Relating to others earlier than anticipated
I went to Houston to visit a friend who invited me over for a weekend and he told me something along the lines of “I know you are into spiritually and I’m kind of starting to have some curiosity around what’s that about, can you tell me?”
I didn’t know where to start or how to summarize my 7 years of search, so I decided to start from the very beginning, from what made me interested in spirituality, and from what I had discovered, was the thing that get’s everyone interested, and quoted a sentence that I had seen recently in a “Zen moment” in the Central Texas Center for Spiritual Living service: “Religion is for people afraid of going to hell, spirituality is for people who have been there”.
Then I shared with him how I started my journey seeking for answers to random pains all over my body that led me to my first and only depression. I told him how I visited numerous doctors and got multiple medical tests done only wishing that they could find something wrong in me. Desperation was so big that the only consolation was that they found something big and real that recognized that I wasn’t crazy and that there was some sort of action for me to follow and recover. I now remember how much peace it gave me to have been wrongly diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.
In those moments I didn’t know anything about spirituality and couldn’t have cared less about it, but it’s with that suffering that I started realizing that the path I was on was not the right one.
My friend then told me that he was blown away and opened up to explain me that a few months ago he had gone through some stressful events that had caused migraines and pains along the body that no doctor could explain, and that now, after those events had passed, he was feeling much better but there was something in him that still wanted more truth around what he had gone through.
It looks like for him and me the point of entry had been originated by physical suffering which was a coincidence, but for many others it’s still this suffering comes in many forms, disease, break ups, depression, apathy…
I explained him the difference of pain and suffering and how suffering comes from beliefs, expectations or interpretations that we have learnt. Pain is a strong unpleasant or hurtful body sensation while suffering derives from our interpretation of this pain or of another life event that we are going through such us “this is not fair”, “I can’t handle this anymore”, “I can’t live like this”, “I don’t deserve this”, “why me?”, “life is not worth it without you” etc.
Are all these suffering-provoking thoughts necessarily true? As we start realizing that it’s our thoughts about a situation what create the suffering more than the situation itself, that’s when the spirituality game kicks in
Game Basics
During our childhood specially and during the rest of our lives we unconsciously learn millions of things about ourselves: that we are not good enough, that we are not worth it, that we should be married by certain age, that we don’t deserve love, that we should be taller or stronger… but is that all true?
The problem with these kind of beliefs is three-fold:
- We are not aware of them. Most of them are in the backend of our minds without us being conscious of them
- We don’t question them. We take as unquestionable truths those few that we are aware of and are able to articulate like “I should be married by 30” or “I can’t live without you”. They run our lives in a “death spiral”. They create our identity of who we think we are. We act based on this identity. For example if we think we are not worthy people we may abandon ourselves in a desperate attempt to get love from someone else
- Nothing positive and nurturing can come out of this abandonment. If we get we are looking for we will unconsciously learn how we got it and repeat the patterns like a broken record to get what we want over and over again through manipulation, seduction, pretension, etc. The other problem with getting it is that we may lose it as quickly as we attained it. This situation creates anxiety because we are basing our happiness in something fleeting we may lose. This makes us desperate and takes us back to the starting point "3". If we don’t we will reconfirm that we are not worth it, that no matter how hard we try, nobody loves us. We can then try harder and go back to starting point "3" as well
These kind of beliefs put our intellect against ourselves. Our minds are so tricky that we are able to rationalize arguments that justify our misery, our own intellect creates our own suffering, this is bananas.
Who am I?
So if I don’t need to have the personality I have and if I am not who I think I am, who am I? Imagine we have a white paper and we draw two lines that cross each other. We will have an intersection point which we can call point A (or Alfred). Alfred is:
- Black
- .2cm of diameter
- In the top right portion of the paper
Alfred can identify with all those things. The more he believes things about himself and strengthen his identity as being that point with those characteristics the more he will become separate and distant with the fact that he belongs to both lines and is a part of them
If we drew a couple other lines we could create points: B (or Brandon) and C (or Caroline) and poor Alfred could start developing a more complex and twisted sense of identity:
- I am ashamed that Brandon is thicker than me, I need to be thicker (Shame)
- How could have Brandon over painted me, he shouldn’t treat me like that (Blame)
- I am sorry I am brighter than Caroline and getting all attention, I shouldn’t be doing this to her (Guilt)
Shame, blame and guilt create Alfred’s sense of identity through beliefs of separation from the rest of the points that make him forget that in essence he is paper and so are Brandon and Caroline. They are parts of the same paper, they are parts of each other.
So if those beliefs separate us from our true essence, what unites us to everyone else and everything? Everything not based in comparison, judgment, labeling, fear or separation. That is honesty, transparency and vulnerability.