Thinking Addiction

The world is full of addictions: addiction to drug, alcohol, pornography, sex. But there is an addiction which is pervasive and greater than all these – addiction to thinking. I call it the mother of all addictions. You probably have never read about thinking as an addiction. Well, the people you are expecting to write about it are also addicted to thinking and do not know it.
A thought usually starts very little and grows to become destructive. Thought is a little magnetic entity and it wants your attention in order to grow. It tries in subtle ways to get your attention. When it succeeds in doing this, it tries to pull you in. This is how little thoughts rise to bigger thoughts.
When the mind perceives there is a problem to be solved, addiction tends to intensify. You want answers. You want solutions. You want to figure it out because when you do everything will be better. Really? Overthinking makes things worse than they are. It ruins the situation, makes you worry, and ruins you.
Most of us are occupied with the content of the mind. The mind then reigns supreme. After using the comb on your hair, the proper thing to do is to drop the comb. Imagine combing your hair throughout the day continuously. That will be insane. The mind is a tool to be used when necessary in our practical life. After use, one should let go of the use of the mind and come back into the present moment. It is insanity to use the mind throughout the day, thinking every minute or second. But this is how most people live. They are lost in unconscious and unproductive thinking in which they addictively replay the same mental patterns again and again in their heads. Rather than being a helpful tool, the mind is more like a possessive master. Are you feeling depressed, troubled, or unhappy? If yes, then one thing is certain – you are thinking or over thinking about something. So you suffer. Thinking and suffering are inseparable.

One of the most prominent characteristic of typical addictive thinking is to externalize problems, to blame things on other people or situations. This tendency to play the role of victim and/or to be bitter about what life has “done to” him or her is totally unconscious on the part of the addict and is part of the denial system. Those addicts who have an easier time expressing hurt outwardly invariably take the role of being bitter or angry. The unconscious reward in this for chemically dependent individuals is that they never have to look at themselves, and therefore, never have to quit using substances.¹

Are you feeling anxious? Are you feeling stressed? If yes, then you are addicted to thinking. The consequence of addiction to thinking can be serious: being lost in thought to the point of not being aware of what is happening around you. This can lead to accidents and missing out on the joys of life.
The racing of thoughts in your head is your mind’s way to flee the present moment. Your mind is resisting what is, and it is especially so when what is is not wanted or desired. So your thought goes to the past (What could I have done differently?) or to the future (What will go wrong?). It does not want to stay in the present moment. It is this resistance to what is that causes anxiety and stress. You lack peace then because your mind is filled with thoughts that just won’t stop.

Note:
1. Las Vegas Recovery Center, Characteristics of Active Addiction: Typical Adictive Thinking, www.lasvegasrecovery.com/characteristics-of-active-addiction-typical-addictive-thinking, Accessed May 28, 2017.

To stop excessive thinking, you have to take a step back and observe your mind in action – you have to become a watcher. Watching your thoughts brings consciousness to it and consciousness dissolves thoughts. Much of your thinking happens on auto pilot and you are hardly aware that it is happening. Because you did not bring your presence to your thoughts, your thoughts seem powerful. Bring awareness to thoughts and they dissolve. You do not have to try to stop thinking. Thinking stops automatically when you are conscious enough to watch the mind in action without getting caught up in the content of the mind. In doing so you allow your thought to come up without following it to where it wants you to go which is into bigger thoughts.
Addiction to thinking is constantly pulling your attention to the past and future. Being present, focusing in the moment, is the key to breaking this habit. When you are present in the moment, you cannot be thinking; when you are thinking, you are not present in the moment. Do not try to analyze your thoughts. Doing that can get you pulled into your thoughts which usually gets bigger. Bringing your attention to the present moment is enough to deal with addiction to thinking.
He who is addicted to thinking is mind-possessed. The mind which should be a servant has become the master. Such a person needs to get back control and be in charge of his mind. The steps listed below can help one in becoming the master of his mind.
1. Accept what is: What is is what it is – it already is. Resisting what is is one of the major reasons for problems and stress. It is in your resistance to what is that your mind flies to the past or future in an attempt to escape the present. What is is in the present. You have to accept what is if you want peace. Even if you consider your situation undesirable, then you have to accept what is first. This happens before the situation can be changed for the better.
You come back home one day and you find a pot on the table in your sitting room. You lose your mind because of this, or rather because you are resisting this. “A pot on the table in the sitting room! Why should the pot be in the sitting room? Oh, these children...” Your mind goes on. Do you see that your resistance to the pot’s presence in the sitting-room has not changed the location of the pot? But when you come back home to find the pot in the sitting room and you accept that it is there, the next thing that follows is not your thought that will be in resistance but your action that changes the pot’s location. By changing the pot’s location, you have changed the situation. Of course, you may afterwards want to know how it got to the sitting room, but the fact is that your acceptance came first and it did not cause you stress. You were in charge of your mind all the while.
2. Observe your mind: Thoughts continually show up. A thought starts as little and tries to get your attention so that it can pull you in. Once it gets your attention, the thought grows bigger. You may have started with a thought like, “Oh, I feel tired.” Before you know it, your thought has grown to be, “Oh, my life is so miserable.” This happens when you do not watch your thought. Your thought grows in your absence – lack of presence in the moment.
You have to be present in the moment to observe your mind. When a thought comes in, stay present and watch. Be a watcher. Do not analyze or judge the thought. Just watch. By being present in the moment and watching it, the thought does not get the attention it seeks, hence, it cannot grow. What happens to the thought? It leaves. Presence dissolves thought.
3. Make time for stillness: Stillness is what you may call meditation or quiet time. Stillness is good for your mind just as exercise is good for your body. How come we pay so much attention to the body trying to take care of it without caring for the mind? Yet the actions of the mind can ruin the body.
Stillness is a powerful tool for gaining mastery over your mind and it has been around for thousands of years. You try to focus your mind on the in and out rhythm of your breath, for instance, and what does your mind do? It wanders bringing up unsolved problems and old worries. Leave it unchecked and the peacefulness of the present moment turns into a spiral of fear and worry.
Stillness involves focusing on the present moment which can start with focusing on your breath, on the trees and flowers when you walk in nature. With sufficient practice, you begin to retrain your mind so that it can be the servant. When your mind tries to go off on its own, you can gently come back to the present moment. Stillness has some mental health benefits which include reduced anxiety and depression, addiction recovery, and enhanced creativity.
For the sake of peace, get back control of your mind. Your mind is a wonderful servant but a destructive master.

Time Travelling of the Mind

Your mind is constantly seeking to escape the present moment. It considers the present moment uncomfortable and boring. When you are identified with your ego, there is this compulsive need you have to live in the past or future. When you live in your memories, you are living in the past; when you live in anticipation you are living in the future. All this is to escape living in the Now. So your ego preoccupies itself with time travelling. It keeps the past alive because your sense of identity is invested in the past. Without the past, who are you? Your past gives you an identity. It also travels to the future to find fulfillment or salvation which it is unable to find in the present moment.
Consider what you call “past” and “future.” What you call past is actually a memory trace, and what you call “future” is only an imagination. The past and the future therefore do not exist. All you ever have is Now. When you experienced your past, you experienced it as Now, and when your future comes, it will come as Now. As you read these words, you are experiencing Now. All you ever have is Now. This is a fact. The time travelling of your mind however prevents you from living. You can only live in the Now. Your mind cannot truly live in the past, you do not have it. Neither can it live in the future, you also do not have it. The present moment in which you can truly live is what your mind constantly seeks to escape. The consequence of this is you existing without living.
You can live in the present moment, you can cope with it. But you cannot cope with a projection of your mind. You are in this moment but your mind is in the future. What you have is an anxiety gap; what you have is an illusion. Little wonder you hardly experience joy. Imagine that instead of playing and enjoying your favourite song, you are always pressing the rewind or fast forward button. You end up not listening to the song which makes it impossible for you to enjoy it.
Consider what it is that you are afraid of, that which scares you. Maybe it is your inability to pay your rent when it is due. Maybe it is your album or book not being widely sold. Maybe it is the man or woman you would like to have a relationship with saying, “No.” All this is a creation of your mind, they are not happening now. It is like your mind saying, “Hey, why don’t you start worrying right now about events that have not yet happened? Why don’t you prepare for them ahead by worrying now?” How absurd is that?
In this moment you are fine. Consider what is wrong in this present moment in which you are. I am not asking you to consider the moment ten minutes ago or five minutes from now. Just consider Now, the present moment. Ask yourself, “What problem do I have in this moment?” This is a question that forces your mind to stop its time travelling so that you can be present. Don’t just keep reading. Do this now before you continue reading: take a minute and ask yourself, “What problem do I have in this moment?” If you are fully present in the Now, you will realize that you have no problem Now.
Let go of your ego and step out of the time machine. Live in the Now. It is all you ever have. Embrace uncertainty. Embracing uncertainty is more enjoyable than time travelling because it allows you the freedom to explore, make mistakes, learn, connect. When you let go of time, your Being in a sense comes alive. Then you will be and not be identified with the past or a future projection.
Do not let your life’s journey continue to be an obsessive craving to arrive somewhere, get something, or get someone. Stop trying to use the present moment only to get to the future. Before you know it, you have spent all your life waiting to start living. There is hardly any joy in that. Live fully in the Now. Why would you not do this when all you ever have is Now?

The Birth of the Ego

You have just been born. You see shapes and patterns and hear voices. You will later be told that the shapes are faces and the sounds are voices. The shapes and patterns keep moving and the voices just won’t stop. You have been comfortable in the womb. Now the external environment makes you uncomfortable. All these upset you. You cry. You are aware of what you see and hear but you are not aware of who is aware of those things – you. You perceive what you see, hear, and feel but you do not perceive them as happening to you. You are only aware that they are happening.
Soon you begin making associations. X makes you expect Y. Before long, X begins to symbolize Y. Eventually over time, you may not be able to distinguish X and Y. You make many associations like this growing up.
The biggest association happens when your parent points at your image in the mirror, with you in front of it, and tells you, “That is you.” You are told that your image is you. This is probably the worst association.
You grow older and you associate many worldly things with yourself – your family, your toys, your room, your car, your friends, your clothes, your house. What you do not realize is that you have invested part of yourself in all these. So part of you seem to be invested everywhere. You try to control all of the things you have associated with yourself. That is really out of your control. This makes you worry. You have a lot of things to worry about. No peace.
Remember what I said earlier, “You are aware of what you see and hear but you are not aware of who is aware of those things – you. You perceive what you see, hear, and feel, but you do not perceive them as happening to you.” When you were born, you were egoless. Now you have a false sense of self – ego. You think you are this and that but you really are not what you think you are. Who you are is beyond your thought because it is beyond your mind, and your thought is a product of your mind. You do not think who you are; you know who you are. You know who you are by experiencing your Being.
The ego is a false identity which is a construction of the mind. For people who are not aware, the ego is difficult to see. Ego hides behind thoughts that appear true: “I am ugly,” “I am not smart,” “I am smart,” “I am better than him.” One who has not practiced watching may not see or catch the ego. Ego usually ends up creating emotional drama in your life. It generates emotional reactions like anger, jealousy, and feeling of insecurity. The emotion is as a result of the agreement with the false beliefs that comprise the ego. One sees the emotions and drama but does not see the ego that caused them.

