"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." - Rumi
Bewilderment scares us. We have this obsessive need to "understand" things... everything actually.

So why would someone of the caliber of Rumi write exactly the opposite. "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." To the sage, bewilderment is a joy. It is the childlike awe of not knowing anything intellectually and thus experiencing everything viscerally, fluidly, without memory or definition.

Joseph Campbell put it beautifully: "The psychotic swims with terror, in the same waters as the sage swims with delight."
True confession: I am not always filled with the delight of not knowing.
My spiritual practice over the last couple of decades has been all about finding and being the flow between the pairs of opposites. It has been about realizing the ultimate Buddhahood of the ordinary human being, to live up to the Bodhisattva vow to save all beings from suffering and to experience what Buddha himself referred to as "the personal realization of Buddha knowledge."
I have been blessed to have been enabled to touched the hem of the garment of delight, awe and self-disappearance and to have felt its delicious abandon. Thus acquiring an insatiable appetite for more.
But to enter into that garden of utter abandon and selfless wonder, one must pass through the obstacles of the conditioned mind. Learning to rely on the unseen, which means eschewing the seen and passing through the land of bewilderment. To the sage and the child this land is one of constant amazement and fun. For the unawakened and hopelessly "adult" it is a land of constant challenge. Our acquired skills, assumptions, organizational skills and conventional wisdom simply fail in this land where up is down, back is front, the first last and the last first.
The path becomes completely internal.
"What is in the cave?" asked the nervous Luke Skywalker of Master Yoda.
"Only what you bring with you" was the less than comforting response.

Over the mere 3 weeks I have been on my travels, despite a pleasant, stable place to rest and work, there have been numerous occasions for bewilderment.
Just trying to get a sweet at the bakery (thank god the word "latte" is universally understood) has been moments of bewilderment, counting change (the money looks so different). Just experiencing the million little interactions with others I take for granted and not understanding a word they say except danke and bitte.
I recently left my phone at a friends house and couldn't get ahold of her for most of the day and I had to go several places.
Navigating streets signs, traffic signals, roundabouts and countless thing I couldn't read, in order to make a simple trip to a store a mere 12 kilometers away, without the comforting voice of my GPS, was definitely bewildering moments.
My nervous system was on edge and, as it often does in uncomfortable situations, it retreated into my inner curmudgeon and was seriously questioning the point of the entire enterprise.
But this absence of the familiar was the whole point of my escapade.
So I choose to embrace my bewilderment and, in so doing, I come face to face with my own limits, my own impermanence, my own entropy. In this inner confrontation I learn to let go. I am just a cloud, floating through the sky, constantly changing shape and eventually, inevitably dissolving back into nothingness.

A Workshop on a Subject that is on
Everyone's Top 3 List
After a bit of deliberation, noticing the direction the world is going and feeling how pretty much everyone is feeling quite a bit of insecurity about the future, I decided to address this subject directly.
And so...
Thursday, January 13, at 2pm EST / 7pm UTC
I will be exploring our perceptions of the green stuff, it's meaning, our inner conflicts and how to come into right relationship with it.
I am offering a Super Early Bird Price and affordable payment plans
GP offers dozens of workshops, meditations and courses on his learning platform, The OM School
Check out GP's podcast on Spotify and other media outlets
Watch GP Live Every Tuesday at noon Eastern and Every Sunday at 8pm Eastern or catch his hundreds of vides on Youtube.
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