Thinking is over rated and makes us live entrenched in our habits and indentured to the ignorance that only fear can offer. But as a race, we seem to embrace all of this as the norm of living. We miss so much because we cannot “think” what we authentically are. The mind has been used in such mundane and trivial ways that we have actually trained it to become small and petty. This has been done through the assumption of knowing what is “right” and what is “wrong.”

This supposition then spawns the irrefutable conclusion of judgments that we make upon others and ourselves whereby we live in absolute certainty that we know what “truth” is. By living in human pride we have made ourselves impervious to living as the journey of consciousness through Love.

We fear this emotional humiliation more than anything during the course of a lifetime. I have seen this so often in my career. I go to the hospital to work with a person and they are so humiliated by the body and what it is going through. They just cannot believe that this could happen to them. After all they had protected themselves so well all these years through the aggrandizement of the ego.

For most, life is more a Karmic accumulation of very selfish desires. These yearnings were manifested into our life Karma in this world through a split second of human impulse influenced by the DNA of our bodies, which hold willful intent to have what we so tenaciously pursued as “good” or righteous. These “life decisions” were translated by the emotional state of our hidden doubts about our abilities to survive and be happy in this world.

So, through a lifetime of unbridled gratification that never takes into account the havoc that it renders on those around us, namely our “loved ones,” as well as our own life, we say and do things that bring nothing but eventual misery and sorrow–even suffering into our living. We make many decisions about the quality of our lifetime based on what is often referred to as “low self-esteem” and how to get its revolting taste out of our mouth through seeking to fulfill lavish desires that may not be in our spiritual interests.

This is a painful way of living. Most people do not recognize how they are really living and just go on assuming that they are doing well. The proof in the pudding to most people is the availability of “comforts” as a lifestyle along with something they believe in and have risked their whole life for, “security,” which does not exist. The many decisions that we made years ago, like who we married, our careers and the amount of possessions we had to have, not to mention the number of children we so unconsciously called into this world, all have a way of bringing their “gifts” to us.

Master Po: “Close your eyes. What do you hear?”
Young Caine: “I hear the water, I hear the birds.”
Master Po: “Do you hear your own heartbeat?”
Young Caine: “No.”
Master Po: “Do you hear the grasshopper, which is at your feet?”
Young Caine: “Old man, how is it that you hear these things?”
Master Po: “Young man, how is it that you do not?”

My honor is to help people expand their inner capacity in order to allow for a direct experience. This direct experience is in total opposition to their temporal obsession with the literal life that they firmly believe they are tethered to. Rarely am I able to help people come to the place where they are willing to drop it all and enter into an enlarged capacity that allows them to be so generous that they are free to experience that which the mind cannot. There is far more to this life than the mind can think. The effort is to engage the student through meditation and help them find their own direct experience of Life.

Most people will turn to their family or careers. But what about the bigger picture of what is deeply important to our authentic core of life? How do we really live in the ebb and flow of a world that is constantly demanding the “me first” mentality?

To be willing to sacrifice this “me first” demand and live as the compassion that allows others to do what they do without our insistence that they are “bad” or “wrong” or even “good”…is very helpful to our effort to know the beauty of Karma. Just watch and observe everything without the need to understand. Much will happen.

It is at this point that we can be in the inner place of deep compassion where we can have the direct experience of Life as Love itself. This place is unlike any other in our lifetime. It is a state of being that becomes the inner posture of true awareness that brings us to the blessed state of consciousness. From here, we realize, not through knowledge, but through compassion, that Karma is here to help us, to bless us and to transform us.