Self-Esteem?

10 Sept 08

Self-esteem?

"When you walk, just walk. When you sit, just sit. But, whateveryou do, don't wobble!"

Ummon

All so-called "self-concepts" are illusions. They don't really exist. They are just contrived limits you put on yourself. To add insult to injury, you then endow them with license to influence your life. You may expand and improve self-concepts, but a superior solution is to simply revoke their license, watch them subsequently evaporate into space, and then operate without them! "Safety" provided by this or that self-concept is delusory. In fact, " security" itself is merely a term we've manufactured for the purpose of describing a non-existent phenomenon!

Our spiritual antecedents called it "mushin," or "no-mindedness." It simply means operating without self-imposed limits and self-manufactured speed-bumps. It means dismissing "I am," "I am not, "I don't, couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't, mustn't, could never, etc." The mushin mind unfearingly confronts the challenge at hand, not worrying about the horizon. When in mushin-mode, the mind flows, always forward, never hesitating nor stumbling, audaciously observing no limits nor barriers.

The opposite is "ushin," or self-consciousness. The ushin mind spends its time saying, "What wonderful thing will happen when I win?"or, "What terrible thing will happen when I lose?" The ushin person worries about results and forgets about confronting the challenge before it. When in ushin-mode, the mind is apprehensive, timid, fearful. It constantly missteps, pauses, and over-corrects, converting each trivial speed-bump into Mt Everest! The ushin person is thus ever-bewildered, unfocused, afraid, confined. He flounders forward, charging first this windmill, then that. He goes down to defeat with monotonous regularity!

I have noticed some aspiring Operators, whom I know to be competent, who shoot like blundering amateurs as soon as a prize is involved. They are beguiled into thinking about the prize, to the exclusion of the path before them. The prize imposes a rigid matrix into which they believe they must fit themselves. They thus become progressively unfocused, confused, befuddled. Their mind is disarticulated, spread out over too many irrelevant places. Victory is out of the question!

Conversely, mature Operators think about neither winning nor losing. They don't think about anything! With icy determination, they dash forward joyfully, firm in the knowledge that the Almighty must have great confidence in them to present them with such a magnificent challenge. They become a seamless, flawless, unconfined whirlwind of motion, effortlessly flowing from one subroutine to another, unstoppable, unbeatable. They seldom miss!

"The mind of a perfect man is like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It expects nothing. It reflects, but does not hold. Thus, the perfect man can act without effort."

Chuang Tzu

/John