The "Good" Life:  What is the "good" life?  Can we define or describe it?  For many people their spiritual model is "the good life."  "Good" meaning a life consciously lived--simple, righteous, not ripping off people or the environment, socially conscious, and being a person of peace--not lost in frustrations, in greed, in violence, in anger, in lust.  But even if we are able or manage to get that all together, there's still something in us that is yearning for an answer.

Epiphany:  Leading the good life is just part of the way home to understanding who we really are and what it's all about.  Through life many of us have experienced preoccupation with our personal neuroses, achievements, careers, and relationships.  Some of us reach a point where we can begin to laugh at ourselves and see it all as a mellow drama--not someone else's, but our own.  Some of us begin to take our personalities a little less seriously.  Our personalities are just another shawl, cloak--something else we tend to hide behind.  Some of us come to realized that we are not just body and personality.

Caught in the worldly play:  We tend to create models of our reality that keep us from truly recognizing ourselves--keeping us lost in the world.  No matter how subtly beautiful our models are, they still define us within worldly concepts.  We have learned to function in this world, but we have not yet fully recognized where we come from, or who we are.  In truth, though we live in this world, we are not solely of this world.  To explore beyond the world is like stepping off into the void.

Getting hooked:  We all continually go through phases in our lives where we get lost in the world.  We get caught in worldly play.  We begin suffering emotionally from some form of obsession, indulgence, or attachment to an idea or to a material form.  Slowly the pulls of the world start to get to us and we start looking for a ready, easy solution that will help rid us of the suffering.  We begin looking around for someone or something to help us extricate ourselves from this dilemma of suffering.  In the process we open ourselves to some "easy" formula, ritual, activity, teacher, guide, or movement.  We become vulnerable to being seduced, sucked into accepting a whole new melodrama.  We might get caught in a model or system which has no escape clause--a total "reality" of blind faith that makes involvement a commitment which disallows close analysis or change. We eventually would come to realize this quick fix wasn't the solution to escape or release ourselves from the suffering that we we're experiencing.  It becomes just another melodrama trap.  But even this entrapment is a teaching.

Letting go:  In our attempt to relieve our psychological pain through a "quick fix," we have been seduced by a whole new melodrama.  We have been seeking help outside ourselves instead of looking within and in the process acquired new external attachments.  Our experience is just another teaching we must transcend, to loosen our hold on, to let go of, and to move on.  Teachings have their positive side.  Teachings and the leaving of them gives us more strength, compassion, a greater openness, and a deeper ability to allow the moment to be as it is.  Some of us profit from our teachings, from our experiences, and some come away with despair, cynicism, and paranoia.  Though we may get lost for awhile, eventually our inner hearts will hear what to do, and all the impurities in ourselves and in the world will just become grist for the mill, stuff we work with.

Experience is the teaching:  Experience another person, the world, and yourself as a teaching.  Develop a mind that clings to nothing.  Everything is just stuff.  Loosen your hold on the reality you experience.  Ultimately we all must let go of and go beyond polarity, and awaken out of the illusion of separateness.  Each of us has taken birth in order to go through a series of experiences until we transcend the dualism of experiencer and the experience.  We reside in being--we are the teaching.