Paradise Found

You as human beings perceive paradise as that most perfect of all places where every conscious concept that you have actually works. Where there is no stress. Where all the things that you attempt at least give you some hint that they will work. A place where you don’t struggle with the concept of NO.” Where the ideas you have somehow magically begin and the results of those ideas are somehow magically helpful and planned. You perceive that paradise for a number of reasons. Mostly you perceive it on those Sunday afternoons when it is that your family is together and everything is working. Mostly you perceive it from those times when you attempted something and surprised yourself that you could actually accomplish it. Mostly they come to you by pleasant surprise.

Paradise for you is a pleasant surprise. But even in the best of paradises if it is consistent it becomes just another day. In the best of your paradises, when you live there, it becomes a different thing than it does if you visit there. Paradise is only paradise if you visit. It is work if you don’t. So having paradise has a lot to do with finding it and it has a lot to do with discovering it. It has a lot to do with being surprised within it. We will play a little bit with how to establish for yourself a sense of surprise in life. A surprise that is more beneficial than the surprises you get that hurt you. A surprise that helps you — that expands you. And it is how to make those surprises occur in your life that is also what we will play with.

One thing you do as human a is project. The projection to that paradise are that you are going to feel good if it happens to have just the right breeze; if it happens to have just the right sunset; if it happens to have just the right romance. When you discover that that is true, you feel good. What else happens in your paradises? What convinces you that that is paradise?

All of you have a similar feeling of paradise. It is that little element of not having to worry about those nagging voices wondering when it is going to thunder and storm. It is a little quiet place where it feels warm to you, that you are not attacked. It is that little place that says, At least for this moment everything in the world is right.” If you could have more of those little moments each day, your stress and anxiety would be a lot less wouldn’t it? But if you lived in those little moments, life would be very boring. Excitement happens because those moments can exist. Not because those moments exist all of the time.

You can recognize that quiet moment because you have the polarity of the non-quiet moment. You can recognize the excitement of the moment because you have had the dread of other moments. You can recognize. The difficulty for you very often is when you have too many of those unquiet moments and you think you cannot find peace. When you have too many of those disturbing moments and you think you are threatened. So somewhere between having an entirely baseless, quiet life and having an overstimulated excited anxiety-driven life is the place where paradise can be discovered. Where you can truly appreciate the moment of your existence long enough for you to recognize that there is hope for you. That is where your inner warmth comes from. That sense that you are equal to whatever life throws at you, that you know how to catch it. That you know what to do with it and that you also know how to hurl it back at life in a way that is joyful and sometimes playful.

How can you do that? How can you find that middle place when you are so certain that the one place you have is the only one that exists?

The middle place does exist but it can’t exist without the two ends. You need choice. It does you very little good to think you have the right answer unless you also have a concept of what the wrong answer would be. It does you very little good to fear the wrong answer unless you have some concept of what the right answer might be. So one way to quiet the voices is to listen to them — just enough.

Just enough so that you can discern the two ends. Having one answer isn’t enough for freedom. Having two is. When you have the two answers there is something in between that you can say is life. How do you get in there? Because very often your sense of stress causes you to move farther away. Or your sense of absolute causes you to fall farther into absolute and you are looking in a direction that takes you opposite to the inside of life. So small secret — both are right answers, or both are wrong answers. Paradise lives with a total acceptance of both answers. Without them being threats. If you can have one answer be just as right as another, then you are not afraid of what’s in between. In between doesn’t become a place where you have to select. In between gets to be a place where you get to select. That is a most wondrous thought. How can you get to the in between place?

When you think of something you think of it in terms of wrong or right, which was very popular when you were small children. Everyone encouraged you that that is the truth of life. That wrong or right issue — the black and white element — the place that says yes or no. Being as popular as it was in your family, you accepted it as a reality, and it was very valid that it should be a reality. As small children you don’t have the selectivity that it requires to be able to preserve your physical existence by selecting the right idea. You would place yourself at threat if something didn’t tell you, No, that’s hot. No, that’s sharp. Yes, that’s good.” So you learned it as a state of reality, and a very valid one at the time. As you grew, you grew to be the adult that you are now. But you grew with a concept of that same right or wrong, that same concept of black and white, because you believed that was how reality had to be.

No one taught you that life is Technicolor. Everything encouraged you that it was black and white. Even your society lives with the concept of black and white. And it frowns very deeply at any other concept. Rights and wrongs — without a concept that there are comparative rights and approximate wrongs. Without that concept, you can place things into absolutes, then you can at least control your environment, or you think you do. You can ignore the rest that you can’t control and you can damn that which doesn’t become controlled easily. You can fault someone else because they don’t behave in the pattern that you think they should — they are wrong. You know they are wrong because you are right. You know you are right because they are wrong. You wouldn’t do that — they did it — therefore, they are wrong. And it leaves you feeling as if there is an absolute. But as adults you are actually in a Technicolor world. It isn’t just shades of gray. It is raging blazing colors of difference. There are fuchsias and oranges and reds. It’s blues, sky blues and all forms. Every shade and every hue exists and they are all selectable by you. And it matters a lot that you see it that way.

If you see it as the absolutes of black and white then these become places to stay out of. And you try everything you can to stay out of them but what if the answer is between the black and the white? What if the realm of your existence isn’t so much doing it right but refraining from doing it wrong. What if that is where it (paradise) exists? What if the piece in your life is not so much doing it right but recognizing that you aren’t doing it wrong? That’s the second part.

But to get to that place it is necessary for you to consider both the right and the wrong. To see them not so much as anything but equally right and equally wrong. For while you do it that way, you recognize that your great idea is “A” great idea. You recognize your great viewpoint is “A” viewpoint, no better and no worse than any other viewpoint, but it happens to be yours and you can live with it. Then you have the ability to be able to recognize someone else’s viewpoint and recognize that that viewpoint is just as passionate to them as your viewpoint is to you. It doesn’t actually matter. That’s when you can begin to discern whether you are actually attacked by someone else’s view.

What if they view life as a red thing and you view it as a blue thing? Then you have the opportunity to start viewing it as a blue thing and a red thing. You have choice. But if you view it as a red thing and insist it has to be a red thing, then you never get the value of the blue and that’s important.

What if the value of the blue is helpful? What if knowing just that little bit more allows you to learn how to hunt in a particular area? A place you have never hunted before. What if your concept says the only thing you can hunt is this kind of food and you are hungry and that kind of food isn’t available? Aren’t you limited?

It is hard to have paradise when you think the only tools you have are the ones you have. It’s hard to see life as anything but a threat when the only way you have of escaping the threats are the tools you have, and they don’t work. It is hard. For in order to find paradise you must find peace with the concept that if you don’t have the answer that works, the answer is available. You don’t have to know the answer, you just have to know the one you have isn’t the one that works. And that’s a secret also.