Frights

I embrace getting frights. It's not instinctive, it takes awareness, but that's the point. That's the gift.

Frights, if you let them, can wake you up. Most other surroundings put us to sleep, and being awake is what life is all about.

Have the insight that you are going to welcome your next fright. Of course, you can't look out for it, because then it won't be a fright. You have to let go and let it happen.

Then, when it does, you can remember your realisation and respond differently.

Normally, I curse and cuss when jolted or jarred. You don't want to know what I sometimes bark at the neighbour’s dog when I am watering my garden meditatively and the mongrel yaps on the other side of the wall, amplified by the courtyard.

My body baulks and the chemicals rush through my bloodstream. But I am beyond my reflexes.

Killing the cretin or strangling the unapproachable neighbour would do me no long term good, although both seem appealing in the immediate term, so I have to make a wiser choice.

What can I take from the experience by accepting it as it is and transforming myself instead of struggling with my circumstance?

I can let it be and let myself see! I have had a slight shock. My heart is pounding. I am out of my slumber suddenly. I was asleep! I was lost in thought and the fright brought me back to reality. I can reconnect with the now.

Zen masters are known for walking around with sticks that they use to whip their disciples to wake them. Whenever the pupil drifts off out of the moment, which happens all the time, the teacher cracks him back in to presence. Alertness slowly establishes itself as a state of being.

So embrace your surroundings as a spiritual teacher.

Self-doubt

We have been taught to doubt ourselves.

The seeds of uncertainty were sowed unconsciously the moment we were born and scattered superficially every moment since.

Our global culture undermines us as individuals. Our consciousness has a huge hole right in the middle, which has to heal. It starts with accepting and trusting yourself.

You make mistakes, that's good and healthy. You live and learn, that's life. Understand and proceed.

Doubting yourself is the most insane state to be in. Just think about it. How can something be unsure of itself? It makes no sense, yet it is our situation.

How can we question creation? That, too, is needless and neurotic. Just be!

As soon as we do something assertive, which often comes from feeling insecure (hence the need to assert), we feel a backlash of guilt. I must be wrong. What could I have done better? How must I change to avoid this again?

All this keeps you enslaved and unrealised.

All this comes from what we have been told by insecure teachers, judgemental and unwise mentors. One moment of vigour and we return sheepishly to slumber to avoid the pain of self condemntation that we carry within us like a life-long prison warden.

We have been conditioned into cells that don't even need bars. We have self doubt all around and, more important, deep within us.

Look in to your doubt. You were right when you did what you did. You had a genuine need being expressed and not being met.

You have the right to exist and claim your space. You have the right to thrive and self actualise for a prosperous living.

You are enitirely entitled to be yourself, as you are, without reservation. With discernment and wisdom, yes, but without doubt.

Your uniqueness is your gift and your responsibility, bring it boldly into being.

Recognition

We all have a deep need to know ourselves and be known, to love and be loved. It is one of the deepest roots of our being, one that must be grown and realised.

On the surface, it may be confused with egoic pursuits of recognition, but it is much more profound than that. It is a matter of total resonance, of experiencing oneness.

If you do not meet this need, something will always be amiss and you will always feel unsettled, awry, unrealised.

No outer manifestation will reach into it, it is an inner phenomenon. You reach it by going into yourself and discovering who you are.

When you merge with yourself, the outer responds in celebration. It comes rushing towards you. This is one of the highest forms of realisation.

What is the joy of finding the truth, of realising that you are the truth, without sharing it? What is the meaning of finding the light without bringing it to the world?

What is the use of recognising the universe in yourself without the universe recognising you in return? It is only half the picture.

When you come home, you want to invite everyone, and you want to share it with everything. Your life becomes an endless housewarming party!

When you come home, everything you have thought, theorised, philosophised and prayed about disappears like dust on the wind. You and oneness realise one another and all pursuits of the mind reveal their meaninglessness for a moment before drifting away forever.

