Author: Orenda Review

On Perseverance

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, the juice is worth the squeeze.

The honey badger, hunting a king cobra, is bitten in the melee. He kills the snake and begins to feast on its head, when suddenly, the poison begins to take effect. He passes out for a number of minutes, knocked out from the deadly toxin, laying just a few steps away from the partially eaten corpse. After a few minutes, the honey badger awakens, disoriented. Rather than being dissuaded or discouraged by the power of the snake’s poison, he slowly walks over to the king cobra’s half eaten body and finishes his meal.

Such is the nature of perseverance. Perseverance has no ego and no memory. It has no memory of past setbacks or perceived failures, or successes for that matter. Perseverance lives each day as if the achievements of the past have been washed away, striving anew each day to create new successes and opportunities for growth.  Its lack of attachment to the past, coupled with its ever present drive to move forward into (more…)

On Limitation

 

 

 

 

Your limitations are like a rope tied around your leg, attached to nothing… walk away from what holds you back… because it is you!

A well known and oft told story is how baby elephants are trained not to run away from their human masters. It goes something like this:

When elephants are very young, they are taken away from their mothers, but kept in sight, and a heavy leg iron and chain or rope is placed around the baby’s leg. With the chain staked to the ground, the baby continues to strain to reach its mother. Eventually, the baby elephant stops resisting and gives up. The trainers are then able to replace the chain with a very light rope or harness, and the elephant never tries to get away. After some time, the trainers can leave the other end of the rope lying on the ground. The memory of its boundaries is enough for the elephant to continually recreate its perceived limitations. At any point, the elephant could simply walk away, but it does not!

The nature of limitation as it manifests in human beings is quite similar. Limitation is by definition a perceived boundary based on past experience. One might retort by pointing out that there are certain limits, like the laws of physics, which cannot be overcome, and are therefore not affected by perception or other psychological phenomenon. The most compelling response to this argument is observance of the nature of (more…)

On Words

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Words have the power to transform, uplift, or destroy. They can be used as tools of the mind, expressions of the spirit, or weapons of anger and fear.

Once upon a time there was a mean boy. His father gave him a board, hammer and bag of nails and said to him, “Hammer a nail into the board whenever you say or do something that might hurt someone.”

The first day, the boy hammered 37 nails into the board. After several days of that, the boy began to be a little nicer and the number of nails he hammered each day lessened. The boy found that it was actually easier to treat people nicely than to hammer the nails.

One day, he hammered no nails into the board and cheerfully told his father. His father replied, “From now on, if you go a whole day without being mean or hurtful, then you can draw one nail from the board.”

As time passed, the boy (more…)

On Perfection

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Perfection is something we can all experience by simply allowing it to happen. Doing so means getting our ego out of the equation.

Perfection’s external persona is one of uncompromising excellence. However, beneath its exterior lies its essence, which is its desire for continual improvement and change. Perfection understands that in order to maintain its flawless functionality, the unique characteristic of perfection, it must achieve dynamic balance through decisive and clear intention without attachment, which is the method by which it achieves the former. Perfection is itself a seed that must be planted deep into one’s spirit, and must be nurtured and cultivated until all the surrounding weeds of mediocrity are starved by lack of attention. Although perfection always seeks flawless functionality without attachment, it is our role to employ will to infuse its desire for flawless functionality with integrity and love. The dynamic balance that perfection pursues is dictated by the strength and character of its vessel. The strength and character of its vessel, in turn, must be responsive and welcoming to the constancy of change.

To truly understand the nature of change we must understand the mechanisms of change, the most fundamental of which is one’s paradigm. Change of any scope is always accompanied by a paradigm shift. On a macro cosmic level, the change that must be allowed to occur for perfection to express itself in man is dictated by the perceived avoidance of pain or the gaining of pleasure, (more…)