The inner resistance part 3

The thing is, that when I’m not in this state of resistance towards what is, my body movements become more slowing and precise. I feel confident, energized, present and everything seems to almost work itself out. 

Being present is a key here. I can always trace the beginning of inner resistance to a loss of presence and the activation of automatic thoughts. Suddenly I’m in my head, thinking of how I wish that the situation I’m in would be different. Maybe I’m trying to think my way out of a situation that I cannot get out of. Or I think of other choices that I could have made. Or I wish that other people would act differently.

The inner resistance part 2

I’m pretty sure that this is what the Buddha talked about when he pinpointed resistance and attachment at the basis of the roots of suffering. But I didn’t know that it was something that could be felt so physically. Because it can. 

I feel tension inside my head, both around my pineal glad and in different other areas. When I feel anger for example, i feel my jaws clench and tense up. I also feel tension in my body. I mostly tense up around my chest and solar plexus, but this can happen throughout the body. It is very much an inner resistance towards being itself.

The inner resistance part 1

I feel like it’s time to put it all to rest. What do I mean by this? I mean that it’s time to let go of this inner resistance that I feel more and more clearly day by day. 

I feel how I tense up when something in my reality that I don’t like appears in my reality. Even though I know it’s fruitless, I can’t help but resisting it on the inside.

We only have access to our own minds

This is obvious. Yet, how often do we think of what this means? This means that I only have access to what is going on inside myself. I only know what my senses and my interpretations of my sense-data tell me. I also know nothing about what goes on inside other people. It is of course possible to make more or less educated guesses. But even if I guess someone’s intentions correctly, I still don’t know the person’s motives, reasons or how conscious the person is of his or her behavior. I often don’t even know this when it comes to myself. But unlike with other people, when it comes to me, it is possible for me to know for certain whether I’m going against my conscience or not. Whether I do what I know is right or whether I do what I know is wrong. And to me at least, it’s perfectly clear that there are such things as right and wrong. You don’t lie, cheat, steal or do anything else that is deceitful. And I know that you’re supposed to “turn the other cheek”, both literally or metaphorically. But I don’t always manage to do so. I will from now on try my best to do so though. But I will falter.

This “turning the other cheek” principle of course also implies that you don’t attack other people. But if we go into the metaphorical realm, it’s not always obvious what is an attack. I believe that I attack others. I attack when I hold a grudge, because it will manifest itself somehow in my behavior unless I let go of it. I attack when I plan how I’m going to tell someone off. I of couse attack if I actually go ahead and do it.

But someone else might have a totally different, equally valid view of the world. If my belief is correct, that God made the human condition in some way fundamentally the same, I might doubt that someone truly and honestly could come to the conclusion that it is right to treat others in a way that they don’t want to be treated, unless it is to stop them from doing so to someone else. But I cannot know this. The only thing that I can know for sure, is that I know this in my heart. And this goes for many other things, whose wrongness were less obviously recognizable to me. Again, I can only tell what is wrong for me and not for anyone else. I suspect that I share this sense of what is right and wrong in my heart with other people. I also suspect that I share a clouded vision that hinders me from seeing what is right and wrong clearly. Finally, I suspect that we possess visions with different degrees of clarity, that are dependent upon such factors as our ability to observe ourselves honestly and the amount of baggage that we carry with us that we haven’t dealt with.

But I don’t know. I’m not here to judge. The only thing that I know for sure, is that none of us have access to the content of anyone else’s minds but their own, unless they genuinely are mind readers. Some may be. I only know that I’m not one. 

So, if I know that I’m not a mind reader, the simple conclusion that I can draw, knowing the God exists, loves me, cares for me and has everything under control, is that I need to stop looking at what others do. Completely. And instead, I need to focus on what I do. Why I do it. How it affects other people and what it says about me as a person. Stuff like that.

What is sin?

The concept of sin comes from the greek word “hamartia”, which means “to err” or “miss the mark”. 

Now, I don’t claim to be an authority on sin (I do have a lot of first-hand experience of it though… ;)). So maybe I’m completely wrong here. But I do believe that this original meaning can tell us something that has gotten lost. And I’m not alone in this. Several teachers that go beyond traditional interpretations of the Bible have pointed this out.