One of the most deceptive aspects of the ego is that it generates powerful emotional reactions, and then blames us for how it made us feel. The anger we react with comes from ego based beliefs of being right and “knowing better” than someone else. Perhaps there is also a victim interpretation of betrayal or injustice underneath. After we overreact with anger we might feel badly for what we expressed. The ego shifts to a “righteous self” that “knows better” and berates us for overreacting. All these attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs take place in the mind, and even though they are completely different, we assume all of them come from us. If they really were expressions coming from our genuine self, they wouldn’t contradict…”¹

Note:
1. Pathway to Happiness, What is the Ego?, www.pathwaytohappiness.com/happiness/2013/02/26/what-is-the-ego/

Manifestations of the Ego

We have created a self out of our thoughts. We did not stop there. We have gone on to identify with this self we have created. That is the ego – our self-created identity. It is who we think we are. But you are not who you think you are. Your thought is a product of your mind and your Being is beyond your mind. Your mind finds it difficult to grasp your Being.
You are a manifestation of God, made in God’s image and likeness. Who you are then is after doing good. But your ego, your false sense of self, is standing in the way of you bringing about good. It does this by trying to prevent you from connecting to your Being and it often succeeds. Your true nature then is obscured.
The ego is always trying to protect itself. So, it is always attacking and defending. You may have been in a relationship where you tried to give love only for you to come out of the relationship feeling hurt. You still have love in you but your ego will repress the feelings or expressions of love in order to feel safe. Who you are was not hurt as a result of the end of the relationship. It was your ego that was hurt. Now it wants to feel safe, so it makes you build a wall around your heart to feel protected. What this wall does is to prevent you from giving or receiving love. The ego then prevents you from expressing who you truly are. You are still who you are but the light of your Being is obscured.
Here are some of the ways the ego manifests:
1. Wishing the present was different: The ego does not live in the moment; it cannot. It is preoccupied with past and future. Living in the present moment is actually the only conscious way to feel. The ego is scared of the Now and to live in the Now is the death of the ego. So to continue being in charge, the ego flees the Now to the past or future.
“I will be happy when I become a graduate,” “I will be happy when I get a job,” “I will be happy when I get married”… The ego goes on and on. To become a graduate, get a job, or get married is fine. But when you think that these will make you happy, that they will permanently satisfy you, you have an illusory expectation. You are being distracted from living in the present moment by the active ego. You are waiting to start living. Ego makes you believe that you need this or that to be happy or be at peace. But joy, love, and peace are aspects of your true nature – you have them already. Nothing outside of you can give you these. Things can only give you momentary pleasure. Before you know it, that which seemed to have satisfied you some time ago now dissatisfies you. It can even become a source of unhappiness. The ego which does not want to allow what is to be is always searching for more and more. It tells you that you will find peace when everything falls into place.
2. Identifying with your story: “I suffered as a result,” “He did this to me,” “She did that”… You keep retelling your story. Telling your story again and again is a pattern the ego likes to hold on to. Complaining about your story puts you in the victim mode and stirs up emotions as if it was still happening. This happens because you have identified with your story. The present is actually different but the ego is keeping you in that “story space” not wanting you to let go of the past. If it keeps you out of the present moment, suspect the ego at work. By retelling your story again and again, playing the victim, you create more drama which the ego feeds on.
3. Addiction: When ego wants something like money or sex, it sets out trying to “make it.” It can manipulate or entice others to get what it wants. You are not your ego so even if the ego gets what it wants, it cannot fulfill you. You may get pleasure but it will be short lived. Before you know it, you have an addiction and you engage in a behaviour repetitively trying to fill a hole you consciously or unconsciously perceive to be inside you.
Fame, for instance, can keep you identified to the ego. Ego is an idea of who you are which you project onto the world. People fall in love with the image they have created of the famous person. They fall in love with the image but they really do not care about the person. Fame reinforces the ego and this serves to further disconnect one from one’s Being. The same ego that tells you, “You are smart,” “You are special,” later tells you, “You are dumb,” “You are incomplete.”
The ego leaves you chasing transients, vapours. It urges you toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. The ego makes you center your existence on the desire of yourself rather than the common good. You then proceed to make yourself the centre of the universe.
What can permanently satisfy the ego? Nothing. As it tries to satisfy itself with this or that, it grows bigger and hungrier like a fire requiring more fuel to sustain it. So, the ego creates a spot light pointed at things outside of us. Unfortunately this keeps us feeling separate from our Being as well as from others.
The divine in us is what we call God. So, God is in you and is also in every other person. We are therefore one for God does not have parts. Because God does not have parts, he can never come apart. God is love and by being who we are we can manifest love. One who manifests love is not empty. In fact, we cannot be empty. But living through the ego often results in a feeling of emptiness. Then you feel a void in you; you feel that something is missing in you; you feel that you are not whole. But we were created in the image of God, in God’s love. Feeling empty therefore is not a natural expression for anyone. Feeling empty comes from a false belief that we are separate from the divine. Feeling empty then is an indication that we have separated ourselves from our Being. The ego is in control.
The ego promises to offer us joy and peace. But the ego is an illusion so whatever it offers can never be real, permanent, or fulfilling. Regardless of how you try to fill yourself with what the ego offers you, you will never be permanently satisfied by that. Usually the ego starts by offering us small “gifts.” We get the gifts and are temporarily satisfied. Soon the same gifts that were satisfying become unsatisfying and even meaningless. The ego does not give us the chance to question what has happened and before you know it, it is offering another gift, a bigger gift. We get this gift and it seems as if the feeling of emptiness has been taken care of. Before long, the feeling returns, maybe even stronger. You try to ask why but the ego offers a bigger illusion. It is time for you to realize that whether these gifts, these illusions, are big or small, they can never fill you up. It is time for you to awaken and be conscious.
If you try to ask, “How come I was satisfied by this a while ago but I am not now? Why?” the ego becomes nervous because its existence is being threatened. The ego does not like being questioned, it does not want questions. Asking questions is a step towards consciousness and consciousness cannot co-exist with the ego. Consciousness dissolves the ego. The ego, in an attempt to keep us from asking questions, keeps us busy. When you are busy, you hardly find time to question the ego. So the ego fills your time with as many illusions as possible. Then you find it difficult to be still by yourself. You cannot bear to be alone all by yourself. You dread that. You would rather be preoccupied with outings, watching TV or movies, going online to view posts and pictures or chat on social media. These are some of the means the ego uses to prevent you from being who you are. You remain unconscious. The ego is ready to defend till death that the illusions it offers are truth. You often buy into these illusions as truth. But illusions are false, they are nothing. That is why illusions cannot fulfill anyone. The ego is keeping you from experiencing peace, love, and joy. These are eternal and they are aspects of your Being. You have them already but the ego obstructs you from experiencing them.
To recognize the truth, start by questioning the illusions. The word recognize means to “know again.” This implies that you knew before. The truth is already in you, what you have to do is to recognize it. As you begin to be conscious, you will increasingly be unable to tolerate false beliefs and illusions.
When you begin this search in you to know who you are, the ego will not let go without a fight. Then it becomes fearful, fearful of the light. The ego lives in darkness and consciousness beams light on it. Where there is light, there cannot be darkness; where there is consciousness, the ego dissolves. Ego cannot withstand consciousness just as darkness cannot withstand light. Darkness reigns in the absence of light; ego rules where consciousness is not. So on your way to consciousness, the ego fights and tries to defend itself. It makes you feel uncomfortable and tells you that you are being ridiculous. By continuing your steps towards consciousness, the power of the ego over you weakens. You start seeing its illusions clearer. It wants to take you back to where you have been but you are already seeing the falsity of what it offers. You have heard the defenses of the ego before but now you no longer believe them. You choose not to blindly follow the ego. Enlightenment has come, awareness is rising. You are awakening.

How the Ego is Formed

How did the ego come about in the first place? This sense of self that is false, how did it develop? As a baby you had no idea of you as an “I.” You were not able to recognize your inherent nature. You heard your parents refer to you again and again by a name and you got the idea that your name refers to you. You went on to adopt your name as your identity, your sense of self. As time went on, you identified with your attributes and you defined yourself with forms: I am beautiful/ugly, I am intelligent/stupid, I am tall/short. And so your family, education, friend, profession, cultural and social conditioning determined how you think of yourself. A sense of separation was what you got when you started identifying yourself with “I.” Your ego which is your self-image developed. In relation to others and the world, you see yourself as separate. Ego is your self-image and it includes that compulsion you feel to defend the image. The ego is a concept, an idea, it is therefore not real. And for something that is not real, the ego certainly brings a lot of problems. If you say, “I am tired of myself,” then one can ask, “Are you one or two?” Even though there is ultimately one “you,” the statement, “I am tired of myself,” implies there are two of you: the I and the self which the I is tired of. One of them is real, the other is not.
The ego’s role is to form and to protect the images you have of yourself. You may think that you are a good leader. If someone criticizes your leadership, the image you have of yourself as a “good leader” will feel attacked or threatened. Before you know it, you are fighting to protect or defend that image. Your defensiveness causes you to withdraw or attack. Then your ego feels threatened and you react with fear. Your reaction may seem bold and powerful but underneath it is fear. People usually react in negative ways because they feel threatened and unsafe.
You hardly take cognizance of who you really are. In the process of identifying with a false sense of self, your awareness has been absorbed into the forms you identify with. You lost your mind in the process and now your mind runs you. You actually have an awareness that has the ability to look at things with clarity but this awareness has been obstructed; it is there but it is covered up. As a result of this, you seem to have lost the freedom you have. Then your often irrational feelings, habits, and unconscious reactions run your life.
You seem to have lost your true self. You really have not but it seems so. Your true self is always there, covered up but there. You can get to be who you are but first you have to become aware. When your awareness comes alive, you can see things as they are. Be present in this moment. Be present and be aware of your thoughts and feelings. If you become fully aware of your thoughts and feelings, your identity with them is dissolved already. In your natural awareness, you will be able to see the transient nature of forms, they come and go: money, career, beauty, thoughts, emotions. All of these come as forms, stay for a while and then dissolve. In your awareness you will realize that your true Being is a space for all these. It is formless and without concrete identity. It is because you do not know yourself that you feel the need to find an identity. This leads you to get entangled and lost in the forms you identify with. You look for yourself in clothes for instance. You cannot find yourself in clothes. You end up losing yourself in clothes.

