People always look for certainty and security.
We just can’t help it.
Or can we?
A guy emailed me today to compliment me on the first book I wrote (which was published in 2015), but he also criticized me because of my pretty negative views on mainstream mental health and therapy in general.
As was to be expected I felt the stung of his words in my mind and body (hello conditioning!), but was able to release it fairly quickly.
And I was actually grateful to receive this spontaneous opportunity to investigate some of my old thinking.
Although I still believe in much of the stuff I wrote about back then, there are also a lot of things that have very much changed for me.
Now that is probably fairly normal, this change, this growth in time, but there is a tremendous amount of power in the realization of this (and I’ll get back to that in a minute).
We subscribe to ideas and opinions passionately because it makes us feel safe.
We want to believe that we understand how the world works, and what we can do to get the future we think we need.
We hang on to what we’ve been told is true and valuable, and regard the world from that place, through that lens.
Life looks to us the way it looks to us, because of how we automatically create it.
And no matter how enlightened we are (or believe ourselves to be), there is always a particular system in place that secretly builds the universe we seem to live in.
I don’t really think we can escape all of our prejudices, opinions and preferences in order to ultimately engage in a 100% pure, unfiltered existence, and I also don’t think we have to or should.
It’s our humanness that makes being human worthwhile.
Being alive builds firmly on the wonderful realness of what is essentially a moment to moment imaginary creation, a situation that is only visible and felt by the person lost in that specific point of consciousness.
So, where am I going with this?
Am I just trying to be a spiritual smart-ass?
Well, no (or maybe a little).
Like I said earlier, there is really a lot of freedom and lightness to be found in consciously knowing what we know, and embracing the idea that we don’t yet know what we WILL know one day.
It’s all up for grabs.
And whatever you believe to be true right now, you can take it along for the ride until it doesn’t serve you anymore.
So what to do with this?
What has worked wonders for me (because life has been patiently showing me that over and over again) is to hold things lightly.
All things, or at least as many things as I am aware of.
I deeply love and appreciate the positive and hopeful and powerful outlook on life that I entertain at this moment in time, and it has given me huge amounts of joy and pleasure and fulfillment and liberation and connection.
But I don’t feel the old need to get stuck in it, to defend it all the time, and to build a fragile feeling of security around what is essentially ever-changing.
Part of how I view life and the universe and the me or the I that are part of that amazing ongoing creation, is a more relaxed stance towards who I think I am and what that really means.
I am more and more aware of the flimsiness of thoughts, and the restrictiveness of an absolute worldview, that powerful layer of egoic self-importance, even though I can’t truly escape the circus in my mind.
There is still a lot of intellectual deliberation going on, but I just don’t get lost in it 24/7, and I don’t take it nearly as seriously as I used to do.
To end with a paradox:
There’s security in insecurity.
Now go out and play.
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(Photo by @neonbrand, for Unsplash)