You may find if you choose "no choice" but love, to only have the option of love now and always, this great limitation may in fact bring about your ultimate liberation.
Always Changing, Always The Same
What is always changing and always the same?
Time, for one, likes to play this game
"What's the time?" One may wonder
Two answers come you may consider
Each moment is passing, never repeating
Yet "now" is the time, forever unchanging
"Who are you?" Another interesting question
No right or wrong, it's all perspective
I am me, as it shall always be
I could never be another, quite obviously
But surely I won't be who I was before
Each moment growing wiser, of this I'm sure
"Why are you here now?" You're asked
Answering this right is your most important task
To dance, to work, to eat, to play
The reasons keep changing from day to day
The mind gives many answers to you
But is there one answer that's always true?
Yes, it's the answer my heart speaks of
My reason for being is simply to love
The End… Or A New Departure Point?
I hope to have left you with more questions than answers, in a paradoxical state of being clearer and yet more uncertain than when you started. Embrace this. It can be “good,” depending on how you respond to it. This is not a book of action steps and checklists. I have plenty of other resources I’ve created with those things. It’s a book on learning to grow beyond your BS because you’ll probably always have it in this life, and this means learning to sit with uncertainty – temporarily.
You can look at the surface level of what’s been presented here and get great lessons or go deeper and get different lessons. One isn’t necessarily better or more “right” or “wrong” than another. This can be a book for achieving simple goals like “putting down the damn doughnuts and eating a carrot for once,” more complex goals like starting a successful business, or even extremely lofty and somewhat vague goals like “living greatly.”
This book is alive and dynamic with new discoveries as you read the parts multiple times and play a different game each time.
There were times that I sometimes made choices “either/or.” You may wonder, “Is this an inaccurate manipulation of the possibilities?” The answer may be sometimes, but not always. Either/or is a legitimate and sometimes very practical way to think.
Can a person choose to only be either in a particular room or not in that room? Granted, the smartass solution is to stand in the doorway as “both.” Yet consider, how many problems are created when people try to be half in and half out? What if someone needs you to be fully present with them, and you’re only halfway there with them?” Can it truly be said one is “in the room” with them, so to speak? Or is “half out,” from one perspective, really “all out?”
“Do I want to surf Facebook or write my book?” was a question I asked myself quite often. Are there more than two choices? Sure, but decision making is sometimes an art of selective focus and elimination of possibilities. That paradox of greater freedom through limitation.
You’re BSing yourself if you’re letting your mind limit you to two choices and not allowing other possibilities to exist, instead of you purposely limiting yourself to two choices as it serves you, while still maintaining the ability to remove this limitation should that serve you. It’s like an actor who plays the role of “limitation,” but who may stop playing the role at any time should they choose to, because they know they’re only playing a role. Playing a game, if you will. Or watching a movie and getting into it, but still you know it’s just a movie.
Don’t get lost in your own magic. But then consider, are you both the magician and the magic? Are you both the magic and the magician? Are you both in a house of mirrors and the house of mirrors?
In more everyday terms, you may consider, “Am I asking what to create, or is the creation asking me to create it? If I’m taking 100% responsibility, what am I responding to? Can I be both to the asker and the answerer at the same time?”
There’s no intellectual answer your mind provides that will satisfy these questions logically. Perhaps to even ask questions like these at this point in your journey would seem meaningless and overly philosophical, yet later, they’re the exact questions you need to unlock something. That’s what makes them beautiful.
This book is about teaching you how to dance. To realize that sometimes, there’s no one right step. In making missteps though, you learn how to be a better dancer. At times, it’s a freestyle dance just for shits and giggles alone in your room.
Still other times, it’s a tango. You’re dancing with a partner. Dancing with future and past. Dancing with you and another. Dancing with You and your mind.
In a tango, there is a leader. Not to be confused with master and slave, the leader and follower dynamic is different. It respects choice. The follower goes along because they are willing. The follower has trust that the leader has their best interest in mind. The follower may even benefit more in the short-term compared to the leader, as the leader may sacrifice their own short-term needs for the follower. Like a leader who eats last to ensure that all of their team gets fed first.
Yet remember, the leader doesn’t sacrifice from themselves in the long-term, for they have to take care of themselves, or else the followers suffer. We must still feed ourselves to feed the hungry.
The effective leader sacrifices from themselves in the short-term, but never the long-term. Remember, you can hold your breath for a moment for the sake of your follower, but remember to come up for air. Never forget who the leader is and who the follower is.
A truly good leader, a leader who leads with humility and not pride, finds that through their “limitation” of temporary self-sacrifice, they’ll end up with greater freedom. The follower, through their “limitation” of obedience, also ends up with greater freedom.
