Beliefs in Current Events

After my entry yesterday I did what I do best, I pretended that pain isn’t happening to me. After I reckoned with what is hurting me I failed to rumble with it. Today though! I woke up prepared, I know exactly which thought that I need to avoid. This reminds me of when I quit smoking. I knew exactly which cigarette I needed to cut out of my day to break the chain. It was the first one, the cigarette that I had with my coffee. I would spend the rest of the day chasing that high so I knew that if I did not light one up after my cup of coffee I would not need to smoke for the rest of the day. Now if I don’t let these thoughts about my previous employers poison my mood I, in theory, should not be reduced to filth. It is still crossing my mind but I am not giving it any fuel. My enthusiasm and motivation, in theory, should not be snuffed out today. However, just like when I took cigarettes out of my habit loops I had to put something else in. So today, I have to replace that toxic thinking with something better. With cigarettes, I replaced it with lemon water so today I want to replace these hurtful thoughts with uplifting, hopeful ones. Is this guy really implying that negative thinking is a habit? Yes! Is he really going to pass up an opportunity to be a victim? Bingo! Being a victim has never gotten me anywhere. I will need luck on my side here though.

I am trying to remember what my dream was last night. All that I can remember is that I was back in elementary school. It was a happy dream. I wonder if it was some nostalgia moment that I was experiencing? Nostalgia is just a time when you knew your place. I watched Sadhguru`s interview on Impact Theory yesterday and I think I had this dream because of something he said. He explained how it saddens him to hear people say “I was raised this way etc” because humans are not cattle. He says that humans are supposed to be cultivated. Children are not legacies, they are an individual life with their own unique possibility. They need not look like us, act like us, talk like us, think like us… they need space, love and support to find answers on their own. That we need to cultivate a child to know that intrinsic intelligence and being human is more important than being influenced by heritage. Intrinsic intelligence finding its own potential is more important. He explained how when we see pictures of ourselves as children we are full of life and as we grow you can see that life gets smaller and smaller. What is doing that? Beliefs. Beliefs are just conclusions which are like death on itself because we close the door on something. The more conclusions you make the less alive you become. They call it knowledge but that’s not knowledge, it’s just conclusions that we are drawing about everything. Today, we do not even know one atom in its entirety. We know how to use it but we do not know what it is. 99% of that atom is space and we do not know what’s in it. 99% of the entire cosmos is empty and we don’t know what’s in it. Humans know how to use everything on this planet but we don’t know a damn thing about anything.

What are the instruments of our experience? We only know that we are here because we can see, hear, taste, smell and touch. When we sleep, we do not know that we are here. Our experience is outward bound. We forget to look inward. It’s easy to see what is wrong with other people but it takes a lot of observation to see what is wrong with yourself. That level of keeness of observation is what is missing in most people. That is what we need to cultivate.

Sadhguru knows that letting go of dogma and beliefs is not simple. We define ourselves by our beliefs because without them we don’t know where we belong. To live here without belonging to anything but still be involved with everything takes a lot. Most people just belong but don’t get involved. They don’t have to make a conscious effort to involve themselves because they simply just belong to whatever it is. Belonging, believing and identifying simply means that you found a way to sleep through your life. He explains the term sleep in this context to the same one you use when you say that you put an animal to sleep. You believe this, I belong to this, I’m identified with this means, it’s sleep. You’re partially dead, you made conclusions that took away the life that bubbles within you. “Not knowing” something is not a notion, it is the only fact. You really do not know a damn thing about this existence. When the lights are on you can whistle and walk around a building wherever you want. If you turn the lights off and make it pitch dark where you can’t even see your own hand, will you take every step with most alertness? Yes. So will you be fully awake or asleep? Awake because you don’t know where the next step is. To live like that, in the dark is the natural way to enlightenment. Everybody assumes and believes because it is comfortable but again, beliefs are just assumptions of things that we know nothing about. We either know or we do not know so where does belief come in? It’s just when you pretend to know something you do not know and you can’t believe something all by yourself. That’s why believers are in groups. Seekers are the ones who are alone.

Seeking is not something we need to cultivate, it is intrinsic to human intelligence if you do not bullshit yourself with beliefs. We naturally seek but people want to seek with the comfort of belief. They want to be in a belief system and then seek. He does not view this as an awful thing. He compares beliefs to a treadmill. When you’re on a treadmill it is good exercise, you tone your muscles and if that’s what you want to do then that is perfectly fine. However, a treadmill is not something you would walk on if you were trying to go somewhere. Having beliefs is like being in a rowboat but tying your boat to the pier. You won’t go anywhere but if you untie it you won’t even have to row. It will just go.

I think his message here resonated with me because I have reopened some of my old scars to heal them better. I am rumbling with my identity. How we separate each other with labels. You are this in that body, I am this in this body. Society identifies me with various labels that I don’t fully understand and I want to dissociate myself from them… or accept them? It’s confusing. I just don’t want to walk through the rest of my life feeling like I have a stain or that I am a stain. I am a gay First Nations man to society but to me, I am just myself. If that makes any sense. I just feel like I am realizing now that a lot of these “beliefs, belongings & identities” have been making me mentally constipated. Like, how am I suppose to open my life up if my cup is already full? I don’t even know what I am talking about anymore. I’m just at a point now in my life where I am trying to understand that it is not the content of my life that is making my life but the context of my life that is making my life. I just have a lot of mental decluttering to do if I want to reach my full potential.