We were having lunch at a little café during a lunch break at a Utopian Conference where my dad was both a key speaker, and the founder of the conference.
The waitress was either busy, or ignoring us. Either way my dad wanted more coffee and someone else at the table needed mustard. After a decent interval of waiting, I got up and got both the coffee and the mustard myself.
Dad was worried and whispered to me, “Are you allowed to do that?” Although he was a very successful man in his field, he was afraid that he was breaking a rule of dining.
Del and I are attempting to show my mom how to program TV shows so she can watch them later. When I reminded her that she could simply pause a program for 30 minutes and then avoid all the commercials during a football game, she was fast to respond, “I need to watch it live.”
The rule is, “Watch football games live.”
Don’t we all do this? Rules are everywhere. There are rules of how to eat, sleep, love, play, and work.
There is a difference between a rule designed to protect our safety, or provide for our welfare, and those rules that imprison us and limit or remove our freedom. The rules of “this is how it is” are bars in our prisons, and yet they are beliefs only. One year those rules are one way, the next year they are another.
Together we could list hundreds and hundreds of rules that not only can be broken, but also must be broken.
Let’s break rules this year. Let’s sing a new tune, “Out with the old, in with the True.
Growing up in an English Professor’s household, I often heard the phrase when referring to writing, “You have to know the rules before you can break them.”
Translating that to the broader picture, it means we must become aware of the rules that we live by, before we can choose the ones to break. One way to discover the rules that are limiting us is to look at how we label ourselves. When we label ourselves or others in any way: sex, religion, age, country, family, intelligence, husband, wife, employer, employee etc. we are also accepting the “rules” that go with that label.
As we break rules, there are a few guidelines to help decide our path. Pay attention to whom it affects if you break, or don’t break, the rules. Following the rule, or guideline, “to love our neighbors as ourselves” would keep us away from breaking rules out of greed or survival.
The rule we are ultimately breaking is the rule that we must remain in the prison of human and material perception, which will leave us free to walk in the limitlessness of spiritual perception.
The signs are before us that light the way out of this point of view. Realizing that we have actually never lived in the illusion of materiality, breaking the bond of its limitations becomes much easier, and we behave with more wisdom.
Practice breaking a rule a day. Do you have to eat at a certain time, why not eat when you are hungry? Do you have to go to the store on Tuesday nights, or wash the dishes before having dessert?
This will pave your way to more profound rules to break. Do you have to suffer before being happy, is success defined by how much money you make, must you feel guilty when you choose your own path, or be a certain age before you feel wise?
And the most important rule of all to break: “To believe and act as if you are human until someday you pass through the portal where you will be a spiritual being. “
What are you waiting for, permission? You have always had the permission to live free as you choose, while not harming another in the process.
After all, all the advances that we so freely use today, from flying to internet use, are the result of someone breaking a rule. Someone asked, “What if, what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if it was different than I thought? What if we could?”
Ask yourself the “what if” question often this year. As you become aware of a rule of limitation, break it wisely. Expand and fly and be a leader into the infinite world of spiritual perception and limitless possibilities.
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