Here we are, living in duality. The world around is completely relative, for every yin, a yang, for every day, a night. Einstein talked of relativity, and you would be hard pressed to think of anything which you could then not also speak of its opposite.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that reality gets split. We like some things and dislike other things, we say that this is bad, and this is good. As a result, we end up resisting much of life, and so we fill with stress.

The Magpie, that silver-stealing squarker of a bird, has taught me much about the nature of duality, and balance. Its feathers are black and white, either ends of the spectrum. It sits quite happily, apparently embracing both light and dark simultaneously. It doesn’t have to be this or that, with one negative and one positive. Instead, we can use either ends of the scale to teach us more about the nature of balance and the Middle Way.

It is through hunger that we appreciate what having that hunger satisfied means, through cold that we learn of the importance of fire and warmth. Anyone who has been seriously ill and recovered will tell you that they no longer take their health for granted.

In this way, the Magpie reminds me that in the end it doesn’t matter which side of the scale we visit, wherever we are we gain valuable information that can help us balance all the better later on. This requires a certain amount of flexible thinking, but it has its benefits without a doubt.

Consider this then: every experience is a lesson, every failure is an opportunity for improvement and refinement. Concern yourself not with how low you may go, but with how high that lowness may one day take you.

Here is Now. If you’re not here, your mind is running the show, and I can’t think of something more damaging to the possibilities of happiness and freedom each of us have. As I spoke in my previous post, the simplicity of wisdom often prevents us from accepting it, and even in the face of logic, the idea of being present and paying attention to our bodies and surroundings and thoughts and feelings is one that meets a lot of resistance.

The future only exists as a fabrication, you project yourself forward, assuming such a time will come to pass, but does it?  There is Now, and then when you get to that future time it’ll still be Now. The same can be said of the past, it exists because we think it, project our mind into it, and bring the memories back into the present moment, into the Now. It is quite possible to forget the past entirely if we live in the Now, and without its influence life becomes a lot smoother and a lot lighter.

The biggest argument against this is that future ideas are a reality. You have a job, and tomorrow you’ll have to go it, or you have a bill to pay in a few days, so you’ll have to sort the money for then. You’ll have to eat later, drink later, and so plan things accordingly so you have the supplies. But when you think of these things, you are bringing them into the present moment. This brings stress in most cases, because being future figments there is no hope of achieving them in the Now you have brought them to. In fact, you can never do more than one thing at a time, never be anywhere but in the Now, so bringing multiple illusions back with you serves only to clutter the moment into an impossibly stressful situation. Imagine if a massage therapist decided to book 5 different people in for the same time. The massage therapist is only one man (or woman), so naturally they can only massage one person in that time period, and the rest will meet with disappointment and there’ll be a lot of extra work to be done later on cleaning up the mess of the inconvenience for everyone. Yet this is exactly what we do when we think of all the things we think we have to do in the future instead of simply dealing with whatever is in front of us in the Now.

There’s an element of faith in this when viewed from the linear mind - it says “if I don’t think of those future things now, how will I know to do them?” And I tell you this. You will know when to do them when the time is right, and not before. By being keenly in the Now, you can see what is to be done at that time clearly, in the same way that you can see to make a turn in your car when you are at the junction, but not a mile down the road beforehand. In fact, you could see how counterproductive thinking about making that turn would be when you’ve got a lot of other turns before you even get there.

The arguments for Nowness, for attention and presence, then, are there to see. It isn’t easy, because it takes a commitment to bring attention back to Now each time it wanders, when often people want to avoid what is happening Now as it is unpleasant to them in some way. But the good news is that it is completely in your power, it’s your attention you are focusing after all.
So: Here, or Anywhere But Here, the choice is yours. I know which I choose.

The rising sun will someday set,
On dreams I haven’t lived through yet.

Or, in less poetic words - soon you’ll be dead, so why not make every second count and work towards your dreams instead of thinking them impossible?

It seems to me that we overcomplicate our lives. Spiritual teachers tell us time and time again very simple truths about how to live, and yet frequently they are ignored precisely because of that simplicity. The thing of it is that it can take us a while to accept the simple things, and although they are simple this does not mean that they are easy to follow or implement.

One such truth is that we have the power to create our own reality. How we act and react is completely in our control, we can only be annoyed by the actions of others if we allow ourselves to be annoyed by defensively disagreeing internally with their behavior. The greatest of examples of this is some fearful object, an example which I’m taking from The Biology Of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton, an awesome and mind-altering book.

What if a snake slithered out from behind the monitor and began moving slowly towards you now? For most people, their belief is that snakes are dangerous, so withdrawing in fear is a likely response. But what if you studied snakes for a living? You’d identify very quickly that this snake is not poisonous or harmful in any way, so you would then set about enjoying this beautiful creature, and the wonderful chance to study it. The difference in reactions is purely based on internal beliefs, coloured by knowledge, false knowledge or ignorance.

These beliefs touch every interaction we have with the world and ourselves. It should be quite obvious that knowing this, blaming the snake for coming towards us is a ridiculous and thoroughly unproductive affair, and yet this is exactly what most of us do on a day-to-day basis. We blame other people, or life in general, for the stresses and discomforts that we feel when exposed to their behaviour or the events of our life.

The degree we use this principle we can become free of the negative influence of others, and maintain our natural happiness and peace. It may seem too difficult to grasp this in the extreme - “if I am unaffected by how others act, why bother having human interactions at all?” you may object. Well, that may become clear in time. For starters, work on the little things. Is reacting by judging someone else as wrong and getting irritated because they spoke about something that doesn’t concern you or say something you disagree with really the way you want to live?