Perfectly Unfolding

Hola mi gente,
I like to re-post the following Occasionally because it reminds me of the importance of gratitude.

“Thank you” is the best prayer that anyone could say.
 -- Alice Walker

My readers are probably already familiar with my sickening claim that this moment is perfectly unfolding, right? I mean, I only mention it at least once a week. Today, however, I’m going prove my point beyond a shadow of a doubt -- no charge.

Whether you want to own up to it, not -- whether you’re aware of it, or not -- literally thousands of things go right for you every day, beginning the moment you wake up.

Yup.

For starters, through some magic you don’t fully understand, you’re still breathing and your heart is beating, in spite of the fact that you’ve been unconscious for many hours. You wake up and breathe in the air that is a mix of gasses that’s just right for your body’s needs, as it was before you fell asleep.

You open your eyes and you can see. Light of many colors floods into your eyes, are registered by nerves that took billions of years to perfect. Furthermore, the interesting gift of these beautiful colors comes to you courtesy of an unimaginably huge globe of fire, the sun, which continually detonates nuclear reactions in order to convert its body to light and heat and energy for your personal use.

Do you realize that the sun is located at the precise distance from you to be of perfect service? One small difference and you would either burn or freeze. And here’s another blessing: every day the sun appears to rise over the eastern horizon right on schedule every day, as it has long before you were born. Talk about trustworthiness and commitment.

How about the day you were born, do you remember that? It was a difficult miracle that involved many people who worked hard on your behalf. No less miraculous is the fact that you have continued to grow since then, with millions of new cells being born inside you to replace the old ones that die. And check this out: it happens automatically! You don’t even have to think about it.

Amazingly, the water your body needs so much comes out of your faucets in an even flow, with the volume you desire, and either as cold or hot as you desire. It’s pure and clean; you’re confident there are no parasites lurking in it. There is someone somewhere making sure you will continue to receive this gift of water without interruption for as long as you require it.

Look at your hands. They are beautiful. They’re amazing creations that allow you to carry out hundreds of tasks with great force and intricate grace. They relish the pleasure of touching thousands of different textures, and they’re beautifully perfect.

In your closet there are many clothes you like to wear. Have you ever stopped to think who gathered the materials to make the fabrics they’re made of? Who infused them with color, and how did they do it? Who sewed them for you?

In your kitchen, there’s tasty food in secure packaging waiting for you. Many people you have never met worked hard to grow it, process it, and get it to the store where you purchased it. This bounty of food is unprecedented in the history of the world.

Your appliances are working flawlessly. Despite the fact that they work on a power that would kill you instantly if you were to touch it directly, you have perfect confidence that you’re not in danger. Why? If I may say so, your faith in the people who designed these machines is impressive.

Wait! There’s more! Much more!

At this very moment, gravity is working exactly as it always has, neither pulling too much or with too little force. How did that little piece of magic ever come about? It doesn’t matter, because it will continue to function with amazing efficiency whether you understand it or not.

At the same time, a trillion other elements of nature’s design are expressing themselves perfectly this very moment. Plants are growing, rivers are flowing, clouds are drifting, winds are blowing, and animals are reproducing. Though you may take it for granted, you relish the ever-shifting sensations of light and temperature as they interact with your body.

There’s still more. You can smell odors, hear sounds, and taste tastes, many of which are quite pleasing. You can think. Though some of us don’t use it nearly enough, we have the extraordinary gift of self-awareness. You can feel feelings. Can you even begin to understand the magnitude of being blessed with that mysterious and wonderful capacity? Moreover, as a bonus you’re able to visualize an infinite array of images, some of which represent things that don’t exist.

You have the gift of language. Billions of people have collaborated for untold centuries in order to cultivate a system of communication that you understand well. Speaking and reading gives you great pleasure and a tremendous sense of power.

Want to travel to some far off land? There are a number of machines to choose from in order to get there. Cars, planes, buses, trains, subways, ship, helicopter, or bike -- whatever you choose, you have the utmost confidence that it will work efficiently. Multitudes of people who are now dead devoted themselves to perfecting these modes of travel. Thousands more still alive devote themselves to ensuring that these benefits will keep serving you.

