(Sri Swami Satchidananda; The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, page 5)
Okay, so you heard me, a tiny little voice amongst so many powerful and inspirational ones, saying the same thing over and over again. If you want to be happy, well or at the very least free of suffering all you need to do is let go of old thought processes. Let go of the ideas you have about yourself and the world around you. These beliefs you cling so desperately to do not serve you. They only leave you with fear, make you small and miserable and make the world a tragic, horrible place you have to endure. Yet, you do not have to think this way, live this way. It doesn't have to be this way...in fact...it isn't the way you perceive it to be.
All the suffering you feel right now is because of the thoughts whirling around in your head...nothing more. There is no sight, be it of dreams or from a truer Source, that is not but the shadow of the seen through inward vision. There perception starts, and there it ends. (ACIM W-188: 3: 6-7) There is another way of seeing. And as challenging as it seems to do...you can tame your monkey mind. You can rediscover the peace that exists beneath it...you can experience your true natural state of being.
Where do you start? By being willing to let go.
Willingness to let go seems to be the biggest and most challenging steps for most of us, including me. We are afraid to give up the familiar no matter how it keeps us small and stuck. Having to give up all we thought we knew as the requested payment for our peace of mind is too often the deal breaker for many of us. We simply aren't willing. Why? Kenichi Omhae, an economist guru, puts it this way:
"It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and we have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eye glasses so long he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses and we have to throw the old ones away."
The Unacceptable Bargain
So if I, a stranger on the street, were to come up to you now to offer you a new pair of glasses that I profess would change your vision and allow you to see absolutely everything of value with remarkable clarity, if and only if you agreed to give me the glasses you were wearing, the same ones you wore for years, would you accept? Chances are you would immediately think it was some type of scam, wouldn't you? "Why would this stranger want to give me, of all people, a gift? She only wants something from me...my glasses."
What if I then told you that before I even let you try on the glasses I had in my hand you would have to give me yours so that I could stomp on them and grind them into the ground? Would you make the exchange then?
More than likely...you would shake your head and walk away from my deal as fast as you could. You would think I was nothing but a crazy person and would not trust me that the glasses I had were better than yours. You would fear that my glasses might be just a scam and you would lose the glasses you were so dependent on for the limited eye sight they gave you... forever. Limited eye sight, you would tell yourself, is better than none. Besides these glasses you are wearing are a part of you now. You had to work hard to earn this particular pair. They look right, they feel right and they define you in some way as they give you the vision you have become used to. You wouldn't want to risk losing all that familiar functionality, as limited as it may be, and end up seeing nothing at all with the plain and bogus pair I was trying to sell you. Would you? That would be crazy.
You would be right to walk away, I suppose, because the pair I am trying to give you have the most plain and indistinctive type of frame and most importantly they have no lenses.
Reasons for Refusing
The reasons many of us refuse to let go of old belief systems and ways of seeing include the following: inability to trust what the Universe/God/ Life offer us in terms of gifts; a lack of trust in our worthiness that we deserve such a gift, fear that people who speak about a new way of seeing are all crazier than a bag of hammers :), distrust in others and in the things we are offered, fear of loss of what we know and have become familiar with, fear of losing self identity, fear of losing functionality in the physical world and a fear of nothingness. Those are just some of the reasons why we might refuse to give up the way we see the world now. We fear enlightenment.
Man when are we going to realize that.....
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
(ACIM. T-Intro)
The fearful things we see with glasses on, suddenly disappear when we take the glasses off...or put on those glasses that have no lenses. :) Take the deal!
All is well in my world.
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