The List of Tricks

This is a much bigger post for my silence than anticipated, but since Ive written it, Ill post it:

Well, clearly Ive been spending lots of time thinking about what makes for a happy "enlightened" life. The following little brain dump is my current view on the subject. No doubt more enlightened people will disagree with it in places, and no doubt I will myself change my views in time. But this is what it seems like to me at the moment...

And I think for the most part it comes down to the following little list of "Tricks"
1) To be Aware.
2) To be Present.
3) To Accept.
4) To Care.
Sounds simple enough but I think it is the "all time list of hard things to do"!
The little rhyme to capture it is;
"Aim to stay present and aware, not to mind but to care"

And now for a short explanation:
The awareness means that we need to stop taking things for granted and pay a whole lot more attention to things. At present, most of us don't bother paying attention - we accept what were told by the media, we watch our sitcoms and eat our fast food - More or less we are brain dead and then we complain about why our life is so disappointing... If we were to actually pay attention, we will discern far more and be far better able to interact successfully with the world than we do as average people. It also means that we need to apply the intellect that we were given and to discriminate! That means deciding carefully about what things are important and what things are not, and what is true and what is false and what is some of each etc. - Its a big difference to the way we mostly live but it can easily make life far better although it also requires far more effort on our part - I guess that means that most of us wont bother!... oh well :)
Not only that but we will thereby be able to see far more of the absolute beauty that is always surrounding us but that we have just forgotten how to see :)

The Presence aspect goes hand in hand with the awareness but it involves "Disengaging the Mind" whenever possible and just letting our sensory input "wash over us". This aspect of disengaging the mind though is completely the mental reverse of the Awareness objective so it can be tricky to balance. Ive mentioned before that it seems like I have spent huge amounts of my life thinking things through. There is an immense amount of personal suffering involved in most of this thinking and most of it relates to either past or future events that absolutely nothing can be done about. - Its self inflicted suffering and I think most of us do it most of the time. We have been trained to do it almost all our lives so it is no wonder but it need not be so.
If you stop thinking about the past (and the futures that should have been...) and stop worrying about the future (which will get here when it is good and ready) then you will find that there is almost no bad feelings left in your life.... In fact, just about the only emotion that is left functional if you truly focus on what is happening right NOW is ... Love :)
Yep, everything else is a product of thinking about stuff. There are only a few things that effect us in the now and these are things like hunger, warmth, and pain and of course these need to be dealt with, but the rest is all from the thinking mind.
And again, if we can stop the mind making our lives hell and just look at all the amazingly beauty that surrounds us all the time, and let more of that sensory input come through to our awareness, we can feel that love welling up from inside and let it out into the world :)

The Acceptance aspect is the reason that we spend so much of our lives with our minds engaged and blocking out the experience of the present. As I mentioned in my post about "the myth of security", we are mostly being "run" by our egos and we fear change. This causes huge internal resistance in us (non-acceptance) which causes huge amounts of thinking and bad feelings and we let those out into the world rather than the good feelings... If we can learn to let the world be as it is and not to fight internally with the past or to worry so much about the future then we will have infinitely more time in the present to truly experience life.


The Caring aspect is a hard one to balance with the acceptance aspect.
So, the mind wont think as much if we accept the world as is rather than resisting. This is easily achieved if we just "don't care" about what it is that IS. For most of the stuff we come across in our daily lives, this is a very effective system!
And it seems that there are in fact plenty of people out there who don't "give a damn" about anything but them selves. They don't care about other people or the environment or anything - just money and their goals.
I for one think this is a problem! I think it is in fact critical to care, but the problem is that there are so many things that confront us every day that would just leave us as a weeping pile of misery if we let ourselves care as we currently understand the word, that we would be totally "consumed" in a matter of hours!
This is a huge challenge and how to balance caring along with acceptance is a huge trick ...
It is called Compassion! And without it, in my opinion we are little more than animals!


That's the short explanation and now I will try to elaborate in individual posts...