Let’s break a few rules this year.
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.” — T.S. Eliot
We were having lunch at a little café during a lunch break at a utopian conference, where my dad was both a keynote speaker and the Utopia Society’s founder.
The server was 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.
Years later, Del and I were attempting to show my mom how to program TV shows so she could watch them whenever she wanted to.
When I reminded her she could simply pause a program for 30 minutes and then avoid all the commercials during a football game, she was quick to respond, “I need to watch it live.”
The rule is, “Watch football games live.”
Don’t we all obey rules like this?
Rules are everywhere. There are rules for eating, sleeping, loving, playing, and working.
There is a difference between a rule designed to protect our safety or provide for our welfare and one that imprisons us and limits or removes our freedom.
The rules of “this is how it is” are bars in our prisons, yet they are only beliefs.
Those rules are one way one year, and the next year, they are another.
Together, we could list hundreds of rules that we think cannot be broken but must be.
Let’s break a few 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.”
Applying that to a larger context means that before deciding which rules to break, we must first become aware of the ones we live by.
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 also accept the “rules” that go with that label.
As we break the rules, a few guidelines 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 from breaking the rules out of greed.
We are ultimately breaking the rule that we must remain in the prison of human and material perception.
Breaking this rule would leave us free to walk in the limitlessness of spiritual perception.
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 every 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?
Why not try another way?
This practice 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?
Must you be a certain age before you feel wise?
And the most important rule of all to break:
Believing amd acting as if you are human until someday you pass through the portal where you will be a spiritual being, when you are that spiritual being now.
What are you waiting for, permission?
You have always had permission to live as freely as you choose, as long as you don’t harm others in the process.
After all, all the advances that we so freely use today, from flying to the internet, result from someone breaking a rule.
For things to change, someone asked, "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 soon as you notice a rule of limitation, break it wisely. Expand, fly, and rejuvenate in the infinite world of spiritual perception and limitless possibilities.
“Good men must not obey the laws too well.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” — Martin Luther King, Jr
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