Sure, we are now aware that in the future shrinking oil reserves and climate disruption may impose limitations on your ability to use cars and other machines to travel. But you also know that many smart and idealistic people are right now diligently working to develop alternative fuels to protect the environment.

Perhaps you own an MP3 player or cellphone, fantastic inventions that have dramatically enhanced your ability hear a vast array of beautiful sounds and communicate with your loved ones at low cost.

Let’s say you have been awake for a couple of hours. At least a hundred things have already gone right for you. If one of those hundred things had not gone right -- your toaster was broken, there was no hot water, or your car didn’t start -- you might feel today the universe has conspired against you, that your luck is bad, that nothing’s right, and life sucks. Yet the fact remains that the vast majority of everything is working with breath-taking perfection and consistency. Taking this in consideration, you would be a deluded creature to think that life is primarily an ordeal.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Being vs Reacting

Hola Everybody,
Though I have known it at an intellectual level, the past election cycle has made me actually integrate the fact that there is no Left -- no progressive movement -- in the US. 

I just realized today that I have only a couple of more posts and I will have completed my commitment to posting at least one blog post per day for the whole of 2016. I don’t know if I’ll continue into 2017 -- at least not at the same pace.

Don’t say such changes cannot happen. A vast freedom could live inside you. A loaf of bread wrapped in a cloth for the table is just an object, but inside the human body, it becomes gladness for being alive!
 -- Rumi

I guess that if you wanted to get somewhere, an accurate map is a good place to start. It can make the difference between arriving at your destination with ease and becoming hopelessly lost. However, imagine, for a moment, that when you ask a friend who has just raved about a restaurant where it is, she says, “Just visualize the restaurant clearly. Post a sign on your refrigerator door that says, ‘I can easily and joyfully find any restaurant I want!’ That’s all you need to do.”

I’m sure most people would think such a statement silly -- and they would be correct. But what if my destination is “self-acceptance”? What if all I wanted was to reach a state of inner wholeness that I have never experienced before? As in the directions to the restaurant in the above example, I may have heard wonderful things about it, but I had never been there and don’t know how to get there. Perhaps many of us can relate having been told to, “Just do it. Just accept yourself.” That’s a lot like being told to “Just go to the restaurant,” without being given any directions.

Today, I am grateful for having that direction in my life, for the luxury of experiencing self-acceptance.

Better yet, what if you ask how to get to a restaurant and you’re told that before you can even begin to try to find this restaurant you need to spend several months, or even years, thinking about how bad your own cooking is. That before you can experience this restaurant you will need to explore the reasons why you aren’t happy with your own cooking and why you have this need to go to the restaurant in the first place. In addition, before you can go to this restaurant, you also have to understand how you became such a bad cook. I would say this is sillier than the previous example.

A common belief is that if we understand a problem well enough, it will simply disappear. Yet in my life I could have, at any given moment, articulated the intricate psycho-dynamics of, let’s say, a $300-a-day heroin habit and still not change.

Today I am grateful for the freedom from the tyranny of thinking and the over analyzing that was the prison of my life -- literally and figuratively -- before I became free.

My life is not about affirmations or positive thinking. Shit, I have tried many times to overcome my limitations by sheer will power or trying to act or feel different, telling myself repeatedly that I would be different. But I discovered that this approaching the issue from the outside in. It is tantamount to trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s a lot like taking pain medication for a broken bone: you might feel better for a little while, but if the bone isn’t set right, the pain will persist.

Today I am grateful for the many people who have helped me do the “inside job” of creating a lasting transformation.

Most of all, I am grateful for having an underlying sense of wholeness and well-being whether or not things are going well in my life in the moment. Even when things seem to be falling apart, I feel resourceful. I have had this experience numerous times and, little by little, it has become my default way of being. I am grateful for developing and maintaining an inner sense of self, well-being, and wholeness and perhaps a connection with something beyond myself, that sustains me in difficulty as well as in good times. I am grateful for the awareness that this inner sense of fullness and integrity, and a strong resourceful self is available to each of us, and is our own birthright.

Now, mind you, I ain’t all that well, and have times of when I become attached to sadness, frustration, despair, anger, and irritability -- that’s part of being human. But I am equally grateful that even in those times I can still have an underlying sense of joy as my ground of being. I possess an inner knowing that I have the resources to weather the storms, an unbeatable sense of pragmatic optimism that I will come out on the other side of my difficulties not only intact, but also wiser and stronger.

