Is God’s Will a path or a law?

Much of our confusion and unhappiness it seems comes from a conflict of wills, our will or desire vs God’s will or law. Since this conflict is endless and always coming in some new form or another with each circumstance, perhaps a different understanding of what God’s will is may be in order.

Experience we should all agree is like a path. Every step greets a new situation, an unexpected turn, an unforeseen situation that requires an unrehearsed response. How do we meet this situation? Do we meet it by trying to make it fit our idea of what is required by God, or do we meet it creatively, exploring all its possibilities. Like when we learn to ride a bike, do we learn too much one way, do we put too much strength into the situation, are we compulsive, impatient, too eager?

Perhaps God’s will is like the balance of riding a bike. You have to discover it through trial and error, but once you have the feel of it, you don’t forget. Then whatever turn the road takes each moment, you stay balanced, you ride through. But if we are constantly checking our balance with a rule book on balance—am I doing it right? Am I sitting straight? We look around for guidance—that means that we don’t trust our own balance and we need constant assurance from some scriptural or church authority.

So there are rules, God’s rules, to be sure, but at some point we have to put down the rule book and just ride. Then we experience the freedom from the law. And I would suggest this is the Kingdom of Heaven within that Jesus pointed to. One has to discover this kingdom through trial and error, but once discovered you know  it because it has always been there. You are actually discovering what you already have. God has never left.

When you learn to ride a bike and God Will, then you are God’s will, you are balance. Oh, you can lose it, but you can quickly regain balance because you can feel it. Balance is not knowledge you learn from a book, from a scripture; one must practice  balance by riding on your own. There is no greater happiness than freedom from the law.

When frustration comes…laugh

The Practice of Being Happy: #15. When frustrations come, little one or big ones, and you have created a space between you and circumstances as they manifest, you are free from the grip of frustration…and you naturally will laugh. One takes joy, not in the frustration, but in one’s experienced freedom from that frustration.

You can begin this practice by noticing the next frustration. Perhaps you got the vacuum cord tangled and pulled over a lamp. Noticing this with bare attention expands your field of awareness to include both the tangling cord, the crashing lamp, and your mind’s reaction. You are not being attacked by the lamp if you notice your mind recoiling from the disaster unfolding. Notice what you fear..your wife or husband’s “I told you so.” or your own sense of being a klutz. “I screw up everything.” Or maybe this is not the case. But just watch the exterior and the interior action as one event.

You are not the lamp hitting the floor, you are not the cause of the lamp breaking, and you are not the mind reacting to this event. YOU are watching it, you are noticing it…you are the silent awareness of the body/mind event. It’s like a pond watching the ripples play on its surface. You watch the event, the subjective and the objective play upon the surface of awareness…and that awareness is YOU.

This is best practiced with simple frustrations at home, and then with that foundation of space being created, you can begin to find space in your greater frustrations, like the boss yelling at you or some friend hurting you. No matter what the pain, what the disaster…when there is enough space between you, the event cannot affect you.

The ripples—no matter how big a wave they become—can never disturb the pond or your basic peace. The experience of the pond is…joy. And the experience of the waves is life….you can have both. But without the background of the pond, your life experience will always be ultimately dissatisfaction. Ripples that don’t know they are also the pond have nothing but the fear that they won’t last.

Dont stoke up the furnace!

The Practice of Being Happy. #14 Now that Christmas is yesterday, bathe in the sense of today. The rain came and washed away the “white Christmas” of our dreams and all the shouts of children playing in the snow are but echoes now, fading like last nights dream as the force of today overpowers it. So here we are today, still part of the Christmas weekend to be sure, but something has past. What’s gone? The expectation? The anticipation? And the stress associated with this, the fears the one won’t measure up or make it in time? That things won’t be PERFECT!

This mind party is very obvious at Christmas because the whole culture get heated up, stoked up like the old coal furnace in the house, so that our emotions get exaggerated from the heat. Now that the furnace has returned to normal, we can notice how silly all our worry was, how needless the stress was…everything turned out great no matter what we did or didn’t do. It was Christmas!

Now that you have noticed how silly worry is, how dysfunctional stress is not only to the mind but the body too, use Christmas as a marker, a reference to the same tendencies to worry and stress as  the coming day, even today if you can. Notice when you are throwing more coal than is needed into your emotional furnace. One should keep a steady heat, a consistent flame. This way one avoids boiling over and then cooling down into a depression. You don’t save energy by messing with the thermostat!

Beautiful snow, nasty snow..

