Your house was finally finished, and you were very excited to be living out there. You loved the openness of the field and all the light and beauty of nature. But most of all, you were enamored with the house. You had put your heart and soul into every aspect of the design, and it showed—it was truly “you.” In fact, over time, between your infatuation with the house and your growing discomfort with all the strange sights and sounds outside, you started spending more time indoors. It was then that you realized that with the shutters and doors fully locked down, the house actually began to feel like a fortress. And this was just fine with you. Being a city person, it was pretty scary living so far out of touch in total isolation. But you were committed to making it on your own.
So you gradually became accustomed to living safely within the confines of the house. You happily went about your business of reading and writing as you had always longed to do. It was actually quite comfortable in there since it was fully climate controlled, and you had been wise enough to install a modern full-spectrum lighting system. Ironically, you found your house so comfortable, enjoyable, and safe that you stopped thinking about the outside altogether. After all, the inside was familiar, predictable, and within the realm of your control. The outside was unknown, unpredictable, and completely out of your control. Your sense of inner sanctum was supported by the fact that when the shutters and blinds were locked in place they blended like paintings on the walls, and you never even considered risking going outside to unlock them. They were so well made that when the lights were turned off it was absolutely pitch black, day or night. But since you were accustomed to never turning off the lights, you didn’t notice this until they started burning out. It was only then that you realized your predicament: no one had left you replacement bulbs compatible with the new system. This meant that once the final light failed, you were left to find your way around the house in absolute darkness.
From that point forward, the only light you had came from the few candles you kept for emergencies. But there were very few of these, so you conserved them well. Being a person who loved light, this was very difficult for you. Yet it was not difficult enough to force you to overcome the fears you had developed about leaving the safety of your house. Eventually, the stress of living in this darkness took its toll on your health, both physically and mentally. With time, the very memory of the beautiful sunlit field began to fade from your mind, never to return again.
You became very concerned about keeping the house lit. The only light you knew about was the light you created in the darkness with your precious candles. It became pretty lonely in there. You were cut off from everything, and the only comfort you felt was the sense of protection your house afforded you. You were no longer aware of exactly what you were so afraid of; you were just aware of always being scared and uncomfortable. It was all you could do just to try to hold yourself together. You even stopped reading and writing because of the lack of light. It was dark, and you too were falling into darkness.
Then one day, the housekeeper, who shared your overwhelming need to stay in the safety of the house, called you down to the storage cellar. You were amazed by what you saw. A full supply of emergency flashlights had been found that could be powered simply by shaking them. Your housekeeper had already set some up, and the cellar was fully radiant. This was a true turning point in your life.
You set about your business of trying to create light, beauty, and happiness within the confines of your house. You decorated each room and worked together to keep the light shining brightly until you went to sleep. You started reading and writing again, and it turned out that your housemate loved reading your writings. In fact, it was not just the artificial lights that were lighting the house. The ember of love had begun to glow in both of your hearts. Imagine the light you could create together instead of apart. You began spending all of your time with each other, and you even staged a marriage ceremony. It was so beautiful as you vowed to take care of each other and bring love and light into your home. Compared to the darkness in which you had been living, this was heaven.
One day you came across a book in your library. It interested you because it talked about the natural, radiant light that exists “outside.” It even spoke of bathing in that light. But it was talking about more light than you could ever imagine, without anyone having to do anything to create it. This was confusing to you. After all, the only light you knew about was the artificial light from candles and flashlights. How could you make that much light and keep it going? You didn’t have a clue what this book was talking about because you could only view things in relation to the way you were living. You were living inside the house, and therefore you were living inside of darkness. All the light that you could experience was limited to what you could create within the house. You had lived there for so long that all your hopes, dreams, philosophies, and beliefs were founded upon being inside that dark house. Your whole world was about keeping together the life you had managed to build for yourself within the confines of the house.
When you continued reading this seemingly mystical book, it spoke of what it was like to actually walk around in this natural light. It seemed to be describing a self-luminous, omnipresent light that shines everywhere all at once. It was a light that falls on everything constantly and evenly. Though you had no frame of reference for understanding this, it touched something deep inside of you. The book then discussed actually going outside, that is, going beyond the walls of the world you have created for yourself. In fact, it said that while you are attached and enamored with the world you created to avoid darkness, you will never know the abundance of natural light that is beyond the confines of your house. How will you ever go outside when you are so dependent upon what you have built inside?
The analogy of life inside this house is a perfect fit for our predicament. Our consciousness, our awareness of being, is living deep inside of us in an artificially sealed off area that is absolute. It has four walls, a floor, and a roof. It is so solid that not one ray of natural light comes in. The only light we get is what we manage to create for ourselves. If we don’t create good situations for ourselves, there is darkness. So we are very busy decorating daily. We do this by trying to bring things in there with us—hoping to create at least a little light, in the house of our own making, where we have sealed ourselves off.
