Where do YOU Get the Power to Change?

Copyright 2011 by Mike George


     You’re sitting in your car at the lights. Just as they turn to green someone cuts in front of you and speeds off into the distance. You are furious! What an arrogance! What an idiot…you think! You’re so mad you stop fifty yards ahead to cool down. A moment later someone drives up beside you and tells you that the person that cut you up at the lights had just heard their mother was taken critically ill to hospital. In one second your anger subsides. It collapses into understanding and compassion. In effect you become peaceful and you send loving thoughts of hope to that person. One little piece of information was enough for you to change your mindset and your feelings.

     You could say that this is the “power of information” but it’s not. It’s the power of belief. And who decided to believe?

     In such situations some people believe instantly the information that they receive. And they use it to change their perception and therefore their reaction. Other people, down the more cynical end of the spectrum, have the habit of not believing anything they are told. They have probably been frequently misled many times in the past. They don’t easily “trust” what others say. Perhaps the majority of us sit somewhere in the middle of such a spectrum, sometimes believing blindly and sometimes being incredulously disbelieving. But most of the time not quite sure which way to swing.

 The Roots of Stress

     We do seem to live in a world where more people are prepared to tell lies and mislead others in order to serve their agenda. It’s a world in which creating successful strategies of misinformation is even celebrated. So how are we to sort the truth from fiction? How are we to disentangle half-truths based on others agendas and discern the accuracy of what we are told? In the above example how do we “know for sure” that there is a critically ill mum in a hospital somewhere? There is only one way and it’s called “validation”. The only way to truly know is to go to the hospital and see for our self. Only then does the need to believe or not believe become redundant. Now we “know” for sure.

     The capacity to turn information into the power of belief and use it to change some of our thinking and perhaps some of our behaviors is something we can all do. But it can’t free us from our all our stress i.e. all our mental suffering or our emotional pain. The roots are too deep and cannot be reached by information and beliefs. The seeds and roots of our stress can be found at the spiritual level deep within our being. Information and beliefs can point to the heart of our being but they cannot go there. Information and beliefs can “signpost” what lies behind our mental and emotional states but only the immediate “insperience” of being there, can give us the power to deeply change the thought and feeling patterns that are causing our stress. Understanding why this is so also reveals why so few people seem to successfully and lastingly change the way they think, feel and act. Here is why.

Seeking Relief

     After awakening in the morning most of us get up, look in the mirror, and believe that we are what we see. As we go through the day we will create stress in various emotional forms swinging between anxiety (fear) and frustration (anger) to moments of sorrow (sadness) mostly based on the belief that we are just a physical form in a physical world with no control over anything more than three feet away! We also carry the other learned beliefs that the stress is a) normal b) caused by someone else. We will look out into the world around us and see it as both a competitive and perhaps dangerous place, because that is also what many of us have been taught to believe.

     At some stage in our life we will seek some kind of relief from our physical, mental and emotional stress/suffering. As we hunt for that relief, often with the hope of finding the ultimate solutions, we will encounter a thousand methods, techniques, approaches, philosophies not to mention saviors, all offering and many promising to…fix us! We are likely to encounter what some may call the “spiritual approach”. If we do we will probably receive the following information. “They” will likely say that “in truth” you are not a mortal and finite physical form in a process of continuous decay (as seen on Channel Mirror in the morning!) but a spiritual entity that is immortal, infinite and ageless. They will say they are only reminding us that our true nature is peaceful, loving and joyfully contented and not grumpy, prone to worry or depressed. And they will probably explain that the world is essentially a benevolent space in which all life forms exist in harmonious co-operation with each other; it’s just that some species have forgotten how, including the majority of the human species!

     It’s the kind of basic “spiritual information” that sounds both simple and true. You could argue with it but who would want to? Probably only those who are perhaps a little addicted to their stress/suffering. However, even when we believe it, it doesn’t change us. It doesn’t change our day-to-day state of being, our patterns of thought, our habits of behavior, our habits of “stress creation”, which have all been laid down over many years.
No matter how much we “believe” that it’s all true it doesn’t give us the power to free our self from our daily worries and our existential angst. Well maybe there is a slight lessening of the degrees or depth of our stress/suffering as the balm of such ideas provides a kind of consolatory comfort that all is really well within both our inner and outer worlds. But it’s only as good as an ointment for a rash. It only covers the surface and provides a little temporary relief.

