Living the Dream

Grass is greener on the other side of the fence, they say.  I have come to know this is not true.  We simply forget to appreciate what we have and devalue it.  Our minds work in peculiar ways.  Eckhart suggest we need to get over ourselves, I think, when he says that unconscious naming must cease so we can become aware of space. To me, it is an distanced illusion that grass is greener; a trick of the eye.  If the eye can trick us, consider what the mind can do.  Ego envies what it thinks others have and memory seems to close the door to new ways at looking what happened in our past, what is happening now and what might happen.  It is warped thinking to say “those were the good old days” as if they were, and they most likely weren’t.  Nothing is all good or all not good.

We observe things in a bias’d way.  We experienced things as we wished to experience them.  We have made judgments according to our conditioning and experiences as we have decided was Truth.  We have distorted things in order to justify our self-esteem or lack of it.  We became “Ego-I” people and evaluated and discriminated against ideas without consideration of Oneness.  We cannot be faulted until we become aware that what we have believed is not our truth, once we know the truth of Oneness, we can no longer fool ourselves or others.

Consider some of the following, as I have, in trying to figure out how I came to this single-minded idea of who I am, where I am, and why I am.  You will recognize some of them, I am sure.

Consider that parts of memory fades.  Perhaps some sensual parts of memory are embedded in the body; think comfort food, think knee-jerk reactions, think of your favorite childhood smell, sound, feeling.  But the whole memory is not there, simply fragments that the mind chooses to remember for whatever reason.  Consider that we have those moments we have lapses of memory and are absent-minded.  My mother once put her shoes in the fridge.  And some people have blocked their memories since they could not deal with things and it was easier.  I am sure you have heard of people who say “I have no memory before the age of thirteen…school, etc.”  We may also have misattributed fragments of memories so time, place, people are sometimes wrong.  Our memories are also distorted by Ego, by experiences of Ego, by guilt, by anger, by all of the emotions.  You know how some see perfection in a new partner and then realize that partner was not quite as perfect as they wished.  Ah, and then there are not just the great memories, there are those that we wish we could forget and can’t.

Memory comes from things we focused on.  We become selective about what we wish to remember and for reasons we wish to forget or remember them.  We magnify either the positive or negative according to how the Ego wishes to be fed.  Sometimes our memory is filled in with things we fabricate to justify their happening.  Imagination and true memory gets mucked up together.  True memories get filled in with false memories.

We prefer to consider things of the past in the light of how we were exposed to them.  We recall feelings of an incident because that strongly influences our cognitive judgments.  We like…we don’t like…because…  it is familiar, or compelling and we have already drawn conclusions about it.  In fact, we seldom check why we like or do not like something.  We think we simply do.  When we check back to see why we are deathly afraid of a spider…we will inevitably go back to the first real experience we had with one and choose the part that we choose to have us label that thing good or not good.  This can also lead to over-generalizing because of this little piece of personal evidence.  The story of the blind men and the elephant comes to mind.  There needs be no logic to it, we have simply made it our truth by some little part of an experience.  Once we have a belief, we will stubbornly hang on to it to feed our PainBody/Ego and make allsorts of assumptions about something.  People can give evidence about us being wrong, but if we are sold-out to labeling, remembering, or concluding a certain point of view, our Ego really hates to give up on it.  Denial can be really useful when you are all about being right rather than true.

Mixed up in all this is our sense that life just isn’t fair:  That green grass.  Self-righteousness is a real Ego trip. No, life isn’t always fair, but I believe it does balance out Universally.  Of course, some people choose to use this unfairness as a way to ‘catastrophize’ every bit of negativity and magnify it to full blown puddles of pity that gets them the kind of attention Ego wants.  It hungers for it.  It labels small things big and big things something that was somehow deserved.  But, label it the Ego will so it can go into histrionics which inevitably gets the kind of attention it desires and sometimes needs to keep up the label.    People who are pessimistic because they have labeled so many things “unfair” will inevitably have their Ego tell them they are right and search for proof, however warped.  They will blame others for the pain they feel because that is easier than accepting that there were other choices they could have made.  Sometimes life is fair, but often it is not.  No one is coming to save us.  We are responsible for our own lvies, our own happiness, our own misery.  No one can make us feel anything we do not wish to feel.