How the Ego Sabotages you

Your ego left unchecked sabotages you. You call a number of things that happen in your life “bad.” What you may not know is that most of these so-called bad things are ego-created, so in essence, they are self-created. I call those things drama. The ego in its operation creates drama, and if only you will be fully conscious, the drama will end.

Eckhart Tolle defines the ego as the unobserved mind that runs your life when you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher. When this ego encounters other egos, it will either see them as a potential threat or attempt to use them for its own ends. The ego has no real connection to any other being. When you observe the ego, you see the patterns because it has a deep-seated fear and a sense of lack. So it comes up with strategies to combat the fear and sense of lack. These strategies can be clever but they never truly solve the ego’s problems. Ego cannot solve your problems. Why? Ego is the problem.

“Bad” things happen when egos come together. They can come together in groups, institutions, or personal relationships. The resulting drama of the coming together of egos can be in the form of emotional or physical violence, power struggles, conflict, and so on. You can still create your own drama all by yourself. You create drama when you see yourself as a victim, feel guilty or anxious, or sorry for yourself. Most people have invested their sense of self in their drama. Ego runs their life. They are in love with their story which is their identity. They therefore fear and resist the end of their drama. This is why someone with financial need can win N5,000,000 today through sports betting and be back to the same situation of financial need three months later. That is why after being in dysfunctional relationships filled with drama, you sabotage a situation where someone comes into your life to truly love you. You unconsciously act so as to send the person away. In a way, what you are saying is, “If I should respond to your love, that is the end of my drama,” because you think the end of your drama is the death of yourself. You do not see that you are addicted to your drama.

Your ego, your false sense of self, has reigned for a long time and has made decisions, taken actions, and brought up thoughts. Your Being then follows the thoughts, actions, and decisions of the ego even though the agenda of the ego is mostly at odds with your Being. As your Being follows the dictates of the ego, you undergo misery. This is because your ego does not have the capacity to lead your Being which is way more intelligent than the mind that constructs the ego. As long as the ego presides in your life, you cannot have peace and joy. You may get pleasure but remember that joy and pleasure are not the same. Whereas you do not need to look for joy because joy is an aspect of the nature of your Being (you have it already even though it is obscured by your ego), you get pleasure from external things. The pleasure which your ego seeks from external things is superficial and temporal. External things are bound by the law of impermanence, they come and go, and they also change form. They may satisfy you today and tomorrow you are no longer satisfied by them. Rather than seeing what is happening and understand that transients cannot fulfill you, you seek bigger “toys.” This is the reason consumerism is thriving today and the advertising industry keeps having its way in exploiting your ego. They make you feel a sense of lack and present you with a product that will make you complete by filling the lack. You purchase the product and your temporary satisfaction with the product makes you think that your lack has been taken care of. Sometime later the sense of lack returns and you try to fill it up with another advertised product. This goes on and on.

Your Being wants to be in charge but your ego which lives in constant fear does not want to allow that. And so your ego fights your Being. Your ego knows that your Being being in charge implies the end of its reign and even its death. It fights for survival. This is why after decades of living under the dictates of the ego, you find it difficult or challenging to be who you are. When you allow your Being to be without trying to be this or that, the works of your ego comes to question. Your Being examines things that the ego has spent decades putting in place, things like alcohol and drugs. Your Being tries to stop certain foods from coming in but the ego sees this as foolishness. “Have you forgotten the pleasure you derive from these things?” asks the ego, “I need to fix this right away!” Most people then will gladly settle for much less. The reason is not difficult to understand: the inner battle of dethroning the ego and breaking free of its influence to trust and follow the unpredictable, unfamiliar, unorthodox, and uncertain ways of Being seems too difficult. But ask yourself which is more difficult: simply being or trying to be this or that.

Ever heard of John Kennedy Toole? He wrote a novel called A Confederacy of Dunces. He lived in New Orleans and he submitted the manuscript to Simon and Schuster for publication. However, he and the publisher could not come to an agreement on the novel’s need for significant revision. Ultimately, the book was rejected and Toole took his manuscript back. Further attempts by Toole to publish his book were unsuccessful.

The rejection of A Confederacy of Dunces sent Toole into depression. He started to drink heavily and increasingly became agitated and paranoid. His mental state continued to deteriorate until Toole committed suicide. He killed himself in his car with a garden hose running from the exhaust pipe to the window.
Two years after Toole’s death, his mother started making attempts to find a publisher for A Confederacy of Dunces. She got numerous rejections. She took it to Walker Percy who was a novelist and teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans. Walker Percy read the manuscript which impressed him. He went on to submit it to a publisher. It was finally published by Lousiana State University Press. As a result of A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.
Now what happened? What is the difference between the rejected manuscript and the published manuscript? It was the same. The author was dead. He did not edit it.

If your personal worth is tied to getting other people’s approval such that you are devastated when you do not get it, this is what you have done: you have taken your worth, put it on a roulette wheel, and spun the wheel saying, “Whatever the world decides is my worth, that is it for me.” This action is very dangerous because the world (the wheel) will not come up with your number as often as you would want.

It is important that you separate your worth from your work. It is also important that you separate the result of your work from your work but when your ego runs you, you find this pretty difficult. Your worth as a person is not tied to the success of your career, album, book, or anything else.

When one gets a taste of success, one can begin to have a more inflated sense of oneself and even become addicted to the positive feedback and attention. This is why you may find popular celebrities, star athletes and top CEOs who have become huge, self-entitled egomaniacs. They have made it and they have switched their mindset to “getting what is mine.” Now that recognition, that award, matters. They need the media attention, the money and the title, not for the team but for themselves, “It belongs to me. I have earned it.” Controlled by the ego, they fail to realize that none of the things they presently crave got them to where they presently are.

The egomaniac feels entitled to future success as a result of past success. Life hardly works that way. No one is totally immune to obstacles, mistakes, and failures. As the sense of self of the egomaniac keeps getting inflated, life looks for ways to get him humble. As life does this through his life situation, the egomaniac instead of becoming humble ends up getting angry and frustrated, “What I have earned is being denied me,” he thinks. Put aside your ego and see this: no single result can completely define you for better or worse.

You are not the result of your work. Stop attaching so much importance to what happens to you. Even what happens to you should come under question. What happened simply happened. It did not happen to you. You think it happened to you because you brought yourself into it and told yourself a story. It is a matter of a negative interpretation. For instance consider Ifeanyi and Titi who are in a relationship. Their relationship is three years old and Titi has just gained admission into the university. All the while, Titi has been evolving and now that she is in school, she wishes to move on, not out of hatred for Ifeanyi but simply to continue to allow the process of her awakening without hindering what is trying to come through her. At this point in her life, she also wants to focus on her studies. She decides to move on and tries to explain to Ifeanyi why she does not want to continue with the relationship. What does Ifeanyi do? He blames her. He gets angry and develops hatred for her. Titi does not in any way intend to hurt Ifeanyi but Ifeanyi has interpreted the whole thing negatively and his ego has created a story out of it. He finds himself in a drama. What really happened is quite different from what Ifeanyi is telling himself. Where Titi has actually not hurt him, he has brought himself into the picture and sees Titi hurting him. He has not bothered to consider what is best for Titi. He has identified with his ego. The consequence is what you call pain.

Great article.... You spoilt it thought by your failure to paragraph your writeups

Fyi0:
Great article....
You spoilt it thought by your failure to paragraph your writeups

Thanks for the feedback.

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olamz4real:
Wow! this is amazing!!!! So much knowledge in one piece! . Thank you for sharing.

Thank you.

Pain

Emotional pain is as real as physical pain. We have all experienced it. However, the way most people deal with emotional pain is different from how they deal with physical pain. When we have physical pain, we hardly deny it. We have no problem going to see a doctor about it so that the pain is looked at and treated. If someone breaks a leg for instance, there is no hesitation in going to see an orthopedist and taking pain relievers to stop the leg from hurting. There is hardly any negative self talk or blame like, “You fool. You good-for-nothing. What can you do right? You broke your leg due to your stupidity.” But when we feel emotional pain, we hardly ask for help. What do we do? We deny it or we look for something to distract us from feeling the pain. We seem to find it hard to deal with emotional pain or even get help. For a broken leg, you know that something is wrong. But for an emotional pain, you may not know that something is wrong with you apart from your pain. Also, a broken leg is a broken leg but each person’s emotional pain can manifest in different ways or symptoms.

When you experience emotional pain, people may not know that you are in pain. You may even doubt that there is something wrong. Added to that is your negative self talk, “You are a loser… You will never amount to anything... This is all in your head…Come on, snap out of it.” Your mind goes on and on. You do not want to admit to anyone that you are not feeling well and so you end up self-medicating with distractions – watching TV, going on social media, going for an outing. You end up pretending to be happy. You think the pain is gone but it has not. You have covered it up probably with an addiction. The pain is there. It is dormant but it is there. When it awakens, it will demand for food. The food will be your negative thought or emotion, or other people’s reactions. When the pain is being fed, you are not conscious. Somehow the pain possesses you then. The result is drama. You blame others for how they make you feel and your feeling then is the consequence of believing the story in your head.

Psychologists have used four experiments to discover how people get over emotional or physical pain. In their paper When Hurt Will Not Heal: Exploring the Capacity to Relieve Social and Physical Pain, the authors propose discoveries suggesting social or emotional pain is as real as physical pain. Participants were asked by the researchers to relieve their past painful experiences by writing in detail what had happened and how they had felt. In the first two studies, students were asked to relive both emotional and physical pain, answering a series of questions and then recalling in detail an experience of betrayal by a person who was close to them, or both. Each experience was to have occurred in the previous five years. The students were asked to note how long ago the event happened, how much it hurt at the time, how many times they had talked about the experience, and how painful the experience felt now. The researchers from Purdue University in the US and Macquarie University and the University of New South Wales in Australia found that participants in the emotional pain condition reported higher levels of pain than participants in the physical pain condition. The students also reported less pain when they relived the experience than they had reported before writing the account.

Participants were given cognitive tasks with different levels of difficulty after reliving a socially or physically painful event in experiments three and four. Those in the emotional pain condition performed worse than those thinking about physical injury.
Dr. Kip Williams from Purdue, one of the authors, said, “While both types of pain can hurt very much at the time they occur, social pain has the unique ability to come back over and over again, whereas physical pain lingers only as an awareness that it was indeed at one time painful.
“Why aren’t we always suffering pain by recollections of social betrayal and other forms of social pain? Because we are pretty good at keeping these memories at bay.

