Discontent

Why are we always discontented?

The false self believes that it needs to acquire external things (possessions, accomplishment, admiration, thrills), so it derives its identity from a constant sense of lack, which produces desire and results in seeking. It thus needs a sense of discontent for its very existence. If it were to be completely satisfied, it would cease to exist. Discontent is its fight for life.

The vast majority of our time and effort is spent pursuing everything from money to sex to approval to victory. On those infrequent occasions when we get what we were after – cash, an orgasm, applause, winning a game – our sense of lack disappears. For a few moments we are contented. There is no desire and we are not pursuing anything. We experience joy and peace because the ego deflates and the true self is not obscured by discontent, lack, or desire.

Eventually the thought process of ego returns. It is, by definition, discontent, so it once again foments feelings of lack and desire. Whatever we were contented with just minutes before no longer satisfies because the true self is once again clouded over by ego. We then seek the next possession, the next relationship, the next problem to solve, the next pleasure.

Fandom

Rooting for a particular team is just one of the many ways in which the ego strives to create an identity or feel worthy. By associating with a team, it can pretend that it is somehow connected to the players and then ride their coattails to "victory" so that it can feel as though it has accomplished something.

The ego needs to fabricate a reason to identify with a particular team. It’s usually something flimsy such as happening to live or have lived in or near the geographical area that the team "represents". For example, someone from Maine might become a Red Sox fan because that team is associated with Boston, which is the closest city to Maine that any baseball team "represents". If there happened to be another team that "represented" Augusta Maine, then folks from Maine would root for that team and want the Red Sox to lose.

The true self enjoys simply watching a game. It has no preference for who wins because it does not need to derive an identity or a sense of self-worth from anything external.

The ego cannot simply enjoy a game because there would be no possibility of obtaining glory for itself.

With the possibility of "winning" comes the possibility of "losing". When the ego’s team loses, it experiences negativity. It will get angry or depressed because the team that it identifies with has lost, which triggers its feelings of worthlessness.

How Ego Causes Fear

The ego – the false self – is nothing more than a collection of thoughts. Those thoughts might be positive (I am smart/attractive/popular) or negative (I am stupid/ugly/unpopular), but they are still just thoughts.

What are thoughts?  Temporary, volatile wisps of energy. They have no substance. Thousands of thoughts arrive, grow, shrink, change, and disappear every day. Their very existence depends on a very precarious and fickle mental activity.

When we depend on such an insubstantial thing for our identity, we are keenly aware that our identity is always in jeopardy. This causes the fear of annihilation, and it’s why so many people are on edge all the time: they fear that the false self they imagine themselves to be could die at any moment.

And they’re right. The businessman could lose the deal. The athlete could lose the game. The socialite could fail to impress. This would cause his/her thoughts to change. Suddenly he/she doesn’t seem so shrewd, talented, strong, or popular. The fabricated identity as the shrewd, talented, strong, or popular person is gone. The false self has been annihilated.

What has been annihilated is not the true self, of course, but a thought. When one mistakenly believes that one is that thought, the loss of that thought brings another, painful thought: “You see?  You’re worthless after all.”

We live in fear of just such an occurrence if we define ourselves by our egoic thoughts. What is fear? Another thought. We are haunted by the thought that at any time we could be exposed as weak, worthless, unlovable frauds.

This is just a bunch of erroneous, destructive mental gymnastics. We fabricate an idea that we are some imagined thing and then keep up a constant, stressful act in order to uphold it, all the while feeling frightened that we will fail.

We are not a thought, and we don’t have to uphold a reputation in order to impress ourselves or others. When we stop generating these foolish thoughts, the fear that they once caused disappears.

We Are Not What We Think We Are

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.

The Judge

We all live with an inner Judge. It judges everything: us, others, the weather, and the fact that our soup is cold. It is functional in that it enables us to discern between things that might benefit us and things that might hurt us, as well as keep our behavior within limits that others will accept.

But left unchecked it becomes an insidious monster that creates constant negativity. It tells us that we’re not successful enough, not capable enough, not pretty enough, not strong enough, not thin enough, not interesting enough. It is closely tied with the ego, and is in fact referred to as the superego.

