The 10 Most Important Things I Have Ever Learned
It took me a long time in life to learn anything I would consider truly worth knowing.
I’m not talking about the stuff they tell you at school and university. The nonsense your parents told you about how to live.
None of that stuff is truly helpful for living a happy and fulfilling life. (Although necessary for getting a job and so on).
I’m talking about those things that teach us about the structure of life, suffering and happiness. That help us grasp the architecture of existence so that we can navigate it more skilfully.
With this structural understanding in place, the content (job, relationships etc.) are easier to sort out.
So here we go!
1. The deepest desire is for Love
What do you want from your parents? To love and be loved.
What do you want from your friends? To love and be loved.
What do you want from your career? To love what you do and be loved for it.
What do you want from drugs and alcohol? To relax—for a few moments—the parts of you that struggle to love and feel loved.
What do you want from a cup of tea? To love the tea and feel held by its warmth.
At the deepest level, everything comes back to Love.
All the desires we’ve ever had, are just branches of the Tree of Love, yearning to come back to their roots.
Knowing this helps me to understand the bigger picture of life. Life is a school for learning how to love :). Then we can discern what moves us more in that direction and what doesn’t.
2. (Self-)Love is a subtractive process
The most direct path to love is to explore with curiosity the pain in us which leads us to reject love or makes us believe we are unloveable.
Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Throughout our lives, we have been taught to reject ourselves in various ways in order to maintain the approval of those we depend on. Then we struggle to love others as a result.
We must reverse this process.
Find the hurt, shame, fear and self-judgement within, hold it and allow it. Natural (self-)love is revealed when these internal obstacles to (self-)love are held and integrated.
3. We are deeply, DEEPLY
conditioned beings
We treat ourselves and others as free agents that choose to be how they are.
Yet, I have learned that we act almost exclusively on the basis of incredibly powerful programming that is wired deep in our unconscious body-mind.
Our behaviours are driven—not by the voice in our heads—but by deep caverns of frozen emotion and stuck survival stress (co-ordinated at the surface level by unconscious beliefs).
The mind rationalises our behaviour retrospectively with convenient narratives.
Don’t try to ‘convince’ yourself to act differently. It doesn’t work. Take the bottom-up approach: explore and investigate the deep conditioning and programming in the body.
The most important thing I ever learned how to do was to inquire into and undo this programming.
4. Self-trust is key;
you must find out for yourself
You have to trust yourself and your own experience fundamentally.
After all, what other kind of experience do you have?! There’s only your own. What you take to the experience of ‘others’ is just your own projection. It’s your experience of others’ experience.
Do not give away your authority to teachers and experts. At the same time, use teachers and experts as much as possible to learn.
You cannot know what to do by looking to others. You cannot know what is true by listening to others. The only option that isn’t just believing hearsay and rumour is to find out for yourself :).
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5. Life is deeply counterintuitive
Life is not as it appears to be.
You must venture beneath the surface appearances to start to grasp what is going on. Your mind tells you that life is one way, but…how can you trust your mind?
Everyone sees the world differently and uniquely. What does that tell you about the truth of our seeing?
When we investigate, it turns out that navigating life is a deeply counterintuitive affair. We must let go in order to obtain, we must feel hatred to allow love, we must investigate multiplicity to reveal oneness, we must die to live.
When we take life as it appears to be, it feels stale and static. We don’t see the opportunity for growth and deepening. When it's counterintuitive, illusory nature is grasped, life becomes an infinite mystery. An infinite psychedelic house of mirrors to explore :). What fun!
6. The mind (almost) always lies
The mind is incredibly intelligent, but it never tells me what is true. Only what it needs to tell me to perpetuate itself.
It creates an image of myself, of others and the world not as a true reflection (hint: there is no such thing), but in whatever way it feels it needs to in order to keep my psychological identity (“Ben”/”I”) safe.
It will tell me “I am weak” only so I don’t mess with someone “strong”.
Whatever it projects is only for the purposes of keeping my sense of self intact and is thus (at the deepest level) a lie and an illusion. Even if it is useful for managing day-to-day (note: ‘useful’ is not the same as ‘true’).
Knowing this means that I no longer look to the mind for truth. This is huge! That’s the mistake everyone else is making :D.
Rather than engaging with the mind, I question it. When I question enough, the Silence beyond the mind is revealed.
7. The body never lies
Contrariwise, the body does not know how to lie.
If we ask, it will always reveal our true feelings.
If your mind tells you that you aren’t scared of (say) speaking in public, it means nothing. You could be telling yourself you’re not afraid, while you can’t stop your knees knocking together!
Likewise, if the body is calm and relaxed when you are speaking in public, then you know that you aren’t afraid!
The body is the final arbiter.
When making decisions, sussing people out and generally trying to navigate life, you can do worse than to stick with your heart and your gut!
8. I need help
I cannot do this alone.
I am small, finite, ignorant and even helpless in many ways.
I need help.
Once I recognise this, then I am free (or freer, at least) to ask the many astonishing, wise, caring, compassionate souls who populate our world for their advice and support.
And, incredibly, many are only too happy to give it.
I am deeply thankful for the many teachers I have had on this path.
9. No experience will ever make me truly happy (but I must honour my desires)
You may notice that no experience ever truly satisfies.
I have had thousands of chocolates in my life. Yet, when the next craving comes around I don’t think about how the last 5,000 chocolates never quite hit the spot.
The itch must be scratched at a deeper level. Our happiness must come from within, not from without.
The only reliable source within is that which is there all the time: our Being itself. The path to true happiness is a deeper and deeper connection with (and, ultimately, union with) that Being.
At the same time, you must honour your authentic desires. We all have things within us that want to be expressed and manifested. If we ignore or repress these, we are denying ourselves. Misery and frustration will result.
The trick is not to chase experiences to make you happy. But to realise the happiness within and then act on your authentic desires as an expression of your happiness :).
10. For true healing, every part
of me must be allowed
Every part of me wants to be seen, heard, felt, expressed, allowed.
Even when doing healing work there is a tendency to reject ‘negative’ emotions, like anger or shame. We try to rationalise them away. Or to soothe and placate them.
If there is a part of me that hates my mother, for example, I might try to repress that because I’m not ‘supposed’ to hate my mother, it’s not a ‘nice’ thing to harbour and a bigger part of me loves my mother!
But trying to either resist and repress these parts, on the one hand, or balance and harmonise and justify them, on the other, doesn’t work. When we do this, they only hide themselves deeper in the dark corners of our soma.
Instead, we endeavour to allow each part to be itself fully. Even if that results in conflict and contradiction.
Let the part of me that hates, hate. Let the part of me that loves, love. Let the part of me that resists hatred or love, resist.
My job is to fully acknowledge, allow and express these parts. Not to judge how they should be arranged and whether or not they are justified as part of my make-up.
When we do this, there is the greatest opportunity for the natural intelligence of the body-mind to harmonise these parts itself in the most appropriate way. And we are relieved of the burdening of knowing how we ‘should’ be and what parts we ‘should’ have within us.
Phew.
Alrighty, then.
That’s my top 10 list. It’s obviously very subjective. There are many other things I could have put here and on another day I may have come up with a list that looks quite different.
But hopefully it provides some good food for thought.
What are the most important things that you have ever learned? Let me know with a comment or email :). I would love to hear.
Love,
Ben
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