The valley of the possible?
It is fashionable to attack your limiting beliefs, to say that you can live your life without limitation, that anything that can be imagined is possible in a world of vibrational energy. However there are hard boundaries that are difficult to cross, only what is plausible to you is achievable as you can not do what does not make sense to you, virtually no one can survive falling a thousand feet on to a hard surface, you can not manifest new physics especially under time pressure. Rather than turn to witchcraft or magic tricks, what is available for everyone is to start expand what is in their valley of the possible.
Which is a lot larger than most people think, there is no judgment here if you find it difficult to visualise having any option beyond the narrow confines of your current life because life happens hard and fast, we are given options but no time to consider them, let alone with full knowledge. We are all making it up as we go along, that is fine, that is life, we do the best we can given what is happening in the current moment. Could we do better, yes, of course, that is the point of life, to do a little better than yesterday, be a better version of what we were, we all carry our history and experience of who we are, our habit of doing things, sometimes they are good habits or bad, but they are seldom considered past a moment of regret, guilt or blindly following an urge.
Experience can teach us lesson slowly, you can only wake up with so many hangovers before you consider whether it is the best use of a weekend, not that there is not a place for celebration in life, it important to enjoys the wins you have and surviving another year is good enough for me. However reflection is a useful part of achievement, does it really matter? What is next? What meaning does it have for me? These are important questions to ask, they add not subtract from fully experiencing life, being able to enjoy the victory is good for the soul, though it is never the destination, it is a station to explore on the way, it gives us the experience of being restored. Life might be a journey but it is not a race, at least not against anyone else. You want to enjoy the walk not rush past everything on the way because without the awareness of what is around you, you could miss that you are in a valley with many path in it.
There are easy ways and hard paths, one is not better than the other, you might want a challenging life, where you do hard, difficult things, easy might be pretty appealing from where you are standing at the moment. Sometimes the route to the easy way means taking the hard one for a while, as anyone who has done a degree will tell you, even learning to read is hard, but it is a strange person who wishes that they had never bothered. Though the point of taking those higher paths is not to look down on other who are taking the more commonly traveled paths, rather it is help those who wish to join you and make life easier for those who desire that, it is not for everyone, it takes time and the wish to understand yourself.
Everyone has a different set of life experiences, skills, knowledge and most importantly responsibilities, we make choices about who and what we are, and the traditional paths are full of good, healthy, responsibilities, not everyone needs or wants to be explorers of the valley, they just want an easy walk with their families (which is not that easy, but at least familiar). If you take the road of self-improvement it might be for the good of your family or it could be for all families, the whole of society and the world, however never forget that ultimately without the family there is no future world to be made better. No-one is an island, we do not get to build a fortress of solitude that means anything without sharing it.
We each have a different role to play in life, there are farmer, craftsmen, thinkers and healers, and it would be awful if everyone had to be all four at the same time, we have a choice and who you are will dictate the choice you make, a good society gives their people the options to pursue the route that makes their lives better and by good fortune it is also what is good for healthy society, it is the first and fundamental division of labour that lead to our success as a whole. Whales are all general purpose whales, so are monkeys, rats, horses, whilst in comparison we have the ability to be specialists, to be good at our own thing whilst others are good at other things, and those things change with time.
There was a time when might was right, the strongest took everything, we are currently living at a time when the most intelligent wins ruthlessly, and it should be a wake up call to those people who currently benefits that this will probably change in time as well. Social intelligence might well be the next wave of winners and lets hope they treat us better than the how the intelligent (who should have know better) treated the strong in the last hundred years (imagine if emotional bully becomes a criminal offense, Mensa could become a hate group). What we need is a society that values all these strengths for what they are, part of a greater whole.
On an individual level what is possible and plausible is for your actions to based on the world that you want to create, that is where you can deride your moral compass and sense of meaning that drives your actions, and actions that are in alignment with your purpose are hugely more powerful, they have meaning. Which if that is important to you, make your actions meaningful in the moment that you take them, it gives you a compass with which to point your action towards, it gives a direction to your life that you can get to keep on coming back to and embracing.
What is possible is only limited by what you find plausible, what makes sense to you, and if changing the world is plausible to you nothing is stopping you except for those limiting beliefs. The valley of action that you can take is huge, and you can find inspiration in the lives of those that you admire, both the great and the simple, each have decided upon a life that is different from those who walk in the flat middle of the valley. There are challenging lives to be lead if you want them, though those strange path are seldom traveled and for good reason, they are hard, they are not always chosen, but when they are, they can become powerful or meaningless, that is life it is a gamble, it has risk and uncertainty. Sitting in a cave contemplating awareness can be extra-ordinary or a complete waste of time, you do not know where you are going.
So how do you decide, well the conscious mind is not going to help, it is something that only your silent witness knows and it communicates through feeling and emotions, it gives hints by how energy moves about the body (it is a physical sensation not a metaphor) and you can witness that by observation, by bringing awareness and attention to your bodily sensation. Then you listen to what ii says without words, once you do you will have the realisation that it has been shouting for your entire life and you have been dismiss it as indigestion or background noise to your existence. There is a voice there and it has a different tone to your mind, it does not know the word “I”, the ego is full of self, the intuition is in contrast bigger, wordless and a silence that is full of meaning.
It is only by listening that your valley truly expands and becomes deeper, that you open up to everything that is possible and plausible in your life, and when it does life becomes more beautiful. It does not mean that you have to give up your current life, it just gives you more opportunities and options, knowing that you are doing the thing that brings you more joy than anything else, makes the fact that you are doing it even more special. If that thing is the same as what you would have done without contemplating it, that is fine, better than fine, it is marvelous. Even if it leads to a family and steady boring job that pays the bills, if you chose it, it becomes noble to you, so find the path that you want to walk through the valley and get on with enjoying the view, whether that is up or down, it does not matter, know the path for you and walk it.
