“Understand that if you are running after love or freedom,
it is not love or freedom; it is a reward”
Learning is the life-long challenge of living. It is the greatest and most holy of human experiences. Discovering the mystery of what it is to be human, and the indwelling Self is the highest of all knowledge. But do we even know how to learn? What is required to really learn about a thing? What is it that prevents us from learning?
In order to learn of that which is the True Self it is necessary to begin self-inquiry. But there can be a lot of fear around this because it may ask of us to see unpleasant things or truths about ourselves that we have buried. It requires of us to develop searing honesty in order to tell the truth about ourselves and our life’s situations. It will require of us to combat ourwilful ignorance and fears. It will require us to develop self-discipline.
People would rather throw away their lives in endless pursuits, in blaming others rather than taking responsibility for their pain. An identity is formed around the unresolved pain and then beliefs are acquired to further insulate the mind from the pain at the core. And when we avoid meeting our pain and walking through it until it becomes an ally, the mind deploys its greatest weapon: Distraction.
Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing another. One of the ways the mind avoids looking at the truth of its own nature is by projection. It sees the problems as something manifesting out there without any in-depth inquiry about why what we are seeing is so triggering, especially if it is producing strong emotions. The pursuit of Unity and our effectiveness in that depends on the success we have in achieving unity with the unruly aspects of self. The greatest enemies of humanity are Self-Ignorance, Belief, Pretence and Laziness.
True learning requires patience, commitment, sobriety, discernment, critical thinking, diligence, respect for self and others, respect for accumulated knowledge and expertise. A distracted mind will not be capable of any of this. The ‘knowledge’ it accumulates will be surface at best emboldened by confirmation bias. This is because one’s identity becomes entwined with what it believes, and the seeking of knowledge is limited to those things that bolster the pre-existing belief and the wounded identity that it supports. Everything it consumes is filtered through the lens of belief.
A distracted mind is constantly seeking stimulation, gratification, glorification. A distracted mind clothes itself with self-importance as a way not to look inward. “Look at ME! Look at what I am doing! See how right I am and how wrong you are!“ are its battle cries. It weaponizes the words truth, honesty and hope to serve its own ends with only limited understanding of what those words mean. A distracted mind knows it is a house of cards and seeks to become clever by reading books, consuming online content in an attempt to cover its small and shallow nature. A distracted mind seeks self-gratification through drugs, alcohol, possessions, attention seeking and the garnering of influence. A distracted mind is quick to judge and draw conclusions, is self-righteous and girders itself with aggressive and toxic optimism and positivity.
A deep and vast mind takes time, fosters emotional intelligence, develops discernment through critical thinking skills and deep insight. It understands how to ask the right questions and knows that that rests on having the right intention. It is tolerant of ideas and all people as it realizes that humans and the organizations that they make up are complex and flawed and often make mistakes and that mistakes are a part of life, learning, and growing. A deep and vast mind knows how to listen.
A distracted mind listens only to either bolster a preconceived idea or to reject without any due consideration. It has a short attention span and will only gloss over information without any real analysis. It does not reflect and ask, “Am I truly understanding this?” Does the source that this is coming from truly understand? Context is lost in a distracted mind. Things taken out of context can have a very different meaning than what was originally said.
Where there is massive chaos people are made more vulnerable and conflict between them is more likely to happen. There are those that would take advantage of this. If we are distracted, we give our limited attention to people claiming to have knowledge without taking the time to vet their ability to interpret the data they are presenting. We are unaware that the bits of information shared maybe part of an in-depth study that has a very different conclusion to the one being inferred the bits taken out of context.
A distracted mind cannot trust because at the core is an identity that cannot trust. If you do not trust the inherent goodness in yourself, you will be forever looking outside with mistrust. Always waiting for any sign that someone, something, some institution has let you down. The distracted mind is always running after something because it is incapable of recognizing the completeness within.
Let me to introduce you to an elegant word:
Ne’er-be-gone n. a person who has no idea where their home is or was or when they might have left it – which leaves their emotional compass free to swing around wildly as they move from place to place, pulling them everywhere and nowhere all at once, making it that much harder to navigate.
When we have lost our understanding of where our home is, where all goodness is, where love is, where freedom resides, we are ne’er-be-gone. We become easily distracted, easily caught up in what ever exciting thing is going on, we become easily manipulated, we can become intolerant, intrenched in our thinking, or we become magical in our thinking to bypass the pain. Our home is the SELF that which is self-existent in every human being. When this is fully realized we deeply appreciate life.
This makes us more loving, more compassionate, more open to be wrong and to learn, more flexible, more tolerant especially of those different to us and moves us to find elegant and graceful means to resolve differences. A clear and undistracted mind can penetrate the many inconsistencies that are a part of being human and life itself. A mind in service to the greater good and Life itself understands that we are living into uncertain futures. That our lives are made of such delicate material. It understands that if we dump too much weight into the future, we miss the beauty in this precious now. It finds resolution even in the midst of chaos.