
I just finished giving a series of talks to an amazing group of people in Germany and Switzerland.
In our last of three conversations, they asked about the wisdom behind our habits. How can I say that habits and anxiety are wisdom in action?
Their experience of habits and anxiety–most people’s experience, no doubt–was full of problems and suffering.
Of course it looks that way. But what if our experience of anything as a problem is simply a reminder that we’re seeing from a limited perspective?
Our current perspective is what creates the experience of a problem. Life doesn’t do that, a conceptual mind does.
We talked about the elephant. If you’re standing up close and holding the tail, you’ll swear you’re touching something rough and bristly like a broom. If standing up close and holding the ear, you’ll swear it’s something soft and velvety.
Back up, and you see it’s an elephant. It’s all of those things and none of them.
It’s all about perspective.
Suffering is there to wake us up. To remind is to step back, zoom out, and see the bigger picture.
What is the bigger picture? That you are pure love, peace, and wisdom and that, in your moment of suffering, you’re forgetting. You’re tuned into the computer in your head, taking its habitual output as the truth of who you are. It hurts when we do that, as it should. The pain is there to show us what’s going on.
We have the most amazing, perfect, helpful human design. Habits and anxiety are there to remind us of that.