257. Do you really know that what you believe about dating is true?

All psychological or emotional pain comes from believing our thoughts. We can get a good dose of emotional pain from dating because we’re putting ourselves out into the world and feeling pretty vulnerable. In that situation we’re an easy mark. So when your date doesn’t call right away, or says something you take as critical, it’s easy to feel hurt because we believe what our thoughts tell us about these scenes.

We keep going into the mind for answers to life because we believe our thoughts are true. But are they? What we call mind is really just the memory of things that happened. It’s a wonderful tool when you have to know how to tie your shoes or fry potatoes. It does its job exceedingly well.

However, since its job is to record and play back it also remembers many things it was fed based on our interpretations of life that aren’t true – things we picked up from our experiences or ideas we were taught by those around us. For example, let’s say you saw a stern look on your mom’s face when she was angry with you. You learned that when you saw that look from Mom you’d better “straighten up”, as my dad used to say.

But then one day you see a stern look on mom’s face because she’s worried that Dad isn’t home on time. You think she’s angry at you, though you don’t know what you did wrong. But it sticks in your mind from then on that you can’t trust yourself because you can make people angry without even knowing it. That might result in your being extra-sweet and honey-nice to keep people from being angry at you. The technique becomes a major part of your personality, and it’s all based on the memory of a misconception that you still take to be true.

I once had a conversation with a woman who was almost paralyzed when she saw a garter snake, though she’d been raised on a farm and knew they were harmless. It turns out her mom had been raised in a part of Italy where snakes could be deadly and she passed that belief on to her daughter. Even though this woman knew that garter snakes were harmless her deeper belief, learned from her mom, was still intact. She hadn’t fully questioned it to really unmask the lie she lived with all her life.

In dating and romance we put our hearts on the line and we can feel easily hurt. But any time you suffer it helps to just look and notice that your suffering comes from what you believe, not from what’s actually happening. We believe someone is angry at us when they’re not. We believe our life would be better if he called when he doesn’t. We believe she shouldn’t cheat on us when she does. Reality doesn’t lie. But when you think life should go your way when it doesn’t, you churn inside and hurt. Seeing life as it is you’re like a baby, just watching. No judgment no pain. Thoughts can come and go, we just don’t believe them any more once we see what's false through self-questioning.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

256. There’s one thing in your life that will make dating peaceful and happy always

Everything in the life we know is transitory, changing. We search for new experiences, new sensations, new objects, new loves – anything we think will make our lives happy. Yet every single time they fall short because every experience of happiness leaves us sooner or later, and it’s usually sooner. When it goes we’re back to the search again.

Psychologists tell us there are people who are addicted to romance, or to sex. They find a new romantic partner and in that first blush of romance they’re thrilled. But then the rose fades and they’re disappointed. So they’re off for a new romance. It’s a constant circle of win and lose for them. Relationships with any object, whether it’s a new plasma TV, a new car or a new partner, will always leave us wanting. The thrill is short-lived and transient. Nearly everyone on earth lives their whole lives on this wheel of win/lose, then win and lose again. We strive for something, get it, and then lose the joy it temporarily brought.

There’s good news, however, and it applies directly to dating. The good news is that there’s one thing in your life that has never changed and is always peaceful and happy because it doesn’t take us out on a search again. That one thing is awareness or what we could call presence. You have a sense of being present. You know you exist. That knowing you exist isn’t a thought or belief. You don’t have to think if someone says, “Do you know you are?” Through all the changes in your life – the physical, emotional, mental, and experiential changes – that sense of being, that knowing that we’re present, has never changed. It’s never been affected by any circumstance or experience.

That sense of being or simple awareness is who we all are. No one could say “I’m not” because even to say the words you’d have to “be”. But when we learned the idea that we’re a separate person who has control in life, that’s when our troubles began. “Being” just watches life without judgment, desire, opinion or interpretation. It’s what you feel when you’re immersed in gazing, without thought, at a sunset or mesmerized by a project you’re deeply engrossed in. Small babies live in this empty beingness all the time, never discontent unless they're physically uncomfortable.

