Pain and Life

Before we walked on the Tao, our life was full of pain and chaos. Like others before us - Buddha comes to mind - you could as well say that pain launched our path. We started our journey as we conjectured, "there must be another way!"

As we started walking the Way, we found the root cause of our pain and managed to unload psychological baggage and uninstalled harmful subconscious programs. As we progressed, our being was suddenly full of light, joy and love!  We enjoyed this state so much that we grew attached to it and minded whenever it was taken away. Secretly, our ego was flourishing in the background just as it had done before. We secretly thought we were "it" just because we experienced the bliss!  

As we continued our journey we discovered our natural wiring of going after pleasure, joy and happiness. Just as moths are attracted to the fire, the bees to honey and male dogs to the bitch in heat. The pull is there and perhaps always will be, but we suddenly realized how our attachment creates suffering and limits and how we end up using happiness as a trophy. After this insight we managed to step outside of this identification. 

We also realized that there is some pain which is out of our control even as we let go as best as we can. Just like we cannot control the changing season on this earth, pain will always be part of our life.  Misfortunes are nothing to be ashamed of.  We finally can hang out with all seasons; some we face with a coat and others in a swim suit. We face all seasons with ease and without judgment.

When our dear ones struggle, we can't help feeling the same pain; when some disaster happens, we cry with you. And when life brings us challenges, we experience the same restlessness and anxiety as you do. However, this time we take in this pain consciously. We just stand there, face what is and let it pass just as a thunder storm.

Open up to life together with us.  We are here to experience life with awareness just as is. May life - pleasure as well as pain - flow through us!

By Christian and Su Zhen

The Journey Back to the Garden of Eden

It is a biological fact that once you have climbed out of the mother's womb you can't climb back. The Story of the Tree of Knowledge was exactly that. We left our subconscious connection with God and nature and became aware of our own creative powers. Alas, with the gain of powers came a loss of innocence, a break with our God-connectedness.

When we spend all day getting drunk, stuffing our face, having sex orgies, working ourself to death, or maxing our credit card on stuff we don't really need, we in fact try to climb back into our mother's womb. We want to lose consciousness and experience this feeling of connectedness with artificial means. It backfires as we all know and after a brief feeling of orgasmic bliss we feel even more alienated and irritated. Yet, if we spend time in meditation instead, with people we love or on creating things that are meaningful to us, we in fact are going back to that original state with proper means. 

By the way, we are not saying that sex, alcohol, dancing, working hard or indulging in things we care for is not part of the Way. Drowning out the 'here' with the help of artificial means in order to be 'there' is the problem;  meaningful work, celebration and exaltation is the Way! It is a free joining of a Force that flows through you rather than a desire to escape the here and now.

Living in the Now - walking the Tao as we call it - is the experience of finding this God connection that we once lost. The meaning of life is communicated to us when we experience that divine connection just as in the olden days. We experience life and know that it is "good" without getting entangled in the good versus evil battle at all. 

A spiritual path is the journey Home. We have tasted from the Tree of Knowledge and we now create freely in our Mother's garden. Heaven on earth is right here in front of us. Learn to center yourself as the yin and yang of life unfolds and you can experience Her Presence all of the time. 

Express Your Self

Everyone is born with a gift to share with this world. It doesn't matter what kind of gift it is. What does matter is that you need to find out what kind of present you have to share with others. If there it is one guarantee in this world it is that you will find a way to share your talent. More than that, your happiness and peace of mind will depend on it.

This present could be your love for food. You may love food so much that even the trip to the market is full of joy for you. As you touch the ingredients, and literally caress them, you anticipate how the people you love and care for will enjoy them. Cooking is a form of meditation for you and your heart is literally singing all the way to the dinner table. When Christian's father-in-law turned 80, his sister-in-law was cooking for the family and some friends, and as she made a toast she said with tears in her eyes that for her this banquet was an expression of her love for him and all the people who were present. This is the devotion you can have for anything you do in life. Just imagine your bliss if you can make a career out of what you love doing.

