Prayers Are Seldom Answered

<b>Prayers Are Seldom Answered</b>
"Prayers not answered” means your “expectations not fulfilled.” The TAO wisdom explains why: your attachments to careers, money, relationships, and success “make” but also “break” you by creating your flawed ego-self that demands your “expectations to be fulfilled.”

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

How to Avoid a Dysfunctional Mind


The Awakening and Letting Go
                      
Letting go is the natural surrender of the human mind to any involuntary reactivity aimed at removing anything that might threaten or undermine the ego-self. Letting go should be a natural instinct, and not a technique that one has to learn and master; it is simply a spontaneous human ability to give up all human attachments that create the unreal ego-self.

According to the TAO, the wisdom of Lao Tzu, the ancient sage from China, it is the letting go, and not the holding on, that makes us strong because it overcomes the fear of the unknown and the unpredictable. Let go of yesterday to live in today as if everything is a miracle; let go of the world to have the universe. That is the only path to awakening of the mind.

Lao Tzu believes that the entire universe with everything in it flows with a mysterious force that not only controls but also maintains the natural order of all things. That ultimate reality is nondescript and paradoxical; all humans can know is that it is not only within and outside them, but also everywhere and nowhere.

“The Way to the Creator existed
before the universe was created.
Its essence is formless and unchanging.
It is present wherever we turn,
providing compassion to all beings.
It comes from the Creator of the universe,
who has no name.
To identify him, call him the Creator.
He can also be called the Great Mystery,
from whom we come, in whom we live, and to whom we return.”
(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25)

Accordingly, Lao Tzu’s emphasis is on being, rather than on doing.

This is how the human mind may have become distorted, delusional, and dysfunctional:

·       In the beginning, man did not know things existed, and so he had perfect knowledge.

·       Later, he found out things existed, but made no distinctions between them.

·       Then, he began to make some distinctions, but expressed no judgment about right and wrong.

·       Now, he makes his own judgments of right and wrong, and that leads to his own preferences of likes and dislikes, and thus creating his desires and expectations—the sources of his sufferings. In short, the human mind is like an unbridled horse: it makes judgments, making what does not exist, exist, and what does exist, does not exist. In the process, illusions and self-deceptions are created, and they become the attachments or substances of the ego-self.



Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau

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