We’re All a Walking War Zone

by Fattah

We’re all a walking war zone. The war is between us and the outer world. We must constantly fight to get what we need from a hostile world full of enemies, who are trying to get what they need too. In this struggle we are always on some kind of alert. Fear is rampant. Terrorist thoughts keep arising to threaten us and disturb our peace of mind. The trouble is we don’t know which of these thoughts are true and which are just imagined. Then, when we least expect it during our normal daily routine, an EBP, an emotional bomb from the past, may explode bringing up unresolved feelings from the past. The emotional backwash can be overpowering. It can be devastating.

For me this inner war is evident when I am not feeling well. I have huge amount of emotional baggage around being sick. The fog of war starts rolling in when I identify that something is wrong with my health. Then all these notions I have about not being this mind/body complex get thrown out the window and I get caught up in the fear of being out of control again. This would often happen when I was a kid. When I would begin to not feel well I would repress acknowledging that as long as possible. When I couldn’t deny the symptoms because they were getting too intense then I would get scared. Eventually my mother would discover that I wasn’t feeling well and she would question me about it. Then I would hear the dreaded words from my mother, “I guess we need to go see the doctor.” Now I was in trouble. He would certainly find something wrong. I would panic, but I couldn’t let my mother see it. I would do my best to act normal and nonchalant about it. Never let ‘em see you sweat. Be strong .

We all have these triggers that start an inner conflict. Most of the time it’s an automatic loop that kicks in and we are caught up before we know it. Our finely tuned antennae of past trauma pick up familiar vibrations, probably my mother had anxiety about me getting sick when I was young, and the chemicals that create our response to this EBP, this flash from the past, are in the bloodstream wrecking havoc before we are even aware of our response. This occurs for me when I get sick but also when the cats get sick. I see the animal is having a problem and the emotional distress kicks in. It doesn’t matter that I’m an adult, the vet is just down the street, and know we have the resources to take care of the animal. The chemicals flow and I am awash in the reaction.

I’ve been noticing this a lot lately, reacting to situations and then seeing the basis of that reacting. I have this idea that if I can just be in control, then I won’t have to worry. The problem is we can never be in control. Because we identify with our thoughts and mental process so completely and believe ourselves to be rational, capable beings we assume all we have to do is monitor our thoughts and intervene if we get carried away with emotions. It doesn’t work that way. We are always walking through a minefield of reaction, distracted by our normal mental machinations, and when we trigger these connections with the past, our reaction is in full swing before it appears in our awareness. The horse has left the barn before we try to close the gate. We have been programmed over many thousands of generations to react quickly to threatening situations. Our survival has depended on it so the potent chemicals from the lower centers of the brain kick in to protect us before the thinking in the higher centers gets underway.

This is also true when our ego gets threatened. The ego we have built up is defense against the overwhelming stimulation of the outer world. We have created this guard at the gate of perception and identify with it. The guard serves us but also dominates us and is determined to maintain this domination. The servant becomes the master.

We want to have life go the way we want it to. We are addicted to the control that the ego tries to maintain. A student came to a martial arts instructor that he had been working with for many years. He said, “Master, I have learned so much from you and do well in local competition but when I get to championship bouts I lose my edge and become fearful. Then I am defeated.” The master said, “You must let go of your attachment to having a certain outcome. Your identification with winning and losing is defeating you. The battle with your inner Self cannot be won in the championship arena, it must be won on the practice mat.”

When we truly put our cards on the table this is what we all want. We want to win. We all have an idea of how our life should be. We want to be happy and fulfilled. Life keeps presenting us with how it is, impermanent , unsatisfactory, and selfless. Our individual lives keep presenting us with the dysfunctions we incorporated in growing up. We have to give up the notion of how our life should be and see that no amount of striving will get us what we want. No amount of striving will deliver us from the fearful ego we have all incorporated.

