Books | A NEW NOW | Excerpt

“He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the path to salvation.”

—Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge  by W. Somerset Maugham

CHAPTER ONE

A New Now

Why This Book?

You have been given the most precious gift—your human life. Before you know it, it will be over. Why not make best use of it? 

You may be doing your best to get through each day, but messages you absorbed, knowingly and unknowingly, from family, friends, religion, therapies, and even social media may be impeding your way. You may be living with a tangled amalgam of conflicting impulses or ways of being that do not serve you or support who you are and who you can become. You were born to realize your fullest potential.

Philosophers and writers from Epictetus, Montaigne, Emerson, and beyond spoke and wrote about how to live. The ancient Greek injunction to “Know thyself” is crucial to living your best life, your fullest self.

By engaging with your awareness, you develop your inherent wisdom and powers of knowing, and ultimately step into a new reality. You have the capacity to live on a higher plane. You have an authentic self that can be freed and empowered.

By working with this book and engaging your consciousness throughout the day, you will step into a new reality, a new now. The benefits awaiting you are many. Here are some:

    •    Centering and focusing of your energy

    •    Clarity of mind

    •    Choice and enrichment of relationships

    •    Enhanced creativity and productivity

    •    Enlightened direction of health and healing

    •    Being present

    •    Development of intuition

    •    Happiness each day

    •    Grooming of your destiny

As you free and empower your authentic self, your will and willpower will clarify and strengthen to meet challenges that greet you. Also, you will learn to muster the spiritual strength, discrimination, and qualities necessary to engage with each situation. You won’t be at the mercy of negative emotions. Rather, you will be able to choose to let go of expressions of anger that might otherwise run you. The benevolent emotions you experience will inform your life, like a suffusion of warm sunshine breaking through an overcast sky. You will gain a keen awareness that will observe, negotiate, and choose to be at the cause of your unfolding life, rather than its beleaguered victim. Ultimately, this all will be expressed naturally and automatically, moment to moment. 

Does this seem like an impossible dream? Do you doubt that you have the potential to bloom into your wisdom? That’s okay. You can doubt and at the same time nurture the belief that you can achieve all this and more. 

The essential question is: How can I live as my aware self? If you ask yourself this question and explore it, realms of possibility open. One pathway to the authentic you is to live with wisdom.

Working with this book will help you become wiser, achieve a state of equilibrium, develop a clearer and stronger sense of your purpose, and travel through your days as fully conscious as possible moment to moment, so that you begin to experience a new now, now and now and now. This is moving toward being truly alive.

Why Wisdom?

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary first defines wisdom as “the effectual mediating principle or personification of God’s will in the world.” Wow. How can this be understood? The archaic definition of mediate is to form a connecting link. Synonyms are “conveying” and “conciliating.” Effectual means characterized by adequate power to produce an intended effect or result. In this sense, Wisdom (capitalized) is the connection between our all-knowing Source (God) and us. By growing in Wisdom, we express more of the divine, the intended divine, God’s will. That’s inspiring. 

Aspects of wisdom include insight, knowledge, sagacity, virtue, prudence, judgment, and sanity. Wisdom is utilizing the best of your mental and intuitive faculties moment to moment. 

Wisdom can be defined simply as the comprehension of knowing. Knowing is something that is apprehended or you take possession of in your awareness. Webster’s defines knowing as “the condition or fact of possessing understanding or information or of being aware of something.”

Is it a coincidence that the word “know” is “now” preceded by a k? To know is to comprehend the now. Many sages have said or written something to the effect of: “Now is all we have.” The letter k comes from the Greek letter k (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kaph, the symbol for an open hand. To know is to open your hand to receive the now. 

The species of human beings is Homo sapiens. This is from the Latin homo, “man,” plus sapiens, the present participle of sapere, to be wise. As a member of the species, by being wise you are fulfilling your birthright and your ability to master reality. 

Another way wisdom can be understood is the capability of apprehending reality in your awareness. The more wisdom you possess, the closer you are to omniscience. Being omniscient is having infinite awareness, understanding, and insight; knowing all things; spontaneously accessing perfect wisdom. This is your divine birthright.

If you embark on your journey of mastering wisdom daily, you will be able to move sleekly toward becoming the best you that you can be. You can know better how to live. That’s how best to live, for you. As you learn to handle astutely whatever difficulties and challenges arise, you can begin to master the art of living. You can make decisions that best serve you and others. You can evolve, knowing automatically: what next? You will be able to avoid all kinds of unnecessary involvements that otherwise would fill you with fear, uncertainty, anxiety, and negativity. You will also be able to avoid captivating attractions and false shoulds that divert you from your true path. 

