As we begin the new year, many of us are wondering what's in store for us. We have had a rough year. We have had to endure prolonged unemployment, a dysfunctional government, an unsettling housing market, burgeoning debt, and the fear that no one really understands what's happening to us.
We are real people, so are our problems. We are not insignificant faces in the 9.8 percent unemployment rates nor are we faceless, lifeless, carcatiures in the monthly foreclosure statistics. People talk about us as if they know us or feel the deep angst suffocating our visions for success and happiness. We are the ones suffering while others are posturing over what to do about us.
There's something terrible wrong with the way we feel about ourselves. The best way to describe it is that it feels like thousands of tiny pricks of psychological devastation penetrating our brains. It's a constant, never ending process of pain and suffering. It follows us even into sleep.
Some of us want desperately to blame someone for our dilemma, our suffering, but who? It's difficult to pinpoint the responsible culprits. Perhaps no one is responsible, except us. After all, it's our suffering.
Meanwhile, even as we suffer, our lives are seeking to escape from it all the time. We are meeting new people, reading new books, experimenting with new electronic gadgets, and getting psychologically inoculated with massive dosages of machinations that keep us stupefied with doubts, fears, and worries. We, who live our lives in anonymity, are the ones everyone is designing new laws, plans, and so forth to address our doubts, fears, and worries.
Perhaps there are people who might conclude that we are psychologically abused, because we are weak and unable to make it in the world. We have become victimized by our own failures. So much so that we are incapable to knowing what we want.
Some others might believe we have become too powerless to think and act on our own. So we need someone to make decisions for us. After all, we cannot create jobs, manufacture money or build houses. And since we have become victimized by our problems, we'll just have to have patience until they can create some opportunities for us.
Patience is difficult when you are almost starving, homeless, and your dreams are dimmed by your doubts, fears, and worries. Patience doesn't seem like a good panacea.
Some of us believe we need action, but we don't clearly know what type of action. We are too consumed by lack, limitation and struggle to clearly see our way out of our suffering. And the psychological prescriptions provided to us only seem to exacerbate our problems.
So what do we need to do to solve our problems? Some of us have embraced the concept, it's more of a spiritual philosophy, of enlightenment to overcome our problems. Enlightenment, in this instance, is a tool to assist us with trusting ourselves to solve our own problems. It means believing that we have the power to know what's bothering us and the ability to overcome whatever it is.
Enlightenment is not a contemporary fad. It's not an I-pad, computer, smart phone and so on. It is about our willingness to sit with ourselves and stop creating so many things to distract us from getting to know ourselves. Too many of us have forgotten what it feels like to love ourselves, even when we're told that we don't measure up to society's standards of worthiness.
Nevertheless, to love ourselves is to know ourselves. We begin this process when we face the doubts, fears, and worries in our lives. Whenever we really understand what's causing us to feel so inadequate, we will truly understand the origins of our doubts, fears, and worries.
As enlightenment-seekers, the answers to all our problems are found in their creator. And since we are the creators of everything in our lives, we are responsible for the actions we need to do to change how we think and live.
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