NEWSFLASH: It does not matter how strong you are, how smart you are, nor how educated you’ve become, nor how skilled. Those are all great thing, but all of them can quickly become worthless by being easily undone by a simple internal narrative of insecurity. Whether it’s a sport, an art, in business, or with others in our social lives, nothing will do more damage to us than our own egos and their neverending pursuit of whatever our current definition of perfection is.
We’ll go to the gym, we’ll invest energy in things we’re fascinated by, we’ll spend a lot of time learning about that subject either formally or informally, and we’ll practice it. The reason we’ll happily put in a huge effort in will be because we see value there. We don’t get clear-headed and generally peaceful by wanting to stop our suffering, we get clear-headed by valuing the peace we trust we can create.
There are kids who see practicing an instrument as torture while others see it as an escape. Our behaviours often point quite clearly to our real interests, and when we’re pursuing those our pure zeal leads to us to fill our consciousness with excitement about the thing instead of rolling it’s usually unconscious narratives. There is a great lesson in that fact.
The voices in our heads are debates by for and with ourselves. It’s a strange thing to do when we get right down to it. It’s natural in that no one tells us not to fall into the trap of too much self-talk after we learn to talk, but by the time anyone’s forty they start to grasp that the unhealthy people overthink and the healthy ones seem inordinately calm.
Both groups will still have their big emotional highs and lows, but while one group is whipped around like a flag in the wind for however long the wind is blowing, the other group quickly shifts back to letting things flow around them, unimpeded by personal thoughts. It’s like our consciousness is actually a fast-moving river, and thinking about something too much is like dumping rocks into the water and making the water choppier and rougher. Just looking at a busy-minded person is like being able to see how busy the incessantly burbling thoughts are inside their head.
We must ask ourselves, when and why do we undertake this strange behaviour? What’s our own most common narrative of insecurity? Are we too short? Too weak? Do we need more money? More time? Do we use our narratives to hate others rather than advance ourselves? Do we see the world as against us? Do we tell yourself ourselves we’re unlucky, or doomed or stupid, or lazy or worthless?
We can tell ourselves all of those things and they will act as actual barriers to our achieving all we can. Our other option is to actually learn to get conscious about what internal actions actually lead to our satisfaction.
If we do get conscious we’ll see that our pain comes from our thinking, and when we love our own life it’s because we’re too excited by it to take the time to build any self-limiting narratives. It doesn’t matter how much we go to the gym or read or practice something if our mind hasn’t found a way to embrace whatever it is we need to do. You must fall in love with wherever you are. This general caring about our life is what is often referred to as taking pride in our work, or being respectful or having the commitment to succeed.
We don’t have to work to reach this form of clarity. We don’t add to ourselves to find this peace. We take away our ego, our narratives, our insecurity, and we replace it with a peaceful mindfulness capable of drawing in information at a remarkable rate. Remember, we all learned to talk and walk before we were even three. That’s how smart we can be. But to be that brilliant we must consciously avoid using the words we’ve already learned, to undo the very confidence that enabled us to the learn all the words in the first place.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
There is a constant communication system between us and our soul that can be represented by science as the chemistry associated with our feelings. As most of you know from reading this blog or other sources, that system gets overwhelmed and confused by a constant stream of ego-based personal thoughts.
Stephen Hawking could have just been a depressed kid who did next to nothing. That was what the odds said. That would be his ego’s argument. But rather than self-discuss those odds with himself, Hawking took that time and mental energy and instead learned about science, and in doing so he became one of the most famous in history. There’s a huge lesson for all of us in the example of his life. Undoubtedly the majority of people at the time would never have believed that he could have achieved what his soul lead him to achieve.
Welcome to today’s lesson in awareness and consciousness. Take a good look at the meme above. In creating it, an internet artist juxtaposed a normal reality with what is presented as a girl’s life in the media. It’s not difficult to see the point the artist was making. There’s a tense discrepancy between the one’s shallowness and the other’s depth. The piece feels like the sort of thing 
Capitalism exists but its aspects don’t have to take control of your life. You can develop a healthy awareness that can insulate you. Next time you’re in a store waiting in line and you can see the magazines, just look at the headlines on the cover and decipher how they are tugging at your ego–how they are suggesting the importance of some ideal? What mechanisms are they using to convey that you or your life is lacking or wrong? Photoshop? A headline? A tip?
Get conscious. Witness how our egos are products that companies sell to the real us. Start making a conscious connection between that fact and your dissatisfaction with your life. I’m not saying never go shopping. Go. Enjoy. But go consciously. Don’t be buying things because they’re in alignment with what your social media feed told you you’ll get “liked” for. But what you–the real you–feels natural in. That’s the path to more peace of mind.
Einstein’s mind was so busy on the stuff he thought about that he would apparently sometimes absentmindedly give lectures in his wife’s pink bedroom slippers. If he wasn’t Einstein and you saw that you’d think he was weird. Surely students in non math or physics-related faculties did when they saw him on a campus.
They work jobs they dislike for money they need to look impressive or complete to others. They raise their kids according to their fears about other parent’s judgments. They spend their time in places their society says has value even if they totally feel unnatural there. Most people are egos living in fear rather than spirits living with possibility.
