Living Harmlessly

One of the deepest and most beautiful moments of living is when we transform into the MERCY of being able to truly live HARMLESSLY throughout our day. To live, work and die harmlessly is the very essence of an “accomplished” life.

First, allow me to define my use of the word “harm” so we begin with a clear understanding:

Harm: The injury we create through the violence of our own idea of what we think is “good” and “bad;” willfully projecting our self-defined beliefs and morals upon ourselves and others; wanting something other than what is happening now; living from fear and seeking vengeance thru self-righteous hate.

Nothing is more inhumane than the human. It is prone to hatred, which causes karmic catastrophes by invoking ruthless morals and the vicious circle of living self-righteously hard-hearted.

To live UNARMED is very important. We see it in the life of every Master that has ever walked this earth. To live without the need for retaliation means we are not here to bestow any kind of perceived “justice” upon anyone who may seem to have “hurt” us.

This appears difficult, even impossible, to most people because they feel justified and validated by being the “judge” and “jury” through their biased self-righteousness, and truly enjoy the fleeting gratification that vengeance provides. We see this kind of “justified violence” every day in our society and in the world. When we live by the emotions that dictate our survival, we transfer these emotions into every situation in your life causing us to feel forced to “come out fighting.”

Living harmlessly means we face everything that occurs in our lives as a reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and others…rather than as mere incidents we have emotionally interpreted as unfair, cruel and/or catastrophic. Please remember, my dear ones, NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS.

Pride manifests when we don’t know who and what we truly are…so we are left to merely comparing ourselves to others in this world in order to invent where we rank as either “less” or “more.” For most of us, being “superior” to others to gain their affection and aggrandize our self-esteem is more important than Love and, all too often, even more important than life itself.

It is impossible to live in pride and be harmless. It is best to be defrocked by pride rather than live defined and inhibited by pride as a “person of privilege” or a “victim.” There are NO victims in this world – NONE. We all draw to ourselves the people and conditions that will most serve our spiritual life – some painful to our pridefulness and others not so. We are all linked together as a great oneness and we all play into each other’s lives through “divine rendezvous” as determined by our Karma and fate, both in this world and from previous lifetimes.

If you take the “medicine” in it all …it will serve you well.

Moving in harmony with impermanence, rather than living contrary to it, brings the humility of compassion and leads us into the blessed inner state of mercy. The practice of mercy is deeply important to our lives because it allows us to stop the personal violence we perpetuate through the cruelty of vengeance and pride.

This is the essence of an authentic spiritual practice: to live so simply within that we are available to mercy at all times, thus clinging to nothing that would harm us or others. As Lao-tzu stated in the beautiful Tao te Ching, when we are “sick of our sickness” we realize the mercy that lives within, which frees us to live harmlessly:

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.

Only then can we listen deeply enough to hear the still, small voice of Love within that seeks to move us beyond difficulty and into resonation with our Heart – that we might find the meaning of our Karma, the presence of our fate and the beauty of our destiny.

Once again…from the Tao:

When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good, other things become bad..

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.”

Act without doing; work without effort. Think of the small as large and the few as many.
Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts.

All things we believe to be opposite are actually intimately connected, since their very existence depends on each other. Difficult and easy, high and low, they all define each other. We cannot understand or experience easy without having experienced difficult. We cannot understand what high is without the concept of low. We can transcend these dichotomies when we understand each opposite as part of a larger whole.

Living in simplicity we do not get caught up in conceptual thinking so we reduce the proliferation of harmful thoughts. When we keep our minds clear we give ourselves over to the presence in every moment.