What is resistance?

A while back I talked about the inner resistance. How we tense up inside and try to block whatever is going on in the present moment. This is part of a bigger pattern of living in a state of resistance towards what is. 

Let me give you an example from just this morning. I wanted to get up one hour earlier than my wife. But I didn’t want to disturb her sleep more than necessary. We have a very small bedroom with no given place to put our clothes. And in the darkness I couldn’t find the clothes. I knew that the more time I spent looking for my clothes, the more I would disturb her sleep. So I quickly started to feel stressed. And with the stress, frustration started building. 

I of course found my clothes, after having made sure that there was no way my wife would be able to go back to sleep. And I got dressed with negative emotions lingering in my body.

The point is that that my irritation and frustration over something very trivial did nothing to help the situation. On the contrary, it made me stop thinking about what I was doing, which most certainly prolonged the situation. 

And yet, we have trained ourselves to respond to situations that we perceive as negative in this way. This is resistance. According to Eckhart Tolle, behind all of this is the ego’s unconscious and erroneous belief that we can change our circumstances by making them “wrong”.

We cannot help that we have negative emotions. But we can help how we respond to them. Every time that we get frustrated, blame, criticize etcetera, we are resisting. These are a few examples to help explaining what this is about. But really, every time we make a situation “wrong” in our thoughts and attitudes towards it, we are resisting. And the paradoxical is that there is no point resisting the resistance. As with so many things, the only thing we can do about it is bringing awareness to it, while reminding ourselves that the resistance does nothing to help the situation.

We sometimes think that resistance is valid. The thought may be something like this: I want this, so I’m going to make someone or something bend to my will. But how often has this led to the desired result? On the other hand, when we stay calm and instead put focus on what we can do, while not expecting anything in particular from the world, we start taking our power back. 

Bringing conscious awareness into everything

As with many other things, the first step to changing this, is to set the intention of becoming aware every time my focus starts to drift and consciously bringing it back to what's in front of me every time that it does. I believe that if I persist, I will become aware more and more often. This has worked when it comes to my job. And it works with many other things. 

What I've realized, is that at my job I’m pretty focused on what’s in front of me and do things very efficiently. But when I sit down with projects at home, I tend to lose focus easily and become distracted. And I’ve realized that this is actually a habit. I’ve allowed my work that I do in my spare time to become sloppy and unfocused.

This also goes beyond mere lack of efficiency. When I do things in this manner, I also much more seldom get into a flow state. This means that I more often do things from a place of ego and of trying to force things, which means that I get access to much fewer novel ideas than I could. 

What do you bring out in other people? Part 2

Functioning from the higher place does not always bring out the same in other people. But if it doesn’t, you will instead be able to see their mechanicalness if you stay present. And if you’re fully conscious, this should also not bring out judgment in you. Judgment is obviously never good. But judging someone else’s unconsciousness and mechanicalness is a little extra hypocritical, since judgment, as will be made clear here, by necessity only comes out when we ourselves have become unconscious and mechanical.

To remain conscious in the face of someone else’s mechanicalness is difficult though (Sidenote: I believe that there are degrees to which we can be free, conscious, in contact our higher selves etc.). At least it is for me. If you are like me, you will be tempted to see the mechanicalness as the whole truth of the person and thus dismiss him or her as nothing but mechanicalness. Because our brains have this nasty tendency of not being able to see beyond the present situation, while at the same time for the most part being lost in thoughts about the past or the future.

First: As stated earlier, most people drift in and out of various degrees of consciousness, even though there also are many that more or less are sleepwalkers. Second: you don’t know what is inside the person in front of you, that is waiting to come out. And my guess is that if you have really started to awaken into awareness, it wasn’t your own effort that made you wake up. It sure wasn’t for me. My guess is that your awakening was either triggered by something you stumbled upon by accident, some other external event, or you don’t really know how it happened. Your thoughts sort of just started to drift towards certain subjects, leading you into revelations about who you are and the nature of reality. My awakening was a combination of all of the above. 

So why would you judge someone that is in a place that they have no control over? Knowing that you could just as easily be the unconscious one? And maybe, just maybe, if you were fully in your authentic self, you would bring out nothing but authenticity in other people. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. And I suspect that when I’m fully there, I will never want to go back to my sleeping state again and I will not let any judgmental thoughts enter my mind.

