Choosing to Not Indulge Our Minds

I think we all have splits, to one degree or another, in our personalities. Part of us wants one thing while another part wants something else. We may want a bowl of ice cream, yet we may eschew that bowl of ice cream because of how we might feel it will impact our health or appearance. We may want to lay in bed for another hour in the morning, yet we want also to get up and tackle some nagging item on our to-do list. We are confronted with countless situations in our daily lives which challenge our sense of clarity or conviction. What do we really want? How do we find that which is the best path forward?

There is a tendency that almost all of us have to indulge one part of our personality or another rather than acting from a more unified place. We become identified with just one part of our personality at any given point in time and then we act as if that perspective is our only perspective. As another example, we all have a part of our personality that is fearful and another that is more confident and courageous. Depending on which voice may be dominant at a given moment in time, we will act within a situation in vastly different ways. We may choose to embark on an adventure or remain within the comfort and familiarity of home; We may choose to start a public creative endeavor or we may remain unexposed and thus protected from potential external impacts; We may choose to listen to and trust in our hearts in relationship or retreat from contact and potential vulnerability.

The fascinating part to me is how we give a single part of our personality all the power over a given situation or a decision. This feels very much like an indulgence, like the placating of an unruly child. We allow ourselves to be given over to one voice or another, neither of which may speak from a place of that which is really true.

What we often neglect to see is that there is a unified perspective of ourselves we can hold, which takes all aspects of our personality into account and doesn’t give any of them absolute power. We can either hold ourselves as an integrated being, capable of witnessing all the warring, puerile, confident and at times extravagantly emotional parts of our personality, or we can bounce from one inner voice to another, much as it would be like to play table tennis with oneself, racing back and forth from one side of the table to another. As we recognize ourselves to be something other than our personality, something beyond, something far more simple, something far more true, we can begin to act from the place of that integrated being. We can sidestep, getting out of the way of our minds, and stand in the truth of who and what we are, allowing paths and decisions to naturally unfold. I’m now understanding a little more what Mooji said to me when I inquired with him in India back in 2009 when he said “nothing is greater than that which is unfolding by itself.” How simple yet how true.