The Disease of the Mind

 The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction , however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold  no opinion for, or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. 

Seng Ts'an, The Third Chines Patriarch of Zen  

That last entry was long winded, eh?  I don't expect many, if any, will read it and that, maybe,  is a good thing. Something beyond my initial intention may have plopped itself down on the page.

But...

Questioning The Necessity of Hope in Our Spiritual Evolution

The intention behind it was to question the necessity of "hope" in our spiritual evolution.  Sure, hope is big in psychology and in building a strong character...but it does little, to no good, for the Deeper Self. In fact, reliance  on the future to provide external situations that are more favorable to our personality may keep us in that unwholesome  mental activity that  distracts us from what the Deeper Self is all about: recognizing, accepting and  appreciating Life now, as it is. Hope keeps us in our head.  It is not about the "now", the only time there is.  It is about some notion of a future time that will supposedly be better than this moment. And by "better" what we really mean is  ...it won't trigger a reaction in us. With this whole concept of hope and the need for it, we are deciding this moment, for whatever  reason,  is not good enough and we are then   putting our emotional energy into convincing ourselves  that the "next one" will be better. 

Can you see what  is wrong with that picture? 

Ask yourself the following questions: If you are feeling very dissatisfied with what is going on right now, is it the moment that is the problem?  Is it the challenging external circumstance or set of circumstances that showed up in this moment, this day, this span of time...that is the problem?  Is it the bad patch of the unfavorable, unpleasant  that is before you that is  the problem? Is it the illness the depression or the relationship down you are going through? Is it the financial slump ? The weather?  

"The Sun will Come Out Tomorrow" ?? 

Let's say you believe it is  the weather that is your problem. Is the best thing to do, then,  when it is raining....to spend your whole day singing  "The sun will come up out tomorrow..." and envisioning a better day tomorrow?  That is hope , right?  Sure it made Annie feel better...only because it took her out of the reality of her now and put her up in some future time that really does not exist anywhere but in the head. She judged her present moment as being terrible and something she really needed to escape, didn't she?  Her present reality ws the problem. We all probably would have done the same thing. It is normal for us to want to do whatever we can to escape what we judge as  "challenge, hardship, problematic,  unpleasant" and seek what we judge as "good, desirable, pleasant", isn't it?  Hope is a means for us to do that, if only in our minds.

External Situation...Not the Problem

But don't you see...it is this judgement that is the problem, not the situation. It is the determining  that this is good or bad, right or wrong, should or shouldn't be...followed by what mind does with these judgments ...that is the source of all so called problems  It is this grasping and clinging for the pleasant and this pushing away, denying, and stuffing of the unpleasant that is the problem. Resistance to what Life is unfolding in front of us right now ...is the problem.  This idea that we know better than Life what she should or shouldn't be offering us, is the problem. It is this habit tendency of the mind that creates the problem.

Don't Try to Fix Life;  Stop Reacting

When we judge something as unpleasant or bad, or wrong because it triggers something in our little personalities that we tend to believe are so much more important than they actually are, we resist it...we push it away from our conscious awareness using distraction, avoidance, denial, suppression and repression.  We put so much of our mental and physical energy in to attempting to keep the "bad" down and  the "good" in  by grasping, seeking, clinging to the "good" just so we do not disturb our delicate personalities. This process leaves a host of emotional experiences that were just meant to flow in and out of us...stuck within at the mercy of being repeatedly triggered by life circumstance, creating more and more pain. So we constantly get triggered by external circumstances...reacting here and reacting there. We erroneously believe that in order to stop the reaction we have to either "fix", control or manipulate  Life and make her do what suits us or we escape Life altogether by projecting somewhere in our minds. 

The Disease of the Mind

We can't control Life.  I don't care how many ways you manifest and imagine the future.  Life is going to do what Life is going to do.   Should we not just let her?  Should we not just learn to trust this thing that has been taking care of itself for billions and billions of years , seeing that she knows best? And get out of the way? Stop judging what she offers us as right or wrong, stop grasping and stop pushing away (which really means pushing down deeper inside us adding to the pile of unresolved emotions that want to come out)? . Should we not just let all experiences just flow through us without judging and reacting, resisting or clinging so we are free of them?  Should we not just learn to find that all the conditions we need for happiness we have right here and right now no matter what is unfolding around us, what is "happening" to us?  

Does hope help us to do that? 

Hope serves some purpose for the personality and if you want to serve the personality for the rest of your life...by all means foster hope. If you want to get beyond the personality, however, and break the habitual mind tendencies that keep us stuck...maybe reconsider if hope is a good use of your energy. Practice relaxing into what is instead. 

For more on this, much better explained, see the video below. and read the Hsin Hsin Ming 

All is well. 

Michael Singer Podcast/ Sounds True ( July, 2021) Spirituality: Exploration of Consciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE4_q7qdZ0E

Warren Weinstein (n.d.) Third Chines Patriarch of Zen: Hsin Hsin Ming https://home.csulb.edu/~wweinste/HsinHsinMing.html#:~:text=The%20Great%20Way*%20is%20not,for%2C%20or%20against%2C%20anything.