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Andy
Join Date: Sep 2012
I am currently:  
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If you're having a tough time...
A while ago, I was on the band Motionless in White's blog-thing and I happened to stumble upon this. It was written by Ricky Olson and it helped me a lot. I decided to post it on here to see if anyone else might like it. Enjoy :)
Advice:
I’ve been getting a lot of messages recently regarding people’s personal issues with depression, suicide, and deaths of friends or loved ones, and needing help and/or advice. Just a warning, I might get too involved in this, and it could become quite lengthy. Also, it wont all make sense to everyone, but bare with me here.
Just about every “problem” people have are based on time. Past, and future. If they aren’t stuck in the past, they’re too busy living in a future circumstance.
When your mind is consistently associating with the past, you are letting yourself connect to pain. By processing guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or any feelings like these, you reinforce a false sense of self. You are not these things. As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot become free from it. Subconsciously, you will resist any attempt you make to heal because your sense of self is invested in feelings of the past. The suffering has become an essential part of who you are by trying to retain the false image of yourself that has been created. As long as your sense of self is invested in your emotions, you will unconsciously resist healing. The only way to overcome this hurdle is to make it conscious. When the realization of your attachment comes to light, you begin to unravel the knot you’ve initially tied.
On the other hand, when you’re too busy getting to the future, the present moment suddenly becomes a just a means of getting there. Every task you take becomes unbearable and cumbersome because of your unwillingness to accept the current situation for what it is. People are always waiting for this or that to make them happy.I’ll be happy once I have ____ in my life. I’ll be happy once I achieve _____. Any thoughts such as these are anticipating something you can’t possibly guarantee, and puts yourself in a state of mind that says, “I’m not happy until my life gets to this point.” Everything you do every single day is suddenly meaningless because you want the future, not the present. Waiting is a state of mind, and every type of waiting creates an unconscious inner conflict between the present and the projection of the future you want. Similarly, “what if” thoughts create a projection of yourself into an imaginary future situation which, in turn, creates fear. There isn’t a way to cope with this situation because it doesn’t exist. You can never cope with the future. “The answer, strength, action you need to take will be there when the situation arises and you need it.”
It’s good to have goals in life to give yourself direction, but the only way to truly get where you want to be is step by step right now. When a decision is to be made, make it when it’s necessary. Realistically, the future doesn’t exist, and the past is gone. I think people forget that the only time we EVER have, is right now. This particular moment. We’ve been conditioned to use the past as a scapegoat for our current actions, and to look at the future with anticipation and fear. The only thing that realistically matters is the present.
People say life is a series of moments. If we cannot learn to “die to the past every moment,” we cannot possibly tread with the grain of the universe.
Refusing to go with the flow of life will bring sorrow and heartache. When you cut off your relationship with good things in your life that have diminished, you can grow. It’s a cycle. Clinging to a good thing that used to be and resisting the change in life will bring “failure” in some area. When you realize that everything is impermanent and let good and bad things come and go, you’re allowing the universe to work without rubbing against the grain. Offering no resistance to life will let you be in a state of ease without being dependent on things being or ending up a certain way, whether it be “good” or “bad”.
If you’re wondering what your purpose in life is, sit back and think about it for a moment. If only the present moment matters, your purpose in life at this particular time would be sitting there, reading this. If you’re taking a shower, your purpose would be just that. To have purpose and to have direction are two completely different things. Having a purpose is, again, a state of mind. You don’t need anything. Once you become one with your inner state of being, external situations are far more joyous than anything you can imagine. Simply watching clouds pass is pure ecstasy, in the right state of mind.*
Contrary to what we’ve been conditioned to believe, you are not “you”. For example, I am not Ricky, and I do not play in a band. This is only what external situations have claimed me to be. I am the inner consciousness that watches the bag of bones you know as Ricky. I am simply a viewer. A conscious being sitting back, watching the thoughts and decisions being made. Same goes for everyone. It’s confusing at first, I know. But the realization is profound.*
To go a step further, take a conscious breath. For a split second, you become free of any thought, and just are. This is your being in it’s most pure form. With practice, be it meditation, or just consistently trying to be in a state of “no-mind”, it becomes easier to access this state for longer periods. For me personally, my head feels heavier and expanded in this state. It’s difficult to explain, but once you get that feeling it’s impossible to forget it.*
Something I struggled with for a long time was to not try to force a future outcome, no matter how bad I wanted it to happen. For years, I tried to make music my full time job. Band after band, things kept falling through. It seemed impossible at the time for me to create anything the way I envisioned it, and no matter what happened, I wouldn’t let it go. My persistence was almost too much. I lived and breathed music. When bands stopped working, and I couldn’t find willing and dedicated members, I started creating everything myself. I didn’t have any other choice. I felt like if there was any way I was going to “make it”, I would have to do it myself. Almost every night I would lay in bed for hours just staring at the ceiling envisioning myself playing a show with people I didn’t know, and the feeling of setting up equipment and meeting new people. I lived for those moments before I’d go to sleep when I could almost be where I wanted, in a made up circumstance in my mind. There were many nights I cried myself to sleep because it was the only thing I ever wanted, and it just wasn’t working out in my favor.*
