Buddhism teaches us the following: “I often compare the mind in meditation to a jar of muddy water.

The more we leave the water without interfering or stirring it, the more the particles of dirt will sink to the bottom, letting the natural clarity of the water shine through.

The very nature of the mind is such that if you only leave it in its unaltered state, it will find its true nature, which is bliss and clarity.”

My mother, a dedicated Christian woman and accomplished healer, who knew nothing about Buddhism taught me the same thing when I was a child, only she was referencing prayer and not meditation.  She would often say, “Leave yourself alone, Peter, and let your mind be at peace.  Give over your problems to God.  Let God handle it.  Put it in God’s hands.”

Then she would take the lessons of water to the next step.  She would use the lessons of water as an analogy for healing.

She taught me this simple truth: If you have a glass of muddy water, brown and opaque, there are basically two ways of purifying it.  The first one is laborious and time-consuming, but can work.  You get out your tweezers and your magnifying glass, put the glass of water under a strong light and patiently search and pick out the specs of dirt from the water with your tweezers until the water is clear.  This is called psychology or analysis.

The second way is to pour into the muddy glass of water glass after glass of clean, pure water until the water in the original glass is also clean and pure. This is called spiritual healing.

Pour into your mind floodtides of love, truth, clarity, goodness, etc., until “the very nature of the mind… will find its true nature, which is bliss and clarity.”

In both instances it is important to first identify that the water is muddy.  Many of us skip over this all-important first step and consequently go through life never really getting to and fixing our problems, but instead, decide that we are somehow cursed in some fashion and simply have to live with our problems.

We refuse to live with our polluted streams and lakes and oceans and work to clean them up.  Why would we decide to live with our problems and not attack them with the same gusto?  We all see easily the worth of clean, pure water, yet often fail to see the worth of clean, pure character.

I think it’s why most of us are here on this testing ground called Planet Earth – to purify our atmosphere, to purify consciousness.  I think this iteration of my own life is just that.  I’m here to get it together better than ever.  I’m here to purify myself and by doing that, help purify the atmosphere.

Once again I turn to a song to finish up this evening’s thoughts.  This one, an old 40’s classic.

Cool Water

Words and music by Bob Nolan
Revised lyrics by Joni Mitchell

All day I face the barren waste
Without a taste of water
Cool water
Old Dan and I
Our throats slate dry
Our spirits cry out for water
Cool clear water
Keep on movin’ Dan
Some devils had a plan
Buried poison in the sand
Don’t drink it man
It’s in the water
Cool clear water
In my mind I see
A big green tree
And a river flowin’ free
Waitin’ up ahead
For you and me
Cool clear water

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.

Even More Inspiration

• Spiritual Scientist
• The Atheist
• Words Of Wisdom
• Kickstarter.com Campaign – I
• The Center and Circumference of Pain
• Resisting Evil

2.    The Breath You Take – (See above) Also, I think of the complex machinery that activates this life activity.  What a miracle!  We slap a baby’s bottom and it starts.  Then it continues with relatively no input from us for a lifetime. The average respiration rate for a person at rest is about 16 breaths per minute.  This means on average, we breathe about 960 breaths an hour or 23,040 breaths a day or 8,409,600 a year. If a person lives to 80, then that means on average they will take 672,768,000 breaths in a lifetime!  That’s you.  That’s me.  Cool.

3.    Those We Love – Why is this?  These are the folks we should appreciate the most, but seldom do.  These are the people we should count in our blessings every day.  But these are the people that we expect to love us back because we love them.  Perhaps it’s the nature of love.  We love and expect love in return.  And you know, it almost always does – return, that is.  In fact, I’ll bet that it always does when our love is pure.  That’s the nature of love.  It’s a circle.  Instinctively we know this and so we tend to take it for granted.

4.    Water – This one’s unfortunately soon to slip out of the top 10.  But most of us who read this blog are still pretty blasé about it.  We turn the tap and the water comes out.  When it doesn’t, we groan. “Oh no” knowing what inconveniences that means for our day.  It’s still free – well in restaurants anyway.  We stand under it in the shower and it wakes us, cleans us, feeds us, grows our plants, keeps us alive.  It’s good stuff.
5.    The People Who Shell The Sunflower Seeds – When I was in grade school I used to love to buy those little packs of sunflower seeds in the shell, put a few in my mouth and separate the seeds from the shell with my teeth and tongue, store the seeds over on the right in one gum and then when I had 10 – 15 shelled, spit the shells out and eat the seeds.  Chomping down on those shelled seeds was always a pleasure.  A lotta work for that simple pleasure.  Then one day I walked into the store and they were selling bags of salted sunflower seeds already shelled!  I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.  I’ve been eating handfuls every day since then, never thinking about the work it took by somebody to shell those little guys.
6.    Waking Up – What a concept!  Sleep.  We get tired.  We shut down.  We close our eyes to the world around us and enter into another world, another dimension that we really know very little about where we, for all purposes, cease to be, wallowing in deep sleep, sailing off on the wings of strange, often nonsensical dreams, for about a third of our earthly lives.  And we always expect to wake up!  It goes without saying.  It’s a lot to assume if you think about it.
7.    Elimination – We take it in; we put it out.  In between our pipes strip from the matter what we need and send the rest on to hopeful oblivion.  Both inner and outer plumbing processes are totally taken for granted by most of us more fortunate ones.  With the push of a handle, all is well.
8.    Driving Between The Lines – I just got back from LA.  I’m constantly amazed by the swarms of cars on the freeways.  Basically, they all make it home in one piece.  They all do it right.  All those human beings staying in their lanes, thinking their thoughts, listening to their music, hating their bosses, dreaming their dreams, weeping and laughing, yakking and sitting alone spaced out –  driving between the lines.  Essentially we all want to live.  This is the basic principle behind this miraculous action.
9.    The Internet – This is a new one for the top 10.  The information highway, this wondrous cyber space library of fact and figure, google and twitter, instant satisfaction, endless knowledge is fast becoming our new way of life.  Are we amazed by it? Absolutely!  Are we already beginning to take it for granted?  You bet!
10.    Life

Even More Inspiration

• The Road To Inspiration — Peter Link and Julia Wade
• The Ira Awards Part 1
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 2 – Dreams
• Experiments of the Sub-conscious Mind / A Five Part Series — Part 1 – Sleep
• Grieving In Silence
• A Walk In The Woods