Tag: feelings

On Reflection

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

As the year is ending I find myself doing a lot of reflecting on it. Replaying old memories and wondering what I would do differently. Am I just living in the past or is there value in thinking about what I could do better in the future?

Sincerely,

Looking Back

Dear LB,

You are basically asking if there is value in learning from our mistakes. Although on the surface it might seem like the obvious answer is yes, it has its limitations.

First you must understand that when we say reflecting on the past or planning for the future, you are trapped in illusion. The past does not exist. The future does not exist. Only now exists.

This isn’t particularly useful information however, because in your experience, the past and future feel very real. So how can focusing on some fortune cookie philosophy like this possibly serve you?

The past is just memory. It does not exist here and now. You can only remember it, and poorly at that. The future is also just a play of memory. You are fantasizing about something based only on your past experiences. You cannot imagine something outside of your accumulated experience.

So whether we talk about future or past, it is all essentially memory at work. Please understand, memory has tremendous benefits.

If not for your memory, you would not know how to walk. You would not know how to speak, how to eat, how to drink, how to do anything! Imagine having to learn everything new every single time you had to do it. It would be a clumsy and torturous life.

Then does replaying old memories in order to learn from them make sense? Of course. Even if you don’t consciously do it, your body has memory, your cells have memory, your very DNA is memory. Whether you choose it or not, your system is constantly reflecting and learning from the past.

Reflecting has a huge significance in your physical, mental, psychological, and social aspects of life. But it has absolutely no significance existentially.

When I say existentially, I mean what are you experiencing right now? Not in merely a physical or mental or emotional way, but what is your experience of life? Can you ever experience the past? Can you ever experience the future?

You can only ever experience this moment. And this moment, no matter what you do in it, cannot be changed. It doesn’t matter how much you reflect on this moment, nothing can change it.

Your whole life experience is in reality only happening in this individual moment. Slice to slice, you are experiencing life. The only issue is you are trapped in the allure of memory and fantasy, but it is not real.

There is no harm in looking at the past or planning for the future. But you must understand that it is not existentially relevant at all. When it comes to your life, it is happening only now. Right now you may be thinking about the past or future, but you are not a time traveler. You cannot go anywhere but where you are now.

Reflect and prepare as needed to manage your situations in life. That is the sensible thing to do. Just recognize that those situations are not life itself. They are merely accessories to life.

Life is how beautiful, meaningful, or deep and total your experience is. That’s it. The only place to live life is in each individual moment.

People take life far too seriously. They put too much importance on their past experiences, playing them over and over. They put too much worry into their future, trying to guarantee an outcome when life has no such guarantees.

That’s part of the game of life, to learn and grow. It is unavoidable. But it’s not the main event! Stop taking it so damn seriously. Just give it the minimal attention it requires for you to live properly.

Put the majority of your attention and energy into the here and now. Where else can you possibly be except here and now? Become involved in the life that is happening within you and around you in this moment!

If you just flip the ratio so that more time is spent being present rather than in your memory and fantasy, you will see how quickly your life will transform.

Just think right now how many things are happening that are truly fantastic. You are breathing, the trees are breathing, a tremendous ball of fire is giving you energy constantly, the planet is traveling at unfathomable speeds without fail…

This moment is everything. It contains everything. Eternity is always there in a single drop, moment to moment. When this moment contains literally everything, it seems a bit stupid to be obsessed with the petty memories or fantasies you have.

Whatever you create up in your head can never come close to actual creation.

Your life is not some plan to be executed or some equation to be balanced. Keep your reflecting to where it matters, to play the game that the situations of life bring. Then get back to reality.

All that is worth remembering is this: Your life is now. Not in your reflections.

This moment is your life! How deep and full do you want that moment to be?

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Patterns

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I find I keep having the same thoughts over and over again. I also find I am repeating some of the same behaviours too and like I am stuck in a pattern. How do I change this?

Sincerely,

Pitter Pattern

Dear PP,

When you say you are stuck in patterns, essentially you are saying life has become repetitive. When life becomes repetitive, it is impossible to be receptive. Without receptivity, there really is no life.

So how to stop being repetitive? How to break patterns?

The first thing is recognizing the patterns. It seems at some level, you are doing this. That is fantastic!

The next thing is to understand why we created these patterns at all. If you observe nature, you will see, everything is happening in cycles. The earth around the sun, the trees shedding and growing, even the cellular functions in you are all following cycles or patterns.

The same is true for your thoughts, your emotions, your energies. It is not only the physiology that is like this. But why is it so?

Whenever you perform anything unconsciously, it will be cyclical in nature. That is the default state of existence. Things are always ebbing and flowing from one state to another. What you call as birth and death is simply a cycle, happening ad infinitum, to all things in this cosmos.

We may call it by different names – a flower blooming and wilting, rain pooling and evaporating, etc. But essentially there is only one cycle: birth and death.

This is the fundamental law all things in this universe follow. So when you move through life without consciousness, simply reacting to everything, of course you will be stuck in this pattern.

When I say you are reacting to everything, I don’t mean that you are getting upset about everything. I mean that you are not consciously choosing how you wish to be. You are not responding. Responding is the opposite of reacting.

You see, to be a human being means that you have the ability to think, feel, and act however you wish. If you don’t harness this, then you will be like every other creature, simply reacting to everything based on your programming.

But if you choose in any moment to respond, then the cycle is broken! It is really that simple.

The beautiful thing about all these patterns and cycles you are endlessly repeating is that you don’t actually have to do anything to stop them. If you simply just stop – stop feeding them, stop encouraging them, stop enabling them – they will slough off on their own.

All these patterns are only happening because you have left nature with no choice. You are a conscious human being, the very peak of evolution on this planet. But when you don’t exercise that consciousness, nature falls back on its cycles.

So the good news is this isn’t all that complicated. If you were someone who didn’t even know you were stuck in a pattern, it would be much harder to help you. But when you are aware that things are cyclical, all you have to do is stop and they go away.

Haven’t you noticed that these things take a tremendous amount of effort on your part to maintain? They may feel like they are running with a mind of their own, but it is only because of their momentum. If you just slow it down and stop it, it’s over. In that emptiness, you can choose what you want to do different, if anything.

The problem isn’t with the behaviour or the thoughts. The problem is they are repeating over and over and you want to be in control of them, not the other way around. Even if you have the same thoughts and behaviours, so long as you are the one choosing them, it’s not an issue.

The more conscious you become, the more these patterns will shed. The more conscious you become, the more aware you will be of how many patterns you are stuck in. Believe me, it is far more than you can imagine.

Just try it for even 1 hour – do everything consciously. It will be extremely difficult. When you can finally understand that the majority of your life is happening unconsciously, it will dawn on you that most of your life you are just running on auto pilot. You aren’t really living your life at all.

To be alive means that you are conscious, aware, involved. To break unconscious patterns, all you have to do is increase the effort into responding to life. Respond to everything. Everything is your responsibility.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Control

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

Sometimes I tend to get too worked up and excited about things. How can I better control myself?

Sincerely,

Losing Control

Dear LC,

If god appeared before you right now and granted you a wish, would you wish for more control or would you wish to have more excitement about life?

I want you to understand only people who are afraid of suffering ask to restrict and limit things. Those who want to live should seek to expand their life.

Now perhaps when you get excited, later on you have a mood swing. You go from excited to burnt out or happy to sad. That’s different. That is because you are living with unawareness. Whenever you do things unconsciously, things become cyclical.

You shouldn’t seek to limit your experience of life. How involved you are, how enthusiastic you are – that determines how alive you feel, doesn’t it? Or put differently, the more uninvolved and reserved you approach life, the less meaningful the experience.

Rather than seek ways to control yourself, seek ways to enhance your capability. Seek ways to make your thought and emotion more balanced. If you improve your capability, then you can be as enthusiastic as you wish. But if you work on control, you will just wind yourself up tight.

Have you ever noticed the more you try to control your excitement, the more it builds up pressure? If you don’t express it in that moment, it will come out in some other way, perhaps as anger or sadness. So control isn’t even a solution because you still will have the same issue you are trying to avoid. It just adds to the problem.

Did you come here to this earth to live or not? That is the real question. If you came here to live, then you must live. You must explore life fully and totally.

Yes, that may mean taking risks. It may mean that you burn out here and there. But trying to control your whole life and living piece by piece is truly a tragedy. It will be a wasted life that you will regret in the end.

Better to live enthusiastically and suffer those consequences here and there than to live reserved. You can always be observant and pay attention to your own life. You can learn to look within.

So what, you were enthusiastic today but tomorrow you were sensitive and in tears! At least now you know you went past your capability and can expand that. But if you never push to that boundary, you will never learn and will regress.

Control is an absolute and utter illusion. You cannot control anything! The more you try to control yourself, the more out of control you will become.

Do not be so afraid to live your life. It doesn’t matter what other people think. It doesn’t matter if you get hurt here or there. I am saying that anyway if you do get hurt, control will not help. It will make your hurt even worse.

Conscious involvement, your enthusiasm – it needs to grow! It needs to flourish and face it’s frictions and become deeper and more resilient. So seek ways to make yourself more capable and balanced within, and not at the expense of your involvement and enthusiasm. You need not shut off your enthusiasm to do it.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise.

On Consequences

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

Whenever a question is asked you often speak about going inward, not outward. That’s all fine, but what about managing the external? How does one create a pleasant atmosphere for themselves, one where they can thrive? Surely the external matters to some extent.

Sincerely,

Inside Looking Out

Dear ILO,

People feel like managing their external situation is some big undertaking. Is your life truly so complex?

What is it you are trying to manage – work, a relationship, a family, a home? Every other insect, bird, fish, or animal on this planet does the same damn things without nearly as much fuss. It’s not actually such a big deal.

Perhaps you want a certain level of these things. You have set some standards for these things – but that is your business. Your standard of these things could be anywhere, but you fixed them in such a way that they are difficult.

But let’s just humour you for a moment. Let’s say you get a genie and he grants you wishes. You wish for what? Money, promotion, bigger house, better car, better marriage…? He grants you all these wishes and more.

For how long will you be satisfied? A day? A week? A month? At some point, will you not become dissatisfied?

You keep thinking that by fixing the outside you’re going to fix the inside. This has never worked for anyone and will never work for anyone. Just take a look at the world. Haven’t we tried solving almost every problem by fixing the outside. If we fix the outside anymore than we already have there won’t be a planet left pretty soon!

