I’ve seen often this Zen-ish call that “when you wash the dishes, wash the dishes.” I’ve tried this, and all that happens to me personally is I feel the misery that walks with me every step of every day. This is information, I supposed, worth knowing. It is better to know who you are than to not know who you are, but I want something even from mundane tasks more than an absence of everything else.
What I want is a feeling of connection, of value even in the trivial, but I have not yet figured out how to do this, although I do have a current hypothesis: what I see clearing the blockages is the flow of energy through me, from God to God.
One of the most important Kum Nye exercises is called the Gold Heart Thread, and consists in nothing more than standing with your arms straight out to your sides, slightly bent, with your head straight or perhaps pointing slightly upward. You do this for 10 minutes.
If you try this, most will find that your shoulders start hurting rapidly. 10 minutes is a long time. But reportedly people work up to an hour or more, not as a feat of muscular endurance, but by enabling a specific type of energy flow.
The key, I am realizing, is that energy flows out from the heart through the arms. But most people have many blocks. They stop the energy unconsciously. We oppose work. We oppose difficulty. We have in America today this notion that work is either a bad word, or something to be done simply to survive, or something to be done obsessively, so we can “get ahead” in the “rat race”, so we can “succeed”, and everybody look at us in envy.
But most people work for the work for the weekend. Most people are waiting on retirement, so this thing they dislike will be done, and they can do something close to nothing, and quite frequently the same as the day before.
What happens when you embrace difficulty, take it into your heart, not in a spirit of resentment, but as a wind beneath your wings, without which you could never fly?
And I will add that there are intermediate positions possible between the idea that God is all loving and that everything always works out no matter what decisions we make; and the idea that God either does not exist at all, or is completely indifferent or even malevolent.
It is possible we live in what I might call an Adult universe, in which our decisions count, and in which relative failure is always possible. It is possible God is a sort of parent who gravitates to those who try, and distances himself from those who do not. Our decisions may matter, as the Bible teaches.
And this may be true even when our decisions are very difficult.
Particularly when you add reincarnation to the mix, it may be that all of us have ample time to get things right, although it may be that people also suffer the consequences of their decisions for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is all a little hippy-dippy, but what I am searching in my own self for is the next step I need to take. What I have found is that important change is gradual, and often happens before we realize it, but most of the time the ground has to be set with IDEAS, which, when seeded in an unconscious which has been prepared, bear fruit almost automatically over some time horizon. Thoughts matter. They are not all that matter, or even the most important thing, but they cannot be divorced from primary experience. There are no real advantages to stupidity or naivete, except in contradistinction with truly bad ideas.
That, in my world, is my form of optimism.