Sunday, July 5, 2009

Payback time

If you have lived beyond your means for a long time, you will eventually find yourself in a lot of trouble.

In the same way, if you have been extremely selfish for many years, you will eventually find yourself lonely and miserable. You may have saved up a lot of money, but what if there is nothing your children desire more than your death. Your employees may be polite to you, or even praise you for your business acumen, but no one loves you and if you look inside of yourself, you will find nothing but a wasteland.

If you drink too much or take too many drugs for years and years, you will eventually find yourself in the gutter. In the same way, a society that emits more toxic waste than nature can decompose will eventually be poisoned to death. This is very simple logic.

Some people are constant, habitual complainers. Absolutely everything is wrong and all people they meet are complete idiots. They often try to hide their feelings of disgust behind polite manners and smiles, but it shines through. It is not very pleasant to be around such people.

The question is, is it possible that mindsets like this can be changed? This is in fact the only question you have to consider. Is it possible?

8 comments:

© Marite Art 2013 said...

Yes, it is possible!

Whatever we are capable of envisaging already exists!

It only takes an infinitesimal instant of realization.

On the other hand, it may take more than one life-time to accomplish it.

:Doreen said...

It is not that important that the mindsets of "others" change. What is most important is that one's own changes. EVERYONE has the potential for waking up. But no one else can effect one's "own" state of consciousness. This is Key to understanding.

For example, in discussions we get "enlightened ideas" but through "habits" we go back to the old ideas over and over again. And without knowing it, we go back to original beliefs.

If one "thinks" it is OK for oneself to change but that others cannot, then one hinders one's own change.

I hear people label and define people as if they have a choice as to the state of their consciousness. They do not. Most people are born into a situation; are born with collective conditioning... these are not things one "escapes" through thoughts or the "mind".

There is a subtle shift that happens, where everyone is viewed equally in this awakening process. The time line is not important.

The external world and the way it "functions" becomes less and less important. Because, one no longer is "at the mercy" of others.

Today, for example, the car I and my daughter drive has a problem with the brakes. 3 times yesterday they did not make contact to the drums or rotors(?) so the control of the car was lost, and luckily the car stopped "in time", all 3 times. The car needs repair, no doubt! But when the subject was brought up to the husband, the immediate reaction was "I don't have the money." This is a habitual habit that is not changing because I change; but I realize that he cannot control this. But, now, I have the capacity to find a different solution. For "one of" the first times, I again, realize that he literally cannot hear me.

New Awareness, also, takes some getting used to. Like, Eckhart Tolle, he spent many years before he could talk about what had happened to him.

For example, I hear Ellen Langer, what she says is valid. I have not read her book, but what comes up is this question: How long did these changes in people last? Is it possible that after some time they revert back to their "old" way of thinking? Without one's own awareness of how repetitive thought is dysfunctional, these changes may not last. But, if we, as a society, "once awakened", live within the field of Now, our children would function, also, in this way.

? said...

I’m not sure if you are right. Other people do influence your mindset. It happens all the time, from the day you are born until the day you die. You have been influenced by Eckhart, Byron Katie, Bono, Osho and Susan Watkins, just to mention a few that I happen to know about.

I don’t see awakening as a big bang change that last forever. Nothing last forever. Things change constantly. Attension wanders away. Suddenly I’m lost in a fantasyland, lost in thoughts, and then suddenly I wake up again, realizing that I was lost in thoughts. Now I’m here again.

To be lost in thoughts is not a problem, I believe, as long as we wake up every now and then, realizing that thoughts are just thought, not the reality. Whithout these intermittent “awakenings” one is insane and completely caught in an imagined cage.

? said...

I have to correct my self. It was overwhelming, the first time I realized that the world and the mind was so much bigger than my thoughts and myself. I think of my Santorini experience in that big bang kind of way. The second time in my life I experienced something extraordinary like that was the July 2005 events. Now, however, I live a regular life, with intermittent, daily realizations that, “Oh! This was just a thought again”.

:Doreen said...

One thing to consider is that both Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle had their waking up experiences many years ago. For Katie it was 1986, for Eckhart, I calculated, that since he was 60 last year and the shift happened when he was 29...somewhere around 1977! He published The Power of Now in 1999.

Something he said that resonates with me (well, everything he says does) but in a specific way to his experience; Tami Simon asked him if he thought he was going crazy when he experienced the shift that day when he was 29. He said, no, but everyone around him thought he was. Family and friends. He has said that you have to accept that others around you may remain unconscious.

:Doreen said...

EVERYONE has the potential for waking up. But no one else can effect one's "own" state of consciousness. This is Key to understanding.

yes, I completely resonate with the people you listed. But I could not have heard them without a shift in my state of consciousness. Like, Bashar, i was fascinated and drawn to his words when i first listened to him, mid-eighties... But, not until 2006 did everything he said become clear. What I mean by "effect" is that one cannot try to wake up, it "happens". You are in that state, and at the same time you cannot understand it with the thinking mind. Like, Marite says: "It only takes an infinitesimal instant of realization."
Look at the root of this word: "infinit-esimal". The infinite even exists in the infinitesimal!

You can know this but you can never know this.
The capacity to look at stars and not be dizzy(or bored) but be in awe.

:Doreen said...

one more thing:
Things(forms) change constantly. But the Now does not.
Or the formless dimension is constant out of which the constantly changing forms arise.

:Doreen said...

I know why I am here now, Full Moon.