Your present could be writing, as we do for you right now. Imagine your pen or your IPad as your lover. Every day you feel inspired and without this creative expression of your Self you feel that something is missing in your life. We feel like being a messenger of God when we write for you. To be the best at what we do, we have to deliver Her true message. As a matter of fact, we even have to rearrange our lives for our mission. Sometimes you can't hang out with your friends for too long, otherwise you may miss the divine phone call. You may even discover that you have to have a pure lifestyle to keep this divine communication going. But you will drop all the interferences happily to be ready for this moment of joy, creativity and love. For us it is certainly not about the success - we leave all that up to Her - it is about receiving the present of expressing our True Self.

Your divine calling could be landscaping; you could be a farmer, a singer, a musician, a researcher, an engineer, an educator or artist. You could enjoy healing people, caring for others, protecting the environment or endangered animals. You could be involved in community services, or the government. The list goes on and on. We are moving into a Creative Society where with the help of technology and Social Media everyone has a shot at sharing their divine present with others. Find that activity that fulfills you and makes you truly happy. A profession should be a calling that allows you to express your creativity, your love for what you do and should allow you to celebrate the connections with people that you care about.

Dear friends, have you found your sweetheart yet? Surely you have a hobby that gets your heartbeat going, that puts a smile on your face and allows you to share your radiating energy with others. We are all here to share our presents with this world, whether it is a big or a small contribution, but we all have one. It is ok to start out as an amateur and to keep your regular job to pay all the bills, but get started on sharing your present. The Tao will find you a way to make a living out of it eventually. But the Tao can only help if you take the first step. When you ignore that present and if you do not do your best to share it, you will feel that something is missing in your life and that heaviness will grow over time. Kindle that fire inside of you and let the Tao help you sharing your light with others. The Creative Society is waiting for you. When it comes to your present, the whole Universe is rooting for you, so please express your Self!

By Christian and Su Zhen




Sent from my iPad

Addiction - All in it Together

Why are we addicted to something? Everyone is searching for feelings that we know are our birthright: happiness, love, peace and safety. Yet, too often we experience anxiety, emptiness, loneliness and meaningless instead. An addiction starts because some artificial mean can provide us a temporary substitute, a short-lived bliss experience, an escape from our dreaded negative emotions.

Our mind cannot remain still - it is always running after something. While it is occupied, the mind feels good about whatever it is working on, but deep down inside we know that something is missing. Everything our mind clings to doesn't give us happiness, love or peace. So instinctively we want to put our mind to sleep. Alcohol can do this job just fine. As we drink, we suddenly feel very relaxed and enjoy the temporary relief of a quiet mind; but alas, once the impact fades, our crazy mind starts acting up again. A pattern will develop and we will reach for the bottle again and again until this habit will eventually run our life and we will feel like we are controlled by an external force. Once sober we feel even worse than before because the voice we wanted to shut up in the first place now beats us up over our digression instead. The cloud of emptiness gets bigger and we need larger and larger shots to get the same feeling of peace and bliss until one day we can't break free from that negative energy pattern any longer without help from others.

We all have the tendency to run away from our negative emotions or try repressing them by some external means. Facing them is hard: the anxiety, the fear, the lack of love or the emptiness. Addiction is just the end of the spectrum when you you have tried to bottle up all the demons inside only to find that they come back to haunt you with a vengeance. If you are addicted you will be more desperate than the rest of us, but the problem statement remains the same for everyone. Our mental crutches look more elegant, but everyone escapes something at some time; only few have the guts to face all the turmoils that are brewing deep inside.

We are all the same. We seek help from the external world to get what we think we need. For some this pattern is more constructive than drinking: people go hiking, exercising, hanging out with friends, working hard for success to quieten their fears, accumulating money to 'buy' safety for the future. Most of us are multi-faceted and most of the times we manage to heal our lives, with the occasional blind spot for our darkest fears or the occasional misstep when we project our fears and anger onto others. But then there are these occasions when people like you and I hit a wall; the problems become just too overwhelming to face them and our usual escape mechanisms break down. Addicted or not, a fork in the road is reached at these turning points and they are deeply spiritual in nature. You have not only the chance to turn your life around and become 'normal' again, but actually the potential to transcend to a much higher spiritual level. The downside though, you have to be willing to face your darkest fears at this holy moment.

