As I continue to re-read The Tao Te Ching and apply it in my daily existence, a message that keeps repeating itself is to practice awareness and acceptance despite whatever comes to us. And as I practice acceptance, I find immense freedom in not having to fight or find a solution to things or events or circumstances I can’t change. I can only change my view of whatever is – feed the positive wolf like the Shamans taught. Like Wayne Dyer said, “no one knows enough to be a pessimist“. Freedom lies in our power of choice – choice to choose our thoughts, words and actions.
We have two worlds – inner world and the outer world. My teacher said, “your inner world is your sacred space. You decide what enters or exits from there. Your experience of life all happens in the inner world.” However, as I continue on the path of Self Inquiry, I realize that it is in the integration of inner and outer worlds that helps in having a holistic life experience.
All the stimulants are in the external world / outer world. It is our perception of those stimulants that creates our reality. Reality for everyone is different – it may converge with someone else’s reality at some point in time and then it diffracts, but no two people will ever have the same reality. Our reality is based on two things – 1) our awareness 2) our focus. So whatever becomes part of our awareness and whatever we focus on creates our reality.
Reminds of the real life Two bad brick story from Ajahn Brahm.
“We were poor monks who needed buildings. We couldn’t afford to employ a builder — the materials were expensive enough. So I had to learn how to build: how to prepare the foundations, lay concrete and bricks, erect the roof, put in the plumbing — the whole lot. I had been a theoretical physicist and high-school teacher in lay life, not used to working with my hands. After a few years, I became quite skilled at building.
Being a monk, I had patience and as much time as I needed. I made sure every single brick was perfect, no matter how long it took. Eventually, I completed my first brick wall and stood back to admire it. It was only then that I noticed— oh no! — I’d missed two bricks. All the other bricks were nicely in line, but these two were inclined at an angle. They looked terrible. They spoiled the whole wall. They ruined it.
By then, the cement mortar was too hard for the bricks to be taken out, so I asked the abbot if I could knock the wall down and start over again — or, even better, perhaps blow it up. I’d made a mess of it and I was very embarrassed. The abbot said no, the wall had to stay.
When I showed our first visitors around our fledgling monastery, I always tried to avoid taking them past my brick wall. I hated anyone seeing it. Then one day, some three or four months after I finished it, I was walking with a visitor and he saw the wall.
“That’s a nice wall,” he casually remarked. “Sir,” I joked in surprise, “have you left your glasses in your car? Are you visually impaired? Can’t you see those two bad bricks which spoil the whole wall?” What he said next changed my whole view of that wall, of myself, and of many other aspects of life.
He said, “Yes. I can see those two bad bricks. But I can see the 998 good bricks as well.”
What causes stress or distress or unhappiness is our expectation – for people to buy into our idea of our reality, for people to follow and behave according to our idea of what should be. My teacher used to say that the biggest epidemic in the world is “Chronic discontentment”. We are never happy with who we are, what we have, where we are. There is this constant striving which results in all form of stress and diseases. We are constantly at struggle, filling our diaries with activities without really knowing why we are doing what we are doing, who are we being in the process, constantly being driven by the mind’s incessant chatter. Whenever we feel non aligned, or stressed , the key is to go back to reminding ourselves of what we are focusing on.
As we begin a new decade, a new day, a new opportunity to “be”, let us focus on all the blessings in life. Let’s focus on our 998 blessings which make life beautiful.