The times when we’re in emotional pain over dating are the times when we think we’re in control and believe our thoughts – thoughts that something should be different. That’s why questioning and investigation is so useful. It helps us realize that we don’t really know the answers to life, even our life, which we thought we knew. Eventually we begin to see that anything we add to that awareness of “I am” is trouble. Because that’s when we start dividing things into two – man/woman, good/bad, lucky/unlucky, right/wrong, should/shouldn’t, good/evil, pretty/ugly, etc. Immediately we’re judging that life one way – our way of course – is good and the other way is bad. Even at the moment it looks good to us we only have to wait awhile and it’ll be bad. We all know this. This is nothing new to anyone. The moment we’ve created right we’ve also created wrong. With “good” we’ve created “bad”. But there’s no such thing, except in our thoughts. We put the labels on and then suffer because of them.

To be at peace, content, and happy is as simple as just noticing that every thought, experience, or object appears somehow. What does it appear in? It appears in the clear space of presence or being. The being/awareness is the silent, still background that allows for everything without judging or rejecting anything. We live in that natural state of being or presence when we just witness life as it is. The alternative is to follow thoughts and beliefs out into the world of wants and needs and that never-ending win/lose wheel.

Whenever you have a disturbing thought you already know, from direct experience, that it will change. The mind jumps from one thought to another like a monkey in a tree. But the empty, space-like awareness that allows for thought is never affected and is always content and happy. That’s your true nature and it can watch thoughts without sticking to them or believing them. How could they be real when they’re changing all the time? Their fickleness is proof of their falseness.

When you live in presence/awareness and bring that to a relationship you’ll always be happy, no matter what’s going on with the relationship. Because whatever is going on is just another changing object that appears in the never-changing, always-content beingness of life. That's called living happily and harmoniously with what is.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

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

254. Questioning your beliefs almost magically gives you peace again when you’re hurting

Have you noticed that when it comes to romantic pain will power just doesn’t work? Psychotherapists will sometimes tell clients, “Just switch your mind and don’t think about it.” Or “Get busy with other things so you don’t have time to think about the pain.” No one knows how to let go of thinking or stop it. But everyone has the ability to question their thoughts and look realistically at what’s happening.

We’ve all grown up being taught what’s good and bad and right and wrong about life. We’re sure we know what’s best for us. But the truth is we don’t even know who we are. We think we’re a person running our lives until we question and see that instead life is running us. Thoughts come out of nowhere and say, “He shouldn’t have lied to me,” “She shouldn’t have died,” “It shouldn’t be so hard to find the right person for me,” “I’m older and have wrinkles so who would want to be with me now.” But those are all thoughts we can question easily. It only takes a moment of total honesty to see that we don’t know what the heck we’re talking about. We just think we do, and that causes us a lot of pain until it’s questioned and we see the truth.

A few weeks after my wife died, I remember thinking, “She was only 54, and she shouldn’t have died so young.” Then for some reason – and this was long before I had the understanding I now have – I asked myself, “Can I be really sure her life would have been better if she had lived?” And the no that came out of that question was almost ear-splitting. Of course I couldn’t know that. At that moment it was clear that she was supposed to be dead because when I looked around she wasn’t here any longer. And it was just as clear that I was supposed to have a life because I was here, and something in me knew it was not supposed to be a life of grief and misery forever. I didn’t understand but I did see reality.

Questioning is a gentle, powerful tool that can take you instantly out of any psychological suffering you’re stuck in. It may seem too simple. It may seem crazy. But questioning takes you to the truth when you’re willing to give up what you think you know. And when you see the truth there’s nothing to resist and no way to create pain for yourself. After all, can you ever successfully argue with what is?