You want pleasant surroundings you say. Your external experience is simply a reflection of your inner experience, isn’t it? Perhaps you disagree, that it is only because of something someone else did that you are the way you are. Let’s take a look at this. Are you a victim or are you in charge?

Have you ever been in a situation where everyone was happy and joyful but you were miserable? The external situation was perfect, but it doesn’t matter because you were feeling cranky that day.

Or perhaps a day where you were feeling fantastic, and all of your friends and family were having problems. You were able to continue feeling great and unaffected by their nonsense.

My point is that if you do not have peace in yourself, you will not have peace in your surroundings. It doesn’t matter how conducive the situation is to your growth, if you are not receptive, it doesn’t matter.

Letting the outside situation dictate how you are inside is absolute enslavement. If you had a remote control that controlled your experience of life, but then you hand it over to me, isn’t that slavery? Now I am in total control over how you are within. I decide if you are happy or sad or whatever. Anxiety and stress is natural in such a situation.

You cannot decide how the external goes. It is always out of your control. Only according to your intelligence and capability can you manage it to some extent. You can even manage it well. But never exactly the way you want 100% of the time.

At least the inside must be 100% in your control. Why give other people the power over you that they can decide how you feel inside? Why are you giving the remote that is in your hands to every last stranger you encounter?

Individual people must manage themselves. It is the only thing that they can manage. If this one thing sinks into you, that you are responsible for your own experience, then you will see your surroundings will get better.

Let’s say for example you are at work and someone is particularly miserable that day. Tell me, do you want to be around this person? Please understand that everyone else feels the exact same way about you.

Focus on making yourself into the highest expression of your life that you can. Be such a way that everyone that meets you is better for encountering you. Then your situation will transform. But if you think that by fixing someone or something else that you will transform, think again.

You said that to some extent the external matters. Yes, it does. To some extent it does matter. But not in the way you think. It’s not that you will be happy if only the outside was different.

This is all you need to know about perfectly managing any situation you are in:

Do whatever you want. It doesn’t even matter if it is something “good” or something “bad”. But you must do it fully, involved in it totally. No matter what the consequences of those actions, be willing to accept them and include them absolutely.

It’s simple, but not easy. Every action has an effect. That is the way of this cosmos. Nothing is exempt from it. So your actions have consequences. If you are willing to accept the consequences and not be in denial or run from them, then truly, you can do whatever you want.

But if you want to do whatever you want but then cry or get angry when it doesn’t give you exactly what you imagined, you will suffer.

A wise person will understand that when they don’t know the full depth and breath of the consequences of an action they may take, it is best to walk a little bit more gently.

So don’t fixate too much on the outside – act, accept the consequences whatever they are. The real solution to the outside is inside. You waste your life by thinking it can ever be the other way around.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Education

~ SE ~ 1 Comment

Dear True Self,

I am a bit worried about the way our education system works. I feel like my kids are all being bombarded enough already by overstimulating media, but then at school they are just being forced to memorize endless knowledge. They even ask me what the point of all this memorization is when they can google everything. Is there a better way for them to learn or is the education system fine?

Sincerely,

Too Cool For School

Dear TCFS,

There must be an important distinction made between information, knowledge, and wisdom. Information is simply data. Knowledge is a certain accumulation and access of that data. Wisdom is the ability to apply all of this in a meaningful way. Very few people are wise.

Unfortunately today we equate intelligence with information. The more information you have, the smarter you are. But it is all nonsense.

You go to school and get your PhD, stand next to a farmer and feel good. You can ask them if they know the square root of pi, and when they say no you can feel smart. You can tell them the dates of famous events in history. On and on you can spout information. But the farmer has intelligence too and do things you cannot. In fact, it takes far more intelligence to do what he does.

The reality is the time has already come where information is obsolete. You can ask any question and find the answer in ten seconds with your smart phone. What are you going to do with all this information you’ve been gathering?

In the same way that factory production took physical labour out of the hands of people and into the hands of machines, accumulation and access of information will go to the machines.

Every time machines come and make life less laborious for humans, the unions and workers will protest. But please see, they are not protesting that the technology is bad. They are protesting because they are worried about their livelihood, their survival.

It is definitely much better for a human being to not have to do tons of backbreaking labour all day. If a machine can do it, it means the person is freed up to explore something beyond their survival.

Unfortunately, humanity has never got out of this mentality, that we need to struggle to survive. So now physical labour isn’t seen as the requirement for work, but how much information you carry is.

So the burden of carrying all this information also takes its toll. If you did not have to waste so many years memorizing endless information, but instead could explore the deepest aspects of your own individual genius, wouldn’t this be a good thing?

The nice thing is that we are sitting on a threshold. When finally we reach a point where how much data you have gathered is redundant, people are going to have no choice but to explore something else. Now more than ever, people must learn to turn inward.

Education started as a means of creating a skilled work force. Back when this happened, it was about factory line labour. We are still very much in this mode. A young mind should not be burdened and stressed by dumping copious data into it. This will not make the child smarter, only more enslaved.

Why take a human being who has their own potential and try to form them into some pre-molded shape? It is an absolute crime to their humanity.

Every single human being naturally explores their inner genius. It is not a big complex endeavour to discover this. If you simply leave a child alone, they will anyway explore it. Even before the child can speak, you can observe this. Put two children of the same age together and give them the same toys. They will both play with them in a completely unique way, won’t they?

This is what I mean by their inner genius being natural. It should not be the role of our schools to bombard them with as much information as possible. It should be to make them more capable of exploring what they know and manifesting it into something new. After all, your children should do something you never dreamed of, not the same nonsense as you.

Perhaps this desire to dump as much data into our children as possible comes from some deep fear of them missing out. Children today have more data crammed at them than ever, but tell me, are they any happier? Every child today seems to have some form of mental issue or health issue, especially in the west.

Enhancing the tools of an individual’s perception is really what the core of education should be. If you help someone become more perceptive, then they will naturally find a way no matter the situation. If you only give them data, which by its very nature is limited, then they can only draw from that. And they will find, just as you have time and time again that no matter how much information they have, it alone has not made them any more capable.

Rather than focus education so much on the limited – which is data – why not focus instead on the limitless – their potential? Whichever way it goes, help them go that way.

What would you rather have – your head crammed full of information, or to be more perceptive and capable? It makes absolutely no sense to focus so much on information when it is becoming so obsolete.

When a person is liberated of burden, whether it’s physical or mental or emotional or whatever, they become free to explore what matters. This is the whole point of creating a life isn’t it? That you want that life to thrive and to live beautifully? But every day out of fear of their survival, we are destroying that capacity to thrive.

Simply put, how much information you have does not lead to well being. It never can. Only by enhancing who you are can that happen. To enhance a child or anyone else, you don’t need to add anything extra. You don’t need to give them as much information as possible. This makes them less capable.

If we can shift from information to perception, education would takes leaps and bounds forward and we would see geniuses blossom all over the place. Intelligence is not about data. If we can understand that for our children, we can set them up for success.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Motivation

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I’m finding it very difficult lately to stay motivated at work. It feels so dull and boring and like I’m dragging myself there everyday. How can I get more motivated?

Sincerely,

Feeling Unmotivated

Dear FU,

Where does your sense of dullness and boredom come from? Let’s sincerely look at it.

Do some people at your job feel as you do? Do others feel the opposite, extremely motivated and productive?

Like this, look at anything in your life. Are you not capable of turning just about anything dull? Similarly, are there not other things you do that others may find dull that excite you?

People are capable of suffering just about anything. They can suffer both boons and curses. What I am getting at is that the source of your lack of motivation does not come from the outside. If different people can take the same situation and have such different experiences, clearly it has nothing to do with the situation. It has only to do with how you are.

You are manufacturing everything in your life. Every way you think, feel, and experience is all determined by you. The external situation is merely a play, it happens as it happens. But how you experience it is up to you entirely.

So it’s not your work that has become dull. It is not your work’s fault that you are unmotivated. In fact, motivation is a really useless thing to pour your energy into.

Motivation is for people who can’t be bothered to stay on a trajectory. They need constant injections of energy from the outside in order to stay on any one task. Some people even call coffee their motivation, you know?

If you constantly need something external in order to function, is that motivation or addiction?

So drop this idea that you need to be motivated. You do not. This has nothing to do with motivation. Motivation is fleeting and will come and go. It should not determine the quality of your experience.

There is a natural part of you that wants to expand. Life is like this, always looking to evolve. This part of you can never be silenced. It is in essence what it means to be a life in this cosmos.

When you are in a constant state of expansion, every time you hit a boundary, you want to break it. But at your job, you aren’t always capable of changing everything to suit your needs, and neither should that be in your power.

So you hit that boundary, and because of your survival mechanism, you sit there begrudgingly. Monotonously you do your job day in day out, finding no sense of joy. You are too afraid to lose what you have made.

It’s like you used a boat to get you across a river, but now you don’t want to get rid of the boat. But there is a mountain to climb, so you carry the boat with you on your back. What a burden this will be.

Tell me, when you first got that job, weren’t you excited? Applying for different positions and finally getting into your career must have been quite an experience. But now, that same job is not a source of joy. The job is the same as when you started. It is not the jobs fault. It is only you that is unhappy.

This constant desire within you to expand, no matter what you achieve, you will always find the next boundary. Even if you get everything you could wish for right now, will you be satisfied? Of course you will not be, and will look to something else.

Instead of letting this desire run compulsively in you, if you brought it into your conscious wakeful experience, your life would suddenly become wondrous. Do I mean some kind of miraculous or magical change will happen?

No, what I am saying is that if you bring this desire to constantly expand and evolve into each moment, what else can happen except a sense of wonder? If you approach life like this, you will constantly seek opportunity for growth instead of settling for security.

Settling for security will not work anyway. You are right now experiencing this. You want more, but don’t want to give up your comfort. So you keep doing the same thing every day expecting motivation or a vacation or some other external thing to fix your problem. This is insanity. Nothing will change if you keep doing things the same.

So how to suddenly bring this sense of wonder into your being? What is the trick or technique? First, you need to understand that you are a completely ignorant and minuscule part of this cosmos.

Many enlightened and spiritual teachers have said throughout the ages that you are insignificant. Nowadays, self esteem is such a big deal for people because they have none, so if you tell them they are nothing, they get upset.

