The game you came to play

Not so long ago, I started realizing that dismissing information just because I wasn’t agreeing or liking the source through which was coming was ignorance.  Since then, if I am being sent a video or article, I go through it and look for bits and pieces that resonate within me, that can add value to me deciphering life’s puzzle.

Since then, when people are disagreeing with me, I don’t mind, I no longer get upset or try to change their minds, but I just know that they’re not resonating with that information that I was giving them. That doesn’t mean that they’re wrong, or they’re missing anything, as we all have our own different paths in life, and no matter how different we are, and our paths are, eventually we will all be meeting back to the very Source we sprung out of.

I remember telling my friend Pedro: “Why do you need to try to fight me for things we disagree on, when we can both take from each other’s discourses whatever resonates within and forget about the rest?” Since then, our interaction is less difficult, no friction and neither being like rams slamming our heads, against each other trying to impose our “truths” onto the other.

Sometimes we ignore valuable information just because we dislike/despise or don’t consider the messenger as an authority figure. That is how, at points, pieces and bits that Life is hiding in places that most would dismiss and ignore, might get lost unless we stop judging and dividing, but accept and unite, we will be missing those valuable puzzle pieces that will be hidden where we would never search for or be interested in.

Therefore, my realization is that instead of limiting our views and isolating ourselves from life, we should open our hearts, eyes and ears to always perceive everything without judgement, and picking those useful bits of information that will complete the picture.

It’s good to establish your energy first in the highest place you can possibly get and then explore things and places that you consider as being low or bad, with your new perspective, looking for clues and previously disregarded particles that you could have missed by believing that from the dirt nothing good can come out. Yet look at the beautiful orchids sometimes sprouting out of dirt we wouldn’t dare touch. Or look at the beauty of a lotus flower that came piercing through a considerable amount of mud and then grew its stem through the muddy water all the way up to the surface where it blooms and spreads its petals and releases its scented emanation in the light whilst thoroughly being anchored in the mud, passing through water. Isn’t it a bit like our journeys?

We start with ignorance and predigested information and slowly navigate through learning to pick what’s useful and leave aside what’s not, but with love, knowing that everything is always right, flowing through life with the least opposition from ourselves, always smiling and filtering all that unnecessary out, whilst carefully assimilating the needed. Similarly, a whale absorbs huge quantities of water and retains small fish and other nutritious elements it needs, while water is returned to the ocean it came from.

This is how entire nature and everything always talks to us. We should learn to read between the lines, learn to filter everything through our very Being and see how sometimes there are gems hidden where we least expect, and how even a homeless person may say something that, if you don’t disregard, it may give you a perspective you would have never got the chance to get from elsewhere.

Be always open, because life talks to you through everything, be always ready to absorb missing pieces of the puzzle while maintaining your gratitude for the knowledge and the means through which it reached you. Gratitude is the most essential element we always have to be full of, as by being ungrateful, whatever we have got will eventually be lost because we haven’t fully acknowledged it, and we take it for granted.

Make sure you always do your utmost to give and serve selflessly, a way of giving back to Life, bringing the needed where it lacks in other people’s lives, an eternal circle of give and take. By giving, you empty a bit of your filled bucket and make space for better things or information to come replace that recently emptied space in your “bucket”. It shouldn’t be a calculative move, “I give because I will get better”, because when we approach life from such a cunning material pragmatism, thinking we can outsmart it, we should prepare ourselves for a rough awakening.

Establish your roots in the mud, embracing it, then grow your stem through the muddy waters of ignorance, steadily freeing yourself from the unnecessary and learning to discern and discover valuable knowledge that serves you and pierce those waters of ignorance and bloom when reaching the surface and let the sun of the Existence illuminate you further into deeper levels of knowledge and realizations. This is the game you came to play!

Flowing with life vs controlling it

As long as there hasn’t been any inner work of acknowledgment of the inner programming and unpacking of the hidden undercurrents, be it subconscious or unconscious, how can we truly flow with life? That supposed flow with life will be just going with distortions and social viruses planted by the upbringing and the very system that keeps us in its thralls.

But that superficial “flow with life ” even when we’re not fully aware, is way better than trying to force life into a dynamic of controlling its outcomes, that we assume may be the best road to take.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that we are like a leaf in the wind, as we have to have a clear direction. The best is to just blindly trust life and its currents, even when, from the worldly way of seeing things, things look like they are heading “south”.

Trying to exert the utmost control over our lives and circumstances is even more laughable and futile: like a totally unaware Sisyphus, bound to repeat the same fallacy and eternally hoping for a different outcome, with the stubbornness of a bull insisting on hitting a fence, and trying to get on the other side although the door, just couple of meters ahead is wide open.

