Vulnerability requires real toughness

In my past I used to put up walls around me. Me and my friends had a pretty rough way of speaking to each other and I definitely was one of the most active driving forces behind this jargon. I felt proud of not caring what anyone said to me. The positive side of this is that I can still take a joke and I don’t have to take everything that others say to me seriously. But the negative side is that this goes both ways. Just like I didn’t take in things that could hurt me, I didn’t talk about things that made me vulnerable either. 

When I started going through my real spiritual awakening, I suddenly found myself sensitive towards things that I previously would have brushed off as nothing. I had an initial awakening many years ago, but lost sight of it after a while. It became undeniable that something strange was going on first when I med my wife a little more four years ago and we started to have one strange experience after the other together.

But back to the main topic: vulnerability. I could suddenly not deny that others could say things that hurt anymore. Understanding this, I coul also understand that words can have real power. What I say can hurt. What we say to each other matter.

Now, I’m not talking about some politically correct nonsense, where we have to walk on eggshells around each other so that we don’t accidentally say something that can be interpreted as racist or sexist. I still believe that offence is taken and not given. And I believe that in this context we need to turn things around anyway. Turn things around in the sense that we stop demanding things from others and turn towards ourselves instead. We can complain forever about what others are doing to us and whether or not they are doing it on purpose. Or we can look at our own wounds, why certain things trigger them and how they cause us to say and do hurtful things. 

This is how we get out if this cycle of victims and perpetrators: we stop making others responsible for how we feel and open up to each other. Vulnerability is not the same as being whiny and weak. I was that for a while as well (and can still be sometimes), but this is not to be vulnerable in a positive, responsible way. But it’t easy to be vulnerable in this way when walls that one has built up around oneself during one’s whole life suddenly starts to crumble.

Vulnerability is about courageous trust. About knowing that others can use our vulnerability against us, but choosing to trust that they won’t. To accept the fact that some may and live with the consequences. Ultimately, as with so many things right now, it comes down to whether we want to live in survival mode or not. And in the times that we are living in, survival mode is inevitably going to turn our lives into nightmares. 

Trust and openness takes time to build and in the beginning many of us will get hurt. In a sense, this is a new type of battle. One that is the opposite of taking up arms together and going to war. Instead it’s about our individual, inner struggles and laying down our weapons and shields, both the literal and metaphorical ones. About giving others the chance of choosing not hurting us even if they can. 

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The journey to self-love

Self-love isn’t easy. Neither is it the narcissistic monstrosity that is promoter by our culture. That is the opposite of self-love. Our culture’s idea of “self-love” is about projecting an image based on pride and taking what we can from the external world.

Real self-love is about our insides. And let me right now confess that this is one of my greatest struggles. Why? Because I’ve done lots of things in my past that I’m ashamed of. Lots of things that I, at the time, thought that I could just bury afterwards. But the cliché, that we can never escape from ourselves, is true. We can pretend that our actions don’t mean anything to us till the day we die and not grow one millimeter. But the day that we truly start caring about ourselves and our lives, they will come back to haunt us. 

Therefore, self-love is about bringing all of our darkness to the surface so that we can forgive ourselves and let it go. Real self-love is not a happy-pill that we can take and instantly feel good about ourselves and our lives. It’s a bitter medicine that needs to be taken many times before it has any effect. Because in order to love ourselves, we first need to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives. We need to dare looking at ourselves and not shy away from what we find. 

What I’ve found going through this process, is that this is much like peeling an onion. And the more layers I peel off, the more hurt I find. I’ve thought that I’ve brought my most shameful aspects to the surface many times, just to discover that there is even more there.

But I think that I’m finally starting to get to the core of the issue. And it’s strange to see how all of this struggling and complexity was in some way necessary. But that it at the same time led to a simple end. Namely that at the core I just ensnared myself in a bunch of thoughts. Thoughts that have nothing to do with who I really am and that I’m free to either believe or dismiss. 

I’ve done lots of destructive things. But in my confused state I actually believed that I was doing something totally justifiable. And every moment is a new moment. I’m free to choose something better. And every time that I become aware of an unwanted thought, I can just let it pass. I know that my relationship with God, myself and other people, plus what I believe that I came into this world to do, are what’s important. And anything that is not in line with this needs to go. 

I don’t need to believe thoughts that run contrary to who I really want to be. Who I know that I already am behind all of the layers of ego that I am not. I already love this person. That which I cannot love about myself is an illusion.

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Getting clear on what I believe and stand for PART 4

I have come to strongly believe in openness and understanding. I believe that the truth is to be found in the Bible, first and foremost in the person of Jesus. But I cannot believe that all other teachings are false. This does not mean that I believe that everyone should believe the same things or that everyone is equally right. But I believe in the importance of unity among those of us that believe in something higher and that want a better world. And I believe that we can and must discuss our differences in an open, respectful manner. 

