Tag: gratitude

“Knowing”, an obstacle to Being

Ignorance goes hand in hand with arrogance, both sprouting out of immaturity. Bookish knowledge brings about arrogance, and the misconception of the acquisition of wisdom, which is far from what’s true. Actually, bookish knowledge cements and enhances ignorance under the misleading disguise of the opposite. So the most ignorant people in this world are not those who are unaware of things, but those who assume they’re wise and knowledgeable.

I have been there myself. What saved me? My humility and having the courage to question myself and my understanding of things. The more we discover about life and its experience, the more we realize how small and ignorant we are. Paradoxically, the more we truly know, the more humble we should become.

Once that happens, an invisible door is opened, a door to our inner, self-born knowledge. That inner knowledge has been there all along, but we just disregarded it, or were unaware of it, ignorantly empowering external forces, bookish knowledge, and “believing” instead of feeling and experiencing. Once we start recognizing inner knowledge, we start observing how  confirmation of what’s within in the form of knowledge, is all around us, attested by nature, people, things, and energies…

The realization that everything is indeed reversed downs onto us: the one who believes he knows much is in reality, ignorant and a fool… And the one who dares listen to life, nature and even others is continuously learning and expanding, whereas the self-assumed wise and knowledgeable is just falling for programming, propaganda, narrative and his own hubris

The child learns very fast because he is always ready to reassess and change what he believes in, when better experience and knowledge is available. He’s also humble enough in his flexibility, and it’s the very reason why children rapidly absorb knowledge. The academic people are almost lost, rigid in their beliefs, so crystallized, that they are incapable of starting with a blanc canvas, rewiring their own imagined and pre-programmed “reality.” They’re the bucket which is already full of stale old water, and they don’t dare emptying it as they’ve invested their entire life, time and energy to a fantastic, far-from-truth, predigested and ultimately illusory understanding of life.

Like the great Siddha Master Tilopa said: “… How pitiable the foolish, their struggles never end…” Why? Because they can’t let go! They can’t let go of their “knowledge” stained with ignorance, unable to renounce their concepts and theories that haven’t brought them any true benefit. Unknowingly, they are stuck on the path that takes one nowhere.

Same with mental illness: no one can cure and experience sanity unless they’re ready to redraw the whole understanding of the very Existence. So they continue to believe in the same fallacy over and over again, unaware of the immediate healing being just in the palm of their hands, by choice of revisiting and reviewing everything that they assumed was correct. It’s so simple and apparently easy, but so hard to do, as I can attest from my own experience.

Once you do it, you will be able to apply in all the situations you stumble across. Everything is slowly being revealed, nothing remains a secret. Life has no secrets, no mysteries for the one who is flexible and ready to adjust.  For the one who is humble, all doors are open.  Knowledge is always revealed from within where it was at all times.

For the one who believes that he’s the king of his own little box and assumes that there’s nothing other than his kingdom, his theory is proven right inside his own mind, in its very limited confines, yet he is depriving himself of truly experiencing the vastness of the Infinite, which is ever expanding therefore whatever knowledge exists is also expanding, adapting, and the true wisdom is allowing oneself to flow with this eternal expansion, aware of the fact that while limited to the human body, one can never grasp the full-fledged truth, but can get higher and higher versions of it while it’s capacity to carry that higher levels of truth is opened within by the power of humility and gratitude.

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!

When the silence talks

Throughout the years of my life, I have had experiences that could have easily been spread over several lifetimes, such concentrated lessons in a succession of events that seemed at points to be the very end of the experience in this body. That’s how strongly their pain has been felt.

An external observer would be unable to assess the true vastness and range of experiences, as many of the recent events that touched me were mostly internal battles, inner struggles and processes of transmutation. I am amazed by the fact that I am still here, back again from my inner infernal places, able to write about it all.

I have risen and fallen so many times. I have reached heights of understanding and realizations that I am still surprised I managed to grasp, and at points I was deprived (I forgot) of all that knowledge and wisdom, and even been pushed again to plunge so deep back into the very depths of my shadowy self, to the very abyss that we are all trying to pretend it exists not within our hidden chambers. And yet here I am, all scarred, dusty and almost lost, found again with a true smile on my face and unlimited gratitude to the Grace of the Eternal that manifested through people, events and the entire movements of the gears of Life and its incredible stories and twists.

