This is my response to the question I posed at the end of the related post My Monkey Mind is more Unique than Your Monkey Mind:
Why do I want so much to be unique? To be special? To have my own special, unsolvable problem, condition, situation?
It helps to understand that we have been groomed for specialness from birth. Most parents bring up their children with the expectation that their child will somehow ‘prove’ themselves special or exceptional in some way and if not nobly, well, even notoriously.
There’s something within us that simply cannot tolerate insignificance.
There’s something within us that simply cannot tolerate insignificance. And if as parents we have ourselves lived in shades of insignificance, we make even greater effort to ensure that our children will not. Unconsciously, we feel that our children’s significance will be perceived as a reflection of our own unrecognized significance.
Haven’t we all had to suffer the thinly disguised pride that parents take as they feign a lament over their child’s ‘unfortunate’ idiosyncrasies? ‘Oh Josh is such a fuss pot. He must have his toast buttered just so.’ ‘Amy will not tolerate even a single comma out of place. She is such a perfectionist’.
A child quickly learns the importance of significance and specialness for its survival and is rapidly acquainted with the conditions for ‘love’ and approval that significance or specialness appears to satisfy.
If you can prove yourself, demonstrate some unique ability (or disability), be different from the rest, you’ll get the attention, the approval, the acceptance, the ‘love’ you have otherwise been denied.
You see, what would have been a parent’s or teacher’s pure love was itself already contaminated with and compromised by the belief in the need for significance, for specialness, for uniqueness.
And this is where we start approaching the crux of the matter.
It is not significance that we need nor specialness nor uniqueness. What we are deeply and relentlessly seeking is the experience of unconditional LOVE.
But what is love really? Certainly not anything that demands conditions. So what is it? Well, if you sit in a state that is free from thought – possible but elusive to those who are untrained and unpracticed – you will experience a state of wholeness, completeness, spaciousness, calmness, freedom, peace, power, joy, aliveness, limitlessness….all this and everything good is what love is.
And this is what we so deeply desire to experience. Why? Because that’s our natural state and no normalized state that we have been conditioned into will ever come close
But having been so chronically distanced from our natural state, in desperation, we seek substitutes of which significance and the approval, acceptance and ‘love’ we get through it are some such substitutes albeit appallingly poor ones.
But what we really want is to experience love and all the goodness therein. We want to experience that which we naturally and effortlessly and unconditionally are. THIS is what we want most in life. In fact, THIS IS LIFE and more than anything else we want to be (A) LIFE or ALIVE as Joseph Campbell so rightly observed. We want to experience our A-LIFE-NESS. But having lost sight of this truth, we crave significance instead.
It is a classic and common case of mistaking the finger that is pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In this case, the ‘finger’ is ‘significance’ and the ‘moon’ is Love. If we think about it, we can dispense with the finger altogether and simply gaze at the moon (please do think about that).
Indeed, the threat of insignificance drives us to extreme feats of avoidance and/or craving. We drink, we learn to master verbal and even physical come-backs, we develop quaint ways of speaking or outlandish habits, we self-harm, we beat ourselves up repeatedly certain that someone will eventually take notice and give us the significance we crave albeit in ways that disempower rather than empower us, we seek a partner to give us what we fail to find and experience within ourselves – LOVE.
The thing about significance is that it is entirely dependent on the external world. It has no meaning without other people or things. On our own and in the confines of our own mind, significance is meaningless. It only takes on meaning as a result of the response we get from others. Significance is something that can only be derived from others. Unlike love, it is totally conditional.
So, whether your method for gaining significance is through nobility or notoriety, through greatness or pitifulness, through self-assertion or learned helplessness, through extreme authority or extreme submission, you will need to coopt others into your game.
You cannot do it alone. And understandably, the more you need others to play the roles that you need them to play, the more you are beholden to them, the more you are dependent upon them, the less free, powerful and able you are to be and experience the love that you naturally are, that which you so deeply seek.
At some point, you will have to accept that you can’t have both. You will have to decide to stop playing this ridiculous game of looking for ‘love’ while demanding significance.
You either seek significance and accept/suffer the dependencies and conditions that go with it or you seek love and the freedom that it offers.
It’s about maturing. You understand and accept that happiness, peace and freedom are in the same cohort. Dependencies are in another along with the need for significance, specialness and uniqueness.
In this understanding and acceptance, you are drawn closer to the truth, to the state of love that you are. And you learn to sit in it, to accept and experience your oneness with it. You recognize the irrefutable truth of this unity, this oneness, and you see any separation for the illusion that it is.
You experience the profound peace and power and bliss that is naturally and unconditionally present. It has always been there, this state of love, this natural substrate of the universe, of life, this life itself, of which you are.
And if, out of this state you are naturally and effortlessly drawn to act, to move, to speak, to write, to paint, to invent, to sing, to travel, to think, to garden, to swim, to invite, to teach, to kiss, to make love, to partner…then you can and you will. And as part of this dynamic movement, all else that is a part of it – people and things – will also arise and be drawn into its field of manifestation.
Game over.
REFLECTION
Do you find yourself feeling a need to be different? To be seen as sufficiently different to others (eg from a sibling or a group of friends or a member of a team)? What is behind this need? Is it a reaction against something or someone? Perhaps it is a need to be valued? Reflecton this gently and compassionately.
CALL TO ACTION
Take a few moments to become very still. Tune into that natural rhythm within you and when it feels right, move according to that rhythm. It may change as you move. You might also find that your movement is unlike any other movement you would typically do.
INSPIRING STATEMENT
I move to the natural rhythm that is flowing beautifully and effortlessly within me
MENTORING
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