One of the biggest challenges for me on the path is to stay in the middle. Neither left nor right…
- Neither too egotistic, nor self-cheating.
- Neither too buoyant nor down in the dumps.
- Neither accepting nor refusing credit.
- Neither too nice nor too rude to people and myself.
Choosing belongs to the world of extremes…
When you choose, you un-choose the other extreme, and there begins the mischief.
This spiritual practice could be called the ‘Art of Not Choosing’ yet all religion, all teachers encourage you to choose…
Choosing, ultimately, is the path to a miserable life.
Now, staying in the middle, I guess, is always difficult, because what the ego thinks is that an interesting life has strong emotions… right? Lots of drama.
But
- when you have given a lot, like I have, to find a solution to a problem no one can easily solve.
- when you have shown brilliance, tenacity, and genuine care… like I have, then it’s harder.
In my soul correction, Forget Thyself, it simply says: don’t put yourself first. Let it be NOT about you. Let it be about the problem. Let it be about the solution. But not about you.
I always dreamed about fame. I dreamed about being interviewed on prime television in Hungary, like they interviewed Zsazsa Gabor, infamous Hungarian Hollywood starlet, famous for her tastes for rich husbands, and her “adorable” accent.
And here I am and it is all not to be.
The same is with money. Greed is another aspect of ego… and I need to walk the middle. Neither greedy, nor giving it all away.
Very interesting, if you ask me.
We all have a “machine”, or you can also call it a script, but I think machine expresses the moves better.
We actually have several ‘machines’, each with a different cycle… cycle is a time interval when the same script repeats itself.
I have a year long ‘money machine.’
Every year, around Christmas, I get a great idea, something that is a millionaire maker in someone else’s hand, someone who has a different machine.
But in my hand, by February, it turns into infamy, being thrown out, and poverty, losing everything, going deeper than I was in December.
This year wasn’t any different, except I haven’t gone into infamy… yet.
It is the moment to moment awareness that I have managed to master in the past few years, that has saved me, so far, from infamy.
The trigger: bragging, feeling that it is all mine, feeling the fame coming, feeling the riches coming.
So, you see, walking the middle is actually a life-saver. It seems like a spiritual practice, and it is. But at the same time it is a life practice… because any spiritual practice worth its name, is a life practice, that makes it possible to have peace of mind, serenity, joy, and a life worth living.
Anything that has an opposite, money-poverty, fat-thin, happy-sad, in a relationship-alone, vegan-only protein diet, generously donating-tight fisted, etc. is a misery maker.
This is not a spiritual practice specifically for me: everyone can benefit from it… I never would have thought.
My whole life my life numerology number was 8, the sign of the roller-coaster. It was a thrill to go from extreme to extreme, and exhausting.
It’s taken me 30 years of work to see that I could have committed to this practice 30 years ago, and it would have given me a life a lot more worth living than the one I lived. Maybe less interesting, but more enjoyable.
