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The
Radical Happiness Newsletter
March,
2008
Wanting to Know the Future by Gina Lake
One of the strongest desires of the ego is to know the future. The ego
wants to know the future very badly, so badly that it often resorts to
making it up, if not in a full-blown fantasy at least in thoughts and
beliefs about it that constantly change. Sometimes the fantasies are
negative fantasies and depict the ego’s fears about the
future.
The likelihood of these events actually taking place in the (usually)
dramatic way that the egoic mind tends to think is miniscule, and yet
they grab our attention, stir up our emotions, and even cause us to
take particular actions. The egoic mind creates a problematic future
and then takes steps in the present to avoid it. To the mind, this
seems reasonable, prudent, wise, and practical. But nothing could be
more impractical than being detached from the present moment and lost
in imaginary fears and plans to avoid those fears.
It is natural, however, that the egoic mind operates like this because
it doesn't trust life. It doesn’t recognize the Intelligence
behind life, which is wise, loving, and evolving us toward greater
wisdom and love. In part it doesn’t see this because it is
busy
telling negative stories about life—about how unfair and
unsafe
it is. Of course the egoic mind is frightened—it frightens
itself
every day with negative stories. It doesn’t see the love,
goodness, or support that is present, and it doesn’t
understand
that challenges and difficulties evolve us in ways like nothing else
can. The only thing that sees this is essence—our true
nature.
Essence sees the truth about life, but when we are identified with the
egoic mind and its beliefs and the stories it spins, we
don’t see things as essence sees them.
We want to know the future because we want confirmation of the
ego’s belief that the present is flawed, but it will be
redeemed
by something better in the future. We want someone to tell us
“Yes, your prince (princess) will come and you will live
happily
ever after.” This is the ego’s basic stance: What
is
happening now isn’t good enough, but someday it will be good
enough, and that will last forever. It is a fairytale that is so deeply
embedded in our makeup that we don’t even realize we are
telling
ourselves this.
This stance towards life interferes with actually experiencing what is
going on in this precious moment—a moment that will never
come
again. Moreover, it interferes with seeing the truth about
life—that it is constantly changing, that we have little
control
over it, and that it is full of all sorts of things, both likeable and
not likeable, and that will always be the case.
The egoic mind is not seeing truly when it rejects the moment. It
rejects it because it is seeing what it doesn’t like about
it,
according to its values—pleasure, comfort, superiority, power, safety, specialness,
and
security. If the moment is not providing those, then
it rejects the moment in entirety. But the moment doesn’t
exist
for the ego’s pleasure and to bolster its sense of self; it
exists for all of life and contains everything we need to be happy if
we are willing to just be there in the present without our opinions,
beliefs, and judgments.
Stripped of thought, the moment is alive and always changing into
something new and unexpected. It moves, and it is full of all sorts of
things that dazzle the senses, inspire love, and surprise us. This
moment is all we need and it is all we really have. That it can be any
other way or that it will ever be anything other than the way it
happens to be showing up is an illusion. The ego has little power to
change what is happening because it is already too late—life
has
already moved on to the next moment. All the ego can do is interfere
through its discontent with having a full and rich experience of this
moment. This saps the juice and joy out of the moment, so no wonder we
long for a better moment. The egoic mind spoils this moment and
promises a better one, but that better moment will never come unless
the egoic mind becomes quiet. And then every moment is good.
When you find yourself wanting a better moment—wanting
something
else in the future—it can be helpful to ask: What will that
give
me? We think we will finally and once and for all be happy when that
moment arrives. What we discover when we do get what we want is that
even that wonderful moment disappears and is replaced by the next one
and then the next one. Life keeps moving on, bringing us a mixture of what
we like and don’t like. Why not
like—love—it all
because it won’t be here for long, and it will never be this
way
again.
Meditation
(From Getting Free: How to Move Beyond
Conditioning and Be Happy by Gina Lake)
Meditation
is the
most powerful tool for experiencing essence and for learning to move
from the ego to essence. It is the only tool you really need, although
others serve as well. Meditation is also the most accessible tool,
since it requires nothing but taking time to be quiet. It
isn’t
even necessary to be in a quiet environment because sounds, themselves,
can be the subject of your meditation.
Meditation
is
simple to do, and it doesn’t require much time daily. The
problem
is the ego doesn’t like to do it. The egoic mind comes up
with
all sorts of excuses and reasons for not doing it. When you first start
to meditate, you are up against this resistance and up against a mind
that has been allowed to run amok for so long. It’s been used
to
having your attention, and all of this attention has added to its power
and strength. Meditation is designed to diminish its power by giving
your attention to something else, something truer than the ramblings of
the mind.