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

253. If you believe your thoughts about dating you’re probably hurting

Thoughts aren’t real. They’re always projections of a past or a future. Reality, on the other hand, is whatever is happening – “what is” at any moment. An easy way to wipe out any suffering about your dating life is to remember that: Thoughts aren’t real. Your heart might be broken. You might feel anger, jealousy, grief, emptiness, despair, disappointment. Whatever feeling you have, notice that feelings only follow thoughts (no pain when you sleep, remember) and thoughts are always unreal. Unreal means they’re fleeting, transitory, fickle, and unreliable.

When thoughts cause pain you know, if you check it out for yourself, that you’re resisting and arguing with reality. Thoughts are trying to bring into reality something that doesn’t exist. Those thoughts are a lie; that’s why I say they're unreal.

Reality is what is, and the only reason it could be painful to you is if you think it “shouldn’t be”. At that moment you’re trying to play God. You’re saying, “I know she shouldn’t leave me because we’re the perfect match. She just didn’t give herself a chance to really know me.” Are you positively sure you’re right in that belief? Or you think, “I’m just not finding attractive people to date. I must be doing something wrong because others are finding new partners.” But is it really true that you know how the world – including your world – should be?

When you fight reality you always hurt and you always lose. When you just see and love what is you’re happy and at peace. One way is as good as the other. There’s no right or wrong here, but making war because you believe your thoughts is pretty crazy don’t you think?

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

252. A giraffe doesn’t seem to make much sense either!

Dating in this mature stage of life can be effortless and fun when we just relax into living out the urgings of the voice within. If the voice says, “Take some dancing lessons,” you sign up for some lessons. If the voice says, “Just relax and don’t go to that party tonight,” you just do it, even if it might seem crazy. The ego-mind doesn’t like it this way, though, and it’ll probably pop up with statements like, “No, you can’t sit back right now. You’ve got to get out there if you’re ever going to find a partner. Remember, you’re not getting any younger!”

The ego-mind thinks it’s in control so it wants to make your life work. It wants to know and control the outcome of life. But the promptings from within often don’t seem to make much sense. For example, the ego-mind couldn’t begin to see that not forcing yourself to attend a party that feels unsuitable to you could lead to anything but utter loneliness in old age. But do we realistically know that worry and search will be better than just relaxing into life as it naturally unfolds and as we’re naturally prompted to live? Maybe you’ll literally bump into your lifetime partner in a parking lot fender-bender! That’s not something the ego-mind could ever plan for.

Or with those dancing lessons you took. No one in the class looks at all like a potential partner and you might find yourself wondering, “Why am I doing this?” Then the last night of the class you meet a man who comes to pick up his sister at the end of that lesson… and voila!... there’s the man you were supposed to meet. That apparent “chance meeting” makes no sense to the ego-mind but the Source doesn’t care what the ego-mind thinks. It just lives as you, playing out the life called Jeannie, Sue or Tom in the mysterious, playful way it wants to. After all, this is the same Source that put a giraffe and a bare-butted monkey on earth, remember!

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

251. The timing for your life and dating couldn’t be better

When you’re really intent on finding a partner soon you’re probably in a lot of emotional pain. Not only are you unhappy while waiting for a partner but you’re probably feeling a lot of concern and dread that it may never happen.

I’ve been single more than 12 years since my second wife died, though I’ve met many women and dated a great deal. My first marriage ended in divorce after 17 years. Then two years later I was married again and was with my second wife for 18 years until her death. That’s a total of 35 years of marriage and I liked the idea of having a mate and partner. So I fully expected I’d probably be married again in a few years.

What I’ve learned, though, as a result of really investigating how life works, is that there is nothing that happens before its time or after its time. It couldn’t be possible because everything that shows up is just the One expressing itself in diverse ways. Now it’s clear to me that in the overall harmony of the universe I’m not supposed to have a partner now. I know it because I don’t. That’s the way the One or Source of all life is living itself out as me right now.

