Captivity

As difficult and shocking as it may be to consider, within us dwells a certain level of unconscious desire that loves... to not want. It has but one purpose: This part of us "lives" to resist anything that doesn't live up to its expectations. Why would anything want to live like that? Because what this dark nature likes most of all is being negative!

Question: I live as if things are coming to an end. No matter what good thing is happening in my life, I am looking at it as just temporary. This is horrible for me, and I don't want to miss out on any more of life! Answer: If you want to be free, I'm going to explain "how." Why would any of us want to meet every moment of our life with a certainty that, "Nothing's going to work out...

Imagine for a moment you're driving home from work, or wherever, and that you've just come from having a pretty rough day. As you drive along, your eyes see the road before you, but your mind is in the past. It's very busy re-running all of the day's unpleasant events.

Regardless of the assertion of any fearful state that seeks to convince you otherwise (using its painful presence within you as "proof" that the prison you're locked within will stand until the end of time), apply this one great truth: That fear must break down if it doesn't succeed in breaking down your willingness to test its reality. How do you conduct such a test?...

"Each of us, as human beings, is created for a specific purpose. And it's impossible for any of us to understand what that purpose is as long as our present condition prohibits it. Our present condition is that we are prisoners of a sort. We remain captives (without knowing it) within the confines of a certain order of our own mind, our own consciousness, in which we were never intended to live..."

How is it possible for a man or woman to be both prisoner and, without ever knowing it, his or her own prison maker at the same time? Each time the me mind envisions some future event, it's actually trying to find a feeling of security for itself. But the only security this lower nature can ever know is imaginary. So it has to dream up one scene after another where somehow you'll come out a winner...

Power -- who has it and who doesn't -- seems to determine who pushes and who gets shoved in this world. And given our preference, if we must choose one, we would rather be doing the pushing. The only problem is that on the level of this field of choices, whether to push or be pushed, everyone loses because push always comes to shove...

The real adversary in our lives, that proverbial thorn in our side that leaves us aching and angry, and then sends us looking for someone to blame, is not what we have always believed. It is not something "out there." It's something "in here": an intimate enemy.

Only as we run out of ways to explain our pain to ourselves do we come to realize the true source of that suffering; a revelation that includes the shocking fact that whatever keeps giving us the reasons for this pain... is inseparable from its unwanted, yet unabated continuation.

Topics covered: In the midst of unwanted moments, remember that real life is bigger than what you don't want; The mind is in a ceaseless rebellion against the perceived authority -- outside of itself -- that it believes is threatening to take away its freedom; You cannot separate a negative reaction from the consciousness that blames something outside of itself for the negativity; The last thing that occurs to us is that we may not know what we believe we do...

Topic: Realize the Unseen Relationship Between Meditation and Self-Realization (Classroom Talk 5/1/24)