You wait for the perfect day to be your perfect self. Each day, you carry this expectation subconsciously in your mind and body. And each day, you are disappointed. It’s a disappointment you may not even recognize, it has become so ‘normal’, so mindlessly worn as part of a suit called ‘You’ in which you sleepwalk around moment to moment, day to day, year to year.
Some people call this state of affairs an insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But I call this an irony because its sobering truth is so glaringly missed by so many, so that if you happen to catch it in a good moment, you will find it laughable. Humour, as some know, often travels with an unlikely companion – tragedy. And therein is the irony.
There is never going to be a ‘perfect’ day, a ‘perfect’ task, a ‘perfect’ dance, a ‘perfect’ meal, a ‘perfect’ conversation, a ‘perfect’ friend, a ‘perfect’ opportunity, a ‘perfect’ speech, a ‘perfect’ house, a ‘perfect’ you…none that will be any more ‘perfect’ than the one you’re experiencing in any given moment
Oh, you’re thinking, there have been perfect moments albeit rare, just as there have been infinitely more ‘imperfect’ moments.
No, my friends, that’s the Ego’s most persistent deception. It wants you to compare and judge. Indeed, it compels you to. In fact, to make life easier for itself, it has set your thinking needle at that point – compare, judge, attach or avoid.
Is any one breath more or less significant than another? Each one is equally significant. And yes, equally perfect. As is each moment and each experience you have in it.
That task that you have been working on and painfully struggling through is so only because the Ego has been screaming ceaselessly Give Up! This is too hard! This is ridiculous! I don’t want to be spending my life doing things I hate! I’m made for better things, grander things. Only lunatics subject themselves to this kind of torture…
And you know, it is right! It is right about all of it! But what it cleverly hides is that it is IT’s remonstrations, IT’s doubts, IT’s indignations, IT’s resistance, IT’s denials, IT’s avoidances, IT’s victimizations, IT’s hopelessness, IT’s self-pity that you’re struggling against. NOT THE TASK ITSELF! And certainly not YOU. For you are not the Ego. The Ego, my friends, is a fear-based, unaware, unenlightened thought pattern, albeit a very strong, resistant and recurring one.
A baby performs the monumental tasks of walking, talking and eventually of dressing itself and feeding itself. I say they are monumental because sometimes, it only takes a brief disability, an injury or an illness to prevent an adult from performing those tasks. But we take a baby’s ability to do them for granted. In fact, we are so relaxed about it that we are easily amused at its countless mishaps and missteps for we know with such certitude that it will succeed eventually.
But how does a baby accomplish all this so instinctively and effortlessly? How does it pick itself up again and again without embarrassment or a lack of confidence or a ‘Woe is me’ story?
It is able to because, unlike us, it doesn’t as yet have an Ego. At least not a developed one. One that is berating it every step of the way, exhorting it to give up, telling it that it is incapable, limited, flawed, alone, threatened, unloved and unlovable… and so giving up or feeling limited or unloved is not a concept in the mind of a little child and certainly not in a baby’s
Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven
Mathew 18:3
So Jesus teaches.
My friends, ‘the kingdom of heaven’ is not some after-life state or place. There is no after-life. Life is all there is. And you’re in it either in physical or non-physical form. In fact, you ARE Life.
The kingdom of heaven is your natural state. It is the background that becomes the foreground when the mental chatter quietens sufficiently, like clear water revealing itself in a glass of muddy water that is allowed to stand
The kingdom of heaven, which is our natural state, is available to us in each and every moment. We need to be childlike, free of concepts, beliefs and attitudes that obscure it from us.
Learn to manage the Ego. Learn to simply NOTICE its mad claims which, as a result of our conditioning, appears ‘normal’ to us and which we therefore mistake as ‘natural’. It is anything but. But learn to notice anyway. All of this and everything else that arises in your consciousness.
That, my friends, is quite simply how you quite simply enter into the kingdom of heaven. You see, once all that comparing, that judging, that clinging, grasping, attaching, rejecting, quarrelling, denying, condemning…settles, there is nothing left but the kingdom of heaven. It was always there, just obscured.
Life is irony simply because we haven’t learned to live it even though it’s right there ready to be your complete, limitless experience. Instead, you live the Ego’s delusional world. And that’s hell. That’s not heaven by any stretch of the imagination.
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