The Basic Situation

We chose to be here. There isn't a problem. From the Gods eye view, all of this is just learning. Everything is spirit doing its thing.

We experience pain because we're filtering God through human physiology. And there is a pain of separation. A feeling of limitation and finitude which is alien. You feel that you should be God, complete and free, but instead you are this little creature, separate and constrained. This is necessary. It's a necessary part of human being, and it's temporary.

You can long for union and liberation, and that's fine. You can even work towards it, with practice and study, prayer and meditation. But your union and liberation is inevitable. At the time of your death, you will be released from separation. So don't waste too much of your precious time here on that longing.

Instead, allow the pain of separation to be with you, as a reminder of who you really are, and move on to the reason you're here. Not to experience oneness, but to act in the field of many.

So here in the field of many, we might come across another kind of suffering. The suffering of "This is not the life I want." The thought "I'll be happy once I have the life I want."

You can be free of this suffering. But not by getting "the life I want." Instead, you free yourself by living a life you value.

First, you have to let go of salvation. There is no salvation. As long as you live, there's no future moment where all the pain will be over.

While you're striving for salvation you will always be disappointed.

There's also no final satisfaction in life. Resting satisfaction from circumstance is balancing a spinning bowling ball on a chopstick.

But this doesn't mean give up. It means give up the hope of salvation, give up the goal of satisfaction. Go towards a life you value and take the satisfaction when it comes. Ironically, it comes more often this way than when you're striving for it directly.

Why do we become fixated on Salvation? Because we feel stuck about living a life of value. We don't know how to live a life of value, because we feel trapped by pain. So we take our hope for a good life and send it out into the future to be cashed in all in one go, in a moment of apotheosis, all pain erased and replaced by the perfect "life I was meant to live".

So instead of freezing your hope in a vision of a future perfect life, what should you do? Learn to move in directions you value right now, and work with the pain you previously felt was trapping you.

The pain isn't trapping you, your helplessness in the face of the pain is trapping you. The thought "This pain stops me from doing what I want to do", is actually the thing stopping you.

Not the pain. The thought.

And not even the thought! It's just believing the thought that stops you. You can have the thought "This pain stops me from doing what I want to do" all day long, but as long as you don't believe it, it can't stop you! And you don't have to believe it.

Start acting in the face of the pain, use good tools to work with the difficult experiences that come up, and your life will rapidly improve. Satisfaction will come when it comes, and the salvation you were hoping for will reveal itself, not as a future release, but as the ground of your life in every moment.

I'm so glad you're here xxx

Shoutout to Steven C. Hayes for the language “living a life you value“ and other formulations from ACT, and also shoutout to the Buddha.

Mountain photo by Benjamin Voros