Motivation Tips
Death is as common to life as birth. Yet, we celebrate one, hate the other. Our knowledge of the ever-after is weak. Whatever we don’t understand, we fear. If we were warriors, running into battle, with the probability of return next to nothing, then I guess we’d be more paranoid about death, and the ever-after.
Religion serves to help those who can’t be bothered thinking. It gives them answers to the everafter. Religion becomes very important for people when they are near death, thinking about death or causing it. All religions spend a vast amount of their energy discussing how you should behave now in order to do good after death. Like an insurance policy, invest now, get a return later.
Sadly, many of those religious teachings contradict each other. So, in choosing a brand of religion, one chooses to be differentiated from others. The “rules” about how to live now in order to gain everlasting happiness in the everafter, are so open to interpretation that they drive people to all manner of incomprehendable misdeeds against each other.
The evolution of religion is consciousness. The more fundamental the religious explanation, the more differentiated it is from “good human conduct” the more unconscious that religion is. To condemn all religion is not wise, because some religions are quite evolved. Some on the other hand are primitive.
What defines primitive consciousness? Generically the answer is; all things extreme, but this does not serve in helping us to differentiate. Fundamentalism is also radical and extreme, and therefore unconscious, but again, it does not help us to differentiate unconscious from conscious religious teachings.
Unconsciousness can actually be defined as the need to separate self from other. The more individualized we are, the more unconscious we are. Hence, even non religious, self righteous people, are unconscious. The greenie, the naturalist, the new age spiritual seeker who points at another group and accuses them of unconsciousness is, in fact, unconscious.
So all beliefs can be interpreted as separatist if they are in the wrong mind. The mind of the individual is what causes a teaching to be held consciously or unconsciously. Some vegetarians will claim that they are highly conscious because they are not killing, but really, by creating exclusivity, they have become the brunt of a huge joke. They are in fact spreading a toxin, more rapidly than fundamental religion.
The more we differentiate ourselves from others, the more unconscious we are. This is a radical awareness because much success has been derived from the egoistic stance of “I am better” or driven by the reaction to an affirmation of “I am worse than” – In fact, I would dare to suggest that 90% of western behaviour is generated from the desire to prove one of these motives.
When I counsel people in sessions, the most common belief I have to deal with comes from differentiation, separation. Firstly most people blame or accuse their partner of some misdeed, something is missing or something happening that is unacceptable. Immediately there is a separation, an unconsciousness. Second to this, is the idea that each person thinks that what is happening in their life is unique. So, they have someone developed the sense that they are different to the rest of the human population.
Some people are different, they are ill with mental and physical breakdown of biological functions. Their mind and body are disconnected. But the average person, all 6.5 billion of the rest of us, have no such excuse for separation.
To live without separation is consciousness. To do so, requires a new perspective, a different motive, a different reason to wake, work, eat and sleep. The athlete who is not trying to beat people in a race is doing something vastly different to another athlete who is motivated to be better than others, however, they both run, and both desire to cross the finish first.
Taking ownership.
Nobody can treat you better or worse than you treat yourself. This means that there is no one else to complain about. If you are not being treated as you wish at home, then you must thank this person for revealing the truth about how you are treating yourself.
One client came to me complaining that his wife treated him coldly, unemotionally. He was a very successful man, and was very talented. But all of life for him had turned to calculated achievement. How to derive results from life. His passion and his spirit only showed themselves in moments of drunken release, or hidden far from the public eye. His wife was not acting independently, he was the cause, she was the affect.
Another client was single. He wanted so dearly to have the love and create a family in his life. But there was nothing, not even a nibble on the hook. When I asked him, what would you do if you had 3 hours to live, his answer was, “I don’t know” – and 3 days to live “he was even more confused” His passion for life, the urgency to create and the spirit of love was buried so deep in him, that he had become self contained. There was no room for a lover.
Life and death
The realization of the temporary nature of all things is an important awareness for us all. It causes us to want to experience and express what we are born to give before we loose the chance to give it. Death is inevitable. Every day we wait, is a step closer to the end game. Even religion that promises life ever after does not promise this moment to be relived. Even the most fundamental and foolish promises of life everyafter cannot replace this minute. This minute adds up to this hour, this hour to this day and so on.
The net result of a fear of death – or uncertainty about it, is the sense of wishing to delay. That person who does not embrace the reality of impermanence attempts to avoid it by causing their life to be materialized in money and achievements. They delay truth, they live in a deferment, as if, by achievements and sustained discomfort, they will be rewarded in the future.
One cannot wish death upon others or themselves, but death is a part of life. To celebrate life we must know how to create and destroy. They are both equal in the laws of nature. One builds, creates, manifests – this is the feminine – the other releases, lets go, lives in the now, it is death, it destroys, it is the masculine, and we are all both masculine and feminine.
There are even religions that hold unconsciousness after death. They individualize you, talk about your life after your death. They even suggest there is an experience of individual pleasure and pain without a human body, so, the individualization, separation continues into the everafter. Such is the need for unconscious ideology as the rationalization for separation and the average, unconscious life.
As each blade of grass is separate and functions separately, it is part of a whole. Trivial in its individuality, yet, manageable in this fragmentation of the whole. You too are a blade of grass, temporary, impermanent, a fragment. Your life cannot mean more than that. Your duty cannot be more important than the experience of it. If you are separate, denying impermanence, delaying truth, then it cannot be wrong, simply know that all you do, and all you leave behind as a consequence will be dust and forgotten as quickly as the process that must eventually return your bones to the dust from which they came.
Consciousness is not based on what a person thinks, it is based on how a person thinks. Separation, individuation and the resultant blame, judgement and division that comes from it, is unconsciousness, the delusion that all is real and permanent.
With Spirit
Chris
