Things to Ponder

I have just been reading an article by James Low1, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher, who has studied this discipline since the 1960’s. He returned to London and has now retired from his work as a consultant psychologist. He teaches Dzogchen meditation. He writes about the mind and how illusory it is; how our perceptions change all the time.

 

“Instead of thinking I have to develop myself, accumulate more qualities [….] to survive in this complicated world, the movement of the practice is to relax and open, relax and open in everyday life. The more we relax the more we are able to move in the world intuitively with less planning and more connectivity. […] You are allowing the world to show you how to be. It’s not up to me. […] We find the fresh openness of the ground of being, opens endless, endless, endless possibilities of reinvention, then we manifest imaginally in a world of imagination.”

This philosophy reminds me of the ideas put forward by Jacob Israel Liberman2in his book “Luminous Life”.  It is a multi-faceted book, but one idea I remember is rather than plan a day, notice what the light brings to your attention and deal with that, then allow the light to bring the next thing to your attention. He spent some time doing this. At the end of each day, he realized he had accomplished a great deal, felt more satisfied with the day, more fulfilled, tasks completed that he had been “putting off”.

This is a big leap of faith. We are so immersed in the culture of planning, control, and “organization”. Yet how many times have you set up the perfect plan for the day, only for something unexpected to whisk you away onto something quite different? This can build up a lot of frustration and stress about having to abandon The Plan, not getting things done as planned and ending the day feeling one has accomplished very little yet has been madly busy all day.

I’m not advocating either philosophy, but it is always interesting to learn that there are other ways of looking at/dealing with life and wondering if actually that way may work better for you than the way you have always done it.

I’m not sure where this is going, but sometimes it might be good to stop and query the way we live. Are we awake to the wonder of the world or have we numbed our perception to survive the soul crushing, anti-human aspects of life. What is the difference between surviving and truly being alive to oneself and the world?

1 “Simply Being” James Low.  www.simplybeing.co.uk

2“Luminous Life” James Israel Liberman  www.jacobliberman.org/

 

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