Any real intention we set for ourselves to rise above our present level of being is going to reveal a lower level of self that doesn't want to change. This is a powerful spiritual law that creates both challenge and opportunity at the same time. The challenge: agreeing to see how our unconscious nature -- encased and enchanted by its own negative reactions -- is incapable of doing anything other than resisting unwanted moments. The opportunity: to win the freedom born of dying to this lower nature each time we're shown who (and what) we can no longer agree to be.
Negative reactions go on the way they do because we are unable to tolerate what's going on within us in the moment the reaction is unfolding. So we look to an authority to rescue us from the pain. Up until now, we've never reached a point of seeing how easily convinced we are to blame others. Yet what has blaming another person for our negative state ever done to release us from the nature that always finds someone to blame? The answer is nothing. Then why do negative reactions always come with finding someone else to blame for them? The answer is because when we can be convinced to turn our attention over to something to blame for our negative state, we seem to have reconciled the disturbance and believe the pain will go away.
But how many times do we have to go through the same old pattern of blaming someone -- eating food, getting bitter, regretting, or making a plan in order to reconcile a negative reaction when it comes up in us? Negative reactions cannot reconcile themselves regardless of what they tell us. And the pain doesn't go away because it is connected to a part of us that in its attachment to whatever ideas or images it has, is waiting there in the dark of us for something to come along to reveal it's there.
The only way we can begin to stop resisting these unwanted reactions is to gradually be able to see a Greater Good in their appearance, which is not the good they tell us will come if we do what they tell us to do. The only way to become free of negative reactions is to first recognize that everything we say and do is actually a form of letting this negative state, this negative reaction, tell us what to do. And we let it tell us what to do because if we don't, then we're stuck sitting in pain, and we don't want to be in pain! That nature knows that its power over us is its ability to drive us through a set of habitual patterns that are part of a false reconciliation of the negative reaction.
So, we need to recognize that we actually don't know what's best for us right now. Everything in us is telling us that we do. It's telling us to worry, go eat, go buy something, go make a phone call, go blame something. It's telling us everything we've already heard it say a thousand times, and that never worked! Instead, we can do something we have never done before: We're not going to try to change the feeling that we have and that we don't want. We're going to let the feeling that is unwanted stay in its place. What does that mean? We're not going to follow the same old pattern by resisting the feeling.
The clearer it becomes that the unwanted feeling is inseparable from the part of us that's looking at it and saying "I don't want that," the more evident it becomes that we cannot go along with either the part of us that doesn't want it or the part of us that thinks it is going to fix what it doesn't want. Instead, we recognize that this unwanted feeling belongs to a part of us that we don't know about until it appears. When it appears because of an unexpected condition, it is brought into our consciousness so that by its illumination, we can understand that the proper relationship with this unwanted feeling is to let what has revealed the nature producing it -- a Greater Good -- to act upon it as it will.
This is the only way we can begin to end our resistance to negative states and the reactions that attend them. We understand we're having a negative reaction to something unwanted, and suddenly we feel resistance to our own reaction. But now we don't play along, because the Greater Good is the revelation that the self that reacts has never been who we really are, and the pain connected to that self is not our pain. It belongs to a different order of being.
If we will allow the pain inherent in the unwanted moment to fully sit there without resisting either the condition that our eyes see and blame, or the feeling that we don't want that's actually doing the looking -- if we stay there -- that negative reaction will turn into a release from the level of self responsible for it. The negative reaction will turn into a release from the mistaken identification with the part of us that was formed, whenever it was, and that has driven us from pillar to post for all these years.
Then it isn't so much that we rule the negative reactions as it is that we have come under a different order of life itself that understands the necessity of these unwanted moments that we are now beginning to use for their real and proper purpose.
If we could understand a Greater Good in this idea of not resisting a feeling that we don't want, and leave the feeling we don't want right there, then we would be able to gradually enter into the conditions in our own consciousness where repeatedly this negative set of reactions drives us to react against ourselves, and we could choose a new course of action.
The more we understand that life never ceases to present opportunities to make this kind of exchange for a Greater Good -- which is the nurturing and development of our own true nature -- the more effortless it becomes to agree to those moments where this false belief and this false sense of self are sitting there, and the pain of all that resistance is realized as being a false god, a false condition. We agree to stay with it until the whole thing is made evident to us, and when it is illuminated, we are released.
