Hi,
This is Guy,
And in the short story we just had about Paul,
His sunglasses,
And the seasickness,
We came upon what we can call the first secret of self-release.
And here it is.
Our experience of life is determined by how we see it.
Pretty simple in one way.
And how we see life is determined each moment by what we are looking at it through.
There are many times when we believe we see the world right,
But fail to see,
As Paul was amazed to discover,
That our view of the world has been colored,
Compromised,
Without our knowing it.
In Paul's case,
What he couldn't see is that the very thing he was using to see his world through,
Meaning his green tinted aviator lenses,
Was one of the conspirators in creating his seasickness.
Once the captain was able to show him the actual cause of his unhappy condition,
His condition changed instantly.
And so to help clarify one last important point,
Let's put ourselves in Paul's place to see what we can learn from it.
Imagine all the steps Paul must have taken during those first three and a half days at sea,
Looking for some release from feeling seasick.
We can name them drugs,
Naps,
Special foods,
Exercises,
Affirmations,
Even possibly prayers.
Maybe he even spent precious energies resenting some friend of his who told him the best thing for his stress was to go on a luxury cruise and to get some much needed rest and relaxation.
Right.
Here's the point.
Nothing Paul could have turned to for relief had a chance of working for him because,
As the good captain's intervention revealed,
What Paul really needed was to be released from a misperception,
Not relieved of the symptoms it was causing.
Look,
Let's take a moment here to consider this critical difference between searching for relief from some persistent trouble and being released from it all together.
Relief from something means its essential cause remains intact,
Even if temporarily abated.
To be released from any problem,
We have to face it to resolve its effect and cause.
We find it natural to seek relief from the world around us,
A world appearing to be one stronghold atop another of stressful conditions and anxiety-producing events.
Accordingly,
We seek relief from these contentment-crushing states by struggling to change those circumstances that we see as being responsible for the way that we feel.
Think of all the ways we've attempted to escape those unwanted pressures,
The stress we find ourselves feeling in those same moments.
But experience tells another story.
The more we struggle to change or escape these stressful states of ours,
The only thing that really seems to change is the new conditions we now see as being the cause of our continuing stress.
Then it must continue in this way until we realize the truth of one central idea,
A realization that leads to our release.
Let's take it slowly.
What we actually need is not new forms of relief from these perceived stressful places in our life,
But rather to be released from our own unconscious nature that is secretly creating what we have been blaming all along as being the situation responsible for the stress that we feel.
So let's examine this inner discovery using different terms.
Stress and all of its negative relatives,
Including impatience,
Anxiety,
Frustration and anger,
Are the self-wrecking effects of first seeing and then embracing a false or incomplete view of reality imposed upon us by our own presently unenlightened nature.
Now the good news here is that the stress-producing self that thrives in this inner shadowland disappears when the lights come on.
And that's our task,
To bring about much needed light into our own developing consciousness.
And as we do,
All of the conflict-creating creatures hiding therein have no choice but to depart.
And real victory,
Victory over the pain of stress,
Comes to us in proportion to the amount of light we bring to bear within ourselves.
And since there is no end to this kind of healing light,
There is no end to how bright and free we can be from stress.
It will help if we pause here just a moment to summarize our findings up to this point.
The basic cause,
The core of all true spiritual teachings,
If you will,
Is that the inner determines the outer.
What this timeless idea means to us relative to our study on how to succeed in life without stress is that what we receive from life,
In other words our experience of our self moment to moment,
Is in fact determined by how we perceive the events unfolding around us.
And lastly,
That how we perceive these life moments is a creation of which parts of ourselves in that moment see our life through.
Paul was looking at the people around him through green glasses and was getting sick because it told him they were sick.
We see life through a certain set of lenses that tells us what it means to be successful.
And when we can't succeed according to the images we're identified with,
Then we begin to be sick with stress because we think that what we are seeing in that moment is the fact of life and it's not.
Real facts about stress free us from the stress we have.
So a simple example of this internal dynamic and how it colors our world is seen in those moments when,
As simply as it can be said,
We're in a dark state of mind.
No matter how bright the day,
All we see around us is gloom and doom.
All we feel is stress and anxiety because something is showing us the day ahead of us that we just have to get through in the way we imagine we need to do.
And that's why until we realize this inner relationship between those parts of ourselves perceiving life and our experience as a result of their unconscious interplay,
We'll just keep seeing our stressful condition as something brought to bear upon us by a dark and uncaring world around us.
I assure you there is another way to meet every moment stress free.
