Debating...

What I’m saying here, is not to say that an open debate is not important. In fact, I believe the opposite. In a world in crisis with loads of differing opinions and views about what is going on, it is crucial that all voices can be heard in an open, uncensored debate. That is not exactly what is happening today, but that is not the topic of today’s post. What I am saying, is that debating is very far from a reliable way of getting to the truth.

In debating, in the best case scenarios, the one that has the best arguments and the best rhetoric wins. But it also depends on the audience. Does the audience favor one debater over the other, for irrelevant reasons, such as that one view is simply more popular and cool than the other? Can the topic be objectively proven by logic and rational arguments? What of issues that fundamentally are about subjective experience, such as God or spirituality? What about the fact that everything ultimately is subjective experience?

Stop trying to control everything

This has been a consistent theme in my blogging lately. How we resist what is and therefore try to force the world to conform to our will. And how the world most of the time responds by giving us the finger. So I’m saying this as much to myself as I’m saying it to you.

With that being said, let’s stop and take a look at this for a moment. Can you remember the last time that you felt totally in control of everything in your life? I can’t remember ever having been in such a state. However, I’ve been more or less daily been occupied with trying to control everything, at the expense of caring for my inner life and the things that I actually do have control over. 

Let’s begin with the question: What do I have control over? I do have most control over my inner life. I can choose what thoughts I allow into my head and whether I believe them or not. This in turn determines my emotional state to a large degree. My thoughts may have turned into little monsters because I haven’t given them the proper attention and instead just let them do whatever they please. It is no wonder then that I have some inner discipline to take care of. And just like with a neglected child that has grown into a little monster, the thoughts will not just go along with any new decree. We have to tread careful here or they will rebell. 

But after a while, when they see that the new discipline actually makes us happier and stronger, they will be more ready to comply. As long as we don’t tyrannize ourselves. 

I also have control over my habits and how I organize my life. This again comes back to my thoughts. If my thoughts constantly tell me to just go and do whatever “I” want (really what the thoughts tell me that I want, which may not at all be what I really want) and that responsibility is boring, and I choose to believe them, I will never cultivate good habits or organize my life properly. Or if I instead of doing this, spend all of my time and energy trying to force the world to conform to my will, again something that beings with my thoughts, I will have very little time and energy for the things that I actually can control. 

So, what to do? Well, that’s easy. With all of the above in mind, just let go of everything that cannot be controlled, allow it to unfold as it does and focus and what you do have control over. 

Defending negative behavior to avoid feeling bad

This keeps us trapped in negative behavioral patterns. I think that this has something to do with us erroneously and unconsciously assume that we choose the negative behavior. And therefore we think that it is something that we have to defend. Because it is almost as if it is a part of who we are. So we come up with all kinds of excuses and justifications.

What can we do instead? The first thing is to realize that we are okay the way we are. This may sound paradoxical, but hear me out. Negative behaviors do not make us bad. At the core, we are all beloved children of God. There is nothing shameful in having acquired some baggage along the way.

And here comes another paradox: It is more or less never a good idea to point out someone else’s flaws. Because 99% of the time, this will only lead to a defensive reaction. But if we can take a step back, let go of the defensive impulse and actually consider what is being said, when someone criticizes us, we have a lot to gain from it. We might come to the conclusion that what is being said is totally unfounded. But our gut reaction is often to dismiss the criticism off hand, without first taking it into consideration. 

I want to conclude this post by talking a little more about the baggage that we cling to. It’s even okay to not want to let go of it. Or to not be ready to let go of it yet. We don’t need to explain or justify. In fact, we don’t need to do anything at all. But if there comes a time when we realize that the pain of holding on to it, outweighs the pain of letting go, why not let it go, if we feel that we can do what it takes to do so? It’s much easier to do this if we don’t have leads of stories attached to it, that tell us why we can’t.

The end of a road

It’s time to stop living in fear! I’ve been telling myself this for a long time. And yet I keep coming back to fearful thoughts. Why? Because I seem to keep forgetting that every time I feel really close to God, I get nothing but assurance that I’m loved and that everything is okay.

At the same time, I feel that spirituality is a serious matter. And this, I believe, is where a problem arises. Because if everything is okay, what does it matter what choices I make? One possible answer would be that how much we manage to soil ourselves, might determine what methods God has to use to clean us. I don’t believe that God ever would judge or punish us. But just like any good parent, God might not allow any type of behavior from his children. And the only way to affect permanent, authentic change, is to make the children see the errors of their ways. Not just force obedience upon them. And this might entail allowing the children to experience the consequences of their actions, even if they are painful. But for there to be any meaning to this, the consequences have to be finite and match the intents behind the actions. Otherwise the consequences would just be cruel, senseless suffering. 

Why would a loving God inflict that on anyone? Maybe it's time to start thinking eternal damnation out of existence? Knowing what I know about God's love, I will at least do my best to banish all such fears. And in general do my best to live from a place of love and not fear. Of course there will be mistakes along the way. And that is okay too. I know that I'm not evil. And I don't think that anyone really is. Different degrees of broken, sure. But not evil.