Sorry if this post came out a little messy. I noticed that I had to fix a few things in it and I don’t really feel very conscious today…

What do you bring out in other people? Part 1

In spiritual circles there is this idea that we bring out in other people reflects something within ourselves. Is this true? 

What I have seen, is that I basically have two selves that can come out. One of these selves has several sub-personalities, while the other is an integrated whole. The one with sub-personalities acts more or less like a robot. It has certain scripts which it functions from. If you know this self, you will be able to predict what I will do, say and how I will react to the circumstances that I’m facing. The other self will, as long as I remain in it, be able to make authentic, free choices, say genuine, heart-felt things and respond freely, to the best of its ability, to every given situation.

Now, I’m beginning to notice that others have these two modes as well. They might not be conscious of it, but they do. And I’m not sure about this, but I believe that some may be much more in tune with this higher self than I am and yet not know that they have these two sides.

What I’m also beginning to notice, is that people tend to respond to each other from the same level as you interact with them. This means that if I am acting in a mindless way, other people tend to do the same. This in turn leads to social interactions that look like they are taking place between free people, but that are little more than mechanical actions and reactions from pre-determined scripts.

What's going on on the inside Part 3

When I’ve focused on the energies inside my body, I’ve noticed that they correspond with my physical sensations, my body’s, movements and even what is going on on the outside. I’ve  started to feel the mood of other people much more strongly. 

Furthermore, I’ve realized that I’ve numbed and pushed down many emotions in different ways. And that these emotions haven’t simply vanished, but have instead been stored in my body as tensions. I’ve also noticed these emotions get activated in situations that trigger them. This means that when something happens that upset me emotionally, if I manage to be present enough to notice it, I can feel that the areas where I have tensions tense up more than usual, and that this is the areas where I can feel the emotions most strongly. Finally, I’ve noticed that when I don’t react to these emotions and don’t try to push them away either, but simply let them be there, I can let go of them. I’ve released many tensions this way and my body feels much less tense today, than it did just a couple of years ago.

What's going on on the inside Part 2

The truth is that there is a lot of the things that I’ve discovered that I don’t understand fully. Just that I’ve discovered something significant that has been hidden in plain sight for most of my life. 

Looking inside has made me wonder about the connection between thoughts and emotions. What effect thoughts and emotions have on our day to day lives. I have discovered that when I shift focus between different body parts and the sensations in them I can create very different experiences. I can for example create a totally different experience for myself, depending on if I for example focus on the sensations in my fingertips or the taste in my mouth. Depending on if I’m lost in thoughts or engaging in what is actually going on or what I’m actually doing.

What's going on on the inside Part 1

I know that a key component in what is happening right now, is to become aware of what is going on on the inside. When we start feeling our bodies, we start to experience energies flowing through them. When we observe our thoughts, we see that many of them are just repeating themselves over and over again. It’s often negative content that makes us feel bad. But we can also see that some of them contain what seems to be messages. We notice that the stream of thoughts never stops. That we can’t stop it and that when we try, we soon seem to forget what we are doing. Maybe we start to ask important questions, such as: What are thoughts really anyway? How do they function? Maybe we start wondering why we’ve never asked this before, about something that goes on throughout all of our waking lives. Maybe we start seeing that we have much more choice when it comes to our thoughts. That how we treat our thoughts right now, is not our nature, but rather habits. 

Learning to walk

I am more and more becoming aware of different layers of reality. Of how I have a whole network of energy inside myself that I can come into contact with just by focusing on it. But since I’ve had my attention firmly placed in the five-sense reality, I have the experience of a toddler just learning to walk, when it comes to these other aspects of reality. 

These aspects are just as real as the physical, five-sense reality. They actually seem to be the same as the five-sense reality. The best theory that I’ve encountered, say that at the core, everything is energy, but we can decode this energy in different ways. And one of these ways is the one that creates the five-sense reality. 

