Gassho,
In 2013, as a Sangha, we let go feeling bad. We began
practicing with the awareness that feeling bad only wastes time, obscures
clarity, and feeds ego. Rather than feeling bad, we choose to be here in
whatever situation we find ourselves, ready to receive the clarity and insights
Intelligence offers. In this way we can learn to free ourselves from the
habitual, karmic behaviors that cause us to suffer.
In 2018, let’s make the next move to “Our goodness is
established.”
For the sake of this conversation, let’s call All That Is,
Life, the Universe, God, Whole Mind, Awareness, Consciousness, the Divine,
Presence, Authenticity, etc., GOODNESS.
It’s an all-encompassing GOODNESS so we’ll keep it in caps
for now. If we write it as goodness or even Goodness, egocentric karmic
conditioning/self-hate will close in around it and cause us to forget that this
is a synonym for All That Is.
Within GOODNESS is a small “ability to believe oneself to be
separate from Life,” which we call egocentric karmic conditioning/self-hate (ego
or conditioned mind for short).
Ego’s process is
to pull attention away from the nonseparate reality of GOODNESS and pull attention into the imaginary “world” of egocentric karmic conditioning/ self-hate.
Imagine looking out onto a vast vista. Attention is on
awareness of the scene. Then you focus on a tiny rock at your feet. The tiny
rock occupies attention and you may or may not be aware of what surrounds the
rock. The vast vista is no longer available to you. Is the vista gone? We
“believe” it’s still there, but until we turn attention to it, it’s not there
for us. When you’re focused on the vista, does the rock exist? Once again, we
believe it does, but that’s not our experience until we turn attention back to
the rock. In exactly this way we are pulled, by a shift of attention, out of
the vastness of GOODNESS and into the tiny, imaginary world of egocentric
karmic conditioning/self-hate.
That imaginary world is the world of opposites, of duality
(right/wrong, good/bad, should/shouldn’t, will/won’t, us/them, beautiful/ugly,
like/dislike, happy/unhappy, important/not important, valuable/worthless,
light/dark, hot/cold—and at least ten thousand more!). Not only is the “world”
of opposites imaginary, duality is
imaginary. There is no such thing. A continuum
gets us closer, but even that fails us ultimately as we realize everything
simply is what it is. Which, interesting as that may be, is beside the point.
The point is that when attention has been pulled into ego’s
faux reality, we are moved back and forth from one side to
the other of an incalculable number of dualities, depending on what we “do.” If I say the right thing I’m on the
“good” side of the duality and I feel “good.” In the next moment I may be
jerked to the “bad” side of that duality because thinking I’m so good means I’m
arrogant. (I hope you’ll stop as we go along to have your own experience of
what you’re reading.)
Believing ego’s imaginary
world to be real, we suffer. Believing “I
am ego/ego is me” (though never with the conscious awareness that would cause
us to question that assumption), we are stuck colluding with and defending ego as
it runs roughshod over our lives. I’m told I said something rude. The recipient
is offended. I feel awful. I must apologize. I go to the person I offended to
express my regret. I make excuses, try to explain what happened, declare I
would never intentionally do such a thing. Throughout this extravaganza it never
occurs to me to question the veracity of what I’m being told, to question
feeling bad, to wonder how all that happened, to realize I didn’t know that
happened—to realize I wasn’t there! I was unconscious when it happened.
Believing ego is
me, I take credit and blame for everything ego does. I “live” in a constant conversation in conditioned mind about what “I” do
and how “I” am. Ego cannot exist in the
present so attention is pulled back and forth between pairs of opposites in the past and in the future. (I
shouldn’t have done/said/been that, to I should do/say/be that. Put the
“shouldn’t” in the future and the “should” in the past and sense the limitless
permutations.)
Believing ego’s
imaginary world is the real world, we completely lose sight of GOODNESS.
GOODNESS becomes goodness, the opposite of badness or wrongness in the
illusory, conditioned world of ego.
What else is possible?
--We can realize
that every conversation in the head, every duality, all relationships with past
and future are taking place in the imaginary world of ego.
--We can realize
that our actual experience of
ourselves is as the awareness that is observing what
ego is saying and doing. You are not the author, the orchestrator, or the speaker—you are listening. You are watching. You’re being told that
you’re thinking those thoughts, but a short time of looking
will prove to you that you are not. You’re aware of what’s going on in conditioned
mind, but you are not doing it.
--Once we realize
we are not ego, not doing what ego is doing, not
to blame for what ego is doing, we can begin to experience ourselves
as the expression of Life, the GOODNESS, that we are.
The astounding benefit
of this clarity is that we can stop colluding with and defending ego. Coming
from Authenticity, we can observe what ego is doing and happily report on it!
Not that we’re going back to reporting on what’s happening in conditioned mind
(“the voices are saying….”), but we can see
what egocentricity has caused us to do (because we have a habit of being
distracted by its shenanigans and going unconscious). And we can now, having
acknowledged what we’ve seen, begin a practice of aligning with GOODNESS/Life
in the present and choosing from HERE.
An example:
I am addicted to ___________, I have a habit of
______________, I have a tendency to _______________, I act ______________, I
don’t ______________, I know I should __________ but instead I _____________.
(Hopefully you can find yourself in there somewhere.) And I feel bad. (Yes, even
though we let go feeling bad years ago, I still do and I feel bad about that.)
I am caught squarely in egocentric karmic conditioning and am suffering with
self-hate.
As soon as I recognize where I am (identified with ego) and
what’s happening (I’m believing that the stories I’m being told by the voices
in conditioned mind have something to do with me), I can remember that what this human being is authentically is GOODNESS. That is what a human incarnation is. A
human incarnation is a unique expression of Life, of the GOODNESS That Is.
(Conditioned mind can understand none of this, yet the Heart
intuits!)
We don’t need to improve, change, fix, criticize, compare,
judge, or in any way be involved in the false world of ego in order to get out
of the false world of ego. You won’t one day become a good person who is no
longer bad and therefore not subject to self-hate’s beatings. There truly isn’t
anything wrong with “you.” All that
is happening is that attention has been pulled away from its Home (GOODNESS,
Whole Mind, etc.) and is now residing in that infinitesimal, imaginary world of
duality called ego. Once attention is there, it seems as if that tiny figment is a whole real world. Move attention
back to thisherenow, and ego disappears into the imagination from whence it
came.
Gassho,
Cheri
