Looking back

Living anywhere but in the present is pointless, but there is benefit in looking back in a particular way.

You can revisit your experiences when you acted unconsciously and bring in the light of awareness. This loosens and releases the tension around them, relieving you of emotional bondage. It also opens you to acting wisely the next time around.

This form of looking back happens while you are present. You take your alertness with you to when you did something about which you feel uncomfortable.

Usually, we run from the memories to avoid the shame, guilt or poor self image. Or we apologise to try to restore the ego for ourselves and the other people involved.

Apologising is just patchwork - a trick to piece together appearances - and avoidance gives unconsciousness more power. When we are presented with a similar situation again, which we repeatedly are, we react in the same way and never grow.

When you look back while remaining in the now, don’t run from how it feels and don’t try to restore facades, something transformational begins to transpire.

Awareness prevails. It shows you what went down and why you behaved the way you did. It takes you into yourself and shows you the mechanisms underlying your make-up.

These unravel in the light of conscious attention. The block you have been carrying and running from dissolves and you feel free. You don’t condemn yourself or indulge in regret, you simply see. You forgive and understand. And you awaken.

Then the next time the scenario plays out, you are less reactive and more responsive. Emotions blind you less and insight comes quicker.

Quite soon, awareness stays with you throughout the encounter and a whole new you comes through. Free and fresh, you respond in the now. The darkness has gone and you are light.

Looking back watchfully takes you forward.

Sanity

Today, the same week that he sent extra troops to war, at enormous expense during an economic recession, the US president accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. There he made another speech.

The madness seems to escape people. Society is mad, that's why. People see it but won't face it. Dramatic ironies like this confront them daily in high definition and they simply ignore them.

They debate but don't awaken. They think but don't feel, see or be. They know that unconsciousness rules the world yet they march off at election time and vote in more of the same.

Partners project their insecurities onto their lovers, suspect them of all they feel guilty of, accuse them, and destroy their love. To protect themselves from the self-induced pain, they turn from what they want and crave, and blame the other for their loss.

What is, isn't good enough, so instead of enjoying and appreciating it, and letting it grow where it wants to go, they grind it down and prove their self loathing right.

They feel unworthy of love and mistrust it as a result. They stop at nothing to maintain their broken sense of themselves.

People cling to their misery. They get more and more depressed going against themselves every day in every way, doing jobs they hate in lives they aren't living.

Friends point this out, give them an understanding ear and helping hand, and they have some breakthroughs. Then they go back to the same old stories for the same old reasons, explaining away any semblance of insight.

They settle into the same patterns and relationships, and life loses again and again.

Insanity is all around us. The news is nothing but madness. What it reports on and how it covers that are beyond comment. Just look at it with awareness and you will be struck silent.

The businesses people work for, the jobs they do, the dynamics they drown in, the politics they perpetuate, the so-called leaders they follow, the responsibility they renounce, the masks they wear, the lies they live, and the fictions they believe religiously, are all a complex and sticky web of lunacy.

The world we have created is a reflection of a sick mind.

Lost in the world, we are all mad. Turning inwards we find the source, a thinking machine made up of contradictory and crazy voices. There is no solace in the stream of thick thoughts.

Only beyond that, where the silence begins, does clarity call to us. Not at costly summits to discuss climate change do we find answers but at the centre of our individual being.

Conferences of unconsciousness are like peace prizes for presidents: entirely illegitimate.

Mass media, society, structures, politics, appearances and words all lead further into complete madness. There is just one salvation and that is to discover your true self and from here bring consciousness to all you do.

The only sanity is inside you.