Happy Friday All!
I’m off today getting a massage and spending some time in my garden.
Yesterday was busy with coaching clients and my radio interview with Jonathan Landsman of NaturalHealth365 Talk Radio was really fun. Johnathan was an excellent interviewer and I really enjoyed interacting with him.
I hope you enjoy my TAO-TE-zen sutra today: The Fall is Natural
“The Fall Is Natural” as a sutra means that in order to experience love and life, one needs some contrast. Without mind, God cannot know that God is God.
Thus, to the degree that one realizes that The Fall Is Natural, they realize that once that unconditional love creates the illusion of conditions by which God comes to know God as something other than what is not.
Through life one learns, typically through self reflection, of all the times they were afraid or thought negatively of things only to find out in retrospect there was nothing to be afraid of, and that their negative projections where typically of their own creation.
Yet with each step of self realization, of awareness, that more often than not, we are creating our own fall from the grace of truth, from the offering of any situation.
Then we come to be more spiritual, more aware, more forgiving, more empathetic and compassionate to those who fall; to those who fall because they have not yet learned the truth of themselves.
Everything has a center.
There the origin meets the end.
Spirit draws life up out of the earth.
Life fills itself with the juice of love.
That love is in all seeds.
Each seed is as the O or the 0 in LOVE.
Their desire meets will.
Spring flowers fill the trees and fields.
Summer makes them full and sweet.
Fall is when we harvest her love,
Before the sun goes down.
Life knows that by feeding itself something sweet,
Seeds will be spread around.
The Fall Is Natural.
It’s when Father Sun’s love sneaks under Mother Earth’s gown.
When winter comes they will be sleeping happily,
All around.
TAO-TE-zen practice honors the seasons and welcomes change,
For both are natural expressions of love.
In zen, each relationship with person, place, or thing
Is yet another chance to love, to dance and sing.
Zen looks through the whOle of love
And watches dreams come true.
Desire and will, they do.
So as a simple practice, again be aware of the seasons.
We’ve covered the seasons now. We’ve looked at the necessity of change for self realization and experience, the only way in which the divine can come to know itself as love.
Each step of the way, first sex and violence loving, then conditional loving, then empathetic and compassionate loving we come closer and closer to the truth of unconditional love, and ultimately we realize the truth of ourselves and at that point we being to sacrifice ourselves for the betterment of all.
Yet one must pass authentically and naturally through each of these stages of loving for one cannot get rid of one’s ego self until one has the confidence of knowing that shedding the clothes of the body, the material life, is a necessary step to experiencing divine love, timeless love.
We can only teach what we are, and we can only authentically teach what we know through our own experience. Otherwise, all we can do is pass on more words, more paradoxes.
Love cannot truly be an intellectual experience, for love as an intellectual experience is but an idea, and ideas are as dangerous as they are helpful, until one learns how to manage ideas and carefully look through them to see the underlying truth of all ideas.
Ideas are vibration; the underlying truth of all vibration is stillness. TAO-TE-zen practice honors the seasons. They represent change, which the entire purpose of the TAO-TE-zen is to experience the natural flow of change in life.
Once we become comfortable with the truth of change, then we are not afraid of change.
I invite you to spend time with yourself, learn to listen to your inner voice, and know that there will be times when it will guide you in a direction that seems challenging, scary, and paradoxical.
To the degree that you have come to know the truth of yourself, you have come to know the authenticity, the reliability, the truth and the justice of that voice.
One who knows the inner voice knows that there is no need for negotiation. We need not negotiate with wisdom.
This sutra is an offering to spend time in reflection and think of all the times in your life that you were challenged.
In retrospect, the pain turns out to be a necessity through which we come to know and appreciate beauty and make better decisions in our life and in our relationships.
Enjoy the full moon tonight wherever you are, and may the blessings of the Tao be a light upon your path.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
