Saturday, April 29: Being Human and Free

BEING HUMAN
To be truly human we need to be able to do things in more than one way. Huh? We need to have options, choices, when we go about something or when we react to something.

Such as.

Three or more ways to sit in a chair. One way, and we are a robot. Two ways, and we are flip flop robot. Three ways, and we are free.

Three ways to walk down the street. Ohmygod. What would that mean? Try it and see.

Three ways to get ourselves to sleep at night.

Three ways to prepare a meal. Three ways to eat our meal. Three ways to answer the phone. Three ways to say hello. Three ways to say goodbye. Three ( or ten) ways to say., “Thank you.”

Three ways to get out of unhappiness. Are there three? There are more. One is to come into the present. Real presence can’t suffer. Two, is to choose to be happy, which isn’t that easy, but being a robot is always easier, and since so few people know how to simple chose to be happy, we should we? Three, is to examine our unhappiness: as sensation: what does it feel like (this is coming into the present, actually, but with the shift to curiosity: what do the sensations of this unhappiness feel like. If that is more interesting to us than attaching to our unhappiness, then we can begin to come free). Four is to examine the thoughts underneath our unhappiness, which, of course is the route of the Work of Byron Katie.

Five is to get honest with ourselves. Are we willing to leave our unhappiness behind, or are we committed to it, some strange “right” we have to maintain our feeling bad.

This is not to say we should never feel bad, but this is a sixth way out: to chose how long we want to feel bad and how much.

Or we can keep being a robot, pretending that unhappiness is some cosmic outside force, not something that we are choosing and creating. La, la. Life goes on.