Anything can happen. Anything is possible. Always and in all ways.
Like most people I live my life in patterns and habitual ways most of the time, and that is certainly useful in many ways, especially when it comes to functioning effectively in a complex world. But limiting our life to this alone and letting our thoughts run in the repetitive patterns also closes us to the magic of the above, to the fact that every moment is a possibility and anything can indeed happen. It just hardly ever feels that way when we let our mind habits run the show and control every aspect of our lives.
When we live that way, predictability is the key and makes us comfortable, and usually it is a dramatic event of some kind that shows us that anything can happen and is possible at any time. We fall in love unexpectedly, we win something ‘out of the blue,’ we have an accident, someone close to us dies. All of these events have the effect of jarring us back into the moment and into the realm of the unknown, which is where possibility resides. Our minds are brought to a halt and many people who experience a dramatic event will report afterwards that they didn’t know what to think, that they were incapable of holding a thought, that their minds were reeling. This is literally what happens, our minds are reeling because they have no preset pattern to fall into, no habitual response at the ready for the situation in which we find ourselves. People say that they felt in a daze of sorts and often cannot remember much about the moment they heard the news. Why is that?
They were busy experiencing it. Remember a moment in your life when something completely unexpected and dramatic happened, positive or negative, and you will probably have a hard time recalling exactly what was going on with you at the moment. Our habitual small mind or ego id is taking a break because it does not know how to process the new information and our big mind swoops in and instantly thrusts us into the actual experience in that moment. The full force of the present hits us. This may last for seconds, minutes, hours or days, all depending on the individual and the situation, but it happens to all of us. It’s the present moment saying hello and reminding us that while we are busy making plans, living in our patterns, life is happening and unfolding all around us in limitless ways. We choose whether we pay attention to this or not, whether we are listening or not.
All it requires on our part is to become uninterested in our own thinking and the same old stories and patterns within which we make ourselves exist. I still catch myself all day, I notice my seemingly random thinking and that it has, in fact, a very familiar tone and pattern. That it keeps telling me the same thing about life, my life, all the time, and thus making me hide from the unknown that life is, making possibilities impossible or at the very least unlikely. Constantly barraging me with thoughts of limitation, reasons why something won’t work, cannot happen and is simply not in the realm of possibility. But when we notice it, we can also consider the possibility that there is more to life than the patterns we live in. So much more, in fact, that we cannot begin to truly comprehend or understand it.
This is a much more fun place to live. We don’t have to contemplate the meaning of life here, though that is fun as well, but I am saying that what we think is possible is so infinitesimally small that it would behoove us to consider more. Think of how many people are on the planet having thoughts at any moment, how many molecules are moving about, how many processes are at work both physical and metaphysical – it is limitless, no number could be put on this. And in our deluded ego id states we think we have it all figured out… Sounds pretty funny, doesn’t it? All the great thinkers, explorers and inventors in human history have had one thing in common – they refused to be limited by what the common thought patterns at the time deemed possible. They saw beyond the limitations and knew that realm of possibility, often before they had thoughts, concepts or words to describe it. They were present and thus open to that which had in fact been pre-sent from the space of infinity. They just tuned in and paid attention.
Play with that idea. See what happens, see if your mind is tickled, your concepts start to to feel less solid, your opinions and thoughts about the world and yourself lose their solidity. What if in fact we have no clue, simply because it is impossible for us to understand that anything is possible and anything can happen. And that, as a matter of fact, this is going on all the time. What then?
Cheers,
Ralf