For Authentic Change, Make a List!
Make this list on a big sheet of paper of all the things you will do in the future to put you at peace. On the left side of the paper, number all of these goals. Be as specific and detailed as you can be. Predict how happy you will be when the list is completed. Picture yourself being happy. Take extra time thinking and adding to the list all of the ways that will make you a happy man or a happy woman. Predict how all your relationships will miraculously improve. Try to write down at least a hundred objectives to reach bliss and contentment. Go back over your list to make corrections, deletions, and/or additions.
Now that you have completed your prized list, with both hands, wad the paper (your list) into a ball and toss it in the trash. But why? Because…“You can not think your way out.” A happiness that does not last is not happiness. It may have lasted a day, a week, a month. Authentic happiness and change do not flip back to unhappiness. Just think, we have been making a list like this all our lives (on paper or in our minds) with no lasting results. We simply mislabeled whatever we were doing and called that happiness.
To be clear, a list of goals is just fine for earthly material things, but a psychological list of goals where you will ultimately be happy in some future is rubbish. You have been ‘a work in progress’ for years; how’s it going? Doesn’t it seem that with all that effort we should be further along? Honesty at all costs, even if looking at it pains you, which it will. This is what reveals a new path, an unknown path. In the unknown is where authentic happiness is. The mind likes to trick itself, so it can be lazy and not face the music. It is easier to lie to oneself.
“Do things the easy way, and you perpetuate the hard life. But do things the hard way, and you finally come to the easy life.” -Vernon Howard
For authentic happiness (change), there is nothing to do, but there is something to see. Seeing that we have been tricking ourselves is the beginning of an end to all our problems, concerns, and worries.
Vernon used to say, throw out all your beliefs and ideas for anything true cannot be lost. So if you work with Vernon’s ideas (truths) you might see you are building on top of an unreal foundation, an untrue idea. Real wisdom arrives only with hard, persistent work. Self-deception is much bigger than you think. Returning often to Now, this moment, becoming aware of yourself, for this is where you find gold, not thinking about some imaginary unreal future. Toss your list into the bin asap.
“There is no personal self to be either inwardly sick or healthy.” There is sickness and health. It is our identifying with these two conditions that causes problems, because we do not exist in the way or fashion we have always believed we do. It is a trap, a self-induced trap and nothing more.
Want to grow? Do the hard work of being around people you dislike while watching all your reactions within you. That person is your best friend for they are helping expose things within you that you should not be carrying around. Resentments, judgements, self-righteous parts, etc., these are all unnecessary burdens.
We are born into bodies that already bear the foreign structure of a fraudulent identity fully installed. That false sense of identity allows all the delusional ills that mentally and emotionally plague mankind to have a home and a base for its seemingly harmful influence. An imposter Identity is the only place in you where negativities can land and seemingly affect you. These negative influences cannot really harm you, because you are far more than just a counterfeit identity, and without belief in a fake identity negativities cannot influence you. What you truly are is what can see and recognize the counterfeit self for what it is. Recognizing that fake sense of self frees you automatically from its seeming influence. Freeing yourself from fraudulent identity instantly frees you from the resultant detrimental effects of guilt, shame, shortcomings, vulnerabilities, etc. When that imposter identity is recognized and neutralized, what’s left is what you actually are, the source of a higher octave of behavior which spontaneously, through spiritual insight and intuition, only allows beneficial behavior. The result of which is that you cannot take advantage of another human being or allow another human being to take advantage of you. Seeing that for yourself will allow you to know it for yourself.
Mr. Repp. You appear to have an understanding of the higher nature and the lower nature, can you proceed further and explain where God/The Higher Power fits into your thoughts here? That is, beyond the words of; God/The Higher Power.
What we truly are is an instrument or channel of God given spiritual energy which manifests as the ability to expose the pervasive deception that we are less than whole and complete as we are right now. What is ultimately exposed is the main deception, that a false sense of self, a mere construction only of thought, functions to create a fake identity that always seeks to add to itself in a never ending manner and that ultimately will never be content or at peace. Anyone capable of turning their God given power of attention or observation inward can see for themselves that an illusory sense of self hides our true natural spiritual intuition and insight by keeping itself fruitlessly occupied with unending and unsatisfying needs and desires, painful past wounds and traumas, and future worries and concerns. Reflect on the adage “What’s wrong with right now if you don’t think about it?” The spark of interest in these matters is God’s influence seeking through individuals to overcome the world’s conditioning and programming. The world’s programming can easily be defeated by merely recognizing that without the belief in a non existent self said programming has nowhere to land. It is truly a powerless deceptive trick that occurs too often to too many people, but needn’t occur to you. We are with our own unencumbered connection to spirit, fully capable of dealing spontaneously and equitably with whatever we encounter from moment to moment. God’s power of insight will guide us past any and all deceptions. We are all fully capable of living a free life and all it takes is genuine interest.
Reply to Ramon’s post: You said it, and said it well!