We are born at sunrise and start making our way, following our shadow which gets smaller and smaller until midday. Then our shadow behind us again grows and we follow the sun to where no one knows. The way forward is clear after midday unless our shadow appears which means we're going the wrong way....
The past is just a small number of photos which we weave into a movie. While constrained by what's depicted in the photos, seemingly happy or sad scenes, we nevertheless have great freedom to make the movie a comedy or tragedy. Our attitude determines the storyline. However, when we take what we see in the photos seriously, we lose our freedom to make the movie to our liking....
When I was a child in Act 1 of the play of life, "Terrific," my parents, friends and teachers showed me the ways of this world. However, their views were not as interesting to me as the views of the elders, my grandfathers. As my grandfathers' perspectives were from the end of days, Act 3, I felt the light they projected from their position to mine would best show me the way forward. My paternal grandfather came from Leipzig, Germany. He, my grandmother and father escaped to Israel in 1938, just before all roads out of Germany closed to Jews. My grandfather was a successful businessman in the printing business in Germany and the envelope manufacturing business in Israel. Yet, after 18 years in Israel, my father, who worked for my grandfather and had married my mother in 1950, yearned for the economic opportunities he envisioned in America. So in 1956, when I was 6 and my sister was 2, we moved with my grandparents to Brooklyn, N.Y. My grandfather opposed moving to America. Before leaving Israel, he told my mother to take a long deep look at the comforts she had in Israel because it would be a long time before she would have those comforts in America. He was right. My family arrived in America during a recession and struggled for several years. My grandfather went through many ups and downs in life. However, with his ability to see situations from many different perspectives, he always found creative solutions to whatever problems arose. Moreover, he always found a perspective that made a situation funny and was always grateful as every situation could have always be worse. This was the foundation of his happiness. His was the attitude that I naturally adopted. My maternal grandfather was a dry goods store owner in Haifa, Israel. His approach to life was to enjoy the physical pleasures of life; eating, talking and sex. However, as his lifestyle took its toll, in his last years, he was overweight, diabetic and unsteady on his feet. That taught me that getting fat is just deserts for eating just desserts. While he would likely have been in better shape had he restrained his desires, in his last days he felt the pleasures he realized were greater than their costs. He too was happy. Enjoy the physical pleasures of life is what I learned from his life. My grandfathers made clear my way; to physically enjoy life and realize my potential by making the best of every situation. That describes my life in Act 2. While my grandfathers would likely not have approved many of the choices I made on the way to where I am now, a grandfather in Act 3, their light guided my way on a happy life which is all my grandfathers would have hoped. Moreover, now that I'm in Act 3, the transition, I'm no longer interested in the views of elders. I'm drawn to the energy of those younger; especially my grandchildren. They are closer to where I'm going than I am. Maybe they can reflect the light from which they come to guide me to where I'm going....
God's pupil, the sun, reveals the world. When our pupils see the world, we are God's pupils or pupil....
Who we are is our way. The road to our destination is the Way. When we know our way we know the Way....
"I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes." All that's now is now no longer. What is gone doesn't exist. All there is is what comes next with which we can just do our best....
All around us are things things things, thousands and thousands of things and things that change into other things. However, when we move farther and farther away from things, the things become smaller and smaller until all we can see is one thing. This is the universe, one thing that we see as an infinite number of things which in turn makes us oblivious that it is only one thing. Seeing the one as many is our mind's creation; otherwise the many things don't exist. This realization, that the many are One, can happen anytime but often happens during the transition as we become selfless, merging into one thing which is what we have always been. As all things are just infinite aspects of one thing, we cannot describe the one thing beyond saying that it is what it is whatever it is. Yet, as it is selfless, those who know it feel it as all of mankind at peace Shanti Shalom Salaam....
As stars are motionless, the sky is timeless. Yet constellations tell time far and near, time of night and the month of year....
The way is the nature of the universe; ever-changing, interdependent, eternal and infinite light manifestations of the sole One, the soul. The Way is the path we take from when we are a manifestation in bodily form at birth to our bodily death when all that remains is the soul. When we know the way of Way, we can be one with the One before our bodily death. Then, the Way disappears as the illusion it always was and all that remains is light. We are present, the soul before it is realized as light manifestations. When the present is realized as light, our sensuous experience of it cannot be described (it is what it is whatever it is) but as the acronym of the way of Way ("WOW"). The sound of WOW is made by puckering our lips like when we kiss what we love, that to which we connect with as one. WOW is also our reaction upon awakening, when we don't remember who we were yesterday, what we need to do later today and everything around us appears as we've never seen it before....
The mind is the night sky. Stars are events we remember. Imaginary lines create constellations whose stories affect what we see in the day....