In the “master and slave” game, there is only greater enslavement for all. In the leader and follower game, when played correctly, when played from “give and receive” rather than “give and take,” when driven primarily from love and not fear, there is only greater freedom for all.
Consider, is your mind the leader or the follower? Is your fear the leader or the follower? Are your stories, excuses, and justifications a leader or a follower? Or are these a master or a slave? Must you choose to change the game entirely to unlock new choices? To live with your mind or be lived by your mind, which do you choose?
I can think about the past and future instead of what’s right in front of me, and at times, this is helpful. This doesn’t automatically mean I’m not “living in the now.” The question is, is it my mind that’s taking me unwillingly into the past and the future? Is it reliving an experience or imagining something and playing it out over and over without my consent? Am I a “slave” to the mind and being dragged away from the present moment unwillingly?
Or am I proactively choosing to look back at the past and get a lesson now? Am I choosing to imagine a future and see what might be possible for me now to create this future? Am I being present with my reflection back or projection forward as conscious choice?
This book is about proactivity and being 100% responsible for your choices. However, this does not mean you’re always free to choose willingly how you feel and sometimes even how you act.
From one point of view, we can affect our emotions, but sometimes things happen that trigger something inside of us. Emotions can come up without us saying, “Gee, I’m going to choose to feel really pissed off and hate my life right now! That sounds like a great idea!”
What do you do when you’re triggered? This is your choice.
What do you do if you’re triggered and you “lose control?” How you respond once you regain your composure? This i
s your choice. My suggestion is – make it right.
Even the addict who acts unwillingly still has choice somewhere.
Now remember this when you see others in their different states – for you may be tempted to say that their anger, resentment, attachment, fear, depression, or other things are “just their choices. They need to suck it up and choose to cheer up and be grateful.”
This, too, is only one viewpoint, and when not balanced with love, may lead to judgment and failure to appreciate how all of us may fall for our mind games, and that all emotions may serve us depending on our response to them. This includes our response to our own emotions and the emotions of others.
Consider, are you not yourself occasionally unwillingly falling into poor states? Have you ever in the past? How would you want another to treat you for your weaknesses? Can you treat another in their weakness this way?
Don’t confuse one’s poison for “them.” What if they are purity and the poison was simply added? They may have forgotten about their own purity because they only see themselves as poisonous slime. They may need to see their purity reflected back to them by you showing it to them. They’re not necessarily bad, but rather simply forgetful, as we all are. They’ve forgotten that they’re in a house of mirrors. Have you forgotten too?
Do you choose to draw out the purity within another? You may wish to ask, “How do I draw out the purity within another? Might it be the same means by which I draw it out of myself? Am I treating myself the way I want others to treat me? If I learn how to positively influence myself, am I learning how to positively influence another? Does this work both ways? Might it be wise to ask, “How do I positively influence both myself and others?”
Remember, now you have a choice in how you respond always.
You can choose how to look at a barren field.
You don’t see anything growing, and you may say, “This sucks. There’s nothing growing and so we’re going to starve.” Pessimism.
You don’t see anything growing, and you may say, “I don’t see anything growing on the surface, but maybe there’s something growing underneath the surface I can’t see yet!” Optimism.
Both viewpoints are potentially destructive.
If the pessimist says, “We’re going to starve, so I’ll passively sit back and await my fate.”
Or…
If the optimist uses their wishful thinking to say, “I'll just passively sit back and let nature, others, or God take care of it.”
Then both of them may starve.
The wise person says, “I only know that now I have a choice. I will choose to plant seeds and water them just to be sure.”
The wise person doesn’t make an assumption about the field bringing forth fruit either way, but they still must assume as we all do, that at least planting a seed and watering it would likely lead to something growing. They assume that the laws of nature didn’t just decide to change overnight. They also assume, “There is potential here that’s worth my effort to fulfill.”
Thinking you’re never going to assume anything, when assuming and judging is what your brain is designed to do, is ridiculous. Rather, it would be wiser to simply assume your assumptions are not necessarily reality. To judge your judgments.
You may choose to play the game of assuming that you’re capable of growing more within you and more outside of you than what you see is here before you. The game of “there is always far more potential here worthy of my effort to fulfill.” And when you can’t assume one way or another, ask yourself, “Is it worth the leap of faith, as Jeremiah took, to find out? Wouldn’t it be worth finding out, since my life, and the lives of all those I love, may depend on it?”
One may consider before even planting the field, “Is it I who asks whether to plant this field, or is it the field who’s asking me if I’ll plant it? Is the first question “Will I?” or “Will you?” Is it that I’m I asking or being asked? Am I questioning or responding? Am I requesting or being requested or both? May I choose how to play the game?”
