Rules to live by

The other day I noted that many of us don't follow the 'rules'.

Then the person with me said, "Well, what are the rules, where are they written down?

I responded that there were 84.200 of them, and that it wasn't knowing all of them or even obeying them, but just trying to was the key.

Once we open our awareness, and pay attention to those who came before, the way becomes obvious and we follow it;

so by follow the rules, I really meant pay attention and follow those that came before.

They said, "well, you really have no right to complain if you haven't written the rules down for people to follow.

And you know, they are right.

I'm going to stop complaining about it, and just let people learn to pay attention.

But you know, I wonder if it's possible to extract all 84,200 rules from the teachings and write them down?

Just as an experiment, I'm going to try and list some of them;

Though I wonder about what order to use, they kind of interlink, oppose each other to some degree, and run in circles a bit;

I suppose I can cut and paste later to play with the order.

Let's get started.

They say the first rule is: Never quit; Never give up.

Also the pratice is every moment of everyday.

Watch the seniors, do what they do, and only what they do.

Once awake, do what awake people do; before awake... do what awake people do.

The practice and the Path are one. They are the same.

Everything should be natural.

It's funny in order to be truly free, we follow the natural path... but the natural path can be quite narrow sometimes.

We're supposed to both follow ourselves, and follow the rules; this is because ourselves goes beyond the individual and includes All.

This is the tricky part. We are both our individual selves and a wholeself, which is All.

So we find ourselves, but in realtion to All.

We begin to see why the words are tough... none of them are quite right. No wonder we say the words only point the way, and don't write the rules down. They need to be discovered naturally for ourselves.

But let's keep trying anyhow, let's point the way a bit; perhaps we need to point to opposite directions now and then to include both halves, both sides of the coin, or my favorite... both wings of the bird.

Individual and All... Not two we is The Teaching.

I used to like "All is One" and sometimes I still do, but it's not the Teaching... The Teaching says 'Not Two'. It is more accurate, I suppose, but I still like All is One. Part of my rose colored glasses of seeing things in a positive light I suppose.

We rarely say what the Way is, cause that's impossible, so we're usually left with what it is not. But still let's keep trying.