The point of reminding you of your insignificance is not to make you feel bad. When you understand that you are just a small part of a much larger happening, you will naturally realize that you have no idea about just about anything in this damn existence.

Even with all the knowledge and experience you have, tell me, is there more that you do know or more that you don’t know? Obviously what you don’t know is infinitely larger than what you do know. Yet, you choose to so heavily attach yourself to your knowledge.

You go into every situation looking to draw conclusions based on your knowledge about it. As soon as you do that, you eliminate all possibility of any growth. Like this, you have drawn many conclusions about your work. That you must perform it a certain way, at a certain level, that you must do it the same way you’ve been doing it.

When you were a child, you didn’t have such conclusions. Everything was your playground. You would find a rock and be amazed by it’s shape and size and texture. Now, you see rocks and they are just rocks. Like this, you have traded you wonder for drawing conclusions.

New things will always be exciting. But eventually, that will fade. Don’t become a thrill seeker, endlessly trying to find new things. It will not satisfy you. Instead, be satisfied with what is here right now in front of you. But instead of going through it with dullness, stop your conclusions and approach it playfully.

Life is what you make of it. There is no rule that says you must be bored. Don’t look at this in terms of being motivated at a boring job. The job is not boring. Nothing is boring. Therefore you don’t need motivation.

Instead, simply take that job, or any other moment in your life, and approach it with a sense of playfulness. Drop the serious conclusions you have about everything. Become more playful and curious about life. Motivation is unnecessary.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Worry

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I have an issue with worry. I am always worried about something. How can I stop worrying so much?

Worry Wart

Dear WW,

Worry gives you something to do, but it never actually accomplishes anything. You worry because you are unsure of what life might bring. In an effort to avoid that uncertainty, all that happens is you don’t live.

It is hard for people to accept that they cannot control life. People, situations, and time are all outside of your control. They never go the way you want. Once in a while, they may happen somewhat like you hoped. But never 100%, and never because you were in total control.

We are not in charge of what hand we are dealt. Only for what we do with what we are given. Life brings us each moment without prejudice. But I want you to understand, you won’t always be given a moment.

What I am saying is that you are mortal. There will come a time where you experience your last moment on this planet. You may think it’s somewhere off in the future, but the reality is, you never know. Today could be that last day. Do you truly want to waste it worrying?

Worry will not change the outcome. It will only change your experience of life and make it worse. The one thing that is absolutely 100% in your control, which is your inner experience, you throw away every time you worry.

So you can’t control the outside. Then you feel the next step is to worry about it. Now you have made the inside a problem too. The outside was uncertain, and it could go any way, even ways you can’t imagine. But the inside world, which should be entirely up to you – any possibility of it being pleasant vanishes with worry.

Some people like to imagine “I worry because I care” or “I worry because I see things clearly”. It is not true.

Worry has no use. If it was at least useful, we could claim that there was a point to it. But what is the point in endlessly fixating on problems? Does it solve them?

In the aspect of caring, does it increase your compassion or does it increase your judgment? In the aspect of clarity, does it enhance your perception or does it limit your perception?

No, if you truly cared, then you could always focus on that compassion. Even if you don’t take any action, at least within yourself you can feel for someone else’s struggle. This is not a useless exercise; it makes you more inclusive.

If you truly wanted clarity, then you would understand something very simple: that you cannot sit in your mind and imagine something and then pretend it’s true. It doesn’t matter how much data you’ve gathered.

If you are worried about yourself or someone else, the only way to gain clarity is to admit that you don’t understand everything. Then only will you seek and will truth arise. You can’t understand anything with a conclusion drawn. Worrying is just drawing more and more conclusions.

Worry is something that you manufacture. You base it on a whole bunch of psychological accumulation that has no basis in reality. It’s time to move out of illusion.

Don’t try to get rid of worry. It won’t work. The nature of your mind is that whatever you tell it, whether it’s to do something or not to do something, it will do.

Instead, simply just start accepting things as they are. Be such a way that whatever life  brings you, even if initially you react with worry, take a step back and embrace it, include it, and learn from it. Accept everything that comes in life.

You see, what may or may not happen in life is not a question of good or bad. There is no such thing as a good or bad moment. There is just this moment. If you are wise, you will take the moment as a precious gift and make your experience of it as pleasant as possible. For now, that means dissolving your worry by accepting things as they come.

But how to accept the moment as it is? It’s not about being perfect. Simply, each moment just remind yourself that the next moment is not a guarantee. Anyway that is the truth. If you go on like this, constantly remembering that life is sacred and you are mortal, accepting what comes will be natural.

Still maybe you are not convinced. Why accept things that are unpleasant? They are not unpleasant, but for the sake of argument, I’ll agree with you. The reality is, for a tree to bear fruit, it first had to go through literal shit, didn’t it? Shit certainly doesn’t smell or taste like an apple. But somehow, an apple comes.

Like this, stop worrying about what life brings you. Stop expecting this fruit or that fruit. Just whatever life brings, remember that even though things might seem worth worrying about now, it could be the soil from which something beautiful grows.

See, it’s really your choice. If you go on worrying, nothing ever takes root. You will miss every opportunity for your life to bear fruit because you are so worried about what may or may not happen. If it happens you suffer, if it doesn’t happen you suffer.

But if you just take life as it is, you will be astonished how many fruits you were missing out on, and how each moment is bursting with them.

Or as the song goes “Don’t worry. Be Happy!”

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Integrity

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I have a really hard time following through on things. People will ask me to do something and I will forget or just procrastinate. I will try to stick with a goal or a project but I have so many I’ve quit early or are half finished. What can I do?

Sincerely,

No Follow Through

Dear NFT,

Integrity is a quality that is sorely missing in most people today. Many people are willing to talk big, but few have the necessary discipline, consistency, and will to see their words into action.

But integrity in and of itself is not just those things. Do you know someone, or perhaps you are like this, where they will become very excited when talking about a vision or skill they have? But upon closer examination, have you found these people have little to no success in these areas?

People who are truly successful have a sort of silent success about them. What I mean is whether someone is watching or not is irrelevant, they work towards their vision with the same intensity.

Integrity doesn’t work if you only have it when someone else is watching. Integrity is about how you have decided to be, regardless of the external situation.

I want you to closely observe yourself. Let’s say for example you wish your neighborhood had less litter. Do you go around picking up each piece you see? Or perhaps you simply become irritated every time you see someone litter or you see garbage on the ground.

If your vision truly mattered to you, then it wouldn’t matter who was watching, who was responsible for it, you would work towards your vision. You must be in such a way that every step you take in this life works towards your vision. That is integrity.

But you have so many excuses:

“It’s not my fault, I didn’t litter”

“I’m enabling others if I clean up after them”

“This is just a surface level solution, the city needs to do something!”

Like this you have infinite excuses. Maybe all those things you said are true. But it is irrelevant. The moment you start blaming everyone else for something that you want to see changed, you handicap yourself from being able to do anything. Convenient isn’t it? You can feel better than everyone else and judge them, and all by doing absolutely nothing.

But couldn’t you tackle all those points you made too? You would if it truly mattered to you.

Some people have a vision and just see problems. Others, see opportunities. The ones who see the opportunities are those silently successful people.

If your thoughts, words, and actions are in alignment, then you have integrity. If those three things are one and the same, then results and success are inevitable. No matter what life brings you, you will accomplish what you set out to do.

Maybe it doesn’t go exactly the way you planned – in fact, for sure it won’t. But with integrity, tell me, the only question is when you get there, isn’t it? Your results will be an inevitability simply because you have decided that you will strive no matter what. Nothing can stop you.

So few people are capable of this level of integrity – that what they say, they will do. If you had a goal of becoming healthy, perhaps you decide you will go on some fad diet for 2 or 3 months. But even though you know that you are what you eat, that this very body is just food you accumulated, you go on fooling yourself with these band-aid fixes.

Your life is something that is precious, it must be managed on a daily basis.

So what if today, you simply decided – from now on, until the day I die, I will eat healthier. Not as some statement or goal, but within yourself, you have decided to move from unhealthiness towards healthiness, no exception.

With this level of integrity, you will do what is necessary. Whatever your first step is, you will take. Whether it’s portion sizes, exercise, quit smoking, whatever – you will naturally take that first step. Then, the next one you will take also, and so on. It is not magic or wishful thinking – you just simply must have the integrity.

When you approach it like this, you only take the steps you are ready for. You don’t fool yourself by forcing everything at once. Such change will never last. It will be fleeting.

This is why diets don’t work. You must establish health by putting down roots, growing the tree, nurturing it. Then only the flower of health will blossom. This is transformation; there’s not going back.

See, this isn’t about the plan, or the journey, or the tools, or whatever. Those will come as needed or you will find them when needed. This is simply about trajectory. Integrity is unconditionally sticking to your trajectory.

You have decided that you will move in one direction, not out of stubbornness, but out of a deep sense of focus. In fact, you will be far more flexible with a steady trajectory, because you will be willing to do whatever it takes within yourself to get there.

But if every moment you change your mind, drop what you are doing, become distracted, there is no hope. If I tried to cook a meal but every two minutes I turn off the stove, dinner will never come. I will feel like I am cooking, but any fool can see that the way I am going is a waste of time.

So stop wasting your time. Integrity means simply, once and for all, being decisive. It doesn’t even matter what choice you make. What matters is you make it consciously. Set your trajectory, even in small ways. Then adhere to it and do not waver.

If you can bring integrity into your life, all the hard work you do will actually yield something. Everyone else will think it’s luck or magic, but you will know it’s really quite simple: Whatever you decide to do, you will do. That is integrity.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Jealousy

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I have a friend who doesn’t seem to have his life figured out. He has very little money, can never keep a steady job, isn’t married. He seems to have nothing really. Though he claims he is happy but I worry about his future. Why can’t he seem to figure out the basic things in life that the rest of have accepted and work so hard at?

Sincerely,

Friend in Need

Dear FIN,

He says he is happy. So what’s the issue?

Tell me, did you come to this planet with some sort of checklist – get a job, get money, get married, etc? Obviously not, and neither did he. On top of that, are you some kind of authority on life? Especially, are you some authority on HIS life?

You are playing a very dangerous game with yourself. You think that you know what’s best for someone else. Now, based on this inflated sense of self, you go on trying to tell someone else how to best live their own life.

