Do You…

Human beings reportedly share over 99% of the same DNA as all other human beings. Yet in the remaining less than one percent remains all of the differences that make every person on earth unique. There is literally no other person that is identical to you. But, instead of celebrating their differences and distinctiveness people are spending much of their lives trying to be someone else. Whenever you are not true to who you are, your likes and dislikes, your feelings, your tastes and your aversions you are cheating yourself from the person you were designed to be. I challenge you to find one thing in nature that is identical to another thing. God loves variety. Whenever you are not being your true self you end up as a performer exhausting yourself trying to be someone else. The fake smile, the feigned agreement, the getting along just to get along usually takes more from you than it provides. Who or what has convinced us that we need to be someone else instead of embracing just exactly who we are? Why concern ourselves so much with comparisons and competition? Maybe the real you, the one you’ve been hiding is wonderful just as he is without the endless need for modifications and self censure. If you really want to find your own personal happiness in this very short run through, you need to “do you” the authentic and real you.

Lately I have found myself on a devoted quest for understanding. I suppose you reach a certain age where all of your shenanigans run out and you realize there is so much more to learn if you are willing to seek it. This understanding comes from God, the very source and essence of life. The more I seek for understanding the more I realize that there’s a perpetual voice in our heads seeking to find fault in everything that we do. This voice called the judge or the accuser is on a mission to take away our enjoyment of life. It does so by talking you into certain narratives about yourself. Some of these false narratives have been playing for so long that you no longer even recognize them. These thoughts masquerading as your own, want you to believe that you cannot trust your own ideas. They pick apart your self confidence little by indiscernible little until you get to the place where you are loathe to believe that what you think is true is actually true and cause you to opt for another’s opinion. The message is to fall in line and do not question. Go down the same crappy path the masses are on and do your best from there. Crush all aspects of your unique abilities and conform yourself to everyone else. Now, if that was true, why bother to make you unique in the first place? I’m sure God could have created a series of robots all wanting the same things and speaking the same words. But, there is only one you. There is no one exactly like you on the earth. Maybe your quirks and your oddities add to the spice of your life. Maybe there is one thing that fulfills you and one thing that fulfills me. How could we ever find that fulfillment wasting away our lives trying to be someone else? It is our variety and uniqueness that the world needs. There is a taste only you can appeal to and how can you be appealing unless you “do you?”

Similarly, the judge takes away your enjoyment of life by seeking to censure and limit everything you like to do. You can get to the place where all things are wrong, all things will lead to trouble, all things are going to get you. This is the familiar voice of religion that drives your focus inward and seeks to make you doubt yourself. What, you do not have any control over your own life and cannot determine when something is getting out of hand? Can you not modify and adjust yourself as needed? This false judge is not speaking for God who wants you to freely enjoy all things. To this I say, do what the hell you want to do and make adjustments when they become apparent. Trying to live amidst the controlling voice of perpetual correction does not add to your life, it steals it away. A child living within the confines of continual correction never grows and never experiences life. You have molded little him or little her to be afraid of things and in so doing have stifled their individuality and ability to contribute to the world. If you want life you have to live life. You have to learn to silence that voice and just live. Everything else is just fear sucking away your existence. God loves you and I unconditionally, without conditions. All those damnable conditions and onerous rules do not come from God. There can never be perfection in your imperfect flesh. Why not live your life exactly as you want to complete with mistakes, errors, foibles and your own humanity? Why not learn to discern exactly what you do like and limit and modify what you do not like? Why drag about with this burden of a false existence constantly conforming yourself to every other person’s opinion concerning what you ought to do? If you are wrong or when you are wrong, it will become apparent rather quickly and you will have gained valuable insight. If you never take the chance to “do you” you will never know otherwise.

I often muse that God likes me to be exactly who I am in full acceptance of me. That guy is a lot more fun and interesting than the converse version. Yet I also fall prey to that false voice checking me at every turn. Telling me I am wrong and ever threatening some dire consequence for my actions. The judge closes all the doors and eliminates all of the options. Soon we find ourselves unhappy and depressed drowning in our own negative mire. Yet are we so wrong? Is it even possible that all of our choices are evil? Maybe just maybe we aren’t near as bad as we think. Maybe God looks on our hearts? Maybe God wants us to experience our lives and come to the right conclusions with His guiding hand, tender mercies and ever present foresight. Each of us has something unique that we can offer and there is no one else that can offer it. Yet we cannot offer it if we spend our lives dressed up as someone else. Everyone loves the authentic soul even if they are rude and obnoxious. We don’t like their abrasiveness but we can always admire their authenticity. They are the ones that speak up when everyone else is silent. They are the people who say what they like and what they don’t like even if it brings discomfort to the room. They don’t go along to get along, they offer themselves like it or not. Somewhere along the line, right or wrong, they have decided to honor their own opinions and stand behind them with boldness. They are real people who have decided it is better to “do you” than to try to do anyone else.

