NOEMAYA

To be serene isn’t about managing and manipulating your environment into peace, for most often you yourself are the element of chaos, and your attempts at bringing peace is the very cause of disturbance. Alternatively, one can find serenity by a simple act of reframing the will, the wish, and the goal:

If I want perfection to be the goal and wish that it’s the case, then by reframing what is as the perfect state of things, then the goal is already achieved and my wish instantly fulfilled. And if I will what already is, then I’m doing as I wish, for my wish, too, is what already is. 

The cause of suffering is to wish things to be otherwise than they are, and that’s total insanity: to wish something that has already appeared in a certain form to have appeared differently. 

The key to responsibility, or to responsible life, is to be just and to do justice. And justice, as conceptualized by our Sheikh Plato, is to mind one’s own business. That’s also vigilance and prosoche. 

A more practical approach for those too frail to reframe a totality is to engage in a mixture of movement and reframing: much of the progress toward serenity, in terms of practice, has to do with undoing a habit by replacing it with another or an opposite habit; it has to do with saying NO to yourself. Think about how you ended up here: in light of the universal conditioning, you accumulated more and more impressions through life experiences, and you kept saying yes to the demands and stories of all these impressions when they returned to you; you engaged them, reacted to them, internalized and then externalized and acted upon them. You reacted to them as if they were realities, and they assumed reality in light of your reactions to them: You said “yes” whenever they knocked. It’s your attention to them that keeps them real for you, akin to a man startled and frightened to death by his own shadow.

To undo, simply don’t respond; they will frequent you for sometime, like stray cats and dogs that you’ve fed for a long time; they’ll return and bark and mew and drive you crazy for a bit; but if you are persistent and refuse to say yes to the old habits of thought, refuse to open the door, or to react, they will stop and go elsewhere. Meanwhile, redirect your attention and presence to the things that beautify your soul, that have done so since time immemorial: music, a good book, good company, prayer, play, a walk; and in all that be present and practice presence; it’s all practice. Suffering is a bad habit, and like all habits it can cease to be; pain is inevitable, but as we said above, your pain is none of your business, so there’s no point in concerning yourself with it. 

Oh God! Grant that I mind my own business.  

What’s more insane than spending the now regretting ill-spent time in the past! This guarantees that someday I’ll be beating myself up for what I could be doing right now instead of this ill-spent time. 
We can reclaim everything right now instead of being weighed down by the past sins, for this present moment is such that no sin can enter it; it’s always us that have to leave the now to be touched by the sins of our fathers.

You see, at any given moment, you know exactly what to do. It’s rarely a question of knowledge or information but rather of willingness, or rather resistance. And resistance is like a tent with its corners nailed down in the past and the future. There’s no resistance in the now, for there cannot be a conflict here and now; conflict necessitates duality which is impossible in the now.

Behold the beauty, and that’s the path, to gaze at the beauty. The best seeking is seeing. Wherever you are, expose yourself to the truth and the beauty, in any form available to you: music, art, literature, philosophy, dance, or play. The key to salvation is constant remembrance of God, and that’s constant exposure to beauty, for truth, beauty, and play are the best forms of God.