The real question isn’t about him. Sure, maybe you genuinely care about him. But the reality is your worrying about him is not coming from a place of concern. It is coming because you feel threatened by his very way of being.

The real question is with you. Let’s say you have the job, the money, the spouse, all of it. But are you any happier? Did these things all guarantee your happiness? Nothing wrong with having those things. Nothing wrong not having them either.

If you go on in life thinking that you can create happiness for yourself by gathering it from your external surroundings, it not only doesn’t work that way, but you are existing like a parasite, extracting it from everyone and everything. Would anyone want to be around someone like that?

Unhappy people who seek happiness from outside themselves are extremely dangerous to be around. They constantly drain those around them. Your friend seems to have found a way to be happy by his own nature. Just within himself, regardless of what he has or doesn’t have, he has figured this one thing out – that his happiness is determined by him, not by anyone else.

See, your friend may very well be a success. He just has measured it in a much more sensible way. You cannot measure success based on what others are doing. You can only measure success by comparison to your own journey.

So maybe your friend doesn’t have all that you have, but he has decided to be a success within himself. He wants to be established in who he is in, so that his happiness is his own making.

Deep down, you understand that it is not your job, your money, or your spouse, or any other damn thing you have accumulated that is making you happy. Maybe short term, it can bring some joy. But the reality is your happiness is manufactured within you only. Even if something external happens, the happiness is inside you! Nowhere else.

But for some reason, you have gone on trying to find something that is inside you somewhere else. Why would you try to find something that is right here somewhere else? It is ridiculous isn’t it?

Now, on top of you seeking your happiness like some pursuit – it is not a pursuit, it is an expression of who you are – you now feel you are the authority on everyone else’s happiness too. Please humble yourself and see the truth.

Your friend may be more successful than you when it comes to happiness. You may be more successful in material ways, but none of those things truly matter. If you cannot do those things joyfully, then you are simply enslaved by them.

You have only two choices when you see someone who is more successful than you: Either you can be jealous, or you can grow.

Because you are working so hard to be better, but doing it outside in approach, you only want other people to be happy if they do it your way too. But your way isn’t working. So now, your friend comes along, and not only is he happier than you, but he is not doing any of the things you are struggling so hard to do. How rude of him!

Your whole way you have done your life is now threatened by him. It’s time to stop compulsively being jealous and actively trying to drag him into your nonsense. It’s time to learn and grow.

If you see someone who is doing something better than you, if you are wise, you will grow. If you are compulsive and arrogant, you will become jealous and try to change them. People are not your business to change. Your business is with yourself.

Your friend says he is happy? But maybe you are still too skeptical and jealous to buy it. Well, maybe it’s time you sat down with him, and asked him to share with you why. Maybe it’s time to experience what has worked for him. If he truly is a failing life on all levels, then you will know only by being with him with an open mind, won’t you?

But if he truly is established within himself, then you have a tremendous possibility to grow and learn how to do the same. Either way, you will have options. The way you are trying to do things now, all that will happen is you will become more self-righteous and he will want to be around you less and less.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Suffering

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

Why is there suffering? What is the point? Why couldn’t existence have no suffering?

Sincerely,

Enough Suffering Already

Dear ESA,

Pain exists. Not suffering.

Why do I say this? Suffering is entirely something you made up. Pain exists for sure. But suffering is not real.

Obviously it feels real for you and many others. We have all experienced suffering. You might think I am just arguing semantics, but it is deeper than that.

There are some things in life that are beyond your control. Anything external, anything that happens to you, this is always a question mark. So many variables determine what life hands you.

But what you make out of it, that is always entirely up to you, is it not?

So pain is an inevitability. Sometimes, it is just going to happen. No one goes their whole life without experiencing pain. But suffering is entirely an interpretation.

Is an interpretation the truth? Is it reality? No, an interpretation is how you choose to see something. You see it through your lens, your filters, your judgments. It has no basis in reality whatsoever.

So why waste time asking such a question like what is the point of suffering? You created it! Just stop doing it!

You see, you need to learn to see life just as it is, beyond your prejudices and judgments. You see pain as bad. You think it has no use. So then, you suffer.

You are afraid of pain, so you walk more cautiously, more hesitantly, but you can never avoid pain forever. You act as though all this caution will guarantee you safety, but in the end, you wind up getting hurt sooner or later. This isn’t some sad hopeless fate, it is just reality.

When things have the proper amount of friction and struggle, they grow stronger. Too little struggle, too much struggle, both are death sentences. If life is to thrive, pain is a great tool.

Understand that pain is not as bad as you think it is. I’m not talking about taking pain and embracing it like a sadist. No, I am simply saying that pain has a function. If you didn’t feel pain, you would just pull of your whole body piece by piece. Just look at your fingernails for example. Any body part that you don’t feel pain, you are willing to drop it like a piece of clothing; it’s of no consequence to you.

So pain serves a purpose: to make you appreciate the value of your body for self preservation. It’s simply a signal. There’s nothing good or bad about it, it’s just serving a function, to help you survive.

So maybe you should ask me, why is there pain at all? Can’t we just all grow without it? Well brother, I didn’t make this universe, that’s just the way it is. You may as well ask why we breathe air instead of fire.

But at least I can say suffering is totally pointless and within your capacity to end. Suffering is just an exaggeration. It comes from a deep lack of awareness and consciousness.

If you were aware that your body is a gift, and that you are mortal, you wouldn’t need to suffer when you feel pain. But because your mortality has not sunk into yet, every moment you walk as though you have time to waste.

Tell me, did you come with some guarantee for how long you will live? Is there any sticker on you that says your expiry date?

Yet you walk around as though you will die of old age in some cushy peaceful way, as though it’s guaranteed. Now, every time pain comes, a very real and jarring reminder of your mortality sinks in. So you suffer simply because you are avoiding the truth about your life: that it is ever so brief and precious.

I don’t say this to scare you. All things die. Death is not the worst thing that can happen. It is only because of death that so many things are created in this existence. Nothing is ever wasted in this cosmos. All death is a transition point from one expression of life to another.

But imagine if you lived forever. That would truly be terrible. What would be the point? No, death is the only thing that makes you seek in this life, to make you explore your ultimate nature, to knock some sense into you! Pain? that’s just a small little reminder once in a while for you. Accept it in this way, to help you grow, and it goes from suffering to blessing.

So whatever life brings you, weather its pain or its protection, you accept it with grace and humility. It’s no small thing to be alive and here right now. If you are wise, you will take pain and grow with no hesitation. You don’t need to seek it, but when it comes, make the most of it.

But if you are wanting to avoid life, then suffering is unavoidable. If you think you can go about life endlessly seeing things through your psychological ideas of good and bad (and that includes this stupid idea of pain being bad) well, you will suffer for sure.

Try to move beyond your preferences. Try to stop labeling everything as good and bad, raising things on pedestals, looking down on other things. Just simply observe life as it is.

See the use in everything and everyone. You will see, nothing in this creation is a mistake or out of place. You will see, suffering has always been a creation of your mind. Because of your fixation on the petty creations of your mind, you have been missing out on this boundless creation happening in every moment.

So why does this existence have suffering? Quite simply it doesn’t. The existence with no suffering you wish existed already exists. You just keep creating suffering for yourself when there’s no need. Time to end that silly game, no?

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Ambition

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

No matter what I achieve in my life, I seem to be perpetually unsatisfied. Goals and ambitions get achieved and then a few days later I feel unfulfilled again. I feel like I am just moving from one distraction to the next, trying to get by each day. Where is the joy and beauty and meaning in all this? Is life just an endless movement from one pointless goal to the next?

Sincerely,

What’s the Bloody Point

Dear WTBP,

Anything that you do repetitively if not done with the proper intensity and focus will become dull over time. Just try it now. Just sit there, and say the words “Boo Boo Boo” over and over again, without any sense of involvement. It will become dull for sure.

Your endless ambition has become like this. You set some target, then reach it, then set another, then another, then another…It becomes dull. Why? Because your focus has become entirely about the goal and what you can get out of it, not in the process.

If you do not involve yourself intensely in the process, life will just become dull for you. Thinking only of achievements, results, rewards will not give you any sort of meaning. They will only bring temporary satisfaction, which will become more and more fleeting as time goes by.

Eventually, you will keep on increasing the difficulty of your goals, but it won’t make a difference. Because the process feels repetitive, you will become dull.

What you are practicing by not paying attention to the process is dullness. You are making what should be a beautiful journey into something you want to rush through and force your way through. So in a hurry are you to get the fruits of your labour you are willing to destroy the entire tree. But the tree provides much you could enjoy.

No matter what ambition you have set for yourself in your life, the focus should not be on that ambition. It should always be on the process. The process is your very life! That’s where you meaning is!

Let’s say for example you set an ambition of getting perfect marks on your final exam for school. First of all, you must be honest with yourself. Is what you want truly better marks? Or is what you want to be more intelligent? Is what you want to be more knowledgeable, or capable?

If your whole focus is just on the result, getting 100% – what is going to happen? You will just memorize a bunch of data and forget it after the exam. But if you instead focus on increasing your capability – then every step of the way you will learn and grow.

The very nature of life is that it wants to endlessly evolve. This is not something you have decided as an individual human being. This is just the way life is. This is the way the whole creation is. The only way to satisfy it is to give it something infinite, something boundless, and the only way to that is to stop limiting yourself.

It doesn’t matter what your ambition is. Do not get distracted by the result you seek. It is a limitation. Why are you so fixated on a limitation? Or do you not think an ambition is a limit?

Nature has set no sort of limit to your potential. For each and every person on this planet, there is an inner genius. Maybe you don’t have the capacity to be the next world champion boxer. But maybe you do have the capacity to do something else as equally spectacular in a different realm.

Your potential is infinite. So why are you going on endlessly fixing some stupid and arbitrary target for yourself?  Why are you drawing a line and saying that that’s the boundary? Goals and ambition are fine as a device or as a tool. But they can never be an end in and of themselves.

You should set an ambition so wildly unattainable that you could not possibly achieve it in your life. Then you should strive to make it happen with the utmost intensity and sincerity. Why? Because only when you are not focused on results do you give results a chance to flourish.

Pursuing results are not your concern. How you express this life in each moment is your concern.