There is no God, there is only God, no you, only you. Words evaporate on musical notes of laughter into the eternal.

All of existence, all that is and ever was, congregates in the moment in a white light of pure consciousness.

Recognising yourself turns everything to love.

Form

Form fades. It's a fact. That's its function. It forms then fades, comes then goes.

Everything comes then goes, from your breath to a butterfly, to you, to a mountain, to the solar system.

What doesn't fade? What aspect of you is formless, timeless, eternal? That aspect of you, your consciousness, is really you.

It's ironic that the only real thing is nothing. Reality has no form. Anything with form is a dream, it is not permanent.

Form is peripheral whereas formlessness is central and essential. We are formlessness with a temporary form.

It is the most marvellous delight, a rare privilege of the highest and most mysterious order. Are you enjoying your form to the full?

Are you living the adventure to find your formlessness?

Alchemy

Alchemy means having the Midas touch, being able to turn base elements into gold.

It means having access to the mysteries of life and being able to affect transformation. It means having tremendous value in the world by being able to put people in touch with who they really are.

It means being a catalyst, a mystic. It is a wonderful word for being yourself for a living.

Alchemy means travelling your journey and being on your path. It is a state of understanding and harmony.

Alchemy is intelligence. It looks mysterious but it is merely more alive, more experienced, more insightful, more in tune.

Your touch turns things to gold because everything passes through your consciousness, which cleanses it and gives it a sparkle.

Your awareness purifies. It puts people who come near it in touch with themselves and the clarity of creation. It makes sense of their stories.

It gives them an inner glow. They go away enriched with access to the divine. They are re-sourced.

To be an alchemist, you need to seek the riches of the world. Then you need to see the futility of these and search, rather, for your own treasure.

You need to travel far and wide until you realise that everything you have been looking for has been with you all the time. You have been going out when it is within.

Going out has eventually taken you in. Going in then brings you out. What you find makes you very rich, as you are. It also draws the world to you, as everyone wants more than anything to be themselves.

Having burned away the false elements and distilled yourself to gold, you are a pure conductor of source energy. People are pulled towards that. The whole universe and the beyond are pulled towards that.

Simply prepare yourself and spirit will find you.

The alchemy is in the quality of your being. The wealth is in finding yourself. The gift is in drawing people closer to themselves by simply sharing your presence.

In that, love is exchanged. Love leaps from one conductor and induces another.

Love is what turns everyone and everything to gold.

Religion

For the majority of people still, religion is synonymous with culture. I make a clean distinction.

Culture is beautiful. It is socially developed, rich and varied in its rightful place. But people take it too far and believe in it, applying it to deeper realms in the absence of deeper experience.

They have not tasted true religion, so they extend their social self to the realm of spirit. Many problems arise as a result.

Spirit is never discovered because they think they know it, so they never enquire and explore sincerely. They accept what they have been taught and defend it against other factions on the same level of form.

They uphold differences in the name of oneness and live in war. They also can't enjoy culture in its rightful way, which is lightly and colourfully as a collective creation.

Culture is a celebration. It is not fundamental, so it is for weaving not believing. It is a fabric, a cloth and covering, not an inner phenomenon.

So the discovery of religion does not imply the loss of culture, just the distinction between the two. What most of us see as religion is simply culture, and what is true religion is on the horizon, what we are beginning to find.

True religion, or religiousness, or spirituality, or spirit, is clear consciousness, no more and no less. It is non-denominational, uncatergorisable, universal and beyond.

Culture is created, it comes and goes, whereas spirit is eternal. If something separates and defines you, it is cultural and superficial, a function of form and diversity.

When something unifies and liberates us, it is spiritual and fundamental, a function of the formless and non-sensory.

When you differentiate between culture and religion, you can enjoy the first for what it is, and truly encounter the second. Your culture is yours, a heritage.

Religion belongs to no-one, we are an extension of it.

