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Understanding Life
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If you understand, things are just as they are;
if you do not understand, things are just as they are.
Zen Proverb
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Life is so, so simple. It just is.
There can be nothing simpler to understand. It requires no categorising, no studying, nothing. Not even thought.
Yet so many people struggle to live freely. Walk into any major bookshop you’ll find hundreds of books promising you eternal bliss… wonderful relationships and all the success you can handle.
Yet very few people are able to use this information. Still more people struggle with these issues than don’t. Even when they’ve read the books. So then they go read more books. Still they don’t get it. Now they’re really frustrated and so they believe life must be incredibly complex.
It isn’t.
So why does it seem to be so?
Because we want to live freely and joyfully, but we feel as though we need someone to give us the permission to do so.
Here’s the key. Don’t rush through this, it is really important.
If you find life difficult to understand intellectually… it’s because you don’t want to accept it emotionally.
If you accept emotionally… intellectually its simple.
What happens is that when we come across something that challenges a belief that we want to hold onto… we complicate it by trying to make it fit around the thing we want to hold onto. It doesn’t work. So then we keep looking and making the solution ever more complex.
You see when we feel like we need permission we are telling ourselves, that someone else is in control. Therefore we feel powerless. Why do we believe this?
Because if we felt powerful and in control of our lives we could never experience negative emotions. There could be no journey from the dark side to the light. No trials to test us. No doubts to overcome.
Here's something to keep in mind.
Every experience of Life is only an adventurous game. It's like a book or a film. What would Star Wars be like without the Dark Side. Or the Matrix, without the Matrix. Harry Potter without Voldemort. Rocky without first losing.
Every situation, however grave it may seem right now, will not matter in a hundred years. Most won't matter in a week or two.
When you are smack in the middle of a frightening, nerve wracking or desperately grieving you are at the bottom, most physical level. You feel most stuck because you cannot see anything other than what you are focused on. And so there seems to be no escape.
But from the highest, most abstract, the most spiritual level you have the broadest perspective. Here you can see many views, many routes and options and so you feel powerful and in control. Here no event seems so serious or so desperate. Each event is created, like the scenes of a book or a film, in order to provide a context for the hero or heroine to demonstrate their character or skill.
Different people operate on different layers, at different times, and so they see the same thing in very different ways. Neither is necessarily right or wrong.
If you could only see the front part of an elephant and thought that was all there was… and I only the back… we’d both think that we were experiencing different things. But we’re not. It just takes a more distanced perspective to see all of the elephant. With all three you are able to take the close ups to add detail to the overall.
In much the same way, once you understand life on different levels, you are better equipped to enjoy it more. Generally people read books like this to learn what they need to do to be happy. Then they think they mustn’t be doing it right if it doesn’t work.
The truth is; there isn’t anything you have to do to be happy. You’ve just got to stop the things you’re doing now that make you unhappy. In this book we are going to cover the almost universal mistakes that cause people to squander their energy, enthusiasm and happiness.
As you go through the book, remember;
If you find life difficult to understand intellectually…
It’s because you don’t want to accept it emotionally.
This book might look at life on a deeper level than you’re used to thinking about it. Sometimes people seem to have a resistance to getting deep. This is because emotions are stronger here. If you feel a strong emotion… it means you are reading, thinking or talking about something that is important to you. The stronger the emotion… the more important to you it is. Once you get to the root of the cause… the more powerful the emotion, the bigger the change.
Many people read books like this and want practical steps to get on with. I have put some exercises in with the principles. They are not the definitive exercises or even necessary. For these are only tools that can help you to integrate the principles into your everyday life. Sometimes people get hooked up on the tools and miss that they are just a vehicle to get to your destination.
Of course you can make changes through the practical steps and you can solve the problems that are facing you. But if you use techniques to solve problems without changing the source of problems, they just keep coming back in different forms.
The path ahead is simple… easier than the path you took to get here… if it isn’t, work out what belief you are holding onto that is making it more difficult than it needs to be.
Everything in life is simple… you just need to grasp the basics. When I was seventeen or eighteen I used to go to boxing training. There was one thing that marked out the best boxers. Barring exceptional natural ability, the best were those who’d been boxing for the longest time. It takes seven or eight years for a boxer to reach his peak.
