This is what it feels like when I meet most students: They arrive feeling somewhat insecure and they often lack confidence in their ability to live their lives as well as they might. I can agree with that assessment only in part because gaining consciousness does benefit us all.
What I cannot do is join others in feeling they are either broken or failing. Shrouded and lost maybe, but broken and failing? No.
To use one of the parables of Jesus as a reference, I only see people who are ‘hiding their light under a bushel.’ They are beautiful souls, executing the verb of creating problematic thinking that prevents them from realizing who they really are.
People’s thinking will generally be some form of comparative, problematic judgment that forms who they believe they are –hence their desire for change. By going through the experiences in the sessions, people begin to see thought for what it really is, and in doing so it loses its power.
We have to be someone, so our history helps form our thinking, and even the wisest spend their lives yinning and yanging back and forth between the thinking of their ego and the knowing of their soul. As I routinely say, we can’t have a path without having not-path.
This means enlightenment isn’t some state we achieve, it is the verb of ‘being without thinking.’ When we can see through our thinking we see it as nothing more than ill-informed, ephemeral theories about the world and ourselves.
Once people naturally realize that no one really knows anything for sure, judgment slips away and the natural confidence that all souls had as children emerges again.
We imagine that we feel better and gain confidence. In reality, we have always been fine. We are naturally buoyant in life, it is only our debilitating thoughts that appear to weigh us down. Confidence does not need to be acquired, it only needs to be uncovered. We can each do that by gaining a deeper understanding of how our thinking truly creates our reality.
peace. s
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.
You’re a parent and obviously you want to do a great job of raising your kid. Or maybe you know a parent who’s trying to do that. Either way, people have no idea what the future will look like so it’s essentially impossible to raise a kid for success. About all anyone can do is raise their children to be flexible enough that they can thrive in any future.
Styles. Before, when two parents met for lunch, one parent could see the other parent’s kids were alive and they’d talk as two adults about things unrelated to their kids. Today people meet and fretfully discuss the latest article they read that either promises the path to certain success or that explains what is certain to lead to disaster. It’s all very binary, as though parenting is either good or bad when really it’s neither.