KNOWING THE GIFTS OF EXISTENCE

KNOWING THE GIFTS OF EXISTENCE

I am reminded of the story of the beggar who sat near the seaside on an old rusted wooden box that he found near the sea. He put old newspapers and rags on top of it and made it his home. He sat on the box every day begging from the passers-by. Everyone knew him as he sat on the same place every day. He spent many years of his life begging for his living.  People took pity on him and some gave him money while others brought him food or clothing. He accepted everything gratefully. It happened that one day he died in the night as he slept on his box. The next day the town’s municipality came to remove his body. They also wanted to remove the box and clean the place. When they tried to move the box, it was very heavy. So they decided to break it open and remove the pieces. When they broke the rusted box, they found that the box was full of ancient gold pieces, coins, and other ancient treasures. If only the beggar had taken time to notice what was inside the box, he could have lived the life of a king.

Existence is a grand gift but by believing the stories of our mind about our situation, our past experiences, our future, our imaginations, our concepts, and our ideas, we build a huge wall of illusion around ourselves.  We become blind to the gifts of existence. Awareness of the present moment dissolves the stories because the stories are everything outside this moment.

Belief in our stories have created a lot of repressed feelings of anger, hurt, sadness, pain, and need. These form the foundation from which we view our life. Limiting beliefs from childhood of “I am not loved, I am not wanted, I am not worthy, I can’t do it, and I am not capable,” go on a big list of things that support the story even more. We continue to live our life within our stories. Then we project our stories on to the present moment and judge everything in the moment based upon our stories. This creates a distortion about life, about love, and about us in general.

The stories take over every aspect of our life and prevent us from being our wiser, peaceful, and compassionate selves. The stories make us feel imprisoned with hopeless life situations. This then triggers us into making up more stories of a future that can bring us success or love;. Any ideal or goal to achieve in a future makes life more stressful because the future never comes as the future also becomes the now moment.

When we try to practice positive affirmations and follow the laws of attraction without first waking up in awareness, we continue to live within our story making it bigger and bigger. We can continue to improve our stories, but we cannot escape our stories.

Awareness is awakening out of our mind stories of the past and future, and out of the limiting beliefs that we have gathered from our childhood. In awareness, we understand where the truth of life is. We cannot stop our mind from thinking, but we can realize that we need not believe or attach our emotions to our stories. We need not feed or fix our stories, but we do need to wake up to know that they are stories and that we need not believe in them.
 

~Excerpt from my book "Twelve Steps to Inner Peace"
Copyright © 2012 P Rajkumar , S L Christian
All rights reserved.
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