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Why do we think about ourselves all the time. Why are so many thoughts about I, me, my? Look how often you think about how you're doing,whether you like things or not, and how to rearrange the world to please yourself. You think like this because you're not okay inside and you're constantly trying to make yourself feel better. -excerpted from The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer
Okay honestly now, were you able to read the above paragraph without flinching? Few of us could claim immunity from seeing the painful truth about ourselves in this honest assessment of human self-absorption. But wait, don't run off fearing this will be too painful to continue. This article is not about making glaring examples of our human frailties. Rather it's an invitation to use the light of recognition to find our way out of the suffering that is mired in unconsciousness.
Awareness is the first step in healing any form of suffering. We know that we suffer but we often don't know its cause. Worse even is thinking that we know, and being completely wrong! We abhor not knowing so we will go to any length to identify the culprit that is causing our distress as quickly as possible. In our haste to lay the blame, we look out upon our world and see what or who is "wrong with us." Something or somebody must be responsible for this discomfort (anger, fear, sadness, disappointment, loneliness, you name it ) This is the pathological approach based on logic that says our experience directly correlates to conditions in the world of people, circumstances and events. We assume that if things were different our suffering would end.
Such a conditional formula for well being puts enormous strain upon our minds, mandating a constant lookout for what we need in any given moment and how we can manipulate an environment of people, places and things, so we can be okay! Have you been successful in controlling even one person in this world, let alone the countless personalities that pose risks to our fragile psyches each day? Can you control the weather, traffic, government actions, mechanical breakdowns, the economy, or any of it? We can't but we have it set up in our minds that we must have these things under control and to our liking if we are to be content! It's an insane expectation that we hardly ever question!!
So let's take a collective breather from this insane demand upon life for our well being and learn the master's way of achieving the same state with far less stress and much greater success. Can you guess? If you are student of wisdom, you have already heard time and again the answer is always some form of a reversal of the problem. So, if control (need for) is the problem, then the answer is letting go! That's it, let go!
We let go of the need to control because it is completely untenable and causes us endless suffering. Some of us fear that if we let go, our life would fall apart. But the truth is that when we let go of our need to control our life, our life begins to work better. We come into alignment with "what is" and more easily adopt a yes attitude to life. We spend less time protecting and defending our preferences and more time expanding our awareness of the Self that is already whole and content. From this place, life is no longer a battlefield, but a field of opportunity to bring our whole selves to the game and find growth and expansion at every turn. This is freedom. This is liberation. This is what the author of The Untethered Soul describes as "untethering yourself from the bondage of your psyche...to steal freedom for your soul."
Okay honestly now, were you able to read the above paragraph without flinching? Few of us could claim immunity from seeing the painful truth about ourselves in this honest assessment of human self-absorption. But wait, don't run off fearing this will be too painful to continue. This article is not about making glaring examples of our human frailties. Rather it's an invitation to use the light of recognition to find our way out of the suffering that is mired in unconsciousness.
Awareness is the first step in healing any form of suffering. We know that we suffer but we often don't know its cause. Worse even is thinking that we know, and being completely wrong! We abhor not knowing so we will go to any length to identify the culprit that is causing our distress as quickly as possible. In our haste to lay the blame, we look out upon our world and see what or who is "wrong with us." Something or somebody must be responsible for this discomfort (anger, fear, sadness, disappointment, loneliness, you name it ) This is the pathological approach based on logic that says our experience directly correlates to conditions in the world of people, circumstances and events. We assume that if things were different our suffering would end.
Such a conditional formula for well being puts enormous strain upon our minds, mandating a constant lookout for what we need in any given moment and how we can manipulate an environment of people, places and things, so we can be okay! Have you been successful in controlling even one person in this world, let alone the countless personalities that pose risks to our fragile psyches each day? Can you control the weather, traffic, government actions, mechanical breakdowns, the economy, or any of it? We can't but we have it set up in our minds that we must have these things under control and to our liking if we are to be content! It's an insane expectation that we hardly ever question!!
So let's take a collective breather from this insane demand upon life for our well being and learn the master's way of achieving the same state with far less stress and much greater success. Can you guess? If you are student of wisdom, you have already heard time and again the answer is always some form of a reversal of the problem. So, if control (need for) is the problem, then the answer is letting go! That's it, let go!
We let go of the need to control because it is completely untenable and causes us endless suffering. Some of us fear that if we let go, our life would fall apart. But the truth is that when we let go of our need to control our life, our life begins to work better. We come into alignment with "what is" and more easily adopt a yes attitude to life. We spend less time protecting and defending our preferences and more time expanding our awareness of the Self that is already whole and content. From this place, life is no longer a battlefield, but a field of opportunity to bring our whole selves to the game and find growth and expansion at every turn. This is freedom. This is liberation. This is what the author of The Untethered Soul describes as "untethering yourself from the bondage of your psyche...to steal freedom for your soul."
2 comments:
Jack Kornfield in Paths of Buddhist Pyschology describes life as the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows which every one of us will experience. In order for these joys and sorrows NOT to determine our happiness or grief, as you say, we need to somehow release the control that these situations have to our sense of well-being. I think that the answer to this is the Buddhist concept of Loving Kindness or what I call an Open Heart. As you stated, we all tend to think mostly of ourselves and or look at things from our own point of view. We tend to grasp at "good" things and worry that we will lose them or tend to push away things that are unpleasant. We think that "life happens to us". We are on the rollercoaster where our happiness is up and down depending on how "life is treating us". The release or untethering is achieved when life is viewed with an Open Heart. Our experiences are not unique. They represent what all beings experience in life. We all experience these 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. When experienced with the Open Heart, the joys are experienced with great gratitude and wish that all beings kow similar joy and the sorrows are experienced not as something "bad" happening to us but with compassion and love for all beings because we know that all beings will and have experienced similar things. This lessens our sense of separation and emphasizes our oneness with each other. We are not our experiences. The Open Heart shows us that our well-being is within us.
The short answer to "what frees" is in your last week's blog on The Way of the Open Heart. An Open Heart is what allows us to see our experiences not as something that happens to us but as what all beings experience life to be. The Open Heart experiences personal joy with gratitude and the wish that all beings can know this joy. The Open Heart experiences personal sorrow not as grief but with compassion and love because we know that all beings have and will experience similar sorrow. In this way, we can move from our separateness and the rollercoaster of "good" and "bad" experiences to the experience of our oneness with all beings. Here we find that our sense of well-being comes from within.
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