Number Forty Eight

If you walk into a hotel, you expect to be taken care of.  You expect to be safe.

The room surrounds you with silence.  No voice penetrates the walls and drapes.  The pain in the street, the angry running men, the shadows calling out for help cannot reach you.

You are safe.  You are contained.  The ones who wait for you to come, you cannot find.  The ones who have something to tell you, you cannot hear.

You are safe.  Comfortable.  You turn on the TV, watching a disaster too far away to imagine.  You have a drink.  And then sleep comes.

Now the sun is behind the curtain.  Bright but distant.  It is the same everywhere.  Death is the same everywhere.  Pain is the same everywhere.  The room protects you only from life.

Number Forty Seven

Loving the moment is embracing, with equal measure, the doubt and the certainty, the loss and the connection, the sin and the sacrifice, the fear and the courage.  Loving the flaws protects us from being the flaws.  Seeing the beautiful pain and opening to its perfection, keeps it from defining us.  The more we love the dark, the more we live in the light.

The pettiness, the anger, the selfishness, the cruelty must be seen and loved.  If these parts of the self are rejected and made "not me," they grow to envelop, to become the self.  The way to the divine always leads through what is wrong, what we are desperate not to be.

There is nothing at the end that wasn't at the beginning.  Each thought, each feeling that is banished becomes a monster that we feed.  We nourish them with fear, disgust, shame, and -- most of all -- avoidance.  The things we fear to think and feel grow large.  Haunting and powerful.  Until they become nearly everything there is.

Number Forty Six

Consciousness -- both of the individual self and the collective whole -- constantly evolves.  Because it must.  If your are awake, you learn.  You grow.

Consciousness uses what it gains.  To make things.  One definition of god is the ability to make something from nothing.  The collective whole -- the sum of all awareness, the combined light of all souls -- has already made this universe.  And perhaps others.  As it evolves, it will make new, unimaginable places with which to interact and grow.

When you shine a light -- the brilliant white beam of collective consciousness -- through truth, it refracts.  Into a new, suddenly visible spectrum.  So what is impossible at one level of truth becomes commonplace at another.  As consciousness evolves, it takes, for example, the truth of how a planet is made and turns it into unknown molecules with new laws of relationship. A new physics.

Consciousness is never complete.  It can only keep learning.  Growing.  Becoming.

Number Forty Five

The perfect day ends with a thought: will I have this tomorrow?  And the thought tears what the day was made of.  The fabric of the perfect day is made from the sounds of the outer and inner life -- like two notes of a chord.  And the chord exists not one moment before or one moment after.  When the mind enters before and after, it no longer hears the chord.

The chord is the source of joy.

Number Forty Four

Memory anchors our identity.  The garden with the straight, white paths; the rumbling streetcars that descend -- between dark storefronts -- to the sea: By those scenes I know my loneliness.

Memories make us.  And we return again and again to each familiar image, hoping it will reveal the truth of ourselves.

But we are amnesiacs, captive to the scenes of a single life.  The rest of us, felt in the movement of sun and shadow, known in the chill preceding dark, heard in wind and birdsong and falling water, dwells in a hundred forgotten lives.

Number Forty Three

Identity is to self as a cover is to a book.  It is the face of self.  We learn to recognize ourselves by our cover, by familiar patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.  Identity is built on a sentence that starts, "I am a person who..."

Identity includes the emotions by which we know ourselves.  "I am a person who is...(angry, afraid, sad)."  And characteristic ways we cope.  "I am a person who...(shouts, avoids, gives up, drinks)."  Identity born of reacting to life is left behind when we leave the body.

Identity that grows from what we've learned becomes part of self.  Of soul.  It is an enduring core wisdom that evolves with each life.  "I am a person who has realized..." is the place where self and identity merge, and the reason we are here.

Number Forty Two

To understand what self is, we must first know the purpose of self.  Why are there seven billion "selves" on this planet?  They are all here for one reason: to learn.  To gather experience and wisdom for the whole.  The whole can only evolve and grow as each self observes, remembers, acts, and learns.

Just as bees have mandibles, wings, and legs for the sole purpose of gathering pollen, all the properties of self derive from its purpose.  To learn, each self must observe experience, remember experience, organize experience (into categories and higher order conclusions called wisdom), and choose mental and physical actions (focusing awareness and deciding what to do).

No learning can happen without engaging each property of the self.  No wisdom tradition can find truth through a single aspect of self.  As each self learns, the whole becomes god.