This is a short post, but as always you can listen to it in the player below =)
Audible Version
Music: Fleets Over Vegas
Artist: The Intangible
Our mental awareness is programmed to project situations as good or bad at the fundamental level, and it’s the judge’s perspective that decides where it falls into. And we are the judges.
Now, this is normal and the way things are, we wouldn’t be able to live without having the discernment of what is beneficial or detrimental to us. This works in complete harmony with our survival instincts, our surroundings always pose some sort of threat to our safety in one way or another. So it makes sense that we base our views of the world in the same way. Or does it?
Where we start missing the point is beyond our survivability, we extrapolate this basic reaction to stimuli to complex situations in our lives, interactions that carry a different challenge to our notions and that require a deeper analysis and can’t be simplified with a black and white judgment.
This is like the software of our lives, the operating system that runs our views of the world, rather than the hardware that needs protection from the environment.
We now live in a fear-based society, this means that we operate under the same mechanisms that warned us from latent dangers in nature, the reptilian level of the brain which is concerned with territorialism, aggression, competition, fight or flight, and everything else that provides a basic reaction concerned only with existing.
This part of the brain and its triggers have taken control over our political, societal, moral, religious, dogmatic, cultural views, and everything else that shapes us into the humans we are today. This is why we are still worried most of our lives with earning a living, nothing is safe in our surroundings even with all the technological advancement and the vast control over nature we currently have.
We have been conditioned to see the world with right or wrong goggles, like those old 3D glasses that have a red and blue configuration for one eye and the other, and so everything that we see takes a color when we look through one of the lenses. Let’s continue to use the archetypal Red for Bad, and Blue for Good.
For everything we judge, we are using those goggles and looking through one of the eyes, depending on our current perception of how things ought to be, the color we assign to situations, events, moments, actions, people and so on, will be considered good or bad. And so we live our lives in fear of the bad things, and relief on the good ones. I call this The Life Rollercoaster.
And this, like I mentioned before, is part of the architecture of our reality, the Simulation we live in has been programmed this way for reasons I can’t and won’t even attempt to go into. Knowing this is vital for reasons I’ll explain below, but the first thing I want you to understand is that it’s completely normal to see the world this way, we were raised and brought up looking around with this software, but it’s not beneficial to our mental state.
I realized this when I encountered a paradox in my life.
Let’s take you for example, the person that you are today is not the same one from last year, and that person is different from the one the year before, and so on. In fact, it goes down by the day, the minute, and the seconds (it’s just that we can’t perceive such small changes in our lives).
We are constantly changing, and if we take any one of your old selves, you will immediately judge it for all the “wrong” things it did in the past. Right? I mean, we all look back and say “I’d never do something like that again”. Does that really mean you did things wrong in the past? Let’s assume you did.
That means that you were doing a lot of things wrong then and didn’t know it, you lived a bad life. Fair enough, we all have but, would that mean that a lot of the things (if not everything) that you are doing today are wrong? Absolutely. And what about your ideas and the way you think? That too.
So there goes my paradox, how do you live knowing that most of the things you do and think today are completely wrong? What kind of right should you be doing? How do you start “fixing”? And what would be the outcome of fixing anything? Surely once you start doing something differently they will be wrong again by definition. It made no sense to me.
That is, until you take the goggles off.
When you remove the glasses you will never see things as right/good or wrong/bad again, things simply are. Putting your ego aside allows you to see things as events that occur for your growth, and not as achievements or laments. I have to admit that it’s particularly hard (I still work on it every day) to stop seeing our past as all the good that made up our joyful side, and all the bad that created the fearful ones that form us for what we are today, an amalgamation of some sort.
After all, we still long for old moments of joy and bliss, while holding contempt for other events and people that caused harm or negative effects at some point in our life. There is a fundamental issue here, living in a mix of nostalgy and grudges is only creating more duality in our mental state, and perpetuating the judgment in the present.
So where’s the practicality in this realization? We cannot stop assessing if things are harmful or beneficial at the survival level. But where we can definitely use it is, first and foremost, in the constant internal struggle we have with ourselves, judging our decisions and actions, the vicissitudes of life and all that presents a challenge to our perception of how these events affect our lives.
This also doesn’t mean that if you find yourself judging a situation as right or wrong you are failing to use this concept, to the contrary! It’s a practice round you get in life to resolve a particular part in you that has been conceiving that situation as right or wrong.
Allowing yourself to take the goggles off to analyze a situation is the only way you stop using the duality of your mind and permit your real Self to absorb the meaning of the moment, seeing it as it really is.
This puts things into a much better perspective since you don’t have any judgment, whatever happened was just another instance in your life that creates a better you, as it gives you experience and a new viewpoint. It takes away the guilt or the stimulant, and it leaves you with the essence of the opportunity you were able to experience, live, and learn from.
Substituting this binary thought process with the simple understanding that everything is a lesson in your journey, and topping it off with gratitude to have such an opportunity to grow, will make your life much easier and without the unpredictable Emotional Rollercoaster.