Advanced Studies in Ending the Ache of Ambition
There is an endless hole in the heart of most of us; a pit that demands our faithful daily service and that causes us, in our compulsion to fill it, to be pitiless towards those who stand in the way of this endless ambition. Most of us will spend our lives as slaves to this psychic abyss, driven in one form or another to satisfy in ourselves what can only be satisfied by our continuing struggle. But it need not be this way. We can be free of this futility; released from the meaninglessness of mindlessly, mercilessly, working for what lives only to perpetuate itself at the cost of our happiness. Such freedom has a cost. One's self must be known, its inhabitants realized.
All desire is mindless, meaning that this force of life arises out of powers that are subtler than even the most complex mental formulations that we can derive about them. But their present power over us -- that leads us to pleasure only to leave us in pain -- may be understood by a Light within us that lives beyond desire's irrepressible influence; a Life that is free of ambition and all of its aching because this awakened Wisdom understands, sees clearly, the impossibility of escaping from something that doesn't exist.
The following Key Lessons are advanced studies in ending the ache of ambition. Certainly the world around you, and most likely the world within you will take exception to the truths about to be revealed. Never mind the negative. What does not want you to see what is must cast its blackness to keep itself hidden. Nothing can hide from the Light of Truth. Our willingness to see by its Light is what leads us out of our petty, puny and self-punishing life, returning us into the Heart of Real Life where love and innocence rule side by side. We can begin by asking ourselves this next question... and answering it with all the honesty we can muster:
Who suffers more? The one who fails to become what his socially conditioned mind imagines is success -- so that he loathes his own life -- or the one who becomes successful as defined (and demanded) by his culture, and who then struggles the rest of his life to keep that condition in place? Once we see that both of these individuals suffer the same fate, but only call their aching by different names, then we will realize the possibility of a truly successful life! Now study these next 5 Key Lessons until their light sets you upon the Path to Freedom.
Waiting and struggling to finally become what one imagines will fulfill him is the secret avoidance of being what one is. Wanting to avoid what one is is the nullification of relationship with what is. Nothing can become something out of nothing, which explains perfectly why whatever it may be that we struggle to fill ourselves with today leaves us feeling so empty tomorrow.
All acts of "kindness" upon the path of one who is "becoming" are not acts of kindness at all, but clever contrivances on the part of his ambitious self to ensure that others will help him in his never-ending struggle to obtain his stated goal.
What is our impatience with others if not our negative reaction to their un-informed interference with our plan for reaching an imagined perfection!
There can never be any real rest for the one who feels that he must become more than he is, and here is why: the conditioned mind that drives him to achieve its desire no sooner experiences the sensations it imagined it would, then it must set out again in search of that source of stimulation that it has given to itself by naming, yet again, something else to become.
We give our ambitions great names because without the pleasure of these pre-packed sensations stored away within our own precious self-images, we would have to stand there, bare, seeing the fact that such endless ambition is only the futile attempt to escape the fear of emptiness.
