Friendship – Simple vs Real

Anyone can stand by you when you are right, but a Friend will stand by you even when you are wrong.
A simple friend identifies himself when he calls.  A real friend doesn’t have to.
A simple friend opens a conversation with a full news bulletin on his life.
A real friend says, “What’s new with you?”
A simple friend thinks the problems you whine about are recent.
A real friend says, “You’ve been whining about the same thing for 14 years.  Get off your duff and do something about it.”
A simple friend has never seen you cry.  A real friend has shoulders soggy from your tears.
A simple friend doesn’t know your parents’ first names.  A real friend has their phone numbers in his address book.
A simple friend hates it when you call after he has gone to bed.  A real friend asks you why you took so long to call.
A simple friend seeks to talk with you about your problems.  A real friend seeks to help you with your problems.
A simple friend, when visiting, acts like a guest.  A real friend opens your refrigerator and helps himself.
A simple friend thinks the friendship is over when you have an argument.
A real friend knows that it’s not a friendship until after you’ve had a fight.
A simple friend expects you to always be there for them.  A real friend expects to always be there for you!

Goose Sense

When you see geese flying along in “V” formation, you might consider what science has discovered as to why they fly that way. As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately following. By flying in “V” formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own.

People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going more quickly and easily because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.  When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone – and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front.

If we have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in formation with those people who are headed the same way we are.

Came Across an Old Friend Today – Desiderata

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love;
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

- Max Ehrmann

January thoughts

I’ve taken a few days and gone away to be with – me.  And I realized today that whenever I’ve gone away like this, I’ve always been thinking about how great it is to get away from the madness of work or whatever. I’ve been trying to get away from it all, with no real understanding of what it was I was actually trying to get. This weekend for the first time, I’ve been enjoying the positive side – having time with me.

And having spent some time with me, I’ve found that I really like:
watching the snow fall;
staring out of steamed up windows, watching condensation dribble down;
walking by myself across the fields;
walking into very strong winds;
watching the snow being blown over the land;
saying “good morning” to people I don’t know in the street;
saying “good morning” to people ‘cos they’re in the same hotel as you;
having a picnic lunch by myself;
running downhill and not knowing how I’m going to stop myself;
having a cup of tea in my hotel room;
reading the Sunday Times magazine with my breakfast;
deciding what I want to do next;
smiling;
yeah, smiling a lot;
singing very loudly on the beach because nobody can hear me;
not caring when I turn round and find that someone *can* hear me;
hiding by the rocks and talking to myself;
seeing the sun break through the clouds.
y’know that sort of stuff.

Listening – the difference between intuition and chit chat

“Listening to Spirit”

How do you know the difference between intuition and chit-chat?

No one can tell you what your intuition sounds like or looks like or feels like. Only you can figure it out. Sometimes it’s so strong and unmistakable, almost like a burning bush. Other times it’s like a gentle breeze that you could miss if you are too active.

When I decided that I wanted to follow inner guidance, but could not distinguish between Spirit and self, I figured I would just follow everything. For a long time that led to wild goose chases, and lots of frustration. I would evaluate my choices after they came into manifestation. When I started to do this it would take me 6-12 months to even realize I needed to evaluate the choice. It took me 3 years to get down to 1-2 days. I noticed, through my evaluations, that guidance from self almost always required me to push and force. While guidance from Spirit had me moving through life in a dance. The contrast was remarkable.

Choosing a path

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.

Carlos Castaneda

What will I be doing tomorrow? Where will I be? With whom will I be? While I can’t predict the future, of course, I do know that the answers to these questions to a great extent depend on what I do today, on decisions I make about which road to get on right here, right now. There is, of course, no right or wrong road, and we may end up going down several different roads for different aspects of our lives, but we do have many decisions to make.

Create your own life and then go out and live it.

Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were meant to be there… to serve some sort of purpose, teach you a lesson or help figure out who you are or who you want to become. You never know who these people may be but when you lock eyes with them, you know at that very moment that they will affect your life in some profound way.

And sometimes things happen to you that may seem horrible, painful and unfair, but in reflection you realize that without overcoming those obstacles you would have never realized your potential, strength, willpower or heart.

Nothing happens by chance or by means of good luck.

Mindfulness, thoughtfulness and patience from Hesse’s Siddhartha

I found an old copy of Siddhartha. The first time I read it was over 40 years ago!

Hesse began writing this novel in 1919 in the nightmarish aftermath of World War 1 and his wife’s overwhelming schizophrenia. This was Hesse’s effort, like Siddhartha’s, to meet the fear of impermanence and find a true path. Thirty years later, Siddhartha, published in English in 1951, resonated with seekers of the Beat and post-Beat generations, who knew in their bones that the time were changing. But what about the book? The story is simple, the language plain as befits a fable, maybe a bit preachy, overladen with teachings. Siddhartha is both spiritual biography and fiction. This simultaneously interests and discomforts.

