You are already good enough

to see life as it is.

THE PLAY OF OPPOSITES
You want to be happy, don't you? So do I. The key is understanding that happiness only exists with its opposite, unhappiness. As long as we are alive and functioning in these systems of consciousness that we call our bodies we will experience both happiness, sadness, and even more difficult feelings. 

These are the rules of the game. No way out of that one. Do not pass go! Do not collect $100. I don't like this any more than you do. The personal will always want more and better — in this case — to be happy all the time. So what to do?

Always subject to the play of opposites, life is genuinely hard, and yet our human ability to see the whole picture is the gift of yoga. Opposites may seem to deny one another when in actuality they don’t. They make each other possible. One doesn't exist without the other. Life requires separation and polarity to even exist. Opposites create each other. They actually exist on a moving continuum. They are incapable of standing still.

Conquering the Play of Opposites 
One of the most difficult steps I have had to make in my life is to accept that we live in a complex and often uncomfortable world; to acknowledge the complexity and necessity of opposing thoughts and feelings and how they don’t just apply to me, but to every level of life lived in form — the manifest world.

Arriving at some place that holds the answers and relieves all of the pain and suffering is not part of the system. First of all, no place exists. It is always moving and even worse, no steady state of mind exists either.

Could a universe as powerful as this one, made of polarities and vast intelligence exist without the play of opposites? Whether or not you believe it could or couldn't isn't the functional point at this time. The fact is this play is at work in the world and also inside of each of us. Yes, in you, your loved ones, those you admire, and those you don’t. No one is immune.

Willingness to See More
In order to not be constantly buffeted around by our rising and falling thoughts and feelings we are absolutely going to have to be willing to see more.  

Without fighting the facts, we will need to be willing to open our awareness to the whole picture. We will need to cultivate bravery and persistence in order to recognize (without resistance) what actually “is” expressing in our own embodied experiences. The willingness to see hard things is fundamental to being able to see life — and our place in it — as it is.

Craving Happiness is a Miserable Trap
Most of us crave positive feelings and are averse to negative. The problem is that it just doesn't work that way. There is actually no genuinely static place in nature. Nothing exists as a thing, a thought, a feeling, or anything else that is constant and doesn't change. Everything is always in process… always. Think about it.  What would happen if we understood that right to our very cores?

Never happy. Never whole. Always doing our best, and getting nowhere.
Commonly we cling to the positive and resist the negative, trying to hold the positive feelings in place and get rid of the negative. It simply never works. Everything is always changing.

The degree to which we resist the movement is the exact degree to which we will suffer. Joy gives way to pain, gain to loss, love to sorrow…and of course the reverse: pain to joy, loss to gain, and sorrow to love.

Duality is the game of life. It’s where we live.
Life is duality, creativity, and movement. It is the drawing and repelling of opposites. That never stops. We live in a field of things, thoughts and feelings, each with their own differentiated sets of qualities and traits. Everything is always moving. We cannot catch it, or hold it steady. And, that’s alright.

Gaining Perspective — Seeing the space in which the play is happening
Did anyone ever tell you that life was going to be easy? The trick – again – is in being able to see, to know the whole stream of play in which the polarities are constantly rising and falling in relationship to one another. 

The question is: Who am “I” in this?
What is under this — the source of it?

What am I missing here?
What we commonly miss is the direct experience of the unified state of it all; what weaves it all together and itself doesn’t do anything. Ever.

What never does anything? Is there (as we may have been taught) an actual crystal clear sea of empty radiance right here? The hugeness of unmanifest (having no form) intelligence and creativity hiding out, right here in plain sight?

We miss this completely when we are preoccupied by our own little life spheres. We don’t see it because we are not attending to it. Rather we identify with and attach to our own thoughts and feelings as if they define who we are on every level.

Yes, we are individual and we care about things, but might we be subject to a serious case of misidentification when we think that is all we are? We are so busy defining ourselves, what we do, what we have, how we feel, etc. that we don’t even notice what is under all of the personal.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

The inquiry is into the space.
Exploring inner space opens a window into the magical place of transformation where “things”, manifestation of all kinds begins to take shape. We get glimpses. We notice the small spaces between the mind’s fluctuations and grabbing from one thought to the next. The space between the thoughts. The actual space. What does “space” contain? What is the nature of embodied space? Look more closely, again, and again.

Shifting our attention from constantly being attached to and driven by the fragments of form and function, we have a chance to see for ourselves what is the “more” to life. Knowing that this more is no-thing — no object, no thought, nothing except the pure potentiality of life — we begin to find clues into the context in which we live.

We can do this.
The big fallacy is that this is difficult to see for yourself! Thinking that is just another fancy obstacle to clarity. What if you can experience this for yourself and it is not reserved for those you think are in some important ways better or smarter than you?¹

Explore the processes that are underway inside your own mind without resistance. Bravery in action; willingness to witness our own faults and issues without judgement is an important key for not getting mired in our own thoughts and feelings. Resistance keeps us locked in place and is a great hinderance to deeper vision.

Yes, we do have to practice.
Practice means honing our ability to pay attention. We attend to the inquiry, “What is under all of this?” Without indulging in how terrible or great our thoughts are, practice means looking for the space between them. The palpable empty radiance from which they all arise.

You do not need to be better to do this! That is a limiting myth, probably perpetuated by hierarchical structures that we have absorbed and still default to thinking are true. There is no hierarchy here. At the micro and the macro levels we are all part of the same unified field. No better and worse is present here. In fact, what a strange construct hierarchy in general! It’s everywhere in our culture and nowhere in nature.

It’s all happening right here, right now and you are perfectly good enough to witness this for yourself.

1. Unfortunately, this superior/inferior way of thinking is perpetuated by some (not all, of course) who would like you to think they are smarter and more “evolved” than you. This is not a helpful teaching. It is a trap.