Shortly after birth, we all make the decision subconsciously to believe that the purpose of living is to escape pain and/ or pursue pleasure. Untold number of stories throughout every culture and tradition show that using this decision to lead your life leads nowhere or to destruction and ruin. In our culture, companies like TMZ make millions documenting people who pursue that faulty purpose of living to the extreme.
We can explore this more in another post but to be awake as a man, you must continually question this premise made several moments after birth. It follows that the one requirement for waking up and charting your course is to question this basic premise. Just about every decision that 99% of the world makes is to escape pain or pursue pleasure. So, what is the alternative?
Every religion and especially the mystical traditions give instructions that are the same in regards to what your first step is. In Christianity, it is to renounce. This renunciation can be seen as renouncing your personality to realize that it is a largely a collection of subconscious decisions and reactions. In Judaism, it talks about becoming “shomer” or literally to be a “guard,” to watch. Lets face it, 99% of us largely behave machinelike with buttons that can be pushed with predictable reactions – not exactly charting our own course.
Once you break away from that basic decision mentioned above, there is a frame of reference you can develop that is a higher aspect of yourself. Initially this part of yourself is weak and must be built strong through exercise. It is a life-long pursuit with many hills and valleys. Step aside, renounce or cease owning your personality and become a watcher of yourself as though you were looking through a glass ceiling in the room. You have the power to tap into a higher aspect of yourself and liberate who you really are – and you are more than you ever think.
The aim is to be awake to truth at all moments, to get rid of the screen / garment of personality, judgment, and imposed suggestions and liberate your true self. The most treasured part of the majority of people is not really real at all but is made mainly of layer upon layer of personality, suggestion, and the pursuit of pleasure or avoidance of pain. If you are on the path of realizing a higher frame of reference, then realize that it is for you to wake up and not to wake other people up – they need to come to it on their own as you did. The greatest contribution you can make is raise the mood of every interaction and let them see that you are living truth. It should also serve to remind you to be a guard on duty to be “shomer”!! It is then that they may approach you and ask you what it is you are in to. It is only then that you should share.
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Freely adapted from work of Gerald Epstein, MD and Dr. Robert Rhondell Gibson