all this beauty

What is it that binds you?
You are not bound by any chains now.
Is it just the thought that you are bound that binds you?
Mental chains can only be broken by mental effort.
Zed (slightly edited)

We are living in a world where everyone is thinking “What can I have more of? How do I find things that will make me more happy? What can I complain about now so that I can feel more of myself?” We are constantly seeking more.

So we buy things, use drugs, sex, food, relationships, whatever we can find to attach our self to so that we can feel security in this fictional self that was created by thoughts.  This “self” is not who you are, but who your mind has created. We are constantly in state of a fictional self. We base our entire lives and our beings on thought forms, and other people.

So often you lose yourself in analyzing every situation and detail of our life. We don’t know who we are anymore because we are constantly seeking. If you simply watch the sunrise and do not analyze how it is rising, you can enjoy it. If we stop analyzing our own actions and the actions of others, we can become just as enlightened as we feel while watching the sunrise. We can be still, feel peace, and realize that we are beyond thoughts, beyond emotion, beyond anything tangible or explainable. We just are.

We seek our happiness within everything but ourselves and that is why we do not find it. We base our emotions, our decisions, and ultimately our life on situations that occur, people, places, and materialistic things.

People are not relating to you, they are relating to the thoughts of you in their mind. Places are not going to relate to you, they are as they are with or without you. Things cannot provide eternal happiness, but only temporarily offer a good feeling. Thoughts are not what we take with us in the afterlife, thoughts are not what make us who we are. We already are. You are already complete. To be who you are, you don’t need anything but right now.

When you give up believing that the world is to provide your happiness and you focus on being in stillness, you are then truly happy. When you see what the world cannot do for you, you can simply accept whatever is. Whatever is at this moment is as it should be.

An enormous freedom comes into your life when you drop the demand that things should be other than they are. As you bring an inner alignment to the ‘now’ you find peace. It has nothing to do with the form it takes. It arises because you allow it to be as it is. By internally embracing the form of this moment we find peace.

“I might as well say yes to this moment, because this moment is life. It is the only moment there ever is. I might as well embrace it for what it is.” This does not diminish your ability to change things that need to be change, but allows you to be aligned with your true being. It allows you to respond to ‘life situations’ naturally, the way we should respond. Which is, response of our inner stillness rather than reaction of emotion or thoughts.

Things are going to work themselves out whether we think about them or not. If you are searching for yourself within a problem, then problems are all you are going to have. You have to step out of this and realize that there is much, much more to life.

The stronger you are trapped in the sense of the fictional self the more you will emphasize problems (which you’ve created in your mind) and problems of other people. If you are always a victim, and life is always taking a dump on you, then that is who you become. But it is not this way. Living is not the equivalent of frustration but rather the meaning of life.

The world cannot make us happy. To demand that situations, people, places, or attainments are supposed to make us happy are only going to lead you into a pit of frustration.

If you are in this moment, all the things that you pursued in your thought that were so important before, you realize none of it matters at all.

We are living in a world of collective mental illness. How does God allow us to feel this way? To suffer? Why do I have to suffer? Within this world, everything has it’s place. Everything is as it should be, including the way you feel at this moment. Just because something happened to you or could possibly go wrong in the future doesn’t mean you have to be in this state of suffering forever.Your suffering, to some extent, begins to dissolve the egoic structures in your mind, which is what you need to grow.

No matter what your story is, you are here, now. That’s an amazing thing to be! To be here, now, and to see that the outcome of your life is that now you’re stepping out of it and you realize that yes, that is how my life unfolded. But yes, I am here. I am alive, and well.

All forms are temporary, all thoughts are temporary. The eternal shines through these forms. A transparency is happening in you, so that that which is beyond form (stillness) before got mixed up with the story of your fictional self. The preciousness of being is your true specialness. What the egoic self had been looking for on the level of your life story, that very thought, obscured the fact that you already could not be more special than you are right now. There is a beauty and preciousness that is within the entity of your being.

We are trapped in our conceptual thoughts, our egotistical self. When we worry about the future or still feel trapped within ourselves, we are neglecting what we need the most. We are neglecting the present moment. 

If you are petting an animal, you can really enjoy yourself. You can sit with it, look at it, pet it, and just be with it. This is why a lot of people are animal lovers. You don’t have to psychologically protect yourself from the animal. Something transmits itself because the animal lives more deeply connected with the source of life than most humans. The illusion has not grown to such an extent of being a separate entity… it’s rooted in being and living. The animal does not create a world of problems, it is one with life. And humans have separated themselves with life.  You become present with the animal because the animal is present. Thus, you begin feeling peace.

The sun, trees, animals, flowers, and the beautiful things that have always been a part of creation for all time are what connect us to ourselves. Because these things are present, these things are not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow, yet they are continually growing.

Be still. Enjoy yourself. Enjoy this moment. For nothing else really matters.