We are surrounded by images of the fantastic and the deeply disturbing. We have conversations of despair, of hope, wishes and of imagined scenarios. We dream of being better, have illusions about who we are. We hear others tell us how we should behave and what we really should want from our lives.
We are confused, doing one thing whilst wishing we were doing another. We are in conflict being unsure what to do next, how to carry out our lives. We may follow the patterns of others so it becomes all mapped out for us how to live so we can drift through life without ever having to work it out for ourselves.
We may have invented elaborate beliefs that allow us not to have to worry about death. We have heavens and immortality to comfort us without knowing the facts of what happens at death. We don't know how to live and we create illusions about death so we can give meaning to our lives.
Surely living is more important than death? Yet we seem so helpless in our own lives driven by the society one is in with all its social conditioning, chasing money and our own selfish desires. We have created psychological time for several reasons and one of them is to put a distance between now and death. This gives great comfort as we can place death in some distant time that is not now.
Having put death out of harms way with beliefs and psychological time we carry on attaching to things like power and wealth that cause us to be ambitious, aggressive, selfish, jealous and envious. These are the attributes that are promoted in most societies and so we become trapped by the conditioning all around us.
Many of us end up with ideals that are not what we currently are, they are a wish list made by thought working to an image of being a better person and so conflict follows us around as a chain around our necks. Before we can live properly we have to understand all the improper things we do. We have to see without judgement what it is we have become so attached to and ask if we can live without all the attachments and ideals we have built around ourselves. Without this serious enquiry there will not be any fundamental change to the self and so real love and compassion will not flourish.