Perhaps if you surrender asking your question for a moment, you’ll quiet yourself long enough to hear the question asked of you.
There are many points of view, and each one brings a truth to the table. Each one is an essential significant part of the whole, and yet each one can be insignificant. Not all truths are equal. The truth that I’m wearing a white shirt as I type this is something I believe should matter less than the truth that children are being sold into sex slavery right now. Which truth do I choose to remember? Which truth do I choose to bring awareness of? Which truth do I choose to make matter more? Or perhaps, which truth is asking me to make it matter more?
What truths or points of view do you choose to make matter most right now?
Be careful not to let a point of view become a permanent way of life.
I have one point of view I’ll offer for your consideration. It, too, is but a mind game, yet still an interesting one to play.
I have a dream that we will be neither united nor divided.
Because the ultimate paradox is that your perfection is different from my perfection, and your BS is the same as my BS. It’s our perfection that divides us, and our BS that unites us.
I will see that your perfection is different from my perfection. While I am in some sense perfect, something is still missing without you. I will look at you and say, “Your gift is perfect and so is mine, and yet neither of us would be complete without each other. I appreciate your perfection, your gift, because it makes you different from me. I choose to make you special to me, and in this moment, I become special to you.”
I will see that your BS makes you just like me. Rather than letting our BS, our bullshit, our belief systems, our blind spots divide us, we can look at one another and say, “You and I are one in being total bullshitters. Your mind plays the same games that my mind plays, even if we’re playing different games at the same time.”
If we only see how we’re all different, we no longer appreciate how we’re all the same. If we only see how we’re all the same, we no longer appreciate how we’re all unique.
Let’s come together as one, and yet never forget that we are many. May the fact that your gift is unique make you significant, and the fact that BS is common to all, make this BS insignificant.
Why Did I Write This Book?
Simon Sinek says start with why. I’m ending with “why” because it’s my book, I do what I want, and he can’t tell me how to live my life. Also because some lessons here make more sense now that you have the entire context of this book. Plus, isn’t the end just the start of something new?
Why did I write this book?
Many reasons, many partial truths. Many changing and evolving intentions over the course of time.
This book started out as a book called Don’t Do This… with the intent to cover some self-help myths. I wanted to write a new book to make some more money and grow my business, but also because I’m passionate about personal development. I’m committed to empowerment, enlightenment, and compassion in all things I do. Although I’m a health and fitness author as well, that’s really mostly a means of teaching principles of empowerment to those who’d rather learn how to get a six-pack than be one of “those people” who reads self-help books.
This book had pretty humble beginnings. Nothing special, but still a somewhat “pure intent” to serve others. A somewhat “tainted” intent as some may call it to make money – which of course is actually a potentially pure intent because money is useful for doing all kinds of good.
Yet something happened as I went on this journey. It happened when I started writing with the intention to help us collectively better understand ourselves so we may be more compassionate towards ourselves as well as others.
It evolved to be a book about choice. A book about finding freedom from the enslavement of our own minds so that we can find freedom from the shackles of fear that bind us in the world at large. A fear that divides us because of ou
r differences, our BS. A fear that keeps people playing small so as not to offend others when it is this very playing small that is robbing the world of the gift it needs the most – the gift of showing that we don’t have to keep living, or suffocating if you will, in fear that may destroy us. We can let go of holding our breaths in fear which may serve us but only for a moment, and choose to come up and breathe in even more of the air of Greatness which we need to live. We can now choose to love fully.
That’s all choosing greatness is – choosing love. Choosing love not for a moment, but always. Always striving – actively. Making love your being, your doing, your having. Giving and receiving love freely. Always receiving love, never taking it. Always giving love, never rejecting it. Suffering along with the love if that what it entails as a human, but realizing that love in its pure state is nothing to fear, for it can only give life and never take from it. This means that choosing greatness can only give life to you and those you inspire. One’s greatness can never take greatness from another.
We no longer need to fear our greatness. We no longer need to make it forbidden and lock it away in a cave behind gates of BS. The world appears to be dying, and we need to break through the gates to find the one thing that can save us. We must break through these gates with or without the permission of others, because all will thank us for this act of courage eventually.
We need to draw out the greatness, the purity, the love, when we discover it in ourselves. We need to draw out the love, the purity, the greatness, when we discover it in another. We need to remember, it’s always there, in all people, waiting to be discovered and unleashed. We are not our poison, we are purity with poison to be filtered out by forgiveness.
Although I could have chosen to see myself as but one insignificant part in the whole body, I decided I was going to be significant and play at 100% to do whatever it takes to keep the body alive by offering my gift – writing a message that is beyond me. I needed to give this body, this world, a little longer to heal because I believe that it will heal.
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