So, it’s time to learn to walk by putting more and more focus on these other aspects. The interesting thing is, that when I focus on these other aspects of reality, the effect is not that I withdraw from the five senses and become neglectful of the physical. On the contrary, focusing on, for example, the energies inside, puts me in a flow state, where everything just seems to run more effortlessly. And if I’m focused on the energies around me, I become able to detect more of the subtle nuances of other people’s behaviour, or the things that God wants to tell me through the events in my life.

But thoughts that "slip by" can teach us something

When we stop believing our thoughts and instead start thinking of what they are saying about us, something happens. We can start looking for clues to what is broken inside of us, or what negative beliefs that hide inside us. This is very liberating. I, for example, have noticed quite a few judgmental thoughts inside my head. But when I chose to just observe them, while knowing that they are not me, they lose their power. As with so many other things, we take control simply by bringing awareness to them.

Don't let thoughts slip by

This is sort of a continuation of  yesterday’s post. This realization came because of something I experienced during meditation yesterday. I’ve been aware for quite a while, that thoughts disappear when I observe them and that when they do, I become present in the moment. And other things seem to happen, such as that my third eye seems to open up and I lose my sense of the physical, of my body and the rest of the world. 

But sometimes thoughts come through that don’t seem to disturb my peace. I’m fully present with them. And they are distinctly different from my usual thoughts, in that they seem to speak to me and they seem true in a sense that my other thoughts aren’t. Yet, at the same time as they seem to speak to me, I’m in more control of them than my usual thoughts, in that as long as I’m fully present, only thoughts that I accept into my mind comes into it.

But as soon as I lose focus, other thoughts can creep in. In fact, I’ve realized that when it comes to any thought that is derived from any other state than present moment awareness, are not fully my own. They slip by, often undetected. And if I’m not careful, I might very well end up believing them.

Think only about now

Something struck me while meditating a while back. When my thoughts were focused on what was going on in the present, such as how my body was feeling, the slight movement that my body did by itself to adjust my spine etcetera, the thought didn’t seem detrimental to my meditation. But as soon as they drifted off into the past or future, my focus was disturbed and I got lost in them. 

Thinking of this afterwards gave me an interesting insight. Almost all thoughts about the past and the future are useless. Not only useless. They profoundly disturb my peace for no good reason. The only time that I can find that it’s useful to think about the past, is when I consciously wish to learn something from it, or when I consciously conjure up a positive memory to elevate my emotions and/or strengthen it. And the only time when it is a good thing to think about the future, is when setting conscious, clear intentions about it or when I think about what I’m doing in the now, in relation to my intentions for the future.

It is interesting and a little scary to notice, that I, and more or less all people that I’ve ever known or come into contact with, have given very little thought to how our thoughts operate. And that we habitually let our thoughts just go where they please. We do this even though it doesn’t take that much to just become aware of what is going on inside our heads from time to time and give the thoughts a nudge in a preferred direction.

Is energy only needed to set things in motion?

I do a bit of dancing in the morning as part of my morning workout. In this dancing I’ve discovered sort of a flow state, where I intend to do certain moves and then just relax into the rhythm, using my whole body and as little muscular tension as possible. This has the effect of me more or less letting go of my body, and I can be very present in the moment and reach what I would describe as an altered state. I don’t do anything that my body isn’t normally capable of, but I definitely transcend my mental limitations that normally restrain my body. 

What I noticed the other day, is that when I set the intention of doing a certain move, I have to use a little bit of force to change direction. How much or little force I have to use, depends on how fast I can get back into the flow. Sometimes I lose myself in thoughts, which is something that more easily happens when a change in direction occurs. When this happens, I soon find that I’ve exhausted myself. And if I observe what my body is doing, I discover that unnecessary strain and tension has crept into the moves as well. 

I then tried this with the rather simple tasks at my work, when I remembered doing so. And the results were similar to those that I experienced dancing. 

I don’t know if this was related, but when I lost the flow and presence, more I got more clumsy and careless than usual. I tipped things over and was not thinking at all about what I was doing. It was almost as if life wanted to show me that I was no longer in this higher state.

It feels as if using as little energy as possible is key here. And that this can be applied to all areas of life. Right now, I can’t see how this could be applied to more complex tasks. But somehow I believe that it could. Maybe I actually get into contact with something higher (dare I say God?) when in this state? And maybe there is no end to what this higher (God?) can do through us, if we just let go and allow?