Imagine waking up to this

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Dream with me for a second, Reader.

Outside your room is the most beautiful scene—nature in all its glory. You see a chair, greeted by the green foliage everywhere, the sweet silence of nature where you can hear the leaves of the trees caressed by the wind, the colours and the morning chirping of the birds. A serene and peaceful humming beckons you to come, to come outside. You feel a smile on your face, you know, you need not look any further because, there, you are at home…

You want to go out and experience all this close up. The beauty outside represents a wonderful, fulfilling life that you have always wanted.

You push down the door handle to open the door but you can’t because the door that is the only way out is locked.

Boom!

To truly appreciate the delights of nature, you need to find the key and unlock the door.

So you’ve ventured out into far-off lands, you’ve searched everywhere for this key, across vast deserts and empty oceans. You tried so many things, you spent so much time, so much effort, you tried beyond everything you knew that would deliver this key.

But then, nothing.

Pounding. Kicking.

All this means you need only keep holding on, you’re this close to opening the door. Where’s the hammer? Better get an axe. You so desperately want this.

You damn door OPEN!
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It takes everything from you. But the door will just not open. And it gives nothing in return. Nothing you’d want, at any rate. Those are your true feelings.
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You look left. Open. Wide. Enterable. Another door, and this one IS actually open.

"For why? If I don’t get what I want, then neither should I want the option. So you see, it’s quite impossible for me to imagine a scenario in which I’d stop to claim what I think is mine."
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And that is how you realize you’d stop at nothing.
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"You’ve gotta calm down. Your ambition knows no bounds."
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"It’s what I’ve been aspiring all along, and I’m failing at it. I won’t give up, now."

It doesn’t feel amazing, does it? But how did you get here?

The path to gaining access to this closed door often starts with using the key—trust, embracing.

It might be for you exactly the door you don’t want is what you want.

You want it? This other door?

There is this concept of 'de shi' (得失).

'De' literally means 'gain' and 'shi' 'loss'.

When we receive something from someone or when someone lends us a helping hand when we are in need, we know we should say thank you.

Take this as to 'de' something, so we know we should say thank you.

What about when you get 'shi'? Would you say thank you? I mean not just the words. I am talking about true gratitude from the heart.

Well, again, probably not that easy.

Because of the very fixed patterns we follow. We have to firstly be trusting and embracing enough to truly appreciate a loss. When we learn about the loss, our lives gain. It is rare to subtract off your life and inflict 'the suffering of loss' on yourself deliberately.

On the level of social Dao De (*read in the captions for its definition), when something is common sense to be 'evil' or 'not good', it is usually seen as negative, dark, chaotic, low level or obscene. On the other end of the scale, 'good' refers to that which is seen as positive, bright, harmonious or uplifting. Humans often want to get rid of that which is deemed 'evil' or 'not good', especially when it is seen as a source of problems for human life.

Loss and what we don’t want is being viewed as a source of problems for a human life.

So it’s understandable that we’d rather go for the closed door, what we want, 'de', instead of the open door that we don’t want, 'shi'.

If we look at the above dream with the closed and open doors more closely, we will see that they might stem from our worry about 'de' and 'shi'. We want to get what is the opposite of what we don’t want. There are many things we dream 'to achieve' or 'to have', and we make plans and take action to obtain these things, and to get more of it. They make sure we do not get to the place of what we definitely don’t want. Plans and actions mean putting time and energy into these pursuits and in many cases sacrificing, sacrificing time with family and friends, doing things we enjoy, and even the most precious assets of life such as our Qi, health, happiness, wellbeing and freedom.

A lot of this has something to do with 'the fear of anything that we don’t want'.

If we look at our decisions, look at the gain and losses you make with these decisions, in a decision the duality of 'de' and 'shi' is present and we make the decisions to avoid 'shi'.

So there is an avoidance.

And behind the avoidance comes always a sort of fear. The association with Avoiding & Hiding and fear go side by side.

This identification to this specific pattern of 'de' and 'shi' is present in almost everything we do. The process of seeking to 'de' (gain) is often a stressful one when we have grown an intense attachment to it. Because it is common that we keep trying to get the closed door open as our fears continue to grow. Holding on tightly is a form of attachment.That could keep the door closed even more tightly. And these fears will make very few people get to a content state.
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​When we realize that to 'de' is not working the way we imagined it, to feel a release from what we don’t want, the stress level becomes even higher.

It is when balance is disrupted that something is seen as 'evil' or 'not good'. How does something become 'against' Dao De when it is following its natural Dao De perfectly?

When the balance is disrupted (when we are going against Dao) is the point where the things that we view as 'evil' or 'not good' will start to cause problems. It may look that the things we labeled as 'evil' or 'not good' are causing damage to our health and life, yet the reality may not be this simple.

What are the obstacles to manifesting to embrace whatever comes our way, if even the open door that you don’t want can be a key to the door you want?

XOM

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*Dao De is the totality of the fundamental qualities and manifestations of the process of Qi movement and transformation of everything in the universe, giving the basis for harmonious relationships between humans and the universe (including everything in the universe), which people should follow for the development of human life.

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