Head and Heart

Are you talking yourself into what you really want, or out of it?

Do you know what you really want? Perhaps, at least, you are being nudged towards it.

Is circumstance seeming to push you out of one way of living or into another? Do you carry an unlived life around within you?

Are you full of frustration, even grief and rage at the choices you are making? Or are you just numb?

Do you know what you really want? Have you even considered what that is outside of all you have been raised to do and pretend to be?

Are you living a connected or a conditioned life?

What you really want is simple and associated with what your heart tells you. Can you access what that is?

Can you detect the difference between your head and your heart?

Your head is full of what everyone else thinks and says. It has a notion of right and wrong, plausible and impossible, desirable and unacceptable. It is probably in control.

Even when you access your heart, your head is difficult to overcome. It can talk you out of almost anything. It analyses and paralyses. As a tool, it is useful, when you know what you want. For that, though, you need your heart.

Your heart is closer to who you are. It cannot lie or confuse. It knows the way and doesn't bother about details, because those work themselves out. You can use your head for them, once you have found direction. Until you have done that, your head is a problem.

Your head is your inner dialogue. Your heart is your guide. What you really want is seeded inside you and entirely plausible. You may be using your thinking to materialise or suppress it. Your thinking may be using you.

When your head serves your heart, you shift into gear.

Rejuvenation

The single source of real rejuvenation is nothingness.

Just a small taste of that during sleep each night refreshes our consciousness. Without it, the world is a dark place. With regular contact, the world becomes beautiful.

We understand ourselves as a conglomerate of complexities: personality, memory, aspiration, mind and body. These are all tensions, struggles, things, that occupy our energies all day.

Every night, we return to source, or should do, to rediscover ourselves in our essence.

At first, before falling asleep, we need to stop doing and let being take over. Then sleep comes of its own accord. You cannot make yourself sleep, it is a state of passivity. You allow it and it swallows you. You stop and it starts.

Then, as it takes over, you disappear further and deeper into it. Each layer you descend through leaves less of you. The mind, still active in dreams, eventually drops, too, until all of what constitutes you is absent. No more personality, thinking or tension. Just nothingness, a reconnection with source.

In a full night's sleep, this happens only for a short time, and, with our modern lifestyles, not nearly as much as we need it to. When we don't it get enough, we feel as if we haven't even slept. We may wake up more tired than when we laid down.

When we do commune sufficiently with absolute stillness, we wake up feeling vital. We live quality lives. Time out of ourselves brings us back with essential energy.

The other way to integrate with nothingness is through meditation. This does not imply any particular practice, posture or penance, just presence. It can come through sitting or lying still, being in nature, exercising, being creative, or doing your work mindfully.

Anything that silences the mind, takes you inwards, and brings a feeling of time standing still is meditative.

The difference between meditation and sleep is that in meditation you are conscious. In deep sleep, you are not there but you are not aware of it. In meditation, all the layers have fallen away, and you have disappeared, but awareness remains, crystal clear, unclouded.

Meditation rejuvenates too, and, combined with sound sleep, reveals what life really is. In time, the tensions lose their grip and blissfulness surrounds you as you go about your business.

Connecting with nothingness brings happy resourcefulness.

Arguing

Who argues?

Unhappy people with a bee in their bonnet. Arrogant people who want to prove their importance. Ignorant people who don't know better. Partners in a power struggle.

When you are aware and awake, you are not going to argue.

What is there to argue about? If you know something, you will listen or share but not defend or impose. If you don't know, you will discover.

You will not be attached to your position, because knowing needs no attachment, and not knowing needs openness. The other may help but cannot hinder.

Who is there to argue with? Someone who knows when you don't will supply you with insight. Someone who does not know will either be receptive to your sharing or insistent on their ignorance.

Someone who thinks they know when they don't will be a pointless pursuit. And someone who knows as well as you do will commune with you in silence or stillness, a joyful resonance.

Some people define themselves by arguing: drama-addicted lovers, power-hungry parents, philosophers, politicians. Children.

They strengthen their egos in the name of love or intelligent debate. Or childishness. They use beautiful words to conceal their ugliness. Or simply don't know better.

You may feel somehow left out of their self-important endeavours, and drawn to get involved. But there is no need to be insecure or to argue.

What is to be gained by arguing? Tension, sharpened cunningness, and false victories. Ruined relationships and reputation.

Argument-free is the way to be.