Everyday Wisdom

A Spiritual Book of Days

Excerpts from Everyday Wisdom

Enlightenment

You are the subject: your thoughts, your feelings, your words, and your actions. If you are willing to turn your attention to these, then you don’t have to run around like Don Quixote fighting windmills and saving damsels in distress.  You can be where you are and address the origin of joy and suffering inside yourself.  
     Enlightenment doesn’t involve getting something you do not have. It involves relinquishing a barrier you have placed between yourself and truth.  It is not so much a finding of truth, but a giving up of illusion.

The Miraculous

It is the nature of the ego to become attached to the past, and to project the past forward into the future. The ego wants what is familiar, because it is basically uncomfortable with change. Its job is to create continuity.
     If something is continuous, it is not miraculous. Miraculous events are not continuous with what happened before them. They represent a shift of energy, a movement out of past perception, past limitation.  They are unpredictable, unexpected and in many cases inscrutable.
     You call them miracles because God’s hand is in them. But without your permission, they could not take place.
Without your surrender of the past, miracles could not come into your life.
     You prepare the ground for them. You create the space in which the miraculous occurs.

Now is the only Time there Is

Every moment contains all other moments. This moment contains all the past and all the future.
   That is why the central teaching of all spiritual traditions is to claim our awareness in this moment. While this moment may be only one point on the circle, any point will do. Any point is the alpha and omega. A special time or place is not needed. Here is as good a place as any; now is as good a time as any. There is nothing that you have to do first. There is nothing you have to do later. There is only what is happening now. That is your only responsibility.