A preacher was once giving a sermon and he said, "Everyone who wants to go to Heaven, stand up." Everyone in the congregation stood up except one little boy. The preacher asked the boy, "Don't you want to go to Heaven?" The boy replied, "Oh, I thought you meant, right now." There's a similar story about Zen Master, Roshi Sasaki, who said to a group of his students, "Anyone who wants to be enlightened, come forward this instant!" Not one student moved. It's interesting to ask ourselves, what do we really want right now? Often we find that we have conflicting wants or desires. It's difficult for life to respond to ambivalence. While sometimes we just know what we want, at other times we may just be stuck in postponement because we are afraid that, if we choose, we may make a mistake. Sometimes the only way to get off the plateau of indecision is to choose a course of action and put our whole being into it. This moment now may be your moment to choose the way forward into your breakthrough. 

A caterpillar once looked up at a passing butterfly and yelled, "You'll never get me up in one of those things." Just as it is the caterpillar's destiny to one day change into the butterfly and be lifted from the bounds of the earth, so too are each of us in this life to be free. The butterfly flits through the air compelled by no pattern, conforming to no routine. When we release ourselves to inner freedom, our life becomes filled with a momentum and energy that lifts us from being bound by earthly cares and worries. What was a struggle on one level becomes a joyous adventure on another. Freedom gives our life meaning and happiness. When we feel like the caterpillar slowly crawling our way through this life, let's remember that our destiny is the freedom of the butterfly. 

A fax machine transmits written documents from one place to another. The only condition is that you have to have a fax machine to receive what another fax machine is sending you. Many times people will call up and say, "Well, I'll fax the invoice or the letter or the material to you." And if you say, "Sorry, we don't have a fax machine," then together you have to figure out a more laborious way of receiving the material you need. Sometimes the universe is trying to fax our spiritual breakthrough to us, but our inner fax machine has shut down; so we can't receive the message. Sometimes we just don't believe that something new and good is going to happen to us. But so many, many things have happened to us in this life— why couldn't something really great and stupendous happen? There's nothing to stop it from happening. Why not keep our spiritual fax machine open to receive the message that opens our hearts and fills our life with joy? 

Sometimes we see life as a series of problems for which we haven't discovered the solutions. Maybe we just need to redefine our problems as susceptible to solutions, that within each problem there is a solution and we are capable of finding it. I once had a day that I called Solution Tuesday because a whole series of long-term, difficult problems were solved, one right after another. Sometimes we think that if we receive one solution to a problem, then that's the end of our allotment for a long time to come. We think of solutions as being doled out to us in a very stingy way. Yet there is a solution right now for us no matter what the situation. 

Joseph Campbell once said that where we stumble is where our treasure lies, meaning that often what we take for a mistake, accident or unfortunate situation is really the way in which a deeper spiritual realization occurs. Campbell cites a story in the Arabian Nights about a young farmer who is plowing a field. His plow becomes stuck, and when he reaches down to see what stopped it, he discovers a valuable ring; digging further, he discovers a vast treasure of precious jewels. Sometimes when we seem to be stopped in our tracks, and we see no way out, we are forced to go deeper into ourselves until we discover a solution so unexpected and so beyond what we imagined that the solution produces riches of undreamt of joy and creativity. 

Idries Shah tells the story about when the legendary Sufi Nasrudin once spent some time traveling across the border between Turkey and Greece. The customs official was sure that Nasrudin was smuggling something across the border, but each time he searched Nasrudin's donkey, he could find nothing. Some years later, the now-retired official ran into the now-retired and very prosperous Nasrudin. The official asked, "Nasrudin, what were you smuggling?" "Donkeys," replied Nasrudin. Sometimes in life we are so busy searching for hidden and deeper meaning to things that we miss the obvious that is right in front of us. A wise person once said, "Always look for the simplest answer to any problem first." When we allow ourselves to realize that which is simplest and most obvious in any situation, many times we need look no further. As Robert Creeley, the poet, once wrote, "One says of the drunken farmer / leave him lay off it / and that is the explanation." 

Anthony Trollope, the great Victorian novelist, once received a rejection of a manuscript he had submitted for publication. On the train on his return trip home, Trollope is said to have turned the rejected manuscript over and begun to write a brand new novel on the back pages— a novel which became one of his great successes. How often, when we are faced with rejection or frustration, do we throw our hands up in the air in despair and say, "I give up— it's not working." We can quit too soon— before the breakthrough— or we can be like Anthony Trollope and disregard apparent failure, brush aside rejection and go full force into our new creative project. Don't quit on yourself, and don't give up in the face of opposition; stay focused on creating something great in this life. Any time we feel stuck or let-down, we can choose to begin again; the closed doors begin to open, and we quickly connect with our fulfillment. Stay centered in your dream until it comes true. 