The process is all you have control over. I know people have been telling you in this society to have goals and pursue them, but life is not a pursuit. The only pursuit is you are heading to the grave. Every minute your life is ticking away!

If you realized this, then you would truly only do what mattered to you. You would not be so stupid as to set some silly goals for yourself and believe they will make you happy. Nothing you ever accomplish will make you happy. Happiness is a quality that you exude no matter what you are doing. It is not a reward for what you do.

This is why again and again I say devote yourself to the process. No matter what life brings you, it is always in your control to keep yourself the way you wish. If you want your experience of life to be pleasant, that is 100% in your hands. What life brings you however, is never up to you.

Leave the results up to life. If you devote yourself to the process, if you focus on your growth and evolution and conscious being rather than the result, then I guarantee you 100% results will happen. You won’t get to choose which results, but they will happen. Things you couldn’t even imagine may happen!

When the unimaginable is always possible, it is a very stifled way to approach life to only strive for what you can imagine.

In your life, has it ever gone the way you have imagined it? Definitely not. And thank goodness it didn’t! You should have realized by now, what you think you wanted more than anything at one time often later turns out to be a true blessing to have never received.

Ambition has become too common in today’s world and look where it is getting us. Very few are happier or more peaceful, but everyone is ambitious. It is time to shift our attention.

Focus on your life. Focus on each moment. Focus on your growth, your journey. Stop trying to extract meaning from short term results. Just simply shift your attention to what you are doing along the way.

The only ambition you truly need in this life is to grow. To flower, to become more conscious, to live joyfully and beautifully. The only motivation you need is that you are mortal, and life is precious. If that is all you remind yourself of, I promise you, life will transform exponentially for you.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Profound Experiences

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I have tried being more spiritual and seeking, but still I haven’t touched anything profound. I’ve had moments here and there that were more emotional, but other people seem to be having something much deeper happen to them. What am I missing? Why does it seem to work for others but not for me?

Sincerely,

Untouched By the Divine

Dear UBTD,

One thing that is a bit counter intuitive, is you cannot try to be more spiritual or try to seek more. It sounds hopeless when phrased like this, but bear with me.

Seeking isn’t something you can practice. Just like being joyful, or loving, or peaceful, or anything else. These are certain qualities. They are a consequence of proper action, they are not an action themselves.

We are talking in some ways about cause and effect. If you want a certain result, you must do the right thing. This is the way of the cosmos. It doesn’t matter if you are a good person or a bad person, a criminal or a saint – only if you do the right thing will the right things happen for you. Existence is not judgmental.

If you want to be a seeker, then the first thing you must have is the genuineness to admit that there are things you do not understand. If you draw conclusions about life, then try to seek, it is not going to work. But this is what most people are doing who claim to seek.

When you were a child, you genuinely didn’t know a damn thing. Every time you opened your eyes, there was a world of wonder in front of you. Every tree, bird, stone, car, person, lamppost, every damn thing you encountered was a new world to explore.

Curiosity and wonder reigned supreme then. You had no idea about anything, and it was fantastic! But then you got a bit older, a bit more certain…

What you know is a very finite and minuscule amount. Only what you don’t know is boundless. What is boundless is the divine, is the beyond, is god, is whatever you want to call it.

But you have become so strongly attached and identified with the little that you know. Then, based on that tiny tiny amount you know, you are drawing all sorts of moronic conclusions about everything.

You look at a tree now, and you just spit out what you know. It gives you some air, it provides some shade, you can use it for it’s wood, and that’s it. Nothing else worth knowing, you know everything you think matters, so now there’s no point in paying anymore attention to it. Like this, your conclusions go on and on with everything, and you get dull and bored with life.

You can never know anything in this universe in it’s entirety. Even if you spent your whole life examining a single vein on a single leaf on a single branch of a single tree, you still would know next to nothing about it. So rich and infinite is everything in this existence, but for some reason, you’ve traded curiosity and wonder for conclusions and boredom.

What a complete and utter shame! You are missing out on so much, not because it is being hidden from you, or other people are better equipped than you. No, you are only missing out because you are not genuine enough to realize that what you know is so incredibly insignificant that it’s not even worth mentioning.

Stop living your life through the limited psychological conclusions you have drawn. Existence gave you no limitations to your ability to experience, but then you box your vision so that you only have a narrow slit to look through! From that you try to become some expert on life. It’s not going to work that way.

Again, only if you do the right things will the right things happen. So you want to be a seeker? Stop trying to seek. Just admit you are a damn fool! Then quite naturally, you will seek. You won’t have to try, you just will seek.

You want to be joyful, don’t try to be joyful. Simply understand joy is a consequence of ease. Relax, you have nowhere to be and nothing to do. Simply be here and settle. Joy will naturally come.

You want to be peaceful, don’t try to be peaceful. Have you ever noticed that your breath is directly tied to your level of stress or peace? You rapidly breathe, you trigger your survival mechanism, and stress is a natural consequence. Like this, so many things are overstimulating you in life, and you wonder why you are stressful? Just simply breathe, slow down. Peace is then inevitable.

You are putting the cart before the horse always. You want a result, and you want it now, so you think you can sit there and force it. You want the fruit but you don’t want to go through the business of planting the tree and nurturing it. Good luck with that.

Results happen by themselves if you simply devote yourself to the process. Your business is with the tree, not with what flowers and fruits it brings. That is the trees business, but you can enjoy them when they arrive. You just see that the tree grows beautifully.

Have you ever just tried, even for one day in your life, for 24 hours, to just breathe consciously, steadily, gracefully? If you just did this one thing, you would not believe how many of your so called problems and obstacles would just vanish.

Don’t waste your time diving into your nonsense trying to dismantle these obstacles. All of your barriers are self created. You made them. And they require your constant maintenance to exist. Simply by not feeding them, they crumble on their own.

What I am saying is you must simply just be here. Be present. Whether it is the way out of your problems, or the doorway to the divine, neither are going to happen by you forcing them. Just be present with this slice of time, this moment.

“But True Self, every time I sit and try to be present, so many thoughts…!”

Look, if you are struggling to simply just be here, then focus on something. That is why there are so many tools you can use. You can utter a chant, you can focus on your breath, you can perform a ritual, whatever.

If you can’t be present by just sitting, then use some other action to focus in on. The key is just that you must be consistent, your attention must be unwavering. Otherwise it’s like trying to cook a meal but every 20 seconds you turn the stove off and on again.

Yes, your mind may wander, yes so many things might happen. But you just keep practicing being unwavering. Focus on just one thing, and just be with it. Breath is always here, even if you have nothing else. Breath will also make you realize your mortality, and if that happens, that profound experience you are looking for will not be far away.

The divine is everywhere. I don’t say this as a religious statement or dogma. Divine is life. Life is everywhere. Is there anything that is not life? Even emptiness is life! You are after all mostly empty space, are you not?

When something is everywhere, you don’t need to do anything to see it. It is like being in an ocean. Then you ask me, how to I find some water? The problem isn’t that the water is hiding from you, the problem is you have stopped noticing something that is everywhere, all the time.

This is why you can’t make something profound or divine happen to you. It is always happening, even right now. You just need to take off the blinders, and simply be here. In order to do that, you just must be present. That is all it takes.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Intelligence

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I feel like I am an intelligent person. I look around and people are similar to me. They seem to have received similar education, have similar intelligence. But people everywhere are doing incredible unintelligent things to themselves, others, this planet…

If we’re so smart then why can’t we all come together and make this world a better place? What is wrong with our intelligence?

Sincerely,

Smart But Not Smart

Dear SBNS,

There is nothing wrong with your intelligence, or anyone’s intelligence. Your intelligence is a tool. Any tool is only as good as the person who is using it, no?

First I want you to understand there are different kinds of intelligence. You may have a degree, someone else may be a dancer, another may know how to grow tomatoes. Each of these takes an incredible amount of intelligence. If we measure everyone by the same academic standards, we will miss out on a person’s true genius.

Each person is unique in this existence. Every moment, every atom, every damn last thing in this existence is unique. Each one has it’s own unique potential. Unfortunately, today’s standard of intelligence has merely become about how much information you can puree and pour into someone’s skull.

Some people may be suited for this and excel. But if you try a one size fits all approach, you will stifle and stagnant the vast majority. Each person needs to be taught how to explore their own genius.

You see, the very nature of intelligence is that it is only as good as your perception. The more you can perceive, the more you have available to you. It would be better to work on enhancing your perception of life than it would be to see how much information you can regurgitate.

So that is the first thing: Not to judge everyone by the same standard. Intelligence is individual. Look at a person for what they are, not compared to you or someone else. Provide them with what they need to uniquely flower.

The next thing you need to understand is how intelligence works. It is not just one thing, or how you think, or your mind. Your intellect is a sharp tool, ready to dissect this existence. That tool is held and guided by your identity, and your identity is made up entirely of your accumulated experiences and genetics.

Largely, your identity has been made by accident. Then you pick up that knife and start flailing it around, trying to use it to fix everything. It’s a very dangerous way to approach life, for yourself and others. Not very graceful or safe.

When I say your intellect is a sharp tool, what I mean is you are always using it to categorize everything. You see one thing, and immediately your mind will try to dissect it and break it down, won’t it? It only functions by slicing everything in two.

For example, if it is hot right now, you only know that by comparison to cold. Just like this, you see a tree, and your intellect says “it’s big not small, it’s green not red, it’s a plant not an animal….” On and on like this it dissects everything.

And those conclusions you draw about that tree, they are not just empirical observations. You will also say “I like this tree because it’s big, and green. I don’t like small red trees.” This is the work of our identity. All your likes and dislikes decide how you use your intellect to categorize what you experience.

The only reason you decided you like big and green trees and not red small trees is because somewhere in your life, you had some experiences that shaped your identity. You decided arbitrarily to like this thing and not that thing.

These opinions you have stick to your knife like when you cut a cake. Your mind because more and more of a burden and turns against you. It’s time to recognize it’s limitations and clean it up.

What I am saying is none of this, from your data you’ve gathered to the identity, to the intellect, have any basis in reality. They are all psychological. They are not existential. In other words, they are not real. They are interpretations only, not the truth.

To enhance you perception means to see things as they are. Beyond your likes and dislikes, your opinions, your identity, all of it. Just to simply see everything as it is. Don’t raise anything on a pedestal. Don’t look down on anything either. If you can do this one thing, you will enhance your perception.