That is the visual: you are inside a house, totally sealed off from natural light, and the house is sitting in the middle of an open field full of brilliant light. But what is your house made of? What are your walls made of? How can they seal off all that light and keep you locked inside? Your house is made of your thoughts and emotions. The walls are made of your psyche. That’s what that house is. It is all your past experiences; all your thoughts and emotions; all the concepts, views, opinions, beliefs, hopes, and dreams that you have collected around yourself. You hold them in place on all sides, including above and below you. You have pulled together in your mind a specific set of thoughts and emotions, and then you have woven them together into a conceptual world in which you live. This mental structure completely blocks you from whatever natural light is on the outside of its walls. You have walls of thoughts thick enough, and closed enough, to where nothing but darkness is inside that structure. You are so entranced into paying attention to your thoughts and emotions that you never go beyond the borders they create.
If you want to see how restrictive your walls are, just start walking toward them. Let’s say you have an emotional fear of heights. When you were young you fell off a ladder, and the impression stayed with you. That is one of your walls. If you doubt that it’s a wall, let’s see you walk through it. Let’s say something happens that activates these old feelings of fear, and you decide to walk right toward it. The closer you get, the more you will have the urge to pull back. That which you collected from your past forms a boundary that you intuitively want to avoid. That’s natural, that’s what we do with walls; we avoid running into them. But because you avoid runn
ing into them, they lock you inside their perimeter. They become your prison because they are the boundaries of your awareness. Because you are not willing to approach them, you cannot see what is beyond them.
When you approach the barrier areas of your thoughts and emotions, it feels like going into an abyss. You don’t want to go near that place. But you can go there, and if you want to get out, you will go there. Eventually you will realize that darkness is not what’s really there. What is really there are the walls that are blocking the infinite light. When you’re looking for light, that is a crucial distinction. If you see a wall and it is protecting you from unending darkness, you will not want to go there. But if you see a wall that is blocking the light, you will want to go there in order to remove the wall. It is often said that you must go through the darkest night in order to get to the infinite light. This is because what we call darkness is really the blockage of light. You must go past these walls.
It’s not really difficult to get past the walls. Time and again, every day, the natural flow of life collides with our walls and tries to tear them down. But time and again, we defend them. You must realize that when you defend yourself, you are really defending your walls. There is nothing else to defend in there. There is just your awareness of being and the limited house you built to live in. What you are defending is the house you built to protect yourself. You are hiding inside. If something happens to challenge the walls of your psyche, you get highly defensive. You have built a self-concept, moved inside, and now you defend that home with all you have. But what creates that inner home, other than the walls of your thoughts? When you say, “I’m a woman and I’m forty-five years old. I’m married to Joe and I graduated from this school…” those are thoughts. The actual situations don’t exist in there with you except in the form of thoughts that you cling to: “But I was a cheerleader, and I was president of my senior class.” That was thirty years ago. Those situations don’t exist anymore. But they exist inside of you, and they form the walls in which you live.
What if somebody challenges your self-concept and breaks a little hole in it? What if somebody manages to shake one of those foundational thoughts that the house of your psyche is built upon? Imagine if someone told you when you were twenty years old, “Wait a minute. Those are not your parents. You were adopted. Didn’t they ever tell you?” You would adamantly deny it until they showed you the documents. It would shake up your whole inner being. Just one wrong thought and the structure starts to crumble. Tremendous fear and turmoil can open up inside of you simply because something is not the way you thought it was. It shakes you to the core of your being because it challenges the house of thoughts in which you are dwelling. To fix this, you start in with your rationalizations: “I knew they were really nice. They were just like my real parents would’ve been. Imagine them adopting someone like me and bringing me up just like their own. God, they were even more special than I thought they were.” You patched that hole up very well. That’s what we do with our walls. We keep them solid. Nothing is allowed to shake those walls.
Notice that you patched the cracking wall with thoughts. You patched with thoughts that which is made of thoughts. That’s what we do. Just like the people who fearfully locked themselves inside the dark house in the middle of a sunlit field, and then struggled to create some light, we work hard to build a world within the confines of our inner walls that is better than the inner darkness. We decorate our walls with the memories of our past experiences and with our dreams of the future. In other words, we decorate them with thoughts. But just as the people in the house had the potential to step out of their own self-made, artificial world into the beauty of the natural light, you can step outside your house of thoughts into the unlimited. Your awareness can expand to encompass vast space instead of the limited space in which you dwell. Then, when you look back at that little house you built, you will wonder why you were ever in there.