“We had to induce our participants to think about the details of the social painful event in order to get them to feel pain at the present. Merely saying, ‘Oh yeah, my boyfriend cheated on me once…’ is insufficient to cause current pain. They have to steep themselves in the memory, and that’s something we don’t ordinarily do.”

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Emotion: The Reflection of the Mind on the Body

You are here now but your mind is not. Your mind has raced to the future and it does not see good. It sees “bad” things coming, “bad” things that will happen to you. And you feel something in your body. Something we call emotion. Your mind is at work and your body is reacting. Emotion is your body’s reaction to your mind.

Love, joy, and peace are aspects of your true nature. When you are still without the activity of your mind trying to sabotage you, you can experience true love, true joy, and inner peace. They are connected to your being. They do not have opposite because they do not arise from the mind but from beyond it.

When you are unconscious, you often call pleasure joy. But it is not. Joy arises from within you but you derive pleasure from something external. When that thing that gives you pleasure leaves you, you feel pain due to its absence. The thing may even give you pleasure today and tomorrow give you pain. When it comes to addiction, the “high” gives you pleasure and the “low” that follows afterwards gives you pain. In this way, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. This is nothing like the aspects of your true nature – love, joy, peace - which you cannot get from external things.

These aspects of your true nature are obscured by the activity of your mind. Through thinking compulsively, your mind serves as a noise-maker that hinders your connection to your nature. You do not feel connected to your true nature because you are not conscious. Love, joy, peace are already part of you. Seeking them in external things is vain. They are within you already. What you have to do is to connect to your true nature. The sky may be cloudy but that does not mean that the sun is gone. On the other side of the cloudy sky is the sun. It is there but obscured by the clouds. Your true nature is, but it is obscured by the mind. The mind cannot however destroy your true nature. The disturbance of your mind causes you to feel emotion. That is literally what emotion means – “disturbance.” The word “emotion” comes from the Latin emovere which means “to disturb.”

There is an energetic charge that results from the amplification of a thought pattern. You feel this as emotion. The emotion usually succeeds in taking over you because you are not conscious. You have not being able to bring the presence of your being into the Now. With enough presence, your emotion cannot take over you. But you lack presence and you identify with the emotion unconsciously. In other words, the emotion becomes “you.” A loop develops between your thinking and your emotion. Both power each other. The thought pattern which is magnified results into an emotion in your body. You magnify the thought by giving it your attention and dwelling on it. The emotion this creates energizes the thought pattern. And it goes on: the thinking-emotion loop.

The emotion gives you pain and your mind fights the pain so that it can remove it. But it never succeeds. Imagine the Inspector General of Police trying to find a murderer where he himself is the murderer. The mind can never find the solution to emotional pain because it is part of the problem.
The solution then is to free yourself from your mind. Disidentify with your mind and become conscious. The mind which has held a place of power is toppled and you connect to your being. This is consciousness. When you are conscious, the true nature of your Being will reveal itself.

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Suppressing an emotion does not mean you have dealt with it. It may seem as if you are protecting yourself by shutting off your emotion but that is not really what you are doing. Many cultures believe that it is a masculine quality to suppress emotion and that the expression of emotion qualifies one as weak. Avoiding your emotions never makes them go away. If the same situation that led to the emotion were to happen again, you are likely to find it more difficult to manage. In fact suppressing your emotion can strengthen it. If you feel pain because your girlfriend left you, you may try to avoid the pain by watching movies, going out or chatting, however, the pain is still present in you and a little incident can trigger it and cause you to overreact to the situation. Effects of consistent emotion suppression include high blood pressure, stress, and heart disease. While I was having a conversation with a lady one day, she told me she does not forgive anyone who has made her cry. Even if she tries to forgive, she will never forget. When someone does something which makes her feel hurt, she does not tell the person about her hurt but she carries it within her. Hardly does the person know how hurt she has come to be. There was a time someone very close to her was giving her a cold treatment. She was very much hurt by this as she never expected such a treatment from the other person. I asked her to go have a discussion with the person concerning this and she was emphatic that she would never do such. She expected the other person to talk to her about whatever she may have done that led to the cold treatment instead of being quiet about it. At a point while we were talking she broke down in tears. I saw clearly that this lady was suppressing so much emotion in her. I saw a child who was feeling hurt. She was able to discuss this with me but not with the other person involved in this even though the discussion would have been a forward step in letting go of the pent-up emotion. In a matter of minutes she was back to her old state. Now she smiles but the emotion is not gone. It has gone back to its dormant state waiting for a situation to activate it again.

There is so much pain in the world but the greater part of human pain is unnecessary. This pain is self-created but we are hardly aware of this due to unconsciousness. When the mind possesses you and runs your life, you are unconscious and in such a state, you will create pain for yourself and activate other people’s pain.

Pain comes in when you are in resistance to something particularly to what is. So behind pain, you find non-acceptance. You have what is but you do not accept it, so you resist it. Your resistance then brings about pain. Your resistance is in your thought in which you have judged what is. You have judged what is and labeled it unacceptable. So you are in resistance. This reflects in your emotion which manifests as negativity. The greater the degree of your resistance to what is, the present moment, the greater the intensity of your pain. You have the present moment but you are denying it, you want to escape from it. This gives you pain and you suffer, the consequence of mind identification.
When you suppress your negative emotion, you are avoiding it. You are trying to escape from it so you do not even bother to look at it. Since you do not face it, you do not see the negative emotion for what it is, you do not see what it is in the present moment. You succeed in suppressing it. But is the pain gone? No. The pain cannot be completely dissolved without you fully facing it. So you have a remnant of the pain as you go about your life situation.

We have much to learn from nature and even animals if only we could be present and watch or listen. Hear Eckhart Tolle:

In “The Power of Now,” I mentioned my observation that after two ducks get into a fight, which never lasts long, they will separate and float off in opposite directions. Then each duck will flap its wings vigorously a few times, thus releasing the surplus energy that built up during the fight. After they flap their wings, they float on peacefully, as if nothing ever happened.
If the duck had a human mind, it would keep the fight alive by thinking, by story-making. This would probably be the duck’s story: “I don’t believe what he just did. He came to within five inches of me. He thinks he owns this pond. He has no consideration for my private space. I’ll never trust him again. Next time he’ll try something else just to annoy me. I’m sure he’s plotting something already. But I’m not going to stand for this. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t forget.” And on and on the mind spins its tales, still thinking and talking about it days, months, or years later. As far as the body is concerned, the fight is still continuing, and the energy it generates in response to all those thoughts is emotion, which in turn generates more thinking. This becomes the emotional thinking of the ego. You can see how problematic the duck’s life would become if it had a human mind. But this is how most humans live all the time. No situation or event is ever really finished. The mind and the mind-made “me and my story” keep it going.¹

Eckhart goes on to say, “Flap your wings” which means “let go of the story.” Let go of that story and return to Now. The Now is your place of power.
Instead of dwelling in the Now and paying brief visits to the past and future when necessary to deal with the practical aspects of life situation, most people are living in the past and future and paying brief visits to the Now. So they exist but they do not live. Show me the past. Show me where it is except in your thought. You do not have the past, it does not exist. Neither do you have the future. What you have is the present moment and you are not even living in it. What are you doing with your life then?

You are not willing or not yet able to let go of situations internally so your story stays and accumulates more pain. That is a heavy burden of the past you are carrying in your mind and you carry it about. What you call past is memory and memories are not a problem in themselves. You can learn from your memories, your past mistakes. But when thoughts about the past take over you, you become imprisoned by them. In such a situation you are in resistance. You are resisting the present moment so you are not in it. You are in a state of non-acceptance.

Note:

1. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, 2005, Penguin Group, New York, USA, pp. 137-138.

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Pain is Due to Non-acceptance

As I talk about pain, I am not referring to physical pain or such pain that can be felt if you touch a hot stove. When you feel the heat from the stove, you quickly remove your hand. You responded to an external situation by removing your hand when you felt the heat. The pain I am referring to is the mental-emotional pain which is as a result of your internal response to a situation.

You are upset – understandably upset – about a situation you consider undesirable. You get angry and question how unfair life is to you. You are not at ease with the current situation. Your thoughts have taken over you and your body has responded with the feeling of distress. You are in pain but you do not stop there. You are in resistance to the pain so you deny it. The consequence is suffering – pain plus resistance. The pain is real and you are fighting against what is real, what is. You suffer.

A common form of resistance is people rejecting their emotions. You feel anger towards your brother for instance and instead of acknowledging the feeling of anger which is there, you deny it. So you experience an inner conflict with your anger as you continue to harbour the anger. If you want a change for the better, acceptance is the first step. But many people find acceptance difficult. Perhaps they have these beliefs about acceptance unconsciously:

• If I accept this painful situation, I will give in to it and it will take over my life.
• If I do not accept this it will miraculously change and I will not have to face it.
• If I accept this painful situation, I am accepting a life of pain without end.

But how do you move on to problem solving without first accepting that what you call problem is? Let us assume you do not like the colour brown. Then you move into a house where the room is brown. If you refuse to accept that the room is brown because you do not like the colour, you will be fighting reality and that will make you suffer. You deny the colour of the room which you do not like while still living in the room. The room remains brown. You get so caught up in denial that you do not change anything. Accepting the brownness of the room is the first step to having that room painted with a colour you like. Acceptance is not approval. It is not the same thing as judging something good. Acceptance is acknowledging what is. That is the beginning of your freedom from suffering.

The way your child died, the way your father treated you, the way your husband cheated on you, these may be hard to accept. The memory comes with pain and so you avoid the painful thoughts. When this avoidance becomes habitual, it turns to denial. Denial makes it difficult for you to be aware of the pain in yourself or in others. So here you are hoping to eliminate the pain through denial. Ironically, the denial perpetuates the pain.

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If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

Accept the Now

You may want a life that is predictable, a life in which you have control over everything that happens in your life. But the reality is that your life is unpredictable. We are in a world of forms and no form is permanent. So things come and go and even form changes form. You are not able to choose what happens in your life but you can choose how you respond to what happens. Respond not react. When people react, they are not in alignment with reality. When you accept what is, you align with the Now and your power is ready to manifest as a response. What you do when you are in alignment with the Now will have the power to move you forward which is a step in changing the situation you consider undesirable.
Accepting the Now is the beginning of the end of suffering. It is a liberating experience. By accepting what is, a new door will be opened for you to go through. But when you do not accept what is, you struggle. What is already is and you are fighting it. That is insanity. It is a fight you can never win. To accept what is is to accept the truth and this will set you free.

