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.

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.