Rather than resolve to make yourself better in any way make real promises that are love statements. Make some radical statements of self-acceptance. The being you are is beautiful enough. Promise to take time with this being. This I promise will give you more than enough. With these promises you cannot fail because there is only the changeless beauty that always is. Promise to be less judgemental. Judging others and ourselves is the ultimate disease. We have a tyrant within our minds. We allow this tyrant to beat us up and put down the very beauty we are. This tyrant tells us we have something to prove in order to be loved. You are love. Promise to liberate yourself by knowing this. The cessation of judgement in terms of good or bad is the beginning of this liberation. Trust that you. are beautiful enough. Your essence is beyond good or bad. You are more beautiful than the limited mind of little me can ever imagine. Promise to be delightful. This vow scares little me. In our culture of emotional dishonesty it is fine to be at best OK. It is not OK not to be not OK. To be delightful appears to be too much. It seems self centred and egotistic. In this world of joylessness and absence of wonder I love the idea of sharing delight. It seems so radical and transformational. This allowing of delight lightens the hearts of others. Of course it takes tremendous courage to be delightful. I take heart in the beautiful instruction from the Buddha that tells me, Be a light unto yourself. By being a light unto yourself you allow others to shine their light. Promise to discover real power. This is the power to heal the suffering of separation within time and space. This is the power to bridge the two worlds. This is the world of time and the world of the timeless. All healing that transforms is from the world of the timeless. This power is not the power of little me but the power of the true self. This power can be accessed via radical prayer and meditation to name only a few ways. One does not seek such power for oneself. This power is the power of nothingness. It is the power of love beyond the drama of my love. This love is not possessive. It needs nothing and no one. This power emanates from the formless and the unknown. It is not something one does but something that one is. It is allowed to arise out of the formless into the world of form and time. Promise to know who you are. This knowing who you are is the real beauty of life. It is the greatest discovery that you will ever know. All creative endeavour comes from this place of knowing that you are. It is paradoxically a place of no-thing-ness. Out of this no-thing-ness all is created. This nothingness is paradoxically the ground of all creative potential. It is a place of the deepest stillness. It is a place of no mind. It is beyond the place of the chattering in our heads we call thinking. It is the peace beyond understanding. One becomes the peace. One becomes the understanding. One becomes the unity. One becomes the knowing. Promise to die. This is not the wish for death in any physical sense but the death of all that little me thinks it is within the limitation of time and space. This dying to little me illuminates the real self. To be who I am is to be in love with life. More than this it is to know that one is love eternal. It is to be the experience of life as flow and not life as my experience. This experience I call my life is the life of limitation and judgment. This is the life we cling to and save but in saving lose our real life. Promise to learn a new language. This is the language of self-love. This means I watch the words I place in my mind. The words we place in our mind create our lifes vibration. With the words we allow to enter our heads we create our fineness or our not feeling fine. Choose only to use the finest words. There will be resistance. The ego senses you are trying to escape from the prison of limitation within time and space. Simply watch this resistance without judgement. Allow these words of refinement and self care to be your primary language. Allow these words to journey between the head and the heart. This is often the most difficult journey you will ever allow. At this threshold place of the New Year 2006 I wish you light, I wish you love and most of all I wish you the knowing of who you are. I remind you that you are already wonderful and wondrous. You are beyond persona. You are beyond your thinking about. You are a wonder and wonderful being. There is nothing you need add. How to know this? Let me leave you at the end of this year with the most wonderful instruction you might ever practice. This is an instruction I would place on my tombstone. This will liberate you from suffering. This instruction is, Be still and know. Have a blessed new year beyond the limitation of time. Tony Cuckson 2005 |