I know that something very strange is happening on the planet. That the world isn’t what it seems. I know that there are people that run the world from the shadows and that they don’t have our best interests at heart. Ultimately, I believe that these people are as misguided as anyone that does harm to others, albeit in a much more sinister and elaborate way than the average sinner. And I believe that the correct response to this is to build something better, be clear on who we are, live as authentically as possible, do our best to simply avoid what these people have to offer and turning the other cheek if we get attacked.

If we want to do all of this, I believe that it is crucial that those of us that truly want something good for the world an humanity, start setting our differences aside. That we start cooperating and listening to each other with open minds and hearts. Not because we need to change anything unless we want to. And certainly not so that we can find fault with each other’s views, so that we then can set them straight. If we truly believe in the rightness of our beliefs, we don’t convince others of this by talking. We show it through the people that we are, who we are becoming, the lives that we live and the lives that we are creating for ourselves. 

We need unity and not division if we want to be as strong as we need to be in the times ahead.

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Getting clear on what I believe and stand for PART 3

I know that we have so much more potential within ourselves than we have been lead to believe. We are not little pointless creatures that live meaningless lives where we have to grasp for every little pleasure that we can get our hands on, before we wither away, die and descend into oblivion. 

It doesn’t mean that we should always take ourselves dead seriously. But I believe that we should treat ourselves with a bit of dignity and respect. We were not meant to work jobs that we hate so that we can watch TV-series, play video games, eat junk food, and chase likes on social media on our spare times. Or pay off debts because of over-consumption. Or get drunk out of our minds and chase sex in the weekends. If this truly makes you feel fulfilled, then go for it! But if it doesn’t, maybe there is something better out there. I would say that this type of life, even if we live under the illusion that we are making free choices, is not a life that we choose freely at all. It's just stimulus response, stimulus response, stimulus response... Sensory gratification, instincts and habits.

Therefore I truly believe that it is time for each and everyone of us to take a look at ourselves. At how we choose to live our lives and what we choose to give our time and attention to. There are some tough times ahead of us. But those tough times are meaningful times. If we understand this we can find joy in our hardships. Not just because we know that they are leading to something wonderful, but because we know that they contain a meaning that was not so clear before. Because we know that we walk with God while we experience them.

We can still suffer even if we are pain-free and sometimes, struggling and dealing with hardships is what makes us feel most alive. And no matter what, if we try to numb ourselves and run away from our challenges, life will catch up with us eventually. It did for me. I choose to accept that and do my best with it. 

I know that I would gladly trade comfort and security for true meaningfulness every day. Even if it means that I have to struggle, feel negative emotions and take risks. I believe that everyone who truly and honestly thought this through would. 

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On pleasure PART 1

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I think that anything that is such a significant part of life as pleasure deserves some conscious reflection. After all, God gave us our senses and our ability to feel pleasure by using them. Therefore I think that it’s clear that God wants us to enjoy ourselves. So why shouldn’t pleasure be important?

When I was in my late teens to early twenties, I was a total hedonist. After that, I’ve tried many different approaches to pleasure, without thinking truly consciously about it. As with many other things, I’ve ran into different teachings and ideas, often without thinking about the philosophy behind them, and adopted them as my own. This series of posts is my first attempt at actually reach some clarity on this. 

Basically, as with everything, I believe that just the thing that I’ve been missing for so many years with regards to pleasure: doing things consciously and with intent, is what is most important if we want to sort this out. And “sort this out” is the right way to put it. Because yes, most people, including myself, have made a mess of their relationship with pleasure.

I believe that we need to seriously start asking questions such as: How do I want to feel pleasure? In what ways? What constraints do I need to put on myself? Why? 

Doing this is not a way to make life more boring or less pleasurable. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s about making our ways of feeling pleasure more refined, varying, exciting and better for us in the long run.

The "normal" is insane

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We pay huge businesses money to poison us with unhealthy foods and justify it by saying: “you have to live a little.” I’m not saying this to judge. I’ve struggled quite a lot with kicking unhealthy foods in my life and justified doing so in all kinds of ways. And until my mid twenties I was quite overweight. And besides, we do so many things out of habit without thinking about it and never question it. I’ve done this too. I probably still do, but since I do it unconsciously out of habit, I don’t know about it. But I try fo think about it, because even if I don’t dismiss everything about our culture, I don’t think that its values will bring us any kind of happiness either.

