From The Ancient Sage by Alfred Tennyson
“The days and hours are ever glancing by,
And seem to flicker past thro’ sun and shade,
Or short, or long, as Pleasure leads, or Pain;
But with the Nameless is nor Day nor Hour;
Tho’ we, thin minds, who creep from thought to thought,
Break into ‘Thens’ and ‘Whens’ the Eternal Now
This double seeming of the single world!—
My words are like the babblings in a dream
Of nightmare, when the habblings break the dream.
But thou be wise in this dream-world of ours,
Nor take thy dial for thy deity,
But make the passing shadow serve thy will.”
The history of man is littered with the lives of men and women whose lives were lived with noses close to the grindstone. In some cases their heads were held there by the hand of another, but in most the position was and is self-willed.
Why do we enslave ourselves thus?
Man, especially in our current era, is a slave to the clock. The strings of his soul are swept not by the inner breath of life, gliding gracefully along like the second hand on a mechanical watch, instead, they are agitated by external, visible forces of the outer world and tick inescapably with quartz-like precision in a funereal march to the end.
His escape is not to be found in withdrawal. Neither is his freedom gained by rebellion. Freedom from this limitation, my dear readers, begins with learning to be free in the limitation.
Balance comes from relaxation. It’s enemy is tension. Relaxation allows the strings of your soul to come to rest. More importantly, it makes them available the creative reverberations which move from within outward, from above to below.
The experience of the single world is at hand. You needn’t go anywhere else to get there. It is present within you and around you no matter how chaotic, intense or quiet the circumstances around you may be.
Gregory Hake 
We have so much more potential than we give ourselves credit for, and yet just a fraction of each person’s ability is usually tapped. It is definitely true that we have limits and limitations, but our minds stop most of us long before we are anywhere close to them. There are tried and true methods to getting around and through limits, but you have to first stop whining and complaining about them to ever have a chance to overcome them. There are many starting points in this blog’s previous posts, and if just one of them was taken to completion, your progress in life would be farther than 99% of most people.
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The strings of my soul sing thanks for your words. There is much to consider in your words regarding our soul and its purpose. A designed purpose to be available to be played by what you say as the creative reverberations that move from above down inside out. This realization does bring a relaxation and an openness and a love to let such creative reverberations sound through me.
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Thank you for such a moving reminder to not waste our precious lives. No doubt my journey has had twists & turns I didn’t anticipate. Also highs & lows often equally out of my control, but the hours I’ve been fully engaged in the now have been the most satisfying to my soul. Training myself to stay focused in living in the present, not reliving the past or putting happiness on hold ’till everything is “going my way” has been a process. I find reading those things and finding friends that support that has been a tremendous help in changing that popular behavoir that robs us of our opportunity to make a difference.
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Great post!
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It is interesting isn’t it, what we humans decide to spend our lifetimes doing. Believing to be so important, that we dare not do anything less. Caught in the net of our society, and its belives of importance and value. When our souls tell us that it is not so, that those believes are only false believes. I think today, that I will sit in the grass, and feel the sun gently warm the top of my head, and allow the wind to tickle my skin. To taste the cleanness of the air around me on my tongue. And prehaps by doing so, I might stop long enough to see the love and beauty of the “Great I Am”. And there shall I find the importance within my Life.
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