Let Me Teach You How To Live

Deep inside of you, there is fear.

A storm of anxieties and worries, of grief and anger.

These lay at the center of your being.

The rains and flashes, the thundering vibrations -- all rage on, whether you’d like it or not. And what do we do in a storm? How are we taught? Sure, I know you… you are just like everyone else. You take shelter, you ride out the storm, you pull up the covers and wait for it to pass.

This is survival.

The stone and mortar walls you’ve built to protect yourself the only thing standing in the way of certain, violent death.

Here’s what you do not know -- for you are inside and the power is out, how could you?

You are not surviving the storm, you are surviving you.

Logic now, let’s begin to use it. Can something survive itself? Can a rock survive a rock? Where is the threat of an object to itself? No, this cannot be. To be threatened requires an object, requires something outside of you. You are what is being harmed, you cannot also be the harmer. You believe you survive the storm. You must believe this storm is not you. But listen here; the storm is you. You and the storm are inseparable, and those processes which create the storm are the same that form in you every other inclination and desire.

And yet you are the one who has called some “you” and some “storm.” Oh what have you gone and done! You’ve hacked off a whole part of yourself!

You think you are safe from the storm in your house, but you are lost in the center of it.

Let me teach you how to live:

Go out. Get the hell out.

Out of the house! Out, out! Stop hiding, for you are not hiding but killing, that essential part of you by imagining it as a storm and not as you.

You know there is that old scientific myth that we only use 10% of the brain; well I do think there lies truth there. For look at you, cowering in your house, you have no access to those subconscious forces that make the storm, you have rejecting responsibility for them and declared you cannot control them, you cannot deal with them, you cannot understand them.

Let me tell you precisely what you have done; you have given yourself a goddamn lobotomy.

You’ve turned yourself into a robot. And worse still you fear yourself! Pathetic! Ignorant!

Out, out.

Into the storm. It cannot kill you because it is you. It is not other.

You will discover a great power which is that you can weather it. Of course you can -- only fear has kept you from seeing this. Tear down your home that keeps you from yourself. Seek not to inhabit it, but to inhabit yourself. Can you love yourself? This is to say can you understand yourself. Not inside, no. Out and explore.

Go on, now, you’ve no time to lose.

Let me teach you how to live:

Realize you are the storm, and suddenly you will find you have control over rain and shine. Understand the totality that is you and confidence and control will enter into your life, like the first rays of sun breaking through the clouds, onto a rain-soaked field after a summer storm.

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