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The Buddha has taught us that the cause of all suffering is ignorance, which is either not knowing what we don\u2019t know or believing in a thought that\u2019s at odds with what\u2019s true, what was true in the past or what will be true in the future. One of the most common untruths of this kind is, \u201cI\u2019m not good enough.\u201d <\/p>\n
Aside from these two types of ignorance, there is another dynamic at play that creates our suffering. If we\u2019re told something that isn\u2019t true often enough, eventually we can come to believe it anyway. In today\u2019s world, all three of these roads can lead to suffering in our daily lives. <\/p>\n
In the modern world, misinformation, out-and-out lies and conspiracy theories abound. When we have people in positions of political power whose means of relating with the public involve not being truthful about what is, we\u2019re doomed to live in a society that becomes dysfunctional and conflicted. All roads that lead to suffering become open to us as a community of fellow citizens.<\/p>\n
What can we do to address such dysfunctionality? We need to become aware<\/em> of what is going on. By gaining awareness of what\u2019s going on, we can determine if we should support such political messaging or, on the other hand, allow our truth to be known and carried out on our life\u2019s path. <\/p>\n This requires us to speak truth to power. Only by doing this will those who are being dishonest be forced to relate to those of us who can see through what\u2019s going on and will hold them accountable for their words and behaviour.<\/p>\n So what is meant by awareness and how do we achieve it? Adyashanti writes: <\/p>\n Awareness is that part of us that perceives and witnesses our thoughts, feelings, behaviours and our body. It can be quite transformative to realize that you are not what you thought you were, that you are not your feelings, that you are not your beliefs, that you are not your personality, that you are not your ego. You are something other than that, something that resides on the inside at the innermost core of your being. For the time being we are calling that something awareness itself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n When our awareness resides in the present moment, we\u2019re in touch with who we really are, with our very essence.<\/p>\n Being in the present, or being in the now, is being one with each heartbeat and each in-breath and out-breath from moment to moment. We only have our next breath, our next heartbeat. As Jon Kabat-Zinn has stated, \u201cThe past and future are only concepts, we only have the now.\u201d <\/p>\n When our lives are being run by reactive thinking, we\u2019re filled with fear, ignorance, judgments, myths and interpretations about ourselves and others.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n So what exactly is it that prevents us from being in the present moment at all times? In short, our reactive minds keep us from being in the present. From our earliest life encounters, our reactive thoughts create storylines about our experiences. In our storylines, we come to conclusions about ourselves and our world and make judgments about who we are, including whether our needs and feelings are OK or not. For each of us, our inner critic is a creation of these storyline-based conclusions we reach about who we are.<\/p>\n When our lives are being run by reactive thinking, we\u2019re filled with fear, ignorance, judgments, myths and interpretations about ourselves and others. We\u2019re incomplete, never good enough, always striving for completion. When we\u2019re caught up in our storylines, we\u2019re listening to their words. By doing so, we become hooked by each storyline and either relive the past or rehearse what we anticipate experiencing in the future, based on what we\u2019ve experienced in the past. In this place, we\u2019re susceptible to misinformation and to being misled by others.<\/p>\n When we\u2019re in touch with our awareness, our thoughts reflect an insight and wisdom far beyond anything that our reactive thinking can imagine. We move from a life of doing things to find our identity to a life of being who we are in the present moment.<\/p>\n Our task as individuals and members of our communities is to become aware of thoughts that make up the misinformation that resides within us. With that, we won\u2019t be taken in by the misinformation from our political leaders who want to control us or confuse us about what is or isn\u2019t truthful. In this place of awareness, we can connect with our inner truth about who we are and what\u2019s being presented in the outer world, and then speak our truth to power.<\/p>\n On another level, by being present to and aware of what\u2019s within us, we\u2019ll also become less reactive towards those with whom we come in contact. By reducing the conflict within ourselves, we can naturally reduce the conflict between others and ourselves. Outer peace in the world begins with achieving peace within. <\/p>\n \u00abRELATED READ\u00bb<\/strong>\u00a0THE STORY OF AMERICA: Migration, identity and the politics of liberty\u00bb<\/strong><\/p>\n image: Leejoann<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Buddha has taught us that the cause of all suffering is ignorance, which is either not knowing what we<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shop-cili.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
The difficulty of staying in the present<\/h2>\n
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Inner peace leads to outer peace<\/h2>\n
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