We spend a lot of time looking for things to change in our lives. And it doesn't take much for us to panic at the thought of gaining weight, bulging stomachs, hanging wrinkles, and thinning hair.
Some of us try to change things based on what others tell us. We even react to friends, strangers, even passersby, who don't tell us we look great or fine.
The bottom line for most of us is we need one more thing to make us happy and complete. And then another, and another, and so on.
Basically, most of us cannot find enough things -- money, people, places, and power --to make us feel complete in this world.
We feel incomplete because our beliefs and values confirm it. They limit our perspective to embody our completeness as we are right now.
As long as we can remember, we have been adding things to make us better -- smarter, handsome, pretty, wealthier, important, and so forth -- without ever reaching a point of completeness.
So unbeknown to us, the turbulent beliefs of incompleteness keep us in a perpetual state of searching for things to make us feel better. And also unbeknown to us is that one of the side effects from our searching is self-condemnation.
By definition, our search for things confirm our self-condemnation. In other words, we condemn ourselves for being who we are. And the more we condemn ourselves, the more we crave for things to make us better.
Nevertheless, as difficult as it might be for many of us to admit, we condemn ourselves because of our beliefs and values: The ones taught us by parents, society, and life experiences.
We were taught to believe we were born incomplete, and they -- parents, society, and life experiences -- were responsible for teaching us how to become complete.
The challenges facing most of us are to learn how to unlearn what we have been taught. Or more succinctly, to stop relying on the information we have embodied as being sacrosanct.
Self-condemnation produces powerlessness. It weakens our resolve to discover the unconditioned power in our minds. It makes us dislike ourselves and believe that things outside of us are greater.
The key to enlightenment is the freedom from self-condemnation. In other words, we must like who we are now.
This doesn't mean we must like the actions caused by our beliefs and values. It means we must like the unconditioned consciousness in minds that holds our enlightenment. .
Regardless of how many roads we travel on our journey, we never escape from ourselves. We are always present in all of our activities. So if we travel down a road where we create intense suffering, we can condition our minds to travel down a different one.
Similarly, if we search for things to make us better, we can always stop and accept ourselves as we are now. Unfortunately, for some of us, this is difficult because of our reliance on our current beliefs and values, which tells us things -- people, places, status, and so forth -- will make us better.
Meanwhile, at some point in our lives, we must face the illusions causing us to condemn ourselves and question our completeness. And when we do, we will know that the real culprits for this type of thinking are our beliefs and values. They are totally responsible for how we perceive ourselves and the outside world.
Our minds are both the death and resurrection of our illusions. We use them to create both intense suffering and exhilarating enlightenment.
So when we stop searching for things outside our minds to make us feel complete, we will understand that all power, including the power to perceive and understand heaven and earth, exists only in our minds. This clarity will allow us to know that consciousness is the source of all of our power.
Nevertheless, even with this information on enlightenment, some of us still find it difficult to believe that this power exists in our minds. Yet if we stop and think for a moment, we will quickly realize that everything we know, or don't know, about ourselves and the world is caused by our clarity.
Clarity of mind allows us to know that we are born whole, perfect, and complete. And there's nothing wrong with us, except the toxic beliefs and values we use to perceive ourselves and the outside world.
No comments:
Post a Comment