Under Construction

Good Morning,

Most of my posts this week have been about happiness, unhappiness and the root of their causes. You may be starting to understand that in most cases we are the biggest influence on how we feel. You may not be comfortable with that thought, you may think I did not ask for this, or did not cause that. If you look closely though you will see that in the center of almost every incident of disappointment, desire, fear or anxiety is a core of you. . . your desires, your expectations, your way of viewing and dealing with the world.

Intellectually, this situation is not easy to understand, but I suspect all of us actually have some innate awareness of the problem. This is one of the great secrets of life: each of us individually experiences this sense or feeling that something is wrong with us. Growing up is learning to pretend along with everyone else that you are OK and they are OK. A great deal of social interaction is about reassuring each other and ourselves we're all really OK, even though inside we feel we're not.

Why is this? The most common cause is what I refer to as a "constructed" concept of "self."  Why does this make us so uncomfortable? Well most of us have constructed ideas about ourselves. This sense of self is really nothing more than our habitual ways perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting. That's all. Those processes interact with each other and give rise to our concept of being a self separate from other selves and other things. If we strip away these constructed layers like the layers or an onion when we get ti the end we find nothing. There is no hard core, seed anything else at the center. . .there is nothing. AND WHAT"S WRONG WITH THAT? NOTHING!

The basic problem is that we have been taught to have a high self esteem and we don't like being nothing, after all a gaping whole at ones core can be quite distressing and thus the dirty little secret that makes us all go around thinking something is wrong starts to reveal itself! Another way to state this is to say that our nothing-ness means our constructed sense of self is ungrounded, so we are perpetually haunted by a basic sense of unreality and insecurity. 

So what do we do when we start to realize the true nature of ourselves? Many of us go back and forth, usually bothered by our sense of lack, but also occasionally experiencing our emptiness more positively as a source of spontaneity and creativity, like athletes do when they are "in the zone." The point is,nt to get rid of the "self", that's not possible. Nor do we want to get rid of the sense of self. Rather, what we work toward is a more permeable, less dualistic sense of self. To be more aware of and more comfortable with the true empty nature of the "self" we have constructed over the years.

Whenever I get caught up in my own views and my own constructed perceptions I recall a very powerful little proverb that snaps me out of the delusion and frames my moment: The Window we look out of becomes the frame in which we're displayed.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Peace and Love, Jim