I have for most of my life thought it was important to know everything and even if you didn’t really have the first fucking clue about something, pretend that you knew and have an opinion, based usually on our own prejudices or what others say, who also had no fucking clue either.
Groups of people have great debates on subjects whereby none of them has a fucking clue and they make what they think are the right decisions based on that.
The only thing we know is ourselves and the things that we actually experience and even then, when we are in our unconscious mind-obsessed state, we only see what our mind wants us to see. In this moment now is the only thing we really know, when we are awake and conscious, seeing the world without any evaluation.
We do not have to have an opinion, we do not have to know and it is better to listen than to know.
The more we listen, the more we understand.
Inner peace, joy and a conscious existence, just being our authentic soulful true essence, comes from the freedom of knowing nothing, not evaluating everything. Knowledge is a burden because what we think is knowledge is most often thought and opinion within our own heads or from the collective mind.
Knowledge creates this false righteousness, as we believe our knowledge to be the absolute truth that our egos will force us to defend at all costs.
The opposite where listening, understanding and not knowing everything creates connection, respect, freedom and the liberation from the pressure of having to know and having to defend that knowledge.
I have over the course of a lifetime allowed my mind to dominate the real me, I have shackled myself with repeating thought patterns, made up in my head by the unconscious ramblings of others’ minds and the never-ending ramblings of my own.
I have created these so-called ‘truths’ about myself based on utter nonsense and then acted upon them. Thus actually creating the stories in reality. What we believe reality is, is what reality is. We always create and manifest our own reality. If we believe something to be true, then it is. If we believe we can do something we can and, of course, if we believe we can’t, then no surprise, we can’t.
I have felt shackled by those restrictions that I have created in my head and I have been slowly unshackling myself. However, I feel like I am slowly undoing a bolt or just starting to take the hacksaw to the chain and cutting slowly through it.
I feel that I want to jump into the water, but I just put one toe in, maybe a foot, and then I’m scared, the water is frightening, it’s cold, so I run back to the safety of the beach. It’s funny, that I am able outside of the nonsense of my head, to run straight into any sea, in any temperature and dive straight in, I have a cold shower, and during the winter months a fucking freezing cold shower, every single day and have done for 2 years.
However, when it comes to getting on with my life dreams and allowing my soul to experience the things it wants to, the things I’d really, really, really want to do in life, then I am back to dipping the toe in the water and running back to the safety of the beach. Fear, as in whopping great psychological fear grips us all when it comes to the things we really want to do most in life. It is the fear of the uncertain future, that is just a concept in our heads as, of course, the future does not exist there is only now.
I am building the bravery muscle, as I want to stop just slowly removing the shackles, like dipping the toe in the water, I want to just dive in, I want to tear the shackles off in one go and be totally free of the restriction.
I want to live a totally authentic life, where I allow the real me, my soul to experience life unhindered by the shackles of my mind and its thoughts and ego.
That means I have to face vulnerability and if you love Brene Brown’s work as I do, you’ll know that facing and rumbling (her fav word) with vulnerability isn’t a fluffy, cool and easy thing. It is like having to cross a river of molten lava in a flimsy dingy. Vulnerability, as in truly being our authentic and soulful essence is hard and requires true courage to ‘brave the wilderness’ (great Brene Brown book).
The hard things in life always bring us the most amazing and magical adventures and experiences, the very reason we are here and they get easier the more we brave it and build that bravery muscle, it’s all habit. The easy things turn sour, they bring us the suffering, regret, pain, internal pain, and eventually mental and physical decline. Easy gets hard and hard gets easy. But hard things require taking the shackles off, diving in and crossing the river of molten lava. But if life was plain sailing, no molten lava rivers, there would be no point to it.
Of course, our minds and egos don’t want any of this risk so it sabotages our attempts to be vulnerable and throw off the shackles. But at some point, when we are on the edge of that diving board looking down at the pool wanting to jump, we can either jump and become free or stay put, suffering a life of not achieving our true dreams living an unconscious mind-dominated life, whereby we miss real life now and spend it in our heads.
Philip Dodson 