Spiritual Search and Destroy

Spiritual Search and Destroy

Free will. Freedom of choice. Free speech. What do you think about that? If you are like most of us, you talk about these freedoms as a right, but don’t much exercise them. It’s how our brains are wired. And if we do nothing to change it, there we sit.

Most of our thoughts are habit-thoughts. We think the same thought over and over and over for decades, like driving the same route home, like rain carving a runnel into stone.

In order that we might really have freedom of choice, free will, free speech, we have to practice every single day. And how do I do that?

Why do I choose? What else might be true? How could I do this differently?

Choosing to be aware is crucial and fundamental. When I start paying attention to where I am, what I’m doing, and what I’m thinking and feeling, my life will change. I totally mean it. For someone like me, who was always in my head, this change was earthshaking. For one thing, I stopped whacking into stuff, cutting my fingers in the kitchen, and bumping stuff with my car. For another thing, I started to notice that I really was thinking the same stuff over and over. That made me act the same way over and over. No wonder I was having such a hard time making changes in my life.

On the one hand, routines are super important. They make the tasks we want done easy to accomplish. Tacking a new behavior at the end of a routine makes adding that new habit pretty easy. It’s why I stuck my qigong practice onto my getting ready for bed routine.

On the other hand, making what we believe of others a habit, making our opinions habit without review, making arguments with our family or friends or coworkers a habit, making our political and religious beliefs a habit, does not serve us.

Sticking with our old habit-thoughts keeps us stuck. To paraphrase an old saw, “if you always think what you’ve always thunk, nothing ever changes.”

I don’t want to be an adolescent 40 year old person, and yet we see them all the time. Even sadder is seeing adults throwing temper tantrums, whining, pouting, being mean, stuck in little kid behavior for decades, and wondering why they aren’t happier, and blaming us because they are stuck in an antique rut.

There’s another old saw I like, “If if works, don’t fix it.” But here’s the caveat: It may have worked when I was 20, but maybe it’s not working all that well now that I’m 50. I need to slow down enough, become aware enough, to notice. And if it’s not working, I need to dump it.

At the bottom of it all, a lot of our ideas, our notions, and beliefs, were formed when we were really really little ones. I’ve started to think of them as “fixed delusions.” I used to believe that I was the center of the universe. I shed that fixed delusion, and came to believe that I am a divine and infinite being. Now, if that’s the case, I can afford to be kind and loving, I have compassion for everyone, I can be generous, I can also make sure that I take care of myself, and one way to do that is to look for, and shed, my fixed delusions. I like to exercise my brain and my body. Search and destroy missions for fixed delusions is a nice spiritual exercise that will bring me startlingly nice results.

How have I changed from operating from childish beliefs to living from a place of true free will?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 121422013

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