Acceptance does not mean that you do not desire in any way to change your present situation. No. Acceptance does not imply helplessness. On the contrary, it is when you have accepted what is that you can really move past it. You go deeper in yourself and you find a new resource, a new way, or a new opportunity. You act with what you have found to create a different life situation for yourself. This is how you change your situation. Accept, then act. See what happens afterwards.

You do not need to create an identity out of what you have accepted. Say for instance you told a lie and you have fully accepted that you lied, if you create an identity for yourself by saying, “I accept myself the way I am. I am a liar,” then you are keeping yourself stuck. In such a situation, there is hardly any chance for change. Acceptance is realizing the situation as it is. It is unnecessary and not helpful to identify with it. No singular act, whether you describe it as good or bad, can define who you are.

In his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle narrates the session he had with a woman in her thirties. When she started telling Eckhart her story, she began to sob uncontrollably. She felt lonely and unfulfilled with much anger and sadness. She had been abused as a child by a physically violent father. Eckhart quickly saw that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body (which I simply refer to as the pain entity in her). Eckhart saw that the pain in her had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was unable then to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts and she was completely identified with both. So with her thoughts she fed the pain in her and this resulted to a deeply unhappy self.

Eckhart directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts. Thinking that this was a way into her unhappiness instead of a way out of it, she reluctantly did what she was asked to do. Tears rolled down her face while her body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel,” Eckhart said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”¹

She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and she said angrily, “No, I don’t want to accept this.” “Who is speaking?” I (Eckhart) asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I’m asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don’t mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don’t you want to find out?”

She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I’m still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less…” That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.

I didn’t say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past – the dimension of presence… Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.²

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

Notes
1. Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, 2005, Penguin Group, New York, USA, p. 165.
2. Ibid., pp. 165 - 166

Recovery from Emotional Pain

As we go through life, we sustain physical injuries. However we have access to bandages and ointments to treat cuts and sprains. We also sustain what we may call psychological injuries. But you hardly know how to treat emotional pain and you end up brooding over memories or thoughts that are distressing to you. The urge to brood over them is compelling. Over time, stress hormones are released into your bloodstream which can put you at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease.

You have ideas about how things should be in your life but those ideas collide with how things are presently. Sometimes you torment yourself about choices you have made or a path you did not follow. Or you may find yourself postponing your happiness with thoughts about what is wrong now or what is missing. Thus, you live in the future. You fail to see that your pain arises from your thoughts.
It is easy for the body to let go of pain the moment the underlying cause is healed but the mind has a sort of instinct for holding on. It finds it difficult to let go. With the use of your mind you create suffering and you imprison yourself in this suffering. You then forget that you created what seems to have imprisoned you so you do not even know that they key to your liberation is with you.

We can feel overwhelmed by the intensity of a strong emotion and simply not know how to deal with it. As a result, we unconsciously try to suppress our feelings and in the process form various coping mechanisms. We suppress our feelings because we seem to believe that we will die if we feel them. So growing up, we have learnt how to push intense emotions down into the subconscious. In trying to survive under challenging circumstances, we not only turn away from emotional pain, we also deny it. But even though we unconsciously suppress the feelings, their energy operates in our lives. You may be cut off from your feelings but that does not mean that they are not there. You are only trying to protect yourself from what you perceive to be intolerable. You feel powerless. So you go about your life pretending to be fine but in the background, there is a feeling which ranges from some sort of uneasiness to intense emotional pain. You wish you had a word to define or describe it.

We often make the mistake of believing that it is something outside that makes us anxious, angry, or afraid. But the cause of every emotion is within. Outside events can only serve as triggers. Give permission to yourself to feel your emotion. See it and experience it. You have been running away from your feeling. First, stop running. Now summon the courage to turn inward and face the pain. You will not die. Your emotion will not kill you even though it seems it will. Your thoughts however can kill you – suicide. So do not dwell in your thoughts but you can bring your presence to your emotion. If you are conscious and allow your emotion to be without labeling or judging it, you create a space around it such that the emotion feels safe to leave.

Do you want to heal that emotional pain? Go within and let it rise into your conscious awareness. Care enough about yourself to spend time with yourself looking within. There is an infinite source of wellbeing and emotional support available to you. But this is available to you from within. What you call negative emotion lets you know that something needs to be seen within you. The negative emotion is therefore calling for your attention. It is calling for your presence. Go within.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

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Transcend your Mind

Many thoughts arise without you even knowing it. You usually end up identifying with these thoughts and that defines your experience. So you have many worries, many troubles which do not seem to be going away. Even though you are not conscious of your identification with your thoughts, you still suffer the consequences.

Say you have to get your car fixed. You know you have to get your car fixed but that thought keeps repeating itself asking to be resolved. You carry the thought which seems to have a hundred pound weight on your shoulders. Now your thought tells you life is not the way it is supposed to be and will not be as it is supposed to be until the car is fixed. All of a sudden the mechanic calls to tell you, “I cannot come until Monday.” This hurts you as you have to carry the hundred pound weight around until Monday. Many thoughts arise fast in your life – car fixing, appointment with the doctor, office work with deadline, rent payment. When you are asleep in the night, you are in a state of deep peace and you are free from all your identifications. You wake up. Boom! Mind activity resumes and the mind at a terrible speed looks for something to identify with and quickly finds the car to be fixed, the appointment with the doctor, the office work with a deadline, the rent. While you were asleep you were at peace but now you are awake and thanks to your mind, your life appears miserable.

It is not as if you do not have what you may call good thoughts. The presence of the “good” and “bad” thoughts creates conflict. You want one over the other and the result is stress. The remedy is not to have one thought over another but to stop identifying with your thoughts altogether. You can witness your thoughts by being the watcher of your thoughts. You can bring your attention to what is here and now. And by doing so you break the thought pattern and your identification with thought.

Right now you are breathing. It is happening in this moment but you are hardly aware of that. In your natural state of being you have peace. This peace is not some emotional experience which takes place on the surface. This peace is deep within you and you have it regardless of your life situation. The activities of your mind however obscures you from experiencing that peace. To experience that peace means you are no longer identified with thoughts. The car still have to be fixed, you still have to see the doctor, office work has to be completed, rent has to be paid, but you are no longer wearing these like a hat. The hundred pound weight is off your shoulder. What you may not know is this: When you lose your identification with thought and experience the peace that is an aspect of the nature of your being, you have opened yourself up to the creativity that lies within you and this brings up ideas and leads you to take steps that will be helpful in changing the situation you consider undesirable.
So we are hindered and kept down in many ways when we believe that our thoughts are literal representations of our circumstances, people, ourselves and things around us. That is an illusion. If I say, “Orange,” you know what I am referring to but the word “orange” is not what the thing is – orange. In the same way, your thoughts about your parent, sibling, friends, situation, or anything else, are not what those people or things are. The mind which produces thought is a wonderful instrument helpful in the creative process. It is also necessary for practical day-to-day living. But to use the mind as an interpretative tool for situations, people, and things can be highly misleading. It can trap you in an illusion where you think what you think is real.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

Transcend your Mind

Many thoughts arise without you even knowing it. You usually end up identifying with these thoughts and that defines your experience. So you have many worries, many troubles which do not seem to be going away. Even though you are not conscious of your identification with your thoughts, you still suffer the consequences.

Say you have to get your car fixed. You know you have to get your car fixed but that thought keeps repeating itself asking to be resolved. You carry the thought which seems to have a hundred pound weight on your shoulders. Now your thought tells you life is not the way it is supposed to be and will not be as it is supposed to be until the car is fixed. All of a sudden the mechanic calls to tell you, “I cannot come until Monday.” This hurts you as you have to carry the hundred pound weight around until Monday. Many thoughts arise fast in your life – car fixing, appointment with the doctor, office work with deadline, rent payment. When you are asleep in the night, you are in a state of deep peace and you are free from all your identifications. You wake up. Boom! Mind activity resumes and the mind at a terrible speed looks for something to identify with and quickly finds the car to be fixed, the appointment with the doctor, the office work with a deadline, the rent. While you were asleep you were at peace but now you are awake and thanks to your mind, your life appears miserable.

It is not as if you do not have what you may call good thoughts. The presence of the “good” and “bad” thoughts creates conflict. You want one over the other and the result is stress. The remedy is not to have one thought over another but to stop identifying with your thoughts altogether. You can witness your thoughts by being the watcher of your thoughts. You can bring your attention to what is here and now. And by doing so you break the thought pattern and your identification with thought.

Right now you are breathing. It is happening in this moment but you are hardly aware of that. In your natural state of being you have peace. This peace is not some emotional experience which takes place on the surface. This peace is deep within you and you have it regardless of your life situation. The activities of your mind however obscures you from experiencing that peace. To experience that peace means you are no longer identified with thoughts. The car still have to be fixed, you still have to see the doctor, office work has to be completed, rent has to be paid, but you are no longer wearing these like a hat. The hundred pound weight is off your shoulder. What you may not know is this: When you lose your identification with thought and experience the peace that is an aspect of the nature of your being, you have opened yourself up to the creativity that lies within you and this brings up ideas and leads you to take steps that will be helpful in changing the situation you consider undesirable.
So we are hindered and kept down in many ways when we believe that our thoughts are literal representations of our circumstances, people, ourselves and things around us. That is an illusion. If I say, “Orange,” you know what I am referring to but the word “orange” is not what the thing is – orange. In the same way, your thoughts about your parent, sibling, friends, situation, or anything else, are not what those people or things are. The mind which produces thought is a wonderful instrument helpful in the creative process. It is also necessary for practical day-to-day living. But to use the mind as an interpretative tool for situations, people, and things can be highly misleading. It can trap you in an illusion where you think what you think is real.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

Freedom from Pain

The mind is very powerful. However the mind is a tool, an instrument. It is a tool that should be used when necessary and left when not needed. But the mind is the master of many people. It runs many people’s lives. It has become the master and they are mind-possessed. The mind then uses time to wield its power and dominate them. The mind is so powerful that if you fail to use it creatively, it will creatively sabotage you.
The power of the mind comes from you or rather the loss of you. When you are unconscious, you give attention to your thought which is the product of your mind. A thought that started out as little, used a subtle means to get your attention. It then grew bigger and bigger and has resulted to your pain. You may not be aware of it but you create your own pain.

When you are in pain, when you suffer, you are in resistance; you are resisting what is. You are unconscious, therefore, you are not aware of this. The more identified you are with your mind, the greater the degree of resistance you have for what is, and the greater the intensity of your pain. Understand the egoic mind: it is always seeking to deny the present moment and escape from it. It accomplishes this through the use of time – past and future.