Babies

Picture a baby with a loaded gun in its hands.

Bright-eyed but naive, it stares and sticks its finger down the barrel, fiddles curiously with any switches and moving parts, finds and fumbles with the mechanism, and, in no time, exercises its compulsion to pull the trigger.

Without hesitation, it does the unthinkable.

That's us, the human race. What we have in our hands, in the form of scientific knowledge and technological capacity, is almost entirely a danger to us because of our lack of commensurate wisdom to handle it.

We are causing all sorts of carnage because spiritually we are mere infants. We have an inkling that we are clueless but we are not even awake enough to see that waking up is our priority.

To shift metaphors, the telephone has stirred us, we are speaking to a paramount client, insisting aggressively that we are compos mentis, yet we are stumbling around in a slumbering stupor!

We are a walking world war, destroying the ecology, and eating ourselves from the inside through diseased consciousness.

We hear a click, wake up and watch ourselves put the phone down, then realise that we have just done something serious while deeply in a dream.

A shuddering sobriety shoots through us because we can't remember who we spoke to, what we said, and what our bodies did in our absence.

We must grow inwards to the same degree, at least, that we grow outwards. At the moment, our interiority is alien to us and our exterior is running our lives.

We have the engineering capacity to build marvellous machinery, but the car is in control. There is a newborn behind the wheel.

The head is ruling the heart instead of the right way round.

Consciousness needs to lead science and business.

Inversion

Most of our lives are lived inside out.

We get an inverted pleasure from pain. We derive our meaning from martyring ourselves.

We perceive our purpose as depriving and punishing ourselves as a way of showing that life is hell. That's our way of proving that we are worthy of our misery.

It's a function of the ego to aggrandise itself through denial. It is so entrenched in our collective psyche that you have to be ultra alert to spot it.

It restores itself all the time, so you have to be awake to drop inversion and turn yourself the right way up again.

'If I die of despair-induced illness, that will show people how much they have hurt me and make them repent.' That's the kind of logic your ego likes.

It will happily kill you so that it can feel important and validated. It can't let life be what it is and live in a state of acceptance-based bliss, because then it would not exist.

Forfeiting of life equals the ego. Absence of the ego equals life. The ego is an inversion. Bliss is a restoration.

With the ego, something has gone horribly wrong, which, of course, is part of everything going perfectly right.

We have to know entirely who we are not first so that we can be who we are, with the experiential knowing of the opposite. We have to turn ourselves inside out to rediscover ourselves for real.

Have you discovered fully who you are not? Have you thoroughly lost yourself so that you can, with consciousness, emerge from the false and be true?

Can you wake up from inversion and be who you really are?

It a simple yet cryptic key to life. Until you see it, it's cryptic, when you see it, it's simple.

Nothing is too good to be you.

Reasons

People often use the sentence, 'Everything happens for a reason,' to reassure themselves and others that there is a plan or purpose behind seemingly random or inexplicable events.

It just indicates that they are not in touch. It is their socialised way of trying to get in tune. It's like a drop saying, 'Don't worry, this must all make sense on some level, I know there's an ocean out there somewhere.'

Well, of course, we are the ocean. It's not out there, it's in here and everywhere and indistinguishable from everything.

And it is orchestrated with such precision on every level and in every way that a mere mind could never fathom even a fragment of it. That would be like a strand of nano wire trying to handle the current of a power station, just for the sake of reasonable analogy.

Life is unfathomable, endless mystery. It is infinite.

Sometimes when I am feeling that I have lost touch with this knowing, when life feels empty and random and I seem to be adrift in emptiness, I remind myself of moments of synchronicity.

You know the ones I mean, when you are floating along and suddenly you see that everything is connected in the smallest details. You get a glimpse into the fabric of everything and realise that it's not that life is forsaking you but you who have separated yourself from it. Your little ego has tried to assert its importance and ironically proved its pathos.

