The Benefit of Release - noticing my life

Im not a selfless person.

In fact Im pretty damned selfish as people go. Im a lot closer to a thug than to Mother Theresa.

I used to think that I couldn't talk about any of this because I would be the biggest hypocrite in the world. But if I wait to become totally selfless before I talk about this I will be waiting a very very long time.

The things I now know in my heart about this are all that I can say - this is my experience.

Consider for a moment how much stress you carry with you every day. How much anxiety and worry about self protection in so many forms. About how much you wish for some good fortune to happen to you. How much you wish to avoid trouble of all kinds be it health or financially, or with school or friends, or your career or within your family - how much you worry about someone you love maybe, or how much you can't let go of some wrong that was done to you. Maybe you're rapped up in a particular political outlook or a religion or an ideology, whatever is eating you up inside.

Now consider how much time and physical energy those kinds of thoughts and all that emotional stress and worry consume.

I'm not talking about what most people think of as stress - the obvious stuff that gets you into drug rehab for instance. No, Im talking about what most people would consider "normal" everyday life or living.

You know, the kind of "living" where people are murdered by the dozens every single day. Where kids are abused or neglected because we just don't have the time or care. Where we eventually devastate the planet in order to fulfill our biggest dreams and deepest personal ambitions. The kind of "living" where people will do almost anything to get ahead, to get theirs, or to get their fifteen minutes of fame and profit or to get there fix - whatever that fix is.

Ive lived in the inner city my entire life, I have known and seen stress. Ive been in life or death encounters, Ive seen people killed, Ive come upon people who were so far gone that they could just as soon kill you as look at you - and without batting an eye.

Then there is the other end of the spectrum. Maybe someone along the lines of Mother Theresa. I'll use her behavior as an example here, not necessarily her mental outlook. Perhaps the Dalai Lama would be a more appropriate example given the context here, but Im trying to make a larger point. Someone who shows such a lack of self protective impulse and complete "at-ease-ness" among even the worst conditions of human experience that you can't help but wonder, are they something other than human?

Clearly, most of us fall somewhere between these two ends of the stress spectrum. We just might not decide to 'wipe out our family' one day because we lost our job and things have become too much to handle. And the odds are equally 'not so good' that one day, people will consider us as saints and pray to us because of our - utterly selfless yet immense - dedication to easing the suffering of others.

So, even though we fall between these two -lets say extreme examples - still, there is a lot to be gained by examining the role that self preoccupation plays in our lives. It is this thing we each call "my self" that is exactly 'energy bound-up.' It is freedom relinquished and constrained.

Without knowing it, without being aware of it, the problems that are present in our lives which arise from the preoccupation with self are almost incalculable. Im not going to claim that ALL our problems arise from our 'present' attitude, many of them were a long time in the making. But understand this, we are stressed! In fact when you really think about it, it's hard to find a single negative factor in our society that doesn't arise in some way due to the preoccupation with self.

Ideological wars, domestic violence, most types of crime, corporate greed, drug abuse, over consumption, obsession with fame and power and control, even down to things like urban sprawl, environmental degradation, heart disease and road rage.

Nearly everything (or maybe everything) is effected by the urge to satisfy and protect the self! We are egomaniacs all of us, and in great irony, this preoccupation we have with self inflation, self obsession, self protection, is actually killing us sooner and one could say "un-naturally". And it's killing our environment as well.

'How' it is killing us is that when we self obsess - as we in fact are - this action of "self" (and that is what self is, it is an action or process) contains (blocks) tremendous amounts of energy within both our bodies and minds. This energy gets "contained" in the form of ignorance, narrow ideology and views, destructive habits, physical dis-ease, tension, stress, anxiety, depression and other mental afflictions, muscle pain, neurological blockages and physical ailments and destructive behaviors of all kinds.

We don't (or maybe can't) even see this. We are so busy in our lives that we just don't see what we do, why we do it, or what the effects of our actions are. We don't see that we are in fact completely crazy and acting completely crazy. We don't see how we are killing ourselves - we allow no time to see. We are 'too busy' to see.

I believe we all DID once see this though.

As children, we have very big dreams and are pretty open and much more stress free than adults. I believe that at a certain stage children can really see the possibilities - the widest potential of what they could become.

But then we raise them to copy our own example and they become successful crazy people and fail to reach their potential for release and saneness. We beat them down with our own crazed anxiety. We turn them into victims "just like the rest of us" and condition them to "survive in the real world".

In this way, little if anything actually changes in the way of society. Children eventually lose their sense of possibility and take on all the habits that we happily pass along to them.

We forget what it is to be child like - or more accurately, we suppress it. We forget or suppress the child that is still within us (as cliche as that sounds).

So look at the world for a moment. Look at your life. Notice the problems and negatives - not to become depressed or to dwell on the negativity, but just to note that there is a possibility that things could improve.

It's strange really, that all this begins with a simple -but hard to detect- error of perception. That's really what Buddhism is pointing out - a simple mental error - an erroneous concept is a more apt description.

The erroneous mental factor that leads to (has and will always lead us to) the experience of being on the brink of catastrophe is this: We take the idea or concept of "my self" and believe it is a valid and truly existing reality - it isn't. That's the real tragedy.

It is such a small error, but it leads to this, just look at the wreckage. Look around you at the stress, at the greed and deceptive lengths people go to disguise it, and then look at the suffering that this stress produces on us, on our families, on our society, on our planet.

As I said, I am not one to really talk. I am not a selfless person. I am mostly part of the problem. But although I am just beginning to see, I have to express my experience of seeing. I can't advocate anything really. I can't say that we all should go out tomorrow and begin helping the homeless, or volunteering for community service - in my case THAT WOULD BE hypocrisy and that just adds to the anxiety. Also, that may be personally the wrong approach for you or for me - sort of putting the cart before the horse.

We really need to look to what is happening closer to home. We really need to treat the root cause in order to cure the dis-ease - not just address the symptoms. Why am I like this? Why is life slipping away from what it was (or once had the potential to be) when I was a child? Im just saying to who ever wants to listen that there is an alternative to the craziness around you - or in you.

THAT is what this is about. THAT is why I write these things.

One final note on this topic: Perhaps the greater irony in this regard is that what is really needed here is not to "view the world as a dark, dangerous and crazy, out of balance place", in fact, it's almost the complete opposite of that.

What Im saying is that children DON'T view the world that way - as dark, dangerous, out of balance. They view the world as "anything is possible so lets actualize those possibilities!" This is pure joy, pure release. What I'm pointing out is THAT view.

In turn, when we have that view, that open or 'released' view, not only does this change our immediate experience into something positive, it positively changes how we effect the world itself.