The mastery of the art of living is in how well you negotiate the challenges that come and the impulses and demands of your mind. As you progress with this mastery, when you make free time and ask yourself the essential question— “How can I live as my aware self?”—you open the door to ideas and possibilities.

Developing your wisdom is a way of taking charge of your life while, at the same time, aligning yourself with your higher consciousness. In this way, you are attuned to those quicksilver nudges that come unbidden from that consciousness. And because you have been pulling the weeds of negativity, tilling the field, and sowing good seeds, you are more likely to notice these intuitive, supremely helpful intuitions and act on them.

Life is tough. At least, that’s the way it feels much of the time to many of us. But you can also look at it as an ongoing journey in which, to navigate well, you need to use all of your wits. As we progress from babies to infants to children and then on to teenagers, young adults, and mature adults, we grow in our ability to navigate. Some progression in wisdom is naturally taking place. But we have vast, untapped resources of knowing what to do when. Each of us has a benevolent, higher, better self that we can learn to open to more and more.

Imagine that your consciousness is an inverted well of knowing. Think of it as an aquifer. An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock. Think of strata rising in your field of awareness with the spaces between the strata as pure consciousness that can filter down to your everyday present awareness. Believe that you have an infinite, inexhaustible aquifer behind your eyebrows that you can access and which will flow through to you. The conscious work you do with yourself accesses that “liquid” higher consciousness and dissolves the rock that is holding it back. 

Gaining better and better access to your inherent well of knowing transforms your life. It gives you assurance, freedom from anxieties, sure purpose, readier achievements, and happiness.

You can master wisdom daily, at your own pace. You don’t need to disrupt your life and attend expensive retreats. You can integrate your own private course into your daily life. In fact, this is the best way to master wisdom daily. 

To practice and master wisdom daily, you will need to observe what is going on within you—your feelings, thoughts, flashes of intuition, changes in bodily sensations—and what is going on around you—especially interactions with people. You can learn to be a detached, discerning observer of your life rather than be pulled from one impulse to the next, unknowingly. It’s not difficult—you’re simply devoting a bit of awareness to observing. Exercising your observer awareness is a muscle of awareness you possess and may or may not have developed. Your observer awareness is your friend and an element of your consciousness that you can trust and let guide you to enhanced richness and satisfaction and a life truer to who you are and to who you are becoming.

Thus, the way to master wisdom is to teach yourself. Working with this book, read a section, be aware of it, and apply it to feelings, thoughts, situations, and actions as they arise. From time to time, when you are prompted—intuitively or mentally—read a particular section or return to it, and know or figure out how you can apply it to your life. If you are so moved, write notes that you date and can access later.

How many times have you read an inspiring and practical book only to forget its key revelations and lose the opportunity to integrate its wisdom into your life? If you only read a book, you may remember one to three things and, if you don’t forget them, to what extent would you incorporate them in your life? That’s why to profit handsomely from this experience and bring about real change, you might want to keep a journal. You could call it your “Journey Journal.” 

The Journey Journal is the means by which you can gain the most value from this book, by choosing what you want to work and play with and recording key lines from the book and your experiences, reflections, and goals. You can also enter what you intend to practice and enter the page number of the book that discusses it. Then after you do practice it, you can write about it. Although your creative juices may flow better if you write by hand, if the entries are typed (after your handwriting or initially) and searchable, you’ll be able to find your observations, experiences, and states of mind and relate them to where you are presently.

You can create a section for items you would like to attend to in the future with references to your journal and/or the book. When you read a section that triggers a response such as curiosity, ideas, memories, or hopes you want to explore, you can also practice freewriting either by hand or typing. Freewriting is letting yourself go to write whatever you feel like, knowing that it can and will be free of others’ scrutiny and your own judgment. Freewriting is meant to be freeing, opening your expression to feelings, higher knowing, and inspiration.

If the name Journey Journal does not appeal to you, you might wish to call it Now Notes, Experience Journal, Wisdom Journal, or simply Journal or Diary. Choose whatever feels best and resonates the strongest for you. This is your personal, private journey. If you’d like to keep your journal entries organized in the applicable chapters and sections of this book, you can download a Word file of “Contents” in Free Media on my website (goddart.com).