Not because there is anything particularly complex. But because when your head is swimming… when you don’t know who you are or where you are… the experienced boxers protected themselves and fought their way out to survive and recover. The moves and strategies were ingrained into them to do even without any thought. The others when they got disorientated lost the ability to move and so never recovered.
In the same way, the difference between a black belt martial artist and a novice; is that the black belt knows many variations of the same few basic techniques. The successful business carries out the basic steps more effectively and consistently that the less successful.
Get the basics right and the rest will come easily. If you don’t get them, nothing else will work effectively.
The root of our problems is that most of our knowledge about life has been passed down from generation to generation. However that knowledge was based on what our Ancestors understood about life. Today with scientific discoveries and advancements in our understandings, this knowledge is out of date.
The problem is demonstrated in the difficulty that older people typically have with new technology.
Say when you grew up, if you wanted to play music you would have to play it on a vinyl record. That got ingrained into your mental framework as the root of your musical reference tree. Then as tapes and cds replaced vinyl, new branches stemmed off from the root.
Now here we are in the age of mp3's, with these little stone sized things that hold as much music as an old fashioned record shop. Even though we understand the advances, our mental framework is still stained by the old view. Every reference relating to music from birth, until coming to terms with mp3s, stored unconsciously, is still going to use some physical symbol for music.
When one of those triggers is activated the memory will be based on the old root. So you will try to understand new technology through the paradigm of the old technology.
So new knowledge that overturns old beliefs is like messily rubbing out a mistake on your schoolwork and replacing it. You will still often, initially at least, confuse your first answer with the later one.
So the basic beliefs we have that underlie everything we do… are preventing us from being anywhere near as effective and happy as we could be.
Yet because we get so caught up in life we don’t realise these misunderstandings. And as they underpin all our thoughts and actions… our relationships… and our businesses… it makes life so much harder and less enjoyable than it could be.
Life is like a great experimental laboratory. If our beliefs are conflicted, acting on them feels bad. If we keep on doing it, but try harder… we’ll feel even worse. The harder we try the worse it gets.
If what we think is congruent, we feel passionate and alive.
For most people, in at least some areas; life doesn’t feel good. This is because conventional wisdom is full of conflict. It’s like an old coat that has been patched so many times that you cannot tell what the original looked like.
The harder we try the worse it feels. The solutions to the problems our world faces are not going to come through legislation or indoctrination. The problems are not a matter of finding the right way to control and contain people. They are merely a reflection of what we believe.
When we as Individuals can get over the arrogant assumption that we are here to fix the world and everyone in it… the world will show us what works and what doesn’t.
Most people have been taught to think of our planet as a giant dolls house. And ourselves as a doll placed in there. By this I mean that we look out on the world. We see that it was here and seemed complete long before we were here. And we know it will go on without us. So in that sense the world looks far more solid and important than us.
Yet just the law of gravity shows us that a simple movement can have enormous consequences. Everything is affected by you and affects everything else in the universe.
The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)
A smile that is meaningless to you may change entirely what another may do. Causing dramatic changes to the rest of the world. Every action you make is significant.
Yet as we look in the world without realising this… we often feel as if we are insignificant or unneeded. Often if things don’t go so well… we look out at the dolls house and we say ‘Oh well, that can’t move. It must be me that doesn’t fit. Maybe they put me in the wrong room. I need to find the place where I fit in’.
That’s where it all starts to go wrong. You cannot bend to fit into the Dollhouse. It is in your trying to fit in where life goes astray.
The picture of Earth as a Dolls House is false. All of life is in relation to you. Every action of yours causes a reaction in the world. I don’t say this to make you feel good. It’s a rule of gravity.
You are an integrated part of this planet travelling 16,000 miles per hour through the universe. At no moment is anything around you static. We are all hurtling through life. All bound one to the other. You cannot get off this ride, but you can learn to steer it and travel without getting motion sickness.
To do this you first need to stand up and decide to take control of your life. The first principle to ingrain into yourself is an understanding that everything in life is in relation to you. It doesn’t matter what they did to you, what twist of fate happened 50,000 miles back. It’s all about you. You can spend the next decade whinging and complaining about how hard life is or you can learn the lessons life shows you.
