The Story of You

You change for two reasons. Either you learn enough that you want to, or you have been hurt enough that you have to.
(Unknown)

I read Steve Chandler's book, "The Story of You: And How to Create One", and I quite liked it. Yes, you are that powerful. Everything about you is your implicit belief system and who says it can't be changed! "Success" is always yours to choose; your so-called failure is just there to help you discover what true success is all about. You choose the story of your life - don't let some subconscious programs tell you what this story is all about.

"The Story of You" is a self-help book, so if you think there are areas in your life that need to be reinvigorated, you might get a tip or two from it and learn how to re-tell 'the story of you'. This learning process is all about dropping a few limitations in the process. It is quite subtle though; while limitations are always self-imposed, living your dream is always a joint creative process with a higher Force.  A Tao traveler would tell you that 'the story of you' is read out to you along the Way. Actually, I was intrigued by the ending of the book; a Tao traveler could have written it:

As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.
(Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea)

Conflicted

Attractive women have called him a "good man" on a number of occasions and mostly he smiles politely, but deep down inside there is a storm brewing when he hears that expression. His demon laughs heartedly because that's what he is has been trying to tell him for the longest time: "don't try to be good, make use of your good looks and have some steamy fun instead!"

There is a problem in our spiritual community and that is to state so confidently that it is our right and destiny to live in peace, love and happiness. Sure, if your notion of spirituality is to have a loving family, a creative job, a good standing in the community, with the occasional yoga and meditation class to ensure a healthy mind, body and soul balance, then there is every incentive in the world to just look the other way when it comes to these internal conflicts. Yet unless you deal with everything that is hidden in your psychological basement, true peace of mind will never be yours.

A spiritual mission is a full-contact sport to discover the robot inside and free yourself from it. Peace, love and happiness are by-products of this discovery. Pretty much everyone is trapped in conflicting mission statements that beg resolution: biological drives, ego's battle with the spirit, parental mission statements, soul demands and subconscious programs. It is hard work but it can be done, at least so we are told by some of the masters who claim they overcame the internal conflict of humanity and divinity.

A spiritual mission starts in earnest when you discover lies in your life and you say to yourself, "Hey, what's up, there must be another way!" There are so many "white" lies and you could look the other way just as you have done all your life. Yet, for some reason you
suddenly do mind and you start to ask questions and solutions present themselves. It turns out you are on the Way once you start looking for a new way. Ask for God's guidance earnestly and you will always get an answer.

One little qualifier though, if you strive to be a "better" person because you don't like what you see in the mirror you will always be caught in the duality of life. A spiritual path is not about striving, it is about break-through. It is about observing, understanding and transcending, and not really about "doing" anything. All you have to do is to be mindful of internal conflicts and about letting the Way help you find answers. It is about seeing the yin and yang at work and learning to dance with it. A conflicted person hears the demon speak and is devastated. A spiritual traveler perceives the conflict inside and smiles: another creative solution must be near-by.

That Which Tastes Like Poison at First

Do you know people who sabotage themselves at times? Who knows, perhaps it was  a father lashing out at his son telling him that he is a  good-for-nothing, or a nasty remark of a relative telling a little girl that she is ugly at an impregnable age. Unfortunately these words can burn themselves like vicious memes into our subconscious and we take them for granted like God commands without the ability of our intellect to overwrite them when we are older.  The good news is, just as these irrational programs can get installed you can uninstall them with the help of targeted symbolic acts. Please read Alejandro Jodorowsky's excellent book Psychomagic for many case-specific examples.

So when we talk about the subconscious mind we really talk about two different things, a mindless computer that can work for or against you, as well as a divine source of wisdom and guidance. Every spiritual traveler will have felt this wisdom,  sometimes even heard a guiding Voice deep inside. Sometimes we receive divine messages from our environment. We call this external communication channel the Tao. You get step-by-step instructions to help you understand who you truly are and encouragement to tackle your mission in life.

A spiritual path is really a cleaning up with all these subconscious programs that hurt your Self-discovery, while at the same time learning to get in touch with your inborn Self-connection. One fine day you discover the red carpet the Tao has always laid out for you and from therein all you have to do is to follow it. Still, despite this divine touch,  you are not any different from all the others. You too have to tackle insecurities, overcome fears and deal with confusion. Sometimes the divine Voice will tell you to cut out stuff that seems like fun to you, but it will be explained to you  why this particular activity would stand in the Way. So in a sense a spiritual path is like an ongoing therapy course. Every resistance along the Way is yet another sign to reposition your self in order to connect with your Self.

