The Untethered Soul (10 page)

If you sit within the Self, you will experience the strength of your inner being even when your heart feels weak. This is the essence of the path. This is the essence of a spiritual life. Once you learn that it’s okay to feel inner disturbances, and that they can no longer disturb your seat of consciousness, you will be free. You will begin to be sustained by the inner energy flow that comes from behind you. When you have tasted the ecstasy of the inner flow, you can walk in this world and the world will never touch you. That’s how you become a free being—you transcend.

The prerequisite to true freedom is to decide that you do not want to suffer anymore. You must decide that you want to enjoy your life and that there is no reason for stress, inner pain, or fear. Every day we bear a burden that we should not be bearing. We fear that we are not good enough or that we will fail. We experience insecurity, anxiety, and self-consciousness. We fear that people will turn on us, take advantage of us, or stop loving us. All of these things burden us tremendously. As we try to have open and loving relationships, and as we try to succeed and express ourselves, there is an inner weight that we carry. This weight is the fear of experiencing pain, anguish, or sorrow. Every day we are either feeling it, or we are protecting ourselves from feeling it. It is such a core influence that we don’t even realize how prevalent it is.

When Buddha said that all of life is suffering, this is what he was referring to. People do not understand how much they are suffering because they have never experienced what it is like to not suffer. To put this into perspective, imagine what it would be like if neither you, nor anyone you know, has ever been healthy. Everyone has always had major ailments so acute that they can hardly get out of bed. In this world, nothing gets done that can’t be done near the bedside. If that were the case, then people wouldn’t know anything different. They would have to use all their energy just to drag their bodies along, and there would be no concept or understanding of health and vitality.

That is exactly what is going on with the mental and emotional energies that make up your psyche. Your inner sensitivities expose you to a minute-to-minute, constant situation in which you are suffering to one degree or another. You are either trying to stop suffering, controlling your environment to avoid suffering, or worrying about suffering in the future. This state of affairs is so prevalent that you don’t see it, just as a fish doesn’t see the water.

You only notice that you’re suffering when it gets worse than usual. You admit you have a problem when it gets so bad that it actually begins to affect your everyday behavior. But in truth, you are having constant issues with your psyche during your normal daily life. To truly see this, compare your relationship with your mind to your relationship with your body. Under normal, healthy situations, you are not thinking about your body. You just go about your business walking, driving, working, and playing without focusing on it. You only think about your body when there is a problem. In contrast, you think about your psychological well-being all the time. People are constantly thinking things like, “What if I get put on the spot? What should I say? I get so nervous if I’m not prepared.” That is suffering. That constant, anxious inner talk is a form of suffering: “Can I really trust him? What if I expose myself and I get taken advantage of? I don’t ever want to go through that again.” That is the pain of having to think about yourself all the time.

Why do we have to think about ourselves all the time? Why are so many thoughts about I, me, and mine? Look how often you think about how you’re doing, whether you like things or not, and how to rearrange the world to please yourself. You think like this because you’re not okay inside, and you’re constantly trying to make yourself feel better. If your body had not been okay for a very long time, you’d find yourself constantly thinking about how to protect it and how to make it feel better. This is exactly what is going on with your psyche. The only reason that you think about your psychological well-being so much is because it has not been okay for a very long time. It’s actually quite fragile in there. Just about anything can upset the psyche.

To end suffering, you must first realize that your psyche is not okay. You must then acknowledge that it does not have to be that way. It can be healthy. It is truly a gift just to realize that you don’t have to put up with, or protect, your psyche. You don’t have to constantly be mulling over what you said or what this person thinks of you. What kind of life are you going to have if you worry about these things all the time? Inner sensitivity is a symptom of non-well-being. It’s the same as when the body sends pain or displays other symptoms when it’s not well. Pain is not bad; it’s how the body talks to you. When you overeat, you get a stomachache. When you do something that puts too much stress on your arm, it starts to hurt. The body is communicating through its universal language: pain. Your psyche is communicating through its universal language: fear. Self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety—they are all fear.

