On Seeing Clearly ¾ Especially Appearances

EXPERIENCE has taught us that this appearance of our outer improvement is a vain attempt to reshape the appearance of action into compliance with a certain set of unwritten, inner, self-justifying, deflective, image-shaping rules. 

Basically ... a flaw to cover a flaw. 

Two wrongs make a wrong.

This is referred to loosely as “self-image actualization”: if the rearranging of the outer world is done properly, then it will hopefully bring the beholder a sense of safety and serenity. 

The art of not doing what it is that I appear to be doing.

Try this: Make an art out of living life; make it be how you walk the walk.

It was a native shaman I knew many years ago who said to me that to begin to walk through life in "a sacred manner," was the beginnings of the development of a reverence for life, a reverence that we will all need to develop, sooner or later.  This reverence is not self-seeking, nor does it seek self-satisfaction, there is no deeper ego functions outside of the fact that the ego will participate in the process simply because it is there and a part of you in the first place.  Simply put, life is as it is, with no real beginnings and no real endings, edgeless … eternal.  I am the Alpha and the Omega, containing everything, lacking for nothing, everything being exactly as it is supposed to be.

As we begin this journey … most of us make an uncomfortable discovery … we are not in sync with things, nor are things in sync with us.

So?

This process of walking lightly becomes the simple recogni­tion that the pain we suffer is caused by our thirst for the satisfactions of our own little desires, the ones we think we need so desperately to satisfy, willfully, as the expression of our newly found powerfulness.

Always trying to counteract the original forces of powerlessness from our earliest experiences.

Keeping us perpetually out of sync.

Remember The Working Miss-Definition Of Freedom:

What most people call freedom is simply their willful ability to satisfy their desires.

Walking the walk as a sacred exercise … developing a Point Of View … can leave you in a place of not being invested in any of the outcomes of your actions and that can lead to the satisfaction of the greater spiritual desire: freedom from the mind's incessant wandering and thirst for more. 

Under all this … lay the understanding and appreciation of Forgiveness.

For Your Journal: In Longhand: 

Forgiveness to me Means …  a page or two long hand in your journal.

Einstein's Riddle

There are 5 houses in 5 different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar, or drink the same beverage.
The question is: Who owns the fish?
Hints:

• The Brit lives in the red house.
• The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
• The Dane drinks tea.
• The green house is on the left of the white house.
• The green homeowner drinks coffee.
• The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
• The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
• The man living in the center house drinks milk.
• The Norwegian lives in the first house.
• The man who smokes Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats.
• The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
• The owner who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer.
• The German smokes prince.
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
• The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.

Einstein wrote this riddle early during the 19th century. He said 98% of the world could not solve it. Its not hard, you just need to pay attention and be patient.