Consciousness work does not only aim to make you transcending your believes about what you currently think to be and identify with but it has also tangible implications to improve your life as a human being. It allows you to conduct your life in a much more grounded way turning fear, stress, anxiety, negative emotions into a tool to help you achieving anything you want. In this post I would like to stress the fact that awakening is a unique and fundamental path to achieve anything you want in this earthly life because of your infinite potential.
“Why are you unhappy?
Because 99,9% of everything you think
and of everything you do
is for yourself – and there isn’t one
-Wei Wu Wei-
We all want to be someone, right? We all fight and sweat daily to achieve something we have in mind to give our own contribution in this society or simply to feel good with our self. We invest most of our own youth in shaping our unique personality, to become someone that makes the difference within the environment we live and work, someone that receives validation from others or simply someone we feel proud to be. No one can deny how much it feels good to be awarded and to be recognized as someone that is having an impact in whatever field we commit to. It feels good to have achieved something regardless all the difficulties and obstacles, something that looks like a miracle looking back from where we once started.
At the contrary we are all a bit reluctant to swallow the bitter pill of being considered zero, nothing. Our first reaction is of denial, blaming, anger. We refuse to be zero because zero brings in our mind words like failure, flop, loser, nullity. Nothing and zero are retained in our society as a disease to be cure as fast as possible because those people will never contribute to anything within society. Better to get rid of them.
Is it really so?
It is not uncommon to hear about people struggling all their life in achieving whatever goal they fixed in their mind in a moment of euphoria. Everyone knows that having an idea is one thing, but to be able to actualized it requires another level of commitment. Even the most stubborn person sometime gets discouraged from all the ups and downs that a long term goal implies along the way deciding eventually to quit to invest in something easier or more affordable. Some people are not even able to set a goal because they are so busy and lost with their negative emotions, messed up relationships, depression, fear, anxiety, busy mind, lack of passion and motivation, laziness that cannot focus on nothing else. Other people are just pleased in being and staying in their comfy situation, they do not really want to push themselves to the next level because it is too risky. “You know what you leave behind you but you never know what you will get”, they say. How many people do you know (maybe you are one of them), claiming that they would like to have a change in their life, that they would like to do this and that but they never do it? They are blocked by negative thoughts, by fear, by incertitude, by the inability to make a long term commitment.
It is important to realize that fear or any other negative or positive emotions present in each of us are not casual experiences. They have a precise purpose, that is, your survival as a biological entity. Let’s take boredom as an example. Everyone dislike to be bored, it sucks. We want to move, to take action, to build up something concrete in our life and we miss the importance of boredom in this process. If the experience “boredom” was not present in our set of emotions you would probably sit all day watching TV and eating chips. Any emotions we have as a human being, even the most terrible and painful one, have their purpose and should be recognized and accepted as a gift that allows us to move on. However, in most of the case we are unable to live life from this perspective and emotions simply overwhelm us. We are run by them rather than using them as a push to achieve anything we want. We become their victim and target. We become their slave and as I mentioned before, we are stuck in our mind and nothing concrete ever happens. Why is that? Because we are unaware of our true potential, we are unaware of what we can do. We are like a a superhero that has no control over his super powers ending up making disaster after disaster. And believe it or not fear and other emotions are just some of our superpower, we just do not know how to use them.
So, what can you do?
There are thousands of self-help books available to teach you what you should do to use these emotions as an ally, books that help you to transform your life in a more productive way, books that show you how to overcome your blockages. All these books might have their functionality but they lack, in my opinion, the existential foundation to build up a long term transformation. What all these books are doing is just shuffling cards without getting to the core of the problem. This approach will never give you a solid ground to allow a real and durable change of your current situation. All these books are based on the premise that you are someone that is currently sad, depressed, stuck, fearful and they try to make you someone happy, successful, brave. This approach might work for a while but as long as you take as a cold fact that you are someone, you will always operate from survival mode. And the survival mode is not a stable ground to build up a conscious and happy life. It is a shaky ground and behind the corner you will sooner or later face some threat that will put upside down your new fresh happy identity. As long as you identify yourself to be someone, automatically some features and labels get attached to this new identity and as soon as this happens you are kept in check.
And you already know what will keep you frozen: the same fear and negative emotions and thoughts that have being blocking you for most of your life. They might present in different forms or dresses but they will catch you no matter which disguise you have decided to dress. As long as you construct your foundation on which to build whatever you want on the assumption to be someone, you are in a unstable situation. It is like building a skyscraper on a ground made out of sand. It will not last long. Fear and incertitude will make you desist because it is the safest thing to do, it is what you need to do to survive.
How can fear and negative emotions always find you no matter how good you are in changing your dress? "How come bad things always happen to me!", we say. Because you are that that among all powers has the ability to create all these emotions. You will never be able to shake off your fears as long as you do not understand you are creating them! And until you do not realize you are the creator of emotions (among many other things), it will look as if emotions happen to you making your life a permanent struggle.
