Insight out of insecurity, part 2
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Human life is not always a walk in the park; not by a long shot for many of us.
Since life is a contact sport we can’t entirely avoid the ups and downs or getting hurt and bruised along the way. However as we deepen our understanding of who we are and how our experiences are created, it makes life far easier to navigate. It may even become an opportunity to thrive and flourish.
Continuing on from part 1, I shall outline how that understanding can help us overcome feelings of insecurity.
Navigating through life can be made so much easier with a user’s manual. This is how I see a new understanding that now informs my life and which I share with others through my consulting, mentoring, facilitation and teaching activities.
It is a spiritual understanding of who we are and how we function. Spiritual here means that it includes both the formless and material dimensions of life; and that actually there is no separation. Whilst it is not rooted in a particular religion it does contain the essence of their message. It is also a new paradigm to explain how we function psychologically and looks to draw out our innate mental health rather than looking for, analysing and fixing problems.
According to this understanding, each of us is the energy of life creating and having an experience. However, we often get caught up in the illusion that makes it look like the outside world is determining how we should feel and who we should be.
As I continue to steep in and live from this understanding, I notice that I am far less critical towards myself and hence others. I’m not constantly needing to fix myself because there’s nothing wrong with me, other than the thought that I’m broken. Whilst I have preferences, I am less inclined to take things so seriously; and when I do, it is short lived. In turn, I am more tender, patient and kind with myself and regard life as a fascinating and enriching adventure rather than something to dominate or get defeated by. What’s even cooler is that imperishable potential is already inbuilt into each of us and it can be realised and harnessed. What a relief!
To be clear, when I say understanding, I am referring to insightful knowing or wisdom, not intellectual knowledge. The only thing that determines whether we truly change of not is what we see and feel for ourself, a fresh, new and spontaneous knowing. We can’t think ourself into an insight, only out of one. Insights are like drops of grace and are more likely to occur when we are relaxed and in a contemplative state of being. This is an insight friendly space. And it’s simpler than we think. Much simpler.
Insecurity, a case of mistaken identity
We are all only ever doing our best given our underlying level of understanding. That understanding forms the basis of our identity and determines how we think, feel, speak and act in all situations. We can always deepen our understanding.
When we know better, we feel better and we do better.
Normally we are too busy trying to become something and thus we don’t allow ourselves to simply be.
Whether you are part of a different ethnicity, gender identity, age group, religious organisation and so on - we have all kinds of made up stuff about what kind of person we need to become. We then raise our children to look at the same world and they invariably end up seeing similar things and getting impacted and limited by that. So it becomes like a group identity about how we should be rather than just being. This is what insecurity looks like to me.
As we deepen in understanding, we start to appreciate how each of us is a marvellous and miraculously unique expression of creation. Each of us is like an individual snowflake, differing only in appearances, personality and unique experiences, but are made of the same spiritual nature and work in the same way. And that imperishable potential, our essence, is loving and wise beyond measure. I also intuit, based upon my own experience and research, that this same energy source controls the expression of genetic material and is transcendent of our social conditioning and that the brain isn’t the seat of consciousness.
What this practically boils down to is,
The quality of feeling, state of consciousness, or energy vibration we inhabit is where we create life from.
We are the creator, not the creations, of experience
According to the three principles understanding, that spiritual energy gives us the capacity to create and cognise the entire spectrum of experiences. That spiritual force has two functions - it gives us the power to create experiences via thought and to cognise those experience via consciousness. The interplay of thought and consciousness is what creates the illusion of a solid and unchanging world of form. And it also gives meaning to what we perceive through our senses.
The spiritual energy that empowers life also gives us the ability to be aware, via consciousness and the power to create, via thought.
Here’s a metaphor to illustrate that. When you go to the cinema, before the show begins, there is a silver screen before the moving pictures are projected on to it. Consciousness is like the silver screen and experiences are like the moving pictures. Experience consists of physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, images, and memories.
Consciousness is a constant and functions to perceive the variability of thought created experiences. Consciousness and thought are aspects of the formless energy of life.
Two huge and liberating implications of that are
all our experiences are created by the power of thought
we are the creator and not the creations of experiences.
That means you are not the victim of your thoughts. You are not the victim of your memories. And each time you think about it you don’t have to suffer. I shall be sharing a lot more how these play out practically in future articles.
When that first dawned on me, it was initially quite shocking and destabilising. It shook up all my notions of who I thought I was and where I believed my experiences were coming from. Through familiarity and deepening of insightful understanding, this experience has become more stable.
An irreversible and transformative shift in consciousness.
Whilst we can’t think or will ourselves to have an insight, we do have a natural propensity for it and can come to that understanding empirically and directly for ourselves. Furthermore, there are certain conditions, while they don’t entirely guarantee that they will occur, that are more conducive to insights.
Insightful understanding or wisdom can be realised and harnessed in many ways. My way in was via a simple meditation practice called ‘clarity of the mind’ found in Buddha’s Sutra Mahamudra teachings. My understanding of its significance has deepened through steeping in, living from and allowing that to express itself in various ways.
More recently, I have come across a simple and accessible way to articulate and facilitate insightful understanding, for many people from all walks of life, through the teachings of the late Sydney Banks and his students in the Three Principles community.
I have discovered that the more we see and live into that understanding, the better we feel and the better we function.
An insight into the spiritual nature of who we are and where our experience comes from is an irreversible shift in consciousness. From there on we see ourselves and all things in a different light; from a deeper vantage point and broader perspective. That can happen at anytime, anywhere and in anyone.
With understanding we will naturally be more loving and kind towards ourselves and others as well as experience longer moments of peace and ease. We are more likely to have better health and lasting relationships. We will be more creative, have improved performance and more fulfilment.
TRANSFORMATIVE INSIGHTS ARE DROPS OF GRACE
It is rare, but does happen, that everyday people have a spontaneous and transformative epiphany. It is even rarer for those individuals to clearly articulate and share what they have discovered and have that profoundly impact others. Such individuals are the likes of Sydney Banks, Byron Katie and Ekhart Tolle are in the mainstream consciousness. I am also aware that there are many others who dwell simply and anonymously getting on with being in service in all areas of life and all manner of conditions.
It is far more common that transformation happens through a series of micro-mental and incremental shifts in awareness, culminating in an overall awakening of consciousness. In practice, the most conducive conditions are a relaxed and contemplative state of mind which is not caught up in thinking and doing. This can happen spontaneously and unintentionally, whilst in the midst of an intense personal struggle, or more intentionally through engaging in spiritual cultivation. In all instances there is a surrendering of the intellect, the seat of ego, to something far bigger, yet is intimately and intuitively known by us. That is when we have a transformative insight.
Having set the background, in part 3 of this article, I shall share how these implications play out practically in general and particularly for overcoming our feelings of insecurity.