Not until you are lost, that you can start finding yourself
It’s a lot like “empty your cup” in the last article… as long as you know, you are stuck with it…
I watched the movie “Something The Lord Made” again.
This time I paid attention to the music, and started to see the underlying message the film makers were making: poor black kid… blah blah blah.
The story is about a smart, ambitious black kid, who wants to be a doctor, but has no money to go to school. He starts working, first as a janitor, then as a lab assistant, and then as a researcher for a surgeon in a hospital, and develops the method for the first heart surgery, the blue baby surgery.
All credit goes to the white surgeon, and our black kid gets neither credit, nor a paycheck to match, nor the gratitude of the surgeon, but he does what he loves to do.
Now, we can bemoan his fate, blame the system, blame the surgeon’s arrogance, but that is a story that will keep everyone miserable, and in the “not now” where it is never the way it should be.
Or what I suggest we could do is celebrate his tenacity and celebrate his ingenuity that in spite of his circumstances he managed to do what he always wanted to do: medicine, heal people, use his hands and his heart for people, to do what he did best: do something that is as if “the Lord had made it”.
Now, why am I sharing this? Because you have 100% control over where your attention, where your eyes go. The fact that you don’t exercise your control is neither here nor there… you have the control, but you have allowed another concern to take control of your eyes: the concern for ego, the concern to keep things the same, the concern to remain in the valley of the shadow of death.
You know yourself as the hero or heroine of a particular drama, you know how to play your part, you know how to grieve, scream “bloody murder”, but you don’t know how to live free, inspired, fulfilled… and it seems you don’t even want to stray there…
So I know you, and I know full well that my words fall on deaf ears, and yet, I am going to say them, because I used to be exactly like you, and to stay on the Vertical I need to still learn to control my eyes better.
He, the guy in the movie, leaves the path twice, out of self-righteousness, out of a sense of right of how to be treated to be well. Luckily to all of us, he finds his way back, and gets to do what he does best, better than anyone. He lives a life he enjoys living… wow, right? How many of us can say that?
Now, I am going to do what I write these articles for, really, for the reader to “MAP” what I write onto their own life… i.e. find the same in their own life.
So here I am, mapping… So how does this show up in my life?
I was, like all of us, brought up that you need to be at least as much as the next person. That if you are smarter, then you are supposed to make more money, have more people you can order around… the usual stuff.
I have two brothers, one is a millionaire, the other is a security guard… but one thing they share: both equate success with money.
I have chosen integrity as the measure of my success… and integrity clashes with money, big time.
So, in the eyes of my fellow human, I am not successful, in fact I live in poverty. I knew I didn’t have any elbow room, but I really realized it when my steady students sent me donations, and they really drove it home: I would not be able to afford sending a donation like that to anyone. (Big thank you to you guys, thank you, thank you, thank you! You made me feel an emperor, not a beggar… very generous, thank you.)
It seems that the more integrity I have the less money I have to play with.
Now, I could bemoan my fate… hell yeah, I could. And I would be good at it! I would drive everyone away from me with the moaning… I have done that.
But I would be miserable, resentful, and probably not very creative either. I would blame “Source” whatever that is, fate, myself, for not having more money.
Or I could look at the bigger picture: selling products to people who won’t benefit from it has no integrity for me… so I won’t do it.
And live a life where I love to look into the mirror and meet myself: “Hey you! you are something else, I am glad I am you, not someone else!”
And use my life for growing, vertically, instead of horizontally (money is on the horizontal!), keep myself out of the desire, more desire loop, and document everything I do.
Maybe it will become useful, maybe not, it is useful for me, keeping me in awareness, in Consciousness, and a life worth living.
