Ah, to be a hypocrite

Over the last couple months, I have been dealing with a family move and one or two family emergencies. That stuff is still ongoing. Luckily today, I have some time to write, and I want a short interlude from the Integral stuff for now.

Life is really your greatest teacher. You may or may not have a person guiding you spiritually in life, but you always have Life to teach you, for as long as, well, you're alive.

Self-examination is one way of gleaning lessons from Life. Idries Shah and other famous sufis often talk about self-examination of behavior, or even simply being able to examine yourself. Most people are not capable of stepping back and looking at their own behavior on deep levels. Consequently, there are a lot of "hypocrites" out there. Idries Shah often used that word in his writings to describe people who are out of touch with their own behavior and wind up doing the very things that they preach against. Pretty much everyone falls into that category at some point or another, more often than not.

Hell, I've done it.

If you look around and do some digging on the Internet, you can find all kinds of people who believe in "manifestation" or "magic", or "magick", however you like to spell it. There are many other terms to cover the same thing, even the term "prayer" is used often. The underlying basis of all these things is changing your life to be something other than what it is right now. At a deep level, they are all exactly the same things with exactly the same arrays of mechanisms.

Of course, change is not always such a bad thing. You have a right to try to change your situation if you do not like the way it is going. However, sometimes it is easy to forget that there is an overarching Reality that does not change. This Reality filters down through the levels of existence and has a way of communicating things to us. Sometimes, the communication is, "Tough crap, buddy. You ain't changing this."

My attitude has generally been to trust in Reality and let it do whatever it does. Many years ago, I gave up all esoteric attempts to fiddle with Reality. I saw no point to it. Play the cards you are dealt and shut up. If you work hard and be smart, you increase your odds of having an "easy" life, but the ease of life is more your perception than anything else, so work on that perception instead, if you feel like working on something.

That right there, folks, is some hypocrisy. Good example.

Years ago I gave up trying to change the world through esoteric means, but I never gave up trying to change it through conventional means, which is even worse! Trying to change Reality even when it says, "No way, buddy" is a useless exercise. That's true whether you do it by magic, prayer, or good ole fashioned hard labor. At times when Reality will not allow you to change it, the point is to accept what IS.

When the time comes to get up off your accepting ass and move, Reality will let you know. Have no fear in that, but until that time, the best thing to do is to hang out in the Present and chill, or not chill, as the case may be in a hard situation. Sometimes, the best solution to a problem is to do nothing but wait. Other times, waiting will get you killed. The trick to telling the difference is to have some insight into what the universe is trying to tell you.

It all boils down to self-observation. Lots of lessons to be learned in that exercise.