Despite the countless changes in external appearances and actors and players, our human civilization, this version anyway, has had a consistent philosophical base in duality.  You and I, Yin and Yang, This and That, White and Black, Good and Evil, God and Devil… so on.  This duality has been so ingrained as to be instinctive, the glasses through which we understood and sought to understand everything in the universe.  Competition and domination, the basic driving force in our society is an offspring of duality.  What, then, is the alternative to duality?  What can fill the narrow and yet impossible gulf between God and Satan?  What is the “middle” that we have forgotten and need to recover?  The answer is life, energy (Ki), and Human.  Especially, a new understanding of the human, the instigator and protagonist of creation, is the key to overcoming the inherent flaw of duality. 

Say a flower recognized itself as a flower and bloomed forth in all its glory; however, if the said flower did not have anyone who could appreciate its beauty and with whom it could share its fragrance, then what good is this flower in such a place?

The key to making the divinity bloom is hope, the same hope that forces an endless fountain of energy to shoot forth from within us.  I call this “vision.”  A “vision” is a spiritual business plan in which you lay out the strategy and action plan through which you intend to actualize the divinity that you have discovered.  Vision is the life’s goal that you have created through your choice to be enlightened.

Observe your own body.  It breathes.  You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity.  Who, then, is breathing?  The collection of information that you mistakenly think it’s you is not the main protagonist in this drama called the breath.  In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you.  You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going.  The expression, “My life” is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption.  You don’t posses life; life expresses itself through you.  Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.

I recall seeing a sign in a national park.  It read, “Please take with you what you brought and leave what was here already.”  This should be the basic axiom when dealing with Earth.  Earth is not ours to do as we please.  We have just been granted temporary stewardship of Earth.  We did not purchase Earth with money.  What we can attain during our time on Earth is not more land nor higher skyscrapers but inner maturity.  We have been granted permission to use the grand “toy,” the whole of the natural environment, from the trees, forest, seas, air, and earth, as tools to facilitate our inner maturity.  This is why we have a responsibility to return the toy to its rightful place in its original condition.  Such awareness should be the basic minimum that guides our actions. 

As long as we are in this physical form, we have to eat, excrete, sleep, and engage in social relationships.  Every moment of your life is a series of choices, and to make a choice, you have to judge the situation beforehand.  In another word, you have to weigh the situation on your internal scale.  Then you have to take responsibility for the choices that you make.  Although everyone starts with their scales at “0,” we put so much stuff upon them as we live our lives that we eventually forget what is was that we have on the scales and lose our sense of the “0.”

And you have to start with something that is easy, enjoyable, and natural: like breathing.  After you experience and internalize the effects brought about by these new changes, you will feel sense of something larger in your life and a need to share them with others.  As you embark on this road, your attitude toward life will change, your worldview will change, and you will have become a pebble that causes a new “enlightened” cultural ripple to spread outward. 

However, your instinctive trust in the energy of your own life force, especially confirmed by your own conscious experiences, will help you overcome these doubts and hesitations.  When we feel the strong, pulsating energy of life and marvel at the process of life that does not require our conscious manipulation, we have no choice but to trust it and be humbled by it.  Trust in life and listen to it.  Listen to the rhythm of life.  Listen to your own breath and pulse.  Learn to resonate consciously with that rhythm.  No, don’t learn.  Stop learning and just listen and observe.  Observe how you breathe, how your heart beats, how your skin palpitates… Now, express your life’s rhythm freely, for it is in that freedom that Truth resides, Life lives, and Creation is consummated.