Night – Balance – A Warrior is Poised Between Heaven & Earth

For everything there is a season,    a time for every activity under heaven.2 A time to be born and a time to die.    A time to plant and a time to harvest.3 A time to kill and a time to heal.    A time to tear down and a time to build up.4 A time to cry and a time to laugh.    A time to grieve and a time to dance.5 A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones.    A time to embrace and a time to turn away.6 A time to search and a time to quit searching.    A time to keep and a time to throw away.7 A time to tear and a time to mend.    A time to be quiet and a time to speak.8 A time to love and a time to hate.    A time for war and a time for peace. Ecclesiastes 3

Balance is a key law of nature to avoid the dreaded stagnancy. Once our conscious is in harmony with our subconscious, our routine will balance demand and desire. Once our routine is in balance, our dreams will balance our waking life. From this pinnacle, even the worst nightmare – hell itself – can be looked at objectively, as a story with earth-shattering significance.

Moderation in All Things – said Hesiod, the Roman poet 750 BC and it’s still good advice. We use balance as a whetstone to sweeten our pleasures and soften our griefs; torrents are unsurvivable.

Challenge – We need to set up our brain’s “reward system” to handle pleasure and suffering or we will be prescribed drugs in an often futile attempt to achieve the same effect chemically. Drugs can be certainly be useful as training wheels when we are seriously off-balance; ideally we want to master our systems and teach them to achieve the same effect naturally. Calm is the first step to balance, so we must learn to calm ourselves. Meditation and yoga offer the best methods for reliable self-soothing. First we assert calm over our breath, then our bodies, lastly our thoughts. It’s not that difficult! Reminder: we do it every night as we fall asleep.

Danger – Unfortunately our contemporary life has become a competitive pursuit of “highs”. A good life well-lived provides natural highs – learning a sport, falling in love, listening to music, having children, enjoying the grandeurs of nature. Our intellect teaches us that every “high” is dramatically enriched by thinking about it! That’s why we are called the species “homo sapiens.” The pursuit of highs without the thinking and enshrining stages always leads to excess and grief. Highs for their own sake inevitably disappoint, leading to a pursuit of more and more dangerous highs, which, if we are not thinking about them, sharing them with others and incorporating them into our beings, damage our ability to experience joy.

Opportunity – Joy that is held in the mind and considered is joy endlessly re-experienced. It will be yours forever, and you will be able to share it with all the people you love for the rest of your life. Treasure these moments in your Training Journal. Conscious dreaming (often called lucid dreaming) provides the best avenue to filter these experiences down to your subconscious level. Always have a joy to think about just as you are going to sleep, and another for when you are waking up. This will sharpen your apprehension of ecstasy and deepen your life.

#Haiku: The Law of Balance

Newborns grow;
Love kindles;
Youth shades;
Seniors remember
Peace;
Joy
Mastered