 Hi everyone. So, in a previous video, I talked about the four-part rhythm of a conscious life. For me, I call it my life monastery. Working without ceasing, nourishing sufficiently, rest efficiently and get up towards love. And I realized there was, there's a fifth part to the rhythm that is equally important. So I want to bring that forward today, which is to reflect frequently. And the reason why this is so important is because there are many moments in our life when we aren't, focused on our work or doing household chores or watching TV or whatever where we have a lot of idle mind time. We may be actually doing some work or doing chores or waiting on something or doing some exercise, light exercise, or we don't have to focus a lot, and there's just time for your mind to do all kinds of things that the mind does. Maybe, you know, worry about the future or think about some random thing in the past or have some songs stuck in your head, or, you know, just random thoughts, conversations that you wish had gone differently or whatever may be. And so those are times when I encourage us to reflect on the bigger picture of life, or you might say your deeper values, or something more meaningful and contributory to your spiritual growth instead of just letting your mind do its random thing. So that's what I mean by reflect frequently. And in fact, something that's useful for me to reflect on often is how did it go with my recent rhythm, whatever it was, maybe I was taking a nap, now I'm up and doing some chores, or maybe I was working on my business, maybe I was hanging out with my wife. What just happened during this reflection period, what just happened and how could I have made it more meaningful, made it more aligned with my values, made it more purposeful for spiritual growth. So like reflecting purposefully on what just happened, like the recent past, so that I can learn something. And then reflecting on what's coming up next after I, you know, do this chore or whatever I'm doing that's kind of mindless. After this moment, what's next as part of my five-part rhythm? Am I going to work? Am I going to rest? Am I going to nourish myself? Am I going to get up because I'm, you know, I'm resting right now as I'm reflecting, whatever it may be, what's coming up next. So this is, this five-part rhythm is something that I'm still very much in the beginning practices of, and I'm sharing it because it's interesting to me. I don't know if it's interesting to any of you and please feel free to comment below if any part of this is interesting, or if you have your own way of thinking simply about how to live consciously, like for a day. And for, you know, because for a part of a day or for a day or for a week, how do you live consciously? And I'm hoping that we can live consciously every day, you know, ideally. Not just, oh, this is a special holy week or something like that, I'm living, no. It's like, well, every day deserves your conscious attention to your spiritual path because your spiritual growth deserves everything from you. I mean, if you agree with me, I don't know if you do, but if that's why we're here in this life, that's why we're here. We're not here to, you know, make money or even to, you know, set up a family, grow a family. Yes, that's part of it. We're not here to stay healthy in our body, that's part of it. But like the greatest purpose for which all of this activity exists is spiritual growth. We stay healthy so that we can, you know, of course, work on our business or, you know, take care of our families, take care of our community. Oh, that's true. But the deeper purpose of all of that, all of that is to me simply a stage for our personal and spiritual growth. Another way that I like to think about it, and the reason I'm saying all this is because when you reflect in the idle mind times of your day, not only I just mentioned reflect on what just happened, reflect on what's coming up, but I think also it's helpful, meaningful to reflect on the bigger picture of life. Like what's this all about? And therefore maybe that's actually the first thing is to reflect on what's this all about. Remind ourselves again and again and again. It cannot be too often, I think, that we remind ourselves of the bigger picture because it's so easy in our day to day existence to fixate again on the small picture. On, oh, I hope this thing that I'm doing goes well. Oh, why did I say that, you know, to that person? Well, I can't believe that person said that to me. Or, you know, oh, I'm worried about something happening to this person. Oh, I'm worried about something happening to me. It's so easy, natural, natural for our monkey minds to be thinking of these small things that matter relatively little, almost not matter at all in the bigger picture of life. That if we attuned ourselves frequently to the bigger picture of life, we would live much more purposefully. We would, first of all, find life much more meaningful, I think, deeply meaningful, so that we never ever question what's this life for? What's the point? Or, oh, I'm not achieving my goals in my business or in my health or in my relationships or, oh, the future is bleak. All of these worries or these concerns and anxieties, in my experience, in my opinion, are connected or means that we are disconnected from the bigger and deeper picture of life. Like, because if we, again, reconnect to the bigger picture, which I'm curious what you would say is the bigger picture of life, I believe that is an antidote. It's a solution to so many of our daily anxieties, our small fixations, sweating the small stuff, essentially. You know, you've heard that term before, don't sweat the small stuff. Well, don't sweat the small stuff and how do we not sweat the small stuff? Because we focus on the big stuff and there is nothing bigger that the biggest stuff we can focus on, thankfully, comforts us, encourages us, gives us hope, unlimited, profound, brilliant hope for the future, for the destiny of our souls. No matter what's going on in this world, in this lifetime, with this body, you know, with this society, no matter, that is still, in the big picture, the small stuff. Right? Again, I'm curious what you say is the big picture. Now, of course, since I'm here talking to you, I can only share what I believe is the big picture, right? And I've set this in other videos. I don't think it, I can say it too often enough. You only see these spiritual videos from me once a week, so that's certainly not too often, I hope. So my view of the big picture, the bigger stuff is that you and I are eternal souls. Even though this body will die, even though the society may collapse, even though the earth may eventually die off, our souls will remain. And I also deeply, deeply believe that our souls are on an eternal journey towards ever greater understanding, creativity, and love. And power, true power, deep power, not power over others, but power to create, power to determine our own experience. Our souls are on this eternal journey, and that journey is so secure because it is given to us by the Creator. I don't know who or what the Creator is. We could say the Creator is the ultimate consciousness that is the most powerful being. I would say the Creator is the collection of all of us souls that we are somehow working in collaboration towards some greater purpose. But that's what I believe from everything I've studied in this lifetime, and maybe in previous lifetimes, that's what my, I have a strong intuition that this is true. Not