We are told
from the time we’re very young that we are of a particular color, gender, age,
nationality, political ideology, and/or religious persuasion. We believe this
lie because it gets pounded into our head during our most impressionable years.
We erroneously believe that we are
these attributes, so any threat to them is perceived as a threat to our very
self. This causes a compulsive need to defend them. For example, if someone
refutes our religious belief, we cause ourselves emotional pain by imagining
that we are being personally
attacked, and we rush to the defense by arguing or even committing violence.
All of this is
nothing more than thought. We use our mind to create a conceptual (false) self.
In order to keep up the belief that this false self is real (e.g., that we are
Republican, Democrat, Christian, Muslim, American, etc), we have to keep
feeding the idea. Our true self is empty awareness and peace; there is no
thought of being of a particular persuasion. But we pretend that we are
something else, and the only way to keep up the pretense is by repeatedly telling
ourselves this lie over and over. We do not have to be told what we are,
because anything real stands on its own. False things must be constantly fed
and trumpeted in order to give them the illusion of being real.
Our true self
is peace, but our thoughts fool us into believing that we are a limited, frightened
mind. We are not our mind – we are the awareness that perceives our mind. When
we believe that we are the mind, we
fool ourselves into believing that we are whatever gyrations it is currently
going through: fear, anger, resentment, regret, etc. We then convince ourselves
that we are suffering. When we see that we are not the mind, but the aware
presence that observes it, we can remain unaffected by it because we are no
longer pretending to be something we’re not.
Our true self
can be likened to space, which is unlimited and dimensionless. Consider the
space within a room. It seems to have a particular size and shape because the room
has walls, a floor, and a ceiling that contain it. That limitation is of the
room, not space itself, for the room is just one small part of unlimited space.
Similarly, our mind might contain a small area of awareness, but we are not
thus bounded. We are not the limited mind but the unlimited awareness of which
the mind is but a small part.
Or look at images
that appear on a screen. The images do not affect the screen. They only present
a temporary appearance. The screen is not the images. Imagine a screen
thinking, “I am the people, plants, buildings, and mountains that are currently
showing on me.” That would be absurd. How
equally absurd that we believe that we are the thoughts that appear and
disappear in our minds.
By pretending
to be what our minds imagine, we forget who we are. We might tell ourselves
that we are unhappy, or poor, or unpopular, or sinful, or angry, and we believe
it. We do not so much live as fantasize. We seek to “better” our situation, and
thus deny that there is any peace or happiness now. The very search is a
rejection of the present moment. This makes us actors in a tragicomedy.
