Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them-that only causes sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things naturally flow forward in whatever way they like.
Lao Tzu
I have been writing everyday. Sometimes I publish what I write and sometimes I don't. Sometimes it it is just too "me-me". It is not my intention to personally vent here but I truly study what my mind is doing, what my body is doing in response to what my mind is doing. I study my perceptions, emotions, behaviours. I watch and learn. If I do learn something valuable from this watching that I think others may benefit from ...I share it. I also write here to help me understand what is going on in my mind in relation to what I am learning. If I am "troubled" by what I am experiencing I need to write, to release it somehow, to get it all down. If it is pretty stuck in there it may require a lot of writing before it is out of me...before I can look deeply at it and understand it. This energy is determined, however, to come out. That means I may have several entries that seem like rants and raves on the same topic...resistance, for example. I will write about resistance related to a certain life situation until my knot of resistance is released. Hmm!
Happenings
So yesterday I did write here about some other issues I found myself dealing with over the weekend. Issues that were "crisis-like" in nature. Crisis, I discovered, in the process of dealing with three certain things (things I wrote about yesterday but took down), offers an escape from the pile of rubble I often feel I am buried under in terms of the life circumstances I am dealing with. When a crisis hits, which to me is something where someone's life or livlihood is at stake, or someone is about to lose something truely valuable ( ie. health or a loved one), it pulls me out of this smothery feeling I get. The adrenaline kicks in and my focus becomes so keenly directed onto this one thing. Well...this weekend there were three things...but three things are still easier to deal with than 100 :). Crisis is a distraction for me. Because my life has had so much crisis in it , I can see me developing a crisis addiction, if I have not already. I noticed this tendency and response in me over the weekend as these things came at me(they didn't really come at me at all...they just happened...but it seemed they were coming at me, pulling me out of the place where I was buried under so many chronic and unresolved issues. ) It was almost freeing to be released from that which I felt so stuck under. I focused on the "happenings"
Anyway, all things pittered down and deflated when the "crisis" component was removed. They then fell onto this pile of unresolved issues and I seemed to be sucked right back down underneath this pile which is now bigger than it was before. Sigh! I still need to deal with these things but they are no longer stamped with a"stat".
We Got it Wrong!
I bring this up now because I listened to an Alan Watts lecture today on the Tao understanding of the happenings in Life. Watts mentioned how the typical western world thought is based on two illusions when it comes to Life happenings.
- We tend to think, as I still do at times, that things are happening to us. When those crisis' were brought to my attention over the weekend, I automatically assumed that they were happening to "me". I heard myself saying, "Oh My God! I can't handle this now. What am I going to do about it? Why does everything land on me at once?" These things , though they impacted my Life and forced me to respond by making decisons and taking action, had little to do with "me". They were not personal, even though they felt personal. They were just things that were happening. All things just happen. We, ourselves, are happenings. There is not a "me"...and things that are happening to that "me" . Life isn't that personal.
- We also tend to think that what happens now is a consequence of some past happening, a cause and effect thing. Watt tells us that that is just an illusion, according to Tao teachings, the past is a product of the now, just a wake in the boat of the mind, a memory we create now. It has little to do with the flow of Life and what happenings it brings our way.
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