I don’t know about you, but my life lessons were centered around the concept that I was responsible for the quality of my life based on the choices I made and the things I didn’t do. Looking back, I can see the purpose of such teaching, and I can also see that the point of the lessons came from the same erroneous place to which I was directed. The adults in my life taught me about how to live by remembering their past and imagining the results of my actions. In Truth, no one can know with certainty the outcome of any action. There are so many people whose lives do not reflect the results we imagine they should have. We see people who don’t work living as though they did, and those who don’t keep their promises getting to keep what we imagine they should lose. At the same time we see those who seem to have done everything right losing what seems to be their right to have. It’s crazy! Not that this is happening, but that we have been so limited by the desire for some and fear of other outcomes that are not guaranteed.
We don’t really need to know how this works. In fact it would be better if we didn’t know, because then we couldn’t use it as a basis for past reference and future projection. But until we get a grip on that tendency, we will struggle with being in the moment anyway so it’s kind of like the old saying “robbing Peter to pay Paul”. Here goes! The imagined co-dependency between the past and present, present and future, and past and future is what shapes all of our values and actions. How we see the past is not set in stone, any more than how our futures will turn out but it is suggested in the theory of cause and effect. There is a counter concept to the suggestion of cause and effect, it insists that seeing life in this way will keep us stuck in a cycle of suffering because the past is over, the present is but a fleeting moment, and the future is not yet to come.
It’s true. When the seeming results of our actions manifest they are not the future past come true as the present arrives, but the present nearly lost on imagining these other things. And by the time we realize this, the present has become the past. How any of these appear is totally the result of our thoughts in the moment. The past, present and future, as three distinct experiences are actually nothing more than three variations of thought. We use conceptual thoughts to create the past and future which only “exists” as our thoughts in order to determine our choices and behavior. If anything, the past hasn’t come true, but we are being present to thoughts of our past or present to wonderings of our future. These are not separate entities but flexible, selective, coordinated imaginings. We can say we have “memories” which seems to affix our thoughts about the past to actual events. We can do the same with the future only then we refer to “outcomes” and “results”. The bottom line is these do not exist independently of the current moment, they are imagined.
The imagined co-dependency that we call past present and future is the root of all our problems. Introduced as a tool to acquaint us with the ways of the world, we try to use it to stay safe, it is something that needs to change. One might question how we can shape our values without considering the consequences of our past and present behaviors. I would suggest that if no one ever again considered the damage often associated with the past or fear the harm often projected as future there would be no reason, no reactions, to control our being-ness with values. It's time to release the values which might also be called beliefs and limitations. It is difficult to imagine a world that thrives without consideration of limitations, where people don’t base their actions on moral values and beliefs. This is because we are once again considering the outcome of our actions and what has occurred in the past. But a world without limits already exists and it is time for us to return to its wonder. If we don’t concern ourselves with the danger associated with letting go of these considerations then there is only one thing we are left with and this is pure Being, much better than energy lost on illusions of past, present and future. Being replaces the fear-based model with wisdom.
Wisdom may be defined many ways, but if we look at the word as though it were an abbreviation in a text message we might see it as the dominion of what IS. WhatISDOMinion. Okay, so maybe that’s not something you would find in a text message, but stick with it for a moment. To juxtapose wisdom with fear recognizes that fear is all about imagining the domination of what isn’t (known). One acronym (nicely put) summarizes FEAR as Forget Everything and Run. What we have forgotten and what we run from is not our potential outcomes, not the history of our past, but the truth of our real nature.
When we are in wisdom, we accept our is-ness or being-ness, we reside in the center of our being, the seat of the soul. When we feel fear, it is not because of the imaginings we are entertaining about the past or the present or the someone, something, or some condition outside ourselves, but the sense of disconnect we experience as we have removed our awareness from our place of wisdom and limited ourselves to engaging the fear-based model under the illusion that we are separate, partial, un-whole, unholy, in need of limitations to compensate for what we are lacking. This is a very complex plot that fails to render safety instead miring us in the muck of fear, doubt, avoiding and resisting. Wisdom is a state of being that accepts and appreciates all that IS. Of course the fear rises to worry about what is bad, while wisdom recognizes that most of what we thought was bad would not exist at all if it wasn’t for fear. Wisdom is not about embracing what doesn’t work, but seeing it for its transient state, the imagining or memory of what we do not need as it serves only a model that has failed and is ending.
At this point in time we are being called upon to change, to see the devastation of our fear-based model in the lower physical symbols of investments, savings, insurance, jobs, property. It is not to stop having these things, but to stop placing the measure of our lives on our ability to do so and instead embrace the wisdom of knowing that none of these present or missing will make or break what underlies those illusions-- our spirit, our completeness, our holiness.
A simple way to practice wisdom centered being is to recognize those sensations of fear as drops in energy as we displace our awareness to what we imagine outside ourselves, focusing it on the remembered or anticipated actions or reactions of another person, time or thing. We need not take another moment to tell the story in which we were lost. We need only sense the detachment from Self – the drop in energy that is fear - take a breath and refill ourselves in now-here. Yes, that’s also “nowhere” because prior to manifestation which is the illusion of duality and separation, nowhere is that blessed instant, that clean slate upon which the balance and beauty of all potential can be written when we choose to live in What IS DOMinion.
