Are You Arguing or Accepting Reality?
WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?
As we come upon the New Year, and I think back to all the different blog topics and podcasts this past year in 2023, I can’t help but sum up the awakening journey into one simple concept, “Are you arguing or accepting reality?” To answer this, you must decide which side of the mind will answer this question. If you realize you spend a fair amount of time resisting what is happening in your life, you can be fairly certain the ego is making that decision. To live in resistance is to allow the ego to be the main character of your story in life. On the other hand, if you find you are accepting and allowing life to unfold, whether that life appears good or bad, you are seeing through the eyes of your spiritual side.
It can be a back-and-forth decision throughout life. After all we are in the classroom of life looking to graduate! If we are still here, then there is more to unlearn before we return to the All. Recognizing you are in a classroom is a big step toward seeing you have a choice to make every moment of every day. When we are living in a reactionary state of mind, it can often lead to more mindlessness. Stepping outside of your thinking mind gives you the opportunity to choose how you see any situation. Simply realizing you can look at your ego and choose differently, is a huge step in the awakening process.
Spiritual seekers yearn for a deeper experience in life, so much so that it’s quite common for the ego to get involved and claim ownership over different experiences you may have. Notice when your own ego wants to insert itself and strive for awakening. Anytime you are striving, working to achieve, and gain something for the self, it is from the perspective of the ego. Sacred insights and shifts in consciousness are deeply personal and private. They are there for your own undoing. When you are pulled deep enough, the undoing will take you to a level you may not want to be a part of. The ego will not invite this experience. In fact, it will wage war against it, which is where the inner battle begins.
THE DAY TO DAY
No matter what is happening in your own spiritual journey, no matter what life is throwing at you each and everyday, you can implement your spiritual nature into the very practical life we are living. What is the point of awakening if we don’t actually practice it in life? What is awakening teaching us if we don’t use it in our interactions with others? Blowing up and arguing with those around us or resisting what is happening in our lives just keeps us stuck in the ego’s trap. These resistances are merely distractions from seeing the truth within you. There are many wise people in this world, there are many teachers preaching spirituality and religion, however, do they live it? Talking about spiritual insights is one thing, but applying what you feel within you is quite another.
All of us are working to survive in the world. We have jobs, friends, families, spouses, and children we must interact with routinely. Our biggest spiritual insights can often be through any one of these relationships. Other people act as mirrors to ourselves. What we despise in another is often what we don’t see in ourselves. Using your personal, business, and familial relationships as teachers to help you see clearly can make all the difference in your personal freedom. The more you can apply this principle in your life, the lighter you will feel, the less personal you will take things, and inner peace will begin to grow.
If spiritual transformation is leading us to living in this way, why do we resist it so much? Why is it so hard to want peace? Why do we feel so justified in battling others, in grasping a hold of our position to the point of potentially losing those we really care about? What is the mind gaining by adopting such a rigid approach? Why do we argue with reality that is right in front of our face? Most likely because we are terribly confused about who we really are. The thinking mind is so powerful, with a lower case “p,” it is so loud and outspoken that we assume this is who we are. However, when awakening begins to occur, sacredness within grows, and stillness becomes known, which begins to show you another way.
THE REALITY OF LIFE
In order to see clearly, you must first acknowledge the world you are living in. The dual world is full of chaos, endless oppositions, belief systems, complications, and an overall sense of uncertainty. The one thing you can always count on here is everything changes. Nothing lasts or stays the same forever. We all go through phases, stages, and changes repeatedly throughout life. Notice in your own life where things have changed. Do you feel like the same person you were as a child? Do you see things differently as you’ve gotten older? Many people grow out of child-like curiosity as they get older. Eventually you realize nothing in this world ever works, nothing lasts forever. For those seeking a deeper meaning in life, or a connection to the spiritual, begin to question everything we thought to be true.
However, the vast majority of people walk through the world with the ego’s invisible armor wrapped around them. They have no idea this is present because the identity with self is dominating. Defending their personal positions, arguing with whatever is happening in their lives, feeling justified to behave poorly, disrespecting others to protect themselves, and resisting WHAT IS, seems to be the driver in control. Many people are constantly swimming upstream against very strong currents just to experience nothing but pain, sorrow, misery, and heaviness.
If you don’t think this is accurate, test it in your own life. See how quickly you jump to assert yourself, to protect yourself, to make sure that your position is validated, to justify being right, or to prove you are not what someone judges you to be. Watch when you have a recurring encounter with an individual, someone you always butt heads with, and see what your mind tells you before you see them. Are you telling yourself this will be awful? Are you setting up for another circular situation?
Notice how quickly your mind will fixate on a pre-determined outcome that it doesn’t know will happen yet. It is living in the past and expecting the same thing to happen. Can you look to drop any previous story and live in the moment with this person, truly listening and keeping yourself connected to spirit? Can you detach from taking on whatever this person is saying and just be there as an open mind? When you shift how you approach your connections with people, a doorway in the mind opens and your experience of life completely shifts.
WHY ARE WE SO DETERMINED TO ARGUE WITH REALITY?
Until you begin to detach from your mind, you will not see what is really going on. When the ego mind is dominating your life, when you are attached to this aspect of self that you consider YOU, it will work overtime to make sure that doorway in your mind remains shut. The ego’s primary objective is to keep you blind to the spiritual side of who you are. If you connect to the symbol of our Real Home in God, then the ego has no meaning. As you can imagine, the ego wants to be the star of the show, just see where you have tried to maintain your role? Notice how often the ego pushes that curtain open and begins its plea to keep you believing in its validity. The last thing it wants is to feel unimportant, because when you truly drop it for good, it no longer exists.
As A Course in Miracles teaches, if this world is truly an illusion made up by the ego mind, then everything within it is false. If the only thing that is real is God, then in order to return home as one in God, the entire world must disappear as we recognize the truth. The enormity of this is why the ego argues with anything and everything. It’s why it spends all of its time distracting us with survival. If you’re not busy trying to feed yourself, your family, and keep a roof over your head, you’re busy trying to attain, achieve, and attract perfections into your life. Or the mind finds some other corner of the world to stay focused on so the spirit within stays behind closed doors. According to the Course the dual world is the ego’s heaven, and it has nothing to do with the reality of God’s Heaven. This simple, yet extremely difficult concept to accept is the primary driver of our constant need to resist whatever our eyes see.
If you can shift your perspective and see what is behind the ego thought system, it will start making sense in your life. You will truly begin to understand why you do what you do, and why everyone else is participating in it too. The one thing we all share in this world is our belief in this illusion. Waking up from this illusory world is when everything begins to change. This does not mean you change anything about what you do in the world, but what it does mean is the way you perceive it will be altered forever.
You will begin to flow with spirit and allow life to unfold. Your doors of resistance and arguments will lessen, and letting go of your positions, beliefs, and deeply held need to be right will begin to leave you. A vastness steps in and replaces the rigidity of the mind. This expansive field of awareness takes the place of the argumentative actor seeking self-gratification. When you live in harmony and acceptance with what is, when you allow life to show itself to you, instead of you trying to control everything, is when true inner peace is born.