Accepting What We Can’t Change
Accepting What We Can’t Change
by Dr. Lynn
To accept what life hands us on a moment to moment basis in a state of quietude, without emotion, with the ability to transcend is probably the most difficult path of being human. We all attach ourselves to life through emotions, cravings, greed, ego, pride, and conceit. We are terrified to fail, to hurt, and to die. In fact our three greatest fears (from which all other fears arise) are fear of not being loved, fear of rejection, and fear of dying. If we could accept our worse possible fear from a place of balance and understanding we would soon realize that all of life is simply an opportunity to grow and learn. Life is meant to be a spiritually learning path made possible through earthly interactions. The risk of not living fully presents a far greater failure.
Finding balance and accepting life as it presents it self to us is the path of yoga. Life is seen as an opportunity to gain wisdom. Our only true goal in this earthly life is the attainment of wisdom. For in the end it is all that we have as we depart.
Wisdom can not be found without the ability to live and take the risk of living. Take love for instance. Without taking the risk to love and be loved we miss a tremendous opportunity in life. If the worse should happen and we should lose the love or not be loved in return, we at least have known love and knowing love is a wonderful part of the human experience.
To accept with balance we must learn to detach from the emotionality of attachment, control, and fear. To detach means that we are able to sit quietly and observe what comes into and out of our lives with a joy that transcends the emotionality of anger, greed, deceit, and pride. Void of the emotionality we are able to let go by accepting and thereby gain insight and knowledge rather than getting lost in fear and anger. Life becomes a process for learning. We realize that the only way to know true love is to know the opposite. We can never know a thing until we know the opposing force. A thing only has meaning as it relates to it’s opposite. So joy and sadness are both opportunities to learn and experience and it is from learning and experience that wisdom is gained.
Love & Light,
♥Angel Love♥
Question: What is forgiveness? Are forgiveness and compassion identical? To forgive another may be possible, but is it not necessary to forgive oneself?
Krishnamurti: What is forgiveness? And when do you forgive? And is forgiveness ever necessary? I have hurt you; you store that hurt. Either time heals it, or you deliberately set about cultivating forgiveness. First you store the hurt; you accumulate it; you guard it, and later on, you forgive. But if there was no storing, there would be no necessity for forgiveness.
Is not forgiveness different from compassion? Can a man who is hurt and is forgiving – can he ever know compassion? Surely love is a state in which there is no hurt. Hurt exists only, does it not, when the ‘me’ is dominant in that love, when I am expecting something in that love. When I want to be loved, in that love I am still the dominant factor. When the ‘me’ or the ‘I’ is wanting – “I want to be loved,” “I want to be looked after,” “I miss the person” – I am still the center, and that center gets hurt or pleased; and when it gets hurt, it stores it up; and later on, it forgives, according to pressure, interference, influences, fears. Is compassion a state in which the ‘me’ – the center, the ego, the self – is ever conscious of itself being compassionate? In compassion is consciousness of the ‘me’ necessary?
When you know that you are compassionate, when you are conscious that you are compassionate, is that compassion? When you know you are forgiving, is that forgiveness? And the moment I am conscious of virtue, is that virtue? So, does not the conscious act of forgiveness, of being hurt, the conscious act, does it not strengthen the entity, the ‘me’, that is always gathering, always accumulating, comparing, judging, weighing? And can such an entity ever be free, ever know what it is to love, what it is to be compassionate? Please find out for yourself, don’t listen to my words.
What is it to be compassionate? Please find out for yourself, feel it out, whether a mind that is hurt, that can be hurt, can ever forgive. Can a mind that is capable of being hurt ever forgive? And can such a mind which is capable of being hurt, which is cultivating virtue, which is conscious of generosity, can such a mind be compassionate? Compassion, as love, is something which is not of the mind. The mind is not conscious of itself as being compassionate, as loving. But the moment you forgive consciously, the mind is strengthening its own center in its own hurt. So the mind which consciously forgives can never forgive; it does not know forgiveness; it forgives in order not to be further hurt.
So it is very important to find out why the mind actually remembers, stores away. Because, the mind is everlastingly seeking to aggrandize itself, to become big, to be something. When the mind is willing not to be anything, to be nothing, completely nothing, then in that state there is compassion. In that state there is neither forgiveness nor the state of hurt, but to understand that, one has to understand the conscious development of the ‘me’ – the ‘me’ that is growing, becoming big, virtuous, respectable, the ‘me’ that is ultimately going to find god . That is, one has to understand the emphasis on the self, the cultivation of the self, the ego, whether one places that ego on the higher level or on the lower level.
So, as long as there is the conscious cultivation of any particular influence, any particular virtue, there can be no love, there can be no compassion because love and compassion are not the result of conscious effort.
:love:
was I not give life, to enjoy and experience my emotions. . though yes, it amazes me how this socity forcess its
youth to sit till their brains flat line
why the silence, why the empty, let us dance till it kiss the past from our present through the music we make.
an we not simply let ourselves be, listen to our body talk, universe is pretty quick to share, the longing of its soul purrpose . . . innately programmed as we each are . . We are born acceptive of ourselves. it is schooled out of us through every time we are corrected. or hear some, and know, we do not measure up , , , , yes, sink sink sink through all the layers of. . . it like watching the silt settle in still waters . . all clarifyes in light, lest
ahhh love, so much silence in the music i hear, when i am not listening, for it would only be I who could understand the words, but sometimes I forget to listen n i am silently hearing. yes sinking to rise, the sunlight in your eyes *~**!**~****~*~**~**!!*!* :love:
I am not good at accepting that there is anything I can’t change, so I put difficult things on a “shelf” to come back to. Very often circumstances intervene and things change themselves, like a miracle!