Tag: liberation

How to be free from negative feelings about yourself

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A brief journal on 2022-03-03

I was honest with my manager today about my lack of productivity and my feelings of self-doubt surrounding one team member’s seeming disappearance and another’s illness*.   I am wondering if I am somehow driving them crazy.   I know this is insane but I still entertain the thought.   I have PTO tomorrow so I will get some down time.

*they are both ok

The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:

It is important to know what you are and what you are not.  You have a heart that pumps blood, yet you are not the heart nor the blood.   You have lungs that breathe air, yet you are not the lungs nor the air.   You have a gut that digests food,  yet  you are neither of these.   You have a thinking mind that thinks thoughts.   Remember this,  you are neither the thinking mind nor its thoughts.  The effects of the thoughts that you observe the mind thinking include feelings of guilt, shame, anger, and fear.   You are not these feelings that you have observed being felt.   As a result of these feelings,  you may become depressed, perpetuate unloving thoughts,  feel uncompassionate, selfishly withhold joy, and act in an unpeaceful way.  This is not you nor has it ever been.

Know now that you are not these thoughts nor the effects of them.  The egoic system is a clever prison that offers no escape.  It hides the very fact that you are not trapped nor does confinement exist in reality.   By releasing our attachment to our unloving thoughts we can begin to realize freedom.   By letting go of our aversion to the effects of these thoughts we will forgive ourselves and embrace compassion for others who can also be forgiven.   We will see that our negative thinking resulting in feelings of apathy,  anxiety, and self-doubt are only projections of an illusory system.  There never was a prison and we have never been trapped in this pain and suffering.  It is only a story that we thought and felt was real.

I make these promises to you.  Once we realize these delusions for what they are, true reality can be seen.  Complete love and care for ourselves and all others has never been denied to us.   An understanding of the distress we all feel as a result of identifying with this false story of the thinking mind makes it possible to give forgiveness freely to everyone that has been a victim of its flawed fantasy.  The ability to connect and share freely with others the joy of being our true Self and an understanding of the reality of peace which exists without limit will become apparent.   This has always been available to you as a light that shines constantly and can never diminish.  It has been here for you eternally and will never be denied to you.  I will wait patiently through all time until you are ready to accept this truth and partake freely in the love that has always been offered to you and all others.  This is my promise.

Allowing compassion: How do I overcome the desire to remain uncompassionate?

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The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:

True compassion is not limited or controlled.   It is not directed towards one side, tribe, or nation and denied to another.   True compassion is felt equally for the poor person and the rich person.   It is felt for the attacker as well as the victim.  The reality in this world is that we all suffer.   It is the egoic mind that perceives variance in suffering and even believes there are those who do not suffer.  To believe an attacker is not attacking due to their misconceptions and unskillful lack of practice is to believe in a  delusion.  Without suffering,  without fear there can be no attack.

To understand this more clearly,  be alone.  Go into nature alone and rest, comfortably sitting.   Think of only your breath feeling the sensation as it enters the body and leaves the body.  We do this to clear our mind of thought.   As thoughts arise, send them off gently and without contempt.   Remember,  it is the mind’s nature to think thoughts,  it is not to blame or be chastised.   You may imagine a stream and allow the thoughts to float away on its currents;  you may imagine the wind allowing the thoughts to rise up and become peaceful clouds.  Return again the breath after releasing the thoughts and celebrate the joy of silence.   Be with me here and I will help you feel compassion for everyone and everything.

It is in understanding that all suffer in this world that we can lay a foundation for compassion that can be practiced and taught.   Even as your mind resists and demands to not give compassion to the unworthy,  I am here to proclaim that it is given.  Don’t worry if you find this difficult, you will eventually come to this understanding even if it takes many lifetimes to do so.  It would be better to start now and be free from the task of playing judge and enforcer for the mistakes of others.   It is a job I would not have for you and you must let go if you are to be free from the prison of your suffering.   To learn to give compassion to all equally is to learn the true nature of your existence and that of others.  Hear me now when I tell you that we are one in the same.

Caring for others: What can I do to ease suffering and help others to grow?

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The best way to affect change in the world is to love and forgive everyone.  It is a common belief that the ego’s desires for the future can be made reality through prayer and visualization.  The impossibility of this becomes apparent when we realize the natural variations present in each individual instance of the ego.  A better way to bring about a positive difference in the world is to express loving care for each being encountered and accept the current state of affairs as they are.