Since it’s animating my every move and heartbeat how could it make a mistake? For something to be called a mistake it would have to be compared to some other thing called “not mistake.” But that would mean there are two and that’s a myth. The idea of a separate, individual “me” who has any independent power and should have my way is only that – an idea. No doctor, doing an autopsy, has ever found something called an “I” or “me” inside anybody. Outside of an idea or thought, none of us has ever been able to locate this thing we call “me” either.

At first that sounds like bad news; we realize we have no control because there’s no “me”. But the exceptionally good news is that we no longer have to try to make life work. We don’t have to struggle to succeed any more. We don’t have to worry that we’re doing something wrong and that’s why we’re not finding a partner. We just notice that we’re moved when it’s time to move, we sleep when it’s time to sleep, we blink, breathe, digest food, allocate nutrients to the right parts of the body – all done in perfect timing because we’re not actually doing any of that. It’s so clear when you look at it that way isn’t it?

Perfect timing is also what’s happening in your relationships because the One just shows up as it wants to and only the idea of a person would argue with it. The simple, peaceful, happy way to live is to simply do what’s obvious for you without opinions and judgments about how things should be. If you doubt that, any time you’re suffering because life isn’t going your way just ask this one simple question: “Do I absolutely and without any doubt KNOW it should be my way?”

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

250. You can be happy, but it won’t come from finding a partner, strange as that seems

Nearly everyone dating in these mature years is dating with a goal. We want to find a partner. But that’s really a middle goal. The ultimate goal is the same as the goal for virtually any activity we pursue: We want to be happy, or at least happier. So if the final goal is to be happy why not just skip the middleman – getting a partner – and go for happiness? That sounds kind of nuts doesn’t it? But if we examine it a little closer it may not sound so crazy.

What is happiness? Is it really getting something we want, whether it’s a partner, a new car or that next cruise? No, we can see that that’s not true. If getting something made us happy we’d be happy forever once we had that thing – a partner or a new car, for instance. But are we? No. After awhile we’re on the search once more for some other thing to make us happy.

And while we’re searching we’re not happy. Oh sure, some people say they find a lot of joy while they’re working toward something. But we’d have to say, if we’re totally honest, that the nagging feeling of wanting and not feeling quite completely fulfilled isn’t what we’d call happiness.

Since we’ve temporarily eliminated a partner as our source of happiness where do we go to find the happiness we want? We thought finding something new would be it, but we’ve just looked and noticed that’s not true at all. So what is happiness? Well, ancient and current people who have really examined and investigated life have noticed something interesting. Happiness isn’t getting something, even though we do feel happy when we’ve gotten it and it feels like that thing or person is the source of our happiness.

Actually, a closer look reveals that it’s not the object we’ve gotten but the lack of that nagging, striving, seeking desire for a short time that is the real source of happiness. When there’s no desire for something to be different the mind is peaceful. It can be present with simply what is and that feels happy. In sleep, for instance, happiness and peace is always there because there’s no nagging thought of what should or ought to be, or what we want to be different from what we have.

Even during waking hours we all have those moments when we’re totally peaceful and happy. Those times usually occur when we’re so totally engaged with something, whether it’s a project we’re working on or watching a gorgeous sunrise over a lake, that we’re just “lost” as we sometimes call it.

Another point: We tend to think that happiness comes from the object of our desire. A car is a good example. Does that metal and glass and rubber really make happiness? For a person dying of cancer giving them a new car wouldn’t mean a thing. So it’s the subject, not the object, that provides the happiness.

As one well-known East Indian sage, the late H.W.L. Poonja put it, “To have true peace you have to be alone, separated from everything you enjoy and love as separate objects. This bliss, the bliss that does not depend on enjoying an object or an experience is imperishable, permanent. No matter what else is destroyed this will remain. Nobody knows where this happiness is because everyone is looking for it in the wrong place.”