If you mistreat an animal, it becomes afraid. This is what has happened to your psyche. You have mistreated it by giving it a responsibility that is incomprehensible. Just stop for a moment and see what you have given your mind to do. You said to your mind, “I want everyone to like me. I don’t want anyone to speak badly of me. I want everything I say and do to be acceptable and pleasing to everyone. I don’t want anyone to hurt me. I don’t want anything to happen that I don’t like. And I want everything to happen that I do like.” Then you said, “Now, mind, figure out how to make every one of these things a reality, even if you have to think about it day and night.” And of course your mind said, “I’m on the job. I will work on it constantly.”

Can you imagine somebody trying to do that? The mind has to try to make it so that everything you say is said the right way, taken the right way, and has the right effect on everybody. It has to make sure that everything you do is interpreted and seen the right way, and that nobody does anything that hurts you. It has to make sure that you get everything you want, and that you don’t ever get what you don’t want. The mind is constantly trying to give you advice about how to make it all okay. That is why the mind is so active; you gave it an impossible task to do. It’s equivalent to expecting your body to lift trees and scale mountains in a single jump. Your body would get sick if you kept trying to make it do things it was incapable of doing. This is what has broken the psyche. The signs of the body breaking are pain and weakness. The signs of the psyche breaking are underlying fear and incessant neurotic thought.

At some point, you have to wake up and acknowledge that you have a problem inside. Just watch and you’ll see that your mind is constantly telling you what to do. It tells you to go here, but not there, and to say this, but not that. It tells you what to wear and what not to wear. It has never stopped. Wasn’t it that way in high school? Wasn’t it that way in junior high and elementary school? Hasn’t it always been that way? This act of constantly worrying about yourself is a form of suffering. But how do you fix this? How do you get it to stop?

Most people try to fix their inner problems by getting better at the same external games they have always played. If we take a snapshot of our inner problems, we will see that each person has what we’ll call the “problem of the day.” This is the thing that is bothering them the most at any given moment. When the current problem isn’t bothering them, then the next one pops up, and when that one isn’t bothering them, the next one pops up. That is what your thoughts are about. Your thoughts tend to focus on what is bothering you today. Your thoughts are about the problem, why it is bothering you, and what you can do about it. If you don’t do something about this, it will go on for the rest of your life.

What you’ll see is that your mind is always telling you that you have to change something outside in order to solve your inner problems. But if you are wise, you won’t play this game. You’ll realize that the advice your mind is giving you is psychologically damaged advice. Your mind’s thoughts are disturbed by its fears. Of all the advice in the world that you do not want to listen to, it is the advice of a disturbed mind. Your mind actually misleads you. Suppose it tells you, “If I could just get that promotion, then I’d be fine. I’d feel good about myself, and I could get my life back together.” Have you found that to be true? After you get the promotion, does that end all your insecurities and leave you financially satisfied for the rest of your life? Of course not. All that happens is that the next problem comes to the surface.

Once you see this, you realize the mind has a serious underlying problem. And what it’s doing is making up external situations that might make things more comfortable. But the external situations are not the cause of the inner problem. They are merely an attempt to solve the problem. For example, if you feel loneliness and insufficiency within your heart, it’s not because you haven’t found a special relationship. That did not cause the problem. That relationship is your attempt to solve the problem. All you’re doing is trying to see if a relationship will appease your inner disturbance. If it doesn’t, you’ll try something else.

The fact is, however, external changes are not going to solve your problem because they don’t address the root of your problem. The root problem is that you don’t feel whole and complete within yourself. If you don’t identify the root properly, you will seek someone or something to cover it up. You will hide behind finances, people, fame, and adoration. If you try to find the perfect person to love and adore you, and you manage to succeed, then you have actually failed. You did not solve your problem. All you did was involve that person in your problem. That is why people have so much trouble with relationships. You began with a problem inside yourself, and you tried to solve it by getting involved with somebody else. That relationship will have problems because your problems are what caused the relationship. It is all so easy to see once you step back and dare to look at it honestly.