What more could I ask of my life?

All of us have personal limitations we have struggled to overcome. With some of these challenges, it seems that no matter what we do, they won’t go away. Most of us turn away from those parts of ourselves we don’t like. We try to repress feelings we don’t want to have. We try to “think positively” and push away negative thoughts. These approaches will never work -- they never seem to create natural, lasting change. Besides, at least half of life ain’t all that pretty and how can you expect good results if you’re busy denying a good chunk of reality?

I am here to say today that I am most grateful to be able to carry the message that the way to happiness is through our limitations.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

Butterflies

Hola Everybody,
I have to run! Please consider donating to my campaign so that I can continue to write and do the work that I do. If anything I’ve ever written struck a nerve, or was useful, or made you smile, or even pissed you off, then please give. You can so give HERE or via PayPal, HERE.

The Butterfly Effect

Feelings aren’t facts...

Think about it: how much time do we spend agonizing over things that, in the long run, are inconsequential? I submit that about 99.999999% of the shit we sweat in our lives is totally unnecessary. But sweat we do -- all the time.

Reminds me of a story. I love stories, so bear with me. A great teacher famous for teaching that life was an illusion was discovered sobbing uncontrollably by one of his followers. He was grieving the death of his son. Shocked, the follower asked his teacher, “Don’t you preach that all life is an illusion?” The teacher turned to his disciple and said, “Yes it is true that all of life is an illusion, but this is one fuckin' big illusion.” LOL

And so it is with life: feelings aren’t facts, but it’s a fact that we feel. Some issues are graver than others and we can get stuck, and that’s fine. However, the real heart of the matter is how long we stay stuck. If we spend our lives feeling betrayed, angry, resentful, or insulted, then where is the time for living? You will blink your eyes one day and years will have passed and realize they you have used all your energies fighting off the equivalent of a swarm of butterflies.

This is not to say that we should be inconsiderate -- to ourselves and others, or that our relationships are meaningless, or that our feelings don’t matter I know I have made some genuine connections here on the ‘Net over the years and I am grateful for them. I happen to consider some as friends, but I have seen others show their real side. There are many people who engage in cruel behavior on here and in “real” life and rationalize it by saying some bullshit like, “It’s just the internet.” I submit that if you’re capable of cruelty in one context, then that potential exists somewhere in you.

Of course we shouldn’t proceed as if nothing mattered because that’s the other extreme, nihilism. What it does mean is that we choose our attitudes and reactions all the time.

There are plenty examples to go around. How many times have you caught feelings over a miscommunication and as a result exchanged insults. Guilty as charged. Some of us resemble out and out psychopaths, resorting to all kinds of stupidity. This happens for several reasons, but the main reason is that there is anger in our hearts. The tragedy (and comedy) in the grand scheme of things is, if we’re honest, much of what we dramatize really isn’t that significant. However, it matters that people feel insulted and disrespected, misunderstood and ridiculed.

Now, before anyone here begins commenting, let’s all be honest and just say we have all experienced similar events in our life, okay? I see it and hear it all the time. Most of the time, it’s not even worth it. That means you and me.

Shit happens: we lose jobs, grow out of relationships, get hurt, and betrayed. Shoot, I live in a city where pushing and jostling is considered the norm. I run up against sweet old ladies who act like All Pro NFL linebackers when getting on and off the subway! The thing is that life is like that. There’s shit happening all the time. If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, with the perfect love (“The One”), at the perfect job, or location -- if you’re waiting for all that in order to smile, or smell a flower, or walk barefoot at the beach, then you will have wasted your life waiting, because, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there’s no Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy and life is hard. 

Life is hard and fuckin stressful. Believe me, I know and I’m sure you do as well. I mean, I’m about to get my phone cut off in a day or two, I don’t have my own place, I am unemployed, and I’m literally down to my last shekels. But you can be sure I will make it my business to see something beautiful or to find the sublime in the mundane. I will laugh today, even while I’m crying because I have to walk several miles to make a job interview.

