Many years ago, there was an ancient Buddhist Monk who had a great way of looking at life, he would talk to someone and ask one very simple question which nobody could ever answer correctly, “who are you”. You see when told a question like this most say something like “I am solace”, “I am a writer”, “I am a Buddhist” etc. and every time someone would answer with one of these answers he would ask them again “no, who are YOU”. It generally takes some time but more often than not, the person will come to realize the true meaning of those words and reach a higher level of consciousness.
You see, you are not your job, your identity or your religion, you are your untainted spirited self. Everything that you think you are is what has been imposed on you by society, by the world and by everyone around you, you have been influenced to such a degree that you believe you are what others tell you. Of course this seems to be your own decision but little do you realize this decision was created from those surrounding you.
To finally come to the realization that you are not your habits, beliefs or virtues, frees you from the great amount of emotional turmoil many people carry around with them for their entire lives. People are so attached to the pain and joy that these attachments bring them that they begin to count them as part of themselves, and they start to become the things they associate with most often. Just like how when you hang around the same people for any amount of time, your friends, your coworkers, your boss, you tend to become just like them, so too do you become like whatever you identify yourself with or as. If you constantly tell people you are a writer that habit becomes more ingrained and you find it hard to disassociate with it (if you ever want to change careers) and thus you become stuck in more of a rut (which can sometimes be good but most of the time not changing is a bad thing).
When you realize that you are not what you surround yourself with and identify with you can start to become more Free, both emotionally and physically. You may come to realize that beliefs you previously held onto because you thought they were a part of you can be released. Old habits that don’t serve you can be lost and you can stop trying to be better than everyone else by having a higher up status or job and completely release yourself from your ego. Some things that people often drop when they realize they are not themselves include habits that don’t serve them that have simply been picked up from their parents such as arguing to defend your version of reality. Often the most open minded and happy to discuss different ideas people are those that realize they are not their attachments and often when you listen to other with a very open mind you’ll begin to learn and pick up ideas and interesting thoughts you’ve never come across before.
Furthermore building on what has been said by Steve Pavlina you are not your physical body, imagine life is a video game, you move around the world, you do things that raise and lower your state, you experience problems and you find solutions. When you navigate around a video game you of course realize that you are your character in the video game. How about taking on the perspective that you are not your real life character, your name is not what it is and you are simply a free form spirit controlling this physical body. Now you don’t have to be religious or particularly spiritual to experience this shift, just as you don’t have to be religious or spiritual to play a video game, just open your mind to it. Funnily enough many people often give themselves less freedom than a video game and instead choose (albeit unconsciously and influenced by the mass of society) to treat their lives like they are characters in a movie, they don’t get a choice to make, they just follow the movie script of life (go to school, go to uni, get a job, retire, die), and pay little thought to the alternate options they have out there, instead choosing to live a life on rails from start to finish.
So how does this help us? For one thing, when you realize that you are not your physical self, you can feel a sense of relief as you learn that everything that happens to you is merely effecting your physical body. If you are in a state of anger, realize that this is merely a state of fear that is causing you to be angry and you can step back, take a look at your physical self, look at those emotions but from a third perspective and realize what must be done to make them disappear (or more of them if it is a positive emotion you are invoking).
Not only this, but realizing we are not our attachments allows us to be far more open minded in life, you are free to sample and try different religions instead of subscribing to the one that was imposed upon you at birth. You can change careers without worry about being attached to your previous self and previous lifestyle, who said you have to be a wage-slave and you can’t be a rock-star? Society at large did, the same society that are also wage slaves and don’t want anyone else to get ahead. So get out there, be a rock-star do what you want to do and never say can’t, because all in all, you are exactly the same as everyone else and you can learn to be/play guitar/write just as well as anyone else possibly can, you just have to get out there and do it.
If you can’t quite see how living outside your physical body will help you out in life, I urge you to just try doing it for just 30 days. Feel what it is like to live without the attachments of life that hold you back, and see how much different your life is when you can sit back and relax when an emotional storm hits your body. Observe your emotions from the outside and see how they effect you, why they are there, and how they came about, then step back and look at how you can create less (or more) of these emotions in your life.
Have Fun,
– Solace
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