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.

Existential Despair / Depression part 2

We are thrust into this dream world. We pursue and avoid and manipulate in order to make the dream more comfortable or interesting. When we succeed we consider life to be good, meaningful, and important. Success keeps us immersed in the dream.

It is when things don’t go our way that we begin to wake up. We get an inkling that the life we’re living is meaningless because it’s just a continuous pursuit of temporary enjoyments, fraught with inevitable bouts of both mental and physical pain. Even when we succeed, the victory is short-lived, for we will tire of our gain and see something else we want, turning our satisfaction into desire once more.

Trying to reach a state of continual happiness via external gains is a futile endeavor because things do not always go our way, and even if we “win” every battle, the fact remains that we are always fighting battles, which makes it impossible to relax. Plus, eventually we will lose everything: our health, our wealth, our loved ones, and our very lives.

This perception can bring existential despair. We might see no point in existing at all because we are in a situation where we and everything/everyone we care about is doomed. This can take the wind out of our sails.

The emotional letdown caused by our insight is a predictable result of realizing that the dream is an absurd game that perhaps we would be better off not playing. People who have not yet begun to wake up consider this letdown to be a disease (“depression”) because they cannot understand how anyone can avoid being blindly immersed in the dream of social status, money, possessions, fashion, competition, and cheering for the local sports team. They do not realize that the “ill” person is aware of something that they aren’t, and that if they knew what s/he knows, their bubble would burst too.

Whether this life is “all there is” or a prelude to something greater, there is a lot of learning, growth, and enjoyment to be had in it. If we are not experiencing them, it is only because we have been searching for them in the wrong places. This is why the dream has not delivered what we want and we are depressed.

Depression, like all feelings, is caused by thoughts. The reason depression is so difficult to deal with, diagnose and treat is that while we feel the feeling, we are not aware that our thoughts cause it. Our erroneous thoughts have been swimming in our minds so often and for so long that either we don’t even notice them or we just accept them as true. They cause and perpetuate negative feelings such as depression, anger, resentment, and fear.

It is not merely the presence of thoughts that create feelings – it is the fact that we believe them. Thoughts are constantly appearing and disappearing in our active minds, so it would be extremely difficult to stop them, but we can realize how wrong some of those thoughts are so that when they appear they will have no power over us. For example, when the negative thought “Things will never improve for me” appears, we can question it. Do we know for a fact that things will never get better?

When they feel that the world has let them down because life itself has no meaning, some people turn to religion for a sense of meaning. They might consider this an inward process, similar to finding oneself, but it isn’t. It is just another form of searching outside oneself for validation or security. They pray to an external authority figure, perhaps reciting prayers or lighting candles or counting beads, in an attempt to get to a more enjoyable place or win the authority figure’s favor.

If life truly is meaningless, i.e., we have been thrust into a meaningless situation, then it is only the situation that is meaningless. It does not mean that we are somehow worthless, because it is not our fault if life has no meaning.

Perhaps we feel that life is meaningless because we are relying on externals for enjoyment or a sense of self-worth. Do we really need them? Can we not enjoy the awareness of our own existence? Do we have to own or do something worldly in order to enjoy being? Maybe we can simply rest in who we are and enjoy the bliss of self-awareness.

Aloneness

Why do so many people hate to be alone? Do they hate themselves? No. Well, at least not their true selves. When they are “alone” they are not really alone – they have a constant companion: their ego. It is a terrible companion, for it is what brings fear, desire, resentment, depression, and other negative feelings. That is what makes being “alone” so awful, and leads us to reach for externals such as television, food, alcohol, and Facebook: we are trying to distract ourselves from our nemesis. It is better to have no companion at all than an unpleasant one, so if we can cease the egoic thought pattern, we can then be truly alone, and we will enjoy it because we will finally have peace.

Awakening in a Nutshell

Awakening simply means to wake up from the self-created dream and regain the pure awareness we had so long ago, before our parents, teachers, schoolmates, and the media told us who we were. That untainted awareness is our natural state. We cannot force it to happen. All we can do – and indeed, what virtually everyone does – is create ideas that obscure it: the belief that we are a particular nationality, color, gender, religion, political position, social class, or job title, and that we must do or acquire certain things in order to uphold that image. Awareness is like breathing: we can’t force ourselves to breathe. We just breathe naturally. However, we can interfere with breathing by holding our breath. If we simply let go of our breath, breathing will happen with no effort on our part. Similarly, if we simply let go of our egoic ideas, awareness will happen without our trying to be aware.

Why We Give Up the Present Moment

Why do we focus on the future and the past instead of the present? It seems like we have a love affair with what was and what will (or might) be. We obsess about it. We regret the past, worry about or anticipate the future, and ignore the present. Why? What’s so bad about the present? It is only when we are totally immersed in the present that we can truly enjoy being. An engrossing hobby, a beautiful landscape, delicious food, a funny joke, a great song, and lying on soft sheets are all wonderful because we are completely involved in them, not thinking about anything. Why would we give this up? Why would we turn away from the bliss of the moment?

We – our true selves – do not turn away from the moment. The ego does. The ego is not a being but a thought process. A thought process can deal only with thoughts. The past and future are thoughts. The present moment isn’t a thought, it is an experience. There is no thought in experience. Only the true self can truly experience. The ego can only think about experiences. It thinks about how past experiences affected it, how future experiences will affect it, and how the present experience is affecting it. But it cannot immerse itself in experience because the act of experiencing anything is not a thought process. As long as we live via the thought process of ego, we will continue to think and thereby fail to fully experience.

The Importance of Things

When we allow something to bother us, it is because we give it more importance than it deserves. We ignore who we are and focus on a particular thing to the point where we make it our entire world. Without the light of our own being, external things seem to be very important. But if we are conscious of our true self, external things have much less effect on us. It can be likened to a candle. If there is no other light, it makes a big difference whether the candle is lit. But if there is light from another source, e.g., a light bulb or the Sun, then the candle ceases to be important.

We might observe the mountains-out-of-molehills behavior in others. For example, a child becomes upset when he loses a toy. We, from our more learned position, see how trivial this problem is. But the child cannot see that. Well, we still get caught up in mind-made drama of our own sometimes.

We are much bigger than any worldly object or event. No matter how big they might seem, we are bigger because we are the space that contains them.

The Need to Be Liked

The need to be liked stems from the ego. It is insecure and fearful, and needs others to like it in order to assuage its negative feelings. It worries that it isn’t attractive, smart, or likeable enough, so it acts or dresses in ways that it believes will garner others’ acceptance.

But even when others accept it, it remains insecure. Why? Because it knows that the ones who accept it are other egos, not true selves. Egos are by their very nature judgmental and negative. Their default mode is to reject others for being different. Acceptance must therefore be earned via actions, words, or appearance. That acceptance is never secure, because as soon as someone says or does something that egos deem unacceptable, they will reject him/her. Each of us is aware that we are interacting with other egos, not true selves, so we know that our “acceptance” can be taken away at any time. This cannot do anything but add to our insecurity.

The true self is the opposite of the ego. It always loves and accepts other true selves. Even when it is confronted with an ego, it looks past that ego and tries to find the true self behind it. If everyone were to drop their ego, then everyone would love and accept everyone all the time, so there would be no need for fear, insecurity, or putting on an act in an attempt to gain acceptance.