirror. Do I see a smile? If not, it is because I am not smiling. Ever heard that old homily – “Smile and the World Smiles With You”. Its true. If I carry my smile with me and there will always be at least one beaming back. The world thrives on smiles. It’s just that sometimes the the lens through which I view the mirror gets a little foggy or dirty – or even somewhat grimey. Its just the stuff I create between me and the mirror. It’s just distraction. Its up to me, in these cases, to carry a cloth to wipe away the fog, the dirt, the grime that is holding me back from seeing the mirror.. If I get too rough, too care less with a glass mirror while cleaning it, it might shatter. Be gentle, be care full and the fog, dirt and grime will wipe away easily and the smile I carry with me will shine right back at me. Sometimes it is easy to forget that that stuff is not part of the mirror. It is, however, just stuff that distracts me from the fact that there in front of me is a really great mirror.
Message from Me to Me: Want to see your smile reflected back at you? Stop throwing stones. Stones are not very healthy for mirrors - nor are they healthy for you. Beware. The stones are very subtile. They will look at times like gifts!
Magnets – Here’s another good one. My world is filled with Magnets. Now as we know from elementary school science class, magnets have two “poles” … South and North. We name the poles that way because the earth, itself is one giant magnet. We also know that when we try to force two poles of the same disposition say, South and South or North and North, what happens, even with weak magnets, is that you need a tremendous amount of force to push them together. They just don’t want to join. All you get is Repulsion. Just try to keep a North and a South pole apart. Wow, now there’s another story. Attraction, big time. You really have to put some distance between them so the attraction is minimized – but that’s all it is, just minimized – not zeroed.
Now here is the magnet principle where it comes to me and my life. I am a magnet! If I find that no matter what I do others seem to be backing away from me, it is because I’m approaching them with the wrong energy pole toward them. So, emotionally, I tend get miffed or hurt or otherwise put off when everyone around me is heading in the opposite direction as fast as they can. The first thing I do (because I’m always right – even when I’m wrong) is to make it about them. “I didn’t want to connect with them anyway… they’re not really worth my time or effort… ”. So I spend some time minimizing how much I wanted to join with them.
Underneath it all, though, all I want to do is to connect, to love, to be in relationship or in Relationship or in RELATIONSHIP! Let that feeling come out, the loving, connective, joining feeling, and it can become easy to figure out how to get the right energy moving forward in an Attractive manner. The Principle of Attraction and Repulsion states: “You cannot attract by being repulsive, nor can you repulse by being attractive”. So if repulsion is going on then I know that I’m not being attractive. And again, underneath it all, all I want is to love and be loved. So, its all about being aware, in any situation, of what pole, what energy, to put forward so that attraction happens.
And, finally, the last one for this post...
Success: This one may be hard to accept, but guess what. There is no such thing as failure. It may feel like it. It will especially feel like it when I am attached to having some particular outcome. No matter what it may look or feel like, I am not geared to failure. Not ever. I don’t believe anyone is. I think I could call this one the Principle of Real Success and Imagined Failure. Just look at a baby learning about its world, a young child extending that by learning to walk. It’s get up, wobble, fall down, get up, wobble, fall down, get up, wobble, take a step, fall down. It seems like this process goes on forever. To a parent it is both a painful experience and an exciting one. Parents keep wanting to help. And I did, when my son was learning to walk... My wife and I both stepped in, offered support, assisted in the process of strengthening leg muscles, refining balance. At one point, one step for him became another before the fall down, and then, wow!, it was look out world, here I come…! There is no concept of failure here. Learning language is the same deal. No failure. Just a slow successful process from apparently meaningless sound to “Mama” (or in my son’s case “Penny” which says a lot about our relationship to money at the time), to a few words together like “want eat”, to sentences, to paragraphs, and finally to oration.
So here’s the deal, if it looks like failure then it means that I had a “hidden agenda” going on, and the hidden agenda succeeded. Check it out.
Words from Me to Me: When was the last time you felt like you failed? What happened? If what happened was a successful outcome, then what was the agenda that had to be going on for that to be the result? Now how true does that feel? Not? Keep working at it. Keep searching for the hidden agenda until it feels true. Here is another way of putting it. What you have is what you want. This might seem harsh, but once you get the hang of it, it’s just a way of learning what’s really going on. Buddhists talk about enlightenment as “waking up” Buddha – “The Awakened One”. In all things, try to wake up, try to look for the hidden agenda. And when you find it you will see that what you have will be the successful outcome of that agenda (or, since we make our lives so complex, those agendas – no sense just having one thing going on – we’d know exactly where to look. Lets have a gazillion things going on – make it challenging – after all we’re the dominant species, we’re up for the task. :-).)
If that doesn't work, if the search for a hidden agenda doesn't dredge up something, then it is just possible that the process hasn't completed yet, that I am just impatient and (which itself is an agenda).
So that’s it for now. Tales from the Light side. Ways of viewing the world so that it will be easy, flowing and creative.
Again, be light, Be Light (or as a friend and teacher of mine once said “Enlighten up!”) shine on everyone around you. Light up, lighten up the world. It desperately wants it!
posted by Michael @ 1:36 PM
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