"Are You Listening to Me?
Who is willing to be 100% honest in answering the following question? "When somebody doesn’t listen to you, to what you are saying or asking of them, whether it be parent to child, co-worker to co-worker, friend to friend, what comes up inside of you when “they” don’t listen?"
Is it love that comes up?
….And if it isn't love that comes up, what does ?
Rage, Anger, Judgment, Blame, Resentment, and the like.
Why?
Why would negative states arise in us simply because someone doesn’t listen or do as we ask, and doesn’t our reaction often seem so disproportionate to the event?
Well first of all, it isn’t because they aren’t listening or doing what we ask of them that is the problem, because that is the misconception. What takes place in those moments when the anger, rage, resentment, etc. is triggered, is that the mind has an immediate answer and response to the event (conditioned by the past), and if we aren’t present in that moment, the reaction is simply unconsciously agreed to.
We then become the instrument of that anger, that rage, that resentment, all the while believing that it’s because of something happening outside of ourselves, when it’s not. It’s all taking place inwardly.
Because we do not know ourselves, we constantly react from unconscious hidden demands in our consciousness that just sit and wait, ready to pounce on everyone and everything.
What these hidden demands, these hidden parts of ourselves, live for is the sensation of themselves, the “feeling” of being right, of being wronged, of being disrespected, of being ignored, of being harmed. If you think about your own life, you can see the truth of what I just stated. Don’t you feel the most “alive” when the sensation of anger or resentment is enveloping you?
We say that we don’t like those negative sensations, but if that were really true, we wouldn’t so easily succumb to them. If you don’t like fruitcake, you choose not to eat it, right? So, the first thing we have to do is admit that something in us likes the sensation of negative states. But perhaps it’s not really “us” (who we truly are) that likes them. It’s the hidden demanding nature within us that likes them and NEEDS them in order to live.
I hope this isn’t too deep to follow or understand, because what it means is that these hidden demands must be old parts of ourselves that have just continued as they have because up until now, we didn’t know that there was another option. We didn’t know to question them.
However, we can start to question them now. We can practice seeing the truth of what I am sharing. When an unwanted moment comes, we have to work to see the hidden demand that we have on the moment, on Life. “He shouldn’t speak to me that way.” “He shouldn’t do things like that.” “She should listen to me.”
There is nothing in the world you can do to keep an unwanted moment from coming. The reason they keep coming is because something in us loves the sensation that the resistant reaction produces. Plain and simple.
Here is something important to remember in that respect: Identification with the negative reaction is asking, through spiritual law, for more of the same to come your way.
The only way to change things, make things new, is to agree to see those demands when they arise, instead of unconsciously acting from them. If we agree to consciously allow the demands to come and go within us before taking any action, we suffer them rightly. There is pain in that suffering, but that conscious suffering is useful. Unconscious suffering produces more of itself. Conscious suffering produces less of itself, less of the negative nature in us.
That’s bringing something new into this world that can happen in no other way. That conscious suffering produces real and true change.
Be that change that you wish to see in this world, and always remember that what something in you accuses others of (as in a child not listening to you), you do that very same thing in one way or another.
If you really see that, you won’t so easily allow those demands to do what they always do – which is to convince you that Life shouldn't be the way it is in that moment because "it" knows better. It doesn't and never will.
Image courtesy of: Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels
Exercise for the Week: The exercise is inherent in what I wrote here – work to see hidden demands that you have on the moment, on Life.
