Sometimes, those of us who feel victimized by our mistakes, failures, disappointments, and lack of resolve to continue working on ourselves, might find it useful to begin defining the something we are working to become.
Perhaps this type of clarity will assist us with understanding the expectations and results we desire from our actions. At least, it will illumine our minds to understand that work for the sake of work is meaningless without clearly defined results.
Meanwhile, there's not a day that passes without most of us thinking about what life would be like if we could overcome our current difficulties. This form of daydreaming besieges our minds with thoughts about how inadequate, incomplete, unfulfilled we feel about our current lives.
So it becomes our goal to work on changing the things -- money, health, status, relationships, etc. -- that cause us to think we are inadequate. We muse coyly, "if we could only overcome these problems, then our lives would be complete. ..." Yet, the more we work on overcoming the things preventing us from feeling adequate, the more inadequate we feel.
For some of us, working on achieving enlightenment (empowerment) is like working on a calculus problem without having first mastered basic mathematics. That is, the harder we work, the less progress we make because we lack a basic foundation in the work we are doing.
Nevertheless, a well-thought out spiritual, freethinking, open mind is necessary for us to have if we ever expect to properly interpret the results we receive from our actions, prayers, meditations, and hopes.
There's very little, if any, incentive to work on becoming a bum, an addict, criminal or some other undesirable type of victim. Most of us are quite content with our victim accomplishments, at least when compared to less desirable victims.
So our motivation for working on ourselves is determined by our desires to become something greater than what we are now. And since we already believe we are better off than some other less accomplished individuals, we have fairly good ideas about what we don't want to become. It's more difficult to decide when it comes to what we want to become.
Let's assume like the Vedanta's do that you don't need to do anything to be the person you were created to be. In other words, you were originally created by the Creator with everything you need to express your life's purpose.
For many of us, this type of philosophy seems a little quirky, a little too simplistic. We have been taught all of our lives that we must work hard to achieve success in the world. By not working hard, we are considered lazy, shiftless. The idea of thinking of ourselves as complete and adequate is frightening.
The thought of a world of complete and adequate individuals seems out of the realm of human understanding. What we would do about teaching all the inadequate people how to achieve enlightenment, salvation, and getting closer to the Creator? Obviously, many well-intentioned spiritual and religious practitioners would become unnecessary.
We function because we believe we are inadequate. We believe it is part of our existence to have success and failure, pain and suffering, need and fulfillment. The thought of our lives without these disrupts the work we are doing to become something like that which we don't believe is possible.
If enlightenment (empowerment) is our vision (goal), then it must mean we believe at some point in our lives we will become complete, adequate. By achieving our life's goal, we become free from working on ourselves.
On the other hand, if don't believe we can achieve this type of awareness during our lifetimes, then we must believe we will get it in heaven or some other place where we don't have to work anymore.
Nevertheless, in either situation, we are the ones creating the expectations based on the results of the work we are currently doing to overcome the things in our lives. The results from our working on ourselves will exists in the something we have defined as enlightenment (empowerment).
No comments:
Post a Comment