Apr 26, 2022
Freedom From Routine
A spiritual essay
Why do we search? Why are we restless?
Whether it’s with money, relationships, experiences. We seek in the name of progress, of improvement; for the betterment of society. That’s our natural response, or, the one we’re most familiar with.
Why are we dishonest with ourselves?
From the moment we’re born, a blueprint awaits our soul. We go to school, we listen to mom and dad, we’re put into a religion, we get a job, we find a partner, we have a family. Congratulations, society applauds us.
Yet we’re still as uncertain as we once were.
The rest of our lives is then dedicated to searching despite doing all we were supposed to. We associate with those who have similar traits as ours. We dislike those who don’t. We accumulate bitterness, we depend on pills.
The meaninglessness of our existence creates suffering, temporarily relieved through our children, through “God,” through goals. The sky’s dark, but we force ourselves to believe there’s a reason behind it. There must be one.
We compare our lives to that of others’. We condemn people, or adjust to their behavior. Not seeing how expressing ourselves externalizes our limited perspective on life, we feel naked in the realization, then on the defense.
We justify ourselves. Our intellect becomes the slave of our fears. We say things we don’t mean, we react, we’re compulsive. Never trust the one that speaks, always look at behavior over long periods of time.
We’re unhappy. Our daily output proves it. We’ve constructed a maze. The highest score is money, the lowest, being a nobody. This maze is society as we know it today. It’s a game we love to play. The most known to date.
A play of routines, of mechanical living, one that extirpates all sense of life from our existence. A “standard” that disconnects us from Nature and the Cosmos — from essence, from life.
In beating our souls for centuries, with platitudes, we forgot what it meant to “live.” The Monster we’ve created took over us. And our endless misery — whether mentally, emotionally or physically — is the natural consequence.
Does living mean keeping up with the Joneses?
Does it mean finding the “best” partner, earning more money, buying expensive objects and living luxuriously? Does living mean being loved and celebrated? Does it mean looking smart, being famous?
The world we created now drives us, and everyday, we associate living with fighting this world of our creation. Doesn’t it hurt to bite one’s own tail?
What we call living is a perpetual adjustment to our parents’ expectations, to society’s standards, to what everyone else is doing — and we continually adjust ourselves to external factors because deep inside, we’re insecure.
We’re unsure about what it means to live. We crave safety. We conform. We blindly follow the one who claims to know.
Outside our current, narrow outlook on life, there exists a realm of endless possibilities — one from which all human suffering is seen with accuracy, as being a choice rather than a fate, as we love to believe.
Our habitual response to challenge is reaction.
If someone makes you angry, acting on that anger is a reaction. Reactions always generate more reactions. In the case of anger, it can go as far as revenge and enmity between the groups involved for generations.
If, on the other hand, anger is processed before reaction — because anger happens within and is therefore an internal process — the outer world loses its illusory power, and action results.
Action is the fruit of clarity. Acting is living. Like light, action dissolves darkness. Action is brief, concise, and irrevocable. In action, there’s movement, and that which moves is alive.
We have chosen to live as we do today. The results of such living have spoken for themselves. Rather than reacting to our creation, and giving more credit than it deserves to the outer world — it’s time we choose differently.
Living means learning. Learning means observing. Observing means understanding how we’ve created our misery, understanding its very fabric, and from that understanding, realizing the vastness of life. The one beyond our limited perspective. The one that encompasses all dimensions.
