260. Being peaceful and happy is as natural as gravitating toward a mate

Our natural state is peace and happiness. You can prove that to yourself by just noticing that in those moments when you’re just being, without really thinking of anything, you’re perfectly content. Or consider this, before any movement there’s stillness. Stillness has to be the background on which movement appears. It’s that way with noise also. Before sound there’s silence. Notice that you can jiggle a cup of water and when you stop jiggling it goes back to its natural state, stillness. You can make any sound – strike a gong, play a note, say a word – and when the sound stops there’s silence again. Silence is the natural state.

In silence and stillness there’s nothing but peace, no disturbance. It’s the peace we feel when we’re asleep at night. It’s the state small babies live in until they get old enough to have a sense of “me” and begin to believe their thoughts. We suffer, in dating and in other aspects of life, because we’re confused. We resist and argue with life as it is; that’s the confusion. We think life should be different because we’re confused about who we are. We haven’t noticed that living is happening through us not from us. We aren’t the authors of life. In fact, we have no independent power at all. Our very existence and every breath and heartbeat is given to us.

When you feel stress about your experiences in dating just notice that you believe some thought that’s fighting with what is. We don’t argue with gravity, we don’t whine that leaves fall off the trees in the fall, we don’t complain that some flowers have no perfume. This is all just the way life is, and who knows why?

All of life is like that. There’s a name for it when we disturb our natural inner silence and stillness by thinking anything should be our way instead of the way it is. It’s called insanity.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

259. You can’t lose when you see dating as it is, a delightful adventure

This morning I read a comment written by a 70-year-old woman who was saying that being older is not as good as being younger. As you read that do you notice that this is a woman who’s adding a slight stress to her life by arguing with reality? If you question whether something that subtle is stressful put yourself in her shoes a minute and ask yourself two questions:

1. How do you feel emotionally when you think the thought that life isn’t as good as it once was? Just feel that for a moment.

2. How would you feel if you paid no attention to that thought and just let it disappear into wherever it came from? Feel that one.

Even hypothetically, doesn’t question #2 feel better? Living happens, aging happens, spouses die or leave, we find ourselves alone in life. If you think it shouldn’t be this way isn’t that a bit like thinking if you drop a plate in mid-air it shouldn’t hit the floor? You just make yourself miserable.

The articles in this blog don’t say you can find a partner and here’s how to do it. What these articles say is that whatever happens in your dating you can enjoy life with a sense of well-being and contentment when you go with life as it is. Thoughts come and go by themselves. You can only have one thought at a time so any time there’s a new thought, which is every second or more, you’ve also lost the last thought.

If we buy into certain thoughts and nurse them and feed them and pay attention to them because we think they mean something we just create a lot of suffering for ourselves. I’m not even really talking about acceptance here, because to have acceptance you also must have non-acceptance and rejection. I’m only talking about being, before thoughts, before judgments, before attachments. Just see life as it is and you’ll have no pain. Then mature dating is a wonderful adventure and you can’t possibly lose.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer

258. Believe thoughts about dating and they’ll bite you every time

The mind is a wonderful slave but a wretched master. Unfortunately, a huge part of our waking hours we let thoughts master us. We believe them, and then get jerked around by them like an animal on a chain, forgetting that we started the whole process: “He didn’t pay any attention to me when I spoke to him. He must be mad. It’s probably because I said I didn’t want to go camping with him. Maybe if I make his favorite pie he’ll get over it.” And our story builds and snowballs. But do we know it’s true? We’ve believed our thoughts without questioning them.

Let’s say this woman catches her insanity and says to her guy, “You didn’t answer when I spoke to you, is something wrong?” And he says, “You spoke to me? Gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you said anything. I was so engrossed in fixing this thing that I didn’t even hear you.” Or maybe he does say he’s mad because you won’t go camping with him. Is that your problem to fix? You know he’s supposed to be mad because he is. You don’t need to change him or fix him. You may decide you don’t want to live in that tension, though, so you go shopping. Or eventually you may decide to find a different guy. But you don’t fall into mind traps that say this shouldn’t be this way.

We build stories in our minds because we’re interested in our thoughts. We think they’re real and they mean something. But they’re not and they don’t! All worries, doubts, problems and questions about dating only exist and make us suffer when we’re thinking about them. What do most of us do to relieve the suffering? Usually one of several things: 1) We try to change someone so they’ll be or do what we want. 2) We try to find some experiences to get our minds off the suffering. 3) We try to keep the mind silent, which is like saying, “Don’t think of pink elephants.”

The real answer to the end of emotional suffering is always to question and see what story you’ve got going that argues with reality. Never once will your stories win when they fight reality because reality is just what is. How can you argue with what already is? We just think it should be different, but does that have any effect on what is? Not for a second!

The world works as it works. Dates cheat. Partners lie. Women have affairs. Men say mean things. Is your situation any different? It’s just what is. The way the Masters have found to be always at peace and happy with life is to see that we’re part of its creation and not to form self-centered opinions and judgments about it. It seems too simple, but if we just settle back and relax, life is problem-free. In the end we might even let ourselves see that the me-personality doesn’t even exist. There is no independent person. That too is just a thought.

Copyright © 2007 Chuck Custer