Wednesday, July 11, 2012

THE PEACE OF CHANGING ONE'S MIND

[This is a reprint of a blog of mine from April 30, 2011.]

I found when a tried-and-true spiritual message doesn’t make sense to me that if I’ll just take the time to look underneath the message, I’ll often find the sense of it.

“You must go beyond reason to love” was one of my first puzzlers. Luckily, I recognized fairly quickly that my reason is driven by my ego, and therefore most any problem I had, my reasoning mind’s solution would be for my benefit. To go beyond reason to love meant seeking a solution whereby all parties could be winners. It was perfectly clear to me that I alone could not do that…I would need to let a power greater than myself wholly into my life. That’s when I made my decision to let God have my will, my wants, my hopes, my worries…simply to let God do my thinking for me. I succeed the majority of the time…that’s 51%, but I usually do a tish better than that.

When first I heard ”We have given up fighting anything and anybody,” my reasoning mind balked because reason said not only was I going to have to be a doormat, but I was going to have to like it. In opening deeper, my win/win solution came up. I needed to give up fighting, that’s all. I do not have the option of fighting, arguing, being disagreeable just because I think I am right, in short. So the goal, when I find myself in a disagreeable situation, is to buy time (shoot a “thank You”), and let some other solution bubble up from within…a solution for the benefit of everybody. 

Imagine my surprise when I realized that this is the exact same basis for “agree with your adversary quickly.” The goal is not to agree willy-nilly, making myself a hypocrite or a bald-faced liar (both of which I admit to having been, and I’d just as soon not go back there). The goal is to open my mind (actually, to change my mind from self-based to others-based), to go beyond reason to Love which brings a win/win solution every time.

This has taken me years of practice, and I flub it more often that I would like, but to flub it at all is more often than I would like. The peace of mind brought by simply changing my mind is truly the pearl of great price.

Thank You.

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