It seems at first to parallel the life of Buddha, then diverges and becomes, perhaps, the life of a Buddha. It would be a stretch to say there is a plot. Rather, the novel moves through a sequence of relationships –with Siddhartha’s boyhood friend Govinda, who becomes a disciple of the Buddha; Gotama Buddha himself; the courtesan Kamala, who schools Siddhartha in sensuality but sees that he is sadly unable to open his heart; the merchant Kamaswami, who teaches him the ways of commerce, simultaneously leading toward material wealth and spiritual poverty; the saintly old ferryman Vasudeva, his closest companion; Siddhartha’s unnamed and prideful son, child of Kamala, who flees his father’s righteousness; and, at last, the river itself, all-accepting, ever-flowing. Siddhartha’s understanding is tempered and shaped by each encounter. Each is incomplete, each leads to suffering, yet the reader sees that wholeness is always nearby. But it takes all of this book, all his life, for Siddhartha to see this himself and mysteriously transmit it with a kiss to his oldest friend and fellow seeker, Govinda. Is Siddhartha’s message particularly “Buddhist”? Maybe not, but it has surely led many thousands in that direction. Hesse, speaking through Siddhartha, calls his path “yoga-veda,” or the yogi’s way.

Doctrinal purity is impossible, but each of us can choose to live a meaningful life. I would say, to borrow from Sulak Sivaraksa, that this is Buddhism with a small b. From reading about Hesse’s life and his deep involvement with psychoanalysis, it strikes me that this novel is the first meddling of psychology and Dharma, a melding that today is often found in Western Buddhism. One can see the ferryman Vasudeva, with his infinite ability to listen, as a scantily clad proto-analyst. In the middle of the book, Siddhartha is asked several times to explain what he has learned from his years as a mendicant and seeker. He says, “I can think, I can wait, I can fast.” This means, I believe, that Siddhartha can use his mind and senses, he can practice patience, and he can endure hardship — essential capacity for the practice of spiritual life. No one of these qualities is sufficient for awakening, but the ability to wait, to be patient, to accept and release each moment is key.

I find that mindfulness, thoughtfulness and patience are at the root of a compassionate life.

Finally, this is where Siddhartha arrives and embodies his own name, which means “one who has accomplished his aim or purpose.” From ferryman Vasudeva, from the river, from his own trials and reflections, Siddhartha learns to listen — and his innate wisdom flowers: “It was nothing more than a readiness of the soul, a mysterious knack: the ability at every moment in the midst of life to think the thought of unity, to feel and breathe unity.” Hamlet says that “readiness is all.” In the face of impermanence, this is my watchword. Between the writing of Siddhartha’s “Part One” and “Part Two,” two years unfolded as Hermann Hesse worked his way out of depression and became “ready,” receptive, able to find his way to the novel’s end. I admire his intention, dedication and skill.

May we all get ready and wake up.

Trust, trusting ourselves

In a world in which we are exposed to more information, more options, more philosophies, more perspectives than ever before, in which we must choose the values by which we will live (rather than unquestioningly follow some tradition for no better reason than that our own parents did), we need to be willing to stand on our own judgment and trust our own intelligence—to look at the world through our own eyes—to chart our course and think through how to achieve the future we want, to commit ourselves to continuous questioning and learning—to be, in a word, self-responsible.

Nathaniel Branden

Trusting ourselves–what a concept that is! In a world in which there are hundreds of people every day in our media, in ads, and in our personal lives telling us that we should trust their judgment and do as they say, it’s quite a novel concept to trust ourselves and to trust what we learn and what that learning means to us. But you see, we have to live our own lives and make our own ways through this world, so it’s up to us–and only us–to determine who we become and how we interact with the world, its people, and its nature.

We all were given intelligence, and we all have our own unique conscience. We were given our own sets of desires and wishes and wants, and we were given our unique gifts that will allow us to make the best of our lives if we use them to their fullest potential. We choose the values we live by, and we choose how we treat others. Far too often, though, the criterion for our choices is simply, “Well, that’s how everyone else does it.” This criterion, needless to say, doesn’t take into account our uniqueness or our own judgment. It’s an easy way out of having to make decisions that may be fairly difficult to make.

But those are the decisions that make you who you are, and that help you to become the person you’re meant to be. If you don’t make them, you’re standing in place or treading water, however you wish to look at it. That’s not fair to you as a person, and you deserve to be treated fairly, especially by yourself.

Using negative angry feelings

If we face our unpleasant feelings with care, affection, and nonviolence, we can transform them into a kind of energy that is healthy and has the capacity to nourish us. By the work of mindful observation, our unpleasant feelings can illuminate so much for us, offering us insight and understanding into ourselves and society.

Thich Nhat Hanh

More often than not, we’re taught to “banish” unpleasant feelings, because of course, they make us feel bad. So let’s get rid of them, get them out of our lives and out of our minds and out of our hearts so that we can live healthy, positive, pleasant lives.

But what if there’s something to learn from those unpleasant feelings? What if the fear that we’re feeling has a deeper message? What if the discomfort we have when we’re in the presence of a particular person has something to teach us about our own prejudices, biases, or instinct? Ignoring the feeling and trying to push it away will do nothing to help us to learn whatever it is that the feeling is trying to teach us.

It would be much like going to a class and disliking the content, and thus never reading the text because we didn’t like it. We may avoid more unpleasant feelings of dislike by avoiding the text, but what have we learned? Of course, we’ve learned nothing, and we’ve made an obvious choice to learn nothing.

Unpleasant feelings can be a part of who we are. When they’re caused by something specific, they can be a part of us for as long as that something is a part of our lives. But what can we learn from them? How can we face those feelings and accept them and actually learn to care for them, no matter how unpleasant they are? Until we find out how we can do so, we may be losing some of the most important lessons of our lives by trying to banish the unpleasant feelings just to feel a bit better in the moment.