Shifting the "I"

"We're quiet. We aren't dancing to the culture's drum. And we are silent inside. That silence is there so that we can hear our intuitive wisdom. This culture sees life as collecting experiences. But [awakening] is an emptying out and beginning to experience the moment, what's happening right now...

It's also the witness... You stand outside the action. Shifting perspective takes the suffering away... You are shifting the "I." When you get into "I" as the witness, you can experience your life as a movie. Then there is no more suffering. Because the soul doesn't suffer.

At the ego level, the sensory level, there is pain. But you aren't fighting it anymore, and you're not afraid of it, and that releases you from its grip..."

~Ram Dass~

Deconditioning and Awakening the Deeper Self

A few weeks ago I started having feelings that there has to be more. Living in the shadow of COVID, the current political climate, mass shootings everywhere, climate change, and now Monkey Pox has me hesitant about so much. I've had a good many opportunities lately that when I'm honest with myself don't really interest me. For instance, I've had the chance to meet some very interesting and nice guys, but I can't get my interest to rev up in genuine ways. I'm not really interested to meet anyone new and not much interested in even a casual FWB. I want to be, but deep down inside the spirit just isn't there. I see guys out there meeting, fucking, meeting, and fucking and I wish so much I could be like them. Yet with everything going on in the world, I can't figure out how to get past my spiritual wounds. I'm jealous and wary, and I don't want to be either. This leaves me with an emptiness, a feeling like there has to be more. This can't be all there is. What in the world does "it" all mean? I feel I'm searching for something and looking in the wrong places. I see so many going through life just going through the motions. They don't feel. They don't seem to be self-aware. It feels to me like they're all looking externally for satisfaction and happiness.

All this has made for a very strange yet eye-opening morning for me. I fully realize the world is changing dramatically on a global level and on a "personal world" level as well. I'm full aware of the changes occurring both externally and internally. Each day lately it seems I'm uncovering more about myself. Falsehoods I've spent a life believing and letting control me. People, places, and things I can do without. I'm fully aware that I'm in the midst of some type of spiritual culling. It leaves me feeling empty. I've created a void in doing this and now there's a hole that is asking to be filled. Not an addiction hole, but a spiritual one.

What I believed were some of my truths I'm discovering were not at all. They weren't solid and grounded. It was all false ideas conditioned into me either by myself or others. It is, however, a nice place to be right now. All at once it's exhilarating to be able to recognize and purge. It's also a little frightening to be out on this ledge, so to speak. It's also a little deflating and depressing, realizing the enormity of this massive reevaluation and reorganization. I have this sense of being left holding an empty bag again. I recognize that this can also be very positive. I get to choose how to fill the bag this time. The filling isn't dictated by anyone else. It's not conditioning I was raised to believe in. That's the where the empty feeling comes in. It borders on being directionless. I realize this moment can spin either positive or negative. I have to be self-aware enough about what's going on to make sure past beliefs and behaviors don't manifest in a different disguise. I can the bag with worthwhile things; mindfulness, meditation, more self-awareness, a deeper love of my essence and spirit and how that translates externally. More "adult" things that I can carry with confidence and pride from what is the wrapping up of my Second Act and into my Third.

Lifting the Curtain on Mental Conditioning

When our eyes are opened to the lifetime of conditioning we've undergone by family and society it can seem overwhelming. The curtain being lifted on that can be staggering. We begin being told at a very early age what to do, what not to do, how to behave, what's "acceptable" and what isn't. In the process we lose our "magic," our wonder, and our zest for living fully. Stifling a young person's creativity and curiosity has incredibly damaging effects in their adulthood. Conformity becomes the norm. We don't know any other way to think.

Then one day we realize what's going on. For some it's a slow wake up. For others it's a sudden jolt. For me it has been a slow realization. With several years of reading, listening to my own thoughts, getting honest with myself, learning to recognize my own deceptive thinking, and regular counseling sessions I've finally arrived at a place of reckoning. I understand what went on in my youth and how it conditioned my thinking and what I know and believe about myself. Once the first hints of that started to appear, the domino effect and the snowball effect took over. It all began to domino in the sense that once one conditioned (and by conditioned the word "false" is inferred here) belief fell, the rest started falling as well. In turn, once the dominos started falling the realizations began snowballing. One realization added on to another, and another, and another. Each domino and addition to the snowball has brought me closer and closer to the intensity and satisfaction of living as full a life as possible in each moment in the best way I can. Are some days more vibrant and alive than others? Of course. Everyday isn't filled with sunshine being pumped up my ass. Some days are a real fucking drag. But armed with the knowledge I've gained and am gaining, I now know those crappy days are not permanent things. 

One of my initial reactions to all of this was to reach back into my past and be angry with myself for not knowing sooner. That's just more conditioning trying to get my new-found thinking back in check. The past can only have as much control over me as I allow it to have. As I mentioned in a previous blog posting, the past cannot reach out from the calendar and yank me back. The past is a memory. There is nothing tangible to those thoughts. Today is today, and yesterday is a wispy memory and tomorrow has yet to be lived. There's absolutely no value is looking back in anger or ahead with anxiousness. The only reason I look back now is for the lessons, not to relive traumatic events. The future isn't something that holds me back from living here and now. Neither have any bearing on what I'm doing right now or this afternoon, tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. 

