in our personalities.
Multiple levels that have been placed on our internal landscape.
Science has shown that from the moment the baby's heart starts to beat in the mother's womb, and the baby starts growing, the baby is open to all kinds of stimuli being provided by the mother. Everything pings on the little one....forming a layer of consciousness. Once the baby is born, the brain becomes phenomenally active absorbing all the stimuli that is around him/her....this would form another layer....and as the baby grows, layer after layer is added on....by the parents, by the school, by friends of the same age, by all people the little one comes in contact with... The process does not stop. As we grow from stage to stage the pinging goes on from new environments, new people, new places of work and living.
Some children start thinking for themselves at an early age. That is when the sifting of the layers starts. Some are discarded, some are changed or altered, some are retained....according to the experiences the child goes through.
Some people start thinking for themselves at a much later stage in life...some, even as well advanced in age. The same sifting process happens, only it is much more painful...for there is a whole life to look back on and assess.
This sifting happens because there is only so much the brain can handle. As we grow the capacity of our brain increases...whole new dimensions are added to our mind, thereby causing more and more layers to form. We have to get rid of the extra baggage - the baggage that is really not doing anything for us. And, I feel, we need to do this for our own sakes. We know that the ultimate aim of our lives is to be at peace with ourselves. Comes a time when it no longer feels important to fight for all kinds of issues...we can let a lot of them just go. But we have to do the sorting. I have found that there are some hard layers - painful layers - that take a lot of digging to get loosened up. Ramifications of thought go through from this layer to some on top and some way, way below. But the loosening up has to be done so that they can be finally just yanked out and removed. It is a painful process because suddenly we are confronted with a whole lot of things that we had either taken for granted, or not thought of as being important.... It could be that we had ignored some very important signs and signals which could have changed the course of our lives.... We come up against people who hurt us, destroyed a part of our lives, or who helped us and we ignored them.... There are things we did that we are not proud of, but we did them without thinking, and the consequences of those changed the very course of our lives.... There are mistakes we made - some unthinkingly, some wrongly, some because we took the wrong advice... We have to resolve all these in our mind. To resolve means to look at them, accept the lesson learnt and then let it go. These may hang on a bit, but then they do go away...
If we don't do this, the bitterness is likely to poison all the other layers that are forming on top even as the bitterness obliterates all the good in the layers below, hardening up into one hard mass.
If we think strength lies in being hard, think again. Strength is not in being hard. What we mistake as being hard is actually being bitter - we have allowed the bitterness of the years to become a solid mass. Strength lies in our very vulnerabilities and how we handle them without changing our basic nature of goodness, happiness and above all gratefulness....without disturbing the lake of peacefulness which is inside our hearts.
Real strength lies in saying my parents screwed up, but I have a chance of setting myself right. I can let the past go and not blame what I am or what I have done on my parents or friends or situations or circumstances - these are all now in the past.
Real strength lies in saying I screwed up, but I have a chance to set things right...and I will do that...