Friday, October 15, 2010

Loving Ourselves During the Low Points in our Lives

One of the most troubling aspect of working to achieve enlightenment is the vicissitude of life itself. We are living in a constant state of flux between happiness and sorrow, success and failure, love and hate, peace and angst and so on. While we know life is sometimes this way, we still find it too difficult to accept, particularly the low points in our lives.

Nevertheless, without planning to do so, we every now and then reach a low point in our lives. It's usually not something we anxiously awaited, like the joy from a wedding, it just suddenly happens.  This emotional downturn appears in our lives like the flu, a toothache, unemployment, or some other unwelcome problem.  And when it happens, we feel terrible. Life sucks. We quickly turn on ourselves by lambasting our behavior and stupidity.

During our moments of experiencing low points in our lives, we continually search for outside reasons to rationalize our decision making process. We struggle with guilt. We say  over and over again, "If only, we hadn't made such and such decision, then we would be in this fix."

Regardless to the number of times we vainly attempt to blame others, we always find ourselves right in the midst of every detail. And there's no amount of wishful thinking, "If we could just turn back the clock and start over again," that's going to assuage the pain of regret raging through us. The moans and groans only make us feel worse. 

During our conditioning as victims, most of us were never taught to love our low points. We were taught to seek the high points and shun the low ones. Yet it's the low points where we discover what's really happening to us. It's in our low points that we wage the most vicious attacks on ourselves.

When we feel down, we tend to search for more and more ways to attack our behavior, to demean ourselves. We find the attacks to be healing, to be liberating. They are our punishment to remind us not to make similar decisions again. These are the actions of self-victimization and powerlessness.

Similarly, the need for self-victimization is instinctive. We instinctively devalue ourselves so that we search for succor from others. The victimized mind is always uncomfortable with itself. There's little room for succor. We believe someone will provide us with the comfort, love, compassion, and inspiration that we're unable to provide ourselves. 

Meanwhile, and unbeknown to us, the power to liberate comes from us -- the ones who made the decisions that caused the low points in our lives. Our actions guide us. We follow them, however, we are their creator. And it's this understanding of personal responsibility and self-reliance that unlocks the mind to recognize the presence of enlightenment within us.

With open minds -- the awareness of personal responsibility and self-reliance -- we are able to love and comfort ourselves during the low points in our lives. We have the capacity to know that there's no difference between happiness and sadness, except our beliefs. If we believe such and such make us happy, while such and such make us sad, then we must ask ourselves who's making the decision about how we feel. We are.

One illustration of this power is the happiness we feel at a wedding or the sadness we feel at a funeral. These are feelings produced from years of victimization and from our limited knowledge about enlightenment. Enlightenment is available to us whether we're aware of it or not. We must treat it like a new invention.

Moreover, when we give power to events that don't possess, we devalue ourselves. We believe we are required to act in a certain manner during some situations. By embracing these beliefs and practices, we feed our victimization. For example, it's possible to be angry during a wedding and happy during a funeral, because we might dislike the people getting married, and feel happy  because someone we despised has died.

It's important for us to remain awake. And when we are awake enough to understand the low points in our lives, we also know that how we treat ourselves in certain situations depend more on our abilities to use love and compassion as effective tools of enlightenment than on the situations.

When we become awake enough to understand this concept of love and compassion, we will have the power give ourselves and others love and compassion. 

Meanwhile, enlightenment is just that simple. It's about using love and compassion during both the high and low points in our lives. If we do this, we will have opened our minds to see the limitless possibilities we have in the world.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Imagining Ourselves with Limitless Power

Many of us find it difficult to believe that we have limitless power. We constantly proclaim our limitations. We believe that it's socially acceptable to tell everyone about our imperfections. It's our way of confirming our victimization. And by confirming our victimization, we remain prisoners in our small, closed world where doubts rule.

Some of us believe this confirmation makes us like everybody else who think as we do. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how many people say we have limitless power, we cannot will our minds to believe it about ourselves. To do so would completely alter the perceptions we have about ourselves and the world we live in.

Some of us might equate this type of thinking as spiritual heresy. We believe these beliefs about limitless power will plunge us deeper into self-victimization rather than liberate us from it. Surely, we opine to ourselves and others, if we think this way, something bad will happen to us. So we stop our search for the power, because of our fears.

Similarly, our limitations are nothing more than our beliefs about power. We are created with the universal equivalency of our Creator, at least insofar as our abilities to create ideas and express them in the visible world. In other words, like our Creator, we are able to create things from our thoughts.