The psychologist/mystic Gurdjieff once said that if you follow a spiritual path you manage to avoid living like a pig and dying like a dog. This sounds a little extreme, but I am sure every spiritual path traveler understands the truth behind it. If you experience your Self while living, it is hard to get carried away by life's fickle temptations, just as you have little to be afraid of when you die.

The Bhagavad Gita puts this theme in the following way:
That which tastes like poison at first, but tastes like nectar in the end, this is the joy of a mind at peace with itself. Pleasure of the senses seems like nectar at first, but is bitter as poison in the end.

 Follow the signs of the Tao and you already are reunited with the Source. Life becomes an ongoing feedback mechanism and your subconscious understands that you are completely taken care of. All life demands of you is to stay away from the poison and enjoy the nectar instead. That is not hard to do, is it?

Better Than I Used to Be

I ain't no angel
I still got a few more dances with the devil
I’m cleaning up my act little by little
I’m getting there
I can finally stand the man in the mirror I see
I ain’t as good as I’m gonna get
But I’m better than I used to be

(Tim McGraw)

The problem that we spiritual travelers have is that we want to improve, very much as Tim McGraw envisions his journey in his song "Better than I used to be". We want to be "enlightened" but feel that we are not, so that means that we need to improve, right?
But hold on a second, if you want to disassociate yourself from the scoundrel called "ego", by setting up this self-improvement goal you are still very much under the ego's spell. That's what the ego does day in, day out; thinking and scheming how one could possibly advance. So it is the same struggle only wrapped in holy clothes this time around.

There is only one way to deal with this problem. Let go of the steering wheel. Let the Tao do the driving and you will find that everything is suddenly "better than it used to be". You encounter fewer problems, you experience Grace no matter where you look and where you go and you discover that you already have everything someone possibly could ask for. Actually, Tim McGraw can even aim higher in his already pretty uplifting song using this insight. Once you stumble upon the divine Now you realize that you already are as good as you gonna get - ever.

By Christian and Su Zhen

Moments Along the Way

What does it mean to be a spiritual path traveler? It is a way of seeing and perceiving events and people somewhat differently as you used to. When you see a beautiful girl on the street you have the choice of seeing her body or you can peer into her soul. You can see her as a gem in a beautiful landscape, or you can see as a sex object. When you are work, you can contemplate how to advance professionally at the expense of others, you can worry about how others may intrude into your well-defined professional space, or you can just do what the situation requires without wasting a thought of what this means for you personally.

When you consider yourself spiritual, you can devise little schemes of how to always say yes to God and no to your ego. When you are on the street, you can condition yourself to zoom into the eyes of the girl who walks next to you rather than first looking at her breasts. At work, you can try to look for a profession that is meaningful to you so that all your psychic energy goes into what you love doing rather than fighting for your next promotion. All that is part of self-improvement that you can pursue, and it might well be your mission, but it is still not quite the Way.

A spiritual path is a something much more natural than that; it is a way of being synchronized with life. Self-improvement means that you are doing something consciously; so you will focus and over-write something inside that wants to do the opposite. Along the Way all you have to do is to show up and everything is being done for you. In the divine Now your entire being is carried along, you just have to come along for the ride. So when you meet the before mentioned attractive girl on the street, your eyes naturally meet. For some strange reason her attractive body is just part of a beautiful landscape. At work you fall in love with the yin and yang of energy. You appreciate everything as is without applying any mental filter to it. You realize that scheming is a waste of time since every mental plot is immediately outdated and proven wrong by the unfolding events. Friend and foes are impossible to define. Where the divine Now rules, good and evil melt into nothingness. Every choice becomes instinctive, it is as if a red threat is on the path and all you have to do is to follow it step by step.

If you already have experienced glimpses of the divine Now, know that you have reached the beginning of the end of an ancient journey. You may still practice 'self-improvement' from time to time, but it is with the intent of letting go rather than becoming somebody. You do what you can do to remove whatever obstacle is in the Tao's way. You start understanding who you truly are. Every fear that pops up is sooner or later recognized as just a wave of energy that comes and goes. The same with anger, exuberance, depression, worries, aggression, greed,   envy, lust, etc. You naturally outgrow all these interferences and you learn that by being connected to the Tao, everything becomes a child's play. No matter where, no matter what - wherever you look there is bliss, joy, peace and love.

Peace

Buddha allegedly once said "The good stuff, do it. The bad stuff, don't." That is indeed it. When you have reached that stage, peace is yours. When every action, every word and even every thought and feeling you experience is in harmony with the Way, peace, bliss and love are yours forever.

Unfortunately, Buddha's insight is exactly why so many in our spiritual community struggle. You want something. You want to be peaceful, you even try convincing yourself that you are peaceful and happy. Yet you are not. You are "here" even though you want to be "there". You want so much to be "there"  because deep down inside you know how miserable you are.  You mind that your "ego" is in the way to experience the "True Self" and that is why you are not peaceful.

