True Self - update

Have tried out this understanding of self being formless and so the way to truth being is to throw off all images we have about ourself and to simply to Be Oneself. There are many pitfalls!

Being oneself is a very profound experience, and usually we are not able to be that profound. We tend to fixate upon some event and associate ourself with it.

At the weekend my mother burst into my room in the morning and started lecturing me. I wanted to sleep, she was waking me up, and I began to think this is very disrespectful and I started to get angry. So I analysed it from the "be yourself" perspective.

The anger is not really "me". I could feel some anger arising but I refused to associate with it. This is not my anger. It belongs to someone else.

The I looked back a bit. The anger was coming because I had this image of myself wanting to sleep and of my mother wanting to talk. I was associating with the desire to sleep, and was associating my mother with the desire to talk. Worse I was then imagining myself with a "right" to sleep and her with no "right" to talk. That imbalance then suggested that the situation should stop and I should get my way, rather than her.

Of course the error came in forming the image of "rights" and then associating myself with them. And, before that, forming the image of a desire-to-sleep and the associating with that, and also the image of wanting to talk and then associating my mother with that.

In reality all selves are formless! True my mother wanted to talk, and true I wanted to sleep. There is nothing wrong with those images. True also that maybe I had a right to sleep, and she should have waited until later to talk. But the error came in putting those costumes on the players in that room. The whole situation could have unfolded without me feeling at all associated with either character, or by associating with ither character.

In the end I decided to associate with my mothers character and enjoy her desire to talk. So while that fellow in the bed was being woken up, and maybe was tired for the rest of the day, from my mothers perspective at least she had her say.

Freedom arises when as can step aside from the images of the world and let them play out their own intrinsic natures without feeling the need to take sides and associate with any or them.

This may all sound very odd! Most of us can grasp that our material possessions are not really us. While we can see they are outside us and not in any way connected, we can still hurt very badly when we lose or have things damaged or stolen. If we can't see the absurdity in feeling associated with things which aren't even physically part of us, imagine how much harder it is for us to see the absurdity in feeling connected to things which are apparently connected to us!

We can lose a kidney, a leg, genitials, a finger even an eye without to much discomfort. In reality we are still the same person afterwards. Going deeper we can become quite unhappy, or happy, depressed or joyful and still be the same person. Take these losses further and other people begin to feel that we are not the same person. But deep inside we still know somehow we are the same person - even after a serious car accident, or even some serious psychological illness. Then we image that there comes some point down the road of loss where we are insane or dead and then we no longer exist.

But all these inner images we have are only that - images. There is no reason why we should associate out true self with any of them. Our true self is formless, it is nothing, it is present upon the world all the time, and while it may wear these many jackets of identity and events - it by itself is nothing.

Its an amazing thought that even when we die, that is an event which we don't really have to associate ourselves with! See it like this. If we are not intrinsically associated with the events of the world when we are alive, then it is not us who dies!

This is not to say that we are removed from the world, watching it like it was a film. That is still imaging the "self" as having some form, and that form being "outside" the picture. There is only the picture - don't make that mistake. The only issue is whether we associate with elements of the image, or not. Football fans associate with different parts of the same game, that is what makes it so much fun - but there is no intrinsic "link" between each fan and his side. In the same way there is no intrinsic "link" between the world's events and "Team Me" the team I habitually support called Alva. Alva is just a name for a remarcable entity which has no form. An entity I am only just beginning to discover and one which I share with all people and beings in the universe.