kentonwhitman.com

Enlightenment. Awakening. Satori. Dwelling in the Now. Non-Dualism.

These are huge, beautiful words. They hold the promise of something amazing and wonderful, available to us if only we can unravel the secret of finding them.

When we dwell on any of these words, we can feel their power in our imagination. We might imagine ourselves being peaceful in all situations. We might imagine feeling a true sense of understanding of the world. We might imagine perfect emotional health.

Because these words create such pretty pictures in our heads, they become both valuable and treacherous.

In a world where it is all too easy to live all eighty or ninety years of our lives in a state of constant distraction, these words can serve to pull us out of the our usual blur, and remind us that there is something besides work, television, and constant efforts to improve both ourselves and the external world we interact with. Without these words, we might very well remain lost in distraction for our entire lives.

But beyond acting as forces to spur us onward, these words cease to do us much good. In many ways, the images we create around them give us ideas of expected behavior. Behavior which we inevitably fail to live up to. In this way we set lofty goals of ‘what enlightenment is’, and ‘how we should act if we want to be enlightened’, and get frustrated with ourselves for failing to meet these expectations.

In essence, we’re creating our own cycle of suffering.

I use these lofty words on this site for a number of reasons. But I also try to remind us that these words can create suffering for us if we don’t use them wisely.

So for now, let’s toss them aside. To be truthful, they have very little to do with the message of these writings. Let’s let everything ‘spiritual’ slip away for a bit, and get completely practical. After all, I did not discover the things I write about by going to meditation retreats, studying under a guru, or balancing my chakras. What I discovered was something entirely more simple than that. I discovered nothing more than our natural state of being, and for that, no teacher was necessary.

Your Natural Self

My message here is to tell you that your natural self is everything you dream you want to be. Your natural self is exuberant, passionate, peaceful, aware, and free of negative emotional patterns. Your natural self does not create cycles of frustration and stress in your life. Your natural self is literally perfect, and knows how to love life fully and act with perfect compassion.

The second part of my message is even more important.

Here it is –

You must work tremendously hard NOT to be your natural self.

This is important because we are convinced that the situation is quite the opposite. We believe our life is difficult, stressful, and spotted with suffering, and we believe that we have to work hard if we want to break out of that cycle and become our natural selves.

The tragic result is that we end up spending enormous amounts of energy, on all levels, applying ourselves to a fruitless task. Indeed, the most startling aspect of this is that our efforts actually create the problems we’re trying to solve.

We are like a man I once knew at an institution for people who are a little ‘touched in the head’. He had a bruise on his thigh, and felt sure that the only way to heal the bruise was to do deep-tissue massage. So he would hit his thigh and press it and rub it all day long. His thigh, of course, was naturally just fine. If he hadn’t started hitting and massaging it in the first place, it never even would have been bruised. But now, his efforts to heal himself were actually creating the injury. And no one could make him see that he was the one doing the damage.

Your natural self is you, right now. It is your ‘True Self’, the self which is not confused, is not needy, is not grasping. The solution to all our problems and the ‘secret’ to life are revealed to us when we are simply our natural selves.

Why, then, does it seem so difficult for us to find our natural selves? Why do we feel so ‘unnatural’, in the sense of being lost in a confusing and apparently arbitrary world?

Natural is Easy

As our journey to find our natural self begins, we imagine that we’ll have a difficult road ahead. We are carrying emotional baggage from years past, and patterns of behavior which we’ve developed over decades. Our minds ramble without our consent, and we feel victimized by worry, stress, and feelings of inadequacy or frustration. In short, it seems impossible that we could ever be truly happy. At the very least, we’ll need a complete personality overhaul if we wish to succeed in finding the secret to life.

But what we naturally are is the easiest thing for us to be. Being our natural self is not something that requires more work and effort. It’s something that we have to remember – something we have to ‘come back to’.

When I spent my time in the wilderness during my mid-teens, I quickly discovered that I was completely insane. No question about it. Here I was, surrounded by vast natural beauty, with no schedule and nothing required of me. Yet somehow, I was stressed. My mind was going crazy. I felt emotions of loneliness. I felt strange pangs of hunger as I thought of chocolate and butter and milk. I wondered if I was wasting my time, just hanging out in the woods. I felt annoyed by the heat, the cold, and the mosquitoes. I even felt frustrated that I couldn’t control my mind enough to just enjoy where I was!

The world around me was calm, peaceful, and quiet. And the activity inside my mind was a chaotic mess.

This seemed very strange.

If we stop in any moment of our life, we’ll find pretty much the same thing. Even in the midst of emergency situations, there is rarely very much going on. Imagine you are squatting over someone who has been in a car accident, giving CPR as you wait for the EMTs to arrive. There are people crying and shouting, and other people gawking, and a terribly injured person lying on the road beneath you. Someone is honking a horn, and more people are rushing up to see what happened.

Can you feel your blood pressure rising, just thinking about it?

Really, all that’s going on in that exact moment is that you are leaning forward to give a chest compression. There are some sounds in your ears, and the feeling of the person’s chest on your palms. That’s all. Very quiet and calm.

But inside your head, it’s a wild, unruly party.

Will the person die?? When will the EMTs arrive?? Am I doing this right?? This is just like when my sister died in that collision three years ago!! Will those people stop shouting and crying??!! Aaaagh!!!!!!

Another chest compression.

Our natural self sees what is actually going on. Its mind isn’t careening off into wild thoughts. Our natural self is right there, giving compressions, and it’s able to be there perfectly and fully, because it realizes that there is no other time than right now.

This ‘calmness’ of life is true thoughout our day. Anytime you like, stop in the midst of your life and see what’s actually going on in that very moment. You’ll probably find that nothing much is happening. It’s only when we start to use our mind to imagine what’s coming in the next moment, and the next, that our life seems suddenly jumbled and stretched and sometimes unbearable.

We may understand all of this, but our natural self, who can see the moment and be perfectly within it, seems like a stranger to us. Surely we could never be like that!

How Do We Find Our Natural Self?

We can’t create our natural self by doing special exercises or by trying to shape our thoughts or emotions into certain patterns. This is like trying to build a living flower out of sticks and twisty-ties and sheets of colored parchment. We can only build a mock flower in this way.

Our natural self is what we are when we’re not trying to be something else.

But how do we do this?

If you read that question again, you’ll see that the very act of asking it has already entered us into the cycle of trying to build our natural self out of artificial ingredients. As usual, we’re hitting our own bruises, hoping that will heal them. What we need, if we are to find our natural selves, is for our gaze to turn in just the right direction – a direction in which we can see clearly what it is that we’re doing to create our own fears and insecurities and frustrations.

There are many ways to allow our gaze to soften into this view. But the softening can’t happen until we experience for ourselves the futility of our searching.

In part three, I’ll take us on an imaginary journey into the wilderness, and we’ll get a chance to find our natural selves in the forests of our imaginations.

Explore posts in the same categories: Awakening and Reality

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Awakening and Reality. 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.