I had a new moment of lost again and realized something that I wanted to share with you. We find ourselves in a moment of pain or fear and battle with it in that moment. What we battle with are the very things that keep the battle going. We pretend to not be in fear, we tell ourselves "Im smart, im a good person, im good looking, im happy", and so on. But there is a little thought every time from the depths that says the opposite. "Umm, your not very smart or clever, your not really worthy enough to have an opinion, your ugly, that person was right about you." We attempt to pump ourselves up to feel better about ourselves and it only serves to pull us down. That is our weapon. The fear is not gone, in fact it grows more powerful. The weapons you used against the fear were given to you by fear! This interaction of light and dark forces inside of ourselves is like a vortex pulling you in. Perception is creating the experience.
In the moment of feeling lost I realized inside of my mind existed a constant jumble of emotions and thoughts that were conflicted. I remembered what I have said and what others have said to me when feeling lost; "Where do i start?" How does one start to discover freedom in a prison?
Seeing that fear is in controll changes everything. Once you see, you have begun to change your relationship with it. To start seeing you must become observant and stop yourself and see what is driving you. Guy Finley calls this 'stopping the first response'. The first response is a mechanism in us that reacts right away. You might say something, hit someone, make a joke, kick something, watch a movie, pull grass out of the ground, jump onto a computer game and start killing things. We dont see that we hurt people through this mechanism. Someone says something to you and your first response is to say something and you see their face change or their tone change. You might see that you have just hurt that person because you are in pain. We are using fears weapons once again and we dont even know it. You stop yourself when you get that urge and you see what is asking for you to do that. Sometimes you do it anyway but you stop yourself the next time because you glimpsed it a little. Realize that when we are doing this we are answering fear. If we truly want to become free then we must change our relationship with fear.
What we need to do after we see is to learn to stop feeding it power. Let go of needing to fight. We seem to find ourselves minutes, weeks, years down the road, completely conflicted and have no idea about true freedom anymore. We are lost in the prison of our mind. We have fed it so much power through the war inside of ourselves that we cannot see the light of day.
What helped me to come back to the now and let go of the conflict was to first see it and then to realize that it would pass me by if i just let it. Its a strange thing that we see a fear come up and we stand in front of it and say "Hey you! Fear, I don't like you. That's right, your just pain and suffering and Im gonna fight you." We dont realize that in this very moment we are feeding a fire and asking for more. It wants to pull us down and we participate in it! Of course we must do this in order to learn. The problem comes when we never give up on the battle. We fight that battle till the end of time because that's what we think we are meant to do. We actually start to identify with that feeling so much that we cant fathom it not being there. Then where do you start? Where do you start when there is no other reality to experience? You have already decided that this is it. Why try? So you keep fighting, living in misery. Letting fear tell you where to go and what to do. We become stale in that life because we don't know how to move into new areas. We actually start to live in a world of Hell.
Ignorance is the jailer in our prison. Ignorance is what digs the hole that we fall in to. Ignorance is a black hole that sucks in all light. To live that divine life you must accept that you are subject to this. If you do not admit your in pain, that you have fear then it will never change. If you can see your in pain but instantly ask yourself "is this really the answer or just some guy tooting his own horn". Realize what is saying that inside of you! That's fear giving you a weapon to fight off more pain. Because the only way to truly become free, is to let yourself be free. Only then can you change it all.
Lets jump to a matrix metaphore. If your life is the spoon, and you are attempting to control your life (bend the spoon) through your doing and thinking, then you will never bend the spoon. Its impossible. It will only cause you more and more pain. Try to realize the spoon doesn't need to be bent by you. Realize the hole that your in is not really there. And the prison doors are wide hope for you if you would simply let yourself be in a new moment, unknown to you previously. We seem to lack faith in those dark moments. In the bible jesus walked on water, the did this simply through faith. If we look at that story as a metaphore you can see the same thing we do in our lives.
Peter and the deciples are in the boat and jesus appears to be walking on water. Peter takes Jesus' hand and is walking on water himself. Peter sees a wind coming toward him, becomes scared, and falls into the water yelling "lord save me!". Jesus takes his hand and helps him into the boat. They tell Jesus "You truly are the son of god". You can start to see some more sense in that story when you put yourself in the place of the characters.
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