Deep inside we know what we want and what we don’t want. We know what thrills our hearts and what causes us difficulty and pain and when we learn better we choose better. We get a sense of what is unique about us and instead of hiding it we embrace it. Sure someone might think it’s weird, but they aren’t living in our skin. Once we learn to challenge those wrong thoughts coming from the judge, the limiter, the defrauder, we can finally begin to live choosing a life we actually enjoy without fear of punishment or retribution. We have one very short experience of life in this giant playground of experimentation God has given us. Why not get out there and take a risk? Why not learn to trust that true voice within each of us and find what we have been missing? Why not break free from the shackles of conformity and do what you love? Why not take a chance on the real you and shine brightly? You just might find a place that only you can occupy and in so doing bring love and joy to the world and to yourself. Oh my friends, “do you!”

Just some good thoughts…

Is Your Mind a Friend or an Enemy?

Recently a very good friend of mine suggested I read a book called, Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine. I only just began the book, but have become fascinated by the spiritual parallels involving the things we say to ourselves and whether we are using our own minds as a friend to help and encourage us or as an enemy perpetually sabotaging our efforts towards success and fulfillment. The primary saboteur at work in all of our lives is called the judge or from a spiritual standpoint (parallel made by myself and not the author) the accuser. The primary purpose of the judge or the accuser is to constantly fill and overwhelm your mind with what is wrong with you, what you do wrong, what you did wrong and most sinister of all, how you can expect good things to happen in your life based on where you fall short? So, the grand question to ask yourself is, is your mind your friend or your enemy or a combination thereof and more importantly, how can you think more with your mind being your friend as opposed to your mind functioning as your own worst enemy.

All of us have a multitude of thoughts running through our minds in a day. Often we aren’t cognizant of those thoughts. Equally as often we associate those thoughts as being true because we thought them. It’s hard to separate what is generated by our own minds and what enters in via the influence of something else. How the judge or the accuser functions is by getting you to judge yourself. There are endless suggestions concerning what is not “good” about you, your behavior, your motives etc. The judge never puts you on the right side of things. The judge’s only function is to weaken you or diminish your confidence in yourself. I think it is fair to say that all self-doubt, all low self-image, all lack of confidence is a direct result of the judge having too much free reign in your mind, bolstered and strengthened by many years of listening to it and accepting it. The accuser is the one that brings up your mistakes from the past and doesn’t only bring them up as an occasion for possible learning, but badgers you with the thoughts until your opinion of yourself changes. The accuser convinces you that you are unworthy or undeserving of God’s love and blessings. The judge masquerades in your mind as you. However, even though the thought is occurring in your own mind, it is not you. Failure to recognize this leads people down many, many painful paths. If you will notice, judging runs rampant in the world today. Typically, the measure to which a person judges themselves is the measure to which they judge other people. The accuser is a liar falsely implying that your value as a person is based on what you do or don’t do or what you did and should not have done. And there is no end to it. The judge doesn’t restrict its function to your worst errors, but works involving every potential error and often when you are not wrong at all. The point isn’t to make you better. The endgame is to bring you down. It seeks to ruin your life by depleting your confidence in yourself and your own ability to make good decisions. Religion uses it to make you believe you are incapable of choosing on your own and instead need the approval of others in order to live successfully by imposing a tyrannical list of approved behaviors to be accepted. You cannot be truly successful in the long term until you begin to recognize this function operating in your mind and silence its voice. More friend, less enemy.

The first step in freeing yourself from the accusers voice is by recognizing when it is occurring. The accuser is often veiled and hard to detect. In fact, sometimes the judge appears as God reportedly chastising you for your behavior or pronouncing judgment in your life. You can sometimes spot this by how often you catch yourself telling God you are sorry about something. Can you imagine that our God of love and light, overflowing with compassion and tender mercy, would treat you like that? Or worse, can you even fathom that God would behave that way? The church folk say, God convicted me of this or that and it always causes me to scratch my head. God’s Word says that Jesus Christ paid for all of our sins, past, present and future hence the head scratcher. In reality, whether cloaked, hidden, disguised or posing as you, that perpetual self-judgment is like a cancer to your mind and heart. The judge is not helping you to be a better person. Listening to and worse responding to the accuser will do nothing but lead you to defeat, doubting yourself and ultimately doubting God and His willingness and ability to help you. Here is a newsflash worthy of remembering, God is not judging you ever! When you hear the judge’s voice stop yourself and say, “oh it’s the judge again” and refuse to continue the conversation. You are talking to the enemy and making or allowing your own mind to become your enemy. More friend, less enemy.

Once you decide to stop judging yourself or at least start working on it, you will be in a much stronger position to treat yourself as a friend. This means having some compassion for yourself. This means accepting the reality that you are an imperfect creature learning, growing and stumbling at times. Make a point to learn what you can learn about any mistakes you have made, then move forward with adamancy. Once you stop all that poisoning self-judgment you can begin to trust yourself and your ideas again. You can set your mind towards the beauty and curiosity of figuring out what you can offer the world and how you can set others free. You can at last be free from the insidious desire to make yourself better and just content yourself with who you are. Who said that you were in dire need of such improvement anyway? Maybe God loves you unconditionally for who you are and even delights in your unique ways. It seems in the final analysis that much of what we thought was sin wasn’t sin at all, but rather our reaction to that ever diminishing voice from the judge, which weakens us towards more sin, pain and error. Making your mind a friend is about you treating yourself with the same love and kindness with which you treat your friend. It’s about forgiving yourself and refusing to un-forgive yourself over and over again. It’s about actually having the audacity to like yourself just the way you are. Let God be the one that works in your heart to live your best life and while he is working just enjoy the ride. If you knew how much God loves you and diligently cares for you, you would never judge yourself again. More friend, less enemy.

It is up to you and up to me to decide which thoughts we will entertain. It is our decision whether we will make our minds a friend or if we will continue allowing our mind to be our worst enemy. We have all fallen prey to this type of thinking. We are all accused night and day by our enemy. We have all suffered as a result and not lived up to our full potential. Yet, we don’t have to keep living that way. We can live our lives by the works of another man. Let all that judgment go towards yourself and then to other people and see how much better you feel. If you can get past the judge with all of his sincere efforts to make you feel bad, you can open yourself up to a new life; a brand new life where there is no fear. Make your mind a friend by silencing your enemy.

Just some good thoughts…

PS Buy the book.

The Happiness Riddles…

It seems there are at least a million books that promote finding happiness, stumbling upon happiness or discovering happiness in one form or another. Many of the books, as varied as they are, approach the subject of happiness as being something you must strive to get, seek to discover or find in ways you may not have considered before. There are principles and keys and laws and techniques all designed, if you faithfully apply them, to bring you finally to that elusive happiness you are seeking. But, what if that is not how people find happiness at all? What if happiness consisted more of what not to do as opposed to a litany of procedures and processes to do? What if happiness was not so much focused on adding onto but rather letting go of something? What if happiness was more the natural state of a person before other things entered in and clogged the system? It seems there are some common pitfalls that almost all people fall prey to and as such thwart their own efforts in being happy. These pitfalls exist as riddles, confusing and complex riddles demanding they be resolved before moving forward. But, these life sucking riddles have no end point. They cannot be solved and in trying to solve them we move further and further away from that happiness our Creator intended. Once you engage in these riddles, which most people do, you become entangled and embroiled in them and it is hard to escape their sticky grasp. These riddles are the real thwarters of genuine happiness. They hinder, they stymie, they retard efforts. They take people down empty roads and further and further away from the true path. These happiness riddles work by deception with man as the unsuspecting victim. All three of these riddles work using the same tried and tested approach. These riddles are called fear, judgment and remembering the past. They are intertwined and interconnected, yet all lead nowhere. If you want to enjoy the happiness that is your birthright as a human being, you have to learn how to not fall prey to these tempting riddles.

In the world of cause and effect, you can expect a certain cause to lead to a certain result. The human mind generally functions based upon logic. But, the human mind is also limited in that it can only learn via the avenue of the five senses, absent spiritual truth. Spiritual truth has to be ascertained as opposed to fully comprehended because it exceeds the capacity of the finite human mind. When it comes to conflict or things that oppose happiness there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think. Similarly, if the starting premise is wrong, the end result will also be wrong. People are deceived because they begin with a wrong starting premise. This will become more clear as we look into each of the pervasive riddles that assault men’s minds. But, suffice it to say that the way our adversary tempts people into thinking incorrectly is by making an appeal to their ego using their human logic system. It seems when confronted with certain ideas, especially when those ideas are negative, the logical course of action is to figure out a way to solve the problem. That of course is logical. However, what is not logical is to try to solve a problem that does not actually exist but rather only has the potentiality of existing. This is a wrong starting premise. No person with their limited human logic will be able to solve a problem for which there is no solution. Instead they will spend their time and life engaging something that seeks only to steal, kill and destroy. This is happiness lost. This is engaging the riddle. 

