Choice should be a flow. Your body already suggests that this is the natural way to exist. Each cell maintains only enough reserve of food and oxygen to survive for a few seconds. Cells don’t store up energy because they never know what’s coming next. Flexible responses are much more important to survival than hoarding. From one viewpoint, this makes the cells look entirely vulnerable and undefended, yet as fragile as a cell may appear, two billion years of evolution can’t be denied.

Everyone knows how to choose; few know how to let go. It is the letting go of past experiences that we have allowed to define us. And it’s only by letting go of each experience that you make room for the next, allowing ‘fresh water’ to flow into you. The skill of letting go can be learned; once learned, you will enjoy living much more spontaneously.

Deepak Chopra shared these guidelines in helping us to make choices without getting trapped:

Make the most of every experience. Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. What does it mean to fully experience something? Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion. Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal.

Don’t obsess over right and wrong decisions. If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another. This isn’t a correct assumption because the universe is flexible – it adapts to every decision you make. Right or wrong are only mental constructs. The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

Stop defending your self-image. Over the years you have built an idealized self-image that you defend as ‘me.’ In this image are packed all the things you want to see as true about yourself; banished from it are all the shameful, guilty, and fear-provoking aspects that would threaten your self-confidence. But the act of banishment creates the chaos of your internal dialogue, and thus your ideal erodes even while you are doing everything to look good about yourself. To really feel good about yourself, renounce your self-image; all self-images have the same pitfall: They keep reminding you of who you were, not who you are. The whole idea of I, me, and mine was erected on memories, and these memories are not really you. If you release yourself from your self-image, you will be free to choose as if for the first time.

Go beyond risks. As long as the future remains unpredictable, every decision involves some level of risk. Risk is mechanical. It implies that there is no intelligence behind the scenes, only a certain number of factors that result in a given outcome. You can go beyond risks by knowing that there is infinite intelligence at work in the hidden dimension of your life. At the level of this intelligence your choices are always supported. The point of looking at risks would be to see if your course of action is reasonable; you wouldn’t rely on risk analysis to override far more important factors, the very factors that are being weighed at the level of deeper awareness. People who can assess their choices at the deeper level of awareness are aligning themselves with infinite intelligence, and thus they have a greater chance for success than does someone who crunches the numbers.

Make no decision when in doubt. It’s hard to let go when you don’t know if you have made the right choice in the first place. Doubt lingers and ties us to the past. It’s important not to make critical decisions when you are in doubt. The universe supports actions once they are begun, which is the same as saying that once you take a direction, you are setting a mechanism in motion that is very hard to reverse.

See the possibilities in whatever happens. It would be much easier to let go of outcomes if every choice turned out well. And why wouldn’t it? In the one reality there are no wrong turns, only new turns. But the ego personality likes things to be connected. Coming in second today is better than coming in third yesterday, and tomorrow I want to come in first. This kind of linear thinking reflects a crude conception of progress. Real growth happens in many dimensions. What happens to you can affect how you think, feel, relate to others, behave in a given situation, fit into your surroundings, perceive the future, or perceive yourself. All these dimensions must evolve in order for you to evolve. Try to see the possibilities in whatever happens. If you don’t get what you expected or wished for, ask yourself, “Where am I supposed to look?” This is a freeing attitude. On some dimension or other, every event in life can be causing one of two things: Either it is good for you, or it is bringing you what you need to look at in order to create good for you.

Find the stream of joy. In your own life there is a stream of joy that is just as elemental and unshakable. A worm knows nothing but itself, so it cannot deviate from the stream of joy. You can disperse your awareness in every direction, and by doing so distract yourself from the stream. You won’t really let go of your self-image and your restless mind until you feel, without question or doubt, a palpable joy in yourself. J. Krishnamurti, a renowned spiritual teacher, made this moving comment: “People don’t realize how important it is to wake up every morning with a song in your heart.” The song stands for a sense of joy in existence, a joy that is free of any good or bad choices. To ask this of yourself is both the simplest thing and the most difficult. But don’t let it slip your mind, no matter how complex your life becomes. Keep before you the vision of freeing your mind, and expect that when you succeed at doing this, you will be greeted by a stream of joy.

