Cultivating New Attitudes (Part three)

These examples from part two such as sleep, daydreaming and lost in rummaging through past memories you are already familiar. These show that your awareness could be either elsewhere or little aware while the world and activities are going on around you. However, this becomes a habitual method to hold your energy by perceiving your present moment as either in the future or in the past. I gave a teaching focusing on this subject called Cultivating Joy. It is very interesting and also has some meditations to help find the present moment.

Some people use body awareness meditations or techniques in order to control or reduce fascination with mental events that prevent them from experiencing the feeling of being present. There are many body calming or mind calming meditations that will also help us to become more balanced or remain centered. The mind can then find some temporary rest and be aware without dwelling in the past or the future.

Even with techniques to control your reactive behaviors, high quality feelings such as happiness or respect might not be coming and instead something might be preventing you from feeling that. Some say that the behavior of other people, perhaps even members of their family prevents their happiness. That could be so. The behavior of others certainly does affect how we feel, however, if it was really true, it would be true in all cases. Has there ever been a person who lived in a difficult circumstance that experienced happiness in spite of that? Yes, there are many examples of that, so it means that their perception, under identical circumstances, produced a different feeling. So, the actual event for that person was not occurring "out there," no matter how difficult it was, without denying that things out there can be difficult. The actual event for the individual happens in the perceptions that are translating what is happening. Because of the unique view you hold, events and activities feed and validate your perceptions by perceiving it slightly or vastly differently than others.

So, there is something about your current perceptions that is preventing you from experiencing, or feeling what you want to feel. For example, everyone wants to feel good. Everyone wants to feel happy. Of course, everyone wants to feel satisfied, respected, and content in relationships, work, self worth, and love. There could be a larger number of quality important feelings that we wish to be experiencing. We have discussed briefly some of the uncomfortable stretching of awareness toward the past and future that leave the present moment debilitated. These sad states of mind that we are forced to wear as a result of dysfunctional perceptions as well as trusting the base illogical view cause us to suffer needlessly.

People say that Buddhism only talks about suffering, that is all they want to talk about, suffer, suffer, suffer! We are actually not interested in suffering. The Buddhist path talks about the dharma, which is the healing of the problem that has become uncovered, examined, and understood. In this case, we understand that there is something wrong in the way we search for feeling happiness.

Now, what is the model for a fresh outlook? The inner-based view of awakened beings reveals that we are not alive in the way we think we are. We are not even the one that is alive. There is another kind of living being alive on another level of reality, and that is the real one! We are not the real one. This real alive one is not a human being. That living being is an energy-electrical being, and is on an evolutionary journey to perfection that is calling it in a special language that it is responding to by seeking growth and becoming capable of entering perfection. In its present process, it has been given an ability to emanate into the perceptual human realm where it lives a quasi life to increase its value and strength for the journey. We are the result of that process as emanations. This real being does not belong to the illusory person. It does not belong to us. The one we think we are belongs to it.

So, the question becomes, after we have been seeking happiness, seeking satisfaction, respect, control, and all of the other issues that plague us, the actual questions has not been addressed yet. In reality, if we are not alive in the way we believe we are, and not even the one who is alive, no wonder it has been so hard to find perfection here! So, what is it that the real one, what I call your actual being, needs and wants? Those unmet needs for transformation expressed in the human realm as the many unhappy states of mind is the basis for our dissatisfaction. It is thwarted and unable to express its needs because you continue to believe that you are the primary reason you are alive. To be continued…