We see what we believe

We always interpret the world through our momentary convictions. Those convictions are affected greatly by and are also based largely upon our present emotional state which again is a state with it’s own convictions. We buy in the stories these convictions tell us strongly enough to make it harder to be honest with ourselves. You know what I am talking about, on a bad day we see more bad things than good things and on a good day…you get the point.

But for some reason, even though secretly, we don’t want to see through the way our emotional state convinces us to see. Something in us protects that state, we are afraid to see that the only thing that makes it real is actually, just a belief. Think about a thing you failed at, that really upset you. In a moment like that, how much did you think about the things you succeeded in? Did you have a tendency to trust/believe the things that supported that feeling of failure?

If we believe we know something, like what kind of a person we are, what really is happening in a situation or how something works, our mind prefers to look at things that support that knowledge/belief and to keep out or ignore things that might contradict it (Who doesn’t like to be right?).  What if we just did really not know, what would the implications be? What would that mean?

The more attached we are to a specific belief, the more protective we get about it when the belief in question is under threat. When someone contradicts what we believe, there is a tendency for some sort of agitation like anger etc to arise, for example we might get into an argument. When this happens it actually means that something within us recognizes our own unknowing/ignorance but that gets covered up and hidden by the agitation in these situations. We lose the chance to doubt ourselves by protecting ourselves from the possible pain that doubting ourselves or our convictions might cause. For what are we without our beliefs?

However if we remain/are open to doubt, even though it has a very negative connotation, it will help us through the hard times we will face in life. If we don’t give our convictions the benefit of believing them 100%, the letting-go-of is bound to happen faster and more easily. When this happens, the way gets cleared up for us.

In these convictions there is no real certainty, only the certainty we believe in. However strongly one might believe, it does not have anything to do with what is true.

Letting things go will happen eventually anyway, but why prolong it?

Interpretation

Getting to know oneself is a part of the spiritual search, trying to understand our suffering and our actions etc. But in time when we have seen some of our patterns this “getting-to-know” turns into just another reaction among reactions and a way to hide.

If we don’t watch out we might just keep on looking at our interpretations of things thinking that we are actually getting to know ourselves when actually we are avoiding to take a direct look at ourselves and to really see ourselves. It is very easier to look at what we think about ourselves than at how we really are. All analysis in the end is a runaway, a runaway from the anxiousness, uncertainty and confusion that comes with the admittance of the deep ignorance within us. I believe this to be the “unknowing” what a lot of people talk about.

The weird thing is that when this happens I don’t really feel like I am achieving something, quite the opposite. I feel like something is taken from me and actually want it to stop, it is not a good feeling. But still there is something quite special in these “glimpses”, in this unknowing. It is as if something would open up in me and really look at what is going on, from outside the conflict and the judgement inside.

There is a problem though, I can’t say that I have way to create this feel and I don’t really know the real value of it. But I am convinced of it’s importance.

When this happens I feel a step closer to something, it feels like a step to the beyond.

Fear of no-control

Or actually, fear of there being no control.

I think our every fear is a hint of something, of contradictions we don’t want to see. And the deeper we look into our fears, the more things we learn to see with it.

Recently I realized that whatever it is that fear originates from knows more than we ourselves notice. Whenever I see the possibility of a reaction occurring that I am afraid of the fear is kind of saying, “Shit, this is going to happen and I don’t have any control over it” or “Shit, I can’t stop this from happening”.  Before I had never seen evidence that there is something within that sees but does not tell about these things, we have to become aware enough to see it ourselves.

But what would that mean? If that really is true? Partly, I believe, we don’t see this because we are afraid of what would happen if we would have to admit to what we see. That fact is daily brought before us and we don’t look at it. Looking at it would contradict our whole way of being, imagine what it would mean if we knew that there was no control. If we knew it for a fact that our prides and fears actually are meaningless in relation to what we are, would that not wipe the whole table clean? With all it’s content, good and bad altogether.

Things would be pretty meaningless. Fear is running away from meaninglessness, which for us is equal to death/dying. Look at your fears, is there something more to it than meets the eye? What is fear really saying? What is it that fear really is avoiding?

Admitting both sides of our desire

We all want things, whatever those things might be. A car, career, spiritual success etc. We also want to stay away from things that would take us away from those things that we desire or long for.

I want to be spiritual and to find the truth let’s say and cultivate desires that lead me towards what I consider to be the right direction and push away the desires taking me away from whatever the right direction for me is. Whenever things start to go wrong and the “false desires appear, I say, this is not what I wanted. I want that. We tend to identify so strongly with what we want that we fail to notice and even secretly ignore the fact that at the exact moment the “wrong” turn was taken and things went awry whatever the desire was, was also desired by us and that the falseness it has was also given to it by us. This also gives us the tendency to believe that whatever threatens that identification must be false, for what I desire is something different. This causes a split in ourselves, we admit one side and deny the other. We don’t see the fact that both sides of our desire are equally “ours” for what would that mean if there are contradicting desires and they are both mine?

