The teachings of a frog.

The teachings of a frog

Life is really quite simple when you listen to the nature of it.

Typical Western science would cut this frog to pieces analyse it and electrocute it under microscopic deduction. This would produce a lot of statistics and Latin names in the name of science and in service of the intellect.

Now there is nothing wrong with classification and deduction, but the problem, as I see it, is that it very often ends up “killing” the very thing it wants to understand.

The Taoists where much more to the point I think, they would learn about nature by observation – they would say, if you want to understand a frog it can only be understood where it actually is in it’s waterhole.

Everything is relational and connected and life is like that, and we “the observer” and the “observed” are the same.

Both ways of seeing life and frogs are “right” – it’s a matter of perspective.

What I experience through The Three Principles is that there is a very logical and straightforward way of understanding the principles behind our experience of this frog.(nature)

Mind or Nature knows how to give us frogs in waterholes, and consciousness makes us notice life …gives it a flavour and a feel to it.

Thought, as a principle is what gives us our experience of the frog in the waterhole – and thoughts are linked to feeling. We feel our thinking.

The point is that the frog and waterhole is just what it is, doing what it does.

Our experience and feeling about it always come through our own thinking – that’s the way we are – thinking it up all the time.

So the good news is, that when you realise that life, is as it is, and that it’s not the outside world that creates your feelings, but your own ongoing construction – thought in the moment – you are actually free to experience the frog and waterhole as it is in a purer way and just be with it.

Being aware is enough – we don’t have to trust our own limited construction – all we need is to be open to life without a analytical and conceptual idea about it.

“The power of Thought is one of the most primal force functions of all
human beings.Without it, there is no way we could experience life”
Sydney Banks from The Enlightened Gardener  page 93.

When great discoveries are made – like the one Sydney Bank’s experienced – we often don’t “get it”, because we are looking at life through our conceptual glasses.

But when we take them of we just might glimpse the awesomeness of it all, that life has nothing to do with our presupposed notions, but instead points to a more fluid source of ever flowing grace, not in a religious sense but in a spiritual sense that per se is formless and wordless.

So thank you, dear frog for jumping up and making me stop in surprise and experience this otherness in a split second where time stood still and life was at it’s fullest.

I don’t know if this makes sense to others, but it did to me. It’s nice to get out of the illusion of my own thinking and into a state of peace and love.

I will end this frog talk with a quote from a great teacher:

“Sydney Banks’ tremendous gift to the world was to bring simple principles along that would help people understand what Buddha was talking about, what Jesus was talking about—everyone!—Maslow, Carl Rogers and William James. The Principles, if you look at them deeply, are behind what everyone is talking about. Everyone is saying that Thought is what creates your reality, and that we are all a part of something much, much greater .” – Ami Chen

Let’s enjoy that we already are at home with ourselves – and that we actually don’t have to make life complicated and enjoy these moments of peace and love that we tend to forget when we look in the wrong direction blaming and scrutinizing or over thinking.

Time to go for a walk, leaving our Ego’s at bay for a moment and just being open to listening to the miracle of it all.