Such an amazing game of hide and seek we’re playing with ourselves. Such a great example of the living paradox that is a Soul exploring the lower material plane, such a trap, so cunning this construct and so incredibly booby-trapped at every step. Everything yells for our attention and energy, everything is doing its utmost to steal some juice(energy) from us one way or another, to keep us blind, stumbling in mediocrity. It’s indeed a war, but not with any external forces, but with internal self-created demons who are fighting to preserve and defend the status quo, to try and ensure the survival of the old paradigms of control and their self-preservation.

I am living a true miracle, but only now do I recognize it as such. My old self would scoff and roll his eyes in disbelief and hopelessness, as probably the reaction of the majority of people who ever met me. My “miracle” may look like nothing or even like a scary thing for the unadvised. The simplicity of it all is almost impossible to grasp by the overcomplicated reasoning mechanism of the limited mind bound to old concepts. Even I have fallen back to old paradigms so many times, unable to hold onto the realization of the truth.

I am! I truly feel that these 2 words and 3 letters are all encompassing, like the primordial particle out of which everything sprouted out. “I am” is realized in silence.

The silence and its power are often times misunderstood and disregarded. Yet when you dare facing it, embracing it, it’ll talk to you and you will Know! When you embrace the “boredom” of staying in silence with yourself, the whole Universe will reveal its hidden song, the song of Life and Love, the song that reminds us that we are One, that we are enough, and it is in every single moment of Now that we are always wholesome and perfect.

When we embrace what we used to run away from, we will be able to get all the missing parts of the puzzle that we were searching for only in our comfort zone. Such a fallacy, to look for knowledge and wisdom only where we expect it to be, as silly as being on a bridge and losing a precious object in the river, yet deciding to look for it on the bridge to avoid wetting our clothes.

Truth and pieces of it are found in the places that we least expect. One of this “places” is the silence. What’s ignored, and disregarded, has hidden in it some juice that can’t be found elsewhere. Dare to turn each stone in your life upside down with courage and determination, and you will hear the silence that speaks, that sings and that guides.

My deepest gratitude to my Guru and the entire Higher realm that protects and guides us!

Enough

Has anyone wondered how does it feel to reach a wider perspective while in the human body? Some may assume it should look glorious, majestic and flamboyant. That’s why they miss it. Everyone expects shine and sparkle and glory, yet it feels like vain. It feels like  disappointment from the human perspective.

That’s why we can’t really see it. The diamond is in the dirt, light comes from the primordial darkness, which is neither this nor that. It is in the monotonous and boring layers of life that we’ll find that peace and fulfillment we’re searching for. By accepting the disappointment, and not seeing it anymore as such we will find Love. By seeing it in people and actions where everyone else sees something else, we’ll see ourselves as Love without a doubt and it will feel enough.

Oh, it feels so lonely and painful at first, but the background is always made of peace and quiet. I am no longer afraid of death and neither afraid of life. I am no longer striving for happiness since I have found it by embracing its opposite. If I no longer want anything, how would I taste disappointment?

My life all of the sudden makes sense in its apparent lack of it. I am no longer running and neither looking for anything. Even a curse might be turned into a blessing when you are accepting life just as it comes, with least interference yet doing everything that is to be done. Everything is part of the great cosmic play that emerged from within us.

I won’t be afraid no more, even if when I wake up tomorrow, the poison ivy of the world would have already brought me back, even though it happens every day. We are daily brought back to the very matrix, and to the previous understanding that kept us bound. Bound to a certain outcome and hopes for “something that is good”, back to the thralls of illusion. 

In me now is the  blooming truth that grows and that expands eternally, once revealed, never to be covered. And each time I will get back to the illusion, its power weakens, a scary tsunami in a painting  on the wall that fails to hurt anyone but the fearful, hence prepare your trust to life and in yourself, let’s all go back to knowing who and what we are.

I am diving in pain and suffering and even vice, yet I am not stained by any, I see it all for what it is. No power should prevail over the one who is aware, but his only power of the Self. The wholesomeness that we project and expect as a reward for the struggle, it doesn’t feel like what we would expect to feel. Yet it is a reward in itself. It’s a brand new understanding and perception, that enriches us and pushes us forth.

We’re all projecting positivity onto it and therefore we are missing it. But once we’ve seen it, we will know. Things that used to be so heavy, are just mild jokes that faded throughout clouds of time and space.

