Just an Illusion
Life is made up of events. The only real way to accept life is to accept the events that comprise it. And the flow of events never stops. The driving force of the universe reveals itself via the events of our lives. Why resist this fact? Because it places us in a world that is not perfectible or predictable.
There is awe and mystery in the fact that no one knows what will happen next. But it also makes us feel small and out of control. The realm of illusion suggests that we can get above this flow of events. But that would be a spiritual death, for it is only events that allow us to be in touch with an alive, meaningful universe. If fate is woven of a series of events, then mental health is the ability to accept our fate with enthusiasm.
Preparing yourself with a philosophy enables you to change the meaning of a negative event. With a specific philosophy, you can aggressively change your perception of events. The philosophy of events is as follows. Adverse events are supposed to happen. Their existence doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. There is always an opportunity in a negative event. Developing spiritual skills is more important than getting a good result.
It is not possible to know what adversity you will face in the future, but whatever it is—misunderstanding, abandonment, risk, conflict, loss—this philosophy helps you not to be taken by surprise. It allows you the distance to step back and label the event and give it value above and beyond its immediate details. The event becomes generic. Events of abandonment, for instance, will teach you to develop a set of skills that will make you more emotionally independent. But if you fail to label an event, you can’t see the value in it. All you want is for it to be over. And once it is over, you forget all about it. You learn nothing. Labeling an event, even just to call it an adverse event, allows you to take advantage of it instead of it taking advantage of you.
The Positive Side of Anger
anger be processed right at the moment it comes up. The longer you let it fester, the more ingrained it gets until it becomes an obstacle to healthy living. Processing anger is not the same as repressing it. Buried anger is what probably killed.
We need a creative way of working with anger so it ends up as a positive force. This involves three steps. When you find yourself enraged, take a quiet moment and focus on your anger. Block out everything else. Make the emotion as intense as possible.
Phil calls this self-assertion. The second step is to completely shut off the anger. This is not as difficult as it seems: Visualize yourself in a natural setting at night, looking up at the infinite number of stars. Let yourself feel inconsequential in the universe; your personal concerns will seem unimportant and you can feel your anger dissolve. This step is called self-control. The third step is to focus on the person who provoked your anger and send a loving energy to them. Do this intensely—do not argue with yourself about whether or not the person really deserves love. Do it as you would physical exercise, without judgment. The ability to project a loving energy to someone who has hurt you is called active love, and is the highest stage of selfhood.
Repeat the three steps until your emotions are resolved. You have not repressed or denied your anger, you have transformed it into a different kind of energy. And each time you do this, your sense of self becomes stronger and less subject to the actions of others.
Once you have learned to turn anger into love, you experience a stronger sense of self. From this new vantage point, you will be able to accept the frustrations and unfairness of life without getting tied up in knots.
Decisions, Decisions
Instincts are a form of intelligence different from reason. They come to us all at once and demand to be expressed in action. You cannot tap into your instincts unless you have some relationship to your unconscious. Two keys to connecting to the unconscious are to rely on mind pictures instead of words, and to use your sleep time as a doorway to higher information.
When you face a decision, try this: Before going to sleep, pick one possible course of action and create images of what you see happening if you were to go in that direction. Then switch to an opposing course of action and again create images of what might happen. Erase both sets of pictures and go to sleep. Be very alert when you wake up. You may have a strong instinct to go one way or the other.
For big decisions, you may have to repeat this technique many times. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was famous for taking short naps before he made decisions. Since this is a nonlogical technique that is, in effect, asking for help from forces that transcend the conscious mind, it may seem strange at first. But the more you observe your own decisions and those of others, the more you’ll realize how small a role logic plays in what we end up doing. If you are afraid to act on your instincts, you will lose touch with them.
The Only True Success
The very core of the universe is alive, ceaselessly creating new things. It is human nature to crave this ultimate reality. But money has become a substitute for this moving force, causing us to misunderstand the meaning of success. And using money as a model of success is ripping our society apart.
The truest model of success is right in front of us. The universe itself is remarkably successful. Why? Because it has created endless life in an unbroken stream for tens of thousands of years. Each of us is a tiny model of the universe and we have within us this same need to ceaselessly create. It is only in the activity of creating that we feel truly successful and alive. No amount of money can replace that feeling.
Real success is the aliveness you feel when you create something new. It has nothing to do with external results. Success occurs when you inhabit a space in the universe where you connect with flow. Once you learn how to find this success universe, you will feel that the future is full of endless possibility. Its opposite is the failure universe, a limited world where nothing new is being created. There you feel burdened and victimized, unable to foresee a positive future. Every day becomes a success or failure depending on which world you choose to live in. This changes the whole game. A life well lived is one where you find your way into the success universe and stay there. This is not an intellectual construct; when you enter this world of flow you will actually feel totally different.
Winning by Losing
The obsession with winning has distorted athletics. No one seriously questions this. Pro teams hire athletes with any sort of problem as long as they help them win. Olympic athletes regularly dose themselves with illegal substances to enhance their performance. If only sports were affected, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
This belief has entered our lives so deeply that we rarely question it. But we should. Because the more we focus on winning in a one-sided way, the more we lose. It has nothing to do with what we are trying to win at. The problem is the state of mind this philosophy puts us in. When you make winning an obsession, you become completely fixated on your goal, and it becomes a matter of life-or-death.
Eventually, all of your attention is focused on some thing outside yourself, whether it be career, money, fame, or another person. This is the state of attachment. You know you are in this state when you spend a great deal of time thinking and worrying about the same thing. It’s the state of attachment itself that is the real loss. The Buddhists consider it the source of all suffering.
What have we lost in this state of attachment? We’ve lost the connection to anything larger than ourselves. That higher force in the universe that makes it into one meaningful whole, the one that human beings cannot be happy without a connection to…this force does not exist in things. Things are fixed, while this force is pure movement. The more focused we become on a thing, the further we get from the spiritual energies we need.
Even worse, without a connection to higher forces, society breaks down. When everyone is focused on winning, they are concerned only with themselves. This pulls us further and further apart. You can convert the experience of losing a thing into the experience of gaining a whole new universe if you have a tool to process the loss. The tool depends on the fact that behind every loss you suffer, there lies an infinite force. It’s the same force that creates everything in the universe
Every loss you experience is a chance to form a relationship with this higher force. Instead, we try to bargain with it—“You can take my job but not my wife.” But that’s putting the prime mover of the universe on the same level as man. You must give up bargaining and learn to surrender fully to this force.
The only way to do this is to be willing to lose everything.