The Power of Listening

What is it that connects us consciously to all life?

Listening...

This is not something that we generally give much thought to, but it is crucial in all sorts of ways.

Listening is all about generosity.
The generosity that can enable us to let go of self-clinging.
The generosity that can enable us to let be and allow the present moment to arise before our consciousness, just as it is...

The untapped and potential power inherent within our capacity to just 'listen' is immense and usually completely unrecognized

Continue reading in Return to Forever

Our Only Certainty in Life is Uncertainty

"That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom."

Steven Levine

We may like to feel that we are in charge of our lives, that we are in full control, making our own decisions, going our own way. 

Yet that is all just a trick of the mind, a tweak of the ego. 

The only certainty we can ever have in this life is uncertainty.

That may seem frightening to many and yet it is an unavoidable fact. We can run away and try to hide from this all too evident truth for a while, but we can never escape it and whether we acknowledge this fact or not, somewhere deep inside, we all know that this is what we live with every moment of our lives.

We are in fact standing on a narrow ledge...

That ledge is the mind's belief system, which, if we care to look at a little more carefully, carries with it no certainties what so ever.

Learning to embrace the fact of uncertainty is one of the VERY important life skills with which we all need to arm ourselves. Without it, we face constant and daily disappointments of one kind or another.

We constantly swing like a pendulum between the two extremes of hope and fear, until and unless we can recognise this movement for what it is, we are completely at its mercy.

The solution to this seeming dilemma is not the acquiring of some new system of belief or the attainment of greater knowledge, it is not even something that we do not already know, intrinsically and intuitively within the infinitude of our own inmost nature. We have everything we need within us already, in order to cope to with the uncertainties of 'life,' if we could only know it and acknowledge what so very plainly stares us all right in the face.

Realised beings repeatedly tell us that the purpose of this life is to recognise who and what we REALLY are. The duality in which 'mind' flourishes and 'life' appears and disappears, is a transitory thing, dreamlike and illusory. 

Who and what we really are is not subject to change. It does not come and then go away, it is not made or created, it does not appear or disappear. It simply is...

And the only value in all that we think, say and do lies in recognising that.

Nothing else matters...