Month: October 2017

Do not force it — Continued

~ Abhijeet ~ 1 Comment

Nature plays a playful hide and seek game, when we try to understand it, and take control. There may not be anything visibly magical about it. But that is your ego center observing.

The ego center is all about cutting pieces from one continuous sheet. This moment (which is flowing to another moment) is a continuous membrane, which we are all part of. Ego, when taken out of proportions, misses this continuous membrane. That ego center itself is a part of the continuous membrane, but does not understand it. The ego center has a role. To help our survival. You don’t have to bring it out, it will automatically jump out and take control of you when needed.

But that is all ego center is meant for. If you live all of your life in the ego center (even when survival is not at stake), you will fragment your existence into so many pieces that one day, it stops helping your survival. It suffocates the life out of you.

So after a certain limit, and a certain level of awareness that you can build by paying loving attention to your experience, the fragments that were created by that sniping scissor of yours will soon start to fade. It won’t be as you want it to though. Hence saying this to someone will not directly change their reality. But with awareness and with the flow of moments, unnecessary layers of ego will peel of. Ego will resist, it will bring despair. But the awareness knows too much, and eventually the despair brought about by ego’s layers will be revealed to be futile and it peels off. And then a new reality. But ego has several unnecessary layers. They will peel off just like this in time.

Do not force it

~ Abhijeet ~ Leave a comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5wPLStyQ_I

When you force something to happen, nothing bad might happen immediately. But eventually you will hurt yourself. No one else will hurt you. If you are wise enough, you will realize what is going on. If not, you will burn out.

There is another way. Loving attention to this moment. Allow this moment to flow. If you are having doubts about that, bring loving attention to that doubt. Remember, your thoughts, what you think you know, never has 100% resemblance with how reality will pan out. It might coincidentally match reality, but that’s it. Doesn’t mean you wage a war on your thoughts. Pay loving attention to it. While your thoughts may not be accurate, they have come up, they are part of this moment. Allow them to come up.

Always remember the bigger picture. We tend to get lost in detail. I need to solve this specific problem and that specific problem. There are a 100 problems and another day you wake up and realize they are no more, and then there are a dozen more.  Doesn’t mean you don’t approach your situations, but remember to draw loving attention to it. At the end of the day or at the end of your life you are not getting anywhere in particular. As Alan Watts said, life is more like a musical composition than a road trip. The ending is not as important as you think.

Musings on life, oneness, and towards a more loving existence

~ Abhijeet ~ Leave a comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM-0XEOGTvc&t=4s

The fact that our Earth could be habitable was only true by so many preceding fortunate factors, that we or any other life form had no control over. But here we are. Generations after generations of living things evolving. And now there are self-aware living things that can study their own existence.

Fortune (series of natural events and circumstances) granted us the ability to be able to make good short term predictions into the future (to some extent most living things have this ability). But humans with their ability to build tools, conceptualize, and communicate took this to another level. Hence the birth of ego. A sense of you, me, us separate from everything else, and a concept of future and past. This might have played a significant role in making our lives measurably more comfortable compared to before. We did not have to rely on the ability to fight physically or fly naturally or sprint or run long distances to survive as other species had to. But as is true for all evolutionary layers of life, ego has its limit. Beyond that limit, ego does not make life better. It actually makes it worse. Result, we are living in a world where despite all the comforts and safety of human existence, we are full of stress, anxiety, and we ourselves are our worst fears. We do not have to fear a tiger or even a flood as much as we used to. But other humans.

To an outsider observing us, it will seem bizarre that we are not happy, we are not grateful for what we have, and we are separate from each other despite living so close to each other, and we haven’t yet developed fully the ability to be compassionate to each other and other life forms, despite our comforts compared to other species. This is where ego no longer plays a role in making existence of life better. We need egos to survive, but it alone cannot make our existence better. We will be lost in stories, cultures, religions, or our own personal individual tales, without seeing the bigger picture.

Being a self aware species however, there is no wonder we will evolve. We already are. Awareness is what life has always been. There are moments when conditioning takes over, we suffer, and then awareness kicks in. Next big step for life would be a self aware species that learns that ego is just a layer. In fact, in reality, ego is just a concept. There is no such thing as it on a permanent basis. But to get to that level, you will have to practice awareness. You cannot outlast ego by ego. You cannot control your way past ego. That is like beating your drums hoping to find a fugitive, as the popular lore goes.

You can only get to that point through life experience. Awareness. Trust and loving attention to the present. Eventually you will realize that we are not really in control, beyond our circumstances. This present moment is real. Those thoughts you have in your head are also in this moment. And you can exist as awareness. In fact the concept of ‘you’ will fade. The only thing that exists is this moment. What you call you, are the layers of life that are branches/twigs and leaves of this moment. Hopefully you will learn to be loving to this moment.