You are not your ego identity. You cannot comprehend everything with your mind. You can, however, experience understanding with your being. So sink beneath the surface and let realisation arise.

An insight into synchronicity can put you back in tune with infinity. Step through that doorway and keep walking into your home.

Everything happens for every reason.

Uplifting

Attend for a moment to the lower.

Become aware of your thinking and how most of your energy is in your head. We have been drawn upwards, out of our bodies and into the mind, to the point where it dominates our reality.

With this in mind, let the energy descend. Feel the intensity seep down into your neck and shoulders and then feel it fill your chest and arms, all the way into your hands.

Keep going. Feel it in your abdomen. Be in your abdomen. Your whole upper body is now inhabited.

Feel your energy descend further into your groin. Wow, so much power there!

You have entered the neglected, denied and ostracised territory of your lower body. Welcome.

Keep going into your thighs, lingering in your lovely legs, down into your knees and calves, then your feet. Feel your feet, full of energy, firmly on the ground.

Stay there and at the same time move up again, checking in quickly with the rest of your now balanced body.

As you walk, stay in touch and keep your energy down there. Whenever you remember to, redistribute yourself again and enjoy the full feeling.

It's basic to be in your body. Breathe into it, bringing the cells alive with every intake. It should start vibrating with vitality. You should start humming with happiness.

Being head-heavy is not whole or healthy and your system can't function optimally when you are not inhabiting it. The natural buoyancy of being can't bound about in you unless you are bodily and balanced.

So ground yourself often and feel the uplifting effects.

When you draw your energy down, your body takes you up.

Business

Are you doing what's good for business or what's right for you? Is there a discrepancy between the two?

People live on such a superficial level. 'How's business? Good?' Then life is as it should be. 'Tough?' Something needs to be done.

Work harder, work smarter, change strategy, cut costs, sell more, outwit the competition (with a smile on your face).

Is increasing income for shareholders all there is to living? Now there's a decent question!

Does perceived difficulty open your eyes and heart to what matters, or do you just do more of the same, more tenaciously and stubbornly than ever? Is business all you can think and talk about, all you care for, a shallow substitute for the life you are missing?

Is upping your income your priority or is there more of the ultimate in your field of inner vision?

After a reshuffle, are you now working for the opposition because they pay more and have perkier perks? Have you married for money? Are you paying the price?

What's right for you is good for business, otherwise you are in the wrong business. You need one that is an extension and an expression of who you are.

It must grow with you, deeper and wiser. It must be drawn up into the now, as you are, becoming more and more alive. Business is secondary at most, being is primary at least.

Is selling more important than spirit? Is productivity taking precedence over presence? Is strategy superseding surrender? Are you aggressive or aware?

Are you living in love?

I’m just asking.

Pretending

People are really struggling! They are in anguish. Yet society does not allow honesty and openness about it.

Have you ever visited some friends and found them strangely happy and bubbly but felt a strong sadness? As they talk and joke, your sense of grief and inner discord deepens, which you may feel is yours at first but begin to suspect may be part of the company.

Then you see striking discrepancies in what they are saying, contradictory messages, swings this way and that. They seem to be covering up, very well on the surface but unmistakably beneath it.

Then, when they get drunk or the party shifts or settles, they start to be more real, sharing how they are really feeling, which is not good at all.

Their torment cannot be concealed and their pretending just intensifies it, giving it another layer of dissonance. You feel the grief and the rage and the effects of their feigning, which is draining and disturbing, and they feel worse than they would if they were just forthright with themselves and the world.

But then, hung-over, regretful and insistently forgetful the next day, they pop a pill, try to pull it all together, put on their happy face and do it all over again.

If you are uprooted, you may be doing exactly this yourself.

If you are shaky, you may have moments of peace contrasted with times of turmoil in which you get swept by the prevailing fears and energies of friends and others. Your periphery will be tugged on and troubled and you may find yourself identified with it again, desperately in need of some solitude and centring.