I have conversations with my mind daily, and more often than not, the ‘conversations’ are usually ‘battles within’, and these daily ‘battles’ are wreaking havoc in my life. From basic routines to big ticket items like career or life choices, I find myself in a constant ’struggle’ with my mind to do what is right for my life. Fear has a way of roaming the mind at will, creating images of insecurities and impending doom. Depression darkens the mind; anger makes it erupt in uncontrollable turmoil.

The mind appears restless and ‘wild’, and does not seem to be an ‘agreeable’ partner, but at a deeper level, it has complete orderliness where thoughts and impulses flow in harmony with what is right and best for each person. The mind is ‘wild’ because we try to confine and control it. So the key to taming the mind and letting it settle down is to let it be free. How, then, can we set our mind free? We need to understand how it became trapped in the first place. Freedom isn’t a condition you can simply step into by unlocking a door or breaking a set of shackles. The mind is its own shackle, built up from memories of the past to flow in a certain pattern. This conditioned state is ruling the psyche through a jumble of old, outworn experiences and is forcing us to react in the same limited way over and over, robbing us of free choice. And many of us have build an identity around these reactions without knowing that we have chosen to do it; these are a few of the reactions that have tremendous negative effects:

Manipulation is getting what you want by ignoring or harming the desires of others. Manipulators use charm, persuasion, coaxing, trickery, and misdirection. The underlying idea is “I have to fool people to make them give me what I want.” When they are really caught up in their ploys, manipulators even imagine they are doing their victims a favor – after all, who wouldn’t feel good helping out a guy who’s so entertaining? The external signs are: When you aren’t listening to other people, when you ignore what they want, and when you pretend that your desires cost nobody else a price. The presence of a manipulator brings tension, strain, complaints, and conflict to a situation. Solution: Manipulation comes to an end when you stop assuming that your desires are all-important. Then you can reconnect with others and begin to trust that their desires might be aligned with yours. When there is no manipulation, people feel that what they want counts. They trust that you are on their side; you aren’t seen as a performer or salesperson. No one feels that he or she is being fooled.

Control is forcing events and people into your way of doing things. Control is the great mask of insecurity. People who use this behavior are deathly afraid of letting others be who they are, so the controller is constantly making demands that keep others off balance. The external signs of this behavior come from those you are trying to control: They are tense and resistant; they complain of not being listened to; they call you a perfectionist or a demanding boss. Solution: Control begins to end when you admit that your way isn’t automatically the right way. You can tune in to your need for control by catching yourself complaining, blaming, or insisting that no one is right but you, and coming up with one excuse after another to prove that you are without blame yourself. Once you stop controlling them, the people around you begin to breathe easy. They relax and laugh. They feel free to be who they are without looking to you for approval.

Denial is looking past the problem instead of facing it. Psychologists consider denial the most childish of the three behaviors because it is so intimately linked to vulnerability. The person in denial feels helpless to solve problems, the way a young child feels. Fear is linked to denial, and so is a childlike need for love in the face of insecurity. The main external sign is that others don’t depend on you or turn to you when a solution is needed. By pulling your attention out of focus, denial defends with blindness. How can you be accused of failing at something you don’t even see? Solution: You get past denial by facing up to painful truths. Honestly expressing how you feel is the first step. For someone in deep denial, any feeling that makes you think you are unsafe is generally one you have to face. Denial begins to end when you feel focused, alert, and ready to participate despite your fears.

Each of these behaviors tries to prove an impossibility. Manipulation tries to prove that anyone can be made to what you want. Control tries to prove that no one can reject you unless you say so. Denial tries to prove that bad things will go away if you don’t look at them. The truth is that other people can refuse to do what you want, can walk out on you for no good reason, and can cause trouble whether you face it or not. There is no predicting how long any of us will stubbornly try to prove the opposite, but only when we admit the truth does the behavior completely end.