When you start seeing everything the way it is, instead of through the filter of your psychological opinions, truth is obvious and apparent. It requires very little effort. But the best direction to focus your perception is not outward, it is inward.

Try to see yourself the way you are. Drop all your likes and dislikes. See them for the bondage that they are. Then your true genius will really begin to blossom. When this happens, naturally you will see the outside for what it is also.

That is the intelligence you want to get in touch with. The non-discriminatory aspect that can see things clearly. Your intellect, identity, all the data that feeds it, these are all only good for your survival.

But when it comes to knowing the true nature of your existence, they are utterly useless. They will not get you there. No matter how much you use them, they are incapable of showing you the truth. It’s like trying to use a boat to fly in the air. It just won’t work.

All this may seem so far away. You probably strongly identify with your thoughts and emotions, your identity, all your data. But the truth is, you are not those things. You are more than just your psychological nonsense.

There is an intelligence within you that is actually running the show. It is the source of all creation in this existence. It is in everything, even the emptiness.

It is what makes sure you are breathing, metabolizing, and much more more. It does not need your intervention to do any of it. It is pure consciousness.

As always, turning in is the only way out. Otherwise, you will try to use your mind for everything. You will try to fix the world by stabbing at it with your mind. But you need to operate from a place that unifies, not something that dissects, if you truly want to make this world a better place.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Success

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

How do I become more successful in life? For some people it seems so easy: money, relationships, career…they all have it figured out. What am I missing?

Sincerely,

Suck at Success

Dear SAS,

First of all, let’s get out of the comparison game. If you go on comparing yourself endlessly to those around you, you will always feel inadequate. This has nothing to do with how you are compared to someone else.

If we compared you to someone who had less, wouldn’t you seem a success in their eyes? Would they not give anything to be at your level of success even? So many people in this world are struggling far more than you.

But I’m not going to chastise you for not appreciating what you have already. That’s not a solution to your question. But it is important that you stop comparing and start appreciating what you have, for no other reason than your experience of life will be more profound.

Let us look at this issue of success not compared to anyone or anything else, but just that you have a desire to be more successful than you are.

When you say success, all you are saying is that you want your surroundings to be pleasant for your experience of life. You may give it so many different names, but essentially it is just that.

The only problem is, has anything external ever gone 100% the way you wanted? Have you ever had a plan in your head that went exactly 100% the way you imagined? Even one moment, out of all the moments in your life?

The issue with trying to fix the external is there are too many variables. You can never make the result happen 100% the way you want. You may get close from time to time, but you can never predict or prepare for everything.

That too, look at where your predictions and preparations are coming from – the information that you have gathered. Essentially, your memory. Can you recall even a single memory 100% accurately in it’s entirety?

So you are using your inaccurate memory to plan and prepare for external results which by their very nature can never go 100% your way. Seems a bit foolish, doesn’t it?

This is not to say I am against planning or preparing. I just want you to understand it’s limitations. There is a better way to go, if you’d only drop this fixation on what you define as success.

Right now, you see a specific result as success. You make a goal – I want to earn one million dollars. Then even if you go from earning forty thousand to fifty thousand, you will feel like a failure. On top of that, you have eliminated any possibility of you earning beyond one million.

By becoming obsessed with a particular result, you take 10,000 open doors and shut them, leaving only one.

Life has set no upper limit to your potential. Why are you doing such stupid things? If you are willing and intensely involved, you can accomplish things people have never done before!

Is not each human being uniquely qualified to do something no one else has ever done? You may not be able to do what your neighbour can do, but that is not that point. For sure, your potential is boundless.

Instead of being results fixated, be devoted absolutely to the process. The goal is just a target. Use it to motivate you if you wish, but it is not an end in and of itself. If you are willing to learn, to grow, to involve yourself in each step of the process, guaranteed results will happen, just maybe not the results your limited imagination conjured.

Right now the issue is, you want the fruit but you don’t want to grow the tree. Life doesn’t work that way. You look at other people and see them enjoying the fruits of their labour, but you ignore the huge tree they spent years growing to yield the fruit.

You want success? Success is the fruit. You grow the tree. You work on your intensity, your involvement, your joy, your growing, your gratitude…Why? Because that is all that is in your control.

The external is never in your control 100%. But how you are, no matter what life gives you, that is entirely up to you. That is the tree.

So along the way to getting your fruit of success, you must plant seeds, you must water them, nourish them, give them sunlight, help them grow, and most importantly, you must wait. When the time is right, fruit is a natural consequence of your effort.

Who knows, you might even get flowers along with the fruit! But the fruit and flowers aren’t even the whole story. The joy of taking care of that sapling, the pride of watching it bloom, the shade that it provides you…There is so much also to be reaped in the journey.

You see, success isn’t about what you pursue. It is about your experience of pursuing it. Life is about expression, not pursuit. Devote yourself entirely to the process, and you will see every moment of your life is the fruit of success. What a shame to miss out on it.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Humility

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

There is a lot of talk these days about self esteem, self confidence, self love. How important are these qualities? Is high esteem or low esteem better?

Sincerely,

Running out of Esteem

Dear ROOE,

I would say too many people think way too damn highly of themselves. I would also say too many people think way too damn lowly of themselves. Neither of these are going to work for your life.

You think you are god’s special little child and the savior of this planet, you are going to wind up saying and doing a whole lot of stupid things aren’t you?

Similarly, you think you are worthless, and what are you capable of? Only misery for yourself. What you believe psychologically has no relevance in reality.

When we talk about self worth, we are really talking about what you believe about yourself. You are not seeing yourself just the way you are. If you did, you would naturally love yourself, and all of creation. There would be no need for self-worth because you would see the worth of all of existence, including you.

But now instead, you are seeing yourself as a distorted image, through the filter of your identity, then drawing all kinds of conclusions about life.

Whether it’s a good distortion or a bad distortion is a stupid argument; would you rather see things through a clean window or a smudged window? “No, but this smudge is so pretty….” Do you see how silly it sounds?

You want clarity in your life, then a clean window is best to look through. But every time you make up some nonsense about who you are, you obscure what you see.

I want you to understand that there is a difference between what you psychologically decide about your life and what existentially is true. Truth requires no support from you. It exists whether you think it does or not.

But your self worth, self esteem, self confidence, self love! These things require so much maintenance from you. They are not existentially true, nor relevant.

As a coping mechanism, because life has become too stressful or too challenging, people start talking about all kinds of ways to boost the self. Or, they go the other way. Life has ground them too much into a pulp and so now they think poorly of themselves.

But what is the existential truth? The truth is, you can take a single drop of rain and spend your whole life, even 10,000 lifetimes studying it. But will you ever know it in it’s entirety?

When existence is like this, that even the tiniest aspects of creation can be infinitely delved into, what makes you think that you are worthy of high self worth? Everything in this creation is infinitely unknowable.

Also, what makes you think you are worthy of low self worth? Did creation somehow mess up with you, and you are the one mistake that doesn’t have infinite potential?

Stop fixating so much on what you think of yourself. It is a trap. A giant trap that will keep you from experiencing life right now the way it is, beyond good and bad, beyond your likes and dislikes. Just life, as it is, unsullied by your opinion.

If you want to know that single drop of rain, you must be willing to see it fresh. But if you go to that drop of rain with all your ideas about it, it will be impossible for you to know it. Only by admitting that what you know is far far less than what you don’t know will you be able to learn something new.

What I am trying to say is that what you think you know about this universe is so little. It is not even a drop in the bucket. To say that would be giving it too much value. You know damn near nothing. Your unknowing is boundless. But what you know can only ever be limited.

If you stop identifying with what you think you know, and instead start identifying with your boundless nature, life will open up for you in a fantastic way. You will start seeing everything just as it is, as unlimited possibility, potential. You sense of wonder will expand. Your experience of life will be more profound.

But how is your nature boundless? One thing is your physical body is only a small fraction of who you are. In fact, you are mostly held together by empty space. Just like this cosmos, over 99% of you is emptiness, unknowable.

When it comes to identifying with this aspect of yourself, the emptiness, the boundless, that which is not physical but is the vast majority of who you are – you cannot go with silly ideas about yourself one way or the other. Good or bad, high or low, what you think of yourself is not going to help you.

You must go with humility. Because if you even touched this aspect of yourself for a second, you would realize that this creation is up to far more than you can imagine. Your business is not to fix this existence by giving yourself high or low self worth. This existence does not need your fixing.

Your business is just to humble yourself. Not because you should fear god or pray for answers or some other such thing. Drop all your ideas. Just humble yourself because this creation is so vast, so complex, so intricate! To even be here is a beautiful mystery and blessing.

Humility is the obvious path when you do not know something and want to know. You don’t know something, but you start boasting you do. You don’t know something, but you start playing the victim. Now do you see that this is not about your self-worth?

Humility has become a corrupted word today, because people think it means to put yourself down. I am saying humility is just about recognizing the truth – that you are a tiny tiny tiny fraction of a sliver of a drop in this cosmos.

If you want to understand life the way it is, start with yourself! Live with humility, because in reality you are barely a speck. That truth should not shackle you or make you feel bad. If how small your place and time in this universe fully penetrates you, it will be utterly liberating. Existence will have no choice but to flood into you, opening doors you never knew about.

Practice humility. Treat each moment as something precious and larger than who you are. Anyway that is the truth. You will get it, if not now, for sure your last moment you will understand how precious life is. But what a waste when you can know it now.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Falling Out of Love

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

How can I fall out of love? Falling in love seems so simple, but after going through heartbreak, it seems so tough to move on. There is always so much pain, anger, grief, denial, you name it!

Sincerely,

Heartbreak Hotel

Dear HH,

You can only fall into something. You cannot fall out of something. The whole reason it is so easy to fall in love is because gravity does all the work. If you were skydiving, it’s easy to fall isn’t it? But you want to fly back up, you need something to work against the gravity don’t you?

In this case the gravity is just the biological need to reproduce. Nature doesn’t care whether you are in love or not, it only wants you to reproduce.

I want you to understand that if you keep getting heartbroken over and over the only thing that will happen is that you start becoming weary and protective of yourself. Every time you move into a new situation you will trust less and less to avoid the potential heartbreak. This is no way to live.

So what am I saying? I am always going on and on about being vulnerable to life, but now I am telling you that if you keep loving like this, you will just cause more nonsense for yourself. So which is it then?