I believe that from where we stand now, the best approach to life is to observe and allow as much as possible. Not in the sense that we should just passively do nothing. On the contrary, I believe in taking action. But I believe in doing so from a higher place and not from our egos. I’ve noticed that when I’m present in the moment, I can allow things to just happen through me rather than struggling with them. And I believe that this is important. There is no value in banging one’s head against the wall trying to prove that we are worthy because of our amazing accomplishments or intellectual acrobatics. The wonderful thing is rather that the more we stop trying to be someone, we can allow God to work through us. He does all the smart stuff, but we still get to add our personal touch to it.

We don’t need to force things. We however need to make some room for God. And this means that we have some cleaning to do on the inside. And don’t get me wrong here. This is not about changing ourselves into something other than who we are. This is just about letting to of all the things that we are not. And I don’t think that this has to be hard. We are just making it hard, because there are so many things that we have attached importance to, that are not really important at all.

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. 

Something is constantly trying to push me off track

I usually meditation with one focus in mind: staying present in the moment. I have found a few ways to do this, such as keeping focus on my breath, staying present inside my head and feel my heart and/or body.  

When I meditated the other day I made an interesting observation. Namely that something inside me always pushes me off track. I’ve observed this many times before, but never put it into words. It is not just that no matter how focused I am and how empty my head is of thoughts, I always eventually find myself lost in a thought stream. This is of course something I noticed many years ago and a fact that every meditator is aware of. But it is also that after a while I’m not really consciously focused on meditating and on the technique that I’m using. 

This made me realize something else that I’ve noticed but never put into words. Namely that this goes for everything in life. I start doing something with a clear intention of what to do and how to do it, but after a while my mind has wandered into something else and I’m not doing what I’m doing in the way that I intended at all. 

On top of that, when I’ve gotten some momentum going with something, something always seems to happen, which I allow to get me down and stall whatever it is that I’m doing. Notice that I said “allow”. Because I always have a choice not of how I feel, but how I respond to my feelings. And I’ve often allowed my emotions to get the best of me.

Breaking free

If you absolutely love the state of the world today and feel that our culture is totally sane and making you feel happy and fulfilled, you can go ahead and skip this post. Otherwise, please go on reading.

I want to begin by saying this: You, whoever you are, whatever you have done and wherever you are, are valuable. You are valuable simply because you are you. There is a God who loves you and cares deeply for you. A God who sees you, sees your pain and what the values of the world has done with you. 

That being said, I basically believe that we live in an invisible control system. I also believe that there is malevolent intention behind this system. But this is debatable. What I don’t believe is debatable, is that we live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with appeals to our lower natures, whether it is in the form of food, sex, money, competition or something else. Our culture appeals to our animal sides, making us live in a way where we react to outside stimuli, rather than taking conscious action.

The alternatives that are presented to us seem to be to either fit into someone else’s (who’s?) definition of success, or just letting life happen to us and try to be as fine with it as we can be.

I believe that the first step to breaking free, is simply to decide to bring more awareness into our lives. Then we need to start questioning the values that we take for granted. To try and understand how conditioned we are to believe and think a certain way. To want certain things. Next we need to become clear about what our values are. What we really find important. And compare this to where we actually invest our time and energy. 

Then comes the really hard part. To start looking honestly at ourselves. What I’ve noticed in my own life, is that I’ve unconsciously wanted to preserve a certain self-image. And to pick this self-image apart has been a painful process. I’ve kept pushing so many problems away, telling myself that they weren’t there, until I had nowhere to run anymore. 

Here is what I realized after a while: My life consisted mainly of unconscious thoughts, unconscious behavioral patterns, unconscious ways of interacting with other people, unconscious beliefs, unconscious attitudes and unconscious assumptions. I say “unconscious” a lot here, don’t I? And there is a reason for this. Because as long as we do not realize that most of who we are and what we do, are in most cases not products of conscious choices, we can never hope to break free.

Freedom does not start with you forcing the world to change. Freedom starts on the inside.

Where do we focus? What thoughts do we choose?

I have a lot of happiness in my life already. I have a rich spiritual life, a wife that I love, who loves me and the same goes for friends and family. I’ve also done some serious soul-searching, dealt with a lot of emotional issues and done a lot of inner healing over the past years. And as forty is approaching my body feels healthier than ever. I also know that what is really important, is the spiritual life and the relationship with God and other people. These are aspects of life that don't cost anything and that we always can do things to cultivate further.

So I really have a lot in my material life to be happy about. More than I thought before I wrote it down actually. 

But career-wise I’m not at all where I want to be and my financial situation is a mess. And I've attached undue importance to these things, partially because the world says that you should. I've done this at the expense of being happy and grateful for what I do have and even felt like a failure because of it.

And maybe it is because I don’t focus on all the other good things in my life that these things are a mess. Because maybe my sense of lack drains the energy that I need for fixing my career and causes me to spend money on things that I don’t need.