The way to that is through the anguish, not running from it. The way back to the now is in seeing that you have left it and sitting with yourself.

If you are rooted, you will feel all the turbulence and stormy pressure to join the unhappy party, but you will sit with it and stay with yourself. A great compassion will arise from understanding.

It may be difficult to prevent yourself from pretending as the current tries to sweep you, and people may actually lash out at your reluctance to participate in patching up the pain.

Your centeredness will be a mirror to them and they may take it out on you. And then they will swing and say how much they need what you have.

Stay true and keep looking out for the propensity for pretending.

Disillusionment

I have just returned from a month in London and Paris, where I saw eight live concerts by some of my favourite and some of the greatest artists in living memory.

In London I also spent time with family, enjoyed a sweltering summer, cruised the best shops, and lived the high life.

In Paris, even more so. I stayed in super hotels, ate in superb restaurants, saw the sights, shopped, and was showered with gifts. There is no place like home, and now I am enjoying that.

Yet there is a ceiling to where all this worldly wonder can take you, and that ceiling isn’t very high. But you have to reach it to realise it.

I had a beautiful, growth-filled and blessed time travelling, and I am happy to be home, but I am feeling disillusioned. Somehow all the stuff out there doesn’t reach in here.

I can relish it but it cannot nourish me like I really need to be fed. So I am reaching deeper.

Disillusionment is a good thing! It is the end of illusion, a beginning. I am not hopeless, negative or pessimistic, I am relaxed, rich and happy, but I am seeing a distinction between two levels of living.

The first is the familiar where most of us subsist and struggle most of the time, essentially in emptiness. The second is our destiny.

The world can only take you so far. We are in it but not of it, so we can enjoy it but should not mistake ourselves for it. We are passing through. It is a waiting room, a preparation time for returning home, a way to know ourselves better.

Who we bring and who we leave with, or more precisely, who we really are, is who we are here to realise. What we have forgotten is what we are heading towards remembering.

The first level of existence is the one where we change. We are seeds then babies then children then young adults then older and older people. We gain and lose, live and die. We want pleasure and reject pain but have to settle for both or numbness.

The deeper level is the one where we watch. Our bodies were small and now they are different but something inside us has been consistent. Life goes up and life goes down yet part of us is unaffected. That is our home, who we really are, the truth.

One of the doorways into this truth is disillusionment. It can come through despair or wealth, or it can emerge as a gentle floating above all the noise, but it has an inevitability about it.

On one level there is the illusion and deeper down there is simple truth. To find the truth, we have to shift our emphasis from the dream out there to the life force in here.

When we find the truth, which we all carry, we have to follow it. As our roots grow, we bring new fruits into being, as the outer responds with great joy to the awakening of our inner.

When you begin to find yourself, the world opens up.

Air

I have woken up with the birds, here next to the common. My window is open and the air seeping in is giving form to freshness.

I am floating on it along with the songs of silence and the chipper chirps of winged first light. Summer’s in the air, everywhere I look around.

Now it is late afternoon with midday sunshine shafting through the trees and bushes as the train clicks, clacks and hisses, tossing from side to side.

I have picturesque people around me and the world on my shoulders, if I let it be. Or I am as light as air, floating freely. It depends on me, on my choices, on my now.

It depends on what part of me I choose to engage. Is everything troubled, unsolvable and exhausting? Am I choosing fear? Or is everything the way it’s meant to be, and am I just me?

Are the London rooftops derelict and dirty or quaint and character-filled? Is everyone odd or are we all even?

The leaves and clouds are beautiful. I have nothing to worry about, resist or feel separate from. I can just flow. I can allow. I can be a leaf on tranquil, moving water. I can be a cloud in a clear sky, consistent in transformation.

I can define myself not by pain induced by struggle but by non definition. I am nothingness, anonymous, invisible and silent, yet here. I am just a witness.

Now it is nightfall on the summer solstice. The day has stretched all the way and lingered a little longer. The sky is insistently blue. The night air is about to settle. Everything is suspended.

