Crises as opportunities

A crisis is something that helps us see, when nothing before that could make us turn our heads/minds. It comes looking like a bad thing, and many of us get stuck there, if we continue to see it this way.

Crises come in many forms and shapes, from health issues, to relationships problems, jobs lost etc, etc. Social viewpoints and beliefs form our concepts of what’s important, what we can overcome or not, what defines us and what threatens us. Social beliefs that we have made our own, backed up by numbers, of all the people around us that support the same beliefs.

We don’t have a mind of our own. Not unless we use it to doubt the virtual realities around us and within us that we call “real” and concrete, objective and correct.

But crises are an opportunity. They can be the wake-up call that we needed to pay attention. We are just not sure what to pay attention on. So, we go for the symptoms, trying to cure, to fix, to replace. Until the next crisis comes along! And we won’t realize that it has the same cause, with different or more severe symptoms.

We are afraid of pain and so we turn it into suffering. They are not the same. Pain is a symptom, it shows us, like fear does. When we renounce the pain or the fear as “bad”, “less” or “abnormal”, we convert it to suffering. But suffering is a choice, and is a product of our perception, our point of focus.

No one is implying that a crisis is easy and that it is not a challenging situation; always! But that’s exactly why we need to have a mind of our own, to ride on the wave of experience, instead of experiencing one storm after the other, searching for the calm that never comes, or comes for just a short while.

Most people think that “having a mind of our own” means to have an opinion, to choose amongst existing opinions or the ones that the surface mind can think about, examining pros and cons. But actually, to have “a mind of your own”, you must be able to exit the situation altogether, observe “from above” (an eagle’s view), unattached while experiencing, free from any or a specific outcome, being able to see way beyond the situation at hand.

It’s not something we accomplish naturally or automatically through our upbringing or our education. On the contrary! These prevent us from having an individuated mind; knowing that we are an indivisible duality. We are never actually alone, although we believe to be, listening only to our surface, linear mind.

There is so much to discover about our self, our own mind, which for the most part, is totally unknown. And a crisis is an opportunity to do just that. For our lack of deeper and more substantial attention calls for them! We bring them on to ourselves, on a personal and collective level, unintentionally, but nevertheless with our own Will.

Free Will? No, nothing comes for free in this world and neither does our Will. We pay with our experience, so that we may learn, gain insight, become more consciously present and observant, seek out the meaning of life and where we are unintentionally heading to.