Yes, life is hard and often unfair, but it’s also beautiful and amazing. Life is the most precious gift, and the one true choice we have -- the one card we can play -- is whether we will face it all with a smile or a frown. This is it, people. I mean, the internets are full of memes with great quotes, and we can all adopt this highly evolved, super guru facade, but the best definition of spirituality I have ever heard is that it’s what you do when no one is looking. Can you find the serenity within the chaos? Can you put meditation in action? Can you walk the walk? Can you sit in the midst of life and face it with joy and love -- all of it, not just the good shit?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Sunday Sermon [Love]

Hola Everybody,
It’s still summer and I wish I were feeling better so that I could be at the beach. I am feeling much better today, though… 

Love as Remembrance

The carousel at Central Park

Yes, the Big “L” word. The word we all are scared to admit to it even when we’re feeling it in the very fiber of our being. Some people will go for most of their lives and hardly ever utter the word to those most dear to them. It’s even scarier in romantic relationships. Sometimes we worry and go strategic:

What if I tell her I love her? Will she reject me? Will she use it against me? Will she think me to clingy? Will he say he loves me too? And what if he doesn’t say it?!

Yup. The Big Hairy Nasty Obscene “L” Word.

We’re all afraid to say it. Or if we do say it, we’ll play semantics with it. We’ll draw distinctions, for example, between loving someone and being in love. Apparently, there is a difference! No, I’m not that dense. I realize that when people make that distinction, they’re pointing out the difference between the attraction of the feeling of love and actually committing to it and letting it flower. 

Or maybe not. I don’t know.

Personally, I’m a complicated man and so I have to keep things simple. For me love is an action word, it’s something you do. When I tell you I love you it means I’m going to work at loving you. It means I am committed to loving you by acting – by my behavior. That means that I will attempt to accommodate your feelings, be considerate, protect you, make love to you, compromise with you, do the things I know makes you feel wanted and valued (and yes, probably drive you to distraction *grin*). That’s what the Big “L” word means to me. When I tell you I love you, it means I’m walking alongside you on this journey called life and all that that implies.

So, I don’t know if there’s a huge difference there for me between love and being in love. For me it’s like being pregnant: you’re never half pregnant. You’ll never hear someone say, “I’m pregnant, but not in pregnant.” That’s why I stopped making that distinction. When I love, it’s with my soul, nothing held back, caution thrown to the wind. Believe me, in this life it’s the only risk worth taking. Of course, it doesn’t mean I ain’t shitting in my pants the whole time because, yeah, it’s fuckin’ scary opening up like that. 

To make things worse, I become unbearable because sometimes I really want to sabotage the whole thing and in that way not have to do it. I jump, then in mid-air, I’m screaming like a bitch because I’m thinking: why do I do this love shit, GODDAMIT! And yet I still take the risk because if I outlast my usefulness and they finally come for me to put me in some decrepit nursing home where the nurses will refuse to wipe my ass for hours, I don’t want to be laying there in my shit regretting that I didn’t love in that way -- that I didn’t take the risks.

I think the core issue with love is that it will enter into any mind that truly wants it. Your task is not to seek love, but instead undo the barriers that you erect against it. I’ve heard it said that “Love waits on welcome, not on time.” When you want only love, you will see nothing else. If you could agree with me that love is in part a form of sharing, then how can you find it except through itself? I say, offer it and it will come to you because Love is attracted to itself. Offer hostility or contraction and love cannot exist, for it can only live in a space overflowing with peace.

I have learned that love is already in me and that I need only to extend it outward. Going back to my perspective on love as an action for a moment -- that is the action: extending what is there already inside of me. As M. Scott Peck defines it, love is an act of will for the benefit of another. What a fuckin’ awesome revelation. 

Love is the most sacred mantra you can ever chant, for love is the Divine and you could never know one without the other. Integrated, you could never again be unaware of love and love would never fail to recognize you. And in this recognition, you will live in grace because grace is the acceptance of love within a world of hate and fear. In love you will find gratitude because gratitude is the ring bearer of love. Where there is one the other must be found.

Love laughs at the foolishness of my defenses for that’s what they are. Love demands we lay down all our weapons. Love without trust is impossible. People always ask me about my motivation for writing in this way. I guess my aim is to offer an example of remembrance -- of reminding people of what they really are -- to emphasize that there is no difference between your essence and love.

If all you did today was catch a glimpse of that remembrance you will have advanced on your path in an immeasurable way. Seek the love in you, and you will see it everywhere because it is everywhere.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…