Hunting, throwing stones at wildlife, buying exotic pets, picking flowers, criticizing prominent people, may at times be an attempt to make contact with, even identify with, that which seems free and beautiful and so frightfully unlike us.

When people criticize me I am not any less because of that. It is not a criticism of me but critical thinking from them. They are expressing their thoughts and feelings, not my being.

Before, I thought I was actually fighting for my own self-worth; that is why I so desperately wanted people to like me. I thought their liking me was a comment on me, but it was a comment on them.

The question I could ask myself after receiving criticism, “Does this statement give any insight into myself?” not “Is it true?” If I say, “That’s true,” those words really mean, “I think about myself in the same way.” No one is in a position to know whether or not it is true.

A criticism is at best a description of the immediate past. It does not describe the future course of my life. So is it true to how I have been or true to what I will be? And more importantly, to which end will I use it?

My intuitive sense of the natural, right thing to do under the circumstances—when I am quite enough to hear it—seems somehow to take the future circumstances into consideration. I feel like “Do this,” and it is only afterwards that I see the sense of it. The “sense” however, is not in everything working out the way I would like, but in always receiving an efficient and needed lesson in increased awareness.

To listen to my intuition is to identify my entire awareness, to be my entire experience, and not just my conscious perception. My total awareness synthesizes into a calm sense of direction that is above reason. It is only when my attention becomes fixated that I act like an unknowing part rather than a knowing whole. When I favor my conscious perception over my total awareness, I can no longer hear the guiding rhythm of one whole reality.

Calmness accompanies the whole. Fear accompanies the part. Intuition looks beyond the latest object of my concern to see the stillness of all outcomes.

Do you ever listen to your intuition?

I have discovered that when I am conscious of the radical unpredictability of the future—even the immediate future— I find it impossible to be discontent. Discontent seems to be false concept of time. It leans on my expectation that what is to come will be “the same old thing.” I cannot expect imminent change and remain judgmental of the present. I am noticing that when I am bored I think I am tired of my surroundings but I am really tired of my thoughts. It is trite, repetitious, unobserved thinking that is producing the discontent. Adopting a quite awareness, a kind of listening attitude, usually freshens my mind and brings the situation I am in to life.

Dishonesty splits the mind. If my attention is wandering, there is somewhere it wants to go, so obviously it does not want to be where I am holding it in the name of self-imposed duty. A plan eliminates discontent by promising change. But, ironically, a plan is only my decision to imagine a different future, and if followed too rigidly it blocks my sensitivity to the people around me.

Sometimes my discontent works like this: I don’t like what I am doing and I can’t think of an acceptable alternative. My mind fantasizes one unsatisfactory plan after another and my discontent deepens. When this happens I find it helpful to suspend my efforts to “decide.” Believing that my intellect alone must choose makes my body into an object and it splits me. If I pause and become very aware of the flow of feelings inside me, I presently sense an impulse from more deeply within quietly directing me what to do, or I notice that I have already acted, and that “deciding” was not a part of it. Sometimes the “what to do” is to put my entire self (“pour myself”) into what I am already doing, in other words, to bring all of me into the present.

It is not always necessary to think words. Words often keep me from acting in a fully conscious way. Fear, indecision, and condemnation feed on words. Without words they usually die. When I am trying to figure out how I should relate to someone, especially a stranger, if I will stop thinking words, and listen to the situation, and just be open, I find I act in a more appropriate, more spontaneous, often original, sometimes even courageous way. Words are at times good calling the mind back, but they are distracting when I need to respond to the present.

It is 10:34 and it is now. Tomorow at 5:00 it will be now. On my deathbed it will still be now. Since it will always be now, learning to respond to now is the only thing there is to learn.