This “trust your higher power and the universe will deliver what you need” philosophy has in large part replaced traditional religion where I live (West coast). And much as I’d like to subscribe, I can’t buy it. It’s really the same as the evangelical Christian perspective, isn’t it: the you’re-in-good-hands-with-Jesus idea?

The fact is, things are much more fragile and unpredictable than that. (That perspective would make me a “cynic” in the eyes of many of my neighbors).

Of course, the realized being knows that all it’s OK because everything — heaven, hell, earth, like, happiness, turmoil, war, peace — is neither good nor bad, just is, and we deal with it as it comes, in fear or without fear. Intellectually, I get that. But I miss the comfort and feeling of a safety net that I had when I thought that everything would turn out OK because how could it not?

I’d love to hear what others think of this.

There is a sense of freedom of limitation. I am watching for fear but there is none. So here I present a monologue of this current experience of livelihood’s interruption. Maybe it is useless, maybe it is not.

It seems easiest to attribute the lack of fear to simple presence. This presence is not of the sort like being here in the moment. It is not like being attentive to watching the river flow by, setting up a continuum of coming and going.

This presence is more akin to floating, relaxed resting in river’s currency, embraced with the river’s flow such that water is not moving by at all, just so, so timeless like.

The shores pass, like life’s display, each bend a new vista. In such timelessness of what use is fixation on a passing shore so soon gone, nailing it down, or what is around the next bend making what is not real as real?

Of what use is fixating on such confusion and thereby being confused?

In timelessness, of what use is reifying the indeterminate as determinate?

Why be seduced by memories of past experiences that imprint anticipation of future events? This merely gives power to fear.

By asking these questions, in reflection, the honest answer is laughter.

So this abundant gig that is closing upon itself, just is. Merely another passing divine appearance of innate purity that is perfectly so.

How can fear of losing livelihood climb my back if there are no footholds found?

With a begging bowl I may go!

Thanks, Lewis. As I read the article, I felt like I went in slow motion, saw every word, comma and period. Thank you.

Fe

Thanks for the topic, Lew!

thank you for the honesty.

Standing on one side of a fence and looking in has been a part, been most of my life until recently as an addiction to pleasure, which has a range, like the feeding range of an animal, which runs out, continually.

Somewhere along the path to enlightenment, or bliss, or consumption I stopped and thought… “Is this all there is, am I just an animal?” The animal inside me ignored the question, but the spirit from which doubt arises began to manifest in depth, seeing deep connections beneath all events, and eye contact became very important.

Direct contact with One true nature contains the rejection as fear, and so much of fear is anger, and noise at first. Within me is a calming down, and a watching now, in seeing each moment relating to more than the filling of desire, to the emptying of the shallow shadow side of the desire to feed fear. Can be a lonely place, is a lone place, one place is.