Meditation, in any tradition, is a discipline to go within and find the eternal peace at the heart of the Universe. It is not “letting everything be as it is” because that is doing nothing at all. Meditation is doing something with intent consciousness that goes beyond the lesser mind and takes us into higher consciousness.

It may not look like we are doing something when we meditate. But we are actually rising above the mind and getting in touch with a form of awareness that is beyond our daily concerns. This takes discipline, which is not just letting it all hang out and letting it all slide. Yet it doesn’t necessarily mean we must sit still for hours in the lotus position. We can be conscious and mindful of the present moment in every movement and task we perform.
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We don’t have a choice when it comes to “letting everything be as it is.” It is going to be that way anyway, regardless of our opinions, beliefs, or strivings to bend life to our desires. But we do have a choice about when and how we meditate. We can meditate in the middle of a crowded airport, in the midst of public uproar and disturbance, or in a peaceful garden. Whenever we seek and find that inner sanctuary through concentrated intention, we are meditating.

Fear and a heightened sense of awareness, or consciousness, are very different from each other. Being afraid always has a sense of what could happen in the future. We think about all the bad things that could happen, the pain we will suffer, the loss and upset, and we have an extreme terror of death. Even if we feel afraid for a second, that second contains within it all the projections of future misery or our demise.

A heightened sense of awareness is all about the present moment. In heightened awareness the mind is not imagining all kinds of evils befalling us. It is at rest because it is conscious of so much more than the need to get the next task done so we can eat and keep our bodies alive. While in heightened awareness, we can still perform tasks, yet at the center of the activity is peace.
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Heightened awareness takes us beyond and above our minds and attunes us to the harmony of the Universe. Fear is not a part of this kind of consciousness. Faith, trust, and humility become dominant as we see the unfolding magnificence of the Universe. We may be aware of fear as part of the emotional spectrum, but it does not take over.

Enlightened people may appear to be avoiding all the pains and troubles of life by “being above it all.” But actually, enlightened people delve more deeply into it all. They have examined how our thoughts and feelings can turn our lives into a roller coaster of drama. They see the uselessness of churning our wheels on the road to what we think is progress but may actually lead to our destruction.

While other people freak out and go into meltdowns when things don’t go their way, enlightened people know that “This too shall pass.” Some people may interpret this as indifference. They do not see the wisdom in sitting back and watching how it all develops. They do not detect the wisdom in the enlightened person’s trust in Life.

Enlightenment brings with it a sense of detachment. At base, enlightened beings see through pointless, ego-driven ambitions and opt for seeking who they really are a the depth of their Soul. Their detachment to the material realm can be viewed as avoidance of reality. Yet it is the exact opposite. Mindlessly conforming like sheep to what a society or culture has determined is right, or just struggling to survive, is not enough for the enlightened ones.
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Enlightened beings do not avoid reality at all. They have the courage to look it in the face and see what is truly Real. And they see that anything that does not last, can be destroyed, can rot away, can go up and down, come and go is not Real.

The soul is always at rest. That is one of its characteristics. It does not need to strive, to work, or to put forth effort to be itself. Now the mind is another thing. It is restless, anxious, fearful, and incapable of being happy in the present moment.
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So maybe we should ask, “What work puts your mind at rest?”
Work that puts the mind at rest is work that uses all our talents and abilities. It is work that is appreciated and leads to new discoveries and growth. It is work that does good things for others and creates something innovative. If you haven’t found this kind of work, you will never be satisfied. You will be just another human machine cranking out tasks to keep surviving.
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Lot’s of people have told me they have “sold their souls” to meaningless jobs that leave them depressed and unfulfilled. Yet, we really can’t sell our souls either. They are not for sale. Our minds and bodies may be bought, but never our Soul. That is the part of us that is eternal and not subject to the ups and downs of whatever work we do.

The physics of consciousness is metaphysics. It goes beyond the Newtonian laws of gravity, time, space, cause and effect. It takes us into the unseen world, which operates in ways that are beyond our sensory equipment.

Metaphysics may even need its own language, for it is difficult to put int words the fact that something can be in two places at once. But that is one of the characteristics of our Souls. They can be everywhere at once. This doesn’t make sense to the mind, which requires an organized, linear way of thinking. What do you mean? There is no time? There is no space? Come on, I can see it all around me. Things get old, things die, it takes time to get from Point A to Point B.
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In metaphysics, anything that changes or dies is not real. Yes, you can measure it in a laboratory and describe its characteristics to the human sensorium. But it is not real. What is real is beyond Physics; what does not change: The Universal Source Energy’s underlying intelligence and harmony.

It’s OK to speak your truth in a very direct way. You don’t have to be nice about it. But be prepared for the consequences. If you come across as quarrelsome, nasty, angry, demanding, and demeaning, you won’t get very far with people. They are not likely to reward unpleasant behavior. Even animals will stay away from you if you are cruel to them.

