What becomes clear on this path of awakening is the more you hold onto the need to have things be a certain way, the more you insist this isn’t right, or that should not be allowed, the more emotional charge you are storing up.
Then, when expectations are not met, there is pain and suffering. If your position is exposed as being hollow or false, you might experience sadness or embarrassment. If someone belittles you, puts you down in some way, or betrays you it may express as resentment or anger.
So the work is to welcome, or at least accept your suffering, and then look at what you are inwardly holding onto, the beliefs, expectations, pictures, and ideas. Look at the story you are telling yourself about who you are and what you need to be happy. Begin to see it is only a story, a story you are making up. It is a story entirely of your own creation.
Realize you are not the story, but the luminous ever-present consciousness which looks at the story, which creates the story, and you’ll have a genuine experience, a taste, of freedom.
After all, the story you tell yourself keeps the emotions in a volatile state of readiness. As I said, when you cling to any point of view or psychological position, you are generating an emotional charge.
Freedom comes as you see the story for what it is: a figment of your own creation. When you’re not holding onto any idea or image of yourself, there’s no build-up of emotional energy. You are simply open to life in the present. The secret is in emphasizing awareness itself, having all your senses alert, and not getting lost in thinking. Then your head will be clear, and you will feel the deeper energy, the deeper beauty and power of creation itself, and it will nourish you. Then your emotions will come into balance. They will arise spontaneously and authentically.
You will feel sadness at the loss of a loved one, or perhaps in a moment of being confronted with the tremendous suffering of so many innocent people in our world. Or you might feel anger whenever you are reminded of the terrible injustices still taking place, the brutality, the subjugation of one group of people by another.
But none of these feelings will be taken too personally. The “I” won’t jump in and make some new kind of story out of them, such as a victim story, as in, “Woe is me, the world is too awful and I am too sensitive to live in it.” People who really believe they are victims are always telling their tale of suffering to anyone who will listen, and this constant reinforcement of their story just keeps them stuck.
As you grasp this teaching and let go of the attachment to and identification with your own story, you begin to know yourself as awareness, the pure consciousness behind everything. You start to free yourself. Emotions still arise and pass, but now they happen more spontaneously. The paradox of awakening or enlightenment is that while you feel very deeply, you don’t take your feelings personally. Once you let go of the identification with your own story, you learn to let go of the attachment to other peoples’ stories as well.
Then, in the clarity of your true nature, you see what action, if any, needs to be taken. If something needs to be done about the situation triggering the emotional response, you’ll know what to do, and you’ll do it. But you won’t make a big drama out of it.
From End Your Story, Begin Your Life, Chapter 6, by Jim Dreaver
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