If you keep a journal, it can be a valuable tool in facilitating growth. It’s something you can return to and read to help make sense of your life journey and purpose. Every step you take toward mastering wisdom is positive and allows you to evolve into the being you are meant to become. Along with learning to master different expressions of wisdom, learning to achieve equilibrium will greatly facilitate your mastery of wisdom.

The Power and Potential of Equilibrium 

Equilibrium is dynamic balance, a spiritual center that you can live in and learn to return to again and again. Being in a state of equilibrium is wonderful. It enriches your life and helps you feel good and supports your health.

What are the characteristics of equilibrium? Here are five key ones.

    ➢    Quiescent ego

    ➢    Even temperament

    ➢    Grateful contentment

    ➢    Healthy independence

    ➢    Balanced desires

Quiescence is a state of repose, being tranquil. When your ego is quiescent, it isn’t raging for something it “needs” desperately. When your ego is quiescent, it isn’t inflated, self-justifying, self-pitying, or wallowing in injury. It isn’t driving you to take actions or say things that aren’t in your best interest. Being unaware of your ego, letting it ride roughshod, is self-defeating, knocking you about in dys-ease. The antidote to ego is humility—welcome, revitalizing oxygen.

When your temperament is even, you are not anxious or angry, negatively critical, upset, leery, or fearful. Your instincts are accessible and you’re open to inner promptings. You realize that most people are entirely run by their minds and have no control over what they say and do. People who are run by their lower minds do, say, and write things that are unkind, hurtful, stupid, destructive. Their actions can readily set off your reactions, which can be angry, fearful, or one of their myriad expressions, such as annoyance and worry. 

Have you ever felt or thought that you have everything this moment that you need? One aspect of wise, clear thinking is not mistaking where you think or hope you’re going for where you are now. With contentment comes acceptance. You may yearn to understand what you could do with the rest of your life, but embrace the perfection of who you are now and the intention to take each next step in your life as consciously as possible. Acceptance is a key element of consciously living in reality. Acceptance is not resignation. It’s being here, now, rather than allowing yourself to be run by envy or disappointment. Grateful contentment is a feeling of ease, of peace, of everything in its own time. Regardless of your circumstances, if you attain periods of grateful contentment, more and more, in your state of equilibrium, you will cherish these simple, luxurious feelings.

When you are able to live in a state of healthy independence, your life is not ruled by attachments. You realize that everything is ultimately temporary. People must leave your life and at times that can be unexpected. You are not the center of the solar system, with everyone revolving around you. You have a great storehouse of resourcefulness that you can access to enable your life to proceed well without unhealthy neediness that inhibits your growth.

When your desires are not inflated or squelched down, you are aware of them, and moving at the right time and speed toward realizing them in a way that serves your growth and unfolding. We are desire machines—the mind is constantly spewing out desires. You can learn to be aware of how your desires want to drive you, and you can mentally detach from them, as well as you can, and make mental adjustments that balance your urges and put them in perspective. Being the driver of your desires creates more space for gratitude. By cultivating mental detachment from your desires, you can more readily be present in an expansive now in which you can experience a healthy independence and grateful contentment.

Wisdom and equilibrium go hand in hand. Being in equilibrium is an optimal state in which you can best access your power and develop your potential. You more readily enjoy a positive, confident attitude because when you are in equilibrium that comes naturally. You can more easily deal with and rise above distractions. Being in equilibrium and learning how to achieve and return to it is a necessary adjunct to mastering wisdom. It facilitates the accessing and growth of wisdom. 

The more you realize and embody the five characteristics of equilibrium, the more you reduce stress. Tomes can be written on the benefits of reducing stress. Some doctors believe that stress is the root of all disease. Some spiritual masters say that ego is the root of all disease. Stress and ego are intrinsically linked. This is because when we think then feel that people and things have to be a certain way, and they’re not—we stress. 

If you think you need to get three things done before you leave your home and you rush to get them done, that likely creates stress. You are letting yourself be run by a belief that is undermining your health and state of mind. Why not pause and ask yourself if you can let go of one or two of the things until the right time after you return? It’s not the end of the world if, for instance, dishes remain in the sink filled with water until you can attend to them in a good frame of mind. It’s important to notice what feels good, what feels right. Value your equilibrium. That is being wise. That is helping to prepare the field of your spiritual foundation.

Books | A NEW NOW | Excerpt

“He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the path to salvation.”

—Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge  by W. Somerset Maugham

CHAPTER ONE

A New Now

Why This Book?

You have been given the most precious gift—your human life. Before you know it, it will be over. Why not make best use of it? 

You may be doing your best to get through each day, but messages you absorbed, knowingly and unknowingly, from family, friends, religion, therapies, and even social media may be impeding your way. You may be living with a tangled amalgam of conflicting impulses or ways of being that do not serve you or support who you are and who you can become. You were born to realize your fullest potential.

Philosophers and writers from Epictetus, Montaigne, Emerson, and beyond spoke and wrote about how to live. The ancient Greek injunction to “Know thyself” is crucial to living your best life, your fullest self.

By engaging with your awareness, you develop your inherent wisdom and powers of knowing, and ultimately step into a new reality. You have the capacity to live on a higher plane. You have an authentic self that can be freed and empowered.

By working with this book and engaging your consciousness throughout the day, you will step into a new reality, a new now. The benefits awaiting you are many. Here are some:

    •    Centering and focusing of your energy

    •    Clarity of mind

    •    Choice and enrichment of           relationships

    •    Enhanced creativity and productivity

    •    Enlightened direction of health and           healing

    •    Being present

    •    Development of intuition

    •    Happiness each day

    •    Grooming of your destiny

As you free and empower your authentic self, your will and willpower will clarify and strengthen to meet challenges that greet you. Also, you will learn to muster the spiritual strength, discrimination, and qualities necessary to engage with each situation. You won’t be at the mercy of negative emotions. Rather, you will be able to choose to let go of expressions of anger that might otherwise run you. The benevolent emotions you experience will inform your life, like a suffusion of warm sunshine breaking through an overcast sky. You will gain a keen awareness that will observe, negotiate, and choose to be at the cause of your unfolding life, rather than its beleaguered victim. Ultimately, this all will be expressed naturally and automatically, moment to moment. 

Does this seem like an impossible dream? Do you doubt that you have the potential to bloom into your wisdom? That’s okay. You can doubt and at the same time nurture the belief that you can achieve all this and more. 

The essential question is: How can I live as my aware self? If you ask yourself this question and explore it, realms of possibility open. One pathway to the authentic you is to live with wisdom.

Working with this book will help you become wiser, achieve a state of equilibrium, develop a clearer and stronger sense of your purpose, and travel through your days as fully conscious as possible moment to moment, so that you begin to experience a new now, now and now and now. This is moving toward being truly alive.

Why Wisdom?

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary first defines wisdom as “the effectual mediating principle or personification of God’s will in the world.” Wow. How can this be understood? The archaic definition of mediate is to form a connecting link. Synonyms are “conveying” and “conciliating.” Effectual means characterized by adequate power to produce an intended effect or result. In this sense, Wisdom (capitalized) is the connection between our all-knowing Source (God) and us. By growing in Wisdom, we express more of the divine, the intended divine, God’s will. That’s inspiring. 

Aspects of wisdom include insight, knowledge, sagacity, virtue, prudence, judgment, and sanity. Wisdom is utilizing the best of your mental and intuitive faculties moment to moment. 

Wisdom can be defined simply as the comprehension of knowing. Knowing is something that is apprehended or you take possession of in your awareness. Webster’s defines knowing as “the condition or fact of possessing understanding or information or of being aware of something.”

Is it a coincidence that the word “know” is “now” preceded by a k? To know is to comprehend the now. Many sages have said or written something to the effect of: “Now is all we have.” The letter k comes from the Greek letter k (kappa), which was taken from the Semitic kaph, the symbol for an open hand. To know is to open your hand to receive the now. 

The species of human beings is Homo sapiens. This is from the Latin homo, “man,” plus sapiens, the present participle of sapere, to be wise. As a member of the species, by being wise you are fulfilling your birthright and your ability to master reality. 

Another way wisdom can be understood is the capability of apprehending reality in your awareness. The more wisdom you possess, the closer you are to omniscience. Being omniscient is having infinite awareness, understanding, and insight; knowing all things; spontaneously accessing perfect wisdom. This is your divine birthright.

If you embark on your journey of mastering wisdom daily, you will be able to move sleekly toward becoming the best you that you can be. You can know better how to live. That’s how best to live, for you. As you learn to handle astutely whatever difficulties and challenges arise, you can begin to master the art of living. You can make decisions that best serve you and others. You can evolve, knowing automatically: what next? You will be able to avoid all kinds of unnecessary involvements that otherwise would fill you with fear, uncertainty, anxiety, and negativity. You will also be able to avoid captivating attractions and false shoulds that divert you from your true path. 

