©
Dick Rauscher
Someone once said
that a definition of insanity was doing the same thing today that we
did yesterday and somehow expecting a different outcome or result.
And yet that is exactly what many of us do. We wish for things to change.
We hope things will change. And when they don’t, we often blame
some one or some thing out in our world for the way we feel and for
the problems in our life. We put great amounts of our life energy into
changing jobs, changing spouses, and struggling to change the world
around us to conform to how we think it should be. Can we see that?
That virtually all
of our thoughts are focused on ourselves.....our looks, our weight,
our clothes, our happiness, our hair, our job, our money, our house,
our cars, our retirement, our retirement programs, our health, our
illnesses, our exercise, our opinions, our self esteem, whether others
like us, our stress, our sleep, what we want to eat, what makes us
happy, what makes us unhappy, what is fun, which TV program do we want
to watch, do others treat us fairly, our wants, our beliefs, our certainties.............the
focus on our "self" is unending.
The ego in each of
us believes that "it" is the Ruler of the Universe. The problem
is, there are almost five billion other egos on this world who believe
that "they" are the Ruler of the Universe. And each of them
has their own ideas on how things "should" be. That means
there are five billion other Rulers of the Universe saying no to us!
That’s a lot of people saying no. It’s no wonder we struggle
with stress, anxiety, and depression.
Virtually all of
us are looking for some kind of secure, stable, ongoing and consistent
life where we get only what we want, and where we don’t have to
deal with anything we don’t want. The problem is, that’s
not the way this Universe works. In fact Quantum Physicist Fred Wolf
reminds us of the Second Law of Thermodynamics when he tells us that
life cannot exist in a Universe that is entropic unless it is willing
to struggle. In other words, life cannot exist without struggle.
So the ideal life
most of us would like is basically a fantasy. An illusion. Reality
is "what is." The River of Life brings us what ever
it is going to bring. We must break the grip of illusion that we have
control over what the River of Life brings to us. That we can somehow
control reality itself.. The only control that any of us have is how
we will respond to the things that the River brings.
Sadly, most of us
struggle all our lives to make reality into how we want it to be. We
grasp and we get attached and cling to the things we want or all ready
have, and we struggle to avoid or try to push away from us those things
that we don’t want. That has been called "pushing the river".
When we "push the river" we experience suffering, conflict,
anxiety, stress, and unhappiness. In other words, stress and unhappiness
are not caused by what life brings us. They are caused by
our emotional response to what life brings us.
Reality is change.
When we try to change reality by desiring permanence, we are "pushing
the river" again, and suffering is inevitable. Creation is change.
Without change, there could be no creation or creativity. There could
be no life in the universe. There could be no consciousness. In other
words, creation is not a one time event, it is an ongoing process.
In the same way.
each of us is in the process of being created. To be fully alive, we
must be willing to release the beliefs and illusions of permanence
that our egos cling to so strongly and learn to live with a reality
that is both creative and continually changing. Can we see that in
our lives?
There is a humorous
story told about the construction workers who ate lunch together. Every
day one of them would open his lunch box and exclaim in disgust, "Peanut
butter and jelly again!" His complaining and griping went on for
weeks and weeks. Finally one of the other workers, tired of the complaining
inquired somewhat impatiently, " Why don’t you just ask your
wife to fix you something else for lunch?" "Oh, I’m
not married, " was the reply. "I make my own lunch." All
of us make our own lunch with our thoughts. Our thoughts and our beliefs
create our stress and suffering.
Mark Twain once said
to a reporter interviewing him "I have been through some really
terrible stressful things in my life..........some of them which actually
happened"
Life is nothing but
thought. If we can change our beliefs and our thoughts, then we can
create virtually any life we want. The mystical poet Rumi wrote, "a
hand that cannot open and close is a crippled hand." Just as the
wings of a bird have to open and close for the bird to fly, a mind
that cannot be flexible enough to be both open and closed cannot grow.
Most of us live our
lives sound asleep, unaware that we are living life with our minds
embedded in old habits. We are much like the two men who were observed
working along side the road. One would dig a hole and then go about
ten feet and dig the next one. The other worker was following behind
him filling the holes back in. After watching this unproductive behavior
for a while, curiosity was peaked. " What’s going on here.
What are you men doing?" "Well, replied the first man, my
name is Jack, I dig the holes, that's Charlie, he fills in the holes,
and Roy, he's off today, he plants the trees."
Nasrudin, the Middle
Eastern mullah who legend tells us lived sometime between 300AD and
1300AD reminds us in his humorous way that one should never try to
teach a pig how to sing. It will only waste your time and it really
annoys the pig. In other words, no one…..no one, can
make us change our beliefs or the way we think. Change happens only
when the desire to grow comes from within.
Self-awareness is
very hard work and takes a great deal of our life energy and time.
But we can only change that which we know about ourselves and that
which we accept about ourselves. So unless we are willing and motivated
to free our spirits to do the work of learning about ourselves, we
cannot grow. Since we become what we think about, learning to change
the way we think is an important life skill on the spiritual path.
Earl Nightingale
said one time that you can tell the seeds a person has planted in their
lives by the fruit they are bearing. When we plant apple seeds, we
get apples.. Planting seeds is our life work and only each of us can
decide for ourselves the seeds that we want to plant.
Just as no sane person
would plant a flower and expect to get apple seeds, we will not get the flowers
of happiness until we plant the seeds of happiness. In other words,
the fruit in our lives can come only from the seeds that we have previously
planted, so to be happy in life, we must first be willing to plant
the seeds of happiness.
Most of us try to
reverse that process. We think we will be happy if only we can change
our outer life in some way. In other words, I’ll be happy when
___________. We become experts in getting ready to be happy, but we
never quite get there. We want the flowers of happiness first, and then,
we tell ourselves, we will plant the necessary seeds. It doesn’t
work that way. We become what we think about. Thought precedes expression,
and cause comes before effect. We cannot reverse the order.
The secret of happiness
is simple. If we are not happy with our lives, we must wake up, become
self-aware, and look carefully at the seeds that we have planted. Or
not planted. We must be willing to change the way we think.. We must
be willing to release the illusions that have been unconsciously controlling
our lives. We can blame others for the unhappiness we feel, or we can
take responsibility for our lives, but we cannot do both. We must make
a choice.
We are responsible
for our beliefs and the way we think. Can we see this truth? This
is a work that we can only do for ourselves. Can we see
this in our own life?
We become what we
think about. So the question is "What are you thinking
about today?" "How do you need to change your beliefs
and the way you are thinking?" What seeds would you
like to plant?
These are some of
the important spiritual principle’s that are taught at Stony Hill
to help us live more gently and do no harm to ourselves, the people
around us, or the earth we live on.
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