Ernie Thayer

“When the heart is breaking, the self bleeds self-pity, but Presence bleeds love.”

Several people have mentioned to me lately (including some in shaky economic situations) how greatly relaxing it is to witness the machinations of oneself with only compassion and warm attention. I guess this is hard to express, but well worth the attempt.

When this kind of awareness happens in me, it becomes obvious that there are 2 distinct modes of being that want control of my life. One is the worry, anxiety, fear or pleasure with their push to defend, attack, avoid or approach some person or situation on the ground; this is our normal unrealized state of being. It’s pretty much mechanical – our thinking moving from memory to try to make us safe, have pleasure and avoid pain.

The other mode is a calm watchfulness of the situation and of the inner reactions to it, which realizes there isn’t any need to interfere. If something needs to be done to move the situation along on the ground, it’s done, and there is still only calm. The pain may continue for the moment but one is willing to bear it in order to see what’s really going on.

There are several ways to talk about this. I especially like to say that, psychologically, there is no need to “improve” oneself. Or that technically, any attempt to “fix” inner states is just part of the state that is causing trouble already. It is amazing what relief is possible when you realize this! Of course, you can’t just quit trying to improve just because it sounds like a good idea. But if you actually see for yourself that it is fruitless, then (after a short moment of despair!) you’re free. There is then an orbit around the phenomenon that was once ‘you’ and from that distance, you begin to sense that the orbiting awareness is closer to what you actually are, not the machinery you’ve been watching. The identity shifts. If it doesn’t (if awareness flags), you’ll be dragged back to the mess by the force of its gravity, and remain that struggling ‘you’ a while longer. The only antidote to the momentum of the ‘me’ is attention.

Another way to talk about it is to notice how attached we are to our struggling selves:
“Hey, I’m trying, I have a lot to deal with here, ya’ know. This is HARD. Gimme a break! There’s a lot of s*** coming down on me, man. Maybe if you could help me, I wouldn’t have to struggle so much,” etc., etc. (Here’s something I can personally identify with when I’m ‘caught’!)

And this person is really suffering! In fact, to the Calm mode of being, it’s the suffering that gets the attention. It indeed hurts, but the old mode of being is blaming circumstances, other people, the ex-husband, economics, themselves and god for the difficulty. The emotion around the circumstances is taken to be who we are, and we are quite attached to remaining there despite the pain. There are 2 reasons for this: one, because we don’t see any other way to operate and two, the momentum of the survival mechanism (thinking) is to continue and renew itself. Problems are perfect for this.

The calm mode of being notices this and realizes that the suffering is not caused by circumstances, but rather by this kind of reacting, based in memory responding to current reality. In the seeing, there’s a shift, AND THERE IS NO NEED TO IMPROVE – only to realize that those machinations are not “ME”. This is an intelligent response vs. the intense and troublesome reactions. In my own case, there dawned the realization that I could not continue to be “Ernie” and be rid of my pain. There’s the real conundrum: to be or not to be (me). (Forgive me, William.)

Another way to address this is by noting the ‘self-pity’ that is the essence of a reactionary state. We are so used to judging ourselves for self pity, which is useless, but actually, we do a lot of it. There are endless forms of it, from classic victim-think to ‘justifiable’ anger or fear. Yet what is self-pity without any judgment of it? If you pay warm, non-judging attention to it, what can you see? Can you see the suffering, and the sufferer, in the midst of it? Ah, there’s the culprit. It sounds silly to say, but without a ‘self’, it’s difficult to pity it. In simply noticing the truth about the reactionary state, and the suffering it generates, it’s possible to learn something true about it – that emotional pain is the result of being ‘me’ and (of course) feeling sorry for ‘myself’. Learning this sets you free, because immediately you are not that struggling self, but you are the attention and the intelligent response to what is seen. It is the awareness that changes things, not our attempts to ‘improve’. Wow.

I trust none of this seems glib. For a human being to realize this is nothing less than a transformation in consciousness.