The source of all pain and misery come down to one fundamental mistake.
Pain or misery is the clashing of what life is with what you think life should be.
Give up the need to have life be exactly how you think it should… and you need never feel frustration and anger again. None of us have a deep enough knowledge to have the first idea, what would be best for ourselves - let alone anyone else or the world in general.
We misunderstand what life is… how it works… and what it’s purpose is. The more firmly that we believe in our misunderstanding… the more pain and misery we create. Give up control – which you’ve never really had anyway – and you can direct everything.
Life is so much vaster, has so many more possibilities and so much more flexibility than we realise. The way we experience life is like the way we listen to the radio. We tune in to a specific wavelength. This lets us hear one station clearly, but cuts out other stations.
In any given situation we have hundreds of choices. By focusing only on our wavelength we miss other possibilities and choices. Therefore we trap ourselves. Then we think I have no choice, or I have only A and B to choose between. And so we feel frustrated trapped… with little if any power. This creates frustration and misery.
Once you can truly recognise and appreciate the beauty and perfection of life, you can change your focus, just as we change radio stations. Then life becomes far simpler and more exciting.
Once our problems were relatively simple to solve. We needed food and shelter. These were there, we just had to find them and take them. Today our problems are so complex that most people do not even understand them.
Our planet faces destruction from global warming and weapons of mass destruction. Soil erosion means that our food has minimal if any nutritional value. Superbugs and superviruses threaten us all.
These threats have all been created by our society in the last few decades. Of course we did not intend for these effects. But when we act in the world, without appreciating the order of nature, believing that we need to fix it, we end up stumbling from one disaster to another.
And what is true of us as a society is also true of us as individuals. As individuals we go through life trying to help others, or even ourself, believing we and they need fixing. Thinking that we - or anyone else - can see enough to know the right path for others.
No-one is broken or needs fixing. Nature is perfect. When we understand this, we can get over the need to make everyone else think and act as we do. And then we can begin to appreciate others for the gifts and talents they can share with us. Then instead of straining to fit into regulation shapes, we can all fit together like one huge jigsaw.
The key to life is to fall in love with it. To start to treat it as a big investigative game. You can begin to create order out of the chaos of life. And learn the universal laws and principles that govern life.
Every day you’ll learn more about yourself and life. You’ll begin to understand why things happened and see more options. Then you’ll feel more secure and in control of your life.
It all starts when you stop calling life a bitch and cursing your luck. You can't change anything while you're hitting out at the world.
But when you love life... life starts to love you.
Remember when you first fell in love. You wanted to know all about that person.
All about their past.
All about what they were thinking.
All about what their hopes and dreams were.
You woke up in the morning and just gazed at your lover appreciating everything about them.
Why do you think life should be any different?
Stop treating life like the adverts before the main feature. You know the way you 'kill time' to get what you really want.
Start;
Courting life.
Getting curious and fascinated by the beauty of life.
Enjoying the romance and sheer adventure of being alive.
Forget the myths of romance and chemistry. Study after study shows that it is familiarity that is most influential in deciding whom we fall in love with. We love what we know. What we do not know we fear.
Have you ever wondered what determines beauty? Psychologists have investigated and at least part of it has to do with familiarity.
If you take a hundred faces and morph them into one blended face, that face will be more attractive than fifty morphed faces. And fifty morphed faces will be judged more attractive than twenty-five and so on.
It seems that ugliness is unusual features, whereas beauty is a common or symmetrical feature. It reflects back what the observer sees and understands. The more we know about something, the more we like it.
People who don’t like each other often become friends if they are put in a situation where they have to spend a lot of time together.
Why?
Because we don’t like what we don’t understand. At the basest level we see this in prejudice against someone of a different race, creed or even organization. Once we learn and understand why someone thinks and acts differently, we can appreciate them – even if we still disagree.
Art, sport or a type of music we know nothing about can seem so boring... but once we learn a little we can get hooked.
What does any of this have to do with you falling in love with life?
Falling in love with life is about paying attention and understanding it. It’s about being fascinated with the process of life and treating it as a lover who you are endlessly interested in… rather than viewing it as the way to get the stuff you think you want.
Once you get this mindset, the path forward is clear. |
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