Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

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Author: J Jennifer Matthews
Full Title: Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are
Category: #books

Highlights

This understanding should also be viewed as a kind of ladder. We do not have to study philosophical ideas endlessly and become absorbed in their intricacies. As soon as we have used this ladder to reach the mystery of the present moment, we can kick it away.
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Idea 2 – We fail to appreciate the mystery of life. Allow me to speak for myself. I have been possessed by a kind of madness. This madness takes shape as a definite tendency to fixate on a person or way of life as my salvation. I abandon the ordinary; the day-to-day. I go for the highest, the most intense experiences, which allow me the most special and rarefied of self-images. I reject what is right in front of me, and situate passionate dedication into the receding future.
Striving for perfection, the compulsion to manufacture a perfect situation, is a habit with us. We are addicted to improving ourselves and our lives’ situations. But we cannot experience our true openness by improving ourselves. It is a bit like taking better and better care of our bodies; eating nothing but brown rice and vegetables and running marathons and so on, and doing all this in the hope that one day we will be able to fly. If this is our attitude, we will assume that flying is superior to walking, although flying is not natural to the human body. We might even decide we won’t really feel alive until we can fly. If we live like this, we will fail to notice and enjoy our actual, superb health.
But anger doesn’t do the one thing it seems to promise. Satisfying our angry impulses does not lead to the dissipation of these impulses. In fact, if we give vent to anger frequently, we may get fixated on anger. We may get addicted to angry outbursts, and to the experience of anger itself.
The fact is, we don’t experience the mystery of life by ‘working through’ our perturbation. We just experience it. We simply decide to experience life, without judgment or expectation. A moment’s lapse is a moment’s lapse. The reason our occasional, alienating thoughts and feelings bother us is because we think we should be bothered by them.
Wakefulness or enlightenment can be reasonably defined as appreciating the mystery of life in the present moment, while knowing it is the only ‘thing’ there is. Wakefulness’ opposite – the dissatisfaction brought about by reactive emotions and alienating desire – can be reasonably defined as the futile attempt to ‘get something out of life.’ We can not get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, which would steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.