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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Each minute I live, is less time left in this particular body. It is a steady, dripping depletion.

I turn around and look, and glance at the trail of blood my life is leaving behind. Squinting, I wonder… Is my blood staining the ground, only to be washed away by the rain of time? Or, will it heal and create new life, perhaps become a life-changing transfusion?

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If you follow your heart and cause damage, should you suffer or rejoice?

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How do we know exactly where we are along the path of eternal awareness? That would be a valuable thing to know.

An accurate understanding of where we are in this process is different than making a general statement like, “Well, I can tell you one thing - I am not all that eternally aware” or “I have some awareness, but I sure need more.” Such statements are vague and generally useless. Yet we often say them in a clubby or chummy sort of way, perpetuating the conspiracy of ignorance that occurs when we laugh and agree.

In striving for eternal awareness am I 1% aware? 10%? More? Knowing exactly where we are along the trail would give us a sense of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

One time I was backpacking with my brother and a couple of friends along the Appalachian Trail. The AT is a 2175 mile footpath that runs from Georgia to Maine. We were hiking over a section of ten mountains in New York state. Lugging a 55 pound backpack, I was coming down a small descent between mountains when I misstepped and my ankle twisted, folding under the full downhill weight of my right leg. Instantly collapsing, I had suffered severe ligament tears and could barely walk. We had topographic maps and it was easy to see that there was no quick way out. We were exactly half way, so I sucked it up and with the help of my trusty walking stick and sympathetic hiking companions, we climbed over the last five mountains for another day or two of painful hiking.

That map gave me get a better perspective of the length of the journey. Knowing that I was over a day away from relief kept me from whining about not being on the way home in an hour. I was able to develop a sense of timing which, together with a sense of the trail’s length, helped me overcome the excruciating pain. Whether we are in pain or not, whether our day is filled with light or darkness, shouldn’t we strive for a similar first rate sense of perspective along the path of eternal awareness?

If you knew exactly where you were along the awareness road, you could more clearly see the problems you are experiencing. Maybe you’d see that you aren’t even on the main road, but are on some side road, detouring for no good reason. Then again, if you knew there was a lot of road construction up ahead, perhaps a detour would be appropriate.

This precise sense of measurement is missing. Our current methodologies for determining our position are too vague. “All I know is that it just seems like the same thing keeps happening over and over,” laments one seeker. Another adds in frustration, “I just can’t get a clear sense of what I am supposed to do.” Another echos a common spiritual teaching, “It is all about Love,” while another says, “I am nothing and nothing matters.”

We read books, enroll in classes and surf the net, searching for answers and clarity, and our effort and progress often seems to be measured in inches not in miles. We convince ourselves that we are advancing because our friends act as though their meager progress is satisfying, so we agree and attempt to feel good about ourselves. The prevalence of this reinforcement conspires to convince us that we are making significant progress, but deep inside we know we aren’t.

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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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