Ellen and I have been spending the last week focusing on the question “Just what is the core cause of human stress and suffering?” Periodically life lessons converge in such a way that routine situational and personal skill development answers don’t reach the core of the driving issues underneath the lessons. This last week was one of those times that pushed us to reach beyond our known realm of answers into the unknown to download through insight new perspectives and feelings.
Our focus has been on deep, unconscious motivators that lie underneath the subconscious motivations we normally deal with. For example, we are well familiar with emotional conflicts and traumas from childhood that drives our daily conscious perceptions and decisions on a daily basis. But we were looking for what underneath core perceptual stances may have created the experience of those conflicts and traumas.
Most of the week was spent feeling into what different feelings of entitlement might be shaping our experience of life. We looked at feelings like “I am entitled to have things be my way,” and “I am entitled to have no pain, frustration, or discomfort,” and “I am entitled to do what feels good without consequence.” Our minds say that of course we don’t believe these things really and truly. The problem is our minds are mere passengers on this journey. What they think means nothing and has little or no effect on how we feel in life.
The mind is a construct to guide our doing in life to be sure that we don’t do things that will get us killed immediately. The mind is a safety interface with the world we create through hard knocks with the world. It has no impact on how we feel. The mind convinces us it has power over how and what we feel because it can direct us to do drugs or alcohol or sugar or behaviors that block our conscious awareness of what we are feeling. But blocking awareness of something is not the same as the power to change something. Our feelings march steadily along. We can either feel them consciously or they will go into our body as tensions and disturbances in our health.
We bypass the mind through muscle testing to find out what stuff is hiding underneath the conscious mind in the sub and unconscious mind. So even when we protest that we don’t really feel those entitlements, the muscle testing is able to ferret out the truth. Yes those feelings are hiding deep inside us. Yes, they form the drivers of so many of our behaviors that we keep asking, “Why do I do this or that?” These behaviors slip past the mind filters because they won’t obviously kill us immediately, but they do have negative consequences. We ignore/deny these negative consequences fairly easily even while lamenting them, because we have a deep belief that we are entitled to have things our way and we should not have to have consequences for our actions. Instead of accepting the truth and accepting personal responsibility for the consequences we don’t want by owning that we are creating them, we instead feel victimized by an unfair violation of our entitled rights and then feel justified in resisting, denying, and offloading the blame onto someone else.
Funny, despite our best efforts, the consequences keep happening.
Spirit, higher self, or our spiritual taskmasters support our efforts to break through our limiting beliefs in many ways. Often it is by bringing us into contact with just the perspective and broader viewpoint to help us see past our limiting beliefs. Today for example, I was attracted to an article on the web about a commencement ceremony speech given many years ago given by David Foster Wallace to the graduating class at Kenyon Collage back in 2005 titled “This is water”.
I have no idea why I was attracted to this article – even as I read it I had no idea. But when I came to a youtube link to this speech, I felt compelled to listen to it. The whole speech directly addressed exactly what Ellen and I had been discussing for the past few days. I heartily recommend listening to the speech. (Go here)
The key concept was one I had batted around previously and have even written a newsletter article or two on the subject – self-centered narcissism. His reflections on the subject gave me a somewhat different view of the subject because he saw our tendency to be self-centered narcissists as our natural default setting. It makes perfect sense, since everything we experience is experienced with us at the center of the experience. Everything important to us happens to us. We are the center of our experiential universe. Without thinking we generalize this experiential feeling reality by assuming that indeed we are the feeling center of the actual universe.
This starts at day one for us – maybe even before we are born. It is our most central, fundamental, experiential perspective from which we view all reality. The problem is that it is a lie. And because it is a lie that we refuse to see, it becomes the core source of most of the suffering in our lives. Defending and supporting this lie gives rise to all the entitlements we feel we are due. Ninety percent of the suffering we experience in life all comes from trying to hold on to the belief that we are the center of things – that everything is all about us, and we should therefore have things our way. It does not matter that we may consciously deny having these feelings, they happen anyway and we suffer because of them. The tensions created by holding onto this lie are the source of most human disease – heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions, addictions, inflammatory diseases, and so on all have their roots in the internalized tensions around self-centeredness. Some even suggest that accidents and poisonings, the two areas I would see as not related to our consciousness, are in fact created by our beliefs.
A helpful step is to clarify the bits of truth that are hidden in our entitlements. We are each the center of our experiential universe. No one can make us the center of their universe because they are too busy making themselves the center of their own universe. It is no ones job to give us our way, but it is our job to extend the effort to make a life for ourselves that is the way we want as much as possible. We have no actual control over life, but we can have strong influence over what we experience by controlling our choices, actions, and reactions. We cannot make others connect with us, but we can open and receive others as they are and outflow our light in such a way as to be attractive to others. In essence, most of what we feel entitled to we can have, but by applying the effort to show up in life in the way that naturally promotes the flow of what we want. The deep lie in entitlements is the idea of getting something for nothing just because we exist. We don’t want to do the work of having to learn how to show up in harmony and attractive mutual exchange to get what we want. Earth is a big charm school where we learn how to get what we want by participating effectively and gracefully.
The real question then becomes for us, what does it take to motivate us to let go of our perspective of seeing life with us at the center? Apparently the negative consequences we experience are not enough to get us to let go and expand to seeing life from a bigger perspective. We need something that attracts us more than the false beliefs that “we are center,” “we can win,” “we can be in control,” “we can have things be our way.” Perhaps understanding that all these things we crave block us from having other things we may want. For instance, it is impossible to feel connected to another person and also want control. It is one or the other, never both. Another example is that it is impossible to feel safe and yet carry power at the same time. What it takes to carry power automatically makes you inherently unsafe. Life is full of these mutually exclusive choices. Perhaps experiencing these choices can motivate us to want to be and see bigger than the tiny us as the center of everything.
David Foster Wallace put it all down to the choice to be more conscious and aware – to not fall into our default way of seeing life, but extending the effort to stay bigger than that. I know that that can work temporarily, but effort has to give way to something that is naturally attractive enough to make the effort feel effortless. The mind is too persistent and powerful to constantly fight our natural tendencies. We need a larger driver. Maybe after years of fighting the good fight, we will deeply crave peace of mind – the ease that comes from the
experience of oneness with life. Maybe this desire is enough to get us to reset our default mode from “self as center” to “all life is one.” I am still looking for the key to this transformation.