More thoughts on Self...

I have written a very great deal after my inspirational holiday last month. I feel that most has now been written for the while so a rest after this entry. Some notes: === It seems to me when we seek something we have only one of two choices. (1) We seek something so unqiue and obscure that no-one else wants it. Then we can enjoy it in peace. OR (2) We seek something that is so abundant and easily obtained that no-one else will trouble us for it: then we can enjoy it in peace. Anything else means that we must live with envy and competition all our lives and will be denied the greatest pleasure which is peace. === How much of what we are is due to ourselves? The answer is actually nothing if you trace it back. Given that nothing of ourselves is due to ourselves, it must all have been given if anything, or even it isn't ours. Why do we protect ourselves do dearly then? so much more than others? What happens to me in a moment is uncertain. It depends upon what I do now, and what happens to me now. However that a moment in the future will come is certain. So I can chose what happens to some extent, but I can't chose that something will or won't happen. Happenings are like the flow of a river. The water that was at this bend, will be pushed down river by the flow, and will be pulled into the spaces opening up by the water below at it moves down. The river both a collection of raindrops all milling around some moving fast and then slow, some being pushed up from a submerged rock, or dropping back down under a backwave, some drifting backwards as they slip into an eddy swirling around a few times before reentering the main flow; and yet at the same time a seamless smooth organic downward flow. Quite how the water will make it down stream is never quite sure but that it will head down stream, is certain. So it is with ourselves. Our Life is not under the control of ourselves at all. Rather we will have Life whether we seek to rise to the head of business or politics and change the world, or just sit under a tree and watch the sun rise and fall. It is flow, just in different ways. And the difference, is ego. In the first case the self revels in its power to influence the flow of its Life, never quite stopping long enough to realise that it is only changing something that it already had, and which would unfold anyway. Its not like Life stops when you stop trying: happenings have a knack of happening, that is why they are called happenings! We don't ask for them, they happen! That is Life. While sitting doing nothing: The Spring comes; The grass grows all by itself. [Basho] Now some will argue that this is wrong; that the self does chose Life because it can chose death. So we kill ourselves to prove we are greater than Life. And Death happens to us and we are no more. Did we kill Life or did Life kill the self? Well some people have done very much better than that. Hitler is famous for exterminating millions followed by himself: yet Life shrugged it off as though nothing ever happened. That is why we must remember the war, because nothing else is going to. All that death changed nothing, left hardly a trace. Life still carries on without a care: it just carries on flowing regardless. You can fight it I suppose like Bill Murray in Groundhogs Day but eventually when you realise that Life simply is you will have to accept that this is the way things are. Life gave us ourselves, And we have no choice but Life, For everything is Life. .