Читать книгу Making Your Wisdom Come Alive - Michael PhD Gluckman - Страница 16

In a moment I will give you specific examples from my own life so you will see how to pin down and destroy assumptions. I will also show how this will enrich your life and your meditation practice. But first let’s discuss how to gain freedom from self-judgment.

When you first see these thought patterns you might think: “Yuck, did I really live by this? Am I really that bad?” If you feel like this, remember that when you become aware of these thought patterns, you are free of them. There is no other step necessary. Awareness equals freedom. If they are painful to see, they are a lot more painful to live by.

There was a point in my practice where I was anxious to see every yucky thought pattern in my mind, from why I lied to how I though about sex. I had the feeling that the more I could see, the more freedom I could experience.

And sure enough, with awareness as my weapon, I destroyed much of the yuck that kept me in fear and limitation. Finally when I stood as my bare bones self, I saw the good news: I was not a sinner. You too are intrinsically free from sin!

Notice, I didn’t say replace these thoughts with better ones, or resolve to live by a new “better” pattern. For example, you see the cause of your anger as the big obstacle to your freedom, like anger at your boss, who makes you stay late at work when you really want to meditate at home.

Here you might ask, “What is the difference between a thought and an emotion?” An emotion is a series of thoughts that seem to go through you mind so fast that you don’t notice them. These thoughts could trigger or be triggered by a belief that you hold about who you are, what the world is, what your mind is, or what life is.

Now I said that you apparently don’t notice these thoughts. But you do notice them. If you didn’t notice them, you wouldn’t react to them by getting angry or afraid etc. If you think, “Here they go again,” there is obviously a belief about who you are, who your boss is, and what he can do to your happiness and freedom. The reaction might be anger or fear. We discuss this more in the chapter, “Freedom from the grip of anger.”

Once you see that real freedom comes from within you, you will see these thoughts clearly and laugh at them as if they were a joke. By shining your understanding on them, you will release these thoughts naturally. You may think these thoughts again. But the hook, the sting goes out of them. Then they become like the thousands of thoughts going through your mind that you don’t react to.

So when you see one of these thought patterns, don’t resolve never to get angry again. Just leave an open space where the pattern was and life will flow in ways that you never expected.

Free from these patterns, life gets very interesting. Then your emotions become responses to life, part of the variegated responses that makes life beautiful. If anger in itself was bad, would Jesus have manifested it when he kicked the moneylenders out of the temple?

This also applies to any other thought pattern that seems to trigger suffering; the suffering comes from the automatic emotional reactions that seem out of sync with your life.

Most important, when you notice these thought patterns, which up to now seemed to be automatic, you are on the verge of freedom; so don’t bring in self-judgment.

In the next chapter, “The New Radar that Finds Freedom,” we will show you a quick way to ferret out your freedom. With a little practice you will never again be fooled into thinking that limitation is normal.