Number Seventy Six

We are here to choose.  Every hour, every minute.  Our bodies and minds are a vessel in which decisions are formed so action can be taken.  What happens after each choice is then observed, and becomes the source of our personal wisdom.

A baby chooses to crawl from a high step.  And falls.  The outcome -- a first awareness of gravity -- will influence other choices.  And will expand to a deeper knowledge: that support can prevent so many kinds of falling.

Every outcome observed creates wisdom -- whether the choice is made freely or unconsciously, coerced by pain and pleasure.  But free choice is only possible with full awareness: completely facing and knowing an experience; the willingness to see and feel all there is.  Free choice is the source of wise action -- what we came here to learn.

Number Seventy Five

The mind does four things to protect the life of the body: it predicts, explains, judges, and chooses.  These are its tools for solving problems, the clear and temporary threats that arrive daily in our lives.

But in the face of continuous uncertainty -- the actual fabric of life -- the mind tries to solve the unsolvable.  The mind predicts catastrophe, shuttles from theory to theory, makes searing judgments about what's wrong or right -- and becomes paralyzed.  Thoughts race, but no truth can be found.

The tools of the mind become a plague when we try to solve the core uncertainty of planetary living.  Problem solving mind becomes, inevitably, monkey mind.  The the only way forward, toward truth or knowing, lies just beneath the breath. In that stillness lives all that we've learned, in hundreds of lives, and the conversations -- loud and continuous -- of all the souls who love us.

Number Seventy Four

We learn by doing.  And failing.  The angels whisper to us, but in the end every soul is a scientist -- learning by seeing how things turn out.  Failure is completely acceptable because -- as with every experiment -- failure reveals what isn't true and what doesn't work.

We learn from failure. Our lives are rightly full of it. There is no other teacher whose lessons are so dear, so convincing. The guides and the masters are interpreters -- showing what happened and why.  But we are here for one reason: to learn to be the architects of the next universe.

Number Seventy Three

In the end, as each universe goes dark, all that has been learned turns into the next big bang. And at each inception, a little more of what was unconscious and hidden -- implicit knowledge that can only be felt but not seen -- becomes light.

Number Seventy Two

We are guided by light. The light comes in the form of a thought, a sentence spoken by passing angels.  The light ceaselessly bathes us, but we see it only in rare moments.  Our path, hidden usually by fear or desire, becomes at those times suddenly clear, as if seen in a full moon. But soon the words are gone; the thought disappears. And though the light still shines, we step blindly, knowing only the shadow of pleasure and pain.

Number Seventy One

Every conversation is driven by two things: the desire to be seen and the fear of being seen; the desire to connect against the fear of judgment.

In the life between lives, judgment is just recognition of whether something works.  What we do is either effective, or not; it achieves its purpose, or not.  There is no good/bad, no hierarchy of worth.  Here, judgment is dangerous, dismembering the self; tearing off parts that are called bad and get disowned.

So we are funny or polite.  We hide.  And what's judged in us is thrown away -- the rejected self.  In the quiet between bursts of laughter, between the small remarks, the disease of not belonging grows.

Number Seventy

The alarm sounds and we are afraid.  The alarm says, "run, protect yourself, stay alive."  The alarm rings in the body and the mind to make us zig-zag away from danger.  Avoiding danger is the work of the body.  Seeing danger is the work of the mind.

None of this has anything to do with us.  It is a place we live.  It is a house that will one day not survive the wind and weight of snow.  We are visitors, caught up and amazed by the customs, the way things work here.

This place runs on fear.  Fear creates the illusion of evil.  Fear makes invisible the strands that join us.  And it makes us forget why we came to visit in the first place.

The air raid and the fire alarm, the raised voice before a rejection, the darkness falling on an unfamiliar street  -- it is merely content obscuring meaning.