In order to learn to flow and trust life, we should learn to accept circumstances without trying to make it look better than it is, but we ought to avoid having that cynical approach of: “everything is always bad”, and avoid infusing that belief with the power of our consciousness. By doing so will empower the very thing we try to break away from.

I was many times allowing myself to “flow with life”, unaware of the fact that I am still flowing with past unresolved traumas and unquestioned beliefs that are as far as “flowing with life” as trying to control life’s currents. I would like to introduce my theory that we need someone who can give us a more objective perspective about ourselves, because we may be blindsided by those hidden shadows that we still unknowingly nurture within and by our subjective perception of ourselves.

Therefore, getting a chance to be with or close to someone who is at least as aware as we are is a true blessing. It can be a lover, friend, family member and even a teacher. This blessing we are given by Life itself is a token of unconditional love that the Ultimate Existence silently provides to all its fractals.

There is no being who is not provided with Grace and support from the Ultimate. The problem is our lack of understanding and failure to recognize that EVERYTHING that happens in our lives and given, is a step laid in front of us by our Higher Self, like an invisible wire sent to us, that’s pulling us through and out of the labyrinth of ignorance and false interpretation of life.

So flowing with life is the best approach to have, although without awareness, there will not be that much of a flow, but as I said previously, just a trick of the shadow to express itself unhinged and unnoticed. But even that is a step further and eventually, because the shadow acts in plain sight, we have a chance to notice it and find our way of accepting and transcending it.

What we avoid should be embraced

People in their majority, and here I also include myself, are programed to avoid certain feelings, people, and experiences altogether, although in reality, I have noticed that valuable information and lessons are hidden where we least expect and implicitly in what we avoid.

I can give a very mundane example in which my entire life I was trying to keep myself comfortable especially when coming to extreme temperatures, be it cold or hot. I was always shaking uncontrollably when exposed to cold and suffering greatly when exposed to heat.

One day I went to the sauna with my girlfriend at that time and usually I like warm shower even after the sauna, even if the majority may use a cold shower to create resilience both of the body as of character.

My girlfriend went straight into the cold water which was probably no more than couple of degrees, and was just sitting there without whining or shaking. That was the moment when I was in awe with her stoic resilience and realized that I was weak in this particular matter.

Some years after I was talking to a friend online and said that I am not going out because it was very cold and I I would rather stay in the warmth of my home.

She laughed and said that men sometimes can be so weak, and that she prefers pushing her limits to build her character. Again I felt I was doing something wrong. Since that moment I started taking cold showers after the hot one. The first ones were probably less than 5 seconds 😁, but slowly I increased the time until I reached the moment when I can easily take only cold shower in the morning, and also in the pools I started using the cold water pools which are 0 degrees, and I stay there 2 to 3 minutes at a time.

As a beneficial result I see that my resilience to extreme temperatures increased several fold, as to the point that this winter I haven’t been using a hat despite very cold days. But my point is not in emphasizing the physiological benefits but rather to point out my realization of the fact that when we avoid something and try to force into our lives just the pleasant or comfortable, then we force life to push onto us those gathered small inconvenient events that we avoid snowballed into a big “negative” event to restore the balance.

As I stated in previous articles, I feel life as a continuous ebbing and flowing, a continuous change from Yin to Yang and vice-versa into a perpetual movement of the polarities.

So to get to the theory I propose to my readers to observe:

If we don’t embrace the negative aspects and events, which in reality are not only not “negative” at all, but teaching and enhancing our awareness and forcing us to reason, observe and ponder on the experience, then the choice is that we will have life, or consciousness forcing onto us the gathered accumulated negative charge which can be too much for us to bear.

So just by having a cold shower we embrace the discomfort that at first we experience whilst having it, although later the whole negative aspect of it flips into positive. Just by extrapolation, you can realize inside your own life whenever you try to avoid the discomfort and hoping for the opposite, and choose to change the approach.

As such, when we avoid certain type of people or/and experiences that life is pushing onto us over and over again, we fail to examine the reason behind that, as nothing in life just happens, as I don’t believe anymore in that neither in the existence of sheer luck.

So there are several benefits as I have noticed in embracing what we usually tend to reject or run away from. And those benefits are multidimensional. And once we realize that just by embracing and facing what we used to try to escape from, life will become smoother and more balanced.

With gratitude for Anna (the friend I talked about above ) , who unknowingly inspired me to face the harsh weather and implicitly life’s challenges.