Sometimes people say, "Gee, I'm willing to let go of this troublesome situation, but I just don't know how." How do we let go? Is there a secret formula or technique for releasing what is no longer beneficial to us? I think we need to ask ourselves, first of all, are we really ready to let go? Have we really come to the end of this particular situation— have we exhausted all the possibilities within it? Or is there still some subtle payoff we are receiving from staying in the situation? Chances are, if we weren't still getting something from it, the situation would have dissolved for us long ago. Once we really decide that something no longer fits with who we are now, it becomes easy and simple to allow ourselves to just let go; like when we carry a heavy burden for a long time, and then we reach a place where we can let it go; inwardly we feel a great sense of relief and release. When we are no longer carrying it, we have let it go. Sometimes it's with a shock that we realize that we have already left something far behind us, and it happened almost without our noticing it. 

Sometimes we try so hard to get it right, make it better, clear it up— we try and try and try and sometimes it seems that the harder we try, the less effective we are. Is there another way? Is it possible that we can have our breakthrough by releasing the need to make things happen our way and at our time? Sometimes happy accidents occur— things just happen gratuitously without our having arranged them— and we realize that the universe has its own way of working and that good can come to us without the tremendous effort we feel that we have to exert. Maybe we can relax a bit from our struggle to bring the good into being— long enough to let the good come forth in its own way. Perhaps we can get out of the way and let things happen in their own time and manner. It's really surprising how much good can flow into our life when we are not looking. Let go to your good now. 

Sometimes we think that pushing and shoving is the way of victory in this life. I remember the first time I got on a crowded subway in New York City. Everyone was elbowing his way on as if there were not enough room or seats— as though if we didn't force our way on, we would be left behind. Yet everyone did make it onto the subway—even those who chose not to push and shove. We become very competitive and aggressive when we are afraid that there is not going to be enough good to go around; we think that we need to get ours before anyone gets it ahead of us. What stress and strain all this worrying and struggle can cause us! Yet there is another way; we can choose to trust that life hasn't brought us this far to let us down or disappoint us. We can choose to surrender to life itself, relax, release our fearful hold on people and things, let go and let life guide and direct us to our good. If what we want also wants us, all we need to do is relax into our meeting and connecting. 

Ours is a society based on winning. From sports competition to political elections, from checkers to chess, as football coach Bear Bryant put it, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." With such a strong cultural bias on achievement, how can we understand the Chinese saying that "less is more"? Yet if we think about our life, we may see that being assertive, aggressive or competitive does not always give us a sense of fulfillment or peace. We often feel the deepest and most profound fulfillment precisely when we surrender and let go of our need to control and shape things to our own ends. While, at times, we do feel the need to be in charge of our life, there are other times when a much greater freedom comes from simply letting. Some of our greatest breakthroughs in life come when we simply surrender. 

Anthony de Mello tells a story about a man who is lost and wandering in a desert. After many hours of frantically searching for water, the man all but gives up. Out of sheer exhaustion he stops and lies down on the ground and becomes absolutely quiet. All of a sudden, he becomes aware of the deep, awesome silence of the desert and in that profound stillness, he hears the gentle, murmuring sound of running water nearby. The man gets up and goes in the direction from which he has heard the water until he comes to a stream from which he drinks, and his life is saved. Sometimes, we too are frantically, almost desperately, searching for something to fulfill us or save us—until finally we become very still and quiet inside, and, in that stillness, we find our answer. 

Sometimes when things aren't working out in our jobs or families or relationships, it may be because subconsciously we have developed an attitude of resistance. When we seem to be stuck and struggling, sometimes we think the solution is to try harder to make things come into agreement with us. But the real solution may be for us to try easier— quit trying to force a breakthrough. We may need to relax, let go of trying to make it all work-out and be very simple, very gentle with ourselves and the people and situations in our life. We can ease up for a while and see if it doesn't get better for us and for the people in our life. When we have too many expectations about how everything and everyone should be, we create a tension, and everyone feels pressured, including ourselves. Let's release ourselves and others and relax into this fall season, letting go and letting all be well. 

There are always two ways of looking at any situation— we can always take either the positive or negative point of view. A pessimist is someone who is constantly seeing what isn't working. A pessimist once consulted an advisor who said, "Make three new friends and see what happened." He followed the advice, and nothing happened. Now he complains that he's stuck with three new friends. Things in life don't always work out the way we hope or the way we expect them to. We all have the tendency to become disappointed or frustrated when our dreams or plans don't seem to work out. Yet there is always the possibility that something even greater than anything we have envisioned will come forth out of our thwarted plans. We can always look to the good and claim it even in the midst of apparent disappointment. Never give up on the unexpected breakthrough coming right on the heels of what isn't working. We can turn failure into success in this life by keeping our vision focused on the good we seek, regardless of appearances. Be open for your breakthrough now. 

