Thursday, October 13, 2011

How I Deal With Our Converging Challenges.

I can't (nor should I) hide it... Resource depletion, nuclear insanity, economic turbulence, natural disasters, political malfeasance, cosmic anomalies and other challenges have been really difficult for me to handle since about 2005. Sometimes it seems like everything is going nuts at once. Just when I thought I was on the right track with my response(s) to the world situation, I found more holes in my approach. The truth is that there will always be things that we cannot know or anticipate or prepare for or counteract.

What's a human to do? Here's my current take...

We are all part of the same whole. There aren't really any separate things, humans just tend to have inflated senses of self and like to come up with lots of names and distinctions. My personal human experience had a beginning and it will have an end. I think about a battery. You put a battery in a device. The battery has a life span. Batteries release their energy and allow work to be done, then they "die." Are humans really that much different? Doesn't seem like it to me. We do things over the course of our lives, then our individual human lives are done. It's not sad, it's not noble, it's just the way it is. If you look at yourself as a battery, what work will you put your energy into? It happens naturally, if you let it. Pay attention to the way your life flows, has flowed. Be able to quiet your individual mind and see your life as if it were a drop of water rolling down a parked car's windshield. It goes where gravity takes it. It encounters specks of dirt, bird droppings, whatever, merges with other drops, continues to flow downward, blah, blah, oozing off the car's wheel, eventually reaching the ground full of who knows what, evaporating, leaving what it accumulated during its life, merging with other vapors and coming back down again as a raindrop...

"I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness. The myriad creatures all rise together And I watch their return. The teaming creatures All return to their separate roots. Returning to one's roots is known as stillness. This is what is meant by returning to one's destiny. Returning to one's destiny is known as the constant. Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment."

...I like the Tao Te Ching a lot. This verse above talks about various "manifestations" emerging and then returning to "the source." It sits really well with me. Another translation reads, "watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return." Looking at what we know of the universe, looking at Earth history, human history, I end up with the image of a bubbling, swirling mass. Lots of eddies, flares and other events, but ultimately it's the same, single everystuff.

I think that's all I have for now. Bear with me. I'm feeling wide. I hope this makes sense to someone. Take care and be who you are. Do what you naturally do. You'll know it's happening when you're not trying as hard as you were when you wanted to give up.

It truly is all good.