(Lessons & extracts from ‘The Book of Secrets” by Deepak Chopra)

What does it mean to be genuine, to be authentic? Basically it means living a life of truth with ourselves and others.

In Psalm 15 from the Bible, David describes the character of the person who qualifies to be a guest of God, and in verse 2 there is the special mention about being truthful: ‘He who walks with integrity, and works with righteousness, and speaks truth in his heart.’ Also from the Bible, John 8:32 mentioned: ‘..and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’

Why is it said that the truth shall set you free?

People are punished and ostracized all the time for telling the truth. Lies often succeed. A polite agreement to go along and make no waves has brought money and power to many people. But ‘the truth shall set you free’ wasn’t meant as practical advice. Deepak Chopra said that there’s a spiritual intent behind the words, saying in essence, ‘You cannot set yourself free, but truth can.’ In other words, truth has the power to set aside what is false, and doing so can set us free. The ego’s agenda is to keep itself going. At crucial moments, however, the truth speaks to us; it tells us how things really are, not forever or for all people but right at this moment for us alone. This impulse must be honored if we wish to break free.

These are some examples of flashes of truth: (1) Knowing that you can’t be what someone else wants you to be, no matter how much you love the other person. (2) Knowing that you love, even when it’s scary to say so. (3) Knowing that someone else’s fight isn’t yours. (4) Knowing that you are better than what you appear to be. (5) Knowing that you have to go your own way, no matter what the cost.

Adyashanti shared that many people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest – not only with others, but with themselves as well. The core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were totally truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody. We can not control somebody with whom we have been truthful. We can only control people if we tell half-truths, if we shave down what is true. When we tell the total truth, our inside is suddenly on the outside. There’s nothing hidden anymore. For most human beings, being that exposed brings up incredible fear.

Most people walk around thinking, ‘My god, if anybody could look inside of me, if anybody could see what is happening in there, what my fears are, what my doubts are, what my truths are, what I really perceive, they would be horrified.’ Most people are protecting themselves. They are holding a lot of things in. They are not living honest, truthful, and sincere lives, because if they do so, they would have no control.

Most people don’t get out of childhood without having many experiences of being wounded for telling the truth. Someone said, ‘You can’t do that’ or ‘You shouldn’t say that,’ or ‘That wasn’t appropriate.’ As a result, most of us have very deep underlying conditioning that being just who we are is not okay. We have been conditioned to believe that there are times when it is not okay to be truthful and honest. Most human beings actually have an imprinting – not only in their minds, but in their bodies and their emotions – that if they are honest, if they are real, something bad is going to happen. Somebody is not going to like it. They won’t be able to control their environment if they tell the truth.

To speak your truth isn’t the same as bursting out with all the unpleasant things you’ve been too afraid or too polite to say. Such outbursts always have a feeling of pressure and tension behind them; they are grounded in frustration; they carry anger and hurt. The truth that comes from the knower is calm; it doesn’t refer to how anyone else is behaving; it brings clarity to who you are. Value these flashes (of truth). You can’t make them appear, but you can encourage them by being genuine and not letting yourself fall into a persona created just to make you feel safe and accepted.

Truth is a very high standard. Truth is not a plaything. To tell what is true within ourselves is not to tell what we think; it is not to tell our opinion. It is not to dump the garbage can of our mind onto somebody else. All that is illusion, distortion, projection. Truth is not unloading our opinions onto someone. That is not truth. Truth is not telling our beliefs about things. That is not truth. Those are ways that we actually hide from truth.

Truth is much more intimate than that. When we tell the truth, it has a sense of confession. It is not a confession of something bad or wrong, but the sense where we come completely out of hiding. Truth is a simple thing. To speak the truth is to speak from a sense of total and absolute unprotectedness.

If you have been living a life of lies and self-deceit, make the shift now to live your truth.