What does it mean to love and forgive everyone?   Understand, this does not mean we say yes to every proposition that is posed to us.   This does not mean that we endorse or enable unskillful behavior in others.   What this means is that we express a true feeling of loving care towards each being as we recognize their struggle to find meaning and function in this world.  As you are painfully aware,  this world does not offer an easy path to follow.  Recognize and acknowledge that each being you encounter faces the same dilemma.   Even those you may view as the most heinous degenerates are, in fact, searching for love and understanding in their own way.  The variety that exists in the very nature of the ego mind ensures that the resulting abundance of observed behaviors will include such undesirable demonstrations.  Do your best not to lay blame and pronounce judgements on your unskillful brothers and sisters as they struggle to find their way in this world.

We must care for those who fail, we acknowledge their pain and suffering, as we do our best to help them along by sharing our personal experiences in hopes that they may improve their ability to navigate the complexities of this existence.   Some beings will naturally pose a threat to the safety of others and should be secured and treated as a dangerous element.  As it is now, it will become increasingly apparent in this world that imposing cruel punishments for angry and violent behavior is ineffective and a detriment to the advancement of society.  The administration of institutionalized cruelty helps neither the victim nor the perpetrator to find freedom from the painful shackles of the ego.  When we begin to treat all others in a way that supports their growth and the realization of the joy of peace,  this world will benefit in astonishing ways that will highlight the failures of previous generations in a valuable and impactful way.  Recognize the timelessness of the following statement:  “Just as we may currently look back at the failures of past generations and gasp at the insane conclusions and obvious fallacies; future generations will look back upon the current era and make the same assessment.”   The continuing revelation of peace lies before us, know this to be true.  Do not be discouraged by the day-to-day happenings that seem to hasten its arrival.   The passing of a lifetime is but a drop of water in a deep ocean of experiential existence.

Mastering the act of forgiveness: How to stop perceiving forgiveness as a chore and to begin to understand it as a tool of liberation

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Notes on the day for 2022-02-23:

Many meetings today, stressful.  I started eating too early in the day and ate too much.

The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:

Do not think of forgiveness as a chore.  Do not think of forgiveness as something that must be done.   Forgiveness is an opportunity to be free.  It’s an opportunity to drop the bonds of anger and fear and allow ourselves to commune with our true nature.

The first step in forgiving others is to learn to forgive ourselves.  When we have feelings of guilt or shame,  we can recognize that these stem from anger and resentments that we have towards ourselves.  For example,  if we were to lose our temper and yell at someone or strike out at them,  later we may feel guilty or ashamed of this behavior.  If we were to break a promise to someone and misbehave,  to do things we promised not to do,  we may later feel guilty or ashamed by this.  Guilt and shame are resentments we hold against ourselves.  These feelings are driven by judgments we take upon ourselves and sentence ourselves to.  They stem from the fear-based thinking of the ego.  Guilt and shame are no more than an ego trip that we impose upon ourselves.

We must recognize the unskillfulness of our actions.  They may be things we did that we wish we hadn’t or they may be things we vowed not to do but did anyway.  The subsequent feelings of guilt and shame cause us suffering as a result.  When we recognize the unskillfulness of the ego mind,  we put into perspective the true cause and effect of this unskillfulness and suffering.  It is the ego mind’s inability to love without measure and its desire to control love in a selfish way, to attain more of what it wants and destroy that which threatens it, that is the root cause of its unsatisfactory manifestations.  This attempt at measuring love is also a measurement of unlovingness.  When we are unloving, we suffer through guilt and shame.  When we recognize this, it becomes easier to forgive oneself and be free from this pain.

Once we have mastered the act of self-forgiveness we can apply this to the unskillfulness and suffering of others.  It may be someone close,  someone we love or it may be a distant figure,  a well known person or politician.  The relationship does not matter,  if we can recognize the behavior of others and their unskillfulness and then recognize the suffering and dissatisfaction they experience as a result,  we can recognize in them what we recognize in ourselves.  Just as we had judged ourselves and then were freed through forgiveness.  We can now see equivalence in these judgments.  Just as our unlovingness towards one’s self causes suffering,  our unlovingness towards others causes the same suffering.

