stop torturing yourself

Stop torturing yourself

Have you ever given consideration as to where your anguish really comes from? Most of us suffer quite a lot, psychologically. We get upset by many things. And typically we blame other people, the external world, for all our ills. So we can grumble and moan and perhaps feel rather righteous. But even in that absurd righteousness, we are still suffering. And if you look carefully, that suffering is born of one's own mind.

We are psychologically torturing ourselves. So if we want to suffer less, the first step is to stop torturing ourself. And this torture, this exquisite psychological torture, comes about because it allows our mind to assert itself. It is the ego. It is the sense of I being reinforced through this great mental fight against the outside world. It might be against other people. It might be against circumstances beyond your control, and even beyond other people's. Perhaps your main fight is with existence, with god. It doesn't make any difference. To suffer less we need to stop the mental patterns that like to complain about our situation. And to do this we first of all have to take full responsibility for our own life. It doesn't matter how the boss is behaving towards us. That's not the point. The point is, do we choose to be in that job? It doesn't matter how our wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend is behaving. Do we choose to be in that situation, in that relationship?

First we must reclaim our power, because by being a victim, we are condemning ourself to suffer forever. So realising that we have much more choice than we pretend, is the first step. And with that we have to accept full responsibility for our emotional state, instead of blaming it on other people. So no longer playing the victim, is the first step, and that empowers us. It gives us back our power, and with it our self responsibility. If we can take that step, then we will find we are complaining less about other people, about the outside world. And already our suffering will diminish, but also with it our superficial righteousness. And so this step is actually difficult. Without realising it, it is an attack on our own ego. It sounds strange, doesn't it: to empower oneself is actually to diminish the ego, compared with being a victim.

But certainly that self empowered state is not the final step. It's a necessary step along the way. But having accepted full responsibility for one's own mental state, for one's own circumstances in life, for one's own emotions, having accepted all that, then there is another step. And this is even more difficult. The real difference comes when we see that we are living in a choiceless way, that actually we are a part of existence. And all our decisions, although we like to think that they are our own, that we are making choices, really those choices are coming to us. They are being given to us, just as thoughts come into our head. So oddly, having reclaimed our power and no longer feeling ourself to be a victim, we have to acknowledge, in a sense, we are actually powerless. It's ironic, it's a paradox. But we are, whether we acknowledge it or not, doing god's will. Another way of saying that is we are a part of existence.

We are not separate from the rest of existence. And of course, this non separation, the sense of it, the feel of it, is the ending of the ego, of the separate self, which was an illusion all along. But the ego does not disappear so readily. The mind finds cunning ways to keep that sense of a separate I alive. So it is rather arduous work requiring discipline, and usually years of homework, working on oneself, before this change can come about. But only then, when we have surrendered the illusion of control, of free will, only then have we really stopped torturing ourself. And with that, of course, there comes a great peace, and an amazing lived experience. Perhaps you are hearing some thunder and a cow mooing, in this recording. But if one is no longer feeling oneself separate, that thunder is not outside of one. It is felt as part of one's experience, part of oneself. Same with the noise of the crows and the butterflies flitting past and the leaves fluttering in the breeze. The whole experience of life is felt in an undivided way. But only when we have stopped torturing ourself.