Time

Some people say that time doesn’t exist. For those of us who have spent our lives by the clock, this can sound absurd. Well, let’s look at this thing we call time.

Have you ever noticed that when you wake up, it doesn’t seem as though time elapsed since you fell asleep? Or that when you’re engrossed in something, time seems to “fly”? Or that when you remember an event from long ago, it “seems like yesterday”? Where did time go? Can anything that is real just disappear?

We perceive time as a mental construct that represents the distance between events. For example, if we’re waiting impatiently for a bus or for a line of people ahead of us to move, we perceive time. The more we want a future event to occur, the longer time seems to “drag”. But, as described in the previous paragraph, on many occasions we perceive no time at all. So is time real? It seems that time depends solely on our perceptions, i.e., it has no reality of its own.

Viewing Ourselves as the Body

Our reality consists of all that we perceive: thoughts, feelings, and sensations of our bodies, other people, animals, trees, buildings, cars, the sky, etc.

We mentally separate reality into “me” and “not-me”. We assume our mind/body to be “me”, and everything/everyone else to be “not-me”. This does two things that cause fear and conflict.

First, because our bodies are small and subject to decay, we believe that we are tiny, weak, vulnerable, needy, and doomed. We believe that we will suffer and die without things that sustain our bodies, such as food, shelter, money, and social status. Even if we get them, we will eventually die anyway because our bodies will die, and since we are them, we must die too. The body is under constant threat, and so we believe that we are under constant threat.

Second, it sets up an adversarial relationship with everyone and everything. We must compete with others to get what we need, because they are after the same things we are, so they constitute competition. The world doesn’t easily give us everything we need, so we view it as a harsh, hostile place in which we must strive to extract what we need from it.

Viewing ourselves and our situation this way makes us fear annihilation, suffering, loss, death, and even other people.

The crux of the problem is that we assume that one small part of reality – our body – is us. This shrinks our sense of who we are from an expansive, eternal, peaceful awareness to a tiny, finite, frightened animal. Everything we say and do stems from this latter state: we compete, toil, worry, lie, steal, and focus so much on obtaining things that we don’t enjoy them.

Are we really our bodies? If you were to lose an arm, a leg, an eye, a kidney, or 50 pounds, would the real you change? Would you be “less”? Of course not. The same holds true for anything else that you might consider to be part of you, such as your money, possessions, reputation, or beauty.

Viewing ourselves as a body is stressful not only because it creates fear and conflict, but also because it requires lots of effort. We are constantly upholding the unproven assumption that we are the bag of skin that we ride through the world. When we drive our car, we don’t delude ourselves that we are the car, but we do this with our body. Since this idea is unproven, effort is required to maintain it, just like effort is required to maintain other unproven beliefs, such as religion and politics. And just as religious and political people often become upset when the self they’ve made out of their belief is threatened, we become upset when the self we’ve made out of our body, wealth and reputation is threatened.

Maybe if we let go of the notion that we are our body, we’ll stop creating all the emotional pain that accompanies it. In fact, maybe we should let go of the idea of self altogether. If we focus only on our sensations and perceptions, without the thought that “I am doing/perceiving this” or “this is happening to me”, perhaps we will experience peace.

Judgment

As you are probably aware, negative judgments, whether about yourself or others, feel unpleasant. Even when the ego criticizes others as a way of making itself feel superior, an inner contraction results. The discomfort might be interpreted as anger, depression, resentment, fear, or hostility.

Positive judgments can also cause contraction. For example, if you feel good about your appearance or possessions or accomplishments, then your good feeling is dependent on them. The implication is that without them, you would not feel good about yourself. This can cause an inner contraction, perhaps not as unpleasant as the one that results from negative judgments, but there is still a contraction.

Why is this so? Because judgment is always about the false self. The true self cannot be judged because it has no attributes that the mind can make into objects and then judge. The inner contraction that results from judging comes from the knowledge that a false thing is being judged and that the true self is being ignored.