To be free of pain or suffering, you have to be free of the egoic mind. To be free of the mind, you have to be present in the Now. The mind keeps resisting the Now because it perceives the Now as threatening. It uses time – past and future – to remain in control. In fact, time and mind are inseparable. But the Now is timeless. Be still and be in the moment. In the very moment that you are, time does not exist. Your mind does not run your life in the present moment if you are conscious.

The mind is a tool which we need in this world. Time is also necessary for us to function in this world. But the point where the mind and time takes over our lives is where pain and suffering come in.

The mind keeps trying to flee the Now into the past or future. It runs to the past and asks, “What could I have done differently?” It flies to the future and asks, “What can go wrong?” This is how we are dominated by regret, fear, worry, anxiety, and other forms of pain. What the mind is doing then is covering up the present moment with time – past and present. When it succeeds in doing this, your true nature becomes obscured by your mind. You are unconscious, not connected to who you are, not connected to your Being.

How do you stop creating pain for yourself? By making the present moment the primary focus of your life. Use the mind and time when necessary in dealing with the practical aspects of your life situation and when you are done, be present in the moment. In the Now, you neither have past nor future. What you have is the present moment. You experienced the past in the Now and when the future comes, it will come as Now. All you ever have therefore is Now. This is a fact.

You may say that the present moment is unpleasant. But is it? The present moment is what it is. It is as it is. But your mind, conditioned by the past and in judgment of the present moment, has labeled it unacceptable and unpleasant and this is causing you unhappiness. Do not resist the Now. Allow the Now to be. Then watch your mind in action, be the observer of your mind. Bring consciousness to the activity of your mind. Be present. Your consciousness implies acceptance of the Now. And when you are present in the moment, time ceases, your mind therefore loses power and you are free from its mechanics, hence, free from pain.

Do not resist the present moment for if you do your life situation remains the same if not worse. What you resist persists. Accept the present moment and then act. Your action then will have power which goes to change the situation you consider undesirable. Do not fight or work against the present moment. Rather, work with it. When you make the present moment your friend and work with it, you begin the transformation of your life.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call or WhatsApp 08034140381.

The Common Dysfunctional Relationship

You have fear, the fear of being alone. Your “aloneness” makes you feel a sense of lack. So you want to hook-up; you want to have a partner. A partner that will be with you in a relationship, an intimate relationship. And you meet the person. The person makes you feel special and happy. There are butterflies in your stomach. You fall in love. You feel alive because someone wants and needs you just as you want and need the person. You feel that the part of you you felt was missing has appeared in your life. The relationship is everything and everything else seems insignificant. The fact that something outside of you has become the centre of your life does not seem to matter to you. But there is something you are not aware of because you are unconscious: you are having an addiction.

You are addicted to the other person. No. You are actually addicted to the image you have of the other person. What you call “falling in love” is really an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. This is not true love. True love has nothing to do with wanting. Think of losing your partner. This creates the fear of loss in you which can manifest as jealousy, possessiveness, control, emotional blackmail. And if your partner does leave you, you find yourself in an intense grief. You get “low.” But you feel low because you have been high. Your addiction to the image you had of your partner acted on you like a drug. Your addiction came about because you unconsciously refused to move through your own pain. So you used a person to cover your pain. In other forms of addiction, substance can be used to cover up pain – drug, alcohol, food. Whether the addiction has to do with substance or someone, it starts with pain and ends with pain.

When the relationship ends you feel pain. The end of the relationship is however not the cause of the pain but you do not know this. The end of the relationship brought out the pain that has been in you. And you feel it intensely. “You broke my heart,” you tell the person. But no, your heart was not broken. Your expectation was broken. You can say that the end of the relationship got you closer to your heart. And you felt the pain has been there all along, covered up by the relationship but there. Every addiction gets to a point where it no longer works for the addict. The addict feels the pain more intensely then.

If in your relationships you experience both “love” and the opposite of love – attack, emotional violence, and so on – then it is likely that you are confusing ego attachment and addictive clinging with love. You cannot love your partner one moment and attack him or her the next. True love has no opposite. If your “love” has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets. It is the ego’s substitute for salvation, and for a short time it does feel like salvation.

But there comes a point when your partner behaves in ways that fail to meet your needs, or rather those of your ego. The feelings of fear, pain and lack that are an intrinsic part of egoic consciousness but had been covered up by the “love relationship” now resurface. Just as with every other addiction, you are on a high when the drug is available, but invariably there comes a time when the drug no longer works for you. When those painful feelings reappear, you feel them even more strongly than before, and what is more, you now perceive your partner as the cause of those feelings. This means that you project them outward and attack the other with all the savage violence that is part of your pain. This attack may awaken the partner’s own pain, and he or she may counter your attack. At this point, the ego is still unconsciously hoping that its attempts at manipulation will be sufficient punishment to induce your partner to change their behaviour, so that it can use them again as a cover-up for your pain.¹

Note:
1. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, 2004, New World Library, Novato, and Namaste Publishing, Canada, pp. 151 – 152.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call 08034140381.

The Ego in Relationship

You have your thoughts, opinions, interpretations, judgments, and experience. All these come against her pattern of thoughts, opinions, interpretations, judgments, and experience, in your relationship with her. What is the result? Misunderstanding, grudges, and bickering. “But it was not like this at the start,” you say.

You remember meeting her for the first time. She was the woman of your dream. Full of your egoic thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, you started a conversation with her. And she responded or rather, her ego responded. A relationship is about to begin. There is talk but no true communication. It is your ego communicating with her ego not your true self communicating with her true self. You are not being real, you are not being you, so you pretend to be who you are not. The same happens with her. You do not meet her, your ego meets her ego.

Ego meets ego and so the egos interact and form a relationship. You call it love but ego love is conditional, possessive, having so much expectations. Love is a state of being but for the ego, it is not so. Love for the ego is a business transaction, “I will give you my attention and resources and you will give me your appreciation and sacrifices.” This is why ego love ends up being a story of negotiation and compromise, a journey of infatuation, lust, and betrayal.

At the centre of our being is God. If we are in alignment with the centre of our being, we are in alignment with God. That is a blissful state. I call it the state of grace. In that state, it is no longer you who lives but God – God lives through you. But the problem is that our mode of living is decentred from the source of our being, we are no longer in alignment with God. A void is created and we feel it as fear. The void gives us anything but peace. Instead of dwelling in God to fill this void and experience peace, we try to fill the void with work, entertainment, pleasures, and other forms of distractions none of which can fill the void even though they can make us feel happy. Needless to say, a relationship cannot fill the void but you have the expectation that your relationship will fill the void, will make you happy.

A true relationship is a communion of beings in love, in love with themselves first. You cannot give what you do not have, so if you want to give or share love, you have to experience the love in you first. If you are in love in yourself and she is love in herself, then the relationship both of you will form will be a communion of love. If you are not in love in yourself and she is not in love in herself, then the relationship becomes a distraction, a distraction that prevents both of you from going within to face that fear created by that void resulting from your decentred mode of living. Instead of dissolving the fear, you compound the fear.

You approached your relationship not with the intent of sharing love but with the intent to win affection and avoid loneliness. With the fear of being alone, you approached her for a relationship. In relationship with her, you will keep dancing on the edge of loneliness, “What if she leaves me?” So you keep doing things and present yourself a certain way so that you can avoid loneliness. You are not being authentic. Whatever you do to avoid loneliness becomes a link that holds the potential to that loneliness you are avoiding. It is a counterproductive way to love. Sensitivity to loss and rejection results in dependency on another person who “completes” you. You complain about not being very close with her and the next minute you worry about the thought of being too close with her. You formed a relationship to battle the turmoil going on inside you. You have not resolved the turmoil. Actually, you want the relationship to do that but it cannot. The relationship has become a distraction. It is a means of escape. When the high of the early stage of the relationship wears off, the turmoil inside you alerts you of its presence. Then you unconsciously blame your partner for not getting rid of your fear. You quarrel and fight. The inner conflict manifests in your external world – as it is within, so it is without.

You did not start out to share love but to steal it. You did not fall in love, you fell in need. The whole drama in your relationship is about you attempting to fill a void with a person. The earlier you realize that person cannot fill that void, the better. How can your peace totally depend on what someone does or does not do? You wanted your partner to show you love by doing something. She did not do it. You got angry and you blame her for getting you angry. You are angry because she did not pretend to want to do what you wanted her to do. Had she pretended, you would be happy. She would have been inauthentic and deceived you, and you would have felt happy. A superficial problem is covering your fear. By not resolving that fear, you compound your sensitivity.

Marriage is a wonderful institution but marriage is being used by many to fulfill the needs of ego. You want to commit, you want to present a ring to her. You like how she makes you feel about yourself. You want to feel more of that and you desire her. You are hooked. You are addicted to a person. You do not realize that and both of you go into marriage. The reason you went into marriage with her is how she makes you feel. That reason will take over your marriage and if you are not careful, that reason will cause your separation. Your ego wants this so that you can feel happy. Her ego wants that so that she can feel secured. The marriage increasingly becomes your ego’s agenda versus hers. Conflict again and again. Mentally you live somewhere and mentally she lives somewhere else. Both of you have not just taken positions, both of you are actively defending your positions at war with each other. So both of you wait for the other’s trigger so as to make a move. At this stage, many couples will agree that the love is gone. No, love is not gone. Love is trapped.

Your ego creates problems. It wants love to solve its problems while it goes on creating new ones. You cannot control people. Stop trying to control her life – her interests, opinions, behaviour, even how she loves you. Let go of that script in your head telling you how she ought to love you. You may then realize that she has been trying to share love with you in ways you have never acknowledged.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call 08034140381.

The Ego in Relationship

You have your thoughts, opinions, interpretations, judgments, and experience. All these come against her pattern of thoughts, opinions, interpretations, judgments, and experience, in your relationship with her. What is the result? Misunderstanding, grudges, and bickering. “But it was not like this at the start,” you say.

You remember meeting her for the first time. She was the woman of your dream. Full of your egoic thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, you started a conversation with her. And she responded or rather, her ego responded. A relationship is about to begin. There is talk but no true communication. It is your ego communicating with her ego not your true self communicating with her true self. You are not being real, you are not being you, so you pretend to be who you are not. The same happens with her. You do not meet her, your ego meets her ego.
Ego meets ego and so the egos interact and form a relationship. You call it love but ego love is conditional, possessive, having so much expectations. Love is a state of being but for the ego, it is not so. Love for the ego is a business transaction, “I will give you my attention and resources and you will give me your appreciation and sacrifices.” This is why ego love ends up being a story of negotiation and compromise, a journey of infatuation, lust, and betrayal.