I have lost everything so many times: people, things and even timeliness, yet I am past that, although it may look like I am not. A cuckoo bird for everyone else, or maybe a Phoenix bird born again out of its remaining ashes for myself. I look the same, yet I am not, and I am not scared of what is not, since I am all, and all is One. I am indeed my God, the one that created everything for my experience and sport, and you’re your own God and yet we’re all One. Do you see how what seems antagonistic and opposing in fact is One and nothing else exists but That?

Through pain and loss and sorrow I have discovered joy, but joy that does not look like joy but rather emptiness, an emptiness that’s full of everything and nothing, a wholesomeness that you will feel once you had your share of everything, and you will understand that running for something, chasing a selfish goal, is taking you  far away from Self. So Self is found where you least expect it, within and in all the other places also, under the most boring stone of disappointment, under the unfulfilled desire when you realize its vanity.

Enough with running, enough with chasing, I have nothing to achieve or to repair since everything is right and it is “good”, even the worst of the worst is nothing but That, yourself and nothing else but That encapsulating all, a movie that now looks old in black and white, that was created for your entertainment and experience and at points you took it for  real. Let us wake up and  head towards Reality .

Another perspective on Suffering

Every single person in this existence is one way or another suffering, that is an indisputable affirmation.

Suffering is changing places în a Divine directed sequence in our lives with periods of joy and carelessness. One of the most unknown reasons for suffering, among other more obvious ones that I am not going to address in this article, is that it serves as a reminder of the blessings that we are taking for granted, that we forgot to be grateful for their presence in our lives, so the ungrateful gets a glimpse of how life is without those things that he/she must have taken for granted.

Let’s not go too far into complicated examples, but I will give you an example through a recent realization of mine while trying to sleep, recovering from a heavy cold: I was struggling with my blocked nose and sinuses for days, and to have the nose blocked is so frustrating and annoying.

As soon as I got both nostrils unobstructed I felt relieved, joyful, and grateful, and I realized how many apparently small things we are taking for granted, yet as soon as any of them are temporarily or permanently removed we start lamenting, we realize their true value and place in our lives and we realize what an ungrateful beings the humans are.

It’s so sad, because in nature such issues do not occur, but since we disconnected ourselves from it, by forgetting the fact that we are part of it, we developed atrocious features that not even predators in the animal kingdom display.

If an animal is saved or taken care of by a human, that animal will most likely be forever grateful to that human that shows them compassion. But humans become used to being helped and gratitude is less and less part of their approach to help regardless of what kind. I have noticed especially that the new generation, in their majority, is devoid of this precious feature.

So, from my own experience I can testify that as soon as we start taking things for granted, life will put its gears into movement towards the removal of that blessing that we disregard. It may take a while, or at times it can be quite fast, especially if it is a typical approach of ours.

This is the amazing teaching of life saying “Appreciate what you are having, or you are going to have it taken away”. And it works like that for people who believe that they can continuously trash their own bodies with bad food, alcohol and other ways of taking their body for granted.

Others maybe forgot to tell their partners how much they mean to them, how much they love and appreciate them. Oh, boy! It does miracles, it brings the light into the face of the other! Whisper it in their ear when they least expect it. Try it, especially if you haven’t done it in a while, you will feel that love reigniting, because whatever we put out there, definitely comes back to us. And it’s all because we’ve remembered to throw some wood over a smoldering, almost dying fire.

The secret is that nothing gets really taken away, but by not investing our energy into it, the connection with that thing is gradually diminished and damaged. So invest energy in Love, in taking good care of yourself and your dwelling place, reminding people in your life of how much you appreciate them, play with your kids and pets and leave the phone aside, and it’s not that suffering may disappear, since it alternates with good times like the ebbing and flowing of the ocean. in this paradigm we’re experiencung, but you will easily go over those periods of discomfort and most important of all, you will know that you did all that was in your capacity.

Sometimes even if we give our 100%, there’s no guarantee for success since it’s not in our power to control outcomes, but undoubtedly if we do our best diligently, we will definitely succeed more often than if we are not fully involved.

Ideally, we should remember at least once a week to count our blessings, to be grateful for the people, objects, and everything that we are being given, and to remind ourselves how lucky and blessed we are, and that’s the way to attract more blessings, instead of seeing what we are lacking and inevitably attracting more lack.