That old turkey...what goes around, comes around...is ludicrously relevant here @barge
And another oldie but goldie...we get out what we put in.
Simples innit, like???
DOing it...ah well, there's the rub. Self mastery is a work in progress for most of us and requires discipline and effort to get the old monkey mind to shut the heck up and stop telling us 'we can't' or 'we don't deserve it' or 'we're not good enough' or whatever other nonsense it spouts about!
Fact is there is ALWAYS enough. We are, each and everyone of us, more than good enough. We ALWAYS get what we need. And scarcity is a fiction created by the mind to allow us to fail, be lazy or give up!
Ha!!! Caught you little monkey mind...didn't see that one coming did it?! 🙊🙈🙉😎
Hey Lily, just a subtle point, maybe:
I wonder about this and have done so in the past! Might this be yet another way of the ego/monkey mind "'telling us 'we can't' or 'we don't deserve it' or 'we're not good enough'".
If the NOW is all that exists, what is the notion of 'progress' but yet another way of telling us we are imperfect and incomplete etc etc? Perhaps it is this very notion that IS the force that prevents the 'DO'ing????? - because it's perceived as a perpetual and neverending work in progress (which it IS of course in its own way)...the distortion may be in conflating the notion of evolution (work in progress) with imperfection IMO.
Alan Watts once said that if we are trying to do something, then we obviously don't know how to do it, else we'd be doing it and not merely trying to! Perhaps we are simply trying too hard - after all, the trying thing of effort-making is pushed very hard on us in early years and forms a deep deep impression. Could this be yet another expression of it, I wonder!!??
Yes @barge it might very well be. I think we could indeed conflate "trying" to be better with a scarity of perfection...one does rather imply the other doesn't it?
That said a snowdrop buried beneath the soil, hemmed down by the weight of earth, further trapped by the solid crust of permafrost struggles through these obstacles to reach the light of day and bloom in the pale winter sun.
It IS already perfection, yet it still seeks the light. Maybe we could see the snowdrop's journey as an allegory for the evolution of conscious?
Sure Lily it's a very nice one too: the flower rising, opening and blooming :D
The word that checks me is 'struggle'. I think that is a question of perspective and possibly yet another 'monkey mind' thaang..... Again, for me, everything is accurate! To resist reality is to 'struggle', and to embrace it is to stop struggling.
Yep totally agreed @barge the word struggle IS a challenge to the "flow and grow" in the natural order of things we just do and will grow from the ever present now! And yet, and yet, is the effort required by the delicate snowdrop as it pushes it's little head against the soil and the frost easy? I wonders!!!?
I too wonder :D - if the notion of ascribing such concepts as easy or difficult to the snowdrop's experience of pushing through is itself a projection of some aspect of the human mind. Surely for the snowdrop, there is no value judgement and no sentimentality, it just is. Does the snowdrop doubt its own ability to push through? Does it agonise over the obstacles, or even view them as obstacles? I don't see resistance, I don't see struggle!
Of course there isn't @barge you're quite right there. We are using the snowdrop purely as an allegory or analogy for the human condition. I do totally under, and inner, stand your idea of allowing, of BEing perfect exactly as we are, with no need to prove, no struggle and no resistance. But how many people do you know who are able to free flow in this way who never encounter any obstacles, never have any lessons to learn in the so-called school of hard knocks? My point is that sometimes the human struggle is what makes us stronger and sometimes the pain and sadness people endure turns them to face the light and embrace the truth of who they are.
For me the question is of perception - of seeing 'obstacles'. A perception that sees everything as accurate, would see stepping stones instead of obstacles. It is the same event, apply whichever label you like, it is the label that is emotionaly charged, not the thing in itself. I cannot say I know where anyone else may be at in this regard. The only thing I understand about appearances is that they are deceptive at the first level! I am no better, no worse; not more, not less - than any living being. I lay no claim to anything!