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Going Backwards To Go Forwards

Have you ever encountered one of those people who seem to be happy and peaceful all the time and who seem to be successful at everything they try? Have you ever wondered just how this is possible when so many others struggle so hard to achieve even a little success at one or two things? It just doesn't seem fair! And have you ever heard that little voice in your head that wonders if those people know something that you don't? And if that is true, what exactly is it that they know that makes everything come so easy to them?

The answer to all this is really one of those weird realities that tell us to achieve something by not trying to achieve it. It is so Zen haku! But when you finally do see it you wonder how you could have missed it in the first place. The secret behind all this is in the fact that some fundamentals are so basic and powerful, that any changes in them will propagate into every detail of your life. It is a form of going backwards in order to go forwards or changing the foundation in order to change the structure that stands on it.

Revisiting The Basics

One of the main problems with looking at the basics is that we don't always know where they begin or even how to recognize them for what they are. Often we think we are dealing with some basic and it may have a limited impact but nothing like what we had anticipated and we never think about it any deeper or we might have discovered the truth. Also, it is a little risky messing around with the real basics. We intuitively sense that we might discover something that we may not be prepared to deal with. But such things are based on fear and fear is one of the basics that we need to look at anyway because it is a big part of the prison we construct around ourselves.

All our experiences are based in our minds. Happiness and success like all other experiences we encounter are the result of decisions we make. Now I know that every one of you that just read that sentence who has not yet realized the reality of personal responsibility, will object with great passion, perhaps a little too much passion in fact, but another of those pesky basics is personal responsibility. Sorry! But when you go looking for the truth, you can't just pick and choose which truths work for you and which don't, and if you find yourself doing this, you need to ask yourself just what part of you is trying to do this, and to what end? It's called self awareness.

The Agenda Of Basics

Basics are just that, basic. When we are looking at an individual human life, we need to realize how important things like self worth are. How much depends on how we really feel about ourselves? Think about it! If we feel bad about ourselves, what kind of life do you think we will have? And on the other hand, if we feel good about ourselves, what is that likely to lead to? What might be the consequences if our lives are guided by the values of material wealth and gain alone? Will we be likely to respect life itself? On the other hand, if we are guided by the values of love and compassion what might we encounter in our lives? What if we loved ourselves?

Basics are just that, basic. If we spend our whole lives caught up in a trance of cultural reality, that is, a reality defined by society, civilization and culture, rather than living our lives by more solid and truer values based on awareness of ourselves and a well developed intelligence each of which is the result of the development of self discipline, then we will live our whole lives without actually being there to enjoy it because we will be living inside an idea in our head, a conceptual version of reality. We will have lived our lives for other people, for an idea of life, for a society's idea of what we should be, of the world's idea of how we should live our lives.

The Journey Back To The Garden

Finding our way back to our natural state of being is now more difficult than ever because of the long journey of social, political and economic indoctrination that we have been subjected to. But achieving success in all things means living a successful life, and doing that means developing self discipline which is required in order to develop self awareness, which is the journey to find our natural selves. It isn't a matter of making ourselves into something we are currently not, it is a matter of peeling back the layers of lies and false assumptions that we long ago accepted as the truth and by which we have been living our lives, at the expense of our true and natural selves.

True success is finding our way back to the love that shines in all of us and has been waiting in our hearts for us to find the courage to let it emerge and ourselves unfold into the natural loving and happy creatures we started out as when we were children. One of our species greatest mistakes is in not preserving the child and letting it gain wisdom with time, but rather suppressing it and replacing it with obedient drone workers and consumers in order to serve the undisciplined and unconscious world version of the purpose of life. We have the power to break the chains of our social and cultural programming and reconfigure ourselves according a more loving and enduring paradigm of the purpose of life.

You can begin your journey of self awareness by changing the behaviors that are preventing your success here.