My initial question for this post was: can pain be turned into something positive? Then I realized that the post was really about something else. But I still believe that we can gain something positive from pain. And this really also has to do with where we focus.

For one, the pain of the temporal can motivate us to turn towards the eternal. Towards God. When the pain of living in the past or the future becomes unbearable, it can help driving us to the only place where we can find release: The present moment.

Mental pain is always alerting us to something. Maybe some attitude needs to change. Or we need to take a look at our habits. I’ve lately become painfully aware that I’ve become a bit too comfortable in my circumstances. I’ve also not taken care of my relations to other people properly.

When we feel pain, we have a choice of whether we want to try and escape it or face it. If we try to escape it, it will wear us down and we will start moving towards apathy. But if we instead face it, it can be a catalyst for growth. “Something isn’t working so I’m going to resign to it and pretend that it isn’t there” and “Something isn’t working so I’m going to do my best to change it” are two completely different mindsets with radically different behaviors attached to them. And just like with where we focus, it all begins with which thoughts we allow to enter our minds.

Up and down - personal reflection on where I am right now

I didn’t know how much anger towards myself that I was carrying until recently. And now I’ve finally started to let go of it. How?

I believe that there is such a moment, when everything in life up to that moment becomes meaningful in light of that moment. This sounds very vague, but let me try to explain. It’s something that I’ve come near a couple of times, but never stayed in for long. Words and labels such as “liberation”, “salvation” or “the holy moment” come to mind. Even ones such as “enlightenment”, “nirvana” or “samadhi”. 

What I’m talking about is some sort of knowing that everything is okay. That I’m loved by God no matter what and that in the end, nothing else matters. 

Then I go back to fears and worries again. I think of missed opportunities and how much of my life that I’ve wasted on nonsense. I think of dangers, real or imagined or such ones that I don’t have any way of knowing whether they exist or not. 

But I find myself being able to stay in this calm acceptance and trust for longer and longer periods of time. Just as my periods of negativity become shorter and less intense. As I’ve stated before, it does correlate with my ability to remain present in the moment. And the more I manage to be present in the moment, the more I manage to not identify with my thoughts and emotions. To just observe them and see them for the illusions that they ultimately are. 

So, this is where I am right now. Some people talk about “spiritual bipolarity”. I think that this is quite an accurate term. One day I feel this joyful bliss, love and acceptance. And the next I feel overwhelmed by problems in the physical world and worries about the future. And when I’m down deep in the dirt of inert material existence, I seem unable to remember the love, light and carefreeness of the spiritual. I get caught up in the petty worries about the temporal, instead of focusing on what’s truly important: The easy, loving eternal. 

That is not to say that this physical life isn’t important. We are here for important reasons, that at the moment aren’t totally clear to me. But seen from the perspective of eternity, much of what we worry about on a daily basis becomes rather small. But the ego seems unable to grasp the eternal. And therefore it keeps on dragging me down into the pains of the temporal.  

Is everything in our lives a reflection of who we are?

Yes and no, I would say. I have a hard time seeing this as a cold, natural law. Rather, I would say that God brings circumstances and individuals into our lives that show us who we are. And if we can shift this perspective something happens.

What I’ve come to realize, is that we can view life from all kinds of perspectives, but usually we are locked quite firmly into one, thinking that it is the only one. This perspective is often not spelled out, but can probably for most people be spelled out something like this: The world is what I perceive with my five senses and life consists of a set of more or less random occurrences and the effects of the actions that individuals in my life take. None of this has any built in meaning and everything is ultimately governed by the law of cause and effect. 

One example of a different perspective that we can look at life upon is the already mentioned perspective of an interaction with God, where God speaks to us through the people and events in our lives. Another one is the energetic perspective, where ultimately everything happens on an energetic level and our physical reality is just one way of perceiving these energies. The latter perspective also opens up for there being potentially an infinite number of different layers to reality. 

But let’s get back to the perspective that is the topic of this post. If we look at everything in our lives as God speaking to us, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of taking our power back, and at the same time needing to hand this power over to God. Because we know that we have the power to change our lives by changing ourselves. We know that everything in our lives is there because of us, even though I think speaking of that we have chosen it is misleading. But we also know that in order for this change to take place, we need to listen to what God is trying to tell us and change ourselves accordingly. 

And what God is trying to tell us is not always easy to discern. And why doesn’t God just speak to us directly anyway? To this question I don’t really have an answer. But I know that every time I ask myself the question of what a situation is trying to tell me and I’m really, truly willing to listen to the answer, I get an answer. But it is far from always that I’m willing to listen, if I’m being totally honest with myself. Which I far from always am, if I’m being honest with myself.

I of course know that enormous tragedies befall some people and I’m not here to argue why this happens. I’m talking about the lives of most of us. And for me to realize that everything in my life is telling me something about the person I am and the actions that I have taken as a result of my character, feels tremendously empowering. But first it was kind of a bitter pill to swallow.