Well, perhaps you can read the previous paragraph one more time. Do you now see the way out? Stop trying to be "there" and start accepting the here and now and you actually have a shot at being peaceful. Make peace with your "ego", make peace with everything that is hidden deep down inside, everything that wants to come out to the surface, ugly and crazy as it may look to you. Accept the here and now, accept everything life brings your way. The "I" that you experience, the subconscious urges that you can recognize in the Freudian slips. Know that with every loving gesture just as with every frown you see, you are looking at yourself that moment. When you can accept everything life brings your way, when you accept what is, the "here"  merges with the "there". You never have to do anything to live in the world the Buddha describes. Just drop everything right now and appreciate the "here". That is all really.

 Cancel all self-improvement classes. Stop reading what notions others have about spirituality for a couple of years. Make peace with yourself first. What is self-improvement? It is your mind telling you how things should be. Believe it or not, there is actually violence in this approach since you neglect where you are coming from. You neglect your psychological demands, the unresolved struggles of your parents that you still have to live through. You neglect your unique personality which may well have been an outgrowth of some previous lives. And you certainly have demands from your manliness or your feminine side that needs to be expressed, not to mention the hunger of the selfish gene - the stuff that got you here over the last couple of million years. But you know what, despite all that you can experience peace here and now. Buddha found his way, now you find yours!

The Way is the realization that life is a mirror reflecting all your tensions, aspirations, hope, desires and struggles back to you. This Matrix knows who you are. More than that, the Matrix knows that you already are "there", so it puts the world as you experience it in front of you so that you can backtrack your steps. Accept who you are and then embrace life and always put your best foot forward. When you open up to everything life brings  you with an open mind, the Way - the Tao - will lead you back to the Source. Sometimes you run fast, sometime you stroll in a beautiful park, sometimes you barbecue with dear friends and sometimes you fight with contractors to get the home improvement you paid for. But in all that you can experience incredible peace because you know that you are walking the Way. May Peace be with you!

The Ego Loves Self-Improvement

Has it ever occurred to you that the more you think you should devote your life towards "self-improvement" the more resistance you might be facing. The more proper your life-style, the more power you will actually give to your shadow. Perhaps you have observed for yourself that if you accept yourself as you are instead, your life seems much more in harmony and your so-called shortcoming just naturally fade into the background and are suddenly no longer so bothersome.

You are you, it is as simple as that. Your right and your left hand belong to the same system, so if the right hand starts attacking the left one, don't expect to get very far. Similarly, if you are on a demolition course to erase the allegedly dark spots in your soul, who do you think does the attacking? It is the same you. Just let it be. Don't put the dark spots under the microscope, just let them be in peace and see what happens this way. Trust the "you" and that this institution will end up doing pretty sensible things without the other "you " improving things.

Actually, if you really want to improve things, there is an even better way than just letting it be. Start asking what the so-called dark spots of your soul want to communicate to you. Start realizing that it is in fact your demon that gives you energy. Redefine your notion of spirituality and harness the strength of your demon and let him take you in a direction that is compatible with your spiritual path. Let the right hand work together with the left hand in tandem. Just as God gave you two hands, He endowed you with a few dark spots to let life define you the way you were born to be.

By Christian and Su Zhen

The Ego Loves Self-Improvement

Self-improvement gives the ego something to work with. You aspire, become, live in the future. You have a suspicion that you are miserable now, but guess what, it doesn't matter because you will be better off, enlightened, in the future! Please stop fooling yourself my friend, embrace the now, accept that you are naked and realize that you are drifting like a leaf in the wind. After that realization there is nothing more to fear and perhaps at that moment there is peace of mind.

Self-Improvement

J. Krishnamurti used to compare self-improvement to the renovation of a prison cell. Yes, objectively everything looks better after you are done, but you are still in the same prison. I was reminded of this statement when I was reading 'The Disappearance of the Universe' by Gary Renard who is visited by some of Jesus' disciples who claim the same thing: we are all living in a world of maya and all we should aspire to do is to break free once and for all. 

Well, I obviously haven't broken free so there is little I have to add to the discussion. What I would say though is that I seem to have experienced what a spiritual path is. It is a force that compels you to move in a certain direction and there is little you can do about it. Every misstep away from the path is followed by discomfort and it is immediately clear to you what you have been hurting yourself in the process. Every continued misstep brings bigger and bigger emotional discomfort while layer on layer of understanding is added why you are pulled away from your equilibrium in the first place. At one point you just get to tired to even bother doing something else than the Tao calls for.