It is not so easy being a self-reliant and independent person. Try, work, struggle and try again. On and on, an endless cycle. Some people claim that work is fulfillment, and it is true that it can be just that. Whether that is something good for you, however, depends on your goals and perspective, depends on what you are looking to fill yourself with.

Another way of looking at this might be people some would label as irrational. They say their heads are filled with voices. But have you ever wondered where the voice you call your own comes from? How do you know whether the voice or voices you hear are yours?

When spiritual teachers talk about ‘emptying the mind,’ this can be a somewhat misleading expression. It suggests that there are no thoughts, nothing present. Emptying the mind is like taking a glass full of milk that has been left out on the table too long. The milk gets sour. So, we empty the glass and wash it out; this is emptying the mind of (s)our clutter. But it doesn’t stop there. We reach for a bottle of fresh milk, open the cap and let its’ cool liquid spill down our throat. This is the in-rush or through-put of living in the moment, allowing clear, clean thoughts to flow in and through us. We don’t think about drinking the milk; we just drink – and in the moment-by-moment drinking of it, we experience it – with little to no thought.

One way to get potable water is to desalinate it, while another way is to drink it straight from a fresh mountain spring. One way takes a great deal of effort to get from point A to point B; the other way is effortless – we simply drink it straight from the source.

We can’t drink an entire mountain stream. We sip some, some spills down our chin, and the rest flows downstream. Simply drink. Let thoughts flow in and out

It is not so easy being a self-reliant and independent person. So, stop thinking so much. Stop trying so hard. Open your mind and drink straight from the source.

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Kay has a very nice blog at Neosnoia. I visit there often and have been following a couple of posts about hearing a Voice inside of us. It ties in very nicely with a comment recently left on my blog by Speck. Kay said:

A few days ago I decided to “put it all out there” regarding my experience with The Voice while I was praying. The experience was mind-blowing, and I haven’t been the same since.

Her posts are titled Who Am I and On the Altar. Maybe you have had similar experiences that you could share with this fellow traveler. I am sure she would be delighted to hear from you.

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In a post comment I said, “You have caused me to pause and consider the origin of thought. I once meditated deeply and looked for the origin of thought within me. I looked in all the unlikely places first - legs, arms, abdomen, stomach, heart, etc. Then I looked in my head and brain. In none of those places did I find thought. It was coming in from somewhere beyond the body. ”

Speck, an anonymous but always provocative, insightful and thoughtful commenter, posted this response:

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When you realized there was no identifiable origin of thought within you, did you not see that that itself is a thought, and there is no “I” inside? The thoughts follow one another without any effort on our part. If I was to say to you “Come up with a thought” you would see that you actually witness a stream of thoughts, you “pick” one of them, and say, “I will think of this”….lol. So much for creating a thought. But you might argue, well I had the thought of picking that individual thought…but did you really? Or was that just another thought coming from nowhere?

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