I got this message recently: “As humans we sometimes fall into the trap of taking things personally even though there is no ‘person’ in ultimate reality. We know this but occasionally we can't help but feel some hurt or pain within whenever we encounter someone or something ‘negative’. It's like we are on auto pilot due to conditioning and negative programs that were ingrained in us. Could you say something about this?”
Feeling hurt or pain is natural. It’s part of being alive. It happens. As for taking things personally, just to SEE this habitual movement of the mind as it happens is already the freedom from it. Awareness is already impersonal and free, as is everything that happens, including this habit of taking things personally. Seen for what it is, this habit loses its power and believability.
We think in terms of “negative” and “positive” feelings, events, programs, etc., but is reality actually divided up in this way? Can we really separate the light and the dark? In conceptual thought, we can. But that’s the map-world, which is an abstraction, and we so easily mistake the map for the territory. If attention moves away from thinking and instead feels into the bare (sensory, energetic, non-conceptual) living actuality of what we are calling "hurt" or "pain" or “taking something personally,” it’s very different from the label or the story or the explanation. In the living reality, there is no problem, no self, no obstacle, no goal.
In reality, “we” don’t actually fall into any trap—that very conceptual notion or story is itself the apparent trap—and nothing is really trapped. We discover this not by believing it as a comforting idea, but by feeling into our actual direct, immediate, present moment experiencing, just as it is—whether thought is labeling that experience “positive” or “negative,” “trapped” or “free.” Go beyond these labels into the felt-reality itself—the energy, the sensations, the awaring presence being and beholding it all. And then see, who is trapped? Is there a trap or anyone to be trapped in it?
Consciousness hypnotizes itself, creates and falls into its own traps, and wakes up. It does it all. In the story told by thought, which is also consciousness appearing as thought and storyline, “I” (the apparently separate person) fall into an apparently real trap and lose sight of the wholeness that I actually am, and this is all a very real and serious problem that must be fixed. But this is all a story, and even this story and the apparent “losing sight” within it is all a movement of wholeness like a wave on the ocean.
As apparent human beings, we are all conditioned organisms. EVERYTHING we think or imagine or feel or do is a happening of the whole universe. Some of it seems very deliberate and intentional and willful and premeditated, and some of it seems like the knee-jerk reactions of an unconscious auto-pilot, but ALL of it is an impersonal movement of the whole, a waving of the vast ocean of existence.
Nothing is really the problem that we think it is. Our apparent bondage and imperfection don’t actually exist in the ways we think they do. The effort to be permanently free of delusion, or permanently free of hurt or pain or so-called “mistakes” is hopeless, and yet even this efforting is nothing other than the impersonal and perfectly natural waving of the ocean.
And let’s be clear that “impersonal” doesn’t mean detached and dissociated. It doesn’t mean denying the relative reality of what we call a person—it simply means recognizing that the person is like a wave on the ocean—a fluid, ever-changing, inseparable movement of the whole. In another sense, we could say that EVERYTHING is personal! It’s all right here, utterly immediate, what I am. There is no other.
Feeling hurt or pain is natural. It’s part of being alive. It happens. As for taking things personally, just to SEE this habitual movement of the mind as it happens is already the freedom from it. Awareness is already impersonal and free, as is everything that happens, including this habit of taking things personally. Seen for what it is, this habit loses its power and believability.
We think in terms of “negative” and “positive” feelings, events, programs, etc., but is reality actually divided up in this way? Can we really separate the light and the dark? In conceptual thought, we can. But that’s the map-world, which is an abstraction, and we so easily mistake the map for the territory. If attention moves away from thinking and instead feels into the bare (sensory, energetic, non-conceptual) living actuality of what we are calling "hurt" or "pain" or “taking something personally,” it’s very different from the label or the story or the explanation. In the living reality, there is no problem, no self, no obstacle, no goal.
In reality, “we” don’t actually fall into any trap—that very conceptual notion or story is itself the apparent trap—and nothing is really trapped. We discover this not by believing it as a comforting idea, but by feeling into our actual direct, immediate, present moment experiencing, just as it is—whether thought is labeling that experience “positive” or “negative,” “trapped” or “free.” Go beyond these labels into the felt-reality itself—the energy, the sensations, the awaring presence being and beholding it all. And then see, who is trapped? Is there a trap or anyone to be trapped in it?
Consciousness hypnotizes itself, creates and falls into its own traps, and wakes up. It does it all. In the story told by thought, which is also consciousness appearing as thought and storyline, “I” (the apparently separate person) fall into an apparently real trap and lose sight of the wholeness that I actually am, and this is all a very real and serious problem that must be fixed. But this is all a story, and even this story and the apparent “losing sight” within it is all a movement of wholeness like a wave on the ocean.
As apparent human beings, we are all conditioned organisms. EVERYTHING we think or imagine or feel or do is a happening of the whole universe. Some of it seems very deliberate and intentional and willful and premeditated, and some of it seems like the knee-jerk reactions of an unconscious auto-pilot, but ALL of it is an impersonal movement of the whole, a waving of the vast ocean of existence.
Nothing is really the problem that we think it is. Our apparent bondage and imperfection don’t actually exist in the ways we think they do. The effort to be permanently free of delusion, or permanently free of hurt or pain or so-called “mistakes” is hopeless, and yet even this efforting is nothing other than the impersonal and perfectly natural waving of the ocean.
And let’s be clear that “impersonal” doesn’t mean detached and dissociated. It doesn’t mean denying the relative reality of what we call a person—it simply means recognizing that the person is like a wave on the ocean—a fluid, ever-changing, inseparable movement of the whole. In another sense, we could say that EVERYTHING is personal! It’s all right here, utterly immediate, what I am. There is no other.
