Don't Destroy Your Kingdom for a Dime.

Would you let the trivial bring your dream to its knees? Do we always sense when that is happening in our day to day lives?

How often do we kick ourselves out of 'heaven' over something trivial? How often do we ruin our moment and perpetuate an unconscious pattern over something as fleeting and changeable as our apparent circumstances. Circumstances that if we stared into them, we would see just how optional they really are.

There was once a young king who lived in a magnificent castle. The castle was perched high on the hill, and all of the towns' people lived in wonder of what majesty lay behind its walls. A long paved road wound all the way from the township to the castle doors, and its walls were made of huge blocks of polished marble. It was a wonder for any of those who stood before its beauty. But inside the castle loomed a different story to what appeared from the outside.

But it was not that this castle was in poor shape within its walls – everything appeared just as pristine as it did from the outside. The halls were decorated with the finest artwork, and light fixtures had been made by the highest craftsman in the land. The windows were draped with the most lavish of imported fabrics, and the high ceilings and cleanliness of this castle would make anyone feel like they were living in heaven. Anyone except of course, the king who called it his home.

To the king, who had inherited this castle from his father, it just never seemed quite right. In fact, the place looked so run down and far from heavenly in his eyes that he lost sleep over it. To him the artwork was dated, the door hinges creaked loudly, and the corridors were far too dark. He noticed cracks in the outer walls surrounding his kingdom, and even though he had a highly skilled workforce constantly maintaining every aspect of his castle he knew that even in his lifetime he would never see the castle come to his relentless standards of perfection. It was just never going to happen.

And this king was the wealthiest of any of the surrounding nations. His fields were more fertile than any other and produced an abundance of grains and fruits. ‘Ah' you say – it was that he was lonely’. But no – this king had a loving wife and family too – his generosity, honesty, and bravery was celebrated by all who lived in the township. To any outsider he had everything. But in himself, he was tortured by the decaying state of his castle – even though no one but he saw it this way. 'You're going crazy' they’d say, which almost certainly made matters worse for him. No one else could see the hardships he faced on the daily, for how incomplete he felt inside when he looked around this old dilapidated old place that could never be restored no matter how many men he'd assigned to the task.

Is this supposed to be some fable expressing the unnecessary torture we inflict upon ourselves with our relentless quest for perfection. That we are foolishly our own worst critics, even though no one else can notice or understand why we would be so harsh on ourselves. What possible form of improvement it might offer us to beat ourselves into the ground with no real end in sight. A life that we know full well that there will be no relief from until we unhappily die. Yes, that’s exactly what this analogy is supposed to represent. And it comes down to understanding the difference between what the spiritual offers and what the material offers. What it is that the Gods valued and what man values. You see what the Gods honoured was spirit – that fire burning inside us that could bring us to greater realisations of ourselves. They valued the mind that could turn an old home into a castle. They valued awareness, perception and how this gift sitting atop our shoulders could turn a grey looking sky into a great day.

Are we using it? Are we using the greatest gift that was bestowed us to turn our ‘crumby’ life into something that might resemble ‘fortunate’. Because we do this in a pattern that happens every single moment of the day. We do by far the majority of our lives unconsciously, so it is easy to see how we might end up in situations that, unbeknown to us are far from our liking. We don’t even know how we got there. How over time our mind made situations lead us into believing we have been wronged and are hard done by – or, like the king, will never ever be able to fix them before we die. That we will never be the people we want to, no matter how hard we try.

And why? Because we took it the wrong way. Because we followed ‘their’ advice or got unnecessarily offended by people who don’t know or care about us. The God’s valued the unseen. The mind that perceives things as they are and becoming closer to it. They valued desire, and that by our will we could turn the world into something we’d be pleased with. What ‘man’ values is things – the ‘seen’ – he values positions and the illusion of power. The opinions of others, and what they said about me. And it is easy to see how we might be misled if we were to value the things of the material world over the spiritual. Value what we own, or what ‘they’ say over the thing that actually holds our power to perceive it as it is. The Gods valued the fire in our hearts and the things that you can’t see, but man got lured into the things of little to no value.

Our attitude changes not just how things seem and the type of evidence we see, but the nature of the physical world around us. our philosophy can break stone and shrink even our largest problems down into bite sized chunks we can manage. we can change the meaning of an event if we think it really didn't go that well for us. and we can indeed live in the spoils of this world when we know we live in a castle. When we honor our bodies and the gift of perception. When we value our lives enough to stand upright, take a deep breath and proclaim to ourselves what it means to have a mind - to be connected to the potential of all that can be seen.

Or we can have that same mind drive us crazy and diminish what is a pristine castle into a living hell that will never get finished in our lifetime. It matters nothing where we are – to destroy our castle by the situations we have deemed ourselves to be in. so certain that we are a disgraceful human being, because of the stories that have unconsciously got ran away with our lives. We destroy this monument to ourselves, by these situations that are far more imaginary and changeable than we are aware at the time. What did the god’s honour? Spirit, hope, freedom – and these are things that can only be taken from us by our buying in to the lures of how we think we look in the eyes of others. By the situations that crept up on us while we were sleeping and became real while we were supposed to be dreaming. Don’t let a pebble destroy your castle.

“Small things have a way of overmastering the great. This small press can destroy a kingdom.”

Sonya Levien