How long will it take?
How long will it take to free our minds from beliefs and ideas? How long will it take to find freedom? I don’t know. There are many different approaches. It took me about seven years to undo the basic part of my programming but I still have far to go. There are only a few people who find absolute freedom. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj was one of them. But even if we accomplish to free ourselves of parts of our belief systems we can change our life’s drastically. We can have a good life, a life with much less suffering. To me the time I have been investing in freeing myself is the best time I ever spent. The outcome was worth every minuet of it.
My process was and is a step-by-step approach. First I had to look at my parents with brutal honesty. That was very hard to do because I did not see what I wanted to see. Being honest with our parents is something that is very suppressed in our society. We are programmed to honor and love them no matter what. If they loved us or not, beat us or not, mistreated us or not. When somebody says that he does not talk to his parents the first thing on our minds is “what is wrong with him?” not “what is wrong with his parents?” There is this responsibility that we feel we have towards them. Why?
Because they gave me life? Nobody asked me if I wanted it. To be honest if my parents would have asked me before I was born if I would like to be on this planet for some time I would have said absolutely not and especially not with the two of you. Because they fed and housed me? I was a wanted child. They knew that this responsibility comes with being a parent. Because they made me who I am? They did not give me the chance to discover who I really am, they much rather spent the time projecting their ideas onto me to be like they are. I do not feel like I owe my parents anything.
And yes it is true that ultimately nobody is to blame. Whatever problems they have they inherited from their parents and they inherited from their parents and so on. But they have to take responsibility for their actions, responsibility for what they did or did not do.
After I looked at my parents I had to look at myself to understand why I was doing things the way I was doing them. Yes my actions are routed in my programming but now that I understand where they were coming from it is time to let them go.
This processes is still going on and who knows if I will ever get to a point to free my mind completely. But do I really care? What I want is a good life, a life with less suffering. Even though it takes much longer then I anticipated to achieve that I am getting there patiently step-by-step.
"Step-by-Step". General post office/33rd and 8th Avenue/Manhattan/New York 02-08-08 at 01:22 PM.
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