At the centre of our being is God. If we are in alignment with the centre of our being, we are in alignment with God. That is a blissful state. I call it the state of grace. In that state, it is no longer you who lives but God – God lives through you. But the problem is that our mode of living is decentred from the source of our being, we are no longer in alignment with God. A void is created and we feel it as fear. The void gives us anything but peace. Instead of dwelling in God to fill this void and experience peace, we try to fill the void with work, entertainment, pleasures, and other forms of distractions none of which can fill the void even though they can make us feel happy. Needless to say, a relationship cannot fill the void but you have the expectation that your relationship will fill the void, will make you happy.

A true relationship is a communion of beings in love, in love with themselves first. You cannot give what you do not have, so if you want to give or share love, you have to experience the love in you first. If you are in love in yourself and she is love in herself, then the relationship both of you will form will be a communion of love. If you are not in love in yourself and she is not in love in herself, then the relationship becomes a distraction, a distraction that prevents both of you from going within to face that fear created by that void resulting from your decentred mode of living. Instead of dissolving the fear, you compound the fear.

You approached your relationship not with the intent of sharing love but with the intent to win affection and avoid loneliness. With the fear of being alone, you approached her for a relationship. In relationship with her, you will keep dancing on the edge of loneliness, “What if she leaves me?” So you keep doing things and present yourself a certain way so that you can avoid loneliness. You are not being authentic. Whatever you do to avoid loneliness becomes a link that holds the potential to that loneliness you are avoiding. It is a counterproductive way to love. Sensitivity to loss and rejection results in dependency on another person who “completes” you. You complain about not being very close with her and the next minute you worry about the thought of being too close with her. You formed a relationship to battle the turmoil going on inside you. You have not resolved the turmoil. Actually, you want the relationship to do that but it cannot. The relationship has become a distraction. It is a means of escape. When the high of the early stage of the relationship wears off, the turmoil inside you alerts you of its presence. Then you unconsciously blame your partner for not getting rid of your fear. You quarrel and fight. The inner conflict manifests in your external world – as it is within, so it is without.

You did not start out to share love but to steal it. You did not fall in love, you fell in need. The whole drama in your relationship is about you attempting to fill a void with a person. The earlier you realize that person cannot fill that void, the better. How can your peace totally depend on what someone does or does not do? You wanted your partner to show you love by doing something. She did not do it. You got angry and you blame her for getting you angry. You are angry because she did not pretend to want to do what you wanted her to do. Had she pretended, you would be happy. She would have been inauthentic and deceived you, and you would have felt happy. A superficial problem is covering your fear. By not resolving that fear, you compound your sensitivity.

Marriage is a wonderful institution but marriage is being used by many to fulfill the needs of ego. You want to commit, you want to present a ring to her. You like how she makes you feel about yourself. You want to feel more of that and you desire her. You are hooked. You are addicted to a person. You do not realize that and both of you go into marriage. The reason you went into marriage with her is how she makes you feel. That reason will take over your marriage and if you are not careful, that reason will cause your separation. Your ego wants this so that you can feel happy. Her ego wants that so that she can feel secured. The marriage increasingly becomes your ego’s agenda versus hers. Conflict again and again. Mentally you live somewhere and mentally she lives somewhere else. Both of you have not just taken positions, both of you are actively defending your positions at war with each other. So both of you wait for the other’s trigger so as to make a move. At this stage, many couples will agree that the love is gone. No, love is not gone. Love is trapped.

Your ego creates problems. It wants love to solve its problems while it goes on creating new ones. You cannot control people. Stop trying to control her life – her interests, opinions, behaviour, even how she loves you. Let go of that script in your head telling you how she ought to love you. You may then realize that she has been trying to share love with you in ways you have never acknowledged.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been expereincing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting https://steemit.com/@gokike.

If you would like me to come speak at your event, seminar, or retreat on the transformation of consciousness, call 08034140381.

Manipulation in Relationships

In order to achieve the desires of the ego, we often end up being manipulative in our relationships. This does not only happen in intimate relationships but in relationship with family members, friends, and colleagues at work. Some people may not be conscious of the fact that their actions are manipulative.

A manipulative relationship is one-sided and unbalanced, advancing the goals of the manipulator at the expense of the person being manipulated. No one likes being manipulated, so when the one being manipulated finds out about the manipulation, the relationship becomes troubled.

Manipulation is not influence. One may try to advance one’s goals with influence but one recognizes the rights and boundaries of other people, and it is based on direct, honest communication. Influence recognizes the integrity of the other person including the choice not to go along with attempted persuasion. Manipulation, on the other hand, depends on covert agendas and usually attempts to coerce the other into giving in. A manipulator may appear strong and in control but behind this show, insecurity is often found. With the tendency to exploit others, people who manipulate others have difficulty in maintaining good interpersonal relationships.

A manipulator does not usually start his manipulation at the beginning of a relationship. What does he gain if the relationship ends immediately? So, the manipulation progresses over time. The manipulator observes the other person’s vulnerabilities and learns how to exploit them.

Manipulative people have a strong need to be in control. Full of ego, they believe they will be annihilated if they lose this sense of control. They may display strong self-confidence but that is a compensation for the underlying feeling of insecurity. Their motives being self-serving, they pursue their goals regardless of the cost to the other. They find it difficult to show their vulnerable emotions because to them, this suggests they are not in control. One who is being manipulated may actually be enabling the manipulator. So, if you feel you are being manipulated in your relationship, you may want to sit down and see how you may be encouraging the manipulator unwittingly.

Depending on the severity of the manipulation and the damage it has done to your sense of integrity, you may need to consider whether it is worth it to continue in the relationship. There are of course situations where instead of leaving you may have to change the situation. Parent-child relationship is an example.

It is not helpful to try to out-manipulate a manipulator. You will be making yourself vulnerable to further manipulation. The relationship will then be a battle between egos and this can in no way be of benefit to you. Instead you open yourself to a continual experience of pain and suffering as you persist in your resistance mode.

You can disable a manipulative behaviour by making a change within yourself. Surrender. Surrendering does not mean you should be okay with the manipulation. Surrendering is more of an internal acceptance than an external resignation. It involves you seeing the situation the way it is. You do not surrender because you like it. You surrender simply because it is and so that you offer no resistance to what is. Surrender, then act. Change the dynamics of the manipulative relationship. Cease to be cooperative with manipulative tactics. Manipulators who keep working hard to maintain control in a relationship without success usually give up by leaving the relationship and looking for someone else to control – until they become conscious.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting http://consciousevolutionpath.com/info/home.

If you would like me to come speak at your seminar, retreat, workshop or event call 08034140381.

Relationship Addiction

One who is dominated by the ego would find himself constantly accompanied by deep-seated feelings. It could be a feeling of discontent. If one were to be at one with one’s true self, then one would no longer be dominated by the ego and one would transcend one’s self.
But as often is the case, the person with the feeling of unhappiness instead of accepting the feeling resists it. He feels unhappy and now he has added resistance to the unhappiness. The result is suffering. He does not know why he suffers but he is hell-bent on escaping the suffering. Escapism ensues which is usually in the form of an addiction. As often as is the case, a human being becomes the object of addiction and we usually call this a relationship.

He feels unhappy so he says to himself, “I need someone in order to be happy,” or, “I don’t want to be alone.” So he looks for someone to go into a relationship with and he finds her. The odds are good that the person he finds was also looking for someone to escape her loneliness. They become codependent on each other but the say they are in love. Both of them are using each other to avoid the fear they have inside. As they constantly avoid accepting that fear, they block themselves from experiencing the fear and then transcending it. They are stuck but they are not aware they are.

Addiction, attraction, eroticism, control, then add possessiveness to it – this combination produces an intense emotionalism which we often call love. But that which we often call love is an ingrown dependency relationship where another person serves as the object of one’s need for security. This results to an unhealthy attachment to the passion felt at the beginning of the relationship. Shortly after the excitement subsides, you see no reason to continue the relationship. If you have a history of short romantic relationships, falling in and out of love many times, this may be your case. You were looking for a fantasy and you went into a relationship. The relationship did not meet the expectation of your fantasy so you abandoned it and went on to the next. You repeat the cycle again and again. No person or thing can permanently cover up the pain inside you. No relationship can meet the expectation of your fantasy. The pain is the universal feeling of not being connected with the deeper level of your being – not being at one with yourself.

When we go into relationships, we often enter with memories of past relationships and expectations. We also enter with personally and culturally conditioned mental concepts of what a relationship should be like. So on the one hand, you have mental concepts of what your relationship should be like, on the other hand, you have your relationship. You are now trying to make your relationship conform to your mental concepts. You become controlling. You are trying to control reality but you cannot so you get disappointed and angry. You dwell in resistance, you suffer. If you want to truly love, you have to let go of those concepts and ideas.

Try this exercise, the next time you see your partner, let go of the mental ideas and beliefs you have about her. In the moment that you are with her, be with her fully. How can you be fully with her? By giving her your full attention. Relate with her in that moment without judgment. Be empty, be there, be the space, and relate. This exercise may be the beginning of a shift in your relationship.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting http://consciousevolutionpath.com.

If you would like me to come speak at your seminar, retreat, workshop or event email: gnwaokike@gmail.com.

Being at Home in Yourself

“I need to look good so that men will talk to me,” a young lady said. An older lady affirmed, “Yes o. If you don’t look good, they won’t even notice you.” I asked them, “What if after looking good no man appreciates your look?” I went ahead and said, “Nothing is wrong with looking good in itself but to look good so that men will talk to you means hanging your happiness on that happening so that if you look good and men do not talk to you, you feel unhappy as a result of thinking something is wrong with you.”

If a young lady believes that she needs a man’s compliment to be happy, then she is not at home in herself. She may not be able to place her hand upon it exactly but there is a void, a fear, a pain, a level of dissatisfaction she has within. She does not want to give attention to the pain within rather she is constantly trying to escape it. But how can you escape what is in you already? Nonetheless, she continues her fruitless attempt to escape the pain. Before long she comes across something or somebody in her life that serves as a blockage preventing her from accessing the pain. She now has a partner or boyfriend. Because she desperately does not want to feel the pain in her, she is addicted to her boyfriend. In her fear of losing her boyfriend and facing “death” she manipulates him. Her manipulation frustrates his own attempt to control her. Things fall apart – they break up. Her story becomes, “He broke my heart.” She does not see it was her expectations that were broken, not her heart. When that happened, it brought her closer to her heart, closer to that pain that has been there before the relationship but constantly avoided by her, the pain she tried to use the relationship to cover. The relationship is ended and she feels the pain intensely. The pain seems overwhelming and she blames her ex-boyfriend for that. But it was the same pain that was there before the relationship. Now she is not far from the pain because she is not having her ex-boyfriend blocking her from accessing it. This why she feels the pain more intensely. One thing she does not realize is that the break up that happened needed to happen so that she can love herself and be at home in herself.

