Identifying and Resolving Problems

Whatever you are within is expressed in your words and your actions, which make up the entire expression of yourself in life. Therefore without understanding whatever you are within, (not just what you present outwardly), you live your life unaware of where you are coming from, or what motivations drive your behaviors. Therefore, your outer life will tend to be a confused and entirely unsatisfying attempt at living.

To feel - sense within - all that motivates our outer behaviors in life, to understand these motivations, these automatic patterns of experience within, unlocks these patterns, freeing us from their dominant influence over our outer behaviors and our experience of life.

This uncovering of what motivates our every action - to the point where you know where you are coming from in every action in your life - is the birth of a moment-to-moment intelligence directly regarding ourselves. I am not talking about the intelligence of learning and accumulating facts, but an "intelligent awareness" or "felt sense" of what makes us tick day by day, moment by moment.

The solution to the many complexities in our lives are not found in our accumulated knowledge and theories about life. These intellectual reactions distract from the solution and substantiate the problem, by dividing the solution from the problem, ignoring what the problem has to offer, and trying to come up with solutions outside the problem. The solution is however, within the problem. The problem is due to the nature of thinking, to separate the whole of a thing into parts and losing perspective of the whole.

Stay with me on this and you'll get it...

In reaction, we reject the parts we don't want or don't like (now viewed as problems) and therefore lose touch with how these make us feel. But, still disturbed, we continue with thinking about it. We only have, and are only working with, a part of the whole thing now. So it becomes and remains a problem, essentially something we don't understand and won't understand with this partial approach
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The solution is in re-connecting with the whole of it, which means, to stay with and not avoid how it feels to be disturbed, nor try to fix or change what you think is making you feel disturbed. When you are thinking about a disturbance, you are removed from the feeling of it (although unconsciously driven to fix it by the disturbance that inevitably remains) and only connecting with a part of the whole - the external part. The correct solution depends upon a different approach.

That approach is...

Let the complexities and apparent problems be here regardless of how disturbing they are. Don't react by searching for intelligent answers, but rather, live with these, feeling the presence of these disturbed parts of you, giving them whatever time they need to freely burn away.

The result is...

As what you are inside continually meets with the living facts of your day-to-day life, negation of what distorts your reality (your thought reactions and accumulated past distresses) occurs. The disturbance of this ongoing occurrence, between the world (or life) and whatever drives you from inside, is a natural, essential, perpetual healing. This is the ongoing negation of the harmful effects of living, which otherwise build up as tensions in the body to become further resistance to, avoidance of, and all reaction to your life as you live it.

It is your reactions to all this (and not the things you react to) that are your only problem. Your reactions - which come in the form of fear, condemnation, judgment, comparison with something preferred, resistance to or denial of the realities you don't like - are all that is interfering with life's natural process of self-correction or healing.

When such an attitude of understanding meets with day-to-day life, you have meditation in its real sense; making meditation so relevant, so significant a part of your daily life, that life and meditation are realized as inseparable, integral parts of one thing.

When what you think or are inside, matches what you present or have or are outside, then you have the end of the complexities and confusions caused by reactionary behaviors.

Then what you are and have determine your wants, rather than, as it is when in reaction to life, what you aren't and don't have determining your constant dissatisfaction and fabrication of problems.

The origin of emptiness - insatiable needs.

All our troubles germinate when we seek reason for our internal condition in anything or anyone outside of our own skin. When we find a reason in anything outside, that is where we project out inner disturbances, thereby escaping responsibility for, and the sense or feeling of, all that we are, and our part in determining our every experience. This is the point where all emptiness originates, leading to neediness and insatiable desire.

Inside our skin is the fact of ourselves as we truly are. The world beyond our skin, other people, or circumstances, become the stories and excuses we use to avoid the unwanted truth of ourselves. By identifying the outer as the reason or cause for the feeling within, we create all our own confusions and troubles.

These stories are the illusions making up what we call the mind. The mind itself is a myth, consisting of the stories dreamt up in the attempt to avoid the truth of ourselves. Beyond the myth of the mind is the self-evident reality of all that is really you. There alone lies freedom from our emptiness and our troubles.

Try this on for size...

We determine our own experience by connecting what we already are inside, to outer circumstances or other people. By then blaming them for how we are, our experience appears to be determined by them. This is a commonly disruptive delusion, and simply, it is not correct. Every time you refuse to do this, will completely transform your experience of life. Try it for a day and see how your life changes, how your experience of the world around you transforms, without anything or anyone out there having to change. This will take you beyond everything that makes up the mind.

So what lies beyond the mind?

Not the many fictitious imaginings of heavens, enlightenments, karmic fruits, alternate realms or worlds, spirits, gods, or other airy fairy states. For all of this is obviously the delusions we call mind.

So what lies beyond the mind?

The body. The organism that you are. All that is real, here and now.

The intelligence necessary for understanding and living your life as a whole and fully conscious person is already right here. It is not in all your thinking about life, but in living just as you are for now, without trying to change it. Try this approach for a while. All you need is in this; right here where you already are.

But are you here?

If you are not then you are trapped beyond any real sense of yourself as the organism. Preoccupied with stories about life, trapped in the activity called mind.

Come back to the feeling of yourself that is in every sensation of the body. Without identifying this feeling with anything outside of your skin, just stay with it as it is. Feel it in the organism that you are, and the stories of the mind, the emptiness and neediness will come to their own end.

All that then remains is the real sense of all that it is to be you. Living from the solid sense of yourself in and as the body. Only then do you have a chance to just be yourself.