Belief is Not Enough

     We may also recognize that such insights are also not new or exclusive to any particular school of thought, religious philosophy or spiritual understanding. They’ve been around for donkey’s years and they’ve been translated into hundreds of languages in a thousand ways. But still the stress levels rise, the suffering continues, the conflicts deepen, the angst expands. Why? The lack of “validation”. Very few people will give both the time and attention to validating such insights regardless of how right or true they may sound. Regardless of how much even our intuition resonates with the “information” about who and what we really are, regardless of how much we may “believe”, it doesn’t give us the power to perceive, think and behave so that we no longer create our own mental and emotional stress/suffering. The belief that other people and situations are responsible for our stress is so deeply rooted it takes more than just another belief to overcome it. Belief is not enough. Validation means we have to see and know for our self. Just as we may actually go to the hospital see and know the mother is there and is critically ill we need to go to the heart our being to see and know who and what we are and how we work from inside out. Only then can we “know” our self as a spiritual entity, only then can we “know” if our nature really is peaceful and loving. And only then can we see if life really is always a bowl of cherries, sweet and filled with goodness, despite what others may be doing around us “out there”.

     So how do we validate the information that points at “the spiritual”, how do we validate what we and many others “believe” to be true? Only by entering “spiritual” territory, which isn’t a place but a state of being. In such a territory or state there are no words, no ideas, no memories. There are no longer any concepts of self or the world. There no attachments or beliefs and definitely no attachments to beliefs. These are all the stuff of the mental territory or our mental states.

Journey to the Centre

     Validation of self as a spiritual being and the validation of the true nature of our being requires us to leave both physical and mental states of consciousness behind for a few moments at least. And yet our primary habits of attachment and identification are with the mental and the physical. So just as a vehicle can propel us to the hospital to see for our self, what can propel our consciousness out of physical and mental awareness and into a spiritual state of awareness? Enter the vehicle know as meditation, the vintage car of all spiritual awakening. Meditation is the ability to move through and beyond lower states of conscious awareness and into the highest or deepest state of awareness. Most meditation teachers and practitioners will affirm that the practice itself takes us beyond the awareness of time and change (i.e. awareness of the physical and the mental) and into the timeless and thoughtless dimension of being… just being. Only there can we be aware of and know our true self, for our self…so to speak!

     That’s probably why the “spiritual elders”, the sages and saints, and the ones who have created a legacy of spiritual wisdom down through the ages both practiced and taught some form of meditation. They knew that only in a meditative state can we “see though” all the learned identities based on a) physical images (form/shape/appearance/fashion etc.) and b) mental ideas (profession/nationality/personal history etc.) and reveal our true authentic self based on “no thing” i.e. no image and no idea. They knew that once memories were silent and the mind was still the “self” was found to be beyond i.e. prior to, any awareness of the physical and mental dimensions of change. In such a state time collapses into the moment called “now” where there is no “then”. The ultimate peace of this state of being is then known to be the power of our life itself. From the power of that state of being comes the capacity to “consciously create” all that follows i.e. our thoughts, feelings actions etc. Instead or reacting emotionally to the world around us it’s that “inner power” of being that restores our ability to respond with calm consideration and focused determination.

      “They” also returned from this “validatory” journey in their meditative vehicle to tell us of the deep spiritual insights into the nature of the self and the world that awaits us all. Including the realization that life itself, despite all its varied textures and turmoils, is just a game, an amazing playful game, happening through us and around us, in which we all have the opportunity to create our own life and play any role that we choose. And that when we “live out” that awareness, as we bring that awareness through our mind and through our behaviors into the world around us, then the world itself, which is itself just a dance of many energies, will rush to line up with us and serve the energy of our being.

     Rumi captured both the idea and necessity to go beyond the physical and the mental in order to “be in” and validate our own truth, our own spiritual power, when he said:

Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I'll meet you there.      —Rumi

     He was reminding as that “prior to” our mental and physical awareness, prior to our intellectual judgments and evaluations, there is a state of being that restores our awareness of the truth and power of our life. But that truth cannot be known, it’s power cannot change the way we live our life, until we go there and “validate” it’s reality for our self. Only then can we know the peace that “I am/you are”, only then can we know that love is what “I am/you are”, only then can we know pure joy is what “I am/you are”. Such validation changes…everything!

     Some prefer not to attempt to see if they can validate such “spiritual insights/possibilities” about the self. Perhaps because of the fear of change, perhaps because of doubt. They prefer to live in the world of beliefs. They prefer a belief based faith, never quite knowing if what they believe is actually true, never quite knowing why they still feel occasionally peaceless, sometimes a little loveless and the odd moments of joylessness. That too, like everything else, is as it is meant to be…they said!

Question: Why do we find it so hard to take time out for our self to explore beyond the “known” territories of mind and body and into the unknown territory of our own spiritual being?

Reflection: Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.       —Rumi

Action: Learn, experiment with and integrate some meditative practice in to your days over the next couple of weeks.

                                                                              —30—

Mike George writes a column in The New Era Times called Clear Thinking.

Mike George has The Relaxation Centre. A place for insight, wisdom and practical methods to relax your mental, emotional and spiritual energies. 

Please take whatever you find useful there and use in your own unique way because, like happiness, relaxation is an inside job!