(This is Part 8 of a series. Go back to Part 7.)
Let's take another problem:
—My life is on the wrong track.
The antidote to this is, again, love. To transcend this sense of a life gone awry we must first and foremost develop some insight into whether our life is truly "personal" or not.
An intense focus on our personal "self"—the normal human condition—tends to lead to suffering deep down, because then we're living a lie: We're constantly trying to protect and solidify something that fundamentally doesn't exist. That is, it—"we"—doesn't exist as the separate entity that we conceive of it as.
Probably the best way to perceive the fragility and non-existence of the personal self is to repeatedly do the meditation known as tonglen, described elsewhere on this website.
Briefly, we sit down and breathe in suffering. What suffering? The suffering of the world, the suffering of "ourselves", the suffering of all those in some kind of pain, which means all of us. And on the out breath we breathe out love and compassion to all those people and beings and areas of the world that could use more love.
This practice rapidly begins to shift our attention from our "personal self" to other people and to the world. In so doing, in the very process of cultivating more love and compassion, we begin to find that our self-absorption lessens and our sense of alignment with reality increases.
In this process, we suddenly begin to feel that our life is indeed mysteriously on the right track. And, as discussed elsewhere, as our internal sense of things changes, so the outer world seems to change as well. It has to, actually, since the world that we perceive is simply a mirror of what's going on within.
And then, as the saying goes, "we do what works and what we do works." We find our life taking on meaning and purpose even as it becomes less personal, even, we could say, as we become less interested in whether "our" life is on track or not.
(This is the end of Part 8. Go to Part 9.)
—jim sloman, 8.27.04 for Aug 3
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