Our, 'How are you?' is often answered with, 'Not bad' or 'No use complaining.' Most of us generally feel EITHER "Normal! - Just our usual 'ordinary unhappiness,'" OR Bad! - Stressed, contracted & pessimistic. This is NOT caused by terrible external circumstances, BUT by our negative internal conversations (self-talk) continuously droning on in your heads.
Ongoing self-talk is a product of the brain's left hemisphere, activated by greed (neediness, sense of lack, not enough, not good enough - low self-esteem is very common even among mental-health professionals.) AND aversion (anxiety, fear, anger, hostility, disgust, etc). So self-talk is a constant, anxious motivator to escape the present moment. We hope that by escaping and / or acquiring something, we might be happier, if only briefly. This drive to escape the present to possess happiness later is so strong & pervasive that a 2014 study conducted by psychologists at the University of Virginia found that when left alone in a room with nothing to do for 15 minutes, 67% of men & 25% of women chose to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts
YET OCCASIONALLY, BRIEFLY, we find ourselves wonderfully alive, energized & engaged, even awed & grateful by what the present moment holds! It can actually be even something we've come across & ignored many times before, BUT now remarkably, we perceive it as a dramatically spectacular, never-to-be-forgotten experience. Instead of our usual anxious chase for relief, we actually feel peaceful, pleasant, awed, timeless, spacious, wonderfully optimistic & ever so grateful. We might even remark how it seems to make no sense to feel this wonderful when nothing in our outer world has changed at all! "Everything changed, yet nothing changed," is a common statement.
"To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things." Zen Master Dogen
"And as far as we know, this intuition that we’re part of something greater than ourselves is very ancient.
All these cave paintings from 20, 30, 40 thousand years ago, the
practice of burying the dead, dealing with the dead in a ritual way, and
so on, all these things suggest that this has been part of human consciousness for a very, very long time.
No doubt the forms have changed, and the development of the great
religions has put a more unifying aspect on these insights, but it seems
to me that it’s been foundational to human life throughout almost all human history, with the brief anomaly of Western Europe and parts of North America, in the last 150 years.”
"Dr Iain McGilchrist & Dr Rupert Sheldrake - Intersection of Consciousness and Matter." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvwy2LTLMM
This makes no sense at all to our left hemisphere, the narrow role of which is to quickly grab what we need to survive & to solve simple practical problems - basically, the materialist reductionist perspective.
However, when the right hemisphere is given the opportunity (ie some peace, quiet & relaxation) to balance the left hemisphere, we're allowed to appreciate the right hemisphere's far broader perspective which includes intimate connection with all that gives our life meaning & value: love, gratitude, music, humor, the arts, ritual, dreams, awe, mystery, the divine, mysticism, spirituality, mythology, religion, metaphor, paradox, symbolism, etc.
"Why the West is Losing Meaning - Iain McGilchrist interview." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Vyq-yQtk
“Although we all have a fundamentally pure nature, it is not easy to get in touch with it. The gross way our mind ordinarily functions drowns out this deeper more subtle vibration to such an extent that we generally remain unaware of its existence. If we truly want to connect with this subtle essence, we need to quiet all distractions and loosen the hold our ordinary appearances & conceptions have on us. In other words we need to create space, space in which our essentially pure nature can function uninterruptedly. Then. . . we will be bringing to the surface the inner, divine qualities that have always existed within the depths of our being.” Lama Thubten Yeshe
So we might say & actually believe that our self-concepts & worldviews are mature & even spiritual. BUT if most of our self-talk is negative ("broken"), this will make us feel miserable, which in turn indicates that our actual self-concept & worldview are darker than we imagined.
A negative / dark / pessimistic self-concept & worldview,
according to wisdom traditions, the experience of serious meditators,
the opinions of all the current experts I respect, and my own lived
experience, is sadly distorted!
Mindfulness practice is very much about acceptance of what is real, seeing clearly & engaging fully with whatever the present moment holds.
Research findings are encouraging:
• we feel authentic & truly happy only when we're fully present;
• it’s the quality of our presence, not external environment, that brings happiness.
Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 2010; 330(6006): 932.
“Your consciousness, your heart matters enormously, and in a way, it is the only thing you’re asked to look after.
You’re not asked to solve all the problems of the world. That of course would be overfacing. Nobody could ask you to do that. But there is something that you can easily neglect that you are asked to do, which is to take responsibility for yourself.
We don’t know what this gift of life is, but my view is that it is something that we can either waste or we can use for good. And what it is there for is for us to respond to the ground of being - another way of talking about the God that created all of this. That is why we exist. Life is improbably hard to imagine occurring as a random event for all sorts of reasons, some of which I’ve expressed in my writings, particularly in “The Matter with Things.’
But that aside, life involves quite extraordinary expense of energy, in a way which doesn’t deny the second law of thermodynamics but acts, for a while, very steeply against its tendency. In other words, the tendency of the universe overall is we are told, although it may only apply to the bit of the universe that we know of after all, is for energy to deplete – increase in entropy. But life involves kicking that trend extraordinarily powerfully, and the carrying on of the development of more and more sophisticated life is extraordinary. How do you account for this? Because already with very simple early organisms – actinobacteria at the base of the ocean, some single examples are a million years old. If the purpose of this game of life is to increase your life expectancy, then we’ve gone in the wrong direction. Something has put an incredible amount of energy into developing sophisticated beings that are relatively short-lived. What does this mean?
Well, to me it means that the things that we are capable of responding to, which are the great values that I think form the purpose of the cosmos, the expression of goodness, beauty and truth, and I would say also the sacred. The expression of these values requires a kind of reciprocation.
So I see God - the ground of being - and his creation as being in an ongoing reciprocal process whereby that ground of being is discovering about itself what its potential can unfold, as what is infolded is unfolded all the time into myriad complex and beautiful entities. And we are the creatures that can respond, reverberate, resonate, be responsible in a relationship, the primary relationship of all relationships that we have with God who is described as love. And love is nothing if not relationship.
And that’s not unusual. I mean around the world there are ideas of a divine essence which has different names – Dao, Logos, Yahweh, - it doesn’t really matter, but these ideas are foundational in all cultures that there is something there that has produced this lifegiving creative universe, and we play an important part in what that is. And that is not self-aggrandisement. In fact there is something self-aggrandizing and rather ungrateful in the notion that we should diminish ourselves, and indeed the tendencies in our culture towards lacking self-respect for the human species.
I think it’s very good to appreciate the things that we have done wrong, and the havoc we have wrought in the world in the last few hundred years. But I think it’s very, very wrong to vilify & debase humanity. The fact that humanity can do bad things is the flip side of the fact that humanity is capable of the most extraordinary, beautiful and good, and to me holy acts of creation that reciprocate whatever it is that gave us life.
And it’s this dance, this back and forwards, this magnifying, this ever creative, ever growing process in which the good and the beautiful and the true can find expression that is the gamble that that creative source of being took on in creating life and creating complex life such as human life.”
"Why the West is losing meaning - Iain McGilchrist interview."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Vyq-yQtk
“The real question is: Are you willing, whether your experience is tranquil, turbulent, ecstatic, tragic, opulent, or austere, to give yourself wholeheartedly to what is truly alive in you?”
Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017.
"Don't judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant."
Robert Louis Stevenson
Aimee Carty - "Painter"