The point is that even if we might think that we have something we desire and consider to be our “real” desire we still have to admit that our so called “false” desires are as real as the “true” ones. They are still there, they have not disappeared just because we condemn them to falseness. We have no authority to say what is false and what is right, but instead we have to find out and see for ourselves what is true. When we place ourselves as the final authority of things, we succumb to superficiality guided by our own preferences although we might think our them to be final and absolute. In other words, we dont have any right to ignore anything.

Cultivating desires that keep us on the path are a means to an end and not an end in themselves. From this standpoint, the desires keeping us on the path are the “right” ones but looking from an objective standpoint both sides of our desires are equally true/false, whatever we desire and prefer does not affect that. It does not make a difference, what is true is True whatever we might think of it. The more we desire the more we might move, but that does not mean that the opposite desires would be less true.

We do not have any idea what is true in the end.

It needs to get tough

When I started seeking I had this delusion that it was all going to go smoothly and that in no time I would find whatever I thought I would need to find and that would be it. But in no time the reality of a fundamental uncertainty hit me, that delusion was broken. Eventually that also made me see that I did not really know what I was looking for or where to find it or even, what could or should I do about it

I remember it being probably the hardest time of my life. I really wanted to be happy but seemingly I was only able to succeed in more suffering. In blaming myself for my sufferings I failed to see the self-sustaining circle I had gotten myself into. By every downfall of any so called “happiness-spurt” I sunk into a hole of depression, thinking that it was all my fault. Partly it was but I did not see that as long as I was putting my faith in the blissful I would be vulnerable to the following depression. Of course that option wouldn’t have looked very appealing anyway since maybe the way out would have been to stop giving value to that which I at the time thought to be the happiness I thought I was looking for.

I don’t seem to be as obsessed about that direction anymore. Probably only because I have simply kept on going. If we just hang on and don’t give up something beautiful happens, we start to see the real value of things and earn some distance from them. I did not even notice this, probably because of the suffering and depression at the time. But when we start to seek  we unconsciously begin to slowly define what we truly want and the direction we most likely think we might find it in.

For me it a lot of those things that I desired and chased after were given to me, after I consciously started to define what I really wanted. Through this I was able to let go of some old behavior-patterns which were seen to have much less value than at first was thought and believed and from beneath this was discovered a more natural and flowing way to be and act in the world. Now looking back I believe that the struggle was necessary, without it I would not have had the capacity to realize the falseness of the direction I thought happiness was to be found from.

So whatever you do, don’t give up. Keep on going and things will come at you. You need to struggle. There is no way around it, without it you wont be able to see for yourself what you really want. It is easy to believe what others say but if we want to find out for ourselves we need to struggle.

Effects of effort

A lot of times after I have finished something that I consider to be a major effort, like meditating a lot or finishing a retreat I often wonder what the effects of that effort will be or if there will be any. If any progress has been made.

Mostly there has been some effect, something strange happening in the field of perception. Maybe I feel strange or see my mind working differently. But because of any one certain effort there has not been any noticeable permanent change, only passing effects on perception. Patterns are affected and run to their end before the return to the old familiar states of mind happens. This is something that I despair about, all that effort and no reward! Is there a deeper progress being made?

Whatever progress I have felt I have made I never noticed immediately, being around people is not as hard as it used to be and things that used to upset me, now don’t. This all came in it’s time without me first noticing it. We always have hidden expectations about things that should happen because of what we do. Even if we don’t have any concrete ones then at least we expect recognition for what we have done, respect and so on, but from whom? Look at all this effort I made and I am still not enlightened!

But anyway, even this increasing peace of mind is not as important as maybe we might think. It is as if a bow would slowly be drawn little by little until our last look at the target, this I think is the final effect of our efforts. Then, release.

Motion

Everything we give value to lies in motion, in action and movement. What we often don’t realize when we give our trust and hope to that motion is that it is not stable, that it does not have permanence even though we believe it does.

Whenever we observe an unwanted change in that motion we get disappointed and can’t help but wonder where that content and satisfaction is gone. We don’t realize that it is the false value we give to that motion that is the cause of our disappointment and frustration. We fail to realize that this is always the case, that there is no changing change. The moment we place value on anything transient, on something that changes we become blind to the fact that even though our believes seem solid and firm the reality they represent is not. They insist reality to firm and solit, in fact they demand it to be like that.

This disappoints us, confuses us, makes us doubtful and sad. These things seem to happen so fast that we tend to have a hard time following with it. The sad thing is that we cannot just stop this happening, it is going to happen whatever we do. If we are lucky and recognize this in your daily life it might happen that a desire for something that lies outside of the motion of our lives would appear.

In a way I feel that I am in a more desperate place than I was before. Whether one has this desire or not the situation stays the same, we are trapped in the motion of our lives. Even if one desires something outside the ceaseless motion of our lives it does not mean that we are any close of getting out of it. Whatever I thought I discovered or found was just another way back to that motion, it always leads back to that.

We are addicted to that motion whether we want or not and secretly we will keep it going as long as we can even though we might not admit it.t