Is choice what we have? Yes�?Is it the best we can hope for or the best we can do? if your choice is to live only by the illusions of your perceptions…then the answer is also yes. Are we more then what we seem to be or the choices we make, and does it matter…yes we are and how could it not, if nothing really mattered what would the point be of the spiritual quest at all.

I choose to know life without suffering…relationships without jealousy, anger, or misery�?livelihood without the discomfort of need�?Loosing without the sense of lose…a friendly debate without the need of right or wrong.

It is all to easy to rely on things like spirit, God, Love and light and we as human produce these concepts because they are very comforting. We produce something we call inherent as a means of knowing there will be something or some part of us that will live on after death…all because we are scared of the illusion we have created around death itself.

No matter the illusion, this is our reality and that being the choice that will be the outcome. And if your choices in the new year are choices based on your illusions with no aspiration to ‘know�?what the truth is behind what you see, then the illusions you choose are the illusions you will endure.

There are many different spiritual views many paths to choose from…which is right and which is wrong? Both and neither, you will choose the path of illusion that best suits you because creatures derive their character from mind, marshaled by mind, mind made we are.

The mind is the source, the producer of illusion. Will you choose the illusions as they are because that’s what you know and that’s what is comfortable? or come to know the illusions you base your choices on.

~Mykkyo

Hoop,

The reason for my sorrow was in empathy for your desire to feel bad in order to feel good, we all feel bad at some point or we wouldn’t know good to begin with, but there can come a time when the way in which we see and experience bad can become something that is no longer hurtful to us. For me an example is this, I have three children, I am divorced and they no longer live with me. For a time this was painful to me and even they were a source of pain in association with the break up of my marriage. As time went on and I saw the truth of the emotions I was experiencing I also began to recognize the futility of feeling pain in this association. Feeling bad in association with them was nothing more then a creation of my mind and was not at all conducive to feeling good about my present situation or maintaining a decent relationship with my ex-wife for their benefit or the benefit maintaining a respectable relationship with her. So I changed the way I saw these things, removed the bad all together and now even in the divorce itself see only the good, or rather the positive. My ex and I are now friends and I maintain a good relationship with my children. Now this may have not been possible had I not first experienced bad, but having already known bad in so many things, one can begin to eliminate the bad before what is seen as bad occurs and in doing so eliminate the need for it altogether cultivating only compassion of those who we mistakenly think have the ability to cause us pain. Emotional pain cannot be caused by others, we create these ill feelings in or selves, the anger that keeps us awake at night, or brings poor decisions is not something that was placed in us by the individual who we have ill feelings toward, it is what we created in our own mind in relation to what we view, through our conditioning, as bad or undesirable. Once this is recognized no one will be able to make you mad because they never really had the power to do so in the first place.

Dishonor in compassion…the reason I made that statement was not only in relation to this post but also your ‘what bugs you�?post. Whenever I speak about anything its always from a Buddhist perspective, my own Buddhist perspective, and that path is based in compassion for all things. So when you speak of the need for bad, or anger for those who are interested in you life and then relate dishonor to not feeling pain and discomfort, or more specifically in the way I was referring to it, compassion, it leads one to think you find dishonor in this compassion. So if there is dishonor in compassion I would choose it, it does not mean I don’t know what pain is or that I’ve not experienced it, only that the way I choose to let it effect me has changed…it no longer does (most the time J ), and I feel compassion for all those who harbor ill feeling and feel the need to do so in order to experience life.

~Mykkyo