only a strong intuition, but based on everything I've read in this lifetime, it seems to put this picture together for me. And that gives me great hope. And so the bigger picture, every time I reflect on it, I get happy. I feel better from whatever is happening here in this world, in my body, in my life. And so because this path we're on is eternally secure towards ever more goodness for you, for me, for the whole, this path is eternally secure. There's no mistake we can make in this lifetime, or perhaps in any lifetime, that will permanently take us off this path. I mean, what even seems like a mistake that we make that has taken us off our purposeful path? Maybe some of us might consider, we have some years that were considered the lost years when we were not living according to purpose. We were indulging or we were depressed. We were hurt and hurting others. We were unenlightened. Many of us have what we might consider the lost years. Even those lost years were somehow needed, required as part of your path. Maybe right now you're living in your lost years. Who knows? Hopefully in the future, as you get wiser and you look back, you think, God, those years were the lost years. But no, even now, even then, this past experience were all required on this deeply complex journey of growth. Growth is not usually just like this straight line up. Growth is like this. We have to go through peaks and valleys, but somehow those peaks and valleys gradually trend upwards. It might not seem in this one lifetime that it's trending upward, but in multiple lifetimes and in the greater picture, it is certainly trending upwards towards more wisdom, more authentic loving power. And in this lifetime, I also believe we are constantly being tested. Constantly, as you can probably have experienced yourself, unexpected happenings come into our lives. We try to set up a nice life. All of us try to set up a nice life where, okay, we hope we can get a stable income. We work towards that. We hope our health will stay good. We try to solve any problems with our health. We try to stay fit, if possible, or try to eat well. I know we have some lost years there. We try to set up a calm and happy family life, relationship life. Whoever we're living with or with or see in our lives, we try to create positive, healthy, encouraging relationships. We try all of this to set up a physically enjoyable and physically sustainable life, certainly. We try to be smart about our choices so that there aren't too many negative surprises. And yet, no matter how well and smartly we try to create a stable and successful life, even the most successful people, even the most wisest people, still receive unexpected, unwanted occurrences in life. Even the most physically fit person might suddenly develop some genetic disease that they maybe even knew was possible but didn't know it was going to happen so soon. Even the most wisest person in relationships suddenly has something happen to the relationship, some issue that they didn't even foresee come up that destroys their relationship, perhaps even. Even the most financially successful person suddenly gets some kind of tax situation or some other economic situation that could destroy their livelihood. All of these things happen even to the smartest, wisest, most capable person. We are always being tested in this life. Why are we being tested? We're being tested to see whether our character has really grown and matured and to show us, to reveal to us what else is left for us to keep growing into. Because the tests that we receive in this life reveals to us the fragility of this life that what seems to be stability in this life, in this earth school is an illusion that it can disappear at any moment. Hopefully, our building up of the stability of our life has also helped us to mature spiritually throughout the journey. If we were creating a successful life without growing deep in the spiritual life, having strong foundations of emotional regulation and mental resilience and spiritual grounding in the bigger picture, the deeper picture of life, if we haven't developed those, then guess what? The tests, the unexpected occurrences will reveal to us how else we need to grow spiritually. And so, that is a rich material to be reflecting on a regular basis. It's almost, I want to say, it's so interesting. I've been listening recently to some financially successful people who say, the reason they are so financially successful is because they're constantly paranoid. Now, stay with me here. So, it seems to be that paranoia is actually a recipe for success. Stay with me, okay? Listen to this. The most successful people in business and finance are constantly paranoid that their wealth could disappear at any moment, so they have to continually stay vigilant. This is the point. Because of their paranoia about failure, they have to constantly stay vigilant to making wise choices and to shoring up their stability. Now, this is about finances. This is about business. This is about material success. But I'm thinking that is so applicable to spiritual success and foundation and stability as well. Meaning, it's probably a healthy thing to constantly be paranoid that some huge bad occurrence could come into our lives to test us. Therefore, we need to stay vigilant spiritually as well. It is so easy to become spiritually complacent to say, well, I feel like I've grown quite a bit. I'm pretty good at emotional self-regulation. I am pretty wise now spiritually. I know the deeper purpose of life and I have a strong faith or whatever. It's like all those statements that you might say to yourself, belie a complacency that says, well, that means I can handle anything. Okay, that's good. But that belief I can handle anything will often trip us up because life, God, the higher consciousness tests us unexpectedly yet again. And yet again, we're thrown off of our balance and we are surprised again at how we weren't able to respond with love. We weren't able to respond with courage. We weren't able to respond in this kind of spiritual way that is easy for us when times are smooth. So stay vigilant, my friends. I'm talking to myself most of all, by the way. Stay vigilant by reflecting frequently throughout your day whenever you are doing a chore that's mindless. Whenever you don't have to focus your mind on whatever task you're doing because the task is so easy or maybe you're waiting or maybe you're walking, okay, doing a long walk. Reflect frequently. Stay vigilant. Reflect on what is the bigger purpose. Reflect on what you just did and how you might, what went well and how you might improve and what you might continue doing well. Reflect on what's coming up and how you can practice your spiritual life in whatever's happening next for you. Stay vigilant so that when the unexpected happens that throws you, that could throw you off balance, you are ready for it because by being ready for it you are growing stronger and more truly stable in your spiritual character, your strength of courage, your strength of compassion for others and for yourself, your faith in the Divine or in the whole. So I hope this is encouraging for you. I always look forward to seeing your comments below. Let me know what resonated with this. Tell me how you reflect. When you do reflect on the bigger picture, what does that mean for you? What keeps you encouraged? What keeps you vigilant? I would love to know those things below if you'd like to share them. Thank you so much for being here and for watching.