A good place to start concerns remembering the negative past. This refers to the many mistakes human beings have made in their lives. All people on earth have made these mistakes. These mistakes range from simply painful all the way to catastrophic. Every mistake, every error, every sin a person has ever committed was due to the influence of evil in some capacity. Absent evil influence sin would not exist. Some people spend their entire lives remembering some big mistake they made or someone they hurt or something they didn’t do that they should have done. And because it was wrong they often hate themselves for it and live a lifetime in bondage because of it. However, this becomes a riddle from which there is no escape. The enemy of goodness talked you into doing something bad and then seeks to hold it against you for the rest of your life. Yet whatever you did, you already did it. It’s in the books. Logically there is nothing you can do to change it nor is there any way to remedy it. It only continues to exist in your memory. The moment is gone seconds or years after it occurred. It is gone. You can certainly seek forgiveness from God for it if you haven’t already, but it is gone and over with. So logically, if the moment or moments are gone now and there is nothing you can do about it in the present, why on earth would you allow it to continue to live on in your present day mind? This is a riddle from which there is no escape. No amount of thinking or lamenting or wishing or crying can do anything to change the situation. You certainly aren’t doing God any favors by hanging on to it no more than you would continue to hold your child responsible for a mistake they made a year or twenty years ago.  Thus again logically, the best way to escape the riddle, the thwarter of your happiness, is by refusing to engage in the riddle. You cannot find a solution in the riddle because a solution does not exist. The only reasonable solution is to forgive yourself and let it go forever. Do not engage the riddle. 

The next riddle from which there is no escape concerns judgment, especially self-judgment. All people are born into the world with a sin-nature. This means the seeds of sin and error have been programmed into people’s bloodstreams. We all came from the factory that way. (It was not God’s original intention!) So the propensity to make mistakes is born into us. The old nature in a human being could never be cleaned up because the old nature is inherently sinful. No amount of discipline or righteous behavior or adherence to commandments can ever make the old nature clean. Yet, all of religion claims otherwise and by a series of rules and regulations tries to make the flesh bring forth spiritual fruit. Again, wrong starting premise, i.e. you can become holy and clean up that which is already inherently sinful. The Apostle Paul knew this because he said by revelation, “I know that in me, that is in my flesh dwelleth no good thing.” God provided a solution to this dilemma in the life, death and resurrection of His son, Jesus Christ. When Christ was crucified on the cross, God said that our old nature was crucified with him. Everything that was ever wrong with you and me was nailed to the cross. When we believed God and got born again, we receive a new nature spiritually that cannot be corrupted and cannot sin. So, stay with me now, every time you make a mistake or sin or zig when you should have zagged it happened via your old nature which God considers dead. God paid for every mistake, every looney tunes thing we ever did by the life of His son. It is paid for. It is finished! Thus, when we judge ourselves for our every error or human weakness and frailty we are engaging ourselves in something that has already been covered for us. Our old nature cannot do anything but sin. When we judge ourselves or analyze our every move, inspect our motives and find fault in everything that we do, we are simply engaging the riddle from which there is no escape. It is a wrong starting premise. We cannot make our old nature clean by doing righteous things and we cannot pay the price with our own sinful old nature. The more we look for error and flaws the more we will find. Doing so leads us nowhere. Instead we must refuse it by refusing to judge ourselves any longer. God has already judged the old nature and it is spiritually dead. Rest in what God did for you. Stop judging yourself. Do not engage the riddle. 

The final riddle that thwarts happiness is the worst of them all. It is fear. Remember fear is a wrong starting premise. It is a temptation to solve a problem that does not actually exist. Fear is a riddle from which there is no escape. The more you engage the riddle, the deeper grip it gains on you. The more you, out of fear, try to find a solution, the more afraid you will become. You will suddenly find evidence that supports your fear. Engaging fear is not logical problem solving because you have already begun the discussion by accepting a starting position that isn’t true. In this life sucking riddle it always starts with doubt, progresses to worry then ends in fear. This riddle is the most dastardly because it doesn’t just waste your time and your life or steal away your happiness, but will actually bring bad things your way if you persist in it. Fear is a strong expectation that something awful is coming your direction and strong expectations often come true. Like remembering the negative past and judging yourself (your old dead nature), fear is another riddle that must be avoided. You will never defeat fear by engaging it. You defeat fear by refusing the temptation to think about it and solve it with your finite human logic. Replace fear thoughts which are not true with thoughts that are actually true. Do not engage the riddle. 

The happiness you seek for your life is already there for you. You don’t have to go on a search to find it. But, in order to experience it fully, you have to avoid the riddles, the pitfalls of life that take away happiness. Stop holding on to a negative past that is long gone. Stop judging yourself for being a human. Stop letting fear and its companions put you in bondage and reduce your life down to survival instead of thriving. Much of life and living successfully is found in learning to let go rather than gaining something. Get rid of all that false weight and the burdens and live each day as a new day. The experience of happiness is always on the other side of the happiness riddles because the riddles are not true. When things get complex and confusing, error is involved somewhere. Let it all go and live the day in the freedom that God provided for you. He already solved it for you. Just get on board. 

Just some good thoughts…