All judgments are ultimately absurd, because they are a failed attempt to judge what cannot be judged.

You might ask, “Does this mean that we should just accept anything that anyone does, even atrocities?” Some acts are certainly unpleasant, and they should not be approved of the way we approve of pleasant acts. But let us not confuse the deed with the doer. We can acknowledge and try to prevent heinous acts, but if we judge the people who commit them, we poison ourselves with anger and resentment.

If the idea of not judging anyone seems absurd, that is your ego talking. The ego loves to judge, to use an unpleasant act as an excuse to diminish the actor, to define others in a very limited manner. For example, if a politician proposes a policy that the ego disagrees with, it will judge him as a “jerk” or an “idiot” based on that one act, completely ignoring everything else about him, such as his previous record, his devotion as a father, etc. This sort of blind, knee-jerk reaction is characteristic of the small, childish, weak, fearful self that is the ego.

We Are the One and Only Source of Happiness

We seek pleasure/enjoyment from the outside: beauty, music, food, sex, alcohol, drugs, entertainment, thrills, possessions, love, glory, etc. These outer-derived enjoyments are fleeting. We consume them, then they disappear, and the hunger returns. This can cause a desperate pursuit of pleasures in an attempt to satisfy the insatiable inner demand. We seek prettier sights, tastier food, better drugs, more exciting thrills, finer possessions, etc; or attempt to derive more enjoyment from the ones we have. But it’s a frustrating spiral because as soon as they’re over, we feel just as empty as before. Maybe emptier. 

The problem is that we start from an assumed position of joylessness and emptiness. We believe that we must be unsatisfied unless we constantly have something to occupy our mind. This creates a sense of dependency on and addiction to externals. We then chase externals in an attempt to fabricate good feelings. We always feel vulnerable because we know that whatever we’re enjoying in the moment could be taken away. No matter how much of anything we get, the best it can do is temporarily ease the constant sense of lack, and when it’s gone, we feel miserable.

Getting more or better externals will not make us happy because happiness, joy, enthusiasm, and love can come only from within us. They cannot be created by externals; at most they can only be triggered. Even without external things we can still have a wonderful happy feeling as long as we are in touch with our true selves.

It might seem that happiness comes from externals. After all, when we get a new possession, lover, etc, we feel elated. But if we feel unhappy without him/her/it, then our emotional lift is not happiness – it is a very temporary feeling of gratification that will wear off, and when it does, we’ll go back to feeling unhappy. A lasting feeling of well-being can come only from within, for then it will not be dependent upon externals.

The idea that we must have certain externals in order to feel good is the equivalent of saying that our natural state is one of need, boredom, or suffering. What a negative way to view ourselves! When we find our true selves, we feel naturally happy, regardless of externals, because happiness is what we are. When we do get externals, we enjoy the moment with them rather than desperately cling to them, and when they are gone we still feel happy, because happiness is a state of being, not a temporary emotion.

The Thinking Disease

The number one source of human suffering is thoughts. We concoct mental pictures of having bad things happen to us and not getting what we want. We regret the past and worry about the future. We fear, hate, resent, criticize, and avoid. We can’t enjoy the Now because we are too busy thinking about what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow.

Thinking is essential for steering our lives in positive directions. It enables us to build shelter, hunt/grow food, and invent many things that improve our situation such as medicine, transportation, septic systems, and electronics. But we overdo it. We keep thinking when we should be relaxing and enjoying the fruits of our labor.

Why do we think so much? Because that’s what we’ve been taught to do. We spend decades in school and at home learning how to think, calculate, plan, act, and react. We are conditioned to be mentally active most of the time, observing and thinking about life instead of being immersed in it. And the fact that thinking has helped us acquire things such as money, shelter, and transportation reinforces the belief that we must keep thinking in order to maintain or improve our lives.