The mastery of the art of living is in how well you negotiate the challenges that come and the impulses and demands of your mind. As you progress with this mastery, when you make free time and ask yourself the essential question— “How can I live as my aware self?”—you open the door to ideas and possibilities.

Developing your wisdom is a way of taking charge of your life while, at the same time, aligning yourself with your higher consciousness. In this way, you are attuned to those quicksilver nudges that come unbidden from that consciousness. And because you have been pulling the weeds of negativity, tilling the field, and sowing good seeds, you are more likely to notice these intuitive, supremely helpful intuitions and act on them.

Life is tough. At least, that’s the way it feels much of the time to many of us. But you can also look at it as an ongoing journey in which, to navigate well, you need to use all of your wits. As we progress from babies to infants to children and then on to teenagers, young adults, and mature adults, we grow in our ability to navigate. Some progression in wisdom is naturally taking place. But we have vast, untapped resources of knowing what to do when. Each of us has a benevolent, higher, better self that we can learn to open to more and more.

Imagine that your consciousness is an inverted well of knowing. Think of it as an aquifer. An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock. Think of strata rising in your field of awareness with the spaces between the strata as pure consciousness that can filter down to your everyday present awareness. Believe that you have an infinite, inexhaustible aquifer behind your eyebrows that you can access and which will flow through to you. The conscious work you do with yourself accesses that “liquid” higher consciousness and dissolves the rock that is holding it back. 

Gaining better and better access to your inherent well of knowing transforms your life. It gives you assurance, freedom from anxieties, sure purpose, readier achievements, and happiness.

You can master wisdom daily, at your own pace. You don’t need to disrupt your life and attend expensive retreats. You can integrate your own private course into your daily life. In fact, this is the best way to master wisdom daily. 

To practice and master wisdom daily, you will need to observe what is going on within you—your feelings, thoughts, flashes of intuition, changes in bodily sensations—and what is going on around you—especially interactions with people. You can learn to be a detached, discerning observer of your life rather than be pulled from one impulse to the next, unknowingly. It’s not difficult—you’re simply devoting a bit of awareness to observing. Exercising your observer awareness is a muscle of awareness you possess and may or may not have developed. Your observer awareness is your friend and an element of your consciousness that you can trust and let guide you to enhanced richness and satisfaction and a life truer to who you are and to who you are becoming.

Thus, the way to master wisdom is to teach yourself. Working with this book, read a section, be aware of it, and apply it to feelings, thoughts, situations, and actions as they arise. From time to time, when you are prompted—intuitively or mentally—read a particular section or return to it, and know or figure out how you can apply it to your life. If you are so moved, write notes that you date and can access later.

How many times have you read an inspiring and practical book only to forget its key revelations and lose the opportunity to integrate its wisdom into your life? If you only read a book, you may remember one to three things and, if you don’t forget them, to what extent would you incorporate them in your life? That’s why to profit handsomely from this experience and bring about real change, you might want to keep a journal. You could call it your “Journey Journal.” 

The Journey Journal is the means by which you can gain the most value from this book, by choosing what you want to work and play with and recording key lines from the book and your experiences, reflections, and goals. You can also enter what you intend to practice and enter the page number of the book that discusses it. Then after you do practice it, you can write about it. Although your creative juices may flow better if you write by hand, if the entries are typed (after your handwriting or initially) and searchable, you’ll be able to find your observations, experiences, and states of mind and relate them to where you are presently.

You can create a section for items you would like to attend to in the future with references to your journal and/or the book. When you read a section that triggers a response such as curiosity, ideas, memories, or hopes you want to explore, you can also practice freewriting either by hand or typing. Freewriting is letting yourself go to write whatever you feel like, knowing that it can and will be free of others’ scrutiny and your own judgment. Freewriting is meant to be freeing, opening your expression to feelings, higher knowing, and inspiration.

If the name Journey Journal does not appeal to you, you might wish to call it Now Notes, Experience Journal, Wisdom Journal, or simply Journal or Diary. Choose whatever feels best and resonates the strongest for you. This is your personal, private journey. If you’d like to keep your journal entries organized in the applicable chapters and sections of this book, you can download a Word file of “Contents” in Free Media on my website (goddart.com).

