Filed under Notes on 23. June 2008 » [1]
It’s ironic that in the effort to seek and maintain your own comfort, you are never able to relax or be truly comfortable. You give up the inner peace that is your natural state in favor of trying to derive that sense of inner peace from some external situation. So instead of resting in the inherent comfort of your own being, you look for a comfortable situation out there.
When you realize this, it seems utterly insane that we keep falling into this trap. That we’re really that lost. But we are. From an early age we are taught to look outside for comfort, and almost everything in our culture encourages it.
At the root of this search for your own comfort is the illusion of self, the ego. It’s a self-serving pattern of thought that makes you look at everything in the world in terms of how it affects you and your state of comfort. And because it’s based in the illusion of self, it is loaded with fear and suffering.
The illusion is that you will become free of the fear and suffering by gaining external comfort, but the truth is that the suffering is inherent in the search itself and has nothing to do with your situation as such. If you are in suffering and then suddenly win lots of money in the lottery and feel better, your comfort is based in the illusion that it is derived from an external situation. And it is only a matter of time before the effects of that illusion start to fade.
In thinking that inner peace and comfort can be derived from an external situation, you’ve separated yourself from that peace. And you then believe yourself to live in a cruel and unfair world where true comfort is only available to a select few who make it; a world that can give you, and therefore deprive you of, inner peace.
The exercise of simply disregarding your own comfort can help you see through the conditioning, because the illusion of ego relies on constant self-interested mental activity to maintain momentum.
It is truly an amazing realization that in order to find true comfort and relaxation, you must give up concern for your own comfort.
Filed under Notes on 15. June 2008 »
Reading an article on Steve Pavlina’s blog today got me thinking about what it is we are all looking for, and why we’re so confused about what it is and where to find it. In the article, Steve writes about how people get stuck in the socially conditioned thought pattern of thinking about what they want to avoid. It’s a fear-based survival tactic that gets you stuck in constantly needing to think about the future, desperately trying to secure your own comfort by having everything figured out beforehand.
Breaking this pattern of negativity by thinking about what you want can bring about incredible changes in your life. It’s that much hyped law of attraction at work. And it really does work, even if much of the literature on it uses the principle in the service of a slightly more subtle state of fear than the one it’s designed to overcome.
Usually when you read about this principle, that thinking about what you want brings about positive changes in your life, what you want is usually assumed to be some form of possession. It’s some sort of material end result, like 200 million dollars in the bank or a beautiful house.
But what is it that people want from having 200 million dollars in the bank or a beautiful home? Usually the fantasy ends there, with the possession. The thought is that when I have this or that, I’ll be able to relax. But if we keep going with it, what is it that you think you will get from having lots of money, or nice cars, or an exciting career etc.?
We want to feel good. Simple as that. And the reason we look for it in material possession and external situations is because that is where we’ve been told it can be found. We’ve been told that in order to feel good, we need to derive that feeling from something outside of ourselves. And even if we know that money can’t buy happiness, looking closer will reveal that there is still a deep seated belief that it will. That if you had lots of money, you’d be able to relax. You would feel good.
That socially conditioned pattern of thinking will probably not dissolve overnight, but the fog of illusion will begin to clear once you start questioning the validity of these beliefs.
One way of doing that is to simply focus on what you really want. Not the things that you really want, but what it is that you think they will do for you. Namely that you want to feel good. That is what you want, ultimately, and realizing this can short-circuit the whole mess of socially conditioned belief that what you want is some form of worldly attainment.
Keep bringing your attention back to the fact that all you want is to feel good. And don’t get trapped in thinking about this in terms of the future, of wanting to feel good in the future when some condition has been fulfilled, because that would contradict the whole thing. If you thought you had to arrive somewhere in the future in order to be able to feel good, you’re basically saying that you need to derive the feeling from something external.
The beauty is that nothing needs to change so that you can find what you’ve been looking for all along. In realizing that this is what you really want, you see that it’s always been present and available.
This is not to say that you stop wanting to have a nice house and the rest of it, but the difference is that you no longer expect it to make you feel good. Feeling good is already there, and then it flows into whatever it is you do on the external level. And only then will you be able to enjoy things, when you’re not looking to them for a sense of satisfaction and happiness.
Feel good first, and then go from there.
Everyday Wonderland is a weblog on the subject of spiritual awakening, creativity, enthusiasm, inspiration, and generally everything having to do with the higher levels of human consciousness. The author is Helgi Páll Einarsson, 24 years old and currently living in Iceland. He likes books in the morning, making things, and taking long walks.