This
something that
is truer is essence, and it is subtler than thought. It may not even be
recognized at first as anything because the mind thinks of it as
nothing. Once you turn your attention away from your thoughts, you will
experience who you are, but you might not recognize it for what it is,
and it might not be experienced very strongly at first. People often
get discouraged when they first begin meditating because they are
looking for a dramatic experience of the divine Self. However, at
first, this experience is rarely dramatic but very subtle. It may
appear as a soft vibration, a sense of expansion, lightheadedness,
relaxation, peace, or contentment. This is not what we expect our true
Self to feel like. The ego certainly would like something more than
this and expects more than this, and it doesn’t like to fail
at
what it tries, so it uses the lack of drama as proof that nothing
worthwhile is to be found in meditating. The ego is into instant
gratification, and it finds nothing gratifying in meditation. On the
contrary, meditation leaves the ego weaker and with nothing to do.
The
ego seeks
spiritual experience to be special. That is also the reason it is
willing to go along with spiritual seeking. It hopes that spirituality
will bring it more power in the form of spiritual power. What it
doesn’t realize is the price to be paid. Once it catches on
that
its demise, or the diminishment of its power, is the goal of spiritual
practice, it finds ways to subvert that practice while still appearing
to be “on the path.” This is easy to see in
spiritual
seekers: they come to spiritual gatherings for spiritual reasons, but
find ways to walk away with little of real value. They find fault with
the teacher, the teachings, the students, the methods, or the
techniques. They presume there is nothing there for them, and so there
isn’t. Some go from teacher to teacher for decades, at once
proclaiming their sincerity and their frustration with what is offered
and not seeing how perhaps their own ego is the saboteur of their
progress and not the teachings, the teacher, or the method.
It’s
far too
easy to find fault with teachers, teachings, and methods, and that is
the job of the ego in whatever realm it is involved. It analyzes,
judges, and evaluates, which is how it keeps itself separate from
others, from life, and from the Truth. This is not the same thing as
the discrimination that comes from essence, which discriminates the
true from the false (the Real from the Illusion). The discrimination of
the ego is tainted by its point of view and therefore not
discrimination. It can’t see the Truth because it
doesn’t
have eyes for it even if it wanted to see the Truth.
The
ego can’t
discern the Truth of spiritual teachings. The Heart is what discerns
Truth, and the ego obscures the Heart’s messages. Those who
manage to drop into the Heart through alignment with a true teacher can
find the Truth; those who don’t manage to do this take longer
to
find it. Eventually, everyone comes to see the Truth. Spiritual
evolution can be slowed down by the ego, but it can’t be
forestalled forever.
Meditation
entices
you to move into the Heart by offering the possibility that something
other than the mind has the answers you are looking for. It teaches you
to find these answers outside the realm of ideas and words. Meditation
brings you in contact with essence by quieting the mind, which gives
you a chance to experience something other than the mind. The mind is
not the only thing going on here, although that’s the way it
seems when we are identified with the ego. Once we withdraw our
attention from the mental world, we can begin to see and experience
what else is here now in this vastly alive present moment.
Meditation
is all
about experiencing rather than thinking. When we are identified with
the ego, thinking takes the place of experiencing in most moments.
Meditation turns this around. It teaches us to be present to everything
that is happening in the moment, including our thoughts. Thinking is
still happening; it’s just not all that is happening.
Meditation
notices and allows thinking (which can’t be stopped anyhow),
but
thought isn’t identified with. Eventually, usually after much
meditation, unnecessary thoughts (which is most of them) lessen, while
functional ones remain.
When
you are very
present to what is arising in the moment and not identifying with any
thoughts or feelings that may be arising, you will find yourself
aligned with essence and experiencing the qualities of essence. From
this place, your conditioning is not a problem and never was. Even that
was perfectly functioning as it was meant to.
Meditation
is
really just a matter of giving your attention fully to something other
than thought and feelings (which are the product of thought). You can
also meditate by giving your attention to thought or to a feeling, as
long as you don’t identify with it. If you can be with the
coming
and going of your thoughts and feelings without becoming involved with
them, you will remain aligned with essence. So, to be free of
conditioning, thought and even feelings don’t have to stop.
You
only have to stop believing and responding to thoughts and
feelings—identifying with them.
A
useful meditation
for learning to disengage from thoughts and feelings is to simply watch
your thoughts arise and disappear. If you catch yourself being involved
with a thought, just return to watching your thoughts arise and
disappear. Who is this you that is watching your thoughts? It is the
same you that gets involved in the thoughts. This you is either
identified with thought or not identified with thought, but the you
still exists in either case. The difference is that some level of
suffering happens when the you is identified with thought, while peace
and happiness happen when the you is not identified with thought.
Nothing really changed but identification.
Meditation
teaches
you to dis-identify with your thoughts by showing you that there is
another possibility. We are programmed to identify with thought, so why
would we question this? The ego doesn’t, but essence drives
us to
discover our true nature by giving us glimpses of peace, love,
acceptance, and happiness, which are possible when we are not following
our thoughts.
To
purchase Getting Free
in paperback or as a download, click here.
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