Ease comes in business and relationships when you are not afraid to "lose" and are ready for any scenario. The lightness of being appears when you don’t place big bets on life and are not afraid of losing it. This is humility. There is no prohibitive difficulty in adopting such a view. This is the usual honesty with yourself. Tomorrow is unpredictable. The next second is unpredictable. Expecting something is deceiving yourself. All expectations lead to a painful understanding of the difference that inevitably arises between fantasy and the real state of affairs. Apparently, sometimes it is simply necessary to step back again and again from the truths already understood and accepted, in order to return to them later along new paths with a new level of understanding.
The lightness I'm talking about is not a devil-may-care frivolity and not a pig's looseness. This is a state when you don't expect anything at all, realizing that life always does everything in its own way, but at the same time you continue to act.
Anything can happen in the next hour of life. The future moments flowing into tomorrow are such a virgin canvas of existence, on which reality draws for the first time, not guessing for sure, but as if spontaneously, playfully.
Yes, sometimes the "pictures" turn out to be serious, but the degree of their drama is directly proportional to the expectations and the stakes placed on the future. The more hope, the stronger the experience. I talked about this in a recent article on happiness in relationships.
Purely humanly, these are really complex and ambiguous matters. And all because at the current stage of their life scenarios, almost everyone is crammed to capacity with personal ideas about what life should be like. No one is in a hurry to give up these fantasies. They really warm the soul, it is very sweet to anticipate the fulfillment of desires.
Hopes and expectations are the very psychological desires that Buddha described as the source of human suffering. In this sense, the lightness of being is just such a spiritual enlightenment. The more such lightness, the less dependence on the dreams of the mind and the deeper reality is accepted.
All the drama of life arises with desires. The higher the stake on a particular scenario, the greater the fear that things will turn out differently. And this "differently", meanwhile, may be no worse than the expected development of a life plot. But desires have such an insidious property - to suggest that any alignment that goes beyond the desired expected leads to unhappiness. Such a "Pan or Lost" in psychology is called dichotomous - that is, black and white thinking.
Sounds like a diagnosis? But everyone is infected with this "disease" to one degree or another. On progressman.ru I have already indirectly raised this topic in an article about hopes and hopelessness. It is such a style of thinking and living of being, when the mind fishes the buzz out of dualistic anticipations. And the more he is hooked on them, the more in life there is fear that everything will not go according to plan and the whole project, shaken by desires, will crushingly fall apart before our eyes.
Promotional video:
There is nothing definite. Choice, fate, karma - all these are attempts to catch the non-existent. How can we know what life should be like? Why are we so clinging to our own illusions? Mistakes are inevitable. They provide the experience that allows you to bypass them.
Sometimes you just need to break a relationship, get involved in a problem, have children, and then get a divorce, turn up your nose like a child, tame, and then lose confidence, lie well, get drunk, hit the wall - just to understand and see … get your own, real experience. There are no fools. No one can and should not do otherwise. There are only experienced and inexperienced - each in his own way.
Once I had a vivid dream where I and my friends were flying in a large passenger plane through a busy daytime city in the middle of tall buildings. The flight looked very dangerous, the wings of the plane crashed against the walls of buildings, there was anxiety, but along with it, trust in reality and some kind of joyful magic from the exciting journey. Something inside seemed to understand: it is useless to worry if the plane crashes, there is nothing to be done about it. Therefore, most of the attention was focused on the passing houses, busy roads and streets, to the realization of what was happening as a wonderful journey.
Unfortunately, I still do not know how to relate to life with the same ease. But this dream became something of a beacon on the way. The lightness of being and the humility that I am talking about is not passivity, but action in spite of the all-consuming obscurity, from which we so diligently escape into the dreams of the mind. This is not a disregard for the fate of one's own body, but a clear understanding that the body is mortal and, at times, suddenly mortal. I myself find it difficult to admit this fact - something inside resists. But the deeper the understanding of this truth, the stronger personal freedom, the more ease in relation to life.
I recall the Castaneda warrior and man of knowledge, whose main adviser is death over his left shoulder. The warrior acts without expecting rewards, seeks freedom, does not complain about anything, does not regret anything, does not take himself seriously. He laughs at himself and at the seriousness of life.
The "sad" news: we are all going to die; earthly accumulations and worries are worth nothing in this light. Good news: it is completely unnecessary to be sad and worry about it; life is like an exciting journey. Everyone, as if in the same plane, rushes in his present. We have a choice, there is a certain measure of control, but all personal freedom is conditioned by experience and the surrounding reality. At any second, the unexpected can happen. This is a disturbing fact, but if you don’t accept it, it only gets worse: reality turns into a meaningless mortal battle against the inevitable.