Living with Strings

(part three)

Anger and fear entail the need to control. To feel angry and fearful is to seek for external power, a power that can gain others' attention towards the one who feels weak and insecure. This is a common experience for us. Being enraged and terrified, we have the tendencies to act illogically, as we attack others and protect ourselves from the illusion of danger of not being in control. And often we justify our actions like they suppose to happen for the sake of maintaining our external mandate over things, events, and people.

We are so fixated that we think that life do not change. This is one of the foremost illusions of attachment. Our attachment towards a monolithic view of life renders us unprepared for the constant and sudden uncertainty and inevitability of it. Just as how Ian Malcolm, the fictional mathematician of Michael Crichton's famous thriller Jurassic Park, sees the impossibility of running a dinosaur park smoothly based on accurate calculation of events, we must see that Life bears the same chaotic quality and remains naturally unpredictable. One plus one is not always two, as far as Life is concerned. But we seem to continue to control Life. Like a marionette puppeteer, we attach strings onto Life as if we think that we can make it move the way we want it, without bearing in mind that sooner the strings would snap anytime.

Once our smooth sailing lives jerk in ways we do not expect, instead of understanding the nature of change, we are more inclined to blame others for our problems and sufferings. We are succumbed to the devil's temptation of jumping over the cliff and waiting for angels to save us. Simply put, it's much easier to blame others and act with prejudice. We blame our enemies, government, relatives, partners, kids, authorities, and God. Ultimately, the least that we could do is to blame ourselves. So we end up treating ourselves as victims of fate.

"We are puppeteers who control Life with strings of our ego, and ironically the same strings have tied us into bondage of our own helplessness."

This is the second universal form of attachment: the need to change and control people, things and situations. Since we are so afraid or angry with many changes that we do not like, we force people to submit to our whims and manipulate the course of events in favor of our perceived security that things would always be in order as we desire it. We are puppeteers who control Life with strings of our ego, and ironically the same strings have tied us into bondage of our own helplessness. We paralyze our own freedom as we suppress the flow of change with our limited fixations.

Remember our young monk, who, compelled with his anger, blamed the old monk for his action. He felt that he had lost control when he thought his elder companion broke their rules. He forgot that on any muddy road, change is always possible. Likewise, the road of Life presents us possibilities that sometimes defy our fixated perceptions of what is right or wrong. We cannot control it, but we can go along with it. After all, Life has no rules to follow. Neither the strings of fear nor anger can control Life. Life is freedom at its best, given that we can honor and let it be.

And we can see that the need to control is like playing God: it's just impossible. We can only live like God, by allowing and non-interfering with a calm and cool attitude. We allow change to take place in the rhythm of nature and in the hearts of humankind. With this kind of consciousness, we do not anymore treat Life like a marionette. Life now becomes a kite: we allow it to fly with freedom. This is the upside of living with strings. The more we let go of our attachment, the more we become connected. In this kind of freedom, we open ourselves to Love more. As we stop fearing and hating, all the more we stop blaming and controlling. They work vice-versa. We allow anyone and anything to flow and grow. In turn, we also allow ourselves. Eventually, we will express Love with no conditions, and, finally, with no strings attached.

(to be continued)

The Raging Heart

(part two)


Some years ago, in the process of dealing with my anger, I have discovered that anger was my easiest way to react to any situation I encountered that primarily defied my own notions of order and harmony. Anger was my attempt to gain attention from people who seemed not to submit to my control, which allowed me to harness a kind of power where people around me tend to bend on their knees in fear. With anger, I felt an immense force that later transmuted into an appalling helplessness. After throwing thunderbolts of insults and curses, I was left drained and disempowered, let alone stupid of making a lot of mess out of shattered bottles and chairs I hurled in the height of my reactiveness. I felt I had done a nonsense act, which carved within me a huge void filled with remorse of wishing nothing had really happened.

What used to be my deep-seated anger is an ingrained experience of the first universal form of attachment: hating and rejecting negative emotions. It is so universal that no human being can possibly describe oneself free from this attachment. All of us experience this dark and vile force of anger that can consume us uncontrollably. Like the young monk, we hate that we hate; this is the irony that enslaves us in moments of grappling with our unruly emotional monsters.

Long before running amok, an individual who says "nagdilim ang paningin" (Filipino: the sight has darken) has harmed someone not from sound reasoning but from an overwhelming wave of anger. This is the darkness one experiences that makes him or her a dangerous offender. Whatever degree of offense, from verbal to physical violence, it is the pitch black anger that often pushes us to injure others without seeing the consequence of our actions. In the end, the same anger is not anymore directed to others but to ourselves.

"To understand that you are angry in the moment of anger and fearful in the moment of fear is an automatic enlightenment."

We cannot just sever anger from us. It is impossible. Anger is darkness in its full force, coming from this vast fear. While anger is the gravity, fear is the black hole from where it comes. To find ourselves gripped with anger is basically an expression of our fears. We have tried to refuse the existence of fear by trying to wield external power of anger. Angry people are people filled with fear, and they are seeking connections with others and with themselves. Seeing both anger and fear as a call to vulnerability and openness to Love is a unanimous teaching among all spiritual teachers and ancient sages. They are both manifestation of the same dark energy within us, the energy in which both our uncertainties and potentialities aggregate and arise.

The idea that anger and fear should not be present in our lives is illusion at its best. This illusion is our most common attachment. It locks us inside the cycle of anger towards others, then anger towards our anger, and anger towards ourselves. Our target is not to eliminate them, since they would be as pitch black as ever. The darkness they bring needs the light of our understanding. This reduces them from abysmal darkness to a mere shadow we cast. Like Peter Pan, we must begin to stitch up again our wild shadow with us so we can be at peace and return to the state where our hearts remain young and alive.

The paradox of this is to accept our anger and fear in their pure state, letting them adrift in our thoughts and feelings. To understand that you are angry in the moment of anger and fearful in the moment of fear is an automatic enlightenment. You have already cut the cords of their unwanted consequences. It is the very moment when instead of wallowing on the turbulent edges of the storm, you seek the very eye where there is peace and serenity. The first form of our universal attachment has finally been detached. And it is quite interesting that as we detach from this form, we have also successfully detached from the other 3 forms. This is the mystery of their interconnection that we are yet to discover.

(to be continued)





above photo  from PicApp