Portion of Life

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experiences with them. And so the reliance on property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.

Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that have have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they depreciate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has and not by what each is.

But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he sees that it is accidental; came to him by inheritance, or gift or crime; then he feels that it is not worth having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the mans breaths.

Caliph Ali said:

Thy lot or portion of life is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest for seeking after it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance, fills us with with common sense, as well as un-common sense. He skillfully holds a mirror up to us and gently moves it closer, so we can feel the energy of expanding consciousness. That energy is not just our worldly possessions and accomplishments; part our belief system is based on that perception. We tend to measure the self by what is stored in ego awareness, and discount other aspects of the self in order to conform to our image of religious righteousness, and political correctness.

Society is a wave and we ride it like foam in a misty sea. But, we gradually begin to sense that as foam, we are connected to bubbles of awareness that constantly manifest around us. One by one we merge with various bubbles and taste the essence of our own salt.

The days of external power and rational ruthlessness is sinking below the foam, and merging in the water that continually moves onward. The water is not a place or an activity. It is consciousness blending and separating in order to experience the nature of diversity. That blending is a portion of life that manifests without any effort from us. We create realties from the bubbles in our own foam, but discount them until we allow the bubbles to become what they have always been- us.

As the 7th century cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, Caliph Ali, said:

I can be at rest from seeking after anything, because I hold everything of value within me.

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Value is always present in one experience after another in linear time, and we own it regardless of our scope of awareness.