We accept a financial system where one percent ot the population has more than half the assets. We acquire debt so that we can, again pay huge corporations, to consume their products. Partially because we think that they are going to make us happy. But also partially because we constantly compare ourselves to others. We pay off these debts for years, while those at the top of the pyramid rub their hands together, living off of pushing these products to us, while we consume to chase happiness. And we spend most of our time and energy working so that we can continue being consumers.

We know that the cliché that the best things in life are free is true. Things such as spirituality, love, connection with other people, walks in nature and so on. And yet, if we look at what we prioritize, these show up pretty far down the list. Why, otherwise, would we spend a lifetime in debt so that we can own more stuff?

There is nothing new about these insights. On some level we know that it is so. But we don’t want to break free from it. Because change is difficult. Staying the same is easy, even if we do so at the cost of living with a constant dull, mental pain. 

I’ve just given a few examples here. And none of these examples apply to everyone or to everyone equally. What I want to encourage you to do, is to take a look at what you take for granted. What in your life do you truly value? What do you truly want? And what do you want simply because society and other people have told you that you want it?

Learning who I really am and how to act that way

A while back it hit me hard that earlier in my life, I lost sight of who I really was in trying to express my uniqueness, while I complained that others lost sight of who they were in conformity. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that it’s two sides of the same coin and that no one side is better than the other. I’ve written things about this before. And it is because I think that I truly have stumbled over something important here.

A standard response that you get from many people when we bring up questions about who we are is: “We know who we are, don’t we?” But do we really? Do our words and actions ring true when we interact with others? Do I really feel that it’s me speaking? Or is it a social mask, constructed from who I think that I ought to be? Made from who I want others to perceive me as? 

I used to be one of those people that said: “I don’t care what anyone thinks.” What I could have added was: “And I really really want everyone to know how much I don’t care what anyone thinks.” In other words, I did care. What I’ve learned is that those that say these things often are the ones that care the most. Often they are, just like I used to be, people that try to project a tough, rebellious image.

Jesus speaks of occupying and/or guarding one’s home on several occasions. One’s home is an obvious reference to one’s mind and one’s life. This, in turn means something very exact. What I mean is that I have noticed, both within myself and others, how often no one is home. The words that I and others say don’t really mean anything. It’s just part of a social game of expectations, appropriateness, perceived wants, needs and desires. There is no genuine connection. 

I want to bring this back to what I said in the beginning. Namely that when we don’t think consciously about who we are and who we truly want to be, not who we want others to perceive us as, metaphorically other characters move into our heads instead. We will let the world, other people, our unconscious reactions to the world and other people and all kinds of irrelevant factors that we are not aware of, shape us into something that we are really not.

I’m probably using a lot of text to say: Stop playing roles, find out who you really are and how to act that way! But I wanted to put this into some kind of perspective. 

The value of mystical experiences

Are mystical experiences just spiritual “kicks” that ultimately lead us nowhere? Or are they maybe an encouragement to keep going on our spiritual paths? Do they bring us closer to God in some sense? Do they have other functions?

Before moving on, I want to clarify that I don’t believe that mystical experiences are necessary for living a rich spiritual and/or religious life. We can live and grow with God through prayer, through consciously allowing God to be with us in our everyday lives or through meditation, for example, without anything extraordinary happening. 

There is a discussion to be had about what constitutes a mystical experience. It could basically be anything from an ecstatic union with God to the simple feeling that an everyday event holds some meaning beyond the actual experience.

In this context though, I wish to talk about experiences that constitute a significant shift, away from our ordinary way of perceiving life and the world. 

An interesting thought in this context, is that dr. Joe Dispenza writes in his book Becoming Superhuman, that mystical experiences alter our way of functioning, because they expand our realm of possibilities. Once we see that there are ways of seeing and experiencing that go beyond our normal state, they become in a sense part of our overall experience. They expand our idea of the possible.

Another writer, James Defranco, says that through these experiences we move ourselves out of our normal frames that we experience the world from, and by doing so we dissolve rigid thought patterns. What does this mean? When we start noticing that we do not just have habits in our outer lives, but also with regards to our inner lives, it’s easier to understand what this means. Our minds have habitual ways of functioning. And when something happens that brings us out of our normal ways of operating, it becomes easier to start thinking in novel ways and thus see things from new and more expanded perspectives.

I would also add that these experiences, while not necessary, adds encouragement and reassurance that God is with us. As such they should be treasured as the gifts they are. And I would see it as more or less a duty to use these experiences to help others in their spiritual lives. 

3 crucial pillars of following Jesus

Willingness, knowledge and ability. These are the three pillars of following Jesus that I’m going to talk about today.

