Seeds of Insight 011 - How do I betray myself?
We spend much of our lives and energy accumulating more - more knowledge, more money, more achievements, more experiences, more power, more control, even more suffering. If we honestly examine this tendency for “more”, we will see that at the source of it lies our mind’s attempt to avoid an old grief - the grief of betraying our true Self.
Something in us knows that the way we look, speak, dress and go about our lives, even the way the entire world ‘out there’ defines us, has nothing to do with who we really are. And this mismatch between our inner wisdom and outward experience causes rage and suffering.
Until fully met and experienced, this rage of betrayal runs our lives and pulls our strings in ways we are not even aware of. We project it out to the world and the world reflects it back to us, creating feelings of separateness from everyone else AND from ourselves.
The opportunity then is to meet the rage completely. The following story is all about that.
An Unusual Enemy
One day, while a duck was walking by a lake, it suddenly got attacked by another duck. Demons crawled by their side, feathers flew in the air, wings against wings, beak against beak, panic, poison, pain.
On its last breath, the first duck cried: “Why are you so angry? What have I done to you?”
The second duck paused in its rage and said: “You abandoned me”. Its voice was heavy with old grief.
There was a moment of silence. Heavy tears fell on the first duck’s cheeks. It lifted its head only to realise that its opponent was crying too. The wind blew and formed sparkly waves on the surface of the lake. They quickly washed away the duck’s reflection in the water. And so the attacker was gone too.
May we not wait until our last breath to fully meet this pain of self-betrayal, for our mind is our only ‘enemy’ - unusually familiar and also unreal.
With love,
Iri
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
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