Many of us feel like we’re perpetrators of some undefined crime.
What did we do to deserve this and not that? Why am I here and not there?
Perhaps you feel like you’re in some place you shouldn’t be in, or you’re not good enough, or you need to prove your worth, or you have to deserve to be alive.
The crime against humanity is that humans grow up feeling like criminals of a vague nature — something just feels wrong.
We live our lives according to the dictum: guilty until proven innocent. We relate to the apparent self as a problem to fix and a project to complete.
We assume we have to please and appease an upstream audience. If it’s not God, then it’s our parents. If it’s not our parents, then it’s other people in general. If it’s not other people, then it’s ourselves objectified.
If you feel like proving something to yourself, you have simply turned one imagined me into two imagined me’s.
As long as we feel like we need to prove our worth, we have to conjure an Other to prove it too. If there is no Other, then who would require proof?
You don’t need to prove anything to anyone. What is there to prove and to whom?
‘Worth’ and ‘you’ are both social inventions — they don’t really exist as such.
This might be a pill to swallow. (Have some water.)
You don’t need to prove, become, or achieve a single thing to be who you are. Your happiness and contentment depend on these things to the degree you believe they do. The neurotic need for these things is based on a misunderstanding.
Let this sink in.
Don’t move too quickly.
Enjoy the sweetness of assuming you are not only okay the way you are, but are exactly the only way you can be — no matter who you are, what you do, what you have, where you are, what you think, what you feel.
How would your life change if you knew without a doubt that, everything considered, you’re truly O.K. right now?
It’s one thing to hear that life is not a race, that no one is further along or behind, that no one is above or below. It’s another thing to feel this in the depths of your marrow.
You’re okay the way you are right now, which includes feeling not-okay, and we’re not even talking about the real you yet, but we’re about to.
So far, this was only a little psychological permission slip.
We have talked about the social-psychological you — aka the imagined you — and although this you isn’t really you, I want to make the point that whatever there is to this imagined you is fine, even if it seems to seriously suck sometimes.
All these years, you couldn’t fix yourself because there was nothing to fix. Get this. You couldn’t fix yourself, not because you weren’t good enough at fixing or because you hadn’t tried hard enough, but because nothing was broken.
I’ll sound like a broken record saying this but feel free to bury me on this hill (better yet, scatter my remains, but don’t cremate me!):
The you you think you are isn’t you. It’s not actual. It doesn’t exist. And the one you tried to fix all those years was this non-existent you.
There’s no original guilt to purge because there’s no original self who committed the crime.
It’s a bit like seeing your shadow on the ground, declaring the shadow is you, and then demanding of the shadow to perfect itself (disregarding that it’s already a perfectly fine shadow as it is). I trust I don’t need to spell out how hopeless and, at some point, silly this is.
You were never actually working on a so-called yourself. All you did was shuffle appearances (and even that was never really up to ‘you’). To put it differently, you treated yourself like a skill issue.
We usually believe that if we become this, do that, and have the other, we’ll finally be fine. All this comes down to believing you’re still not good enough at something — you’re lacking the skills (e.g., social skills, financial skills, mindfulness skills, positive thinking skills, feeling-your-emotions skills, reasoning skills, etc.)
Because if we had the skills, we wouldn’t have the problems. And then we spiritualize the struggle and call it awakening.
If we just had enough skill in staying present, we wouldn’t be so bothered by thoughts and emotions and all that mess, right?
Wrong.
We spend all our time improving skills/appearances, thinking we’re working on ourselves, and call it spiritual work. And in doing so, we might improve all kinds of things. We might even become a little less stressed and a little more confident, but something still feels off — we’re still tangled up in our own little game.
The game we’re playing is akin to rushing around our home, redecorating constantly, thinking this will get us home.
The solution isn’t in having all the right appearances in place but in resolving the identity crisis that has us convinced we’re separate individual entities — and, despite what I said earlier, those are somehow never alright.
Besides, I’m sure you’ve noticed that all self-help is bound to become self-harm.
When you recognize this game you’ve been playing on yourself (do it right now), you might feel a little silly. Perhaps a little lost. I certainly did. But that feeling of silliness and lostness doesn’t last because it’s replaced by relief. Relief from what?
Relief from the belief that you are a conceivable thing or entity apart from everything else and the burden that comes with it.
What you really are is inconceivable, and it doesn’t exclude anything. It’s not waiting for any perfect conditions to appear. It doesn’t have preferences. It just is.
Earlier I said that you don’t need to prove, become, or achieve anything. But the truth is more radical: you couldn’t, even if you tried. Proving, becoming, achieving requires time, and time — just like a ‘you’ to prove, become, achieve — is just another widget on display.
Now doesn’t stretch forward into better versions of me. There’s no future when and where you’ll finally be okay (or not-okay). Initially, this might hurt like a dagger in your back. But even that doesn’t last.
There is only this awake presence/absence.
How could this possibly be improved upon?
And where else could you be?
Luka
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