Antagonistic Aphorisms
Imagine that you wake up every morning and tell yourself that it’s going to be a lousy day. What do you think your day will be like?
What if you woke up and told yourself that it was the beginning of another amazing day on this beautiful planet? What do you think your day would be like?
Our attitudes, of course, have an immense impact on the way our life unfolds each day. We all know of people who have extremely expensive cars, and are still miserable. And we probably know people who have cancer or other ‘negative’ situations, and they’re happy as can be.
Happiness has almost nothing to do with our external situation. Really, the only tool we need to find perfect happiness is Awareness. And maybe a few pounds of chocolate per day =)
Awareness helps us because it unveils the thought-patterns that are constantly shaping our world. Consider some of the messages we have in our heads. The following are called ‘aphorisms’ – little sayings meant to act as observations about life. I’ve selected these because, if you live in the United States, you will probably be familiar with all of them. Furthermore, you will probably find that you agree with most of them! And yet each one is a function of the dualistic mindset – our usual state of mind that sets imaginary objects against imaginary objects – the very mindset that creates all the stress, frustration, and despair in our lives.
This dualistic mindset is optional. Take a look at the following statements, see if they are familiar, and see if they sound ‘right’ to you. If they are familiar (ingrained), and sound ‘right’, how do you think these sorts of messages shape your world?
Life isn’t fair.
No pain, no gain.
Money doesn’t grow on trees.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
What goes up must come down.
What goes around comes around.
A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.
Time flies.
Quitters never win.
You snooze, you lose.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
If you find that you agree with most of these sayings, the important thing to understand is that these sayings do not accurately describe reality. They accurately describe your assumptions about reality. And because reality is actually very loose and playful, it will gladly shape itself to your assumptions.
I’ll say it again – it causes us no end of grief when we assume that reality is similar to those sayings. It’s not! Nothing could be further from the truth! Those sayings only describe your idea of how the world should be, and no matter how much the world might want you to be blissfully happy, it can’t help you out if you’re telling yourself over and over how difficult it is to dance with life.
There are two ways to counter these negative messages. The first is to replace them with positive ones, by re-training our thoughts. This, unfortunately, is a conflict-oriented solution, and often tends to create continued frustration down the road.
The second is simple awareness. As we learn to actually pay attention to our thoughts, and spend less time in endless habitual thinking, we can see what’s actually going on in our heads. The magic of awareness is that we’re no longer running on auto-pilot, and we aren’t playing endless negative messages in our heads.
The article What’s Really Going On In Our Minds tells us more about what’s going on in there, as well as how to cultivate Awareness.
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