“The only thing that sets man above animals is his responsibility to care for the rest of nature.” - MegaMom
One morning I sat down and noticed that only some of the flowers at my meditation place were open. Although the sun was shining on them, some remained closed. As I pondered the reason for this, they answered me: “You believe that it takes effort for us to open. This is because you hold this false belief about yourself. This erroneous thought is common among humans. We are naturally open and need only to make an effort to close. We do this to protect ourselves from various things in our environment. This is the only act that requires effort. Since being open is our natural state without exerting influence or energy, we would remain open.”
This news was shocking. I had to admit that I did believe that it took flowers effort to open. I could see the truth that this projection came from a deep-seated belief in a condition of my own unfoldment. I held the belief that being closed is natural and open takes effort. This false idea makes “letting go” frightening since religion teaches us that we must expend effort to be open and that we must fight our very nature to do it. It is true that if we have not yet entered the depth of ourselves, our surface and more limited disconnected aspects may drive our spirit nature off the cliff of endless desire, but in contact with our Soul, our true Self would effortlessly to put us into Divine communion; that is, put us into union with our true Self or Soul.
Letting go of trying to be what we already are would bring immeasurable amounts of peace into our lives. We should all just allow our true spiritual nature to express without the self judgment that we should be a different kind of flower or a different color flower so to speak. Trying to be what we are not only distorts us, like a purple flower trying to be white. We are the only expression of God that exists the way we are, so we may as well stop comparing and just bloom.
Note* If you do not believe that the rest of nature is communicating with us, read the Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins or Messages from Water by Masaru Emoto. In the Autobiography of a Yogi Paramahansa, Yogananda talks about an Indian scientist named Jagadish Bose that invented instruments that could measure responses from metals and even rocks! Bose says, “The telltale charts of my crescograph are evidence for the most skeptical that plants have a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless other appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as animals”. “A universal reaction seemed to bring metal, plant, and animal under a common law. They all exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression with possibilities of recovery