Seven Heaven Degrees of Integration

Finding solutions to the most difficult of problems is not complicated. In fact, it's quite simple, but it takes a perspective that must be radically downsized. To start with, in addressing situations we tend to limit our options to the small platforms that we can conceive of for addressing them, no matter how absurdly tasking, far-fetched and energy-draining they are. Like trying to learn how to make French Toast by catching a flight to the country it's named after. It is possible to learn how to make this treat this way and there could be a number of people who from their experience, would support us in doing so, however, with even a little expansion of our experience and subsequent awareness, we know that the recipe could be available from a friend, in a cookbook or online. Without this experience, Paris seems reasonable in comparison to exploring the resources of Australia or Mars, but with it, the French flight solely to make this breakfast seems absurd.

Sound silly? Is it that much stranger than expecting someone will take away our pain and confusion by changing into what we want them to be through our pressuring them, a counselor straightening them our, or by replacing them? Or that by increasing the amount of money we have access to we'll finally feel more secure and at peace with ourselves? Are we so certain that the answers we're seeking aren't as easily available, just not in the places that we keep reactively looking for them in?

There's a deeper problem with problem solving. It starts off from the misperception that the circumstance we're seeing points to the need for changing it rather than the opportunity for expanding our awareness within it. In other words, when something appears to show up in our lives, instead of limiting our perception of it to a comparison with the stored memories, reactive patterns and thinking processes we're already familiar with, we can opt to refrain from acting upon this compulsive need to manipulate what appears, allowing ourselves to go farther into discovery of what is actually happening beyond our thimble full of stored experience about it. Rather than spending our awareness, the moment and effectively, our life boxing up a mystery into a problem that we can manage, we allow ourselves to wander further into the problem without moving the furniture or painting the ceiling until we pass through its walls altogether into the unlimited expansion of its possibilities that we've yet to see.

And yes, there is a cost to this: loss of control beyond our fear's capacity to contain it. There's no consumer protection agency guaranteeing reasonable recourse for our unfulfilled expectations, in deed, those are the first things that have to go.

But there is a reward beyond measure as well: witnessing the opening through a seeming problem into a deliciously full, awareness of life that not only accounts for the discrepancies we initially misjudged, but utilizes them as the very stepping stones into this grander vision and effortless invitation to response.

As the writer and mystic, Franz Kafka so succinctly put it: You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Paris is a trip worth taking simply in itself and French Toast has its own allure as well. When we are not absorbed with having to make either happen, we are free to experience how the two might be connected by a plethora of other friendly wonders just as eager to make our acquaintance.

Bon voyage et appétit.