-Pema Chodron
The Decision to Push Away the Unwanted
So we decide we don't like weeds. We decide that they are bad, ugly and something that must be removed from our gardens, our lawns, our lives. We go to war on weeds...struggling against their growth...putting protective barriers that poison the earth all over our land so they do not grow and when they grow anyway...we fly into fits of anger and spend hours pulling them out and poisoning some more. We become vigilant and defensively on guard waiting for these dreaded monsters to pop up on our preferred perfect landscape and we run and attack at any sign of them.
How beneficial are your actions, I wonder, at getting rid of weeds. How beneficial are they to the earth, to the people who live on it and to your own well-being? Isn't your struggle exhausting and frustrating and fruitless? Is it not interfering with what you truly want...your peace of mind?
And no matter what you do...the weeds keep coming, don't they? And the perfect image of lawn and flower you cling to seems to wilt away regardless...and maybe even faster with your struggles.
Making Judgements: Prejudices and Preferences
The point is we do the same in our lives with everything . We make preferences...deciding on the things that should be in our lives...like flowers, perfect lawns, pleasurable experiences, abundance, happiness inducing things and circumstances, the "right' people who believe what we believe. We open up to these things and put effort into cultivating them and bringing them into a moment.
Our moments will be worth living if we have these things right? And if we don't have them in this moment we are in, right here and now, we will use it to work very hard to bring them into the next...we will find the perfect life lawn and garden, the perfect happiness then.
We also make prejudiced judgments about things, certain people, feelings, experiences that do not necessarily bring pleasure. We decide that certain things should not be in our moment, that they are bad, wrong, dangerous, ugly. These things may include drugs, physical pain, terrorism, cancer, war, potholes, anxiety, depression and certain political agendas. So we struggle and fight against these things, we close up and retract away from them, we resist them and in so doing we close down to the moment they arrive in.
We either poison our minds and bodies with substances that numb or we put so much physical and mental energy into resisting our moment that we become exhausted and ill. We complain and blame others and life for these things that "keep popping up"...and where does that get us? Does it give us the perfect life the neighbors will be jealous of? Does it bring sustaining joy and happiness? Does it keep the unpleasurable weeds of life out of our experience? No
Life still does life...creating contrast and variety just as it is meant to.
Don't Need to change the World, Just the Way We Look Upon It
The point is, as the previous lessons from ACIM point to, it is fruitless to attempt to change the world so we can find the peace we hunger for. All we have to do is change our thoughts. To put away our "attack thoughts" and to see the world differently.
Our prejudices and our preferences are products of thought. They lead to attack in one form or another. They lead to us closing up and away from the only Life we have...which is right here, right now.
We Don't Know
Do we really know what we are judging, condemning and closing to?
Take another look at those weeds and realize you really do not know what they are for...you do not know what their purpose is; you don't know them. What you think you know is just a thought, a judgment, a conditioned belief...it is simply a thought in your head and it isn't real. We do not know what these things we experience are for. We don't know them. We don't know what the people who show up in our lives are for. We don't know them. That is okay.
Beneath our prejudices and our preferences, beneath our frantic thinking... a new way of seeing exists. We can look out upon the world...knowing that though we do not know what the weed is for...God does. And it is all so perfect just as it is.
All is well in my world.
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