The Practice of Being  Happy. #13.  It snowed last night and today and everyone is so excited about it coming this Christmas and how the children will play in it, and how beautiful  our every day outdoors has become. As if my magic, snow transforms our world into a “winter wonderland.”

But snow is also a new opportunity for our problem mind to activate. There are delicious opportunities for new irritations. The neighbor didn’t park his car right. The snow plow dumped snow in my newly shoveled walk, someone broke my car scraper…you know how it goes. Life is an irritation, right in the middle of  wonder land.

Today let your practice be to notice this new source of irritations. There is the white virgin snow, and there is a lump of mud on it, your irritation. Follow the irritation, see the pattern in it, but don’t judge yourself wrong for being irritated. Don’t get irritated with  yourself. Just notice irritation. Say there it is, irritation. How interesting.

In this way you can practice letting pleasure and irritations both string your Christmas tree of the mind with blinking thoughts. Your practice of being happy will bear the fruit of lasting happiness when you can see your mind as a tree of blinking thoughts and feelings, good feelings, bad feeling….but just a string of conscious lights in the mind. You, however, are the tree, the evergreen tree of life…pleasures and pains are just the decorations.

Time…who needs it?

The Practice of Being Happy. #12  Today, lets look at time. Not the time on the clock or the time it takes to get to work, but the time you need to be happy, the time you need for your life to work and your dreams to come true. That is the time we need to look at. Does it really exist?

We can begin our practice by noticing when time is not on our minds. What are we doing? Without getting into specifics, you’ll notice that time disappears when we are giving the present moment our full attention. Attention and time can’t exist together, can the. You can also notice that when you have full attention on some project or activity—and you can bet that if that activity is life threatening you will have great attention—you feel very alive. But as soon as you switch on the time mode, you are thinking about your activity, and measuring it, comparing it to what it should be or should not be, and suddenly, life has become flatter, compressed, and you don’t feel as alive, as full and complete as you did before time entered the mind.

See if you can notice this play between time and the present moment. We are here…then we are not. We are NOW, then we are in thought. And what is thought but an abstraction of NOW. Thought is the peeling of the apple. NOW is the core.

Our heart felt wish, our deepest desire is to eat the whole apple of life, yet all we get is the peeling, life thinned and stretched out in time. We live on the surface of life in a skin called time.

Mind, where is it?

The Practice of Being Happy. #11. What does your mind look like? As anyone ever asked you this? People ask us what our house looks like, what our job is like, what our spouses or friends are like, but who asks what our minds look like. And yet, this is where we live. This is the window through which we see our house, our job, our spouse..the whole world is in the window of the mind, like one of those giant aquarium where you can imagine that you are looking at the whole ocean.

Well, I’m sure you are saying you can’t see your mind to describe it, so we need a couple of analogies, a good metaphor, something we can use to say the mind is like…..fill in the blank. So from the beginning one needs a familiar form to stand in for the mind…because the mind won’t sit still for us to describe it. It’s like those fish in the aquarium swimming by the window. The fish aren’t the aquarium, but that’s all we see. And as soon as one passes another comes into view.

So lets use this analogy of the aquarium to describe the mind. Fish are thoughts. Lets notice them today. Find some quiet time and just notice the activity in the mind, like it was a window that is built into view of the ocean and schools of fish would come by or a single larger fish might stop and look at you looking at it. Image that you mind is this ocean and you are looking in on it. Just look at all those thoughts going by!

Notice how you will forget you are looking at the thoughts and you become the thoughts, going with them to someplace in time, maybe a fearful place or a happy place, but you forget the watcher for a moment. Then you remember you are the watcher. Notice the difference between these two states of consciousness, being in thought, watching thought.

Ask yourself this question:Who am I in this equation? Am I the thought? Am I the thinker of the thought? Am I aware of thinking…and just who is that? Am I inside the aquarium or outside the aquarium or both?

Happines is…

The Practice of Being Happy. #10

Everyone wants to be happy. Even criminals. No body wants to be unhappy, unless in a perverted way unhappiness is one’s happiness. But what is happiness? If you asked a 100 people you’d get 100 different answers. Most people, however, in our culture would probably define happiness as being some optimum circumstances, like winning the lottery or not having to work anymore or having a perfect relationship. Happiness seems to be dependent upon the world or phenomena suiting our special needs. Our consumer culture depends on this definition so it can sells us the means to happiness.

Today just notice how the idea of happiness works in your mind and in our culture, particularly the media (which is our culture now). Identify the happiness bait being tossed into the pond of your mind. Notice when you mind rises to the bait, to look it over or take a bite. Notice how sensory excitation pulls your mind towards the idea of fulfillment. Catch a whiff of a doughnut shop or some other inviting aroma and notice what the mind does. What does your mind do when it sees some visual invitation to excitement and expectation of happiness? It’s all around us, 24/7. Let’s notice this today.

