Believe

"Believe nothing no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and heart."
-Buddha Gautama

One of the things I put down on this blog is that I follow the Buddhist path, so you would think that putting down one of the sayings of the Buddha would be what I would do from time to time. This quote is the single most important quote that I hold dear from the Buddha (Gautama) and you don't have to be a Buddhist to believe in its truth. You have to believe in your own truth no matter what your religion is or even if you believe in an organized religion or no religion at all. I am not here to press anyone to my religion. I don't think it is even important to have one to reach enlightenment. You can do it with meditation alone.

Writing teaches me what I believe in because I don't always know. Humankind know so little about the Universe and even the oceans and even less what is between their own ears. Carl Jung worked hard to know what was in his mind for over 80 years and his intellect was immense and he never reached its outer limits. Writing gives us a tool for learning what is in our minds and one never really knows even as we each pick up the pen and start to write.

We have all sorts of tools to discern this such as writing, dreams, art and other things. Meditation is an excellent way and I use writing meditation to do it. I also use a form of art meditation. You can look up the different ways on the Internet and in books. Or you can make up your own methods. I have done that. I have taken some methods and modified them to fit who I am. That has worked very well. I use a form of walking meditation that I modified from Buddhist masters. It works. I don't think we as human beings can exhaust the number of ways we can come up with different ways we can meditate. Beware of people who have hard and fast rules. I, myself, have no use for such methods but you might like such safe and easy ways of meditating. I don't. I like to make things up as I go along as far as meditating.

I have been a teacher from time to time. When I teach students they are their own teachers and that they should adjust their writing styles to match who they are they sometimes get angry. They think it should be harder than it is. It isn't. In Korea, English is taught first as grammar rules and then as a conversation. It is putting the cart in front of the horse way of learning a language. Children who learn language very easily never learn it this way. The language structure is learned first by internalizing the structure and allowing the self to ascertain what it is that needs to be learned. It almost makes me angry when I see people making writing and other things so much harder than it needs to be.

I like to make everything as much fun to do as I can and that includes writing. Life should be fun and when they put your ashes in a can or your body in the ground or whatever, you should feel if you could that you had one hell of a good time. There are things that might have given you some problems such as health or living in a place where you could not speak or write freely but under the circumstances you did the best you could do and had a great time at it. You should also feel that you used your heart as much as you could and that means loving lots of things including people, sunsets or whatever fit your style.