Now that we’ve seen what failure looks like, let’s define success. Success regarding your psyche is comparable to health regarding your physical body. Success means you never have to think about your psyche again. A naturally healthy body is one that just does what it’s supposed to do while you’re going about your business. You never have to think about it. Likewise, you should never have to figure out how to be okay, or how not to be scared, or how to feel loved. You should not have to devote your life to your psyche.

Imagine what fun life would be if you didn’t have those neurotic, personal thoughts going on within you. You could enjoy things, and you could actually get to know people instead of needing them. You could just live and experience your life, instead of trying to use life to fix what’s wrong inside of you. You are capable of achieving that state. It’s never too late.

Your current relationship with your psyche is like an addiction. It is constantly making demands of you, and you have devoted your life to serving these demands. If you want to be free, you have to learn to treat it like any other addiction. For example, drug addicts are capable of stopping their drug use, going through withdrawals, and never doing drugs again. Maybe it isn’t easy, but they are capable. The same thing is true of the addiction to the psyche. You are capable of ceasing the absurdity of listening to the perpetual problems of your psyche. You can put an end to it. You can wake up in the morning, look forward to the day, and not worry about what will happen. Your daily life can be like a vacation. Work can be fun; family can be fun; you can just enjoy all of it. That does not mean you don’t do your best; you just have fun doing your best. Then, at night when you go to sleep, you let it all go. You just live your life without getting uptight and worrying about it. You actually live life instead of fearing or fighting it.

You can live a life completely free from the fears of the psyche. You just have to know how to do it. Let’s take smoking as an example. It is not hard to understand how to stop smoking. The key word is “stop.” It really doesn’t matter what patches you use; when it is all said and done, you simply must stop. The way you stop smoking is to stop putting cigarettes in your mouth. All the other techniques are just ways that you think will help. But the bottom line is, all you have to do is stop putting cigarettes in your mouth. If you do this, it’s guaranteed that you will stop smoking.

You use the same technique to get out of your psychological mess. You just stop telling your mind that its job is to fix your personal problems. This job has broken the mind and disturbed the entire psyche. It has created fear, anxiety, and neurosis. Your mind has very little control over this world. It is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It cannot control the weather and other natural forces. Nor can it control all people, places, and things around you. You have given your mind an impossible task by asking it to manipulate the world in order to fix your personal inner problems. If you want to achieve a healthy state of being, stop asking your mind to do this. Just relieve your mind of the job of making sure that everyone and everything will be the way you need them to be so that you can feel better inside. Your mind is not qualified for that job. Fire it, and let go of your inner problems instead.

You can have a different relationship with your mind. Whenever it starts up telling you what you should or shouldn’t do in order to get the world to match your preconceived concepts, don’t listen. It’s just like when you try to stop smoking. Regardless of what your mind says, you don’t pick up a cigarette and put it in your mouth. It doesn’t matter if it is just after dinner. It doesn’t matter if you get anxious and you feel the need. It doesn’t matter what the reason is—your hand simply does not touch cigarettes anymore. Likewise, when your mind starts telling you what you have to do to make everything inside okay, don’t buy into what it’s telling you. The truth is, everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything. And that’s the only time everything will be okay.

All you have to do is stop expecting the mind to fix what’s wrong inside of you. That is the core, the root of it all. Your mind is not the guilty party. In fact, your mind is innocent. The mind is simply a computer, a tool. It can be used to ponder great thoughts, solve scientific problems, and serve humanity. But you, in your lost state, told it to spend its time conjuring up outer solutions for your very personal inner problems. You are the one who is trying to use the analytical mind to protect yourself from the natural unfolding of life.