- Foreward
- Introduction
- My Journey
- Adversity
- Anger
- Body Wisdom
- Love Knocks
- Money Tree
- HealthLoveWealth
- Simplicity
- Generosity
- Shock! Treatment
- Responsibility
- Grateful
- Growth Notes
Work on self, not others
When I see someone else behave in self-destructive ways that undermine physical or mental health, I want to intervene to save the person from destructive impulses. Yet when I intervene, my actions have little effect. I can’t live the other person’s life in addition to my own. Today I curb my desire to save others and instead work on myself.
Live today
I live habitually in the past and future, nursing old wounds, dreaming about what might happen. Living day by day challenges me to make every moment count. I put my personal experience to use now, building my future into each day. I will live today as if it were my whole life. It is.
Find Light in Dark Times
Chapter 11:
Responsibility Beyond the NOW
(sample excerpts)
Find Light in Dark Times gives you philosophical and spiritual tools to help you recover from
losses of all kinds, then emerge into the light. These are sample sections from Chapter 11 on responsibility.
Most seekers of spiritual meaning come to believe that if they could only live in the present moment, they would achieve enlightenment. They would feel free of all their burdens and simply live now with no attachment to past or future.
While enlightenment requires a consciousness that lives in the present, that’s not all it entails. A person who lives only in the present moment without thought of the past or future could become irresponsible. She or he may forgive self of all past misdeeds or regrets, absolved of all wrongs.
Enlightenment in its highest form entails more than simply living in the now. A fully conscious person lives in a “rich now,” with full awareness of her or his past, and with full awareness of hopes, talents and potentials as yet untapped. The rich now becomes always pregnant with possibility and history. Yet the enlightened person’s history does not drag on the present, nor does the future possibility weigh it down with expectations or worry. The present moment becomes a knife edge in time, slicing cleanly between past and future without clinging to either.
Many spiritual leaders teach people to forget about the past, to banish all thoughts of yesterday. During meditation, typical practice is to pull consciousness back from its frequent excursions into past events and anchor it in the now, often by attending to breathing or a mantra. Similarly, meditators coach that dread of future mishaps or worry about mounting problems should be abandoned in favor of living only in the moment.
If you find your way to a rich now, you become fully responsible for the entirety of your life. You seize your own reins. Yet you remember with full consciousness every struggle that got you where you are today, all the anguish and pain, the humiliation, the defeats, along with every success, pleasure and joy. When you live in a rich now, you find yourself unafraid of your past but fully conscious of it, free of its ability to constrict your possibilities.
. . . (Inventory your gifts section)
Wait until your light shines with purity and full clarity before you attempt to guide others toward light. Make certain that you have found genuine sunlight, not a room made bright with artificial fluorescent tubes. You may be able to see better in such a room, but this is not the light you want to live under.
To move with spiritual responsibility, first inventory your gifts as a person who has been fortunate to bring light into your everyday awareness. If you sell real estate, perhaps you can bring a smidgen of lightness to every client or prospect. If you cut hair, can you snip away one wispy curl of despair from your clients each day? If you are an enlightened lawyer, can you swap pugilism for genuine collaboration once each day? If you are a journalist, what words can you create that will make others’ lives more full of light? If you work as a nurse or doctor, can you joke with your patients in such a way as to bring them a moment of mirth, of happiness? If you are a carpenter, can you frame windows for others so that light floods into their consciousness?
Be caring, be gentle when you help others toward light. You are not better than others who remain in the dark. You are luckier. You are more fortunate. You happened to have a seat near the opening to the light in the dark cave described by Plato. You were not chosen by some Great Chooser of spiritual people; you were simply a lucky person. Go forward with humility.
Your profession, your experience, your talent, these baskets of gifts have fruit that can feed others. An enlightened you will want to reach into your basket of gifts and bring them to others. As your now becomes rich, it will overflow with benefits for others.