Yes you must be vulnerable to life. What you are doing is not about vulnerability. Because you feel intense emotion, you think you are being vulnerable. But quite the opposite is happening.

You want to be able to do something intense and avoid the consequences of the action. Your definition of love is to totally entangle yourself with another person. Whether it is physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, socially, whatever – you want two to become one, don’t you?

This is all the hollywood and novels that have given you a very skewed definition of love.

Someone must complete you. That is most people’s definition of love. I am saying, what is so missing from you that you need completion? Anything you need is within you, why do you need to extract it from someone else?

If one day you see someone beautiful and think “This is it, the one true love for me“, and you are overcome with feelings of bliss, where is this bliss happening? Is the person sitting there shooting beams of bliss at you?

Obviously, you are manufacturing this bliss within you. You’ve just added an extra step. First someone must come to be the object of your affection, then you generate the feeling you seek. This is an inefficient and unrealistic way to approach your own happiness.

If every time in this life you need to feel something – happiness, joy, sadness, anger, any damn emotion – you rely on the external people or situation to create it within you, then you are just an accident. All that you experience is just because you accidentally stumble upon it.

First you must take your life into your own hands. Love is not happening because of someone. It is happening within you. Love is what you are, not who you are with.

Your love should not be hoarded for one person. You should exude it to all beings. Look upon the whole earth and all that is in it with the same love you would give your very own child. That is love. Whatever you are doing is just nature’s drive to reproduce with some decoration added.

I’m not trying to take all the fun and beauty out of relationships. I am not against romance. This is just a matter of how things work. If you depend on the external to dictate how you feel, you are always headed for heartbreak.

Why is this so? Well, has anyone ever done anything 100% the way you wanted them to? Yet you have all these expectations for the person you care about most, on how they should make you feel. They can never live up to all of it. It is cruel of you to treat them like this, labeling it as love.

You are not asking how to fall out of love. After totally entrapping and entangling yourself at every level with someone, and creating a thousand different expectations and conclusions about them, you ask “How can I undo this quickly?”

Do you see how silly this sounds? You made your bed, now you must lie in it.

You can not avoid cause and effect. You decided to entangle yourself. Now you must untangle. You don’t have to actively do anything. Time will take care of it if you just simply stop feeding all these entanglements. In fact, that alone is the fastest way.

All the opinions you have about how the relationship was, who they are, how they should or shouldn’t have treated you, all that analysis you must stop entertaining. It will come up from time to time in your mind. Simply let it pass.

Anyway it is all false. No one is how you see them in your mind. They are who they are, not what you think they are. They were always that way, but you dressed them up because it made you feel good.

The question isn’t about falling out of love because it was never really love in the first place. I’m not saying that there wasn’t any genuine love for the person there, of course there was always that seed. But because of all the nonsense you expected, it never blossomed into unbridled, unconditional love. That is the only way love can be.

What you must learn to do is throw yourself totally into life, intensely, but at the same time not become entangled in it. Involvement without entanglement, I have said again and again, this is the way.

How to accomplish this means that you must allow people to be free. They are not yours to label, yours to decide how they should be or treat you or to be with you or not. In order for you to love someone, it requires nothing of them. It requires no action from you either. Simply in your heart, love them.

Practice being like this. Live fully, but when a relationship doesn’t go the way you want and ends, be at peace with it. Thank them, forgive them, honour them, cry if you want even, but continue to love them as you love all.

Your time to be together is over, that is normal and natural. Now something new will happen. That is the way of life.

Don’t carry your past with you into every new situation. Experience each new relationship with vulnerability and openness, and don’t hold onto to any of it, ever.

Totally vulnerable. Never entangled. This is the answer you seek. Falling out of love is never going to happen. You are love! You cannot fall out of what you are.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Preferences

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

I find myself getting bogged down by my job. I punch in and punch out but I long for something more. I love my personal growth and spiritual process, but I feel like I have to do the necessary evil of earning a living. Why is it like this? Why can’t we all just be on the spiritual path full time? I don’t want to waste my life!

Sincerely,

Part Time Seeker Full Time Worker

Dear PTSFTW,

You don’t want to waste your life? Tell me, what about it is a waste?

You are speaking as though survival is somehow some evil thing that you must abolish so that you can be more spiritual. I’m saying that survival is just as important as all your other spiritual practice.

The issue is not that you must earn a living and it is taking away from your precious growth. The issue is that you have chosen a certain level of survival in this life, and you have decided that you must earn a certain living a certain way. Now, even though it was all your choice, you complain as though someone has put a gun to your head and demanded it.

There is nothing stopping you from going full time spirituality! You could do it right now, leave everything behind, and go sit on a mountain somewhere. If that is what is truly in your heart, then you should go.

But all of that is not necessary. Spirituality is not hidden at the top of the mountain. It is in every atom in this existence, in every moment. It is even in your job. But you don’t see it that way because you do it unconsciously, uninvolved. Spiritual process doesn’t end when you punch in and start when you punch out of your job!

The whole reason the truth of your existence eludes you is not because your job is in the way. Nothing is in the way except your own idea that this is somehow better than that.

Preferences are the basis of your whole enslavement. I want you to understand this deeply.

The moment you decide that one thing is better than an other, or that you prefer something else than what is happening right now, you have distorted your perception of reality.

This is because as soon as you prefer, you cannot see things as they are or enjoy things as they are. All that happens is you create endless criteria for you to enjoy life that almost never gets fulfilled anyway.

Tell me, can you change what is happening right now? You might want to say yes, but you cannot. Your actions now may affect what happens next. But right now is done. It is decided. Nothing you do in this moment can change this moment.

If you see this moment as somehow wrong, or something that must be overcome, you have trapped yourself. If you think this moment is a problem to be solved, you cannot solve it! There is no way to change what is now.

Like this, you have preferences in every moment. It’s raining but you want sun. You’re neck hurts but you want no pain. You’re tired and you want to sleep. Whatever it is, you always look to the next moment.

Then the next moment arrives. Let’s say you get what you want. The sun shines, your pain is gone, you are full of energy, but you won’t be satisfied. You will then look to the next moment finding something else that you wish was different.

You have been doing this your entire life. It has been one long timeline of you just looking to the future for something better than now. You should have learned, that eventually you have to be okay with what is right here, right now.

At some point it is just up to you to be content, and not up to existence to provide you with everything you think you need to be content.

Your job is not a burden or in the way. Learn to include it as a part of your spiritual process. What’s stopping you? If you can’t take something that you do 8+ hours a day every day and be more conscious in it, then what hope do you have with the rest of your life? You work more than almost anything, it’s a perfect opportunity to be spiritual isn’t it?

But because you prefer to not work, work is a problem. It’s time to stop this silly game. Even if you quit your job, something else will get in the way for you. The problem is not out there with your situation. The problem is in you. The problem is your preferences!

Learn to prefer whatever is already happening. No matter what life gives you, accept it, include it, and use it. Life gives you a blessing, you accept it with grace and you grow. Life gives you a challenge, you accept that with gratitude and you grow. No matter what, you grow!

You can always plan for the future, but there are never any guarantees. When the moment arrives and you find yourself wishing it was different, instead stop. Practice accepting it and including it. You can’t change it anyway.

Otherwise all you will do is waste your life. Don’t sit around whining and complaining through the challenges of life. The soil is just as important as the flower.

This is really what spirituality is about. That whether it is a blade of grass or a forest, or a bathroom or a church, or a speck of dust or a galaxy, all life is important. They are all different for sure. But all of it is just as divine as the next.

Yes, I just said a bathroom is as divine as a church. They both have different functions obviously. But both are important, aren’t they? In fact, if both close down, people will be far less patient about the bathroom, believe me.

Your survival is divine too. It evolved over countless millennia to bring life to this planet. Don’t you think then that your survival mechanism needs to be handled consciously?

In today’s society, jobs are our survival. Earning a living or not is a life or death scenario for most people. If you do not bring consciousness into your work, then it will always be a struggle to survive. But if you are conscious, you have the ability to immerse yourself, involve yourself, to enjoy yourself.

Everything you do in this life must be done consciously. Everything! No exceptions. Nothing in this existence is out of place. No moment is wrong. You must be involved, no matter what, fully, to each moment of your life.

It’s not about perfection. It’s about practice. There’s no need to prefer something over another. You are alive. That is more than enough reason to celebrate existence, and nothing needs to be different for you to do so.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Hopelessness

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit apathetic and hopeless. I look at the world and see so many problems, and nothing we do to help seems to make any sort of meaningful impact quickly enough. It make me not want to do anything at all. How can I get over this feeling AND do something that actually matters?

Sincerely,

Hopelessness Monster

Dear HM,

I want you to understand that nothing you do ever truly matters in the grand scheme of things.

That’s a pretty defeatist and nihilistic way of stating things, but it’s not necessarily a negative statement.

You are just a speck in this universe. Even the earth in this universe, with all it’s trillions and trillions of life forms, is just a speck also. Our entire galaxy, also just one speck among countless. Even if our entire galaxy vanished tonight, the universe would go on just fine.

We are all just on this planet acting out a certain drama, a play. There is nothing truly significant about this drama, but still, it matters to you. Even though it doesn’t matter in the universe’s larger plan, it still matters to those who are living the drama.

All our actions have consequences. Even our very thoughts matter; they are like the iron hot hammer blows on a sculpture, shaping our identity, dictating our reactions and compulsions.

It is important that you understand the rules of this play. That you understand that everything you think, speak, and do, it all shapes your experience of life. And even though one little person’s experience isn’t going to affect the universe, it’s still your experience, and it matters for you. So you should make the most of it. If you don’t understand this now, you will when your last breath leaves your body.

We are all connected in more ways than most realize. Forget whatever you think you know about god or oneness, I will just say it in simple terms: you are not on this planet, you are the planet, aren’t you?

Everything that happens to you is happening to this planet and vice versa, because they are one and the same. What I am saying is that you better make your inner experience of life one that is beautiful, because it affects everything around you too.

So you’re feeling hopeless. You look at this world and see a lot of problems. It is true, there is immense suffering going on right now. I’m not even speaking of natural occurrences that are unavoidable. Simply looking at the standard for how humanity is, we cause great suffering to each other, the other life on this planet, and to the very planet itself.

