Acceptance Is the Opposite of Arrogance
Shortly before becoming a convinced Steemian I wrote a story about my experience with craniosacral therapy. Today, when walking in the forest nearby, I started remembering the experience again. The overall stress in my body started to fade away. A great acceptance appeared instead.
What happened there? To put it simply, I started listening. It made me laugh how arrogant and ignorant we can be.
I could see how my mind and the everyday experience in general works. How I am assuming I know how to do this and that and I know the best what needs be done. Today, in the forest, I was trying to relax hard when I noticed that I am actually telling my body to relax like I know exactly how to do it. I discovered that what I am doing is actually completely upside down. I was told to stop, calm the mind, be silent and listen. Let the body speak, let the forest speak, let the whole universe speak. Invert the flow! Move to the receiving side!
What a simple yet great discovery! It turned my inner arrogance into great acceptance at that moment.
Later on I checked what the word arrogance actually means, where it comes from. Going all back to Latin, it is based on arrogō, which also means to assume. This made me laugh again, because it was fitting the situation too well. From my perspective, to be stressed about anything means to not accept the situation as it is. And we do not accept the situation as it is because we assume we know better how it should be. Then we feel the urge to change things, to fight the reality. And that creates the inner tension.
To invert the flow and let the present moment come close means to weaken the ego, to stop assuming and start listening. Then the acceptance can come and the space is open for any stress to melt and go away.
So really, just try to listen. Go to the receiving side. Be the most stupid creature in the world. Be taught by everything around and inside. Then you will stop being arrogant and a great peace will come.
Picture by James Cattlett
I agree with the first sentence, but I do not think the problem is that we feel the urge to change things. We absolutely are capable of figuring out a better way for things to be, and it is perfectly good and right that we act (within moral boundaries) to improve our situations.
The problem is that we dwell on what's wrong with now, and perhaps what we could've done differently in the past, or just complaining like the world is set against us.
It's critical that we accept and understand a situation and what caused it, without tainting our understanding with emotional/egoic attachments. But from there we should act to improve our situation based on a correct understanding.
I basically meant the same thing, yours is just a clearer and more generic formulation, thanks :-)
Glad to hear it. There's a group of people advocating a form of solipsism these days, saying all we can or should do is accept reality, perhaps understand it, but not attempt to change it. That's not only self-destructive, it plays directly into the hands of the subversives peddling that ideology. I wanted to make sure what you said didn't lead someone to that conclusion. :)
Definitely a good point. It is possible to slip to the side you mentioned pretty easily. But as S. N. Goenka said, most of the teachings are not supposed to make you into a piece of vegetable, but rather the other way around :-)
You should definitely try to do something with your life. You can spend countless hours and days just watching the world, discovering the beauties, which is great, but IMO you will inevitably notice that there is something missing in this approach to life and the time will come when you will be forced to step out. Or at least some people are lucky enough to be forced to step out :-)
This is really powerful! Thanks for the read.
Recently I've listened to the audiobook Ego is the Enemy (also in Kindle) from Ryan Holliday.Your post resembles the book and reminded me to "weaken the ego".Thank you for sharing your experience!
Good post...how long have you been on steemit?
You can see for yourself: https://steemit.com/@void ;-)
Short but powerfull
We have to stop a moment to reach such a reflection