It's interesting that when we don't feel hope in our hearts, we usually feel its opposite, which is despair. Sometimes we've experienced so many disappointments in our life that it's hard for us to have hope that something better will still come our way. Yet, if we adopt the attitude of despair, we close ourselves off from all possibility that something new and different and better can happen in our lives. The sign over the entrance in Dante's Inferno was, "Abandon hope, all you who enter here." Abandoning hope and opting for despair is coming to a premature conclusion about life. It's like deciding who committed the crime when we are only half-way through a mystery novel. We may be tempted to quit reading because we feel that we already know 'who done it.' Yet the precise point of the mystery novel is the unexpected twist that leads to a surprise ending we could never have guessed. Our life is like a surprise birthday cake with candles we can't blow out. Anything can happen— even the very best thing— so why not hope for the best? 

We all go through times, for whatever reason, of feeling uncertain and insecure about ourselves and our life. A man once went to a therapist for a year. At the end of that time, the therapist commented, "Well, maybe life isn't for everyone." Sometimes this is how we feel deep down inside: maybe life isn't for us. We may be facing a health issue or a financial or job issue, or we may have a crisis in a deep personal relationship. Or sometimes, for no apparent outer reason, we just feel insecure, as if our inner stabilizing mechanism was suddenly not there. During these times, we are tempted to do almost anything to regain some sense of security. But we can experience a profound spiritual breakthrough when we allow ourselves not to resist this feeling of insecurity. When you feel insecure, just be insecure; don't fight the feeling or try to cover it up— the insecurity itself will bring into your awareness a deep and lasting insight and realization. When you feel insecure, trust the way of insecurity to guide you on your path. 

A film director who was down and out once went to U.G. Krishnamurti for advice. The director, filled with self-pity, told U.G. all of his troubles: his movies were all flops, his personal relationships had all collapsed, nothing was working no matter what he did. Instead of offering sympathy and commiseration, U.G. told the man, "I'll never forgive you unless you become a success." This demand jolted the director and galvanized him into action. He left U.G. and immediately began to work on a new film. The film was a great success. This was followed by a series of great film successes. This man is now one of the leading film directors in India. When we are stuck and feeling sorry for ourselves, what we may need is not sympathy or commiseration but a shock that will push us into action. 

The idea of actionless action is a bit foreign in our culture. We have been brought up to think of doing and activity as supremely important. When we were children, if our parents asked us, "What are you doing?" And we said, "Nothing." They always said, "Well, do something!" Yet, when we meditate or practice inner contemplation, we realize that there is a tremendous activity that takes place deep within our being and that the more silent and the stiller we become, the more energy and vitality we feel. And inner stillness and quietude also bring unexpected results from the outer world. Sometimes it seems as if, when we let go of the need to force, control or manipulate outer situations and instead turn within and become still, at peace and at rest, that the outer situations begin to shift and adjust of themselves and to come into alignment and agreement with our deepest needs, wishes and longings. 

Sometimes we say, "The more I try, the worse it gets." When we feel like this, it's as if we are on a treadmill, vainly spinning around in circles, ending up always where we started. To break the continuity of things not working out for us we may need to apply spiritual surgery. The most radical and effective way to break the contact with that which is causing us pain is to forgive it. When we really forgive something in our life for not working out, we immediately begin to take the power out of it to do us any further harm. Like cauterizing a wound, forgiveness of a situation ignites a fire of healing at the core of the problem. As we forgive, our hearts are freed from carrying the burden of fear and distrust. Emotionally we begin to feel lighter and freer. New possibilities begin to reveal themselves, and suddenly our solution and our breakthrough have arrived, and we are free. 

It's almost the time to put away our summer clothes and don our fall and winter outfits. It's almost time to switch over our swamp coolers and turn on our heater pilot lights. There is already a bite of coolness in the air in our mornings and evenings. We can feel a poignant regret at the passing of summer warmth. But cool weather brings a refreshing sharpness and clarity to mind and heart. There is a kind of fall awakening that releases us from that summer languor that semi-hypnotizes us into a mild inertia. We need the summer warmth to mellow out our inner being. We also need the brisk, clear, cold of autumn to focus us and give us the motivating force for action. We while away our days in summer— autumn is a time of fresh resolve, a moving forward with new energy into our life. Let this fall be your time of awakening.