Friday, June 18, 2010

Standing Alone With an Enlightened Mind

To be alone is not all that bad if you have yourself as a companion. The self I am talking about is the transformed, enlightened, or awakened mind. The problem many of have with this situation is our willingness to believe we are somehow deficient or inadequate.  And by thinking and believing we are not adequate the way we are, we begin to move away from the self and search for other companions -- people, places, and things -- to make us feel adequate or less deficient.

The more we condemn ourselves, the more intense our search becomes for companions. This is a natural search used by millions of people throughout history. We cannot seem to understand why we feel inadequate or incomplete with ourselves. Some argue it's because we need the companionship of others.  That's why there are billions of people in the world. We need them to make us feel adequate. Perhaps this is valid, but does it really address our individual feelings of adequacy.

Some of us become frightened with the thought of being alone, even for a few hours, without companions. We find it too difficult to feel complete with ourselves. We find life boring without our self-imposed distractions.  We need companions who think and act like us to make us feel adequate. And regardless to their percieved shortcomings, they still provide us with a comforting effect. And while many of us proclaim our desires to achieve enlightenment, we really don't believe it's possible without having large numbers of companions in our lives.

The victimized mind is always searching for more and more victims as companions. We need them to validate ourselves and our judgments about who we are. Somewhere in our victimized conditioning we have reached conclusions about how the world should be, how people should act, and the righteousness of our judgments. We have judged ourselves, the world, and others inadequate. And, somehow, we believe our judgments are valid because they come from us.

When we free ourselves from condemnation, we clearly know that Life without our judgments is wonderful.  There's nothing right or wrong about it at all. What is considered good for one person is judged bad for another, and so on.  It's when we add our victimized beliefs to create perceptions about people, places, and things, that we create a distorted reality of what's happening in the world.

Nevertheless, we are constantly making judgments about ourselves and others and acting on our judgments. This is the behavior that's crippling our minds to seek enlightenment somewhere else. We have become too engaged in the movie and forgotten that we are only observing cinema illusions, not realities. We must remain mindful of who we are in our experiences. When we do this, we clearly know we cannot perceive a reality greater than our beliefs, experiences, and knowledge of the world. 

Whenever we take the time to be alone with ourselves, we realize that we always alone with ourselves.  Wherever we go, we take our beliefs, experiences, and knowledge with us.  We never leave home without them.  We are the self that we despise and want to make better.

For us to become better, we search for others to become our models.  And in many instances, we don't really know the persons we are seeking to become.  All we really know is they seem to be doing better than us.  We want to be like the best and brighest. That's all that really matters.

So we leave our condemned selves to become like people we believe have the things we desire to have in life. It matters little to us that we know very little about their private behavior or level of awareness. This is the pilgrimage all victims must make in search of the self outside of ourselves. This is the journey victims refer to as enlightenment.

Meanwhile, what if our evaluation of the self is incorrect?  What if we are already perfect, complete and adequate?  If we are, then the search for completeness is within us. We must first understand why we believe we are inadequate.  And by what authority -- enlightened or victim minds -- are we reaching this conclusion? In other words, we are untrained medical doctors reaching conclusions about our medical conditions and prescribing medications based on misguided conclusions.  

For many of us on the enlightenment journey, it seems more plausible to accept ourselves as adequate than inadequate.  If we are adequate, we only need to change our thinking about us being inadequate.  Whenever we bestow greatness upon ourselves, we lessen the work we need to do to overcome our victimization. And it begins with the self, not the victimized mind projecting itself to us as the self, but the perfect and complete self

When we reach the point in our discovery where we achieve victim-free minds, we are now open to self-discovery. We now have the confidence, the spaciousness, and the willingness to pursue the uncorrupted, intuitive self hidden beneath the victim beliefs causing us to condemn ourselves. To search for and find this consciousness, we must know or believe that it exists within us.  If we don't believe or know this, we will search for the intuitive self  in others.  And, unfortunately, our searches will be in vain.  We. our intuitive selves, do not exist outside of us, except in our victimized minds.

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