Daily Lesson for April 16, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Luke chapter 3 verses 10 and 11:

10 And the crowds asked him, “What then shall we do?” 11 And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.”

In his book "A New Earth: Awakening to You Life's Purpose", Eckhart Tolle says that our ego selves really do not want to have but rather want to want. Ostensibly, to have would be to reach a point of satisfaction -- our needs and wants met by what we have. But in reality what we have is never enough; we always want more.  And our wants are never quite satisfied.  This is the story of Adam and Eve, who could eat of all the fruit of the Garden save the one they wanted.   And it is the reason my house is so cluttered with toys my kids never play with. The next toy always holds the promise of fulfillment, but the promise is always broken.

The beginning of transformation for us comes first in noticing how our desires are never met.  The act of noticing is the beginning of consciousness; and consciousness, Tolle says, is what allows us to shift from being a people with perpetual desires to a people for whom enough is enough. 

We can practice the consciousness of enough being enough.  One ancient and very practical way to do that is to give things away. In today's lesson John the Baptist tells those with more than they need to give away the extra to those without enough. Anyone who has ever tried to do something like this knows how difficult it can be at first. We are attached to our things -- even our extra things.  Yet it is wrong attachment; it is ego attachment. The giving away frees us from this ego attachment and opens a space for us to realize (come to consciousness) that what we need is not what we are wanting but rather what we already have within us. For the kingdom of God is within us.

This is all pretty heady psychological stuff; so let me finish up with a prayer my plain spoken, West Texan grandfather used to teach the boys in his Sunday School class to pray, "Lord, fix my wanter."  Our wanters can be fixed; but in order to fix them we will need to change our havers also.