What you are referring to is the hypocrisy of people acting all nicey-nice and bland. Everyone feels how fake they are. They have no opinions, or change them quickly, because they don’t want to offend anyone. They tiptoe around thinking everyone is so fragile, they have to be gentle when they ask them to do something. “Will you please, when you find the time in your busy life, flush the toilet? I know it’s hard to accomplish so many tasks, but would you pretty please just do it, just this once? I’m sorry for being so demanding.”
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You don’t need to be fake in your thoughts, words, and actions. If a situation calls for strength, rise to it you can say exactly how you feel about it. Being nice is not always the appropriate response and can end in disaster. For example, if you are being nice to someone who is abusing a puppy. What about the puppy? Are you being nice to it? No, you are being selectively nice and therefore not nice at all.

This is such a funny and clever question, I am laughing as I write this! It is so much like the Zen koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” It makes a person think beyond the linear mind’s routine.

You can’t have clapping with one hand. By definition clapping involves two. In a very odd and funny way, this koan is telling us that everything is relationship and interconnects with everything else. You cannot have one hand clapping. It must always interact with another hand for clapping to exist.

In the same way, there are no sides to yin and yang. They actually flow together and interact. One cannot exist without the other and they are part of a whole. Yin, the feminine “side,” would not have anything to contrast with if the Yang, or masculine element, didn’t exist. Just as we would not be able to know what darkness was unless we also knew what light was.
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The way the yin-yang symbol is designed gives a hint about this too, because it is a circle. If you move a circle around, the yin will be on top, to the left, slightly to the right—however you move it. There are no sides to a circle!

​Yes, unfortunately, humans have had an adversarial relationship to the natural environment. All other creatures live in nature. Humans dominate nature.

We are the ones who are paving over the forests and meadows with concrete. We are building skyscrapers that kill millions of birds a year as they slam into them during migration. And we are poisoning the air and water with chemicals. No other animal or plant dominates nature in this way.

Animals eat the products of the land and kill each other for food too. But it is all within a perfectly balanced ecosystem, where herds are culled for their ultimate health and trees and forests renew themselves in accordance with ancient cycles.

Humans, because of their ego-bound minds, want to take charge of nature. They harness it to make it obey their desires. Factories have turned people into quasi-robots performing repetitive tasks. Industry has turned them into frightened cogs in an organizational torture chamber. Technology has given humans even more tools to bend nature to their will.

Animals do not live with the same kind of stress, tension, ambition, and unrelieved fear that haunts humans. This is because the order of nature is harmony. Even destructive storms have their place in the renewal and evolution of the planet.
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But humans, the fearful animals who want to build monuments to their grandeur, have continued to cause harm. Just look at all animals that have been hunted extinction or almost extinction. Look at the strip mining, the slashed and burned rainforests, the oil spills, the nuclear mishaps, and you need not go further to see the truth of how harmful humans have been to the environment.

Our past and all the moments we have lived are philosophically important because they teach us so much about who we really are. We are constantly changing beings and our pasts attest to that. Yet, on another level much of our past memories have no real importance at all.

We are the same person we were when we were eleven years old. Yet all our cells have completely changed, grown, and renewed themselves to take us from childhood into adulthood and old age. Actually, nothing is left from when we were eleven except our Eternal Souls.

We can gain wisdom from our past. Wisdom is one of the goals of Philosophy. But this is wisdom from just this lifetime. It doesn’t take past life patterns into account. So which life are we talking about when we talk about our past?

On an even deeper level, the past really does not exist. Can you put your hands on it? So many of our memories may be colored by what other people have told us. The present moment is, literally all we have to live in. Obviously we cannot live in the future, which has not arrived yet.
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Furthermore, our minds are fallible and easily forget things. We forget the majority of the moments we have lived. How many people remember the name of their Kindergarten teachers? Do you remember what you had for lunch three years ago on Thursday? Therefore, apart from practical wisdom so we can avoid mistake we already made, and a few delightful memories that are fun to revisit, our pasts are not important.

gWe sometimes need to be swept down into the meaninglessness of things so that we can emerge and find the meaning that makes sense to us. We dig deep and learn new things that come from within us and are not just received beliefs.

If we feel horrible, excruciating pain due to cancer, the constancy of it may seem pointless. We get it that we need pain to understand that something is wrong with the body. That part is logical. We understand the lesson: We need to help our bodies heal.

The problem comes in when already got the message, we are working on healing, and the pain continues. It seems cruelly meaningless at that point. And many people stop here. It’s pointless pain, they need to get out of it. They take a pill and don’t even deal with it at all because it is irrelevant to them.

Or we could ask ourselves, “Since all of life is perfectly put together, what is the message this pain is sending to me? What do I need to learn?” In my case I learned that when insufferable pain comes at me, I can relax into to. If I resist it, fight it, and cry about how unfair the whole thing is—it is definitely much worse. But if I divorce the pain from the suffering component, and relax into it, it is completely bearable.
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So what looked like meaningless pain ended up being one of my greatest teachers about the magnificence and the hidden meaning of life!