That is your journey out. True freedom is very close; it’s just on the other side of your walls. Enlightenment is a very special thing. But in truth, one should not focus on it. Focus, instead, on the walls of your own making that are blocking the light. Of what purpose is it to build walls that block the light and then strive for enlightenment? You can get out simply by letting everyday life take down the walls you hold around yourself. You simply don’t participate in supporting, maintaining, and defending your fortress.
Imagine your house of thoughts standing in the middle of an ocean of light from a trillion stars. Imagine your awareness trapped inside the darkness of that house, struggling daily to live off the artificial light of your limited experiences. Now imagine the walls crumbling down, and the effortless release of consciousness expanding into the brilliance of what is and always was. Now give that experience a name—enlightenment.
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far, far beyond
Ultimately, the word “beyond” captures the true meaning of spirituality. In its most basic sense, going beyond means going past where you are. It means not staying in your current state. When you constantly go beyond yourself, there are no more limitations. There are no more boundaries. Limitations and boundaries only exist at the places where you stop going beyond. If you never stop, then you go beyond boundaries, beyond limitations, beyond the sense of a restricted self.
Beyond is infinite in all directions. If you take a laser beam and aim it in any direction, it will go on for infinity. It would only cease to be infinite if you created an artificial boundary that it could not penetrate. Boundaries create the appearance of finiteness in infinite space. Things seem finite because your perception hits mental boundaries. In truth, everything is infinite. It is you who takes that which goes on forever and talks about a mile from here. What is a mile from here? It’s nothing but a piece of infinity. There are no limits. There is just the infinite universe.
To go beyond, you must keep going past the limits that you put on things. This requires changes at the core of your being. Right now you are using your analytical mind to break the world up into individual thought objects. You are then using the same mind to put these discrete thoughts together in a defined relationship to each other. You do this in an attempt to feel a semblance of control. This is seen most clearly in your constant attempt to make the unknown known. You say to yourself, “It wouldn’t dare rain tomorrow, it’s my day off. And since Jennifer loves being outdoors, she will certainly want to go hiking with me. In fact, if I want an extra day off, Tom won’t mind covering for me. After all, I covered for him once.” You have it all figured out. You know how everything is supposed to be, even the future. Your views, your opinions, your preferences, your concepts, your goals, and your beliefs are all ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you can feel a sense of control. Since the analytical mind cannot handle the infinite, you created an alternate reality of finite thoughts that can remain fixed within your mind. You have taken the whole, broken it into pieces, and selected a handful of these pieces to be put together in a certain way within your mind. This mental model has become your reality. You must now struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn’t fit as wrong, bad, or unfair.
If anything happens that challenges how you view things, you fight. You defend. You rationalize. You get frustrated and angry over simple little things. This is the result of being unable to fit what’s actually happening into your model of reality. If you want to go beyond your model, you have to take the risk of not believing in it. If your mental model is bothering you, it’s because it doesn’t incorporate reality. Your choice is to either resist reality or go beyond the limits of your model.
In order to truly go beyond your model, you must first understand why you built it. The easiest way to understand this is to study what happens when the model doesn’t work. Have you ever built your whole world on a model of life predicated upon another person’s behavior or the permanence of a relationship? If so, have you ever had that foundation
pulled out from under you? Somebody leaves you. Somebody dies. Something goes wrong. Something shakes your model to the core. When this happens, your entire view of who you believe you are, including your relationship to everyone and everything around you, begins to fall apart. You panic and do everything you can to hold it together. You beg, fight, and struggle to try to keep your world from collapsing.
Once you’ve had an experience like that, and most people have, you realize that the model you’ve built is tenuous, at best. The entire thing can fall apart. The whole model and all that it’s built upon, including your entire view of yourself and everything else, can start to crumble. What you experience when this happens is one of the most important learning experiences of your life. You come face-to-face with what made you build the model. The level of discomfort and disorientation you experience is frightening. You struggle just to get back some semblance of normal perception. What you are really doing is trying to pull the mental model back around you so that you can settle down into your familiar mental setting.
But our whole world doesn’t have to fall apart in order for us to see what we’re doing in there. We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens. Let’s say you’re a smoker. If you decide to stop smoking, you quickly confront the urges that cause you to smoke. These urges are the reason you smoke. They are the outermost layer of cause. If you can sit through these urges, you will see what caused them. If you can get comfortable with what you see, you will face the next layer of causation, and so on, layer upon layer. Likewise, there’s a reason you overeat. There’s a reason why you dress the way you do. There’s a reason for everything you do. If you want to see why you care so much about what you wear and what your hair is like, then just don’t do it one day. Wake up in the morning and go somewhere disheveled with your hair a mess, and see what happens to the energies inside of you. See what happens to you when you don’t do the things that make you comfortable. What you’ll see is why you’re doing them.
The Untethered Soul Page 12