Thinking gets you where you are, and often gets you stuck and keeps you there.

Do your passions arise from thinking? Can you be angry and out of control and be aware that you are angry and out of control? If you are truly aware, then are you out of control? We are alive first, thinking creatures second. And I dare say thinking is starkly limited. Many schools teach that thinking almost has no place. I don’t believe that, but I do agree that thinking is mistaken as the power that rules all in the mind. The heart was a “mind” before mind in evolutionary eons, and the gut was mind before that. They still work as well or better than they ever did. People just ignore them.

Thought as we know it is relatively new from an evolutionary perspective, and I don’t think it’s actually “superior”. It is a new ability that serves. But why supposedly is thought us?

Energy can be harnessed, tamed. First was domestic animals. Fire. All very tame. The tamed energies are not the same as the root energies. Nothing about fire made us burn people and villages with it. If anything, it originally wasn’t under our control. There is an order that comes before the carving of the block. The “te” or virtue of the passions is life supportive. Nature didn’t create them in us to kill us.

Passion is like water and like fire. Passion is elemental. It can burn itself out hot and quick. Leaving only a smudge on the ground that gets blown over, which is actually not a bad thing. Or it can move gently and slow like water, and eventually leave a permanent and unchanging mark, but all very slowly, gently with no fighting. Passion doesn’t mean fighting. Fighting is control, not passion.

Conflict is natural. Unavoidable. No philosopher or mystic has ever found a way to avoid it. Conflict is only annoying when it’s resistance. It’s controlled conflict that leads to damage. In aikido, I don’t fight your strength. I help your strength and let you fight yourself. I am left undisturbed. If you move, I move with you. I don’t try to block your body. I accept your arm as you try to land a blow and move with you. I resist nothing and am unharmed.

In Taoism, they speak of, “In possessing nothing you have everything.” The world is your body and your body is the world. You didn’t create yourself, and ultimately you can’t uncreate yourself. Just new configurations of what is.

So why deny the passions? We didn’t create lust, or hunger, or anger, or fear. They predate our thinking. Our thinking twists them. There is a greater wisdom behind the mind. Why shouldn’t we lust? Lust is animal, natural, and only dabbled in. It isn’t romantic ideas that make a male lion seek his mates, it’s lust. Lust reaffirms life.

Is desire better then passion? Desire is attachment. Clinging. What we cling to we warp. We create ideals and in desiring we fail to love. Some ask me why I am so patient. It is not from ideals. It is from seeing the human way and accepting that. Not by saying, “They should not rage.” Not saying, “They should not lust.” But by saying something was defended. Yin is the shadow of yang, but yin is part of yang. It is whole.

That which works against the world looses. To make an enemy of the world, or of your inner nature, is to be defeated before you ever start. There is an inner feng shui, an ebb and flow. I recommend letting the inner tide merge with the wisdom of the world, the sea of life. What greater wisdom is there in the world than that? What more power could you ask for?

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~