These ought to be just footnotes to what is really important right now, which is to grasp and understand the depths of your own self, or to grasp and understand the depths of your own experience of reality, the two being one whole truth in experience, but alas, apparently divided and contradictory realities in language and thought. For many, however, these issues are not so much footnotes as the necessary a footbridge to that very problem, because worry and the illusory struggle for control over your reality lies between you and a full understanding, thus a full possession, of either yourself, your life or your reality…
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What you seek to control in your life is controlling your life. Haven’t you noticed that?
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Worry and try to control…I’d be lying if I said these are tendencies I struggle against. They aren’t. I have learned that it is never, never useful or liberating to worry, and such an insight saves me a vast amount of inner tension and energy. If you can secure this truth for yourself – and the truth demands not just the mental understanding but the experience which affirms it – then worry can begin to fall away: never will you solve the problem of worry if you think the problem is outside of yourself which the worrier always does.
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What do you actually control? Do you control the texture, temperature, duration of your experience or your body or your life?Do you control your fine movements? Do you control even a significant portion of the minutia of experience? What do you really control but for the yes or the no, reaction or else the non-reaction? You control nothing but your non-reacting to the world, let me tell you that much for sure.
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Control, and its necessary other half, worry, ends up controlling your life and causes far more worry than had you left your life to fate, wherein you’d end up arriving swiftly at the actual truth of your life, and, so long as you don’t run from it, wherein you’d begin to discern further into the truth about the human condition as such, and indeed about life as such.
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Faith is a very well trodden path. We needn’t have a religion or belief to have faith: we just need trust, and life becomes very simple when we have trust: it is a complete fiction that one is safer with mistrust than with trust.
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For someone who beleives they understand the world intellectually, at most this amounts to a conceptually ordered mind which thinks itself to be a correspondence to an allegedly ordered reality, and thus lives in – is bound in – illusion. This is life for most of us today, and has been so, unchallenged, throughout our Western history: we’ve nothing really to compare it to.
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For anyone who needs convincing about matters of importance, such as liberation or awakening, i.e. for anyone who is capable of ‘mere’ intellectual persuasion – you may as well stop reading this, because it can only be a danger to you, as any reading must be right now. You will only find the truth of things if you can first find the courage and thereby the willingness to look into your reality and secure truths there yourself. If you’ve never learned you ought to start.
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When considering things intellectually, your mind will give you only the images, from what is known, that can explain reality, but we are not interested in explanations, we are interested in the truth. Moreover, the ego, which is the mind we think we are, will only gravitate towards ‘explanations’ that don’t undermine its limited sense of self and reality, based on its historical documented, objectified experience, not on its current or future more subtle, wordless self-explorations. The only way to establish the truth of anything, including what is suggested here, is to take it into the existential: to find it in experience, otherwise the brain will not be changed fundamentally. It only suspects – it doesn’t know.
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In truth, which is to say, in reality well apprehended, there is no cause for worry, so there is no worry: and there is no blaming, because there is no anger. Why worry about that which is a given – why worry about what is? It is futile – it is at odds with reality, which is to say, with truth. Worry indicates lack of mastery – lack of mastery over self or world: they amount to the same fundamental lack of mastery. And what about anger? Why be angry when you understand what happened, and see it was a result of everything that preceded it, which is always true? Isn’t this a small but highly useful, highly operative and effective truth anyone can secure for themselves? Then why are you angry – why do you blame? What is this ‘system’ we call blame? The questions only begin to arise when we look within ourselves, so in discovering ourselves we begin to discover the world – but these are only very initial ventures.
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Why blame now on before, when before was also now, and now has already become a before? Why blame? Why be an angry and frustrated little powerless person? I’d sooner just admit I’m powerless than huff and puff. Once you see all this you don’t bother hold onto anger which only makes you ill anyway. Your health improves, your life improves etc etc.
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Anger is that energy of self that thinks it is dealing with reality, but is only aiming and firing at mind – or more precisely, an eroneous depiction of reality that is produced by the mind.
