255. Dating heartaches are about what we THINK not about what happens

Every item I’ve posted in this blog is trying to show you how seeing reality lifts you immediately out of any suffering associated with mature dating. This isn’t theory. It’s not something I’m asking you to believe. This is about the way the world really works. And if you’d like you can check it out for yourself. In fact, that’s the only way you can prove it to yourself and experience the peace you get from investigating.

For some years I tried to believe a concept that’s quite popular: We create our own reality. The way it’s most often used, it means that you get what you think. So if you focus on positive thoughts about what you want in life you’ll get it. Seminar leaders and authors tell you it’s so easy: just don’t ever think of what you don’t want and always focus on what you do want. If you apply that to dating in these later years of life you’d have the partner you want if you just hold your tongue right, make sure your socks are straight, and focus on already having that special person in your life as though it had already happened. That’s the way, the experts say.

The problem is, it doesn’t work. Some people’s lives are destined to be successful in society’s terms – wealth, possessions, status, power, etc. They’re the ones who tell us how they did it and how we can all do it too. But try as I might – and I worked hard at it – those ideas never paid off. Nor do they pay off for most of the folks who read the books and pay handsome fees for the seminars. Why? Because, as I’ve now realized, Life is living us, not the other way around. Thoughts or no thoughts, visualization or no visualization, there is no “little me” who could be in control. It’s a myth.

Not one person on earth has any independent power to take a single breath or create a single thought. The Life Force or God, if you want, obviously came into form and sustains itself as form every moment. Humans are one of the forms. We’re the instruments as life is lived through us. We don’t see that though. We want so badly to be in control that we keep trying, failure after failure, to make life work our way because we’ve been told all our lives that God gave us free will. Even if we had free will would we know what to seek, what's really best for us?

Happiness is the bottom line we’re all seeking. To be happy by concentrating on what we want we’d have to have the power to control our thinking wouldn’t we? Yet who can do that? Who can stop thinking? Do you know where the “off” switch is? When your thoughts are so painful why not just stop them for awhile? No one can do it. That’s why we like sleep so much. Thought stops and therefore emotional pain stops because it all stems from believing our thoughts.

Investigating life as it really is, however, helps us see that when we just love life the way it is we have no psychological suffering. Resisting life by judging, interpreting, comparing, setting one thing against another is always painful. When we see that life is the way it is, and we stop trying to tell God what to do we’re happy. God, by the way, is another term for “what is”. How can we know God? Just notice everything you take in with your senses. That’s God. What else could it be?

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer