A martial arts student approached his teacher with a question. “I’d like to improve my knowledge of the martial arts. In addition to learning from you, I’d like to study with another teacher in order to learn another style. What do you think of this idea?”
“The hunter who chases two rabbits,” answered the master, “catches neither one.”
Drop Identity
After reading the story who felt that many times in our life in our over enthusiasm we lose even what we have. If you read the story again you will feel that Teacher has no attachment or need to teach his Art. But in his compassion he was saying to the student to focus on what he has and learn that.
Teacher was not only teaching him Martial Art but through Martial Art he was teaching him how to focus on self. If you can focus on self and become self-alert you have learn the science of spirituality.
Spirituality is nothing but to become alert towards yourself, know yourself. Spirituality has got nothing to do with your so called God but it has to do something to do with your Godliness. Your Godliness is your No-Self, Soul, Emptiness. Whatever you want to call.
As we open and empty ourselves, we come to experience an interconnectedness, the realization that all things are joined and conditioned in an interdependent arising. Each experience and event contains all others. The teacher depends on the student, the airplane depends on the sky.
When a bell rings, is it the bell we hear, the air, the sound on our cars, or is it our brain that rings? It is all of these things. As the Taoists say, “The between is ringing.” The sound of the bell is here to he heard everywhere – in the eyes of every person we meet, in every tree and insect, in every breath we take…
When we truly sense this interconnectedness and the emptiness out of which all beings arise, we find liberation and a spacious joy. Discovering emptiness brings a lightness of heart, flexibility, and an ease that rests in all things. The more solidly we grasp our identity, the more solid our problems become.
We all want to learn because we want our Identity to be solid. With the identity you will be knowledgeable but not knower. To become knower of self you need to learn to drop your identity.
Learning from the story Two Rabbits: Drop Identity
Experience Learning
It’s Much Better to Be Conscious than Smart
If you had the choice, would you rather be smarter than you are or more aware? Go a step further. If a wizard came to you and said you could be either the smartest person in the world or the most aware, which would you choose?
It’s a symptom of the times, I think, that most people would choose to be smarter. We live in a world based on technology, wealth, and entrepreneurship. You have to be smart to succeed in those areas, and if you feel you are only average in intelligence, you are not likely to expect enormous success. The argument for being more aware is rarely made, yet by far choosing to be more aware is the better choice—and unlike IQ, you can increase your awareness.
What awareness brings is freedom from fixed beliefs and habits. You don’t think through what’s wrong with your life as if a formula can be applied from the outside. The core message of Metahuman is that you are consciousness. You don’t have awareness the way you have blue eyes, curly hair, a short temper, or a flair for cooking. You are the awareness from which everything is made.
Once you have this insight, a radical shift occurs inside. You find yourself wanting to intensify the qualities of awareness that are the most valuable. It is undeniable that these qualities are essential to being human, and they include love, compassion, curiosity, creativity, and personal evolution. Everything we value comes from the inside, including science. Everything we do comes from the inside.
So how do we intensify those qualities we value most? We pay attention to them. This is the heart of what Buddhism calls non-doing. Instead of applying an idea, even a brilliant idea, you feel your way along, letting awareness guide you to the goal. Einstein made explicit reference to this when he said that a sense of wonder was essential to any great scientific discovery. Wonder isn’t a thought. Wonder is a quality of awareness, the opposite of taking things for granted.
Awareness brings you close to the source of the most valued things, as mentioned earlier. But more importantly, being aware aligns you with the creative impulse in Nature.
This alignment, known in Sanskrit as Dharma, allows someone to live without struggle. By going beyond everyday reality, you shift your allegiance to metareality. In metareality consciousness is not impeded by ego, memory, beliefs, opinions, and old conditioning. When people aspire to live in the present moment, they may not realize that they are aspiring to metareality. But by remaining inside mental constructs, we cannot live in the present. The past will always weigh us down, and the present will unconsciously repeat the past, no matter how hard we try to make this not happen.
For all these reasons, it is much better to be more aware than smarter. Being more aware will also make you smarter in the bargain, because a conscious person makes better choices than an unconscious person. If people understood this, there would be a rush to live more consciously. I can’t think of a better goal for every person as well as the entire human race.
Tags: Drop Identity Know Thyself Our Question