The other tendancy in these cases is to look back and search for something or someone to blame. For me that's not anything I'm interested in. The people to look back on and blame are not to blame. Just as we all have our baggage we're trying to put down, so is everyone else. We all have demons we're either wrestling or have wrestled. To hold anyone any more accountable than I hold myself is a cruel, unfair, and unloving act. Just as I can't change my past, neither can they. Did I ever look back in anger? You bet I did! When I look back on those people now with my new perspective, I don't look back in anger. I look back with a deeper sense of understanding their motives which immediately brings me and deeper sense of empathy and compassion. To be kinder to ourselves brings being kinder to those in our past. We can no more hold them in contempt. To do so would be ignoring the lessons of the present. 

So today I move forward with a kinder spirit. One firmly rooted in the present and a fuller joy of the moment. We could all stand to have much more of that. 

Kensho, Satori, Working Out, and Oneness

Kensho, sometimes interchanged with the concept satori is generally defined as an insight or awakening. A glimpse into deeper understanding. I like to think of it as a flash of epiphany or "oneness". A connection to a deeper cosmic harmony. I was at the gym this morning listening to "A Stream With Bright Fish" from the album "The Pearl". I've been doing what I call "mindful workouts" lately. Totally focused on the rep and the connection between mind and muscle being worked. Slow, deeply focused repetitions. Not sloppy form, but form that really gets deep into the muscle. As I finished one set and that song was playing I looked out the window at the clouds floating by. In that flash of an instant everything was in synch. The floating clouds, the music, my workout, and my presence. It was all a brief nanosecond of profound harmony and sense of belonging with everything.

It was a great and profoundly serene moment. Everything around me fell away and it's just me in tandem with everything I mentioned.

I've had this experience two other times in my life. They were much deeper and profound than this one, which is not to minimize or take away from the one this morning. The one I had as a teenager I was walking off the football practice field. I literally, for a nanosecond, "felt" the Milky Way. I could see it from the outside. I could feel its rhythms and felt as if I was in all places at the same time.

In relating this to my friend Dan thinking it sounded a bit crazy. He commented, "It doesn't sound crazy at all. I have had two, one on a the lawn I have 5, and another in my grandmother's house when I was about 20. I was alone, looking at a fan rotate."

The sensation almost defies words when it happens. Mine have always been just a second or two. But within those few seconds is a vast expanse of time, I sense. My friend Dan says he sustained his for several minutes, and I told him I wished I could learn to sustain mine for that length of time. But I got to thinking, maybe I'm not supposed to sustain it. Maybe it's fleeting for a reason. A taste, so to speak, of the larger harmonies.

The Russian Nesting Dolls of Worrying What Others Think

Over the past year and a half I've been undergoing major changes and awakenings, embracing my better, truer, and happier self. This is a process that began about ten years ago. A process that I have come to understand as not one with a destination, but one that is an ongoing journey. In the various reading I do on and offline I always come across one point that makes every "How To Be Happier" list. That is: stop worrying about what others think of you. 

Easy to say. Easy to understand. Not so easy to do. I've always been aware of the people pleaser inside me. Someone so concerned with what everyone else wanted and needed. Someone so worried about what everyone else would think that I put my own desires and happinesses aside so they wouldn't be inconvenienced. Guess who was the one that always wound up unhappy and feeling unfulfilled? Through some deep introspection and rigorous honesty from the above mentioned journey, I know and understand where that desire comes from, and why I'm so concerned with what others think of me. That's a story for perhaps another posting, however.

What is important, and curious to me, is how deeply-rooted that worry about what others think of me was/is. It was easy to recognize the glaring, immediate ones. What if they don't like the dinner I prepared? What will people think of the sweater I'm wearing? What if he doesn't like the movie I suggested we see? Behind all of those questions was a fear of being rejected, not being liked, people being angry with me. 

As I progressed in my journey of self-discovery and understanding, I came across deeper, more subtle, and dare I say sneaky places where the fear of what others thought of me resided. Recently I decided to make a career change. I was burnt out and unhappy in my current field and wanted to move to something more fulfilling. Something more worthwhile. When I decided on what it would be I began taking college courses to fulfill my goal. All along, however, I felt a sheepishness, a sense of humiliation, an embarrassment about it. What would people think about me changing careers? He couldn't hack it in his current profession so he's running away. I worried what people would think if I took to long at the gym. Worried what my partner would think if I brought home the wrong kind of coffee creamer. Scared what people would think if I moved the date of a get together. It was constant and deep. I came to realize most everything I did had behind it the guilt and terror of what would people think. It was what I like to call the Russian Nesting Doll Syndrome. Open one and there's another. Open that one and there's another. Open that one and there's another still. And on and on it goes, never ending.

Each day I uncover some new area where I find my thinking has been subtly twisted by this fear of what others may think of me. It perplexes me and intrigues me. Its tentacles have reached almost every aspect of my life. The difference today is that I have stopped allowing myself to be hostage to that way of thinking. Recognition, understanding, and the ability to look into these places with honesty and openness, unafraid of what I will find strips these places of their hold on me. 

Quotes by two people come to mind. My friend Dan who says, "I can honestly say what other people think of me hasn't been a consideration of mine for years. Who cares? Many of them don't even know what to do with their own lives, let alone mine." And Eleanor Roosevelt so wisely advises, "You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." 

I must agree with those philosophies. With conscious effort, mindfulness, nonattachment, and an honest desire to find out more about myself, my journey will be an adventurous one for sure.