Living Deliberately

Living deliberately requires courage and wisdom. These equate to power. Courage is the ability to perceive what is. Wisdom is the ability to foresee the consequences of an action. Combine them and you have power. Power is the ability to remain present, aware and to shape reality.

All beings have some allotment of power, but they probably do not have the control or understanding over it. In their misunderstanding and confusion they waste their power in pointless contests with eachother. Their indoctrinated beliefs and their identities keep them in a competitive turmoil. Power that is used to aggrandize an identity or to possess something creates its own obstruction. Power that is used to acquire more power changes to fear.

Wizard’s know how to handle power without creating repercussions. They are able to align their efforts into a synergetic influence capable of shaping that which is so fundamental that it is present even before the future reality is conceived. This is advanced wizardry. How do you manage to preserve this power that you’ve gained, this power that is beyond the root of the world? How do you keep it from flashing back?

1. Create integrity in your life. To know such wholeness that nothing is favored. To be everyone and everything to that point that dishonesty or denial of responsibility is unthinkable. By that practice alone you will remain present and know the power of being present. Re-acquire the ability to create and experience simultaneously. Simultaneously means that there is no time interval between the creation and the experience ?no minute, no day, no lifetime. You don’t create effects that you are not willing to experience. You cease your unconscious creation of time. The less time between the creation and the experience, the closer you come to being alive. Time is created to compensate for your loss of power. When you have sufficient power, you won’t need time. You will be present.

2. Embrace simplicity. The Chinese symbol for this is the uncarved rock. It’s uncarved because it doesn’t have any definition yet. So this step has to do with shedding definition, letting go, not defining yourself, not investing in a viewpoint. The mind will quiet of its own accord. Again, do this and you will wind up in the present.

3. Reduce the time you spend calculating for your perceived advantage. Release the mind from the slavery imposed by the ego. Allow yourself the gift of universal perspective. Wisdom will appear. Your actions will be guided by an intuitive, spontaneous, compassionately benevolent intent. There’s no regret to pull you out of the present. There’s no sense in trying to possess the result of your action, because in the moment of acting you have already fully experienced the result. You are still present.

4. See the emptiness of your desires. Direct without possessing. What can you have? This idea of possessing implies time and definition and takes you out of the present. The past no longer exists nor does the person who lives for the past. When you possess something you have it for a length of time; you have to create some time in which it stays around. Along with the possession comes the creation of some time and this time is a bet you place against your own power.

When you view yourself from the perspective of living in the world, but still being a facet of that absolute power that generates time and the realities time enfolds, you will discover the power to shape the world. Wizardry. The ancient Chinese call it steering the Tao.

The intention of this absolute is to know itself, to explore its own possibilities, in a rhythm that always returns to balance. That is the intention, that is the Tao. In the West we call it nature. Think of nature and contemplate the action of a mountain. It is thrust up and then it wears away, returning to balance. How long it takes is irrelevant when there is no shortage of time. The Tao runs its course. So be it. Some beings accept this fact in sweet surrender.

Wizardry understands that one can not only steer but accelerate the Tao.