Monday, August 6, 2012

Choosing is a Great Thing

LEE VINING, CA - JUNE 22:  (FILE PHOTO)  The f...
(Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

While meditating yesterday morning, I was reminded of the first time I noticed how beautiful the world is. Do you remember the first time that you thought something was beautiful? How old were you? I was taken back to a time when I was five years old, waiting outside Knotty Oak School, the elementary school my older sister had started attending and that I would enter the following year. It was one of those warm, sunny, days in late spring when the grass is the greenest and the sky so blue. Those days seem to be made for five year olds (or the children within us no matter how old we are) don’t they? Golden sunlight filtered down through the leaves of the small maples I stood under and dappled the grass under my feet. Looking up through the leaves, I suddenly realized how beautiful the world was and how peaceful and comfortable I felt in my world. I just hadn’t noticed before.

Beauty is all around us, every day, in some form, but how often do we notice? It can be as simple as the colors in our natural world, the light that gleams in your child’s eyes, or a kind gesture from a stranger. Beauty is not the gift. The gift is being able to perceive beauty. Whenever you have a thought your body reacts with an electro-chemical reaction and produces a polypeptide, an amino acid string that is the representation of your thought or feeling. Those polypeptides are stored in the tissue of your body, so you not only get to see beauty, but you also get to embody it, to carry it with you wherever you go. First the beauty is in your world and you perceive it and then it is in you and part of you.

Unfortunately, in order to see beauty you must also have the power to see the ugliness around you. So if you see sadness, anger, violence, then you embody that as well. It can’t be helped, it is just a a natural reaction that whatever you see your body will react to accordingly. In our world there is ugliness in many places. So what is the use of having this marvelous gift of embodying what we see, if it is not only going to fill us with beauty, but ugliness and sadness as well? Are we destined to be sponges that just absorb whatever we come into contact with? The answer is that we have another gift, the gift of choice. I am not advocating closing your eyes to the world around you and trying to live with your head in the sand. But if you change the way you perceive events and people, then the physical reaction will change as well.
Beauty
Beauty (Photo credit: Rickydavid)

I am not suggesting that you give up any experiences or your awareness, because you would not be who and what you are right now without each and every experience that you have had. We don’t have the wisdom to know which experiences will ultimately be positive and which will be negative. How many times has what you thought was the right thing turned out to be the wrong thing? Sometimes missed opportunities are blessings in disguise. We don’t always know the whole plan for our lives, that is left up to our higher selves, our Loved Ones who project us into this world.

Therefore, it is better to look at each experience as an opportunity for growth and learning. When we no longer see any ugliness around us, when our perception changes, then we no longer embody ugliness or give it a place to reside. That may be the key to the spiritual belief that the opposite of truth is not falsehood, it is actually nothingness. If you do not perceive anything as ugly or bad, then it doesn’t have a place to reside, it ceases to exist. It is just a matter of perception. And that, my loved one, is your other wonderful gift, the gift of choice. When all you see is beautiful, then you will be the embodiment of beauty. Beauty is all around you and the choice of how you perceive it is yours.

Let’s keep living for peace, justice, and happiness, but when we see the opposites of those goals, let us remember that they are not the truth so they only exist in this domain as long as we allow them to be here.  They are not truth and only truth can exist in the domain of our higher consciousness, our Loved Ones.