If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we have all harmed other people, often those we loved.  Whether it was intentional or not, whether it was an expression of our own suffering or not—it makes no difference to the person who was harmed.

In 12-step programs, an important aspect at a later stage of one's program is to make amends to those we have harmed, except where making amends would cause further harm. It is both an important exercise in accepting personal responsibility, in humility, and displaying compassion and care for others.  (See my post, "Step 9: Make a List of All Persons We Had Harmed and Became Willing to Make Amends To Them.")

I have had two occasions in the past year where this was an important issue for me.  The first was when I realized that being a person of strong opinions, I sometimes have had the tendency to tell people—friends mostly—what they should do, even if not asked.  There was one friend who I know I had pained by my frequent advice (he told me) and thought there might well be others who I have harmed. And so I sent an email to friends, explaining the situation, and apologizing for any harm or discomfort I may have caused.  

The one friend who I knew I had pained responded, grateful for my inquiry and realization that I had overstepped boundaries.  The other friends who responded said that they never took offense at anything I had said, knowing the caring and intent that lay behind it.

The other situation was one where I knew that I had done great harm to a good friend.  This occurred with some frequency despite his obviously getting very upset and telling me what I had done. (This was all prior to my having found the divinity within me and freed myself from the control of my ego-mind.)  How to make amends?

One day when I was meditating/praying, I asked god how I could make amends to my friend. The answer I received was that the past is past; there's nothing I can do about that. The only thing I can do is commit to not doing such things to him in the future, and share my commitment with him. I did this, both to myself and to my friend.  His response, understandably, was, "we'll see."

My father used to have a poster in his office that said, "A stone once thrown cannot be recalled."  How true. Once you have harmed someone, it is very difficult to restore the relationship to what it was. You can patch things up, but the relationship rarely regains its former depth because people don't forget; their ego-minds won't let them.

Making amends is not about making you feel better regarding what you've done. It's about letting the other person know that you have become aware of your actions and apologize from the depths of your heart. It's about showing respect for the other person.

It's hard to believe that I've never written a post devoted to talking about cravings.  When the Buddha first turned the wheel of the dharma and taught his disciples the Four Noble Truths, the center of that teaching was that all our suffering is caused by cravings and that our suffering can be ended by freeing oneself from cravings.

It sounds so straightforward but it's not.  The Buddha said in the Four Noble Truths that the Noble Eightfold Path is the way that leads to the end of cravings and thus suffering. That path consists of: Right view, Right intention, Right speech, Right action, Right livelihood, Right effort, Right mindfulness, or Right concentration.

But as I noted in my book, The Self in No