Depending on how the day breaks for us, we often find ourselves feeling discontent about our life, experiencing any or all of the following conditions whenever we:
- Find ourselves unable to change or control someone near to us.
- Take a close look at our physical appearance and find we are somehow lacking.
- Run headlong into self-compromising behaviors beyond our seeming strength or ability to change.
- Start reliving our uneventful past or imagine an equally unpromising future.
The sole purpose of this list (and I encourage you to make your own) is to help us recognize how much grief we have come to take for granted, as though being perpetually negative is somehow natural!
By the light of our impersonal study, we can see two bright new truths: much of our time is spent identifying the so-called cause of our discontented condition, and the rest of our time is taken up trying to change our unwanted situation into what we imagine will better suit our pleasure. Of course, this description puts a kind of positive spin on what amounts to one's never-ending whirl of wishes, but the facts are that these dreams of "a better time to come" do not originate with our True Self. They are the incessant creation of one's unconscious thought nature, that ever-seeking, never-quite-satisfied self whose endless aspirations we all know too well!
The life span of this discontented nature is the length of time it takes to hand us over to its opposite: the projected pleasure that awaits us when we arrive at our imagined destination. But, as we know to be true, we no sooner arrive at this chosen port of pleasure than we become aware again of what is not right with where we now are. You can see now how the cycle of discontentment starts all over again!
Awakening to see this cycle of discontent for what it is not only empowers us to cancel it, but it also brings to an end the strain of living under the unseen contradiction in our consciousness: the hope that one's discontentment can be resolved by the very nature that creates and sustains it.
So how do we end our agreement to live with this unenlightened nature? What must we do to free ourselves from our discontentment and the divided nature that sits at its core? First, we must be willing to see the futility of our struggle to acquire more of those things in life that have already proven themselves powerless to please us. In concert with this effort comes the inner work of deliberately detaching ourselves from the familiar sense of self that promises us comfort even as it continues to sow the seeds of our discontent.
As we start to see through the source of discontentment, we begin to understand how the thought-self habitually perceives what its conditioned nature sees as not right about our lives, and then compares this negative image to what it further imagines ought to be taking place. And presto, we are in pain of some sort! These are the opposites at work within us. This is what has been working on us, dragging us into ever-deeper stages of discontentment with life.
But we can declare, "Enough is enough." The divided nature that embodies these opposites is not our True Self; it is but a shadow, a single aspect of our own original contented character. We can learn to call upon a new 'I' within that understands the futility of continuing to vest ourselves in the "hope of things seen." Rather than giving ourselves over to these malcontent feelings with their empty promises of a better tomorrow, we can let them go instead and gain possession of ourselves in the Now.
This shift in the sense of 'I' is a deliberate re-placement of our attention. Instead of trying to escape this discontented sense of self, we bring it -- along with its troubles and plans for freedom -- into the new and higher awareness of our True Nature. By daring to bring what would displease us about our life into the light of our new self-understanding, that light itself sees to it that we emerge victorious.
The knowledge you need to start letting go of this discontented self is in your hands. Use these truths to help take yourself beyond that unhappiness that comes with living from a nature that only knows about an imagined contentment to come. Start right now by knowing that the contentment your heart longs for already dwells in you and only waits for you to prepare a place for it by your remembrance of its peace.