LOVE AND FEAR

Love and fear are the opposite ends of the scale of emotions that bounds human life.  You could call these ends open and closed or expansion and contraction. You could call them pleasure and pain or joy and despair.  You could call them heaven and hell.  You could call them life and death.

Our lives are lived at different points along that continuum.  We can shift our position on the scale, but, being creatures of habit, we commonly gravitate toward a spot on the scale that becomes our comfort zone.  We can hover at the top of the range at joy, passion, enthusiasm, at the bottom of the range at fear, depression, despair or somewhere in the middle at pessimism, frustration, disappointment.

Our habitual territory on the scale, our comfort zone, determines our experience of life.  Some people feel a lot of anxiety if they are not miserable so a happy experience that they have accidentally let in will have to be promptly squelched.  It’s too uncomfortable and threatening.  They fear that something really terrible will happen to them if they dare to feel too much pleasure or if they dare to hope for anything better than their usual flavor.  You have probably met people like this.  Maybe you are one of them yourself.  It’s a popular stance in our culture, a kind of world-weariness that passes for sophistication and wisdom.  There is a lot of it going around.

Just remember that it’s a choice.  You can be “cool”, miserable and self-defeating or you can reach for the stars and be joyful, loving and enthusiastic.  It starts in the privacy of your own mind so no one has to know about it.  Then, when good things start showing up in your life, people who notice will just think that you are “lucky”.  You never have to fess up to being a positive attractor of good things.  It can just be your little secret.

PROGRESS

In the “developed” world the surface of life is changing at a furious rate.  New ideas, technologies, inventions, products and behaviors crash over us and suck us powerfully into an ocean of novelty.  We can hardly get our collective breath.  And, the rate of change is accelerating.  Our video game has been speeded up to such an extent that the images are beginning to blur.  Human generations can hardly find a common language to use to connect with each other as they are immersed in technologies whose generations are unfolding in months rather than decades.  We are dancing faster and faster.

We think this must be progress.  There are so many good things wrapped up in it.  If we are among the winners, we live longer, most of our children get to grow up and we live abundant, easy lives.  If anything, we have too much of everything.  We are fat and we suffer from the diseases of wealth.

Sure, we work longer hours for fewer dollars and live from paycheck to paycheck and feel no security.  We are contract or temporary workers.  We live with anxiety.  Our intimate relationships, if we have any, are strained.  We live in “starter houses” with “starter mates”. Marriages have become revolving doors.  We expect to “upgrade” several times in life.  Computers, phones, cars, houses, locations, jobs, spouses and the myriad of things that we fill our lives with are all up for grabs.  Easy come, easy go.

But, Homo Sapiens is physically, biochemically and emotionally the same creature that lived as a hunter/gatherer on the African savanna all of those ages ago.  We have conquered our planet and climbed to the top of the food chain, leaving a huge swath of extinctions of fellow creatures in our path.  Now, we are flirting with our own extinction and looking for ways to escape the rock that we have long called home.

It doesn’t have to be this way, people.  We don’t need to be this way.  We need to change, deeply, inwardly.  I am here to tell you that we can do that.  Let’s start now.

CHANGE

The world that we live in is a reflection of our deeply held beliefs.  It is our mirror.  If we don’t like what we see in the mirror, we need to change the self that is being reflected.  The part of that self that needs to be changed is our beliefs, those things that we “know” to be true about the world, those things that we expect, our foundational thoughts about reality, our programs.

Beliefs are thoughts that we keep on thinking.  They are habits of thought.  That’s all they are.

We can choose our thoughts.  We can say, “no” to a thought and replace it with one that feels better.  And gradually, gradually, with enough repetition, we can install new mental habits.  Then we will have changed our beliefs.  Our world will then mirror those new beliefs.  We will then have changed the world.

The old saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Is backwards.  The truth is, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

Every belief is a self-fulfilling prophesy.  You will invariably find what you expect to find in the world.  Changing your expectation is the key to finding something new in your world.

DO try this at home.

BEING HERE NOW

Being present in your own life is the same as being fully alive.  It seems silly to even say that.  We all think that we are present in our lives all of the time, at least during waking hours.

The truth is that we are mostly running on habit, conditioned behavior.  Or, we are daydreaming, lost in memories of a past that does not exist or projecting futures that also do not exist.  While we are busy doing these things, we are absent to the present moment which is the only time that does exist.  It is only in this moment that we are alive.  Most of us spend most of our time not being alive and we don’t even notice.

What to do?

Control of attention is the key.  If I can purposely pay attention to exactly what my senses are reporting and to what emotions I am feeling, I am here, now.  It takes effort to do this.  So, at first, it will seem like a lot of trouble to stay present.  My attention may wander back into habitual tracks.  When I notice this, I’ll refocus my attention back in the moment.  It’s a little tug-of-war that I play with myself.  It’s good to keep a sense of humor about this.  If I persist long enough, I will notice something interesting.  I will begin to habitually focus my attention on the present.

What a weird idea!  Habitually being alive!  I’ll settle for that.