The Concept is Not Reality

 Am I here to change it [reality] or is it here to change me?

Michael A. Singer

That is one of the greatest questions we can ask on our journey to truth. There is nothing wrong with truth.  Reality is not a difficult thing we have to endure.  It is the mind that makes reality into a problem...into something that needs to be manipulated and controlled, fixed and altered...escaped...pushed away, avoided. It is the mind that does that. 

How ? It creates concepts.Concepts are just projections of reality, not reality. You need to have a look at this on Magritte's famous image, Ceci n'est pas une pipe/ This is not a pipe painting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHQpANmHCE

We get so hung up in our concepts, believing them to be reality, we fail to see and experience reality for what it is. Reality is just reality.  It has a heritage, Singer tells us. It has to follow the laws of cause and effect. 

What is must be because it is the result of all that was...

Yet we want it to be the way we want it to be don't we?  We form these concepts in our mind...these ideas...these mere projections of a made up reality and wrap them all up into a model of who we believe we are and how we believe the world should be to suit us...and we expect reality to match that.  When this reality which is a result of billions of years of evolution...the effect of an infinite number of causes ( that have nothing to do with us) doesn't match this model we freak out, don't we?  This is our suffering. 

Most of these concepts that we created and which make up our psyche model are fear based.  What we want from reality is " for things to be the way that doesn't hurt me."  It is all about "me and my fears", isn't it? So when change comes, if we are basing our sense of life experience on these mixed up schematas in our heads, we are going to resist, struggle against, grasp and cling, prefer, push away etc. This leads to suffering.  It isn't reality... that is just doing what it is doing becasue of too many causes to count...it is attachment to this model in our head that is the problem.  What we need to do instead is say to reality, 

"With this act of change take from me what is afraid of the change!" 

The problem is not reality.  The problem is what we did in our minds. If we keep clinging to our un real concepts, we will suffer endlessly and needlessly.  We ( as these "me"s)  need to get out of the way. Reality can help us do that.

All is well. 

Nerdwriter 1 (2015?) What is the Treachery of Images? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atHQpANmHCE

Michael A. Singer/ Temple of the Universe ( September 11, 2023) Choosing Reality.https://tou.org/talks/