We are used to label as crazy people that society decides to shut inside insane asylum, whereas the real crazy ones are the one outside, totally unaware of what they are doing in their life, puppets pushed here and there by forces they have no control of. This craziness that infests all our individual and social life is accepted and generally shared so it becomes normality. Funny eh? Awakening will move you on the other side of the coin, you will become the crazy one even though you will eventually feel you have not been as healthy as never before by becoming directly conscious of what you and reality is.
And I want to spoil the all story for you, even though it will not make any difference for you simply hearing that. Your mind will just not either listen or accept what I am going to say. You are literally Nothing (capital letter meant), you are Zero (capital letter meant). Not that exciting eh? Why should I embark myself on a journey that might last years just to finally discover that I am Nothing or Zero? That is real craziness. As I said at the beginning of this post we spend all our life to be first, second even third but please not zero. That is not even classifiable. Let me be whoever at this point but please not Nothing.
What is so special in discovering being Nothing or Zero?
In mathematical terms, have you ever contemplated that zero is what makes possible any other number to exist? Positive or negative numbers could not exist without a “space” from which to arise. Zero is the ground that has no ground, something that cannot be pointed, something difficult to grasp by mind but that contains within it all the potential to create infinite numbers like a magic hat. Not only from zero everything else can arise, but everything that arise contains and it is made out of zero. Zero is at the same time the context that allows some content (numbers) to arise and the content as well: indeed zero is present in every number, it is just invisible, hidden. Not much attention and validation is given to zero but it is what makes possible the existence of any other number. The same can be applied to Nothing. Nothing is not the absence of something but that which allows everything else to appear. It is the space in the room that no one notice but without it no object could make its appearance.
As usual I want to be clear that this is not philosophy but I am talking about the reality you live in and about you. All the objects, stars, animals, people, the entire Universe is Zero or Nothing, but it is mislead as being something. Magically, this Nothing that is the only thing that exists seems to be something and you, as a human, are part of this illusion.
You might wonder which is the advantage to become conscious of being Nothing? Well apart of being an incredible and speechless “experience” that per se is priceless, I can also point to some more “material” benefits that will change in the long run your life as a human. Discovering that you are this infinite container that has no shape or any feature and that within you reside an infinite potential to create anything you want is pretty mind blowing. I cannot guarantee for sure, but I am ready to bet that great historical characters had figured out this Truth. People like Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein and many others had probably realized that there was no limitation in what might be created. You, as a human, becoming conscious of this Truth can contribute to society in infinite ways just by setting free your own creativity and stopping putting limitations where there are not limits at all (unless created). Cannot you see that you are potentially capable of doing and creating anything and that limitations only come from you? And the funny and paradoxical aspect of this situation is that it has to be in this way! Being someone that has infinite potential in creation means also that you are also able to create your own limits. If you could not create limitations it would mean your nature is limited. The problem is that most of are stuck in this process because we are unaware of our potential and how it works. But becoming conscious of our true nature we become able to not interfere with our own creative process. It does not matter what it is, the point is that there a no limitation of what can be created because you are the creator that can create something out of Nothing, out of yourself. It is not amazing and magical all this?
How many great ideas you came up with during your day or during an entire year but you never achieved because you have created obstacles out of you? Are these obstacles really there or you just think so?
My initial assertion that "it does not matter how many self books you will read because eventually you will get stuck" is based on the fact that you have not grasped the fact that you are the Nothing out of which anything can be actualized and externalized. You have not realized your amazing potential and you are bound to create disaster. If you keep thinking to be someone specific but just in a different disguise you have created right here the limitation that makes your life miserable. You created it, no one else. But by knowing you are Nothing, you understand that not only obstacles and limitations are created by you but also fear and any negative emotions and this is a powerful realization to change your human life in better because from now on you will be able to use them rather than being used by them.
The revolutionary approach that consciousness work offers is that it aims not to give you commandments to follow but the awareness to be that out of which anything is possible. Unlike religions or any other tradition, consciousness work does not limit you, does not make you feel guilty, does not promise you anything, does not judge or blame any of your action, does not tell you what you should or should not do. It simply give you to be the ground to create anything you want by "pointing to" what you are. No matter which is your profession, this realization will increase your creativity and productivity making real anything you have in mind.
What do I wish for you? My wish for you is to be literally Nothing, Zero, to realize to be that out of which any creation is possible. My wish for you is to realize you are the Nothing out of which both something and nothing (up to you) can be created. My wish for you is to stop creating limitations and obstacles along your path and to start consciously creating something you deeply care about. My wish for you is to not blame, suppress or deny fear and negative emotions but to use them as a tool to construct whatever you love to do, to move yourself to the next level.
Thanks for reading!