Challenge your reality, your thinking, feelings and ideas, all limitations

 

Many of us may not have much awareness of the nature of our mind, how we think, emote, what our feelings are and how they condition our experience of reality, so it might be hard to grasp that there is much of a choice about any of it, but I’m here to tell you categorically that there is!

 

We tend to unconsciously assume that we fundamentally exist as an unchanging core self that has a consistent set of changing emotions with tried and tested ideas, thoughts and understandings about life, and solid dependable sense of that world that we live in.

The fact is that the reality we do perceive is very fluid. It has been changing ever since we were able to make sense of it, and it is still changing, being informed by the input of new information, new ways of thinking, new understandings that are revealed to us and so on. Our mind, beliefs, views, feelings and emotions are all highly conditioned by our ongoing interaction with the outside world.

 

People for the most part don’t challenge any of this, we just assume that it is all true and reliable experience. The way we feel, the way we think, what we believe, how our emotions inform our likes and dislikes of the external world is all accepted as real and accurate input. We assume that our experience of the world and relationship to it is the way things are, or should be, and many will protect this violence if they feel their reality being challenged.

The next observation which is abundantly obvious and indisputable is that every other human being on the planet has a unique set of beliefs, emotional responses and way of reacting to the world, yet we rarely act with this understanding. We condemn, taunt, hate on, fear, reject, go to war with people based on these differences.

 

This is a crazy state of affairs, because if so many people can see the world in a different way, it means that our differing realities are subjective rather than holding any objective fact. This means it’s almost certain that our own personal truth is mostly a delusion, a lie, something that does not really represent reality at its most sublime.

 

It was the same for me, although I’ve often asked serious questions about life, up until my early thirties, I mostly accepted my world as real. I’ve always been conscious that there’s more to know and understand, but there’s this arrogance of the present moment where I always think that right now, I’ve got it all sorted, I know what’s going on.

 

Still, I never learn from the fact that when I look back at a former version of myself, I always think how little I knew at that time. It wasn’t until I started meditating and became more aware of my mind that I started to ask more profound questions of myself and the world in general.

Meditation affords us the experience of watching thoughts rather than being them. We become aware that thoughts are phenomena themselves, they come and go, they have less substance than we think and therefore we don’t identify with them as much. This means we realise that their nature is not what they represent, and that mostly they are rationalisations that fit together to legitimise our desires, our pursuit of security and so forth.

 

Thoughts and ideas are also objects of our sense desires, the sense of the mind. We find great pleasure and pain in our thoughts, which we are constantly using to prop up our ego identity, often to our own and other’s detriment.

 

Consider the possibility that almost nothing in your experience is what you think it is. This might entail obvious untruths about the outside world, our relationships, work, politics, the objective activities of humanity. The more profound issue is that everything that we are comes from the mind, and the mind is impelled to secure its idea of itself, our ego identity.

 

To this end, the mind’s activities are mostly delusive in nature. In other words, we will believe just about anything to make our reality work for us, to procure our desires and avoid that which brings pain without much thought to the harm it causes. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to work, we believe it because it serves us in some way .

 

The crazy thing is that we all believe that what is in our own mind is the truth of things and that others, if they don’t agree with us, are wrong. This is one of the fundamental problems with the conflict and suffering of the human race. We can agree on some relative conventional truths about the physical world we live in but outside of that, all bets are off. So this practice point is about questioning everything, and I mean literally everything. 

 

Something that I became profoundly aware of some time ago was how our mental reality is formed by what we perceive through our senses. At the time, I completely stopped all news media input and had cultivated a Facebook feed with only positive content. Due to this, my world had changed from the daily news cycle to a more spiritual and personal development paradigm. I could see how it was changing my whole world view, my attitudes and relationship to people and so on. 

 

At the same time I was also reflecting on the fact that we are all constantly ingesting information, ever more so since mobile phones and screens became ubiquitous. There’s barely a spare moment that goes by where people are not looking at one.

 

That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s the fact that we rarely discern whether that information is either truthful or even useful. We passively absorb all of this data and simply assume, once again, that it is real and true. This is an even greater problem now in this so-called post truth era where clicks and views are more important than accurately representing reality.

 

The point of all this is that we are faced with an external world that is full of misleading information and outright lies, and we are also contending with the ego’s tendency to delude. The journey of personal growth and change demands not only full consciousness, but rigorous self honesty. Only the truth and the desire to see it will lead us towards growth, personal fulfilment and true freedom. This requires courage and commitment, but we start with little steps, and we won’t see unsettling personal truths until we're ready to.

 

There’s a great freedom in challenging all our perceptions, thinking and ideas, feelings and emotions and our responses to them. To some degree, all these phenomena keep us in a cage, a smaller world. The beliefs in our own limitations and faults, our lack of confidence, biases and ill will borne of fear and so on, these are all part of our conditioning. Every single one of them can be, at the bare minimum, questioned, and at best, completely smashed. 

 

Once you realise this, it means that you are free to see everything with fresh eyes, with a sense of openness, receptivity and possibility. You can look at every aspect of yourself and ask the question, does this feeling, belief, idea, relationship have the ring of truth, does it serve my interests or conduce to freedom? You do not have to subscribe to the status quo anymore.

 

To undergo any personal change, you have to be able to let go of your attachment to all these things, as they inform your ego identity which is the thing that underneath, doesn’t want to change.

Your own ego’s stubborn and wily attachment to itself is only half the problem, you are going to be challenged by almost everybody you know because people are also attached to who you are right now. They are going to be disappointed and want you to stay where you are, psychologically speaking. They may not like or they may fear the prospect of version 2.0, so you will experience blow back.

 

This is however, the great litmus test, because if those people don’t want the best for you and welcome a changing and improving you, then they are probably not a friend in the truest sense of the word.

 

Our journey is one of always being alive to our experience, being aware and open. If one holds the basic idea that whatever is going on can be transcended, can be seen through, understood, not just passively accepted, we cultivate an attitude of always going beyond our circumstances and never accepting limitations.

 

This brings forth a sense of constant positive possibility, of absence of restriction, that there are no dead ends. This will go a long way to supporting our practice and ongoing personal evolution and becoming unconditioned.