When you get to learn about your thoughts and how they don\u2019t represent the real You, a lot of shitty inner conversations start to subside and lose their power.<\/p>\n
When you are given the opportunity to start doubting them and find new insights around that process, it can be tremendously liberating, but it doesn\u2019t mean the system will give up pretending to be you.<\/p>\n
It won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
One of the most complicated and deeply subtle voices for me has been the somehow sympathetic and friendly one that pretends to know how I should live.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the Everything Is Love station, the internal guide who claims to know what \u2018good\u2019 behavior really means.<\/p>\n
After having discarded most of the obvious shitty and destructive voices, this much more intricate one has cunningly nestled itself into my awareness.<\/p>\n
It can be really soft and gentle and convincing if it wants to.<\/p>\n
And its judgments sound like they are just there to assist you on your way to becoming a fully enlightened being.<\/p>\n
They appear to be deeply helpful, and encouraging, and even quite understanding.<\/p>\n
But they are just as much personal or egoic chatter as the clearly negative ones.<\/p>\n
This \u2018spiritual\u2019 voice tells you that you should love the whole world, and it will judge you for lashing out to somebody, or being grumpy, or flashing your middle finger in traffic, or passing a homeless person on the street without taking her out to dinner or giving her your new coat.<\/p>\n
The voice tells you how you should have behaved, what you should have said and done (or shouldn\u2019t have, for that matter), because it pretends to know what a \u2018truly awakened person\u2019 is supposed to do and be.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a disguise, and a very clever one.<\/p>\n
This specific voice dominated my life for quite some time, but its true nature has come to the foreground of my experience recently, like it was time to be exposed and dismantled.<\/p>\n
For years and years, it told me to be nice if I didn\u2019t feel nice.<\/p>\n
It urged me to turn the other cheek if the first one was still hurting like fuck.<\/p>\n
And it forced me to work with people who couldn\u2019t pay me, because it convinced me that I was a lucky bastard so I was supposed to give back, again and again.<\/p>\n
Because I didn\u2019t just listen to this voice, but also deeply believed it to be a better version of myself, I adhered.<\/p>\n
Until recently.<\/p>\n
Now I don\u2019t want to say that it wasn\u2019t helpful to learn how to be patient, less reactive, and more calm and collected.<\/p>\n
Learning to control the raw flaring up of angry or fearful energy, probably prevented me from many unnecessary negative confrontations and situations.<\/p>\n
So it was helpful, and I appreciate that, but it claimed too much power from these positive lessons, and used it to somehow become my spiritual conscience.<\/p>\n
And no product of the mind can ever be that.<\/p>\n
What we often forget is that there is no ultimate way to be who we are, no life we should have been living, no person we should be.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no such thing as a missed opportunity.<\/p>\n
Whatever happens is what happens, just like that, and every single judgment or opinion we have about it, is not spiritual or transcendental, but a mere mental fabrication.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the voice, or one of the voices.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the personal mind, that local activity pretending to be you, keeping you locked in the prison of its mostly flawed predictions.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t HAVE to be spiritual, or behave spiritual, or become more spiritual.<\/p>\n
There are no grades to earn in life.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t have to be anything or anyone, although you are completely free to try it just the same.<\/p>\n
If you want to, and if it feels good, and if you\u2019re somehow convinced that you can become a better person, you are free to believe that and play that.<\/p>\n
But you can\u2019t fail your life.<\/p>\n
Life is simply about living, whatever kind, whatever taste, whatever story.<\/p>\n
Whatever is lived and experienced and fucked up (if that\u2019s even a real thing) is always exactly what is happening, and therefore perfect as an individual, totally unique experience.<\/p>\n
We are not assessed by somebody or something.<\/p>\n
We can\u2019t do it wrong.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s simply impossible.<\/p>\n
And when you start to appreciate that, you get to unmask the sneaky part of your mind that pretends to be the ultimate spiritual guide, jury, and judge.<\/p>\n
It opens up a new level of freedom, and within this freedom, we get to do and believe whatever we want to.<\/p>\n
Within my very limited power and understanding as a human being, I try to live what I deem to be a good and fulfilling life, within my present awareness.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s ever-changing, but it can be really, really simple.<\/p>\n
Because it just feels good to do good.<\/p>\n
It feels right.<\/p>\n
It feels straightforward.<\/p>\n
No tightness whatsoever.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s what I follow, that\u2019s my inspiration.<\/p>\n
And as soon as I get the gnawing sense that I \u2018was supposed\u2019 to have handled something differently, I was supposed to have been nicer or more understanding or generous or holy, or that I am supposed to help the whole world for free or \u2018should have been\u2019 more this or that, I back off.<\/p>\n
Intuition is never judgmental, and only always right.<\/p>\n
Intuition never feels complicated.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Just another reason to keep it simple.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Photo by @samaustin, for Unsplash)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The voice in our head has many different flavors. When you get to learn about your thoughts and how they don\u2019t represent the real You, a lot of shitty inner conversations start to subside and lose their power. When you are given the opportunity to start doubting them and find new insights around that process, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34532,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[97,117,100,105,116,113,103,112],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34531"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34533,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34531\/revisions\/34533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marnix.nl\/homepage\/welkom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}