Are you breathing?

Articulation

You should invest in your ability to articulate. It is a life-changing capacity, for you and others.

It is a way of life. Articulation is a journey of knowing yourself, bringing that to the world, and evolving in relationship.

If you can express yourself clearly, you are thinking clearly. In time, your mind gets to the point where you see and understand significantly better, simply as a function of being well versed in articulation. Your capacity to live properly and make a contribution is enormously enhanced.

If you can express yourself emotively, you are more in touch with your feelings. It reaches the stage where you are generally in tune and aware, able easily to put into words, music, drawing or action what is happening inside.

Articulation can take many forms and it does you good to explore these and develop those that work for you. Come into bloom.

If you can articulate your deepest being and let your soul sing through you relationship with the world, you will be fulfilled and fulfilling for the whole of creation.

Sometimes it may be in silence, that can be the pinnacle of articulation and communion. Sometimes it will take the many forms of your talents and crafted skills.

Access, experience, voice. Share, connect, teach.

It can take years and years for writing to ripen, so you must keep doing and enjoying it, and let it happen. It can take thousands of hours with a musical instrument to get good at it so you must pick it up and get playing.

It can take try after try to tighten your articulation but there is no other place than the here and now. Start, continue, be.

Live your life through articulation, there is no shortcut to self-actualisation.

Strength

There is strength in adversity. You don't develop substance from comfort, it results from inconvenience.

Fruit forms from surviving the elements. Flowers, the pinnacle of frailty and beauty, burst out of hard buds. The strength of softness stems from stalks and seeds.

There is strength in uncertainty. The less you insist, the more you mature. Not knowing is true knowing.

Total flexibility, suspension of the self, is somehow solid. Formlessness is somehow fortified. You do not achieve wisdom, it achieves itself as you subside into it. Strength surfaces as the self disappears.

There is strength in love. Love is all, softer than a scent, denser than diamonds. Love is writing this.

Love wakes you from a dream, draws then dries your tears, lies silently with you as you float in the gentle darkness. Love is your inner light. Love learns and strength is in learning.

There is strength in simplicity. It is the culmination of complexity. It doesn't speak, it silences. It doesn't do, it simply is. It accepts, it understands.

There is strength in beauty. Blend with beauty. Trust truth.

There is strength in exhausting weakness, in stripping away falsity, in exorcising arrogance.

Strength is soft, silent and simple.

Real strength is surrender.

Sitting

At a certain point, perhaps the pinnacle of boredom with life or the pit of despair, or even the height of ecstasy, you may see that all you have been doing, one way or another, is avoiding yourself.

Every activity has been a dodging of who you are. You may have been keeping yourself busy while your life passes you by.

Sometimes you exhaust all avenues and end up with nothing fulfilling enough to satisfy your sinking spirits, nothing real enough to keep you going, nothing convincing enough to overcome the enormous argument that something inside you is having with the way you are living.

Those avenues are all avoidances, beautiful, beguiling and businesslike, and that something inside is who you are.

It knows something that you don't but are bound to find out, even if it is only in your dying moments. It can be put off for a lifetime but eventually you will sit with it.

Perhaps and preferably, you will face it sooner rather than later. You will sit somewhere silently and just let it be.

You will not reach for the TV remote, not get up to work, not drink, smoke or have sex. You will not bury yourself in a book, not clean the house, and not tackle that endless to-do list again.

You will not shop, eat or even listen to music. You will stop talking, stop pushing, stop trying. For once, you will just sit.

Sit with yourself. Let yourself be. Let life be. Do not run away, do not resist.

Do not act on the urge to get going again. Do not. Just sit.

It can feel like hell at first but when you have avoided so much that avoiding feels worse, sitting is all you have left. Then even hell is a welcome relief.

It is the doorway to life that you have turned away from, now opening.

Sitting with yourself is the start.

