Awaken and go "Beyond Thinking" (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; "Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds," Part 4 (AwakenTheWorldFilm)

Moving beyond our pathological obsession with thinking is not about running away from the external world. It is about balancing the inner and the outer, yin and yang -- as is said, avoiding extremes. 

 

When the external world -- which we have created with our thoughts -- is informed by our inner world, then our world will begin to return to alignment. 

 

It requires effort to change these inner conditioned patterns. The effort IS happiness. Why? “There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way!”

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- we live our lives pursuing happiness "out there" as if it were a commodity. 

We have not served ourselves. We have become slaves to our desire and craving.

 

Happiness isn't something that can be pursued or purchased like a cheap suit.

 

This is Maya, "illusion," the endless play of form.

 

In Buddhist tradition Samsara, or the "endless cycle of suffering," is perpetuated by an compulsive craving for pleasure and aversion to pain. Freud referred to this as the "pleasure principle." 

 

Everything we do is an attempt to gain pleasure, something we want, or to push away something that is unpleasant, something we don't want. Even a simple organism like the paramecium does this.

This is called "response to stimulus." Unlike a paramecium, humans have more choice. We are free to think, and that is the heart of the problem. 

It is the thinking about what we want that has gotten out of control.The dilemma of modern society is that we seek to understand the world, not in terms of archaic inner-consciousness, but by quantifying and qualifying what we perceive to be the external world by using scientific means and thought.

Thinking has only led to more thinking and more questions. We seek to know the innermost forces which create the world and guide its course. But we conceive of this essence as outside ourselves, not as a living thing, intrinsic to our own nature.

 

It was the other famous psychiatrist Carl Jung who said:

"One who looks outside dreams;

One who looks inside awakes."

  

It is not wrong and harmful to desire to be awake, to be happy. What is wrong and harmful is to look for happiness outside when it can only be found inside.