The Nature of Existence

"Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us."  

Big Book

"It is clear that God's plan for me is expressed through love.  My response is to love all of His children through service and by example, to ask God to help me imitate His love for me through my love for others."

Some anonymous member of Alcoholics Anonymous

I know, I know, lot of God talk here . . .  One thought, wish, hope I include in my morning prayers is that I am able to express the perfect love that is my Higher Power in my thoughts, words, and actions.  I cannot improve on this thought.  I cannot see how I can live a better life than one based on projecting my vision of a perfect love into my daily life.

Jack Kornfield:  "Spiritual life becomes more genuine when things become more difficult.  We can learn to see here and now those places where we are afraid or attached or lost or deluded.  We can see in the very same moment the possibility of awakening, of freedom, of fullness of being.  The sacred is always here before us."

And then he translates this into our meditation practices: "We will inevitably encounter the same hindrances as we do while sitting in meditation.  We will desire to be somewhere else or with someone else.  We will feel aversion, judgment, and fear.  We will have periods of laziness and dullness.  We will get restless with one another, and we will have doubts."

I ran across the phrase "the nature of existence" a while back and it really rocked my brain.  I mean a Black Sabbath kind of rocking.  It's comforting to me when I'm restless, irritable, or discontented, when I'm bored or in pain, to understand that this happens to everyone and this is going to happen to me again.  It helps me look at things more calmly.  I don't feel unusual or excluded.  I feel pain or boredom or irritation.  I can moderate these feelings but I can't avoid them and I'll only drive myself to distraction trying to figure out why life is like this.  Why do I live in a world where there is pain and death?  WTF was God thinking when he designed a world where animals eat other animals alive and then we kill these animals and eat them ourselves?