Our constant thinking is sapping our joy. We think in order to create future enjoyment, but when the future arrives, we don’t enjoy it; we keep thinking in order to improve the next future, and so on. It’s like a hungry lion killing a gazelle, and then another, ad infinitum, without ever actually eating. Enough is enough. The only way to enjoy being is to not think sometimes. Just as muscles need rest between workouts, the mind needs rest between periods of thought. Our lives won’t fall apart if we spend a few hours each day in thoughtless leisure. 

The idea of not thinking might seem absurd or even frightening. If we believe that we are our thoughts, then we might be afraid to stop thinking because that would seem to annihilate us. But we are not our thoughts. Thoughts are nothing more than activities that our minds do, and it is thoughts alone that constitute the false self. Hence by not thinking, all we can lose is our false self. We then purely experience, with no thoughts to cloud things. Who experiences? Our true self, that’s who! So we didn’t cease to exist when our thoughts stopped. If we didn’t exist, then no experience would be possible!

How We Create Our Own Pain

Most of our suffering is self-inflicted. How does this happen?

It all starts with desire: we want something. Then we make a leap from desire to belief: we believe that our desire should be fulfilled. We “should” lose weight.  We “should not” eat that dessert. Someone “should” invite us to their party. Someone “should not” cut us off in traffic. The cake we baked “should” taste great. Our roof “should not” leak.

These beliefs are rigid mental constructs that we tell ourselves must not be violated, and that if they are violated, then that must be a horrible occurrence. So when someone cuts us off in traffic or our roof leaks, we react with emotional pain because we’ve already told ourselves that we must react that way. It’s premeditated.

The problem is not so much the life events that occur, but our beliefs about them. If events themselves caused suffering, then everyone would suffer equally from each event. But that’s not what happens, is it? Some people get very upset when someone cuts them off in traffic, while others don’t react at all. Why? The former people believe that other drivers must respect them by maintaining a certain minimum distance when passing them. When events go contrary to that, they still cling to their belief. “That jerk shouldn’t have gotten so close!” The latter folks are not saddled with such a belief, so there is no mental construct to be violated.

When people claim that such-and-such should or should not have happened, they argue with reality. It is an unwinnable argument because reality is what is. Period. It’s not necessarily what we might prefer. It simply is. The more we try to fight it, the more we torture ourselves. The only way to avoid this pain is to stop creating and upholding beliefs. Reality is to be accepted, not battled, because it’s a battle we can never win.

Accepting reality does not necessarily mean that we enjoy every event. Nor does it mean that we shouldn’t take steps to prevent or alleviate unpleasant situations. We do not enjoy the fact that our roof is leaking. Nor should we pretend to. But to insist that it “should not” leak is absurd.  It is leaking. Any insistence that it not leak is a waste of time and energy. Instead we should call a roofer. That is the sensible, less painful thing to do. We accept (not enjoy, but accept) that the roof is leaking and we know that water causes damage, so we get professional help in order to alleviate the current situation and prevent further damage. After it’s fixed we feel a pleasant sensation of relief, and we appreciate our non-leaky roof more than ever.

Desire is the root of suffering, and we make things even worse when we develop an entitlement mindset by concocting beliefs that we should get whatever we want. We have little control over the Universe, so let’s appreciate what we have and not focus on what we don’t have.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is not a thought process. It goes beyond thought. If we think, “I am thus-and-such”, that is not true self-awareness – it is us objectifying ourselves via thought. Self-awareness is awareness without thought. It’s very subtle and also very difficult to experience after decades of thinking.

Thinking is precisely what blinds us to the peace and joy that we are. Whenever we are anxious or depressed or angry, it is always because of our thoughts. In this state we lose our sense of who we are. This loss of self-awareness causes agitation. When we don’t think, we naturally return to peace and joy.

Meditation is one way that people try to become self-aware. There are many forms, but the main idea is to stop focusing on thoughts. This doesn’t mean that we must stop thinking altogether – that would be nearly impossible – but we can refuse to focus on them or give them credibility.

When you can relax into your being without getting caught up in thought, you can begin to become self-aware.