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Playing Crash

A few weeks back, I participated in a Firefly-based live-action role-playing airsoft game. I was Crash. The pilot of a ship that had touched down on a backwater planet to do some smuggling. Around me were many of my friends, but they too had strange names and new roles. We had arguments (though we’d never argue in ‘real life’), we had a hierarchy (as friends we have none), and we even shot at each other.

Now, no one is going to confuse me with Crash. I’m Kenton, right? Not the rather foolhardy, irritated and distractible character I played at the Firefly event. Most of us feel we can tell the difference between play-acting and being the ‘real me’.

Emotional Selves

This is all fine and well when we’re involved with a role-playing game. But it becomes a bit more confusing when we apply it to emotions or different evolutions during our lives. I might get married at a time when I have plenty of money and good friends, and my wife might think I am the most fabulous guy around. Then I might lose my job, start drinking a little, and slump into a depression. My wife could easily feel that I am not the same person she married. Who have I become?

When we get angry, sad, or feel overwhelmed with frustrations, we feel more terrible than the negative emotions warrant. Why? Because we know this isn’t who we are. I’m a positive person, and I am too spiritually developed and self-aware to be feeling this way!

Filled with the knowledge that we shouldn’t feel negative – filled with a resistance to our emotions – we torture ourselves by demanding different behavior of ourselves.

We think this is good. If we’re feeling negative emotions, we should use techniques to fight them, right? But the very act of fighting is actually creating most of the suffering we endure.

I’d Better Behave Myself!

This all emerges because we have a set idea of who we are – an ego – and we expect some pretty strict behaviors out of this ‘I’. I shouldn’t be sad. I should be grateful for what I have. I should be enlightened. I shouldn’t be frustrated. I should be more self-compassionate!

A little observation will show us how this game revolves in circles of self-torture.

So who am I, anyway?

As soon as I begin to answer that question, I begin to create a fictional idea that I have to live up to. And my actions will seldom match up with my fictional idea. By creating this basic dualistic backdrop for my life, I create conflict in even the most basic and simple of human actions – Being Me.

What if I could see that ‘I’ is simply what is happening Right Now? If I am Crash, that’s who I am in that very moment. If I’m angry, ‘I’ am angry. That’s what I am in the very moment that I’m experiencing that emotion. If I paid attention in that very moment, I’d see that my mind is experiencing anger, and that’s about it. If I could really experience this emotion of anger, I’d see that it’s a fleeting thing. Just a swift movement in my perception, and in the next moment ‘I’ (or the totality of my momentary perception) might be the vision of some trees outside the window.

When we actually experience our emotions fully, we find that anger, frustration and agitation are incredibly soft and fragile emotions. They flicker into our perception for a brief second, and then are gone.

The Game We Play

But this is not what we experience. Here is what we do.

I feel the brief flicker of anger. But now, instead of my perception moving on to something else, I fill my perception with a new thought – I think “I shouldn’t be feeling angry!” And now I feel tension for a brief moment. I know I shouldn’t be feeling so worked up over something so small, so I think a new thought – ‘This is stupid! Why am I so angry all the time?’ And that thought leads to another, and another, and another . . .

This is not an out-of-control chain reaction. It is a chain that requires thought and effort on our parts in order to create each link. The problem is that we are so much in the habit of creating this effort that we don’t even know we’re doing it. It seems automatic, natural, and inevitable.

Unknowingly, by force of constant habit, we perpetuate the chain of our own suffering by creating ideas in our heads – ideas of how we should be. We simply don’t trust that we might be perfectly fine just as we are. Instead, we think that we are fallible creatures, and that it takes constant vigilance in order to keep ourselves in line.

That very vigilance is the creator of the problems we’re fighting so hard to solve. Indeed, our thinking, vigilant mind might even now be creating a new problem! It might be saying — ‘See! You create your own problems! It’s you’re fault, because you’re in control! Kenton said so!’

But it’s not your fault, because this very idea of control — the idea that you can be at fault and need to modify ‘who you are’ — is causing the whole problem!

Breaking the Habit

This habit of creating suffering is broken with one simple thing. Awareness. We don’t have to force ourselves to feel a certain way. We don’t have to resist certain emotions or thought patterns. We simply have to be Aware.

But this isn’t the awareness we were taught in school. It’s not about an effort of focusing our perception on what’s wrong. Usually, that simply adds energy to the problem, because what we’re really doing is looking at our problems and wishing they weren’t there. Instead, this Awareness is what happens when we cease all effort. It’s what we’re naturally doing when we stop all the constant effort of creating ideas about the world and how it should be. It’s not zoning out, it’s not taking drugs so that we are totally unaware. It’s the amazing, pure Awareness which we all possess, but we’ve buried under layers and layers of ideas.

It’s as if we all have this amazing superpower, but we’ve forgotten its existence. We were all unwittingly taught, since we were babies, how to actively resist Awareness. By now we are so expert at it that we can find it almost impossible to do what comes most naturally to the human creature. We’ve become master dualists, and the idea that we could survive without dualism seems quite ridiculous.

Like a smoker who finds it easier to drive to the convenience store to buy cigarettes (rather than just stay home, which takes no effort at all), we find ourselves driven by our habit, unable to engage the world without the filter of our symbols. The marvelous trick to seeing the world – and yourself – ‘Just As Is’ is simply to cease our efforts. By cultivating Awareness of what our mind is doing, our efforts automatically cease.

It’s all about not trying. If we can re-discover our Awareness (which we do not by concentrated effort, but by just sitting down and letting our Awareness do what it does naturally), that Awareness will see the world as it really is. When it sees an emotion, it will experience it and move on to new perceptions. Our suffering evaporates, because we’re not perpetuating it.

Have a seat somewhere comfy, kick back your feet, and simply take a long moment to see what’s happening in your mind. The more you do this, the more you’ll start to see the patterns you’re constantly replicating, the ideas you are constantly bolstering up, and the symbols that you are constantly applying to the world. You don’t have to fight these things – just take a good look at them, and discover the power of Awareness. Once you find Awareness, Awareness will take care of everything else. You don’t have to do a thing.

Explore posts in the same categories: Being Present, Understanding Dualism

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Being Present, Understanding Dualism. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.