When I was in college, I started working with a friend at a local ice cream shop. The manager there taught me more than I could ever even understand. I would talk to her every day, and she always had the perfect insight to my problems. She always told me to “be patient”, and that “you can’t force something that you don’t have control over. The more you push, the worse you’re going to feel because things aren’t happening ‘quick enough’. You know where you want to be. Enjoy the process of getting there.” To me, this last part made no sense. How could I enjoy all the struggling and heartache that I was going through to get where I wanted to be? Of course I didn’t know how to listen, because I didn’t know what just “being” meant. It was a riddle to me. And the only thing I cared about was making music. Everything was a means of getting to where I wanted to be.Thus, creating constant conflict in my life.*
Months later, I ended up going on tour for three months doing merch for a local band from my area. I was more than ecstatic. It felt like even if I wasn’t playing music, I could get in the groove of traveling and learn the ropes. Maybe meet connections to people who needed a new addition to their band. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Those three months were the worst ninety days of my life. Sure, I was getting paid each week, but there’s only so much emotional torment people can put me through. I got **** every day for not pushing sales hard enough. For not talking enough. For them selling four shirts because they were on a tour that wasn’t even close to their style of music. I drank almost every night. To pass the time, and to cope with the unnecessary garbage I had to deal with. I left as a hopeful guy with all of the possibilities in the world, and came home a broken, heartless shell of my former self. For two months afterward I didn’t do anything. I slept and drank.*
Then one night a couple months later, on my sister’s eighteenth birthday, I tried to kill myself. A combination of years living in the past, the only thing I wanted not happening, and constant pressure of making something of myself all boiled down to that one night. If I wasn’t drunk, I would’ve remembered: down the street, not across the road. I remember going into my sister’s room, and just collapsing on her bed while she was sleeping. Sticky red flowing down my left arm, staining her white comforter, and dripping on the carpet. After that, I can’t exactly remember what happened. I was sort of in and out of consciousness, a cross between too drunk and shock. Pieces are still there: My dad asking me what happened. I’m crying and yelling about killing myself, and trying to throw up all at the same time. Someone wrapping my arm in a towel to keep the blood from dripping on the living room carpet. Someone carrying me to a car, and then being at the hospital having my arm stitched. They said my blood alcohol level was two and a half times the legal limit. And then they said I needed to go to some sort of psychiatric counseling to evaluate my mental state. This was the last time I drank alcohol.
I went to my counselor for maybe a month and a half of sessions that only helped me realize that I wanted my dad and I to have a better relationship. I was still stuck in the bind of my musical endeavors.*
And then Motionless In White came to Seattle on tour. That’s when we met, and things all started in their snowball to my being in the band. Funny how things work.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m the most optimistic person I know- sometimes to a fault. It took so much unnecessary suffering for me to finally accept that the past is the past. I didn’t truly start “living” until this last September. Even after everything that happened, and getting to where I wanted to be, it took me over a whole other year to come to realize who I really am and what it means to truly be.
The point of all my story was that I had already subconsciously set my future in motion by emotionally investing myself into what I wanted- I had brought the opening in the band to me. The suffering and heartache was completely unecessary.*
The law of attraction is a pretty interesting thing. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that I’d used this law to subconsciously bring everything I have into my life. It’s no secret. People do it all the time. This is why being in control of your thoughts is so important. Whatever you think most about, whether it is “good” or “bad” manifests itself into reality. You create the world you live in.*
Don’t believe me? Think about everything in your life, and then think about everything (good or bad) that consciously, and maybe subconsciously, occupies your thoughts throughout each day. The connection is unmistakable.
“If you look for being in any other state than the one you are currently in, you are setting up inner conflict and resistance.”
“Become transparent to the external cause of a negative reaction.”
“It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them- while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.”
“Watch any plant or animal and let it teach you what acceptance of what is, surrender to the Now. Let it teach you Being. Let it teach you integrity- which means to be one, to be yourself, to be real. Let it teach you how to live and how to die, and how not to make living and dying into a problem.”
“When you accept what is every moment is the best moment. That is enlightenment.”
The quotes from everything I’ve just written were taken from the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend this book. It will completely open your consciousness, and change the way you’ve ever thought about life, happiness, sadness, and death.
I apologize for this post being so unorganized. It’s hard for me to condense everything on a topic that has so many different elements involved. To some people, this post will go completely over your head. Which is fine, as you probably aren’t ready to understand it yet, or don’t need it. As for the people who get it and connect with everything I’ve said, you probably brought this post to you as the help you consciously, or subconsciously, needed.
Remember, take control of your thoughts, believe in the universe to bring you what you truly want, and be ever present.
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