There are two primary versions of us. One is awake, the other asleep. The sleepy one is where our habits act like a groove we’re stuck in. The groove of being a limited ‘us.’
These are our personal versions of the repetitive subconscious thoughts that self-define all human egos, (ergo most human lives).
These thoughts are about our past failures; the poor odds involved in realizing our wishful future; and/or we just repeatedly note that we are missing or are weak in every conceivable skill set necessary for success.
These thoughts are so ‘us’ that we don’t even feel ourselves thinking them. We call these thoughts ‘our day,’ or ‘who we are.’ The psychological weather of our day is formed by the tone of that thinking.
But. There is this other us that wakes up every now and again in life. It seems to go in cycles by nature. But it is a version of ourselves that we can learn to conjure up at any time we choose.
What we cannot do, is conjure it 100% of the time simply because we cannot expect perfection from life because all life would define what was ‘perfect’ differently.
We simply have to accept that there will be times where our minds won’t want peace as much as our egos will want to create the paths of our lives with their fears and desires.
That is fine. All waves have crests and troughs. Our spirits are in the forward motion of the wave; it’s our egos that live the ups and downs of the water.
Ironically, the moment we surrender into the idea of accepting the suffering –of accepting the trough of our wave– as an integral part of the creation of reality, we are strangely freed from its hold on us.
We still feel it. It’s still very dramatic. But with acceptance comes a type of detachment. Our suffering feels less like an end unto itself, and far more like just one point on an infinitely long timeline with many varied feelings.
Confident that our future feelings will/do change, we relax into our suffering and by doing so it takes on the form we experience when watching a movie.
We very seriously experience the emotions we have during a movie. And yet we do so wilfully, so even things like fear, or sadness, or pain, can be part of what we consider an excellent artistic experience.
That openness; that willingness to allow reality to be, is what converts ‘being depressed’ into just us thinking very negatively for an extended period of time. We stop being a noun and we become a verb.
All of this means that we will not ‘have’ days today. They are not pre-built things we walk through and feel things about. Today we will actively ‘be.’ And through our ‘being’ we will create our day, and many of the feelings we experience through living it. So create consciously.
peace. s
A serious childhood brain injury lead Scott to spend his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and identity. It made others as strange to him as he was to them. When he realized people were confused by their own over-thinking, Scott began teaching others to understand reality. He is currently CBC Radio Active’s Wellness Columnist, as well as a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB where he still finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.