dealing well with life issues

There are so many issues, such a wide range of issues to “deal” with in this human life–people’s attitudes, physical impairments, natural forces, genetic mutations, social constructions, conditions of all sorts, and the natural impermanence, emptiness, and unseparateness of existence.

How can a human handle any and all life issues well?

Life issues are commonly considered situations of dissonance in our life, rather than resonance. This recognition helps me understand that all life issues are a matter of perception and viewpoint. In another moment, an hour or year from now, I may view and perceive any particular issue quite differently because I will have gone through learning and experiencing that widens my understanding. What I am striving towards here is the realization for the widest possible perceptual view so that I may understand any and all life issues well in the moment I am experiencing life. Handling life issues well appears to require an open consciousness.

Annie Payson Call’s 1914 book, How to Live Quietly, is a helpful resource for me to explain the need for the opening of conscious perspective. “What brings peace is when we face the selfishness in ourselves squarely in its true form, — acknowledge it, repent of it, and refuse steadily to act or speak or think from it. I say “in its true form” because so keenly do people seem to dislike to know themselves that they will take credit to themselves for acknowledging a wrong, and persistently call it by another name, rather than face the evil in themselves for what it really is. They will say, “I am wrong here,” or “I am wrong there” in minor places, without facing in the least their besetting sin.” If we meet our own restrictions of view and consciousness and let them go, refraining from acting on or from the dissonance that arises from those views, we practice the discontinuance of creating and maintaining divisions and views.

It is my current understanding that all conflict is a matter of attachment plus limited perspective. For example, if I adhere to any political, religious, philosophical, scientific, or personal views, then I attach to that limited perspective. That viewpoint may help me in one particular moment and hinder me in another situation. However, as a human being I am inherently limited by the nature of my embodied existence; and yet, I am also unbound by any particular attachment to any particular view. This understanding of the malleability inherent in conscious awareness frees me from the equation of conflict and enables me to handle any and all particular issue well. But, I must actually detach from views, beliefs, opinions, etc in order to realize this flexibility to deal well with all issues. This may be the essential meaning of the Tao te Ching phrase “wander the world without cares,” for if we return to non-egocentric consciously aware presence, then we may move freely around and through the issues of dissonance we find in our lives of contingency.

Seeing divisions I cling to selfish separation and cause the existence of conflict; letting go of attachments I arrive in the actual oneness of presence. Here, now, in the actuality of existence, I attend to needs and manifest natural goodness, health and true peace.

Krishnamurti asks us, “Why don’t you change?” Meeting the challenge of answering this question, I see that I do not change because I am all too comfortable resigning to conditioned and repetitious patterns of activity. I tend to label this activity, criticize the patterns, and judge myself positively and negatively for the whole of it. This is really just more of the same insane, feedback-like commentary where nothing changes.

Now, to change, to bring myself to the actuality of existence and resonate with natural oneness, I must extinguish selfish attachment and turn my conscious attention to the activity that needs doing. Oddly enough, this endeavor is my responsibility as a human being, which if transgressed, causes suffering, sin, selfishness, misery, separation, dis-ease, delusion, wrong, false distinctions, et cetera. Herein is the priority of the practice of conscious awareness, for it is cultivation of natural emptiness, nonseparation, and change within our humanness.

May this post be a helpful reminder regarding the necessity of the practice of natural conscious awareness in every moment and situation of life.

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