STILL GROWING UP

This latest cold snap turned out to be pretty wimpy. It is Sunny and 14.7 F now, it is a nice day for this time of year. We are supposed to have above average highs for the next few days. That is something to celebrate. Of course the normal high for this day is 23 not exactly tropical. Our normal highs won't be over freezing for another month.

I ran into an old guy in our neighborhood; I said, “I notice that you call your wife, honey, dearie, sweetheart and other endearing terms. How do you manage at age 94 to keep it up? What is your secret?” He said, “I forgot her name over ten years ago and I am too afraid to ask.”

Okay, I stole that joke from Facebook. It cracked me up. Perhaps I identify with it. Life is a blast but it ain't always easy. I had a moment this Morning where I felt like I was in heaven. It was shortly after I got up and I was sitting in the living room as the Sun came over the horizon. I felt absolutely loved by the universe. Everything was perfect. I understood “being''. In that moment I couldn't imagine there being any other way of being. Why couldn't this last forever?

Within a half hour or so I got my ego tweaked in a discussion and I lost that serenity.

I think we have to accept that, that is the way of life on this planet, at least for now. We are works in progress. We are learning to give up separation and know Oneness, that means giving up our egos, which are separation. However, we are in evolution and that is great. We must not be self-critical every time we find ourselves visiting our egos.

Loving ourselves means loving all of ourself. Judgement is what feeds the ego in the first place. Self-criticism feeds it more. Judgement of any kind keeps us stuck, as we give up judgement of ourselves we learn to overlook the egos of others.

One of the things that has helped me is the expression, “There is only love, all else is part of the illusion.” If I am lucky that thought will come into my mind at the point that my ego, or someone else's, begins to emerge. That is when I am lucky, sometimes we go to hell in a hand basket; but that is okay too. It is all okay! We can only put our hand on a hot stove so many times before we realize, “Hey, that hurts!”

As I say we are works in progress. We will learn to keep our hands off that hot stove of the ego. Loving ourselves does not mean waiting until we think we are perfect in order to do it. Loving ourselves is NOW. We are perfect. We are not our egos.

And we can't rid ourselves of our egos by pretending we don't have them. We need to embrace them. They are like terrified little children that think they have to protect us from everything. We need to see we don't need them anymore. We need to calm them down, put them in bed, tuck the the blanket under their chin. Thank them and let them know we don't need their help anymore.

There is only ONENESS. There is only LOVE.

Love and Peace, Gregg