Happy Wednesday,
I hope your week is going well.
I have been very busy…as usual, but am enjoying my work each day so it’s all good.
Exploring Tao Te Ching Verse 13
Success is as dangerous as Failure.
Hope is as hollow as fear.
What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure?
Whether you go up the ladder or down it, your position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance.
What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?
Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self.
When we don’t see the self as self, what do you have to fear?
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things.
This is a great verse for all of us to embody.
Many people today are dangerously caught up in “ladder climbing”.
“Ladder climbing” is a means of expressing the climb through hierarchy – a better position/job, higher rank, more money.
The challenge we face in most cultures today is that ladder climbing is largely motivated by materialistic pursuits.
“If I can just get this promotion, I can afford a better house, car, camera…”
Yet, the news is full of reports of famous movie stars, athletes, business moguls, musicians, and people of royalty suffering from drug addiction, radical emotionally expressive behaviors, and suicide.
They have climbed to the top of their chosen ladder, but feel dangerously empty – unfulfilled.
Life is much less about how cool your car is, or what part of town you live in, or even what rank you achieve on your chosen ladder than it is about discovering yourself.
If we fall into the trap of identifying ourselves, and leveraging our sense of self-worth by what we’ve accumulated, how much money we have, or what status group we belong to, we are at risk of losing ourselves whenever we loose our accumulations.
There is a beautiful, invisible “spiritual ladder” that runs from the center of your heart to the center of the universe. Each step you take as you explore your inner-world, you see more and more of yourself in the outer-world.
In time, you realize that everything you now see around you, but didn’t see before, was always there.
It is as though each step up the spiritual ladder represents another layer of cleaning of the mirror of the heart. The top of this ladder is represented as “enlightenment”, which simply means “To see, to be aware of what is, and appreciate it without the need to project your own fears or biases, to actually experience reality.”
Enlightened people are far more likely to sit in meditation when challenges arise than they are to blame others; they know they are the creator of their experiences, and that they choose to participate in the relationships they do.
Instead of blaming others, or getting mad at God, they seek to “clear their ego-mind” and experience what is.
To the degree that the enlightened person recognizes their contribution to the challenge they face, they adjust their intention to be congruent with their dream.
The top of the spiritual ladder leads to No-where but Every-where.
It is by universal design that we begin life as relatively unconscious of ourselves, of our potentiality.
To experience wholeness in individuality requires that we become an individual – that we develop an ego-self. Only with an ego can we experience love.
Love requires a subject object relationship, or there can be no experience of “I and thou”.
The ego represents the conditional, but the soul is like a flower or tree growing ever toward the Unconditional.
If an individual hasn’t been through the trials natural to life, they will not develop an adequate sense of self, and therefore, are more susceptible to feeling lost when boarders and barriers expand into emptiness, as so often happens in meditation.
They often react as a small child that has become separated from mommy in a large shopping mall – afraid, confused, in a state of urgency, in need of mommy/daddy, who creates their sense of “self” for them.
As we exhaust materialism and physical love, we find the edge of individuality and can only be satiated by inner-fulfillment.
The deeper we go into inner-fulfillment, the more we expand. Where we once felt a sense of joy and expansion from accumulating “stuff”, we now experience the joy of freedom from stuff.
It is the strength of our ego, our authentic individuality that we’ve cultivated through our trials and tribulations that offer us the inner-stability to expand without becoming afraid of the emptiness of the Divine.
Where we once marveled over the thoughts of being a millionaire, or famous person, we now marvel at the fact that the world, and indeed the universe are our kingdom.
We may come to experience the Kosmic Giggle; the experience of laughing deeply about how beautifully constructed the game of Self-Realization is.
We realize that the most challenging and painful times in our lives were invaluable for creating the strength of individuality needed to maintain self-sentient awareness while at once merging into the vastness of the universe, and beyond.
Once we are there, something as nothing, it is as though we are in a perpetual orgasm, flowing from toes to head and head to toes, enveloping the grand expanse of Mind and all it contains.
The Perfection, Beauty, and Grandeur of it all comes with a flood of empathy for all the sleeping souls.
With the realization of who we truly are, we naturally want to nurture others so they too can experience the Truth of themselves. That is the nature of love.
In my video today, I share my thoughts on what Lao Tzu may be suggesting with verse 13 of the Tao Te Ching. I hope you enjoy it.
Paul On Wellness By Design Blog Radio
Today my interview with CHEK/HLC Practitioner Sarah Harris from “Wellness By Design Blog Radio” will be available to your for free at 12:30 (PST) and 3:30 (EST).
To enjoy this intensive, informative interview, please go to: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/wellnessdesign/2014/03/12/paul-cheks-approach-to-self-realization-and-life-fulfillment.
Because this is internet radio, you can listen to the show any time you like by following the link.
Sarah interviews me about the concepts and contents of my ebook, Paint A Circle Around Your Arrow and Hit The Bullseye Every Time. This is a brief overview of the topics we discussed:
- Understanding my beliefs about God and why it’s important for optimal living.
- Using our relationships to help us understand who we are and how to make optimal life affirming choices.
- Avoiding life-destructive cultural programming that take us away from our sense of self and our health.
Sarah also shares feedback from other CHEK Practitioners regarding their confusion as to why I talk about God in my training programs when it seems irrelevant to them and asks me to explain my motives.
This is a bit of a trigger-spot for me.
One thing that drives most teachers nuts is when their students complain they don’t get the results they think they should be getting, when it is very apparent to the teacher that they are not practicing what they were taught.
Both Rudolph Steiner and OSHO, as well as many other teachers expressed the pains they went through in this regard.
Charged with emotion, I share AGAIN, why an understanding of what GOD is, and how religions work is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to any CHEK/HLC Practitioner or PPS Practitioner, and should be important to each and all working in the caring professions.
I also explore the importance of relationships for learning what love is, and growing as individuals.
I hope you enjoy the interview. Sarah really knows how to get me going :-)
I hope you have a wonderful day.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
