Last night, husband and I had theoretical reflections about many things including the “self.”  One of the questions was why do we have a constant need in life?  Why do we have these constant desires to fulfill our lives in doing including helping, giving, acquiring, achieving? My answer is because we don’t know who we really are.  We don’t have a sense of being rooted in life which is our nature.  Though we are called human beings, most of us are human doings.  This is why we have so many people looking for the others as saviors to help them complete their sense of self.  This is why we go through life searching for a sense of specialness that operates on the level of “better than” or “more than” or “me, the special one.”  This is our purpose in life: to strengthen our egoic sense of self.  And it may be the motivating force behind our actions in whatever we do. 

So we live in fear that other may be more superior than we are.  We invest so heavily on our sense of self by constant comparing, analyzing, labeling, judging, complaining, blaming, and attacking others so that we can strengthen the “me.”  We complain about life situations and people.  “This shouldn’t be happening….” When we complain about something or somebody, we feel that we are right and the other person and situation we are complaining about is wrong.  There is always this precarious sense of self and love being right.   So we are constantly in a conflict relationships with things, situations, other people, and even ourselves.  We cannot be happy with ourselves because something that happened in the past that preventing us from being ourselves truly or something hasn’t happened yet. 

When we can not achieve the specialness in the way we want, we achieve a reverse specialness by feeling unfairly treated by life.  By feeling that we are victims of certain people or situations, we feel very special.  So we can still win even if we loose.  After five minutes of meeting a stranger, this person knows our whole life stories.  “Do you know what he did to me three years ago…..” We build our specialness around the suffering that happened or even is happening in our lives and imprison ourselves behind the bars that we erect.    But at least we have a story that says our lives treat us “more” unfairly than most people, at least we have the feeling of “more than.”   See how clever we are?

“What is God?  The eternal One life underneath all the forms of life.  What is love?  To feel the presence of that One life deep within all creatures.  To be it.  Therefore, all love is the love of God.”    -Eckhart Tolle

“Take no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things itself.”

“Nobody who puts his hands to the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” 

What message(s) do you think the above readings are sending us?   

We tend to think that we know what we’re talking about when the word God is use.  And we use it with great conviction too.  We argue with others as if we know what God is.  Then we form our own beliefs and assert them into others.  We say, “Our God is the only true God and your God is false.  He-She-It is the absolute Truth. ” God has become a close concept, a mental idol.  We have a mental image of what or who God is.  Perhaps not the man with the white beard but still a mental representation of someone or something outside us and a male figure of someone or something.  We judge, classify, condemn, and hurt others because they don’t share the same mental image of God like we do.  We separate ourselves from those that are not in agreement with our beliefs.

Do you believe in God or do you know God?  Is the mental concept of God a help or a hinderance in enabling you to experience that toward which it points?  Where does God points?

The question of meaning and purpose come in our lives when we rise above mere survival.  Many of us share life meaning in hopes for freedom and expansion that prosperity promises.  Others have already enjoyed the freedom that comes with prosperity and discovered even that is not enough to give meaning to their lives.  When we are confronted with it, most of us find meaning and purpose in the forms of doing and of future.  We may find meaning in caring for our families, helping others, being successful, winning or making it. But most of what we find in our search for life’s purpose in doing is only temporary.  We may notice that these alone seem to be relatively unstable, impermanence, and sooner or later, they will lead to suffering. 

For example, if caring for our families gives meaning to our lives, what happens to that meaning when our spouse decided to divorce us? What happens to that meaning when our children don’t need us and perhaps don’t even listen to us any more?   If helping others gives meaning to our lives, then we depend on others being worst off than we are so that our lives can continue to be meaningful and we can feel good about ourselves?  If the desire to excel, win, and succeed at some activities provide us with meaning, what if we achieved these goals?  Does this mean that our meaning of life is coming to an end?  What if we never win or our winning comes to an end one day (and it will), do we look back at our memories for meager meaning in our lives?   Making it in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are millions of others don’t make it, so we need other human being to fail so our lives can have meaning?