The "Watercourse Way“ of our childhood BEYOND our supposedly adverse life circumstances💦🤸♂️
“…there is something like a guiding star also for us humans. That is why people all over the world resonated so strongly with the image of the unreachable star in Joe Darion's lyrics for Don Quixote's lead song in the 1965 musical The Man of La Mancha: "To dream the impossible dream ... To fight the unbeatable foe.... To bear with unbearable sorrow ... To run where the brave dare not go... To right the unrightable wrong... To love pure and chaste from afar... To try when your arms are too weary ... To reach the unreachable star."
Whoever you are, I'm sure you have felt the powerful attraction of that unreachable star as your highest ideal in life. It is stronger than even the highest ambitions that our Ego sets before us. We can easily distinguish between the two: Our guiding star makes demands on us that are not what we ourselves would ever come up with. We face these demands by interacting with Life.
Our fears want to hang on to the past, our wishful thinking inhabits the future, but only in the Now can we soberly respond to Life and its demands. The Ego is never in the Now, but always entangled in past and future. But by gathering myself into the Now, I come home to myself—my Self.
When we explored the Self, we realized: the Self is one and makes all of us one. As I-myself, I affirm by the way I act that I belong together with all—with all of Life. But this "radical Yes to belonging" is our definition for love. No wonder, then, that the English word "free" comes—like "friend"—from an Indo European root, pri, meaning "to love." And no wonder that St. Augustine sums up right living as:
"Love and do what you will.“ Free choice is not the Ego being able to do what comes into its mind—willfully. Genuine freedom willingly attunes itself to the innermost guiding principle of Life and of the universe as a whole and flows with it.
Eastern wisdom points to this natural flow of things as the TAO*—"The Watercourse Way," as Alan Watts called it. In order to flow in harmony with the Tao, we must recover our original mind, the mind of a child.
When you are still a baby, you are spontaneously both in the flow and in the Now.
"There is," as Alan Watts put it, "no you different from what is happening, and therefore it is not happening to you. It is just happening." You are in "the wonderful dancing pattern of liquid... the patterns of flowing water."
As we grow up, we gain reflective consciousness of I and Self, and as this happens, we tend to lose the grace of being in the flow. Yet this loss is not inevitable. Whenever we are in the Now, we are in the flow—and, as adults, consciously and committedly so. As soon as you are in the Now, your choice flows in harmony with the universe—not by some magic, but quite naturally so. You need only to see things "in the light of your guiding star," to look at the "constellation" of given circumstances, and to spot the opportunity that Life is offering you. Which available course of action seems to promise fulfilment of your deepest, most genuine desire—the pull of the unreachable star on your heartstrings? That course of action will be…
The Watercourse Way: everything "is just happening"-but now with your adult consent. Your choice— whatever it may be that has to be decided—will not be willful but willingly attuned to the music of life.
One sobering thought, however: we can never be 100 percent sure that our choice is truly in the flow. There always remains a chance that we are deceiving ourselves, a fact that we need humbly to accept—and be glad that there is at least a good chance that we are in the flow. There is only one exception: if we feel 100 percent sure that we are right, we can be 100 percent sure that we are wrong. Accepting the fact that our skill in self-deception tends to be well developed, we'll want to do everything we can to counteract it and to develop, instead, full attunement to life. This is the way toward true freedom.
Learning to understand that freeing process better and better and to follow it ever more faithfully is a lifetime task."
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