It would be helpful to make a mental or actual list. Just how many times a day does culture arouse the mind with the promise of happiness? And also notice if you become happy when you grab the bait and swallow. Is happiness lasting or is it just a momentary excitation? Find out today.

As Christmas approaches

The Practice of Being Happy. #9. As Christmas approaches and the media hype builds in a symphony coming to a crescendo, find moments of silence to fall into. Remember the Silent Night of Christmas. You can find it in the spaces between the cars of noise that run through our mind like a Christmas train. Christmas is a great pair of opposites, great noise and excitement against the backdrop of the great stillness of a forest at winter. Nothing can be more silent that a forest after a heavy snow.

Today make it your practice to find these silent spaces. All our shopping, worry about getting this or that on time, fixing what’s broken, making sure there are no upsets is just our best attempt to control the energy of Christmas and make it meet our childhood expectations of wonder and surprise. The great forest of the silent night is the ground upon which this energy of life dances, so look for this silence between the moments of frantic Christmas activity. It’s there. it’s always there…like the ocean between the waves or the sky behind the clouds. You can sense it like you sense the immense size of a mountain or the vast space of a canyon. It’s right there as the open space in your own mind.

Ask for it. Seek it..and you shall find….yourself.

Mind your habit energy

The Practice of Being Happy: #8. I had my hand on the broken coffee bean grinder but I didn’t throw it in the dumpster. I could feel the inertia of my habit energy wanting me to throw the broken and what I deemed unfixable thing away. It pulled at my mind like a rip tide. it had its own logic: “She is never going to fix this. Get rid of it!”

My wife had said she wanted to get it fixed but the one we were using now was working fine, my habit logic said.My habit so wanted to throw it away..and yet my hand didn’t move. I could feel awareness penetrating the current like the sun cutting through clouds. Awareness told me that throwing this away was going to hurt my wife. What was more important: her feelings or my sense of rightness, it asked? Did this grinder have any inherent existence in itself? Or was this grinder just another prop for my habit? What was real here? The grinder or the habit…and was the habit real?

Then I shut the pickup gate and drove away with the grinder safely on the way back to our storage barn. My wife may fix it or she may not, or she may forget about it…but that was not the point. What was important was that I had broken the inertia of my habit energy. I had seen into the unreality of my habit and the objects it picks up and carries away.

Habits are blind currents of energy that always get us in trouble, at least my habit of throwing things away does. Being clean and having an orderly space is important, but one’s order must be conscious and aware of the order and needs of others, and blind habits are never conscious. They are our autopilots, and while they have their purpose, one must stay awake or you will fly right by your home airport.

For today’s practice find your habit energies or patterns. Notice what you do automatically: it might be a reaction or a thinking pattern, it might be some behavior that you are programmed to do, or it might be a comfortable routine, or an uncomfortable routine like cursing at drivers that don’t behave the way they should. Notice the consequences of your habits. Map out the pattern of your habit.  Do they help or hurt those you live with. Our lives are full of habits, deep ones and superficial ones, and we need to notice them. Put signs up like you do at the beach when a ripe tide is active. DANGER, HABIT IN PROCESS. BE AWARE!

What is you story?

The Practice of Being Happy: #7  What is your story? We all have a story, a tale of woe, perhaps, our hope for a happy ending, or reaching the Promised Land; we are all writing our autobiography, our history, our living scripture….but what is it. Do you know? Do things not turn our good in your story. Do you say, “Why me?” when things go wrong. Or something like “Shit happens,” when things go wrong and you think it’s you destiny. Do you expect a certain outcome? Do you feel the victim, the disappointed one, the wronged one?

What is your story, the context in which you give meaning to everyday events? Nothing stands alone. You miss the bus to an important meeting, maybe the second time that week; how does this fit in your story. What meaning to you give it. Our story is like the formula or recipe for our daily bread. It is the shape of our loaf. We are the cook, but we don’t realize we form the dough into its shape. What is the shape of your life?

Facts happen. Stuff happens. We get something, we lose something, we meeting something, we don’t meet something, we go up, we go down, we get sick, we get well, the weather changes every moment…but what meaning do we give it? What face do we paint on our world? THAT is our story.

Today begin to notice how you fit the daily facts of your life into a shape, how each circumstance becomes just another page…your story is your idea of who you are. You have to start noticing how your story is the background of meaning you give to your world. Begin reading this book today!

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