Get started by: (1) Telling the truth to yourself about yourself; (2) Telling the truth to yourself about another; (3) Telling the truth about yourself to another; (4) Telling the truth about another to that other; and (5) Telling the truth to everyone about everything.

]]> http://davidtay.sg/2011/01/tell-the-truth/feed/ 0 http://davidtay.sg/2010/11/live-with-distractions/ http://davidtay.sg/2010/11/live-with-distractions/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:30:57 +0000 http://davidtay.sg/?p=549

Lately I am more aware of the distractions in my life – my head filled with the voices, choices and opinions of others – making me lose contact with my inner guidance, drowning out the still small voice from my soul. However, I have learned to go with the flow, be fully present and embracing all that comes my way, instead of resisting them and going into a denial of the presence of these distractions.

Franz Metcalf shared: We all get distracted by little things. We feel we should be pursuing this or that Big Plan, yet we get swept away in the current of events. (Perhaps this sweeping away is why we call them ‘current’ events.) As the adage goes: ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.’

An extract taken from Buddha’s teachings (Record of Yunmen, Pilgrimage Record 284) gave an account of a dialogue between two Zen masters:

Tiantong said: “If you haven’t understood, you get involved in everything around you.” Master Yunmen countered: “If you have understood, you get involved in everything around you!”

This dialogue explore this question of distraction. Tiantong expresses many of our sentiments about distraction being a problem. Yunmen of course knows this is true. But rather than simply agreeing with that important but obvious truth, he counters with something deeper. He says if you have truly understood reality, you still get involved in all the distractions of life because they are truly what life is. Life is lived in the present moment, with all its richness, its blooming, buzzing confusion. If we aren’t involved in the distractions, we aren’t involved at all.

But this doesn’t mean you have to drop the Big Plan. Just remember the Big Plan is made up of little experiences.

It is our responses to the distractions that will make the difference in how we live in the present moment. We can get flustered by them, sending us further into a tailspin that may put us out of alignment with our chosen paths, or we can embrace them fully and learn more about life. Know for certain that how we respond to these distractions reveals a lot about who we are.

Take notice of the daily distractions in your life, but more importantly, keep a log of how you respond to them. These occurrences can be mirrors of great discoveries of who we are in the school of life.

If saying ‘Thank You’ is the only expression we can utter for the goodness around us, it would be enough; and it will probably create the momentum for the flow of this abundance in our lives.

Sister Stan shared that “the only essence of gratitude is acceptance of what is.  It is amazing how we can miss so much of life when we lose our sensitivity to wonder and awe. When we simply drudge through the days, we may easily miss the daily gifts of life, and lose sense of gratitude. On the other hand, when we awaken to what is within us and around us, when we savour, relish and taste life fresh each day, our heart holds much more gratitude.

If we remember the people who have blessed our life, many of them may be unaware of what they have done. They may have blessed us with their smiles, their loving looks, their affirmations, their stories, their love, their compassion, their concern and their care. When we become aware of the vast goodness around us and the great blessings that abound, we also become aware of our need to bless, with our presence, our goodness, our strengths, our healing, our courage, our vitality.

It is often through tragedies or disasters that we can learn something of life’s priority. It is when we have lost somebody or some great treasure or something we have really valued or some irreplaceable possession that we can reach the realization that life alone is essential. Disasters and tragedies and traumas can be great equalizers, they can give the opportunity for true humility and gratitude to creep in, the gratitude for being alive.”

Take a moment now to reflect over what we have…and be thankful. Being alive is one of them. Put a stop to all the whining and winching about what we do not have…as we have more than enough to live life to the fullest.

Sister Stan added: “Gratitude and greed are mutually exclusive. Greed arises from the belief that we are in control, and that we can control everything, and that anything we have we deserve. Greed is a mindset that tells us we must get and get and get. It is the yearning for more, the push to acquire more, win more, own more, have more. Greed does not know the meaning of enough. Those who lack gratitude’s vision do not possess things, things possess them and that is misery. On the other hand, gratitude flows from a vision of one’s life as a reality received, a gift given freely and spontaneously.”