The great dream of the individual self is to have power over what occurs. It was summed up in the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Find, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

We have exemplified this dream here in the West. The great quest of me. We have built a cult of the separate self and our present leader is a perfect example of the pinnacle of this ideal. His vision is focused on acquiring and maintaining complete power and channeling every resource of the nation to reward his supporters. He will admit no mistakes and is totally oblivious to how his shortsighted, self-serving policies affect others. He believes that in promoting his completely personal agenda he is being directed by the connection with his own deity, a God who justifies his every action.

Friends, this great myth of the personal self wrecks havoc in the world and creates our suffering. What empowers our grail like search for fulfillment and acquisition of material abundance also fuels the fear that separates us in needy, short sighted isolation. From this vantage point we look out on a world that Henley calls a “place of wrath and tears.” With this outlook there can be no salvation.

It all seems so real. Not only are we caught up in the drama of our own stream of conscious thinking but we have this individual physical form that anchors us to this reality we have created. When we are children we play at make believe and sometimes it can seem so real. Sometimes children actually see what they create although it is made up. So the world we see perfectly reflects our outlook and it seems that we are experiencing what is. It is seamless until we discover that we are not our thoughts. That is why we sometimes call our life a waking dream. We are so identified with it. We also find out that just because our thoughts arise doesn’t mean that they are true. We are getting false feedback all the time and do not see how we are being misled. It’s a self reinforcing loop.

Our reality is not reality, it is just our viewpoint. Each person looks out on their own idiosyncratic world and believes that what they see is what is. We are each playing a character in our own play and can’t understand why other people won’t accept the roles in our drama that we have assigned to them. I had this a lot when I was a kid. I was in my own world of make believe a lot and couldn’t understand when the other children wouldn’t participate. Our outlook, which seems totally authentic to us, is an attitude we have taken on. When we examine this attitude and peel away the layers of it that have built up we find that at its core there is no permanent, independent self.

This is not the only indicator that the independent self we have created is only a temporary fabrication. The conscious self appears and disappears as out thoughts arise and extinguish. As a thought arises our identification occurs. “I think therefore I am”. When the thought dissipates, in the space of no thought our identification subsides. If we have a constant stream of thoughts then we maintain the identification. When there is space in between the thoughts then we are no longer locked into it. Try this as an experiment for yourself. Begin your meditative practice as you normally would and when the thoughts begin to slow down note what happens in the spaces in between the thoughts. We think our self into existence constantly but we never marvel at our disappearance with no thought. This dropping away of the self will be more evident to you if you have done enough meditative practice to have long spaces in between the thoughts.

You can see the same process happen when you do a lot of focused chanting. The longer you chant the more you see the boundaries of the self soften, the less of this personal you there is. This can be an ecstatic experience. These boundaries of identification are so constricting and when we get free of them it is exhilarating. Our thoughts are crowded out and we get some relief from our preoccupation with ourselves. We feel the joy and can also experience our connection to a higher energy. If we are chanting with others the connection to them becomes palpable.

It’s essential to get some freedom from the mind stream. When we are caught up in it we get tossed around in the current. Sometimes the current is gentle and sometimes, especially when we get caught up in unresolved issues from the past, it can be overpowering. As long as we are identified with it we believe ourselves to be this body/mind organism with a past and future. When we work to slow the current down or even step out of the current for an instant we begin to see our transcendent nature. We begin to experience not just becoming but being.

There really is no you. That is a scary thought for most of us. Without our protective boundaries we feel so vulnerable. We think we will be overwhelmed by the world and its demands. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are safer in this land of the heart than we could ever be caught up in our thinking. Our thinking is always reinforcing our personality and creating our suffering. This personality covers or encloses a free spirit beyond time and space. This spirit was never born not does it die. It is cannot be confined in a body or separated from others. It wants to dance and celebrate the moment. It wants to reach up to the heavens. It wants to fly free from the earth and embrace the stars.

It’s true, there really is no you. May we all experience this freedom from the self.

Amein.