An e-mail went around some time ago about the big rocks of life. The gist of it was that if you don’t put the important things of your life first, you’re never going to get them in. Most of your day-to-day life is spent with sand -- going to work, shopping, cooking. Not that these things aren’t important, but are they the most important things in your life? The big rocks represent your daemon, or guiding spirit. "Daemon" comes from the word "deva" in Sanskrit, which means radiant, or shining. It’s who you are called to be in this life, what you are called to do, besides just occupying yourself with sand. What kind of person do you want to be when you’re 85 years old, sitting in a rocking chair in an old age home? If you find your daemon, you’ll be interesting to everybody, regardless of how old you are. You may not speak the same language as them or have the same interests, but what people will recognize in you is a person who’s living their life rather than just getting older. Our heroes -- if we have any anymore -- are all people who have found their daemon, people who are doing what they’re meant to do. This is the mystic’s journey -- the journey of Thomas Merton and St. Teresa of Avila and St. Clare of the Holy Flower -- people who went away from the world in order to find what they were meant to do, and then having found it, brought it back as a manifestation of their life. It’s also the path of people like Pina Bausch and Isadora Duncan, people who were meant to dance. A lovely dialogue went on between Isadora Duncan and this very famous writer whose name I can’t remember. Anyway, she had the hots for him, and he had the hots for her, and all they did was argue. She, the dancer, trying to get him to go one way, and he, the writer, trying to get her to go another. So you also notice that you have in your being this dialogue between the head and the heart. The head is arguing for sand -- make sure you have enough money, a job, food, security, etc., and the heart is saying “pack it up, go to Thailand, find a beach, build a life.”

Message from Achariya Doug Duncan, November 2009

If you want to be more than you are, you have to embrace what you’re not. The spiritual life is often seen as a passive and accepting release of stored pain and sorrow, which allows us to relax into calm and joy, even bliss and spaciousness -- awakening as a letting go. While this is certainly one aspect of liberation, there are others. For instance, meditation can be misused as a way of avoiding underlying conflicts that don’t arise in the meditative environment. Also, some issues might arise only when around women, or only when around men, but not in a solitary retreat. Or if your teacher is, for example, male, and you have authority issues that center around females, and you only just meditate, this whole area of your being can remain distorted. Now, while awakening in essence doesn’t ‘fix’ us (nor is it intended to fix us), nevertheless, even the awakened must live and interact with people in their lives. It is on this basis that good communication and co-operative behaviour enhance one's well being and community effectiveness. It is in this sense I talk about ‘being more than we are’.