EVERYDAY LIFE

We live in this society as it's certain part, a small ant, carrying out our tasks, trying to be happy. We have dreams, fears, visions, likes, dislikes, responsibilities that all together form the whole “picture” of who / what -we think- we are. This picture, this persona of us is something we treasure and are proud of; try to make it better, make it look better, become efficient. From our point of view, we see ourselves as apparent, stable, definitive beings, each and everyone of us possessing a very special mind and ego. And we dwell on that mind and ego. why shouldn't we? It defines us, of course. It is who we are, isn't it. We dwell. On ourselves, on our things, gadgets, clothes, money, beauty, on other people, and so and so on. We fear. Loosing our belongings, our money, look, other people. We suffer. From the very fear we 'think' protects us from loosing our "world of surroundings". We are so used to this particular way of life, we don’t even realize how much it affect us on the most important level. From all those fears and dependence, we get depressed. “Our perfect world” is full of psychiatrists. But in many cases they don’t treat people suffering from mental illness, or something like that. They serve as “people you can talk to” for those suffering from extreme loneliness. For those so paranoid they can't actually entrust anyone from their friends, family, etc. For those willing to pay strangers to listen to them, instead of having real friends. I imagine there are lots of reasons preventing them to do so - fear of loosing face, looking weak, or being betrayed. This paranoia might not be unfounded, though. Real friendship, morality, or loyalty; values becoming more and more endangered in our society - perhaps even extinct - are being replaced with pretense, greed, megalomania... Therefore we must protect our privacy on daily basis, what sometimes makes us unable to talk to our friends about problems we need to solve, let alone ask them for advice. Yes, this privacy protecting measures might be necessary at some point, but seriously - can you indeed differentiate that thin line between protection and paranoia? Do you always think about who you can trust, or do you simply incline to trusting no one, hence cause yourselves more and more suffering from permanent and unneeded stress?

Descartes once said: “I think, therefore I am”. Someone else might say: “I fear, therefore I suffer”.

At some point, most of us simply forgot, what was the initial impulse, the goal why we started this cycle of everyday lives, forcing ourselves to end up just as money factories. we eventually forget, why we do all this. Why we get up in the morning, why we get dressed and go to work, why we collect money, try to live well… We may be a big factory, or a small one - that doesn’t really make a difference for this special point I’m trying to make. The important part is, that we fall into this stereotype of ours, making money, trying to feed our families, unconsciously giving up this initial goal of our quest through life. And what a quest it really is. We do it, because we want to be happy. Remember????? (I thought you might:-) )

We all protect our belongings, our bodies, houses, cars, bikes, computers or phones, knowing that if we don’t do regular maintenance, they will break down and stop serving us. Yet we often seem to forget that our mind and heart need maintenance same as anything else. In these crazy times when we have to live in an even crazier civilization, we usually let our selves to be just sucked in mindlessly, enjoying many of technological pleasures that later bring us anxiety as soon as we don’t have them near us. This anxiety is something like a noise to our heart that then helps our lives like a nail inside a muscle… Totally oblivious to its true nature and origin, we fight it by adding even more impulses, like TV, radio, senseless browsing, etc. Sometimes completely depriving ourselves of silence and peacefulness and making us even forget how great can be the enjoyment of simple things that were with our kind for many many millennia. We forget how easy and simple is for us to let go all the stress and fears from old times that is just piling up inside us for years, rendering us sometimes near neurotic… Instead we treat its symptoms by getting some kind of massage - which is usually a great thing, but when the purpose of it is for example “just relaxing” in an occidental pseudo-spiritually looking room that makes you feel like calm and far from your busy life, it rarely means something else than a different location of the problem. It means we have failed in managing our inner harmony, that our lifestyle and means are no longer our tools and servants, we are servants to our lifestyle and means. If we carefully probe and evaluate our present state of being and come to this conclusion, we have basically 2 options.
1: Continue what we’ve been doing, be stressed and then go relax in some “spa-ashram”, if the illusion of being peaceful is enough for us. However perhaps soon we may realize that we are doing something similar to adding another one to your already long list of prescriptions. It might become just another way of treating symptoms, yet leaving the original problem as it is.
2: Change our attitude and decide to get rid of the problem, not just the symptoms. This is paradoxically way easier than it sounds, yet a little bit hard to achieve by doing nothing. The thing is, once we are out of our ordinary environment, it’s so easier to forget about our stress, yet once we get back in it, we are masters of falling back to our old habits, meaning we will be back where we started. Therefore to become peaceful isn’t the biggest problem at all. The main goal of our endeavor is to stay that way. We need to change. To eradicate our idiosyncrasies, to stop caring about things that bother us and cannot be changed. True acceptance doesn’t mean fatalism or nihilism at all. it means that we don’t do futile things like feeling unease when we see or remember things that we don’t like, or being haunted by things that have happened to us in the past, that cannot be changed. Just set out for a new life. Start with changing what you can inside your heart, get rid of bad emotions. You’d be surprised how much powerful is for example “just” firmly rejecting an emotion in your mind. It’s the same mechanism like declaring war. Just say to yourself “I won’t feel this anymore” and you have to be 100% sure you will dissolve those emotions. In this case, it can get a little bit contra-intuitive. We often don’t really understand the real reasons behind stress. Namely, if we get depressed from lack of ice-cream, we can hardly win over this depression by getting ice-cream. For similar reasons spa-ashrams usually don’t work in the long run. If it makes you feel better, by all means, but be careful how you use it, because we all know what too much of ice-cream does:). I will leave the conclusion on you alone this time. And perhaps we will get back to it next time.

To be continued...

慧淨

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