A relationship is a by-product of your connection to yourself. There are times when we need to work on connecting to ourselves and we need to do it alone. You may feel additional pain after a breakup because of your belief that you have to be in a relationship or because of the conditioning that love is found outside of yourself. The pain is there so that you can learn to love yourself but you will find it difficult to do so until you appreciate yourself on a whole new level. When you succeed in doing this, the pain will leave you.

A relationship is sharing and appreciation not control or ownership. When you truly love or appreciate yourself, you will not love your partner like an addiction. If in order to numb the pain you feel following a breakup you quickly go into another relationship, you succeed in doing a rinse and repeat.

There was a period following a breakup that I decided not to go into any relationship for sometime. That decision helped me to appreciate myself and to stop looking for someone to make me feel happy. I found joy in myself. I even asked myself what it was I saw in some of the persons I had relationships with. If I had loved and appreciated myself, I know those relationships would never had happened. If you are in a hurry to find love, you may end up going astray just because you found someone available and willing. It then becomes a case of “if the desirable is not available, the available becomes the desirable.”

During that period of staying away from an intimate relationship, I saw myself cherishing the bonds I have with my family and few friends. I saw how I had wrapped my whole life around relationships which stunted my growth in other areas of my life. I found myself developing new friendships and expanding my horizons. I felt an expansion within and I knew I was growing. In fact I was conscious of my evolution even though I was “alone.” I experienced peace in myself.

If you cannot be happy outside of a committed relationship, you may need to stop and reflect why this is so. In fact you may need to be alone even though you are scared of being alone. There is no way around pain but there is a way through it.

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting http://consciousevolutionpath.com.

If you would like me to come speak at your seminar, retreat, workshop or event email: gnwaokike@gmail.com.

Conscious Relationship

Addictive relationships are always are always driven by the ego. You are “in love” with your partner but on the opposite side, your hate manifests as possessiveness, blame, anger, fear of loss, manipulation, need to be right. That type of relationship does not convey the true meaning of love. It is an unconscious relationship which stems from your attachment to the person. You are trying to find fulfillment through your partner, hence, instead of realizing your individual completeness, you think you are incomplete without the other.

A conscious relationship is not like an addictive one. The love comes from someone who is at peace with himself and is not trying to find salvation in another person. Issues may arise in a conscious relationship but partners do not lose themselves in the issue. In order to enter a conscious relationship or transform your addictive relationship to a conscious one, knowing the following can be helpful:

a. Love is a state of being: You have been searching for love. That is because you think love is outside of you and when you get it, you will be fulfilled. But love is not outside of you. It is not dependent on an external object or person. Love is not a thought or a feeling. Then what is love? Love is an aspect of the true nature of your being. Love is already present in you. But because your ego dominates you, you do not seem to be connected to the love in you. When your ego (false self) dissolves, what is left is who you are. When you are at home in yourself, being who you really are, your true nature manifests. In that state, you experience the love that you already have. Your love does not start with another person. It starts with you and shines through to others.

b. Be present: Conflicts intensify in relationships because we hardly live in the present moment. When you lose yourself in a fight, you are definitely not present. If you are present in the Now, you cannot lose yourself in a fight. You feel the need to attack and criticize your partner because your thoughts have taken over you. When you feel the need to attack, anchor yourself in the present moment by focusing on your breath – breathe in and breathe out, and be aware you are doing that. This would stop you from giving power to your thoughts and avoid a situation where you ask, “What came over me?”
Unconsciously, you fear being present because it will lead you to your pain. But your presence has power and with that power it is able to dissolve or transmute your pain.

c. True communication is communion: Where is the relationship without communication? If you and your partner are not really communicating then you do not have a relationship but an illusion of one. When you communicate, put aside your mind games and emotional tricks. Your communication should be to commune not to win.

d. Relationship does not offer salvation: When you seek salvation or fulfillment from a relationship, you are likely to suffocate the relationship by being manipulative because of the fear of your partner leaving you. Your being is already complete and so no thing or person can complete you.

If you cannot be at ease with yourself when you are alone, you will seek a relationship to cover up your unease. You can be sure that the unease will then reappear in some other form within the relationship, and you will probably hold your partner responsible for it.
All you really need to do is accept this moment fully. You are then at ease in the here and now and at ease with yourself.¹

Being at one with your Being is fulfillment. It is therefore not when you have a relationship that you will be fulfilled. It is when you are fulfilled that you will have a true relationship.

Note:

1. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, 2004, New World Library, Novato, and Namaste Publishing, Canada, p. 174

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting http://consciousevolutionpath.com.

If you would like me to come speak at your seminar, retreat, workshop or event email: gnwaokike@gmail.com.

[quote author=Growing post=72820182]Conscious Relationship

Addictive relationships are always are always driven by the ego. You are “in love” with your partner but on the opposite side, your hate manifests as possessiveness, blame, anger, fear of loss, manipulation, need to be right. That type of relationship does not convey the true meaning of love. It is an unconscious relationship which stems from your attachment to the person. You are trying to find fulfillment through your partner, hence, instead of realizing your individual completeness, you think you are incomplete without the other.

A conscious relationship is not like an addictive one. The love comes from someone who is at peace with himself and is not trying to find salvation in another person. Issues may arise in a conscious relationship but partners do not lose themselves in the issue. In order to enter a conscious relationship or transform your addictive relationship to a conscious one, knowing the following can be helpful:

a. Love is a state of being: You have been searching for love. That is because you think love is outside of you and when you get it, you will be fulfilled. But love is not outside of you. It is not dependent on an external object or person. Love is not a thought or a feeling. Then what is love? Love is an aspect of the true nature of your being. Love is already present in you. But because your ego dominates you, you do not seem to be connected to the love in you. When your ego (false self) dissolves, what is left is who you are. When you are at home in yourself, being who you really are, your true nature manifests. In that state, you experience the love that you already have. Your love does not start with another person. It starts with you and shines through to others.

b. Be present: Conflicts intensify in relationships because we hardly live in the present moment. When you lose yourself in a fight, you are definitely not present. If you are present in the Now, you cannot lose yourself in a fight. You feel the need to attack and criticize your partner because your thoughts have taken over you. When you feel the need to attack, anchor yourself in the present moment by focusing on your breath – breathe in and breathe out, and be aware you are doing that. This would stop you from giving power to your thoughts and avoid a situation where you ask, “What came over me?”
Unconsciously, you fear being present because it will lead you to your pain. But your presence has power and with that power it is able to dissolve or transmute your pain.

c. True communication is communion: Where is the relationship without communication? If you and your partner are not really communicating then you do not have a relationship but an illusion of one. When you communicate, put aside your mind games and emotional tricks. Your communication should be to commune not to win.

d. Relationship does not offer salvation: When you seek salvation or fulfillment from a relationship, you are likely to suffocate the relationship by being manipulative because of the fear of your partner leaving you. Your being is already complete and so no thing or person can complete you.



Being at one with your Being is fulfillment. It is therefore not when you have a relationship that you will be fulfilled. It is when you are fulfilled that you will have a true relationship.

Note:

1. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, 2004, New World Library, Novato, and Namaste Publishing, Canada, p. 174

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting http://consciousevolutionpath.com.

If you would like me to come speak at your seminar, retreat, workshop or event email: gnwaokike@gmail.com.[/quote
All these are so good and deep,I will start digesting them one by one

Growing:
Conscious Relationship

Addictive relationships are always are always driven by the ego. You are “in love” with your partner but on the opposite side, your hate manifests as possessiveness, blame, anger, fear of loss, manipulation, need to be right. That type of relationship does not convey the true meaning of love. It is an unconscious relationship which stems from your attachment to the person. You are trying to find fulfillment through your partner, hence, instead of realizing your individual completeness, you think you are incomplete without the other.

A conscious relationship is not like an addictive one. The love comes from someone who is at peace with himself and is not trying to find salvation in another person. Issues may arise in a conscious relationship but partners do not lose themselves in the issue. In order to enter a conscious relationship or transform your addictive relationship to a conscious one, knowing the following can be helpful:

a. Love is a state of being: You have been searching for love. That is because you think love is outside of you and when you get it, you will be fulfilled. But love is not outside of you. It is not dependent on an external object or person. Love is not a thought or a feeling. Then what is love? Love is an aspect of the true nature of your being. Love is already present in you. But because your ego dominates you, you do not seem to be connected to the love in you. When your ego (false self) dissolves, what is left is who you are. When you are at home in yourself, being who you really are, your true nature manifests. In that state, you experience the love that you already have. Your love does not start with another person. It starts with you and shines through to others.

b. Be present: Conflicts intensify in relationships because we hardly live in the present moment. When you lose yourself in a fight, you are definitely not present. If you are present in the Now, you cannot lose yourself in a fight. You feel the need to attack and criticize your partner because your thoughts have taken over you. When you feel the need to attack, anchor yourself in the present moment by focusing on your breath – breathe in and breathe out, and be aware you are doing that. This would stop you from giving power to your thoughts and avoid a situation where you ask, “What came over me?”
Unconsciously, you fear being present because it will lead you to your pain. But your presence has power and with that power it is able to dissolve or transmute your pain.

c. True communication is communion: Where is the relationship without communication? If you and your partner are not really communicating then you do not have a relationship but an illusion of one. When you communicate, put aside your mind games and emotional tricks. Your communication should be to commune not to win.

d. Relationship does not offer salvation: When you seek salvation or fulfillment from a relationship, you are likely to suffocate the relationship by being manipulative because of the fear of your partner leaving you. Your being is already complete and so no thing or person can complete you.



Being at one with your Being is fulfillment. It is therefore not when you have a relationship that you will be fulfilled. It is when you are fulfilled that you will have a true relationship.

Note:

1. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, 2004, New World Library, Novato, and Namaste Publishing, Canada, p. 174

I write and speak on the transformation of consciousness. Once your consciousness is transformed, there is a shift inside you. You may not know this consciously when it happens but when it does, something changes deep inside you which you may not be able to explain initially. Your experience of life becomes different. Addiction, anxiety, worry, pain, and other negative things you have been experiencing give way to peace, joy, and love. This is my purpose in the lives of people. You can digest more of my content by going through this thread or visiting http://consciousevolutionpath.com.

If you would like me to come speak at your seminar, retreat, workshop or event email: gnwaokike@gmail.com.

All these are so good and deep, I will start digesting them one by one

more

Hahjascho:

All these are so good and deep, I will start digesting them one by one

Good to know you will be digesting them. That is why I am sharing.