We Can Never Lose What We Are
When we feel anxious for any reason, we can fall into the trap of chasing a state of mind that is blissful and peaceful instead to try and replace this uncomfortable feeling. Here, we equate enlightenment with a transitory state. In this case, we will permanently lose enlightenment and forever chase it. In this situation, we are like a dog chasing its tail. Enlightenment will be forever out of our reach. What is essential about the anxiety state is not to seek to replace it with another state but to see that it is reminding us that we are taking life personally and to try our best to meet life impersonally.
The impersonal "self" is what we essentially are, and we can remind ourselves that we are not this uncomfortable anxiety feeling that events have triggered. We can remind ourselves that we do not need to escape this moment into some imaginary future happiness and stay present as the impersonal self. We can remember we can never not be what we essentially are, an impersonal self.
We can effortlessly step back into being it by letting go of limiting personal identifications with feelings and states of mind into the impersonal experience we may call Awareness. From our previous investigations of our experience of this moment, we can remember that the experience of being aware is always there, always constant, no matter what is happening, and for which we can find no limit. Furthermore, from our previous investigations, we will have established that this experience of Awareness is what we mean when we say the shorthand name "I". Therefore, this experience of being Aware is our home of the self. Most importantly, we have taken the step of recognising we do not know (as we have no evidence) that this experience is generated by and limited to our mind. Therefore, we do not know this experience of Awareness is not Universal and a capacity of the ultimate reality that underlies everything. Thus, we have opened to the possibility that this experience of Awareness is what we are and that what we are is everything, not just one thing. We can recognise ourselves as containing the Universe, our most intimate "best friend", and will meet our needs instead of being separate from and a threat to us and blocking our needs.
Effortlessly falling back into this understanding allows us not to take life personally and recognise we are not this uncomfortable feeling in the body. Then any uncomfortable feeling we are experiencing will, as a matter of course, be reframed in our mind, we will let go of avoidant stress-ridden thinking, and we can trust the body to return to peace. From here, we can objectively assess what has triggered our bodily sensations, and our wisdom will flow to see a way through rather than reacting and taking the situation personally. Our brilliant body often tries to communicate a need to us. Living impersonally, we can listen to it objectively and respect it and act to improve the situation step by step from the "inside-out" rather than, as a person, reacting and trying to fix the feeling by changing the situation from the "outside-in". Psychotherapists also learned this principle, which remains the cornerstone of their teachings. They call the former "grey thinking" and the latter "black and white or all or nothing thinking".
As we constantly remind ourselves of our impersonal nature, we feel more and more at peace as we greet our daily life from a solidly open place and do not get sucked into the story of various happenings. All we can do is our best to remember this. Applying this same understanding to our traumatic psychological injuries, we can patiently heal them over time. We can calmly and patiently assess our situations to see what, if any, adjustments to make to them. We can understand that the experience at this moment matters and live fully present, recognising and feeling this moment is the heart of all existence, and everything is perfect. We can fully let go of the need to change or manipulate our environment to solve our unhappiness and share our innate happiness with the environment. Then it becomes more apparent than ever we can never lose what we are, this open experience that is at one with all things and that we can recognise through the door of being Aware.
