The Miracle
of Everyday Life
From the moment when we emerge from our sleep in the morning, until we drift off again at night, our everyday lives are an incredibly well orchestrated set-up for awakening! I can hear the objections now... "not this life with all these messy things going on!" "Not this boring bunch of everyday habits and routines! It can't be!" But when we relax about making judgements about the content of our daily lives, we can begin to notice something very amazing. Please check it out for yourselves, and see if it is true. If we either suspend such judgements for a moment, or perhaps just ignore the noise of any ongoing judgements, we can begin to see our lives just as they really are. What are they? Really no one can answer this for you at all, and have that be of much value. You look into it for yourself and see. I can only answer it for myself, about what I see, and will do so below as best I can. I have noticed that my daily life is idylic until something happens that "makes me uncomfortable" in some way. If I am then being present to what is occurring, I can notice what the content of that discomfort is. Not on the surface, which just might be complaining or reacting, but what is underneath that! This month I lost my day-job. The surface discomfort was worry about money and being insulted about how it occurred. But as I looked more deeply, the experience was that of having deep levels of conditioning be brought up about survival of the body and of the personal self. This personal self, like most, seems utterly hard-wired to be a survivor, and this was a blow to it's agenda for continuance. This pattern managed to remain intact through the clearing of so much of the other layers of conditioning and seemed to need this experience to become visible. This experience has given me an opportunity to view the ideas, beliefs, assumptions and interpretation that I have built up around survival, and to view the self-centered agenda that my personal self runs regarding its own perpetuation. However much I have experienced a loss of self-centeredness in other ways, at the survival level my me-first-and-forget-the-rest-of-you agenda was churning on. The opportunity in seeing this deep agenda for survival is in my just getting to know it, and to relax with it. This gift of the situation is that it has given me the choice to keep repeating this or not: it is no longer unconscious. And yet I am still free to choose. The saying "let go and let God" has an opportunity to come alive in this VERY basic area of my life. Losing my job has allowed this possibility. It will also be fascinating to see what will open up over time because this job is no longer taking up so much of my time. If we relax our mind's unending judgements about which things in our daily lives it likes and which it doesn't, which things it thinks should be there, and which not, then the reality of what daily life's smorgasborg of experiences is offering us has the opportunity to reveal itself. This moment a rain shower has ended, and the sunshine is lighting up the wet garden and everything is shimmering. What opportunity is this then, this raindrop on a daffodil, this perfect chickadee? In the same way that we opened up to the difficult moments, we also can open up to the precious sunshine in the backyard, and feel ourselves touched ever more deeply by what it truly is, without our judgement about it's being the right experience or not. We experience the depth then of what it's true nature is, and are constantly amazed.
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Beginning to Interact on
the new Wide Awake Living
Community Blog Site
The upcoming book "Life Beyond Belief" is in the editing stage, but I'll be giving away parts of it for your enjoyment meanwhile. Please go to the New Wide Awake Living Blog site at wideawakeliving.com/wp and you will see a link to chapter six, a sneak peak at the cover, and some recent nature photography too. The blog site is a place where you can add comments and begin to introduce yourselves and interact if you would like to do that. You just click the "comments" button, and go from there. There is a delay before the comments post, because of spam protection. There is also a link to the blog on the Wide Awake Living home page, and the link is called "community" because that is what it can become if we use it that way. I would absolutely love to hear from you, speaking for myself!
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