Today, it’s time for an inner questioning exercise. This is something I do, usually just in my head, any time I catch myself experiencing a situation of my own creation that is not serving my highest goals.
Through the repeated processes of examination, I have taught myself how to consciously control my emotional reactions to all manner of unpleasantness. It’s easier to do with pleasurable emotions, because one thought can deflate jubilation. This is how I figured out how to control emotion in the first place. This, misused, can lead to suppression, so it’s important to really reflect upon yourself honestly. No one else can do inner work for you.
I’ve been feeling rather discontent lately, and, because discontentment is something I would consider stemming from ignorance of the perfection, I’ll work through the feeling until I understand it. So, why do I feel discontent?
The most basic answer to this is usually going to be because I feel separated from All-That-Is, cut off from Divine glory. I have been oscillating between feeling pleased and loving to feeling out of sorts and rather blah. This is because my preferences are being intruded upon, which is pretty rare, since I tend to be lacking in the preference department.
1. I feel like I don’t have enough time to do what I want to do.
I got a job a couple weeks ago after about nine months of unemployment, which was good, because I had about three dollars left in my bank account and I was temporarily deferred from plasma donating because my protein count was too low. I was unable to pay all of my bills by myself, but my mom and my roommate helped me out. While having enough money to pay for everything now is awesome, it creates a time, attention and energy suck that leaves me having to stay up late to write and get up without feeling fully rested, which isn’t good for remembering dreams or practicing astral projection. Alarm clocks are horrible, horrible inventions.
Part of feeling like there’s not enough time leads me to be really disinterested in being social, and when you live with someone it makes relating to them rather precarious. I have to feel as though there is enough time for everything in order to remain free from preoccupation, so when I get home and my roommate wants to hang out, I put aside what I want to do, which is write for twelve hours until I have to go back to work. Another issue having this job brings up is:
2. My life feels horribly mundane.
Jobs do not go anywhere. Unless you’re ambitious about some sort of work-related goal, I guess. The main thing I like about my job is that I help people find what they want. Seriously, that’s what I like about it. I move grocery inventory about a store, and the best part is helping people out. I also really like looking for things on the shelves and finding them. There’s a short moment of “ah! There it is!” every time I find something new. The other day I was stocking tea, and I looked at a particularly lovely box design and realized “oh, that’s me, pretending to be tea.” And the tea became a marvel to behold. That’s not mundane. I am constantly surrounded by opportunities to experience greater consciousness and awareness, so that’s something profound and enjoyable.
The reason I am working, however, is to pay my bills and save up to move. Living towards something in the future is decidedly uncomfortable for me. I really enjoy being in school, and I’m no longer in it. For the several months after I graduated and sought work, I grew enormously in leaps and bounds. My inner peace and understanding multiplied at a fantastic rate. It was awesome. Now, I read on my lunch breaks and write in all other free time that is not consumed with socializing.
It might actually be the socializing that makes my life seem mundane, actually. I do not share moments of amazement and wonder with other people, and it feels a bit empty. Socializing is full of distraction, from movies and video games to idle banter. The things I really enjoy is when we get into a conversation about spiritual stuffs, but it comes so very rarely, and at this point, I feel like I am constantly repeating myself. What else is there to say, though? We are one. We are a glorious ever shifting life-being. Not many people seem to get it. Or they understand it logically but haven’t experienced it to really grok the implications.
Perhaps it is not so much that life feels mundane as much as it feels lacking in something that isn’t vital, but it would revitalize me. I may live too much for other people, and I don’t mean that in a “oh I’m always volunteering and helping out etc. etc. etc.” because I don’t. But I do put down everything I feel is important to me at any moment to help someone else out, unless what feels important is another person, and I let other people interfere with my natural reactions.
For example, today a guy’s car stalled while he was trying to turn. My instinct was to run up and help him push his car back, out of the middle of the street, but my roommate was with me and I went with my roommate’s preference rather than my own, which was to keep walking on by. I think it was a valuable opportunity that I missed out on, and it illustrates for me all the other opportunities I’m missing because I defer to someone else’s preferences. To live for the One Self, expressing its unity, is quite extraordinary, and if I am alive, I wish for my life to be extraordinary.
3. I feel increasingly isolated.
This is mostly because I’ve shifted so much in such a short amount of time. Every person in my life is a truly wonderful being, but some conversations and “entertainments” have become rancid to my tongue. Talk of violence or disrespect of any kind, even meant in jest, actually disturb me, when not so long ago, I would have joined in. It’s just not who I am anymore, yet I can still see it as being perfect in each moment, as an expression of Infinity. This greatly increases my ability to accept it and love its existence without shunning its form. Without contrasts, we would be far less sure about Who/What we are at any given moment. We define ourselves by these comparisons.
By my feeling isolated (although I understand that I am never anything but Everything), it shows that I am not realizing my unity. It’s easier to see the divine in a stranger sometimes than it is in someone you know fairly well, because with someone you know well, the ego and “me-me-me” feeling takes up a lot of your perspective at any given time.
These three discontentments all come from the same feeling, that there isn’t enough of this or that, which is simply not true. Not enough time? I wrote over 50,000 words in the month of October, fifty of those seventy pages in the last two weeks alone. Not enough wonder? It’s up to me to seek the amazement, the wonder, and the sacredness in every moment. Not enough connection? There is nothing but connection. There is no use in focusing on how alone I sometimes feel, especially when I am doing nothing to alleviate that feeling. I’ve been kicking around the idea for a weekly meditation/discussion group oriented toward a Spirituality of Oneness, that instead of rejecting any religion, would embrace it, and I’ve been thinking about it for well over a year, but I’ve done nothing about this idea, and I don’t think the idea came from my conscious self. How better to meet those with similar interests than to create a space for them to gather?
It does not matter that in the past I have been quiet and introverted. The time for apathy has come to an end.
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