Act as if you had chosen this

Filed under Notes on 7. May 2007 »

A defining characteristic of our conditioning is a stubborn, illogical and counterproductive habit of resisting what is. The ego always wants to be against something, and the default mode of approaching the world is that of resistance, denial and avoidance.

Among spiritual seekers, this can manifest as a desire to use the spiritual path as a means of escaping or avoiding challenges they are faced with in the world of form. It can be subtle, sometimes so much so that it turns into a difficult obstacle. The mind is very clever when it comes to future-projected promises of salvation, some magical solution to all your problems that will get you to a point of arrival or “making it” sometime in the future, and the spiritual path can be seen by the ego as a means to that end.

It can be seen as a way of constructing a safe story for yourself, basically the same old “story of me” but without all the problems. And in this way, you approach the spiritual path as an alternative story line you can use to replace the old one.

And in a certain way this is true; spiritual awakening is indeed the end to all problems. But not in the way the conditioned mind thinks of it though. Becoming free of problems is not about one day finding yourself living in a world where you are free of the polarities of gain and loss, birth and death, success and failure. Things will continue to come and go, but it only becomes a problem when viewed through the filter of conditioned thinking. To quote Shakespeare again, “nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I will go more into this later, in-depth, but for now let me leave you with a little exercise that deals with the issue directly; a pointer that shifts you from being in a mode of resistance, which is more or less our default response to challenges in the conditioned state, and on to being able to work with whatever you are presented with in the world of form. What this entails is simply to act as if you had chosen whatever arises in the moment. It already is, and so you might as well work with it instead of resisting it.

In this way, you can face all challenges completely without turning them into problems that you then want to avoid having to deal with. When you face everything fully in this way, you will begin to see solutions and opportunities instead of problems and obstacles. And so not only will the challenges seem lighter and less serious than before, you will actually be much more able to deal with them effectively.

Practicing this is particularly useful to overcome the obstacle we talked about earlier, of wanting to use the spiritual path as a story device, and can help you shake loose from what can sometimes be a very subtle trap of conditioned thinking.