The Path

[Ananya]

February 8, 2016

11:26 am IST.

Day 1

I am creating this journal so that I can preserve my journey of aligning myself to my core values and reaching the highest possible level of personal productivity. Writing everything down in a notebook felt vulnerable, because the story of my life, my journey of Positive Disintegration, and all my existential crises are recorded in that notebook. In short, that notebook contains a part of me that I don't want to forget at any cost. That is why I want to record my journey in this journal, where I can be assured of it's safety. I also think that this is the one place where my thoughts are truly safe , this is the one place where I can be completely honest without starting an argument with anyone.

To anybody out there who is reading this, please note that I do not write this journal in order to preach or generalise any belief system. So treat it as a diary of one insignificant person in this very large world, and be free to criticise anything I write.

Waking up.

Uptil this point, I have been drifting through my life. Because drifting is easy. It's easy to lose yourself in distractions, to tell yourself that you just can't do certain things , and settle down with compromises. After all, you have all the distractions you need to immerse yourself in. You don't need to challenge yourself, just do what everybody else is doing, fit in the group. And please don't try to go against the current. If it is not in your destiny ,it will not happen. So just accept that already, okay ? You can't change. If you are mediocre and lazy and weak hearted, then that's just who you are, who you were all this time and who you will be for the rest of your existence .

This is what I heard from everyone around me. And this is what many people who I have met believe, not only about me, but also about themselves. And subconsciously, I believed in it too, although I fought with this issue open the outside. Being weird helped, because people always expected that I would turn out different. After all , I was the unpopular, overweight kid who cared more about astronomy than the pop music culture, that pondered and asked too many questions. The one who was never cool enough to fit in any group. 

It was only when I was suicidal, and I seriously contemplated the utility of my existence, that a tiny voice jolted me awake.

" So they say you are unworthy, that you can never change, that you are a burden. That you are to remain stuck with this life of yours because this is who you are ? Are you going to continue with your self sabotaging habits just because you think you can't change ? That you don't deserve success because you are not the right kind of person , that you wasted a lot of your life already ? Let me tell you this, I am not going to tolerate giving up anymore."

This tiny annoying voice was fighting with amother stronger voice who relied on my past failures and shortcomings to come up with logical, realistic reasons on why I should just quit trying to change my life. My mind was sinking into depression, falling deeper and deeper with every passing day. With no one to tell me how to get out of this pit, I felt alone. And when I was alone, and free from my distractions of the outside world , the questions I had been trying to avoid all this time, became unavoidable. 

Why am I here ?  Why should I go on living ?  Is there something I can look forward to when no one else needs me ? Is my value in this world determined by something else other than that which is assigned to me by other people ?  If society were to crumble away and all the concepts and beliefs and the security that comes with them were to shatter , would I have some place inside my heart where I could return to ?  Could I be all alone in my journey and still have the strength to complete it ? 

It was that moment when I decided I was not going to fall away into depression despite the feeling being so overwhelmingly powerful, that I became aware of an enemy that I didnt know existed - my own mind. The sheer amount of force it required to lift myself up from the bed and walk up to the desk to write the first few paragraphs of this post drove me towards personal devlopment. Fighting with others is easy . Fighting with the hard set mould of your own mind, now that is a different story altogether.....

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

On 2016-02-08 at 2:02 AM, Ananya said:

I am creating this journal so that I can preserve my journey ...
...In
Waking up.

Uptil this point, I have been drifting through my life. ...

A lovely beginning Ananya.  Your honesty is refreshing.  Being honest with oneself is the quickest way to wake up to truth.  You already are what you are looking for.  

It is interesting that you should mention astronomy.  That has been a favourite hobby of mine for many years.  I am an amateur astronomer and I studied Astronomy at university.   It is a wonderful field to investigate ... the vastness of the manifested universe.  And no one really knows that much about it.

We grow up in a society, in a particular community, with people who were conditioned to believe a certain way, as their predecessors going way back.  The conditioning is a self-protection mechanism.   People were afraid,  had little knowledge of the strange world they lived in and so they settled for comforting beliefs.  And they passed these beliefs onto their children, only hoping to protect them.   Strange thinking was feared, and still is, even today. 

I remember when personal computers were first introduced into the workplace.   I was a recent graduate, so I was familiar with the new technologies, but the workers that were there for years before I arrived found it very difficult to accept them as part of their work.   These were engineering type people.   We had to write reports, do studies, keep documents and so on.   There were many filing cabinets and a lot of papers filed in every workers desk.   They could find them easily.   They trusted what they could see on paper.  That was their background conditioning.

Then the computer comes along.   Everyone is told that they must now use the computer to communicate, to write their reports, to save all their work and documents for reference and so on.  Everyone is told that this is the future; this is much more efficient.  They did not want to believe this.   They did not trust the computer.  They could not see all the work they filed away on a computer and many had difficulty finding their work on a computer.  It was a time of great mistrust and anger and grievances. 

Over a few years, the older ones were retired and younger people entered the workforce.  They were very familiar with computers.  In fact now they had laptop computers.  (The cell phone was not available yet).  Now, today, everything is different.  So that is one example of the pain of growth. Not too different from what everyone seems to go through in trying to overcome the limitations of their upbringing and the conditioning that is imprinted upon their minds.

You might be able to see from all of this how your experience is in some sense similar to what you say you are awakening from.

This is good.   I find nothing that should be criticized in what you write.   It is the human condition.  For some people the conditioning experience seems to be lot more critical, and they cannot find a way to wake up.  But you are waking up.  This is wonderful.  I cheer you on.  Please continue. Do not fear anything!  Not your past, nor your present, nor what may happen in the future.   You are NOW.  You are this moment - the only possible reality there can be.  Be it.  Be here now always, because that is the only way it can be.  All things happen in your presence,  in the presence of being.  That is what awake means.  

All possibilities are this moment.   Just look.  Do not judge.  Life has a rhythm, a movement, and you are that in a way that you cannot understand at the moment.  But everything is OK.  No matter what you thought or what you think now, the reality is that you are on your way.  The journey has begun. 

Love and Joy

 

Edited February 14, 2016 by walt