So, how does this apply to mature dating? It simply means that if we live in our natural state of being, that state before thoughts and desires, we’re simply being in life. If your natural impulse is to date you’ll find yourself dating. But you won’t be dating with a goal, with that stress and pressure of making your life work in some way you don’t even know is best for you, really. Instead, you’ll just date for the fun of being with someone in the present, with no futurizing.

Having a partner may or may not happen. But why be miserable while you wait for something that may never be when you can be happy in the whole process of dating and living now? Then we just let the unfolding of the universe take us where it wants, which is what it’s going to do with or without our hopes and nagging, pressure-filled desires.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

249. Mature dating is a fun adventure when we live in harmony with the way of it

Dating in your senior or mature years is really not much different from any other aspect of life. It’s one slice of life. However, the struggle, strife and suffering that most people experience in everyday life is often magnified and brought to the fore when we’re dating because romantic relationships are so dramatic and intensely personal. The pain of a lost love can be like no other pain.

That’s why it’s so helpful to see that we can back off from life and not take it personally when we realize that we’re being lived and we really have no control. Then it’s a matter of just flowing with life as it happens rather than trying to fight or control what happens.

If these are new ideas to you I understand; they can sound crazy. They did to me too, at first. However, nothing I had ever done relieved the emotional hurt I often felt when life didn’t go my way. And when I read about what the sages have been teaching throughout the centuries it seemed to me that they might just have something. Those who saw the light (enlightened?) were from all parts of the world, all cultures, all centuries, and they all had come to see the same thing, with no input from each other because there wasn’t the communication in those days that there is today.

What they all saw, simply put, is that some Life Force – call it God if you like – is energizing itself into form, and we humans, like every other form in existence, are among the objects brought into existence.

We’re being lived. If you don’t think so try to make yourself do nothing, for example. You can’t do it. Try not breathing. You can’t. Try not thinking. You can’t. Try not blinking your eyes or sneezing or hiccupping. It just can’t be done. What moves your hands when you express yourself as you talk? What just made you swallow? Obviously we’re not in control of this “me” we think we are. Even the very idea of “I” or “me” is no more than a thought. No one has ever located a Me anywhere. This so-called Me has no individual power. It can’t exist for a split second without the power that enlivens it and animates it. So how could it be in charge of how life should go?

Seeing that, what the sages taught is to just relax, see life as it really is, and flow with it. Realize that what happens is obviously supposed to happen, for no other reason than that it does. You’re stood up for a date? Obviously you were supposed to spend that time doing something else. How do you know? Because the time is available and you’re going to fill it some way, whether you like it or not. Your honey decides to leave you? It must be that you’re supposed to be alone for awhile, or be available to meet someone else. Again, how can I know that? Simple. Because that’s what is and you can’t argue with it. You can think it should be different. You can wish it would be different. But in the end, it just is the way it is. So why spend all that energy and misery resisting the way it is? That's insanity, and a lot of suffering.

Flowing with life the way it is may sound like caving in and giving up but it’s not. It’s a vital, snappy, full-of-life, active way to live. It’s a not-doing that begins to recognize the intelligence-energy of the universe as it is. You begin to see the fullness of life that’s always been present and is available for us to realize when we stop trying to control life. And though we're not the doers everything gets done.

In this realization you’re not succumbing and folding up with your tail between your legs. And you’re not crawling into bed to bawl your eyes out and be depressed because life let you down. Instead, you’re watching with amazement as life unfolds in the way it does, which might be much different than you had expected. What a mystery! What a delight! Life sparkles amazingly when we just see it as it is, and realize we're being lived right along with everything else. We're actually that living power showing up now as a human. What a miracle as it changes every second! Dating can be exciting, adventuresome and fun when we simply live harmoniously with the way it is. What the heck! Might as well since life is going to be the way it is whether we like it or not. We don’t get a vote, have you noticed? In fact, there is no independent "we" to ever have had a vote in the first place. How can a drop of ocean spray vote against the ocean?

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer