"As You Like It"

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts...
                  William Shakespeare

Might as well tag on to a classic when it fits with the theme.  So with apologies to the Bard, I shall borrow his play title and Jaques's monologue to open this blog on duality.  We have been exploring how we see the lemons in our lives, whether they are to be disparaged or turned into something useful, lemonade.  It really comes down to what our perception is and the choices that we make.


In our ordinary plane of existence, duality reigns: good/bad; hero/enemy; happy/sad, right/wrong, etc.  This is not to say that these labels are true - they vary from person to person, culture to culture - but this is just the way that we choose to organize our lives.  This is the level of understanding with which we operate.  It simplifies our lives to have these prejudged categories in which to insert things.  We organize our world into the "I, me, my - 'the self'" of our lives and all the others that are not part of this "self."  Between the two, a great gulf of separation exists, never to be reconciled.  Our "I" on the one side and all the others on the other.  The bad guys are out there and the "I" of goodness is right here, part of the "self."  In both the two previous blogs, "The Opening" and "Heaven or Hell - the End or the Beginning," we dealt with this issue of duality.  It is a biggie and really spins our whole comprehension of life. As long as we feel/think that we are separate from the whole of the cosmos, then we will never have peace and completion.  There will always be that aching inside to find that which will complete us - status, the right mate, money, power, etc.  The cruel joke is that we are already complete and whole because not only are we connected to the source of all life, but it is the very essence of who we are. It is our erroneous thinking/perception that creates the illusion that passes as ordinary life.  To move into extraordinary, we have to break through that illusion and focus our attention on that which is true, that which emanates from within.  To better understand how this works, let's explore how we set up the stage of life from which we act out our own story lines and spin our drama, hoping that someone will notice and give us an Academy Award for our uniqueness. 

The plot begins with how we choose to understand and define reality.  If we see everything as either/or, then we start the duality game.  We are the recipients and not the actors; others have the power and we are just the pawns.  We nurture our wounds and gain solace in knowing that we are the victims who have no responsibility for what happens to us.  The best that we can do is to keep our heads down and hope for the best.  This thinking really borders on superstition.  If I carry a rabbit's foot in my pocket, wear a clove of garlic around my neck, then I will be safe from the vampires.  If we are able to muster enough energy resources and shift our focus, and this is key, then slowly our vision clears from the blur of illusion and we begin to realize that we are far more powerful than we could ever imagine.  As we look around our carefully laid out stage with all of the precisely placed props, we suddenly understand that we are the only actor on the stage and we have trained the spotlight on ourselves. 

With this shift in focus comes the realization that we play all the roles, the good, the bad and the ugly.  We are a one person production, pulling others in only when we need a supporting cast.  Depending on how large a production we are staging at the moment will determine how many "others" we need to include.  Sometimes, we collectively have a full scale extravaganza going and we need to have a cast of thousands such as when we wage world wars. On a personal level, there have been times in my life where I have had major productions going on several stages to quell the anxiety that I had kicked up.  Much easier to project that angst on others than to take responsibility for it myself. 

I have come to see the appearance of lemons as the heralds of yet another coming production.  Depending upon how consciously I deal with the lemons determines the extent of the upcoming production.  It has become apparent to me that regardless of how many other people I blame or draw into the production that I am the one playing all the roles, directing all the action to soothe whatever misperception I have entertained.  This point has been driven home when I find myself in a life or death struggle with some mechanical device, full scale drama taking place, with nary another person around. Talk about nonsense.

So if all of this is true, how do we go about utilizing the lemons and moving beyond duality to the harmony that is the underlying principle of the universe?  It really gets down to what we chose to see and on what "Cs" we choose to employ.  Competition keeps the duality going by fueling our need to prove ourselves better than and the misperception that we are not one and the same.  Cooperation, Collaboration, Connection, Compassion dissolve the illusion of duality by allowing us to exhale on having to defend ourselves from the "other."  To come to the understanding that we are the ones creating our story lines from the thoughts and images that we choose to project from within and that the external is just a reflection of what we are creating is quite a freeing experience. It affords us the opportunity to extend compassion - the ability to suffer together - to another.  Ultimately, the only true defense that any of us have is love - love and respect for ourselves and for each other.  I know that is a totally irrational concept especially if you have not explored that idea with us in "The Opening," but it is the only reality that there is.

Our focus determines our destination - the true reality of harmony or the illusion of jousting with windmills, thinking they are dragons, like Don Quixote.  In the end instead of taking the hero's journey towards the truth, we will have spent our time on a fool's errand.  It is really our choice.  Like Pacman and his goons, the lemons keep appearing alerting us to opportunities to move beyond duality.  Because we are formidable spirits, we will struggle until exhaustion overtakes and breaks us.  This is as it needs to be. 

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in.

That's how the light gets in.

  That's how the light gets in.*

I don't know about you but I am weary of this struggle with myself.  I am closing up my stage, turning off the spotlight, making my theater dark and I am planting a garden on that spot - a garden where life can be nurtured and watered with the "Cs" of cooperation, collaboration, connection, compassion.  I am going to harvest harmony.  It will be hard work to rid this space of all the noxious weeds that have been allowed to take root over the years but it will be soul satisfying, something that all of my theater productions over the years never were.  