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Yr only ever angry at yr mind! And so well you might be if it is a stupid mind – and an angry mind, just like a fearful mind, is always a stupid mind, as well pointed out by Krishnamurti.
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An angry person is someone who doesn’t understand themselves and, indissolubly, doesn’t understand reality.
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The loss of truth – social truth – was owing to the weakening of social love. We have lost sight of truth because for a long time now, we thought being in truth meant being ‘right’ – on the right side of the debate, the argument, the issue. This develops into a pursuit not of truth, then, but consensus – merely social conventional truths.
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Worry is utterly futile – not only that, it is soul-destroying and, indissolubly, it destroys our health. It does nothing but shorten and emmisserate our life, cause us to fall out of favour with ourselves while letting the vast social reality within which we were constituted entirely off the hook: and it may make you feel better, but this is a measure of the tyranny of your mind over your life. It is merely consoling the mind that it is ‘doing’ something about it when in fact it is just rearranging furniture, and it fooled you – it must’ve really seen you coming.
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Worry expresses your objective powerless under a mind that believes in what it worries, and now your objective powerless causes you even more worry: this is the quicksand – and truth will always be quicksand if you spend your life pursuing what is false – e.g. pursuing being ‘right’ instead of truth, of having rather than enjoying, of thinking rather than knowing, of preferring rather than desiring and so forth.
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Without the mind, you’d see plainly and wordlessly that worrying is never a problem in objectivity – it is a problem of the subject: generally speaking, the missing subject. You don’t control reality – this itself is part of the whole truth about reality. At best you might be able to control this or that aspect: but aspect of what, precisely? The whole – and the whole, which determines the aspect, can never be controlled.
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So what does it add to our life that it is spent, from the age of about 14 onwards, worrying about the details? Is it to ensure this or that mental outcome? Hey, if you have a mind that can affect reality merely through the power of worry, than you really have absolutely nothing to worry about.
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Just as your ‘reality’ is all in the mind, true genius is never to be found in the mind but rather comes about through an understanding reality.
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Show me one thing the mind can do, apart from experience that which it is not, or to interpose between two moments its own self as an illusory division, that might justify the efficacy of worry? If I wanted to transform this thought into a reality, I’d need more than my mind: I’d also need the world and the universe with it. So how can the mind, worrying, hope to control anything? If you try stilling your mind you’ll see it’s incapable even of controlling itself! All it is doing when it is worrying is shifting around the pieces and hoping to present the problem to itself in less challenging, less fearful ways.
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Your mind has never controlled reality – rather, reality produces the mind, and mind represents reality. They are two sides of one illusive coin – they evolved together, and have never spent a moment apart in your waking lifetime. Your mind is as much the problem as reality – indeed they are one and the same problem: more to the point, they are all the problems in the entire universe.
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What do you truly want out of life? For sure, we never truly want the details. Desire is wordless and for the whole: the whole experience, which means me and world indissolubly: the whole result, the total artwork or whatever, which means it is something out there – the world – that engages all of me: desires are always about a whole, and the whole is the ends – details are mere details – mere means to the ends of wholeness. This is never untrue – so what’s all this detail-oriented psychology actually driving us toward? Desires, surely – but desires far grander, far older and more historical than anything in your tiny little life, let alone tiny little mind – that against which what you take to be your life, your world is only really a breath-mark, or ‘etchings on the water’ as Thich Nhat Hanh puts it.
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The problem of worry, the problem of seeking to try to control life or reality, stands in contrast to the very clear, one-pointed, calm and peaceful reality and self which flails the chaos that we think we are. The whole picture – the self, the calm, the chaos – is what we are. When we think about the problem or any problem, we get the world we think we are. Worry arises in the world we think is, the world which we think – it arises in and amongst thought – in reality there is nothing to worry about at all. Worry just makes you ill and keeps you conforming in the illusion of control. Why would you do it to yourself?
(This was part one of a two part post. The second part and other writings can be found on aaronasphar.wordpress.com. Many thanks)