You may respond,  “But my actions are not the same as theirs,  the actions of the others are far much worse than the unlovingness that I exhibited”.   This is understandable as the world in which we exist is one of measure and degree.  Others are compared and deemed better or worse based on our subjective judgment at the moment.  It is important to recognize that unlovingness is the same, whether we witness it in ourselves,  we witness it in others,  or we create it from fantasies in our mind.   We may perceive differences in the form of unlovingness,  but in truth, there is simply no difference.  The cause is the same,  the ego mind’s flawed design, its desire to control and apportion love.   When we recognize this equivalence and cast away the perception of difference as delusion, we can forgive others as we forgive ourselves.  This is how we can be free, this is how we can know the peace which transcends all understanding that has been spoken of.

Letting go of misery: How to free ourselves from the irritations of this world and realize boundless love

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Journal of: 2022-02-19

Thoughts for this day:

Slept in and found it difficult to get doughnuts for a friend this morning.   We took the dog along for a visit and at the last minute he jumped in the front seat and trampled them a bit.   All was well though and I spent much of the remainder of the day resting.   I don’t know why I put off writing as I find it enjoyable.   I find sleeping enjoyable too and I put that off as well.   I’m too tired to put much thought into why.

The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:

In the heart of the real Mind we find the cause of all that is in this world.   A simple question must be asked first… Why do you insist on finding fault with everything that is observed here?  There is no fault that will justify this tolerance for continuous misery.  And there is no misery that exists in reality.  That which you observe to be wretched and undesirable shares no difference with what you covet the most.   They are simply two points on the same spectrum,  a spectrum that, even as a whole,  is completely fabricated and only exists to examine a possibility that has already been resolved as pointless.

Make no mistake,  the beauty that you see in this world is admirable and that is to be acknowledged.   Radiate as much love, give as much compassion, share as much joy, and rest in acceptant desireless peace with the beings who have architected this world just as you would with your dearest friends.   There is not a single being in any aspect or level of existence that deserves pointing a finger of judgment at.  If you search my open heart you will find only acceptance there and never rejection regardless of role or lineage, regardless of history or perspective,  regardless of position or connection.   Each being is but a part of the greater whole.   I cannot deny love from any lest I deny it from our sacred Self. 

In this fact you will find what you long for, the satisfaction for the emptiness in your heart.   It does not need to be filled with want,  it needs only to be given freely without desire or direction.   Imagine a capacity within you to love this way, generously and without control and you will understand the true nature of our divine Self.

How relinquishing our desires can free us

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I wrote this about the day:

I started out the day meeting with friends from my Sanga,  “listened” to John Cage’s 4’3”.   I thought about the Zen monk who taught a single word of Zen by just raising a finger and enlightening a student.   I shared this with friends.   What a powerful idea,  to play music without the sound of music or to teach using a word unspoken.   Both of these methods can “trick” the mind into awareness and hopefully, at some point, the observer becomes aware of the awareness and the process of enlightenment continues.   Instead of viewing this as a path towards realization,  we can also see it as the falling away of egoic identity.  Each goal is the same;  as the false self put forth by the cognitive mind dissolves, realization of enlightenment becomes more apparent.   This can be a long and arduous process for the householder who still clings to the vestiges of the manifest objective self out of fear of losing one’s grip on what has been attained or what is yet to be acquired.   Yet this path too,  the path of desire must be fully examined before we can conclusively say that its end is always the same: fear, suffering, and unsatisfactoriness.

The following I believe to be a teaching from my inner guru:

Another approach is to simply lose oneself to the truth of desirelessness.  This has always brought with it a sense of liberation beyond that which any coveted object has ever relayed to the possessor.  Our brother knows this to be true yet still clings to the idea of creating a better something or destroying that which hinders progress.  Neither formation nor eradication is necessary to find our way home to the peace where we reside.   Simply know that you are there and that nothing is necessary for you to share in the joy of this moment but your willingness to let go of the yoke of what is.

In our seemingly endless quest for that which is better than this, we will find ourselves always falling short of the goal that we desire.   This undefined pinnacle,  a precipice of great price, will never be as we expected nor satisfy the ego’s desire for more.   Put away the tape measure of the mind and come and be at peace with me.   I have never wished a punishment upon you nor evoked condemnation of your being to suffering of any length.   Length itself is but an illusion and you, my child, are always welcome at home where elements in dimension and degree are met only with a joyful laugh and sympathetic knowing.  That knowing is the boundless love that I would share with you in this very moment and that moment is now.