Do you ever feel anxious or tense? Are there things that you worry about? Do you suffer from your nerves? Do you get easily hassled? Are you ever stressed? If you perceive yourself to be suffering from any of these afflictions, then you’re letting your mind play tricks on you. The inner you cannot be nervous, anxious, stressed or fearful. The real you is incapable of being stressed or anxious. All these issues are symptoms of an over-active personality – when you feel any of these symptoms, it’s only your personality trying to trip you up.
What you must realize is that your personality – from the Latin persona, which means mask – is simply a mask that not only hides the inner you from everybody else, it has misled you into thinking that it is, in fact, who you are. But, psychology explains that your personality is an accumulation of photographs of events and people that made an impression on you during your childhood – what we normally call our formative years. You took snapshots of these things because they were important enough to make you feel good or bad about yourself at that time. Unfortunately, psychology also confirms that the normal mind is far more disposed to focus on the negative rather than the positive photographs.
Your subconscious mind is still obsessed with those snapshots and it is this obsession that gives life to your personality. Basically, your personality is not real – it may have got you to where you are and you may really like it – but take care that you don’t fall in love with an illusion.
To rid yourself of the afflictions from which only your imaginary personality can suffer – stress, worry, anxiety, doubt, fear, frustration – you’re going to have to go beyond that personality, your perceived weaknesses and strengths. You need to go in search of the real you because not only does it not experience stress, worry, doubt, not only is the inner you fearless, the real you is able to achieve effortless happiness and success. The great thing is that you don’t need to look far to find the real you – it is waiting to be found. You will uncover the real you in the peace of a reflective moment, in the experience of one of those wonderful “natural high” moments that we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives – where peace and happiness reign.
However, you shouldn’t wait for the next peak moment to get over the illusions of stress and worry. You can do that right now by indulging in a little meditation. When you meditate you can start to appreciate that stress, tension and fear are only destructive thoughts and that a clear and focused mind (the real you) simply has not time for that kind of rubbish – it has much more pressing things to do.
July 26th, 2010
Normal behaviour is rarely appropriate. How could it be! Because normal behaviour is generated automatically – you don’t have to think about it, you just react – by your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind is expert at enabling you react – it is this ability that has got us so far as the ‘superior’ species. But, as we’ve already said, normal behaviour is rarely appropriate – because that same subconscious mind is permanently focused on the past – your childhood years – and it uses this past ‘stored knowledge’ to dictate today’s automatic behaviour. With information that is so far out of date being used to enable you react, how is your behaviour going to be appropriate to what is actually happening today?
How could it be right and proper when you consider that the normal person is constantly on automatic pilot? Unfortunately, it’s just the way we’re built. If you’re having a good day, your behaviour can actually be mildly effective – that is in comparison to how effective you could actually be had you taken the trouble to pay attention and act, rather than react. But even at that, normal people only have good days now and again. It’s the normal not-too-bad days that have consigned your life to that repetitive, mundane, not-too-bad life – you know, the one where good stuff almost never happens, the one where you’re unhappy in your work or the one where your relationship has gone off the boil – the ordinary crap of the normal life. And on those everyday not-so-bad days, your behaviour can be anything from midldly in-effective through inappropriate to dangerously outrageous. People losing the head in traffic jams, people bullying their workmates or playing with their workers’ lives. Husbands who beat wives, wives who beat husbands – or just the normal not-so-bad apathy of ‘I wish I was somewhere else’ and all the anxiety that that brings with it.
The problem is, however, that we confuse our behaviour with who we are – a fatal mistake that leads us into recrimination, guilt, frustration, anxiety and even more inappropriate behaviour. You are not your behaviour. How could you be? Your behaviour is automatically created by your personality – all the weight of ‘stored knowledge’ in your subconscious mind. Your personality has absolutely nothing to do with who you really are – there’s enough psychological evidence amassed over the last seven decades that proves this.
Which leads me to a most important point. You can only take truly appropriate action (rather than normal reaction) by deliberately side-stepping your personality or ego – this is the essence of personal development (rather than personality development). However, you cannot do that until you realize that every single inappropriate action comes from that source. What’s done is done – if your reactions have done damage, go and undo it. But you only damaged your own self-image, then, get over yourself and get on with your life – starting now.
July 24th, 2010
