Make Change or Stay the Same

If you make something a definition, you are going to stay in it, no matter how bad “you think” you want to change.

We either change or we stay the same, it’s a simple fact. So don’t ask for what you don’t want.

So many people want change but are defined by their own suffering, so much so that they can’t let go of it, they spend inordinate amounts of time and money seeing different specialists and nothing seems to work. Well the cold hard fact is, it can’t work if you are indentured by what you suffer from.

If you identify as a victim of your own thinking, you will make yourself a victim of the outside world by extension, and of course nothing will work and nothing can work. More on that further down the page.

Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing!

First you have to change the way you think about yourself and then certainly the way you speak to yourself, and about yourself externally.

This means not speaking against yourself, ever, not even as a joke! The unconscious doesn’t know the difference, you send it a little message every time you speak against yourself that it records and acts on.

The negative self talk over time makes the victimhood habitual, the external world mirrors it and we believe it is the world that is transpiring against us, when in fact we are transpiring against ourselves.

It’s a sad state of affairs that need not be. However if we want to see something, we first have to open our eyes and allow ourselves to see.

We have to be able to see past the boundaries of our own bias to see what is truly possible.

Meditation, hypnotherapy, visualisation etc, can be a wonderful portal to change, it provides an incredible paradox that is summed up perfectly by Alan Watts when he famously said, “by going out of our minds, we quickly come to our senses”.

In other words, the only way out, is in! Meditation is not something you do, you don’t do silence, it springs from inside you, it is already present under layers of noise. So if anything it is a practise of what you are. There is nothing to become or anything to achieve beyond yourself, in my opinion it is an anti doing.

Rationale can only come with space, cluttered, anxious, busy thinking cannot solve a problem like the inability to change, first we need to be able to be clear on what it is that needs changing, often that will be the thinking itself.

Now thinking will not change thinking by more thinking!

That would be like a rabbit trying to turn itself into a rabbit while looking in the mirror for signs that it has turned into a rabbit. It’s an insane idea and yet, here we are as an evolved species, desperately still trying to change thinking with thinking, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Still at war with thinking and at the same time utterly hypnotised by thinking and thought. At odds with our brothers and sisters because of thought driven biases like, ideology, concepts, bigotry, racism, religion and judgment.

At our own throats because of thought based feelings of guilt, shame, self judgment, self loathing and comparisons.

We shouldn’t fear other people’s opinions of us so much, you can’t judge someone else without judging yourself, you can’t have a bias without having a bias mind, you can’t have a racist idea without having a racist mind, you can’t be bigoted without a bigoted mindset.

In the end their judgment of you is in fact a statement about their own state of mind, not yours. And yet, all of this is only a problem if you think thinking is a problem, or more importantly, if you think thinking defines you.

All of this is thought.

Why continue the charade?

Put someone in a room on their own with nothing to do and they will quickly become agitated and frustrated, it’s almost like we can’t bare our own consciousness the way that it exists, it’s like it’s almost too much for us to handle. Any-thing but no-thing.

So we will do anything to avoid a void, a silence, a period of spooky emptiness, that awkward nothingness that our mind rushes in to fill with space junk.

Are we so frightened of stillness that we would rather be insane? It appears that way.

Now, if there is a change to be made, and we have just demonstrated how thinking and thought manifest its own dysfunction, what change could we make as a first port of call?

Let’s go with a real change, if we have been stuck for this long with no answer, what is there to lose?

Let’s go with the opposite of thinking?

Stillness. But stillness is nothing you say, is it?

Try to have a thought, an idea, a concept, without the background of stillness for it to appear in.

Who are you without this thinking you identify yourself as?

If you don’t think, what is there? Stillness right, yes it’s only silence.

So you cannot change because you are your thoughts, ideology’s and philosophy’s right?

These ideas you have about yourself and the world, are they your definition?

Where are any of those without the background of stillness? How are they going to appear and be known if there is no background?

Who is this silent observer inside you that hears all of your thoughts? If you are the thoughts, who is this silent observer that is aware of them?

We have already spoken about the inability of thinking to change thinking. If there were no background stillness and silence there would be no-thing at all! No thoughts, no ideas, no philosophy’s, no concepts and no you and me.

Consider this, what would you be reading here if there were no background for me to write on? If it were just the words against no background, no contrast and no context? It would be rather empty wouldn’t it?

Where do my words come from? Do they come from thinking? Or from the background? I can answer that 100% honestly, but you may not believe the answer, the words appear from nothing. They appear in me, only when I am the silent background do they appear for me, it has been the greatest revelation of my lifetime.

Nothing is not nothing. Silence is anything but passive, it is intensely alive and expressive in all of us.

You see it’s not thinking that makes you so, it’s the stillness that makes you so.

Every single night of your life you go home, to become stillness, silence, you become the background. You don’t really go anywhere, the mind goes to sleep and the real you wakes up and recharges it’s batteries.

There is no such thing as restful thinking, it’s an activity, it is not a state. In fact we could arguably go as far as saying it is an object, external to the real you.

If the stillness and the background cannot recharge, your mind goes crazy, short fuses, it’s the ultimate torture to force a human being to stay awake in their mind, and yet, for some unknown, incredible reason, we still define ourselves by our thoughts, there is no rational reason for it. We want to know everything about the universe and we still don’t know a damn thing about ourselves.

Why?

Because we only see the projection, we never stop to consider what is projecting it. We only see the foreground, we are completely blind to our true definition as the background.

Because of this we find it almost impossible to make change to that which is habitual. We live and believe in habit, hence we are easy prey to condition, to polarise and to hypnotise.

Even when the most solid evidence in our own experience is shown to us, still we refute it, still we cannot believe it.

It can’t be so. But it is.

We are gasping for air and ignorant of the fact that we are bathed in oxygen, but because we can’t see it we don’t believe it exists.

Every night you run home from this projection to escape, you look forward to it, when the projection has gone on for too long, you can’t wait for it, for some rest, start paying attention to it. Nothing happens to you, who disappears other than the ideas you have about yourself and your thoughts?

Consciousness, awareness, space, stillness, no-thing are your true definition, they make the projection possible, they make the play possible, they make the ideas, the thoughts, and the situations possible. They make your likes and dislikes possible. They are the real you!

Finally, essentially and critically, they make your ability to change possible.

As the mind quietens down with practise, the heart somehow opens and a new intelligence springs from nothing. It is a benevolent force of inner and outer change, it speaks to a truth that says happiness is a state, not a place nor a thing.