Like the ego, the superego is a thought process. We developed it during our youth as our parents, siblings, teachers, and schoolmates judged us by our actions, words, and appearance. They criticized, rejected, ridiculed, and punished us when they disapproved of us, and we learned that we had to look or act a certain way in order to gain their approval. We became fearful of stepping out of line and being ostracized by the herd. Over time we cultivated a mental judge that told us, “You must fit in this box or else you have no value.”

The concept of “value” is nothing but a mental fabrication. We use our or someone else’s behavior, physical appearance, wealth, etc to judge our/their “worth” as a human being. When two people are different, the Judge assumes that one must be “better” or “more valuable” than the other. This is absurd. We simply are; “value” doesn’t apply.

The assessment of a person’s “value” is a slippery slope that leads to an even stronger form of judgment: attack. The Judge criticizes either ourselves or others for being the way we/they are. Adjectives such as worthless, incompetent, stupid, lazy, fat, and weak are used as the Judge attacks. This is precisely what causes our negative view of ourselves or others.

So, we start out judging, which is good because it enables us to steer our lives in positive directions; but this morphs into attacking as we label ourselves or others as bad, and this creates negativity.

The Judge persists because we continue to believe that we have little self-worth. Every time we fail to say or do something perfectly, it reinforces the notion that we have little worth. Even when we succeed at something, the resulting good feeling doesn’t last long because all we’ve done is temporarily appease the Judge; we still believe that we are inherently flawed so surely we will fail in the future.

If we can focus only on events and not the idea of “value”, we can avoid attack and all the painful emotions that accompany it. For example, if we do something that has an unpleasant result, we should simply acknowledge that such behavior is not conducive to happiness and refrain from doing it in the future. But if we assess that we are “stupid” or “worthless” for behaving that way, we will experience painful feelings.

One reason the Judge is able to torture us is that we don’t realize that it is attacking us. We believe that it is only acting in our “best interests” and that it is always right, so we believe its harsh criticisms. If it tells us that we are inherently flawed, we believe it. We see ourselves as the problem. We then feel contracted, depressed, and sapped of energy, because we believe we are defenseless.

When we realize that the Judge is attacking us, we will see that the Judge is the problem. It is making erroneous assumptions about our “self-worth” (a concept that has no reality) and launching an unwarranted assault on us. Only when we realize that there is an enemy can we defend ourselves. We can then ignore the Judge’s shrill proclamations that we are flawed or worthless, because we know that they are wrong. Sure, we might have done or said something that had an unpleasant result, but it’s not because there is anything wrong with us; we simply didn’t possess the necessary information at the time. If we’d had that information, we would have behaved in accordance with it, because we are intelligent and capable.

Some people try to overcome negative thoughts with positive ones (affirmations). The idea is that if we can replace negative thoughts with better ones we won’t think negatively anymore. The problem with this is that while we might force ourselves to have certain positive thoughts, the negative ones are still there. That is, we haven’t removed them but merely placed artificial ones on top of them – kind of like putting on make-up. The negative feelings will therefore continue.

Thoughts cannot be “beaten” with other thoughts. The only way to eradicate thoughts is to not think them. So, don’t judge yourself (or others). Have no concept of good or bad, worthy or worthless, successful or unsuccessful. Just be. This might sound difficult, but we do it all the time when we are engrossed in an activity such as work, a game, a sport, or even watching television. During these times of involvement, the mind is too occupied to generate judgmental thoughts, so we have no concept of being good, bad, smart, stupid, productive, or useless.

The next step is to be nonjudgmental even when we are not busy. We can do this by simply relaxing. Don’t try to not think. Just relax. Make no effort. This won’t stop our racing thoughts right away because they are still moving along from the momentum they’ve gained, but over time they will lose momentum because we’re no longer fueling them, and as a result they will diminish.

The Judge has been a thorn in our side for a long time. We won’t get rid of it overnight, but realizing it’s there and how it sabotages us is the first and most important step in breaking out of our enslavement to it.