If you keep a journal, it can be a valuable tool in facilitating growth. It’s something you can return to and read to help make sense of your life journey and purpose. Every step you take toward mastering wisdom is positive and allows you to evolve into the being you are meant to become. Along with learning to master different expressions of wisdom, learning to achieve equilibrium will greatly facilitate your mastery of wisdom.

The Power and Potential of Equilibrium 

Equilibrium is dynamic balance, a spiritual center that you can live in and learn to return to again and again. Being in a state of equilibrium is wonderful. It enriches your life and helps you feel good and supports your health.

What are the characteristics of equilibrium? Here are five key ones.

    ➢    Quiescent ego

    ➢    Even temperament

    ➢    Grateful contentment

    ➢    Healthy independence

    ➢    Balanced desires

Quiescence is a state of repose, being tranquil. When your ego is quiescent, it isn’t raging for something it “needs” desperately. 

When your ego is quiescent, it isn’t inflated, self-justifying, self-pitying, or wallowing in injury. It isn’t driving you to take actions or say things that aren’t in your best interest. Being unaware of your ego, letting it ride roughshod, is self-defeating, knocking you about in dys-ease. The antidote to ego is humility—welcome, revitalizing oxygen.

When your temperament is even, you are not anxious or angry, negatively critical, upset, leery, or fearful. Your instincts are accessible and you’re open to inner promptings. You realize that most people are entirely run by their minds and have no control over what they say and do. People who are run by their lower minds do, say, and write things that are unkind, hurtful, stupid, destructive. Their actions can readily set off your reactions, which can be angry, fearful, or one of their myriad expressions, such as annoyance and worry. 

Have you ever felt or thought that you have everything this moment that you need? One aspect of wise, clear thinking is not mistaking where you think or hope you’re going for where you are now. With contentment comes acceptance. You may yearn to understand what you could do with the rest of your life, but embrace the perfection of who you are now and the intention to take each next step in your life as consciously as possible. Acceptance is a key element of consciously living in reality. Acceptance is not resignation. It’s being here, now, rather than allowing yourself to be run by envy or disappointment. Grateful contentment is a feeling of ease, of peace, of everything in its own time. Regardless of your circumstances, if you attain periods of grateful contentment, more and more, in your state of equilibrium, you will cherish these simple, luxurious feelings.

When you are able to live in a state of healthy independence, your life is not ruled by attachments. You realize that everything is ultimately temporary. People must leave your life and at times that can be unexpected. You are not the center of the solar system, with everyone revolving around you. You have a great storehouse of resourcefulness that you can access to enable your life to proceed well without unhealthy neediness that inhibits your growth.

When your desires are not inflated or squelched down, you are aware of them, and moving at the right time and speed toward realizing them in a way that serves your growth and unfolding. We are desire machines—the mind is constantly spewing out desires. You can learn to be aware of how your desires want to drive you, and you can mentally detach from them, as well as you can, and make mental adjustments that balance your urges and put them in perspective. Being the driver of your desires creates more space for gratitude. By cultivating mental detachment from your desires, you can more readily be present in an expansive now in which you can experience a healthy independence and grateful contentment.

Wisdom and equilibrium go hand in hand. Being in equilibrium is an optimal state in which you can best access your power and develop your potential. You more readily enjoy a positive, confident attitude because when you are in equilibrium that comes naturally. You can more easily deal with and rise above distractions. Being in equilibrium and learning how to achieve and return to it is a necessary adjunct to mastering wisdom. It facilitates the accessing and growth of wisdom. 

The more you realize and embody the five characteristics of equilibrium, the more you reduce stress. Tomes can be written on the benefits of reducing stress. Some doctors believe that stress is the root of all disease. Some spiritual masters say that ego is the root of all disease. Stress and ego are intrinsically linked. This is because when we think then feel that people and things have to be a certain way, and they’re not—we stress. 

If you think you need to get three things done before you leave your home and you rush to get them done, that likely creates stress. You are letting yourself be run by a belief that is undermining your health and state of mind. Why not pause and ask yourself if you can let go of one or two of the things until the right time after you return? It’s not the end of the world if, for instance, dishes remain in the sink filled with water until you can attend to them in a good frame of mind. It’s important to notice what feels good, what feels right. Value your equilibrium. That is being wise. That is helping to prepare the field of your spiritual foundation.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

© 2010-2021 MICHAEL GODDART

EMAIL: MGODDART@GODDART.COM

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