Many times we forget that there is abundance flowing freely in our lives and we continue to live mindlessly in the darkness of a scarcity mentality. We tend to face life with a sense of entitlement, we made demands, set expectations and create rules regarding what we need to be joyful and happy. This sense of entitlement is one of the major enemies to spiritual growth; it hardens our souls and keeps us from appreciating the gifts we have all been given. There is plenty for all of us – for you and for me – if only we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear and the heart to feel the gifts all around us and within us.

From this perspective, it is up to all of us to live an active life of gratitude.

Sister Stan said: “Gratefulness is not just a feeling. It is not enough to feel grateful – we must think grateful, imagine grateful and act grateful. We cannot simply say ‘Thank You’ and then continue in a demanding, controlling or competitive way. Gratitude is a whole and holy attitude. Gratitude is at the heart of a healthy spirituality. When we are grateful, our lives will begin to change instantly and we will see that we have so much more that we previously realized, even those times when the world would have us think we are poor.”

As we whisper a prayer of thankfulness in our hearts, remember to manifest this gratitude into action.

For Parents:

Consider these questions about your child’s school:

Are the children valued for who they are as well as for what they achieve? How much parent involvement is encouraged in the direction and vision of the school? How much corporate influence is allowed? Are teachers encouraged to take care of themselves, for example, with times for rest and stillness, yoga, or other means of regeneration? Does your child’s teacher seem stressed or balanced? Is the classroom, and the school generally, aesthetically pleasing? Do you feel soothed and calm there? Are body-centered activities like dance, stretching, or even martial arts, part of the curriculum? Are art, drama, and music respected as a powerful part of your child’s life? Are the children taught to resolve conflict in a creative way?

For Teenagers or Young Adults still in the education process:

What kind of world do you want to live in? What sort of world do you want to see in twenty or thirty years? If the world continues on the course it is on now, can you relax and know this is as good as it gets? What kind of contribution do you want to make? What gift do you want to give? Is your education helping you to deeply consider these questions and to find creative answers, or do you find yourself on a conveyor belt in an information machine? Does the process of learning serve the unfolding of your gifts, or are your gifts subjugated to the process of learning?

For Teachers and Educators:

Feel into the deepest unique gift of each child or student you are guiding. Do you love them for their hidden potential? Do you hold them in your heart? Can you let the unique flame of each child, as it bursts forth in its own way, be just as important as any curriculum or test result or notion of where they should be by now?

Many of the translucent writers and teachers view the schoolteacher as the most important caretaker of our mutual future. A teacher may have more influence on how we grow as a race than a politician or a priest. Please receive our thanks for what you have chosen to do with your life. Take very good care of yourself. It is a stressful job, and when your students remember you in years to come, it will be for the translucent brilliance that shines through you as much as for the facts and testable skills you are able to impart.

Checklist for Educators

Linda Lantieri offers these ten important questions for educators in assessing how translucent a school is:

1. Is there a sense of community in your classroom?

2. Do you and your students feel comfortable sharing thoughts and questions about values, meaning, and purpose?

3. Do you encourage respect for diversity of opinions, beliefs, and cultural backgrounds among your students?

4. Are there opportunities in the school day or week to appreciate the beauty of a work of art or to allow students to make art – poems, pictures, sculptures, music, drama – themselves?

5. Do you provide regular activities to explore and spend time in nature? Are elements from nature present in the classroom?

6. Do you and your students have ample opportunity through studying history or through storytelling to honor the power of ancestors and the past?

7. Is there some free time in the school day, including time for silence and reflection?

8. Do you have the flexibility to allow for moments of spontaneity in which intuition redirects a discussion or an activity?

9. Are there opportunities for students to become involved in volunteering or community or social action projects?

10. Do you and your students feel that most of what is being taught and learned is authentic, meaningful, and useful?

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