Taking Things Absolutely is Harmful (174)

Why We Suffer

In life we suffer for many reasons. One of those reasons is because we take things as an absolute. By ‘things’ we basically mean the words of other people and the outcomes of the various events of our life.

What Does “in an absolute way” Mean?

The best way to describe what “in an absolute” way means, is to give you an example. However before we do, we would like to say that in a general sense to take something “in an absolute way” means to take something small that relates to small aspect of our life as the whole of ourselves.

The Example

When we for example, are told in a harsh tone that we are “useless at time management” we may suffer, by feeling sad, anxious, humiliated, low or even angry and filled with the desire to convince the person that they are wrong. A very powerful factor behind this suffering especially the feeling of anxiety is that we see that we believe the person’s words that we are bad and then we assume ourselves as a whole or as an absolute factor to be bad. In other words we let something small that only pertains to a facet of ourselves to spread and take over our whole feeling or perception of ourselves.

The Truth

The truth is that we have many facets to our life and any judgement that we may make of ourselves and for that matter any judgement that others make about us only pertain to an aspect of our life. Even if a person makes a general overall statement about us, it is still only because of one aspect of our life is good or bad. Usually people make such statements when we did something belonging to a certain aspect our and their life that they didn’t agree with. Other people can experience us as a whole, they only experience us in a certain circumstance and aspect of our life.

We are definitely not all bad! The truth is we have our weaknesses or defects and our strengths or good points. Everyone is like that, even the worst criminal has some good points.

What do you think? Is that true? We are definitely not all bad? We can assume ever that we are totally rotten to the core useless or bad. If we do then we guaranteed will suffer!

The other aspect to this truth, is that any judgment is relative, meaning that any judgement that we make of ourselves or others make about us is a comparison. Compared to something or someone else we are not so good. But compared to someone else or something else we are quite good. So we can never allow ourselves to believe in overall judgments whether others make them or we make them about ourselves.

Applying the Truth

If we really understand the points mentioned above we must use this understanding to stop ourselves from taking things in an absolute way. That is to stop ourselves from forming an overall identity of ourselves equal to the value expressed in others judgments or our own judgements about ourselves.

Identification

The problem with identity is that it can only ever be one and it represents the whole of ourselves. For example we can only ever be one nationality at a given point in time, or we can’t be a women and a man at the same time. So we really have to be careful when we identify ourselves we something, because that can very easily lead to suffering.

In life people identify themselves with some many silly things. The best thing to do is to find out who we really, truly, fundamentally are and then allow that to be our identity.

Summary

In summary, it is important to know that we ourselves always assign ourselves some sort of identity. In other words we are always thinking that we are something, that “I am this or that”. The point is to not believe in that statement that we make in our mind that we are something bad. Why, you may ask.

The reason is that the truth is we are not bad as a whole but bad only say in a certain aspect of life. Of course everything can be corrected and so if we work at improving this aspect of our life we will become so to speak good in that area. So never allow yourself to believe overall, absolute statements about yourself. The only absolute statement we can know to be true about ourselves is what we really are and that is a spiritual esoteric matter which I am planning to write about in the future so stay tuned.

I would also like to say that we have to be very tough with ourselves at times in not allowing ourselves to believe in an identity that others form for us or we form for ourselves. We have to drum those truths deep into our mind until we believe them in the deeper subconscious levels of our mind.

End (174).