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. 

Spirituality is the bridge that connects us to the ultimate source of all existence, the sea of nothingness.  Therefore, a spiritual awakening is reestablishing the connection to the source, discovering your own roots, in a sense.  The first order of business that we must accomplish in order to know our own roots is to know the root of our physical manifestation first and foremost: namely, Earth.  To know that your life and Earth are not separate but one, that you are a part of the great biosystem called Earth. 

The academically gifted are clearly talented. There are children who are able to learn conspicuously more than others even though they study for the same period of time. Such children should continue to develop dreams of becoming a professional, such as a researcher or a professor, in a field they enjoy. The problem is children who are forced to study, even though they have neither the interest nor the talent for it. Left with no other choice, these kids study to keep from disappointing parents or teachers, but they fall behind children who are better at it and always have the bitter taste of defeat in their mouths.

From a translation of Ilchi Lee’s book The Power of the Brain

To discover and develop their child’s talents, parents must develop the eyes to look within themselves. The dreams of children are readily stained by the ambitions of parents. If parents take a cookie-cutter approach to their kids, trying to stuff them into the familiar molds of their own experience, the children will grow to fit those molds, but no more.

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.