Labeling is Self-centered activity.  Everything is not about US.  In the context of Universal rhythms, we are miniscule.  We can not understand our own behavior and intents, if we are not true to the Oneness.  Pain-body people bump in to other pain-body people.  We judge each other without considering cause and can become so enamored of the I-effect.  Never is anything all black or all white, all good, all bad, all negative, all positive in this life.      There are alternatives, but sometimes we see things so one-way that we miss them.  I love the story of the Zen master who offered his students a cup of tea and said, “If you drink that tea I will beat you:  If you do not drink that tea, I am going to beat you.”  It was a conundrum, I am sure, since the ones who chose to be beaten would see a beating as the only thing.  The ones who did not want to get beaten would fight or freeze or flee.  But, the ones who were in a good space would have seen more than the black or white.  They would have seen that gray area of alternatives:  giving the tea to the Master or sharing it with him?  I have been such a sneaky person, I’d have bribed someone else to drink it so they got the beating, I am sure.  *grin* We dismiss a lot of beautiful things when we label things all black or all white.

Sometimes our minds are so danged ignorant.  We choose to dismiss or ignore important things.  We choose narrow views and reasonings rather than open up to possibilities.  We choose to stay unaware and say, “A rose is a rose is a rose.”  I find this in people who are religion-obsessed and go about life in blind faith.  People can be so attached to an idea or a belief that they come across as pretentious, deceptive, shameless, inconsiderate, and disrespectful in their Ego-distraction.  I have been guilty of it to.  I remember when I was in University and was invited over to Kelowna to visit a friend’s family.  They spoke of boats and army subjects that I had no idea of.  I was lost.  I had such educational arena tunnel vision that I could not even relate.  I was quiet and Ego had me thinking I was a higher thinker than they.  Later, I was astounded to hear that they thought I was “rather high-minded”.  LOL.  I had been sitting their justifying my own “goodness”:  I didn’t drink.  I didn’t do drugs.  I didn’t carouse.  I had had no one-night stands.  I. I. I.  I was ignorant of their way of life as much as I was of mine.  Sure, they may have had their ways of dealing with life and so had I…my little invisible big ways.  After I got to know them through the years, they became like family.  Thank goodness they knew how to forgive my ignorance.

Labeling was a problem of mine.  I had my own little sets of rules, to-dos, not-to-dos, what was just and right for me and I applied this to all.  I generalized and labeled things and people and places, like saying “a rose is a rose is a rose”.  I had ideals and I idealized people, places and things.  I had to get over it, seriously.  Life irritated me, people irritated me, things irritated me.  I was in a constant state of irritation.  I also expected people to be mind readers, I guess, because I thought they should know what I know and what I expected.  I spent a lot of time feeling being let down because I had not accepted that I was not, never could be, should never try to be perfect because then I expected the same of them…but then, that was before I realized that everyone is perfectly perfect in the present moment.  I had a great deal of unrealistic labels for people, places and things.

As we label things, we decide with both heart and head not soul and spirit.  It is easy to clump people, places and things together.  The Ego loves that job.  However, it is wise not to be cautious.  There are times when intuition tells you what you need to know, who you should listen to, who you should steer clear of.  The harsh truth of life is sometimes necessary to feel, as well.  There are great lessons in them.  Labeling is simply a way of denying what the present moment is… it is a thief that robs us of Oneness encounters.  Labeling comes from the Ego.

As we try to stop labeling, the Ego will backtalk to us.  It will self-induce anxiety.  It will redirect emotions.  It will try to intellectualize according to its own story.  It will threaten, whip you into indecision so you are easier to handle as its source of nurture.  It will try to rationalize.  It will justify.  It will bring up its own proofs.  It will beg you to come back to that old thinking.  It will act out, big time.  It will tell you you are not entitled to change the rules of its tricks it is playing on you.  But persevere.  I am trying very hard to take out few moments and simply refuse to label.  It is very hard work to submit to this activity but I am doing this for  a spiritual purpose, and an active receptivity is beginning to become sustained as energy is exchanged with that person, place or things, and realization of Oneness is deepened.  I am un-conditioning/de-conditioning, little by little and I find my grass ever green.

“The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. Not at all. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.” — Robert Fulghum, in It was On Fire When I Lay Down on It, Ivy Books, 1989

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