Looking at the original meaning, sin seems to imply a failure to do something correctly, rather than an act of evil. And if we look at how life seems to function, I believe this way of looking at sin to be correct.

You see, from my own experience, I’ve come to believe that we always act from a place where we believe that our actions are “right”, in some sense. Even if we don’t believe that there are such things as right, wrong, good or evil, we still in a sense believe that what we do is right. Or, at least not wrong. Since we don’t believe in such a thing as right or wrong. 

Is it possible to downright do something that we know is wrong, without having some justification for our actions? Sure. But those that do it are a very small minority. And they become even fewer when you take away mentally disturbed people. 

So, the complete nihilist might feel somewhere in his or her heart that some actions are wrong. I used to be a nihilist and I can for sure say that I could feel that many of my actions were wrong. But because of my belief-system, I managed to shut my eyes to these feelings. This does not mean that I’m not responsible for my actions. It’s not an excuse. But it is an explanation. An explanation that I believe is sufficient for me not to be considered evil. Corrupt maybe. Nihilism is for sure a corrupt belief-system. Had I persevered in my nihilism, I might even have become so corrupt that I became completely deaf to my conscience. Fortunately, this is something that I will never know.

The more I analyze my actions and other people’s actions, the firmer I become in my belief that most of us are a pretty confused bunch. We don’t really understand why we do what we do, or how it affects us or other people. On top of that, we live in a very confusing world, where we are bombarded with different messages on how to think, feel and act, together with different types of appeals to our lower natures. And let’s not forget that the values (here in the West, that would be Christian values), for good and bad, that we’ve considered as facts for almost two millennia, are being questioned, with no new “truth” about right and wrong to replace them. 

So if you believe in the idea that God hates the sin but not the sinner, how could it make sense that God would judge the sinner? Isn’t sin, logically, a product of wrongful thinking that, logically, cannot be the fault of the sinner? Doesn’t the sinner engage in wrongful thinking because he or she is broken and confused and not because he or she wants to do bad things? 

Getting into the habit of dealing with our problems right away

Just like with so many things on my blog, this one is another “stating the obvious” post. But this is such an important habit to cultivate, and yet, most people don’t do it. And often, I think, it is because we don’t think about it. We need reminders of not habitually postponing everything. So, here comes a reminder.

This habit will transform us. It builds confidence in our ability to handle things. It makes us more and more into action takers. We will learn that our resistance mostly is in our heads. That things aren’t so bad once we just do them. Our problems won’t pile up and overwhelm us. Instead, we get this nice, comfortable feeling of forward motion and being in control of our lives.

And we will have to deal with the problems sooner or later anyway. And you don’t have to be perfect at this habit immediately. Just set the intention and strive for it and it will come eventually.

Observe and allow. Part 2

The more I am in the now and the more awareness I can direct at the present moment, the more smoothly everything flows. And as soon as I’m back in my head, thinking about the past or the future, I feel resistance and I mess things up. The funny thing is that when I lose focus, I notice how my brain tries to convince me that I’ve been present the whole time.

Observe and allow part 1

I am more and more starting to find this state within myself, where I can just be present and observe what happens. When I’m in a flow state, where I can just observe my body as it moves and breathes. This attentive state lets me respond in an appropriate manner to what is going on at the moment. I just need to allow what is going on and my body somehow knows how to act. 

I talk too much. Part 6

There is an automatic way of functioning in this. I talked about speech patterns in an earlier part of the series. I’m triggered to speak this way by topics that interest me. I often do feel that I have something to say that might be beneficial to someone else in some way. But there is also often a component of feeling a need to impress others with my knowledge on a topic. Or I want to make myself understood in one way or another. As I said, these patterns are triggered automatically. It might be because I have a hard time being fully present in conversations. Maybe being present in conversations is what I have to practice first and foremost?

I talk too much. Part 5

When I engage in unconscious talking, judgments of other people often creep in as well. And yeah, I know “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of”. I know that. And I know that I judge people in my thoughts. But it’s even harder to control one’s thoughts than one’s words. So if I hope to stop judging people in my mind, a good first step ought to be to stop doing it in my words. When I’m not guarding my mouth and someone that I for one reason or another hold a judgment over becomes the topic of conversation, I find myself saying things that I promised myself that I would never say about someone. Having formulated this clearly for myself, I hope that I will be able to change it.