Discomfort

The more aware you become, the more sensitive you will be, and the more attuned to discomfort you will be, too.

Of course, your relationship with discomfort will then evolve.

When you are unconscious, your discomfort will rule your life. You will act on it without being aware that you are doing so or even feeling it.

You will be identified with and lost in the layer of your being where urges and actions are synonymous. You will also be susceptible to manipulation, deliberate or otherwise, by others, the media, social forces and the like.

Discomfort is part of life and the more accepting you become generally, the more at home you will be with the tides of duality. You will not resist them and you will not be swept by them either.

You will be increasingly centred. The world will carry on around you and you will be the inner silence. The wheel will keep turning and you will be the hub.

From here you will allow energies to move, to build up and release. You will understand discord and euphoria to be different states of the same flow, the same discomfort, and you will attach yourself to neither. You will just watch and allow. You will be free and wise.

The trick with discomfort is to be aware of it first, then to let it go. Nothing lasts forever, or even for very long, so there is no need to panic, fight or try to change what you perceive as circumstance.

Just let it be and let it move through. Immediately as you do, it will feel different and begin to shift. Sooner or later, it will reveal its potential.

See it, sit with it detached from it, and discomfort will turn into transformation.

Watching

Watch yourself. As you go about your day, watch what you do. Be the doer but be the observer, too.

Gradually, the observer will become more prominent until the weight has shifted from the unconscious self to pure consciousness. Watching will put you in touch with presence.

Watch your thoughts. They are not you, although you have identified yourself with them for so long.

They are little impulses of energy, pictures on a screen, mental sounds and words, but they are not your consciousness. They float or flash within your consciousness but you are the container not the contained. You are the observer, not the observed.

Watch your feelings. They are deeper than thoughts but they are still the object when you are the subject. Watch them come and go. Watch them rise and fall, go up, down, left and right.

They are e-motions, energy in motion, but they are not you. They are intense, experientially overwhelming sometimes, but you are the awareness that transcends them. You can enjoy and use them and, through them, know yourself, but you are not their slave.

Watch your habits and learned reactions. Watch your susceptibility to the influence of others, plus the insecurity and self-doubt on which it is based.

Watch the part of you that gets irritable and can be pushed and pulled around by circumstance. See the part of you that seems separate from existence.

Watch more and more, and bring yourself back to watching every time you remember to.

Use opportunities when you have to wait for whatever reason to become more of the watcher and turn 'wasted' time into the most profound spiritual growth.

Watch yourself in everything you do because the one who is watching is the real you.

Surfing

I have never surfed in the sea, so I am speaking metaphorically with no existential authority about the metaphor.

Just thought I would make that clear upfront. If that precludes me from sharing my insight in your eyes, perhaps now is a good time to swim to shore. I am going to take the risk and keep writing.

Writing is, in many ways, like surfing.

You make your way out into the ocean, which is the great universal sea of consciousness. You are vulnerable but, somehow, through surrender to the whole, and through awareness, you are able to stay afloat.

You are alone but all one, both at once. It is not up to you whether you surf or not but you head out and prepare yourself anyway. It’s very likely that sometime you will be in the write place at the write time and a wave will find you.

You know how to surf to some degree, no matter your level of experience, and you are at the same time clueless, also regardless of your ability. It’s paradoxical but creative tension is your territory.

Sometimes something happens immediately, or you even head out seeing beforehand that there is motion in the ocean.

Sometimes there are no swells to speak of, so you wait. You float and feel and let yourself merge with the enormous mystery.

Then, when a wave swells, you spring into action, stand up on your keyboard and, using your skill, instinct, and alertness, and in boundless and humble delight, you ride it home.

Surfing must be like writing in many ways. You can’t predict it, you can’t control it, but you can work with it.

You need all your wits about you but it’s not you who does it. You are always learning. If you think, you fall, so you have to flow. It’s a way of life.

Now and then you find yourself on a crest.