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TranceTara -> RE: moving on/letting go (2/14/2009 3:56:17 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: bitterlystung
Any suggestions on good books that I could read on how to do that?
I just remembered a most wonderful book called The Diamond in Your Pocket by Gangaji. And that reminds me of Eckhart Tolle's latest, A New Earth. Both are excellent.
This is from Chapter 3 of The Diamond in Your Pocket:
As we grow up, we experience that even our friends can betray us, can lie to us. We experience in ourselves the capacity to lie to our friends, our husbands, our wives, our teachers, and our governments. We find that our own thoughts can deceive us or torture us; they aren’t trustworthy. Our own emotions can get out of control. Our bodies cannot be trusted: they stumble and fall, they get sick, they age, and they die. The message becomes not to trust, not to open; opening is dangerous; it can lead to hurt. And with that conviction, a kind of hyper-vigilance of the mind develops to try and collect enough information so that if there is ever a time when it is safe to open, we will know when tat time is. In service to this fear, most of our mental activity in concerned with collecting. No matter how much is collected, there is still more to collect. We go to teacher after teacher, training after training, book after book, tape after tape, in a frantic effort to collect the information we think we need to stay safe. Throughout it all, we have profound yearning just to be open. This is often phrased as the yearning to “return home,” to return to the innocence of a child, to enter heaven. But by this time our mind is no longer a child’s mind. OUr mind, our body, and our emotions have experienced some very rough events.
Maybe in a moment of grace you open to your wife or your husband or your child, your lover, or your teacher. But then the habit to close arses very quickly because memory, whether conscious or unconscious, reminds you that hurt can follow opening.
I am not suggesting that you try to open, or that you try to forget about the past, or that you try to receive. That will only create more struggle. What you can do is simply observe when your mind is open and when it is closed. You can observe those times when you are open to receive and when you are rejecting out of habit. Simply tell the truth--not as a means of gathering more information, but as a path of self-discovery.
Telling the truth about any feeling, thought, or circumstance lays the ground for the power of self-inquiry. Inquiry is like shining a light into a basement where a creaky old furnace that you never even knew existed is spewing noxious gases all through the house. Inquiry opens the door and shines a light in the basement, so you can see and realize, “Oh my God, no wonder I feel sick in my body, mind, and spirit.” In that recognition, without even thinking, the natural course is to turn the furnace off. That comes from your own innate intelligence. You also see that you have within you and endless capacity to open the window of your mind and receive the freshness of what is truly pure. Along the way you recognize that even with the experience of wounding and damage, a purity of being remains. The core of yourself is still whole no matter what fragmentizing has gone on around it.
It is not that people won’t betray you. It is not that your heart won’t break again and again. Opening to whatever is present can be a heartbreaking business. But let the heart break, for your breaking heart only reveals a core of love unbroken.
And remember, true happines never comes from something or someone. It is who we truly are. It just gets covered up with manure now and then.
As those wise men of Monty Python once sang:
Life's a piece of shit when you look at it,
So always look on the bright side of life.
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