It’s a given that you need to be willing to follow Jesus if we are going to do so, so this one doesn’t need much explanation. We have to think that there is no better ideal to aspire to and, with all our brokenness and flaws, do our best to do so. It’s an ideal that we can never live up to, but we nonetheless succeed if we do our best to follow it. I myself am far from perfect when it comes to this. I have loads of baggage that makes its presence known daily and taints my commitments. 

Next we need to know how. What it means to follow Jesus. We need to know something about what it means to do so. What did he stand for? What example did he set through the life that he lived? What did he teach? And what did his teachings mean? This last question does not always have obvious answers. What does it for example mean to turn the other cheek or to remove the plank from one’s own eye, before trying to remove the one in one’s brother’s eye. It’s easy to turn such teachings into no more than beautiful words devoid of any true meaning, if we don’t ponder their significance for our lives.

Can I badmouth other people and follow Jesus? What about judging them? What about being hateful? Whining and complaining about trivial things?

It might surprise you that I say “yes” to all of these things. It’s when we do them intentionally that we fail to follow Jesus. Before we make a firm decision to change, we unconsciously adopt lots of behavioral patterns. This means that we may unconsciously badmouth other people or judge them. And we often let our emotions get the best of us and make us do and say things that are not in line with following Jesus. If we do these things, we fail to live up to the ideal set by Jesus, but we don’t fail to follow him. We can be the worst person in the world and still follow Jesus, if we do our best to do so. We probably wouldn’t be. In all likelihood, the more we strive to emulate Jesus, the more we grow in our ability to emulate him. But if, for one reason or another, it doesn’t happen, we still haven’t failed as long as we can truly and honestly say to ourselves that we have done our best, with all that it entails.

This leads us to the third pillar: ability. How do we turn ourselves into the kind of person that is most capable of following Jesus? Here, I believe, comes the real difficulty. And I know that we are living hectic lives and that all of us don’t have the time or energy for self-examination and self-improvement. So we have to work with what we’ve got and trust that if, again, we do our best, this will be enough. I think that one crucial thing, which I talk about a lot, that we can develop, is present moment awareness. In other words, being conscious and present in the now, so that we know what is going on both on the inside outside. In this context, what this will lead to is that we become more aware of our own thoughts, words and behaviors. So that we notice when we for example judge or badmouth others. Or when we want to flee responsibility for our actions or the situation that we are in. 

In general, I believe that the ability to follow Jesus increases as our character develops. How often do you think about your character? I know that I didn’t think one bit of it for most of my life. Which has turned many aspects of my life into an uphill battle. At the core of this lies the simple but oh so difficult abilities to say no to ourselves and to make ourselves to things that we find uncomfortable. In other words, the ability to make ourselves live and act in a way that is in line with Jesus’ life and teachings. 

These are a few examples of what I believe that we can all work on and become better at. There are many others. It can be boiled down to, just like Jesus was in every way, strive to become the best version of ourselves that we can be. 

Getting clear on what I believe and stand for PART 2

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What I wrote in the previous post feeds nicely into the second thing that I stand for. Namely that we need to do our best, in all our fallibility, to emulate Jesus. To follow him and the example he set with the life that he lived. We of course all fall short of this ideal. But I truly believe that Jesus was the first perfect person in the world. One that lived free from sin. But I also believe that if one person manages to free him/herself from sin, that person will become like Jesus, no matter what he/she has done previously. 

A while back I wrote about how our lives are programmed by the world. And the thing is that there is a natural state that we can function from. And it is most clearly presented in the person of Jesus. Jesus walked fully with God throughout his life. You may debate whether the story about him is true or not. This does not interest me very much. We will always have a limited perspective of history and it will be harder and harder to discern facts from falsities the further back in time that we go. 

The important thing is that the story about Jesus is psychologically and metaphysically true. Psychologically because it tells us something about what the life of a fully functional person looks like. And metaphysically because it shows the perfect way of relating to the hidden laws that govern our being in the world. 

The way Jesus is portrayed, he lived with total love, kindness and compassion towards other people. And he lived in total obedience to God’s will. He accepted life fully, even up to the point of his painful execution. 

I don’t think that most people appreciate how radical Jesus’ message was. He was born into a culture of “might is right”. And if we look to the animal kingdom, this seems to be our natural state. This was the prevalent philosophy in the Western world. 

There have been other teachers outside of the West, such as the Buddha and Lao Tzu, that have proclaimed similar teachings. And I do believe that we have important things to learn from them as well. But I would argue that none of them embodied the perfect life. Only Jesus did. 

Some people have a problem with the idea of obeying God’s will. But what I’ve come to realize, is that we are so governed by forces that we don’t understand, that if we don’t freely choose God’s will, we give our will away to the world. This is what I will talk about in the next post that I will save for next weekend.