But now you look at all the problems and say “What can I do, it’s all so futile!”

You are just making excuses so you don’t have to act. To help would mean to be vulnerable. To feel what is happening out there. To start a process of giving back, when most of your life has just been about taking.

The truth is life becomes exponentially more beautiful for you the more you give back. This isn’t a philosophy or a morality, it is just the reality. An empty cup receives the most water.

The more you make it so that you are not the most important thing in this universe, the more you are in alignment with reality. Making your life perfect at any cost, that is not reality, that is all psychological nonsense. How you treat everything is how you treat yourself.

So now you’ve created this psychological high ground for yourself – you can see all that’s wrong, so you can feel better than everyone else. But you do nothing about it, because you also see that you can’t solve it all. It’s all a big game you are playing with yourself to avoid responsibility.

Do you think that the world needs to be perfect before you can help? Do you think that society should be different, people should be different, the laws should be different, industry should be different…should everything change to become extra convenient for you? Then, will you act?

Life is the way it is. It is not right, it is not wrong. It just is. We have the hand we have been dealt in this life. Will you make the most of it, that is the only question.

You cannot sit around your whole life waiting for the external circumstance to be ideal. The reality is, it is ideal for something right now, isn’t it? It might not be ideal for some quick solution that solves everything, but it is ready for some level of action. It is perfectly ready for you to do something, if you were only willing to meet life where it’s at.

There are no such thing as the quick solutions you are seeking. The longer something takes, the longer it will last. You build a foundation through your actions and it will yield results that have a much more lasting impact.

Stop distracting yourself with all this nonsense of “the best solution”. There is only what you can do, now. As time goes on and you put in the effort, more opportunities will open up. If you work intelligently, efficiently, maybe it can happen more quickly.

But the most important aspect is that you simply do something. If you do nothing, nothing ever happens.

Society is such that we are all complicit simply by living our lives. The suffering that occurs in this world is built into the day to day chores we all go through. The food we eat, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, all of it is created with a great deal of suffering.

It’s simply not enough anymore to do nothing and claim “I am at least not actively making things worse“. Unfortunately, we all are taking so much simply by living.

You can’t possibly in your life give more than you’ve taken. But you can give something. If every person gives something back, to something they care about, then as a planet, we create a foundation from which many big changes can occur.

So get off your butt and help in some way that you care about. There are already millions out there doing their part, what’s your excuse?

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Harmony

~ SE ~ 1 Comment

Dear True Self,

How can I live a more harmonious life? Be more in harmony with others?

Sincerely,

One Part Harmony

Dear OPH,

Words like “harmony” get thrown around a lot. There are so many buzzwords that people use when they are working on their spirituality. Even spirituality is a sort of buzzword!

Why I am saying this is because I want you to take whatever definition you have about harmony and throw it away. I don’t care if the definition is correct even, I want you to just drop it entirely.

Did you drop it? Are you willing to just be open, and hear what harmony actually means?

It is important that you are open, because if you are not receptive, then you cannot receive. I don’t want you to even compare your definition to what I am about to tell you and say “See, I was right!” or “Yeah, my definition was similar!”. I don’t want you to compare it all. Just fresh, as if you have never heard about it before, experience it.

Harmony is a certain arrangement. Music has harmony. And music is just sound. If the sound isn’t arranged properly, then we experience it as noise. But if we arrange sounds in a certain way, we call it music. If those sounds are arranged in a mathematically perfect way, we call that harmony.

In many ways, the harmony you are looking for in your life – it’s just a certain arrangement of your energy with other energies. It’s like making music. It’s how you are compatible with the life around you. Do you compliment it or are you creating dissonance?

It could be the people you know, the environment, the work you do, whatever. But if you are living in harmony, then you find a way to arrange your energy so that you are working with others, not against.

When I say energy, I don’t want you to start imagining all kinds of fanciful things. I’m not talking about some big secret divine cosmic energy. Just simply put, all things are energy, are they not? All matter is just energy, at it’s fundamental form. And all that energy is just manifesting as patterns.

Over here, there is energy in the pattern of a rock. Over there, it’s in the pattern of a bee. Over there, it’s you or me or your cat. But it’s all essentially just energy.

Now you do not have the skill or the ability to reshape your energies and suddenly become something else. But all the processes that are happening within you are energy based.

Your body, your thoughts, your emotions – these are the three dimensions of life for sure you can say you have experienced. You might talk about soul or spirit or something but the truth is you cannot ever prove that. So let’s just stick to those three.

Those three dimensions also are just energy arranged in a certain way. What I mean by this is your thoughts, your feelings, your words, your actions – these are the musical notes. They must all be singing the same song, or all you will have is noise.

When someone sings a harmony, they are a supporting role, you know? The singer is doing the main melody, but you come in and enrich it all by supporting. Like this you can make harmony, supporting others with all that you are.

In every thought, word, deed, you must strive to make life a more beautiful and peaceful experience. This universe is not at some big struggle, so why are you?

Everything is happening following the path of least resistance. Like this too, you must move through life, joyfully, easily, gratefully. That is harmony.

But you have been conditioned to do the opposite. Since you were a child you were taught to compete with everyone and everything. You measured your worth only by someone else being less than you. You had to be first at everything to feel value.

Can you possibly ever be at ease with life if you are always at odds with it? If you are endlessly competing and comparing yourself to everyone and everything, there is no hope for the path of least resistance. Harmony will never come. It will always elude you.

So I’ve talked about your energies and now you might think you can go sit and imagine your energies flowing out like a fountain or something. That’s all fine if it makes you feel better, but I want you to understand that the fastest way for you to achieve harmony is not through some psychological fantasy. It is through experiential reality.

Psychological things have no basis in reality. They only happen in your head. Put your attention to how you are and how that affects the life around you.

Okay, so how to do that? Well, you cannot practice making your energy more harmonious. What you can do however, is drop this compulsive nature you have towards competition. This is the real poison in your system. You must remove this poison so the energy can move freely.

The energy of your life or this universe doesn’t need your assistance in order to find harmony. That is the basic principle of energy, is that it always will settle to where it is at ease. It will always naturally find harmony. All it needs is for you to stop interfering with it. For most, that means when they die!

While you are alive you must learn how to live harmoniously. So that means stop competing. Stop basing the value of your life only in comparison to another. Just be happy and grateful for your own life.

You are lucky to be here, as you. In all the history of the universe and the unwritten history to come, there will never be another you. Only you can live your life. It is unique, and it is yours. It is better to be a bumbling version of yourself than a perfect version of someone else.

Harmony is just how you are working to support others, not how everyone else is supposed to help you.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise

On Fighting

~ SE ~ Leave a comment

Dear True Self,

Lately I’ve been having less patience for people who aren’t conscious. It’s no secret we are destroying the planet and that there is a lot of injustice out there – but I get into arguments all the time with people who disagree with me and don’t seem to want to lift a finger. People are calling me confrontational, but I feel like I have to get in their face when there’s so much at stake. Am I wrong here?

Sincerely,

In Your Face

Dear IYF,

We all have the capacity for fighting. There is a warrior within us who is ready to take action, do what needs doing. But when this warrior isn’t used properly, they wind up doing more damage than good, both to themselves and others.

If you do not have something to fight for, you will wind up fighting everyone you know. What I am saying is, it is better to fight for something than against someone.

It doesn’t matter how noble or worthy your cause is. If you use it as an excuse to fight others, you are already lost.

How many people have their been like you throughout history, fighting for something they believe in, only to do so much harm to everyone? The maximum amount of pain and suffering has been caused only by people just like you, convinced they are right and that gives them license to fight.

It is not the cause itself that I want you to pay attention to. Forget your crusade. It doesn’t matter if your crusade is righteous or that you are on the right side of history here. Your business is not with these distractions. Your business is with your own nonsense, your own insecurities and defensiveness, your own compulsions.

Somewhere within you there is a piece that feels lacking. It feels incomplete, it feels like it needs something to fill it. This is what most people refer to as their purpose in life. I want you to know that there is no such thing as your purpose. Your very life is a purpose unto itself, serving a much larger picture. But you have the freedom to act how you wish.

So take a look at how you are acting. How you act is your life’s work, isn’t it? Are you making people’s experience more beautiful? Is your experience even any more beautiful, the way you are acting? Hell, is it even effective?

No, you are acting in a very naive way. In a world so full of problems as you so aptly described, why would you choose to add to it?

Is you arguing with or confronting people helping bring them over to your side? You are making it worse, alienating them and solidifying them firmly on the other side of the issue to you.

Before you even talk to them you decide they are your enemy. Now what choice do they have other than to put their armor on and raise their walls?

I’m not talking about the other extreme as the solution. I’m not saying you go babysit them, hold their hand, and coax them along to your way. I’m saying that it has nothing to do with them.

First you look at yourself. First you fix yourself. First you become a shining beacon and example of what is possible. I guarantee you that people will flock to you. People will gather around you, wanting to be invigorated by your spirit, wanting to take up the same fight. Far more work will get done to help with the issues you care about if you work on yourself.

All this fighting others you are doing, it is just a silly distraction. A distraction for you to feel superior, to feel like you’re accomplishing something, to cement your place within your tribe. You have an identity now as a warrior, and it’s ramping out of control.

You need to put your fierce warrior spirit to good use, or it will consume you and you will just be a bully to anyone who disagrees with you, browbeating them into submission. Conquering is one way to win. But inclusion is far superior, because they join your cause.

There are some people who will never come around. There are others than just want to be included but are afraid of the discomfort of such a journey. The former is beyond your ability to influence anyway. But the latter is your only hope, and so you must be the type of warrior they would follow.

You are actually a problem to the world if you do not have something to fight for. So take up those causes that you care about, and start attracting like minded people and solving them. Stop wasting all this time arguing with others. All you are doing is feeding your own ego.

All that warrior energy can be used to be of service to this planet and all that are on it. It breaks my heart to see warriors fighting other people when they could be doing so much to help. You need not defeat anyone, only use that intensity to help solve the myriad issues that face us. Do you see how you are just making excuses for your inaction by projecting onto others?

The greatest warriors know that their most challenging opponent is their own compulsive self. Work on yourself first. Stop annoying everyone else with pointless arguments and start inspiring them with your action instead.

With gratitude,

Your True Self

Click here if you have a question to ask Your True Self. All questions are anonymous and may be published unless specified otherwise