The Story of Rebellion
By Raven Smith
For many of us one of the biggest stories we tell ourselves is the story of rebellion. Many people get their first glimmers of the truth by rebelling against authority. We begin to question what everyone is telling us, we ask “why should I?” We start to wonder why other people’s ideas about what we should be doing are more important than ours. We challenge the tyranny of control we feel is being propagated against us, the unfairness of it all, and we righteously begin to claim our truth, our independence, “LET ME LIVE MY LIFE THE WAY I WANT TO!” we cry.
Some of us do this in big dramatic ways, and others do it in subtle ways, take a few minutes to think about how you have rebelled in your life and what you were rebelling against.
As we wake up to our spiritual path we are usually still carrying some measure of rebellion. It might be (and often is) the reason we take off on a spiritual path in the first place. The energy of rebellion drives us to question “normal” reality and to try and find what is beyond it. It is a strong energy and can take us quite far in our quest for the truth of who we really are and what this lifetime is about.
Having said that, at some point it is important to start questioning the story of rebellion. What is fairly clear with a little probing is that rebellion is not freedom. We think it is initially because we are challenging the existing structure and the righteous feeling we take on feels more powerful than we felt before, and we begin to take that feeling on as a statement of who we are rather than some “puppet” of the system. Can you feel it?
Yet we are now stuck with feeling “right” to someone else’s “wrong”. This constantly stimulates that same feeling of unfairness we started out trying to get away from, remember?
In fact the rebellion is another expression of the exact belief structure that made us feel trapped to begin with. The original control you were trying to counter was based on a system of right and wrong. You were doing wrong and someone was trying to make you do it right. Now you’ve made it so that you are doing something that is right and the original people are doing it wrong. Can you see how that is the exact same belief system underneath the surface? We still haven’t gotten free of anything, we just changed the frame, moved the furniture around a little, but we are still suffering from this sense of separation and not-rightness about the world. Darn!
The way through is to challenge the whole idea of right and wrong and fairness. How do you know you are right? Open the window up further and you can see you don’t know what is right for anyone except for you and only for you in this moment. Anything else is either self-importance and delusional projection about what someone else’s life is about or you projecting what worked for you in the past onto what is happening now. Which is also delusional as what is happening now is what is happening now, not what happened in the past. Sit with that for a minute.
A short study of the physical world around us in the form of nature can give great insight into the idea of “fairness”. Plants get eaten by bugs, bugs get eaten by birds, birds by cats, cats by dogs, and dogs are slaves of the humans, ordered about and endlessly domesticated. What is fair about any of that? The truth is life isn’t fair, so a great exploration is to ask, “Who told me it was going to be fair?”
Once we take on the belief it is supposed to be fair we immediately start seeing all the ways it is not and begin arguing with reality about What Is, and off we go on the path of rebellion.
The way through is deep contemplation on the falsity of right vs wrong and fairness. We have to get clear about what we believe and how these beliefs affect our experience of the world. Then we must find a way to reclaim the energy we have invested in these stories, this is what recapitulation is all about. Only then will we have enough attention and energy freed up to stop letting the story of rebellion rule our perception of reality.
Again, what we are working on is removing our investment in the story, our identification with it. We need to separate out the energy of rebellion from the unconscious story of rebellion. We can use that frequency of energy to constantly question our beliefs and free us to make conscious choices, or we can use it to fight against reality and thereby create suffering in our lives. Once again it’s all about choice!
For many of us one of the biggest stories we tell ourselves is the story of rebellion. Many people get their first glimmers of the truth by rebelling against authority. We begin to question what everyone is telling us, we ask “why should I?” We start to wonder why other people’s ideas about what we should be doing are more important than ours. We challenge the tyranny of control we feel is being propagated against us, the unfairness of it all, and we righteously begin to claim our truth, our independence, “LET ME LIVE MY LIFE THE WAY I WANT TO!” we cry.
Some of us do this in big dramatic ways, and others do it in subtle ways, take a few minutes to think about how you have rebelled in your life and what you were rebelling against.
As we wake up to our spiritual path we are usually still carrying some measure of rebellion. It might be (and often is) the reason we take off on a spiritual path in the first place. The energy of rebellion drives us to question “normal” reality and to try and find what is beyond it. It is a strong energy and can take us quite far in our quest for the truth of who we really are and what this lifetime is about.
Having said that, at some point it is important to start questioning the story of rebellion. What is fairly clear with a little probing is that rebellion is not freedom. We think it is initially because we are challenging the existing structure and the righteous feeling we take on feels more powerful than we felt before, and we begin to take that feeling on as a statement of who we are rather than some “puppet” of the system. Can you feel it?
Yet we are now stuck with feeling “right” to someone else’s “wrong”. This constantly stimulates that same feeling of unfairness we started out trying to get away from, remember?
In fact the rebellion is another expression of the exact belief structure that made us feel trapped to begin with. The original control you were trying to counter was based on a system of right and wrong. You were doing wrong and someone was trying to make you do it right. Now you’ve made it so that you are doing something that is right and the original people are doing it wrong. Can you see how that is the exact same belief system underneath the surface? We still haven’t gotten free of anything, we just changed the frame, moved the furniture around a little, but we are still suffering from this sense of separation and not-rightness about the world. Darn!
The way through is to challenge the whole idea of right and wrong and fairness. How do you know you are right? Open the window up further and you can see you don’t know what is right for anyone except for you and only for you in this moment. Anything else is either self-importance and delusional projection about what someone else’s life is about or you projecting what worked for you in the past onto what is happening now. Which is also delusional as what is happening now is what is happening now, not what happened in the past. Sit with that for a minute.
A short study of the physical world around us in the form of nature can give great insight into the idea of “fairness”. Plants get eaten by bugs, bugs get eaten by birds, birds by cats, cats by dogs, and dogs are slaves of the humans, ordered about and endlessly domesticated. What is fair about any of that? The truth is life isn’t fair, so a great exploration is to ask, “Who told me it was going to be fair?”
Once we take on the belief it is supposed to be fair we immediately start seeing all the ways it is not and begin arguing with reality about What Is, and off we go on the path of rebellion.
The way through is deep contemplation on the falsity of right vs wrong and fairness. We have to get clear about what we believe and how these beliefs affect our experience of the world. Then we must find a way to reclaim the energy we have invested in these stories, this is what recapitulation is all about. Only then will we have enough attention and energy freed up to stop letting the story of rebellion rule our perception of reality.
Again, what we are working on is removing our investment in the story, our identification with it. We need to separate out the energy of rebellion from the unconscious story of rebellion. We can use that frequency of energy to constantly question our beliefs and free us to make conscious choices, or we can use it to fight against reality and thereby create suffering in our lives. Once again it’s all about choice!
Labels: don miguel ruiz, four agreements, recapitulation, spiritual warrior
posted by Heather Ash Amara | 10:31 PM
1 Comments:
Thank You! Do y'all have a way to search all of your blogs for the pithy teachings I want on a particular day? love.
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