I think that I will hang one of those pretty ceramic garden signs at the entrance: "Peace to all who enter here."

*Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

Heaven or Hell - the End or the Beginning?

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."  Henry David Thoreau

I once saw a two frame cartoon with the exact same picture in each frame: it was a long room with a banquet table laden with food and people sitting along each side of the table.  In the one picture the people were all drawn looking, miserable and skeletal and in the other one they were robust and smiling.  The reason for the difference in the two groups was that in the robust happy group, they had chosen to use the long spoons strapped to their hands to feed each other while the morose group had chosen to try to feed only themselves with the spoons that were too long to reach their mouths.  Appropriately, the captions read heaven and hell.

We create our own story lines and depending upon where we choose to focus - on ourselves and our needs only or on the needs of the collective - we determine the quality of our lives.  To serve only ourselves will never be satisfying on a soul level.  Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not we are all connected and even the minutest thought has an effect on the whole.  So we are free to think that we are entitled to do and think as we please but there are ramifications.  Subtle at times but it is not as free a lunch as we would like to think.  Individually and collectively, we live under the systems that we have created for better or worse.  The density of our negativity has devolved a culture that only serves itself and not any of our human needs.  We are starving to death while we sit at the banquet table of abundance because we refuse to move beyond our self-serving desires.  Welcome to hell.

In his blog of Sunday, May 5, 2013 entitled, "Quit Your Slave Job! (And Live Your Dream Life), Eric Dubay writes, "If everyday you go to someone else's establishment, work on their schedule, do everything they say, and make money for them, then I am sorry to bear bad news, but you might be a slave."   He goes on to elaborate that it really does not matter how prestigious your position, the fact remains that someone else is controlling your time, your fortune and your destiny.  And to think that they have your best interests at heart is sheer folly.

Carolyn Myss in her book, Defy Gravity, describes the price we pay energetically for clinging to our fears and negativity.  "...your negative history creates psychic weight, and the more psychic 'weight' that you carry around with you, the longer you have to 'wait' for anything to heal, or to change..." She continues, "You will compromise the capacity of your soul to heal as a timeless vessel, because the psychic or time 'density' of your ego literally converts into lengthening physical time for any experience in life." Her punch line, "Holding on to past wounds and negative history is more than just an emotional or psychological problem; it drains us of the energy we need to rebuild the present in a healthy and functioning manner."

The lemons of change demanding that we move forward in our evolution are everywhere.  Even the heavens are bursting with this energy to assist in our passage from our status quo of self-imposed hell into the harmony of heaven.  Since the end of April, three  eclipses are happening, one in April and two in May. Susan Miller in her Astrology Zone for May, 2013 explains: "Eclipses are dramatic 'wild cards' in our horoscopes. They shake us up so that we can move from one level of evolution and maturity to another, higher phase, fairly rapidly."  Whether you believe in the veracity of astrology or not, three eclipses this close together is extremely rare.  The associations between the full moon and strange behavior are too numerous to totally discount.  Wikipedia defines, "Lunatic" is an informal term referring to people who are considered mentally ill, ... The word derives from lunaticus meaning "of the moon" or "moonstruck".  Just maybe we should pay attention to what the cosmos is trying to get through our thick skulls. 

So instead of using the following tin foil method of gaining enlightenment, wouldn't it just be easier to start changing our focus from the prevalent "I, Me, My, all about numero uno," to a more collective approach? Really, just what have we got to lose?  Granted it wouldn't be as attention grabbing as these tin foil lids but at least we wouldn't be miserable as we sit before the banquet table of life starving because we refuse to feed each other.  AND - there is more than enough if we all share and not hoard.   

Myss writes, "Compassion is a baffling response to those who live by the law of reason..."  Want to truly shake things up instead of defending your turf, what about applying a little compassion - giving others the same breaks you give yourself; to suffer together - and see what happens.  Bet you will feel better about yourself in the process and the lemon acid won't sting quite as badly.  "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself, " Leo Tolstoy.  Whether we live lives of quiet desperation or ones filled with abundance and joy is really up to us and the choices we make.  Do not blame others if you are not willing to move your thinking beyond the "I, Me, My" of the moment.  We all reap what we sow.  So if you are sitting at the banquet of life starving because someone else owns your time, your livelihood, your soul, what do you plan to do about it?

There are alternatives out there.  The questions we all need to ask, are we brave enough to confront our need for conformity, status, security, whatever it is that holds us back, to reach for our dreams?  As I have alluded to before in other blogs, there are companies out there structured to compensate individual effort and reward collective collaborative team building all the while allowing each person total autonomy.  If Eric Dubay's blog has awakened within you the desire to move beyond slavery and grubbing for your daily bread, then look beyond the status quo for extraordinary because it really does exist.  If we are content to continue to lead a quiet life of desperation, then no words or alternatives are going to change that.  But for those who do seek, there is always an answer.  If you are serious about creating a different more financially solvent future for yourself without owing your soul to the company store, let me know as there is always room for more at the banquet table of plenty.  There really is no better time than during these powerful eclipses to clean our houses with the cleansing properties of lemons so that we are purged and ready for the new.  Spring - it is such a harbinger of all that is possible.  The fall harvest depends upon what we sow today.  I am actively choosing to get over myself and to take a seat at the banquet table where we can all share and work together for the common good.  May I save you a seat?