We Are Taught, Yet We Do Not Understand
When we are being raised and educated, we are simply told how to behave. This is right and this is wrong. The Ten Commandments have been around for quite some time for this very purpose yet they did not prevent people from murdering each other. Nowadays you can be told that ecology is important, but who cares really? We can be asking ourselves what lies behind this behaviour.
People are taught how to behave, so why not simply follow the advice? The thing is, they don’t understand the reason on a deeper level. I shall not murder? Seems legit. But what is the motivation really except that it is a bad thing to do?
It is actually pretty simple. It turns out that by doing bad things it is primarily you that is suffering and experiencing negativity. And this is why you should be concerned about what you are doing every day and where you are heading. It is not really for someone else to be happy.
This needs to be experienced on the actual level. It cannot be taught. This is the main idea behind vipassana, where you observe the reality as it is. When practicing vipassana, you automatically stop doing stupid things not because you are told not to do them, but because you start feeling that you would be harming yourself inside. And who would enjoy doing that?
Now, I am aware that you may object to the whole idea by saying that some criminals don’t regret at all what they have done. It seems that they don’t mind stealing, perhaps they don’t even mind killing. I am not a psychologist to be able to fully analyse such individuals, but the fact that they look perfectly fine still doesn’t mean that they are not suffering inside. They may be just not conscious about it. Actually Mr. S. N. Goenka started teaching vipassana in correction facilities with success.
Taking this to the extreme, there are indeed people that live almost like animals, just using their instincts and surviving from one day to another. But I don’t think that is how a happy life looks like, to downgrade back to being an animal, so I am not that concerned about this case. It is pretty hard to imagine that this would be the path to enlightenment.
Now let’s just try to step back and see the big picture. It seems like walking on the path of self-development is not a linear process. Trying to approach things directly doesn’t always work as illustrated above. It is not enough to know, you need to understand. And it is not always clear how to reach the understanding of a particular matter. You just experience the moment when something clicks in your head and that’s it. You don’t know why and how, but suddenly you understand.
This all just brings me back to the topic of finding your true self, finding what your unique nature as a human being is and where you stand as a part of the whole universe. My experience is that looking for your true self makes you realise everything important for life. So the task seems to be simple. Start looking for your true self, everything else will come as a side-effect. That is why people reaching certain level don’t need to be taught about ecology. Not harming the nature becomes absolutely obvious at one point.
Looks like everything is indeed there already. When walking the path of self-development, we are only finding things that are already there, that are natural. We only need to re-discover them consciously since they are hidden, waiting within, buried under all the layers of what we have been told.
Craniosacral therapy that I have been studying also helped me to realise this. When practicing, the body of the patient is just being supported to remember again the state of pure health that it already knows so that it can go back to that natural state, to the equilibrium.
You see, it is not actually about what is good and what is bad. It is about stepping out and discovering the nature of life for yourself. Taking this road is not an easy task, but for me it is the greatest adventure.
This is what being spiritual is all about for me.