“Any external conditions that are being resisted tend to shift or dissolve quickly through surrender. It is a powerful transformer of situations and people. If conditions do not shift immediately, your acceptance of the Now enables you to rise above them. Either way, you are free.” Eckhart Tolle

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I look up at the clock and it’s 9:11, then I look at the calendar and it’s the 11th of December. Now it’s 9:12. The digital clock does not flow, it lurches from one second to another.

But Life is a flow, a seamless flow, not a jerking movement of the clock jumping from one digit to another. Seamless flow means you can’t feel change. If you are in a stream and flowing with the stream, you can’t feel the stream. You only know you are moving because the banks are not moving. You are the stream. If there were no banks, you would not know you were in a stream. When you flow with the stream, you feel satisfied, free and at ease. There is no resistance and no tension, and no sense of ME wither. You are the stream and the stream is you.

The only way for me to feel ME is to resist the flow of the stream. The more I resist the flow, the more ME I feel, and that feeling of me is a tension, and tension is like a spring of pain. We go to a massage therapist to find release. Pleasure is the release of this tension. We only feel totally free when we are not ME. Any interruption of the seamless stream is what I know as ME.

And here is the double-bind of spiritual teaching, the Zen Koan of the NOW. How can I be ME and Not ME at the same time? The irony is that I have to give up being ME in order to be ME.

When I see the insanity of this; when I am surprised by the absurdity, the irony, the joke, I laugh…and in that laughter, I surrender and I’m free.