It's not the world that is the problem. It’s our relationship to it, it’s how we relate to it.
The world is our three-dimensional reality. This is unavoidable — we are three-dimensional beings having a three-dimensional experience, so it's unavoidable. Whether the world extends only to our immediate environment, this space, this body and so on, or whether it extends further out to include more of the three-dimensional reality, it’s still the world.
So what we mean by “the matrix” here, is the way that we relate to the world which if we start to really examine that for ourselves is based mostly on some kind of transaction and some kind of strategy. I don't mean it's necessarily malevolent or malicious or manipulative, it’s simply the way that the separate self — the self-construct the “me” self — has learned, as conditioning, to operate in order to feel secure, to feel approved of, to feel safe, to feel recognized, and so on. We seek approval, recognition, security, safety — and again I'm not just talking about our material needs that are fundamental to physiological survival, I’m talking about an emotional psychological level.
So we set up a sort of bargaining with life itself — life as it's manifest through our worldly 3D experience, whether that's relationships, whether that's work, whether it's any aspect of life. We set up a kind of bargaining with life — “if I do it right, if I'm a good girl, or a good boy, or a good spiritual seeker” or whatever it might be. “If I'm worthy enough then life will give me either what I desire, what I deserve, all the blessings, or the spiritual blessings, all the material blessings maybe, and so on”. We start to set up a “happy ever after” relationship with life — “if I find my true purpose then I’ll be fulfilled” and so on and so on. We set up a whole load of contracts and transactions, we bargain, we beg and we bully with life itself in order to get what we think or want — what the separate self, the “me” construct thinks it needs in order to feel good, to be whole and to be “enough” — worthy enough, worthy enough of love worthy enough of success, worthy enough of something! That is “the matrix”. It’s an inner matrix — what we call “conditioning”, the matrix of the conditioned mind.
And that is the prison. That is what we eventually want to be free of because all that transactional activity is not only a source of agitation and tension, it's also the source of a lack of deeper fulfillment and the source of restlessness. It's the source of a whole plethora of strategies of defendedness. Some of those are very subtle and some of those are more obvious — whether it’s the armoring around the heart, whether it's our spiritual “myth making” about where we're going to get to when we progress on the path and how perfect life will be. This is an illusion we create, the veils of perception where we do not see clearly. And this is the prison of the self — the “me” self, the ego self. We may call it the “conditioned mind” or the “conditioned self”.
Often we may think that we need to examine all that conditioning in order to be free of it — “if only I could look at it and find out what my conditioning is, where it's come from, how it manifests, where it was inherited from” and we can go back and back and back and back through generations through all aspects of the development of the human species. But ultimately it's like a bottomless pit of analysis, and even if we see that's its a conditioned belief or a conditioned thought or a conditioned behavior or conditioned pattern, yes this is valuable … but what is the way through? What is the way to dismantle that conditioning?
Freedom from conditioning — wherever it has been inherited from, however many generations of belief and patterning has come down — comes to an end in the meeting reality as it is. It’s in the meeting what is here in our direct experience without interpretation and without interference — this is the direct way. It cuts through when we when we are willing to just “stop” and not react, not follow some impulse of defendedness or grasping or aversion. You know, we can we just stop.
It's as if there's a great momentum energetic momentum that wants to pull you into that, but if you stop and hang out here that unconscious momentum comes undone. It’s an energetic experience, not an intellectual experience. We could sit here, or you could sit here, and we could start making a list of all the conditioned beliefs and all the strategies and so on, but in the end that's not the way through.
When we stop, it’s energetic, it’s immediate, it’s direct. The momentum of the archaic ancient egoic psychological structure which we have inherited — yes, as we evolved into being human, yes it's part of that evolution. We also developed a sense of self, a self awareness or self-reflection — the capacity to recognize “I'm here, I'm a separate entity, I have my thoughts and my feelings and so on, and my belief systems and opinions and so on”. And now it's becoming a prison, individually and collectively.
When we stop, that whole momentum has nowhere to go, it has nowhere to go so it has to undo itself. It dissolves in the stop, either for a moment or in layers or more permanently. It is the undoing of the self-construct, the undoing of the ego self — “I am this” or “I am that” based on interpreting your experience and then interfering with it, controlling it, bartering with it, bargaining with it. Awareness now has the possibility to take place. You may get an insight — “ah, there it is, there’s the actual program, I can see it”. Or you may have an emotional release — maybe a deeper layer comes up or some tears or whatever, something opens and the armoring around the heart and if the armoring of the mind, the position-taking of the mind, comes undone.
Amoda Maa
Thanks for reading.
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