The Dream is Not Your Problem – January 25 2019

Wherever it leads you, it will be a dream. The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realize that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of the dream and not another. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

It can be difficult to let go of our thinking. Of our opinions. All these problems in our world that must be solved before we might be safe, comfortable, successful, happy. When we try to ignore the thoughts, they speak even louder. They begin to tell us what is wrong with us, what is wrong in the world. They tell us, in what sounds like our own voice, what really must, must, must be changed. They tell us what others are thinking about us, what others want from us, what others expect from us, and what it will mean if we don’t accomplish this or that.

 

So we try. We try to change the way we are. We try to accomplish what must be accomplished. We try to change the way others see us. Or alternatively, we try to tell ourselves we don’t care–about the world, about the opinions of others–when in fact we do care deeply.

 

But when we do ‘fix’ one thing so necessary to fix, another thing pops up, demanding our attention. And another. Always something, our mind giving us endless reasons for our unhappiness. And in spite of how many of these problems we fix, we find ourselves no closer to happiness than the last time we checked in with the happiness meter.

 

This is the nature of the mind. It works continually to show us where happiness may be found, then tries to give us its best guess as to how to get there, when in fact the mind itself has no clue as to where happiness is.

 

It’s not that the mind isn’t useful. It’s that we insist on using it for the wrong purpose. Like using a computer to drive a nail. You may get the nail driven in, but not very well, and it’s going to play hell with your computer. We never will find happiness using the mind. We never will find happiness as long as we insist on identifying with, and as, the mind.

 

We need to find what we are that is other than the mind. What we are when we transcend the mind.

 

What we find is, we are not men and women trying to have a relationship with spirit; rather we are spirit having the experience of this body and this mind. Why? For the purpose of rediscovering the truth of our Being. The truth of our oneness with all that is. The truth that, as this oneness, happiness is our essential nature, waiting only for us to turn in its direction so that it may express itself through us.

 

The pieces of our life cannot be organized into an equation of happiness. But what we are that is beyond those pieces is perfect, whole and complete. Is happiness itself.

 

Today I will take stock of the thoughts that flow through my mind. I will notice the ones that were there yesterday, the ones that seem never to stop, the ones that seem to be in the voice of my father or my mother or my fifth grade teacher, the ones that tell me why in all the world I am the one undeserving of happiness. I will notice these thoughts, I will let them go, paying no attention to whether or not they cease speaking to me, and I will attend to something else. Something like the miracle of the world that is around me, awaiting only my loving attention to it.

 

Books, tintype, Studio City, CA