“More than those who hate you, more than all your
enemies, an undisciplined mind does greater harm”.
Buddha
From our practices at Light
Tree, one thing appears abundantly clear. The ego-mind with all its incessant
chatter is completely insane. If we do not practice sitting back and joining
with the peace of our True Nature on a regular basis we run the risk of letting
ego run the show.
Sometimes it seems that the
ego has no purpose but the maintenance of the status quo. It likes things just
as they are. Then, suddenly, self doubt takes a new twist and what seems like a
good plan becomes riddled with fear and negative thoughts. We are damned if we
do, and damned if we don’t. This is the madness of our monkey-mind, or ego.
Buddha knew this, Jesus knew
this, and all the great teachers have come to this basic conclusion themselves.
We cannot fully appreciate the hold ego-mind has on our thoughts and behaviour
until we slow down enough to hear it. If we can sit and just witness, without
believing its insane commentary, we can learn to recognize it starting it spiel.
It’s in this precious moment
that we begin to join the consciousness of our True Nature. Really? we begin to
ask ourselves. This much nonsense cannot possibly be true. When we sit in a
witness place, not judging and just watching our essence it’s obvious that only
Love exists. The fear that arises is the false self (little me) trying to
justify its teeny tiny worldview. Why don’t we just try holding it with love and watch
it dissolve? Its just a thought anyway.
It seems we have all had our
share of fear thoughts lately. What can we do when we feel hopelessly lost in
our thoughts and emotions?
For us, the first step is to
realize what is happening and draw on our desire for peace and happiness. We
can choose to love ourselves immediately, before guilt and self doubt come to
see what’s going on. We can use an affirmation that we have practiced in
meditation and choose to forgive ourselves for buying into an illusion that was
created by the false self.
For example we might say, “I
forgive myself for using this (situation) to attack myself and separate from
love”.
We can also bring to mind
the love that we have experienced in our lives and embrace ourselves and the
situation in the memory of that experience of pure peace. There is no reason to
keep the attack going. We may as well stop, notice, forgive, and then laugh at
the ego’s insane attempt to draw us into another of its crazy stories. Why
prolong the agony? Let’s stop the madness now.