Walking Through The Tall Grass

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-Albert Einstein

I just can't buy into the idea that there is heaven or hell. At the same time, I can't buy into the idea that life is meaningless either.

I've been through both heaven and hell. And I've lived enough lifetimes in just this one to know that it is filled with meaning. Perhaps not in every twist and turn- but then again, because perhaps we are not looking. But, the meaning lies, waiting, when we decide to open up and look at it. Decide may be a bit of a harsh description. At times, it takes pain staking effort to work through the webs and paths we've adopted and cling onto to make our own, oftentimes, false meaning of reality.

Some people say- if you do the work, you can reap the rewards. And to most degrees, this is true. But, oftentimes the work can be one of the simplest things, like taking an opportunity to which you pretty much resisted quite a lot (in retrospect). And discover, once you let go- how easily the meaning surfaces.

In this life, there is heaven and there is hell. There are monsters every where you turn- even inside yourself. To deny that, only makes them more tricky to weed out from the trees.

If someone could teach us one thing to make this life easier- it would be to be honest with ourselves. But that would entail those who are teaching, to be first honest with themselves and secondly then, honest with us.

A perfect world, there is not. But, hope is life. And the only way to find our way is to find our way within ourselves, honestly, courageously and tenderly. Getting past what we've been taught, what we've rebelled against, what we may have inadvertently adopted without even realizing- to form this reality in which we comfortably exist. Life is difficult, yet we seem to take comfort in our own view of it's difficulty, crafting our own reality based on our own difficulties, often denying the difficulties of humans as a whole.

Perhaps it is the American, modernized way of thinking, an industrialized cycle of it's own. But we are so self-centered. To a degree we must be, but it seems we've lost our compassion for the human race and our place in it. I think individually and globally, we'd be much better off, and much happier if we could attain the balance between being self-centered in a healthy way and unresistant to being part of a whole.

Either way, the battle lies within ourselves. And to wage a good fight, we must first be open to the possibility that our preconceived notions are often barriers to our progress. And more importantly, that they exist, in the first place to perhaps, be broken, modified and/or abandoned altogether.