Some illustrations of our creative power is expressed in our creations of the facsimile machine, telephone, computer, innovative medical and scientific achievements, and so forth. All these things came from the minds of humans like ourselves, who defied the collective self-imposed limitations of the world at that time. 

Moreover, until they were willing to do the creative work to birth new things in the visible world, people believed such power was nonexistent. In other words, since the world was unaware of the power, it meant that it didn't exist. 

Human limitations are the illusions of people who are unaware of life beyond their own experiences. We cannot accept something if we don't believe it's possible. And regardless to the number of times someone tells us that we have limitless power, we will return to our self-conceived victim beliefs. 

Each time we participate in the process of limited power, we do a disservice to ourselves by destroying the   will to search for the limitless power hidden beneath the victim beliefs guiding us in all our actions. In other words, we kill the creative power by our unwillingness to be open to new ideas.

Nevertheless, whenever someone extols us to examine limitless power, we don't believe this applies to us in the here and now. We have become too fixed on our own beliefs about limitations, and no one is going to tell us otherwise. The idea of limitlessness applies only to those beings who are beyond the illusions here on earth.

Many of us believe we are the children of parents with limitless power, but somehow they were unwilling to share it with us, which is illogical.  We are either created by a Creator with limitless power or we're not. If we are, which most of us believe, then our Creator gave us everything present within its consciousness.

This endowment includes the power to create something simply by conceiving and expressing it according to our liking. If we are not, which some people believe, then we must define how we acquired the power of creation. Either way, we have this power and we believe that we are powerless.

Meanwhile, the acceptance of limitless power is just as plausible as our accepting limitations. It's all occurring in our individual minds. In the main, we are greater than our human awareness.

Even though our self-victimization causes us to doubt our power, it's there nevertheless. Sadly, our lack of awareness only confirms our victimization. It's not a true form of the greater awareness available to us.   

The existence of power is found in each of us. Some of us discover it, while others ignore its presence. Today is the opportunity for a new human paradigm. It's our opportunity to move beyond the prophecies of gloom and doom and into a world of limitless power.

Whether we are aware of it or not, this is our temporary living quarters. There's no permanence, no security. It's a place where we can choose to live anyway we choose to, especially as it relates to our beliefs.

So while we're here, we can create mountains of self-victimization or oceans of enlightenment. It's our choice how we choose to live.

To understand life is to understand ourselves. If we only see a little light and much darkness, we must expand our capacity to bring more light into our lives so we can see the limitless power existing within us.

 

 

Monday, October 4, 2010

"The Truth is Elusive

What is the truth about us? Where did we come from? What are we doing here? and Where are we going?

These are the questions that trouble us on the journey to enlightenment. They inextricably tie us to powerlessness, because we really don't have the answers to them. Some of us believe we do, however, after a five minute discussion it becomes obvious we don't know what we are talking about.

The truth about us is found in the knowledge we have about ourselves and the world.

Some of us have very limited knowledge of ourselves, while others are more attuned to the process of searching for knowledge beyond traditional sources. We cannot know about things that we haven't been exposed to. If we are tied to certain beliefs, such as victim beliefs, we tend to believe this is the truth about who we are. And, unfortunately, we maintain these beliefs until we become aware of other, more enlightening, beliefs.

The simple answer as to where we come from is our parents; however, the more complex answer is found in our belief system.

We come from our beliefs. We are born of our beliefs and we live by them. Our origins begin with our awareness of ourselves and others.  Regardless to the number of times we tell someone we come from such and such city, town, or state, we are merely stating the place where we acquired our beliefs.

We are here to live enlightened lives.

We are here to experience happiness, joy, and live life abundantly, We are here to express compassion, love, and kindness to ourselves and others. We are here to overcome the illusions we were born into. We are here to learn how to become one with billions of other people. We are here to live peaceful lives. We are here to understand the meaning of temporary and impermanence. We are here to overcome our self-imposed limitations. We are here as part of a universal order of wholeness and completeness, and we are here to acquire the power to create limitless expressions of life.

We are going wherever our beliefs take us.

We are passengers on the train of life. Our destinations are determined by the societal whims and fads of the day. If it's a sluggish economy, terrorism, political machinations, religious prophecies, or social injustices, we are the passengers.

On the other hand, if we are aware of the existence of enlightenment, then we are passengers on a different mode of transportation. We must have the awareness to know which train to board.