One of the principles of creating change in your world is flexibility. Understand that the world around you is an extension of yourself. Your world is not apart of you. Your world is a reflection of you. What you are, that your world is. Sometimes working on changing the outer world is not the way because it is only the symptom. You have to work on the projector which is you. There is no thing out there. It is not reality that bends, it’s you that bends. When you know this truth and apply it, you can bend reality.

Being able to switch between different worldviews and paradigms gives you an advantage that can greatly accelerate your progress. Many people are rigid in their point of view because they are trying to establish some concept of congruence. The only congruence necessary is being willing to change one’s way of seeing things according to one’s own exploration at any moment. Life is a journey and one must discover one’s own truth. Only by moving from viewpoint to viewpoint can one see from many angles.
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The soft overcomes the hard and the flexible overcomes the rigid. That which is soft and flexible seems weak but yet has greater power than that which is hard and rigid. That which is alive is bendable and yielding whereas that which is dead is stiff and brittle. Life is all about change, and to change with change is the changeless state. The path to full enlightenment requires one to change one’s mind from moment to moment according to the journey. One’s answer will become better through the transforming.

Through the path of becoming more enlightened, one may have to go the opposite way sometimes. It is a constant move from darkness to light, from light to darkness and back to the light. Advancing seems like retreat and going forward seems like going backward. But this is how one grasps the limits of what reality is and understands truth as what it is defined to be. The contrasts being experienced enable one to know the opposites better and better. This brings greater clarity and certainty to the discoverer.

The advantage of being able to switch from one polarity to another is that you are able to switch back again with as much ease and swiftness. Only geniuses are able to change their minds so quickly and completely, and not be bothered by the judgments of others for doing so. What the masses think of as fickle mindedness, genius calls it supreme flexibility of the mind. It is true that a double minded man is unstable in all his ways. But conscious double mindedness is to arrive at single mindedness quick.

Instability is better than stability in error. It is better to continue shifting than to settle in the wrong place permanently. Failure is hard but success in the wrong area may lock you in forever. The secret of speed is to quickly and continuously change what you are doing until you find that which truly works best for you for life. What seems to constant failure ultimately turns out to be the greatest success. An open hand travels faster than a closed one. One’s mind should travel openly. Close only at destination.

The wind method seems like a method of weakness because it is insubstantial. But true strength comes from effectiveness which is not measured by how it is like while it is in motion, but what it accomplishes at points of impact. The wind moves swiftly and elusively as it travels. It cannot be grasped and has no firmness to it while it is in motion. It seems totally weak and has no power. But it moves so quickly, avoiding all obstacles and being stopped by nothing. At the end it compresses itself into a point.

With great pressure and overwhelming force, the compressed wind blasts into its target and tears it to pieces instantly. That which seemed totally weak and elusive at first suddenly turned into unbearable strength which cannot be evaded. Think of the art of drunken boxing. The stances and moves seem completely unstable and weak. This seems to create lots of openings for defeat. But appearances are deceptive. At the moment of a strike or a block the stance and move takes on a very strong form instead.

The cycle of faith may seem like moving into a decrease of faith instead of an increase. Such is a thing that occurs when one is said to have some sort of a crisis of faith. One seems to be losing faith in one area, but what is happening is that one is merely switching faith from that area to another area. The journey may bring back one’s faith to the form area once again later. In fact one’s faith may continue to switch between different things. This happens until faith is settled more strongly in one area naturally.

It is said that the more you know, the more you know that you know nothing. This is what is meant by the cycle of increasing appearing like the cycle of decreasing. The appearance of decrease is all part of the same cycle of increase. At times like these, what is happening is that everything is being shaken, so that the things that cannot be shaken will remain. The things that you know are being put to the test, so that you will know what is ultimately true and what isn’t. You will know the ultimate answers.

Everyone wants stability in their reality. In may be hard to endure at times when things are being unstable and inconsistent. But know that those are times of continual discovery and you will make progress somehow. In those times it may seem like you will never end up anywhere and may continue in the wandering state forever. But this is what being the wind feels like. It seems elusive and ungraspable until the time where you are meant to strike. You’ll hit hard upon your answers with unstoppable power.[/hidepost]