So if you are addicted, understand that you have received a wake-up call that you delivered to yourself. You are not a loser, you are just a step away from a spiritual journey from which there is no turning back. Once you have faced your darkest fears you will in fact be a step ahead of many of the so-called normal folks. Sleighing the first monster is hard, but soon you realize that none of these monsters really exist. It doesn't matter which destructive pattern you might run after, alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, medicine, video games - it is all the same. Perhaps you even need external help to climb out of the hole that you dug for yourself. That is ok, just remember that you are in fact a step ahead of many when you tackle your addictions now if afterwards you keep climbing along your self-discovery journey.

Becoming 'normal' again may sound appealing to you right now, but use your opportunity to aim higher than that. You are just one step away from becoming a spiritual traveler like us. We are not any different from you - all that we have figured out is that if you always like a heroine face the demon that comes your way, the lack of love, the restlessness, the emptiness will soon pass like dark rainclouds swept away by the bright sun. Life rewards you amply for sleighing our demons for the very reason that they don't exist. Look right past them and see for yourself that there is only love, peace and joy wherever you look.

Most of us start our journey when we come across something difficult to handle. We have discovered that no matter what, addiction, distractions, false desires, mind racing, etc., are all part of the same movie plot; the choice between the journey home or into nowhere; the choice between love and your ego. You are not a loser, you have set yourself up for this hard journey because deep down inside you know that you can tackle this wake-up call. Congratulations, your life is going to change soon in a way far beyond your comprehension. Truth of the matter is there are no 'ordinary' people; there are only people who choose love sometimes and those who choose love always. You can safely put your stimulants away; in the presence of love, peace, joy and safety, they will feel like stale idols indeed.

By Christian and Su-Zhen

Highway to Heaven and Hell

A Buddhist monk was once asked how he can live without sex. He thought about it briefly and then said, ' Well, when you experience an orgasm all day long in whatever you do, you don't miss it that much at night!' There is a lot of wisdom in this statement. Sex gives you a taste for the orgasmic heights we can achieve. All addictions are the attempt to get this state of well-being with artificial means instead. A spiritual path is the journey in the opposite direction, that will teach you how to experience bliss all the time.

Addiction is an escape from freedom. Once you think of whatever it is that makes you high, you already feel the blood rushing through your brain. As you get access to your substance, a strange trance takes over and you give in and let that force run its course. The longer you stay on this highway to hell, the harder it gets to turn your car around. It is a joy ride, no doubt, as handing over the reigns to this force lightens up your pleasure center in your brain. But alas, life becomes unbearable without your fix afterwards and the fix needs to get ever more intensive if you want to experience a similar high next time around.

Walking the Tao is the opposite experience. You interact with life in ever more subtle ways as you understand that life communicates with you always. The joys you experience  day in, day out, become more frequent until you experience bliss wherever you are. The Tao sets you free in the way that life dances with you constantly and you have to stay way too alert for the 'robot' inside of you ever having a chance to take over. The Tao gives you increasing freedom from the  subconscious thought processes. Along this journey, there is mental clarity, a feeling of joy, peace and bliss that you have never experienced before.

The Evolution of Consciousness

A vicious bug got me and I ended up lying in bed yesterday, drifting in and out of sleep. I realized then that my consciousness was at a point similar to the state of deep meditation, or as you would experience it during an orgasmic climax. Somehow you are present while experiencing your connection to a higher force at the same time.

Gary Lachman presented a theory that in the olden days we always had that level of connectedness with the 'beyond' in 'A Secret History of Consciousness'. This makes a lot of sense to me. In our journey of spiritual evolution we apparently travel along a circle. Transcending in our initial state from the animal consciousness to experiencing our existence as a separate 'I', only to evolve back into a web of oneness.

Why do you think addictions are so rampant? It is the desire to return back to the state of orgasmic bliss with artificial means. The price you pay is simple, you are hijacking the neural pathways of your conscious brain, only to find that your pleasure center gets numb in the process and you need to intensify whatever it is that gets you high all the times to experience a similar joy ride. Meanwhile, the state without artificial means gets harder and harder to tolerate.

The spiritual alternative is ever higher awareness and eventually transcendence of the 'I' with help of meditation or by simply by observing that you and the environment that you operate in are in fact one. At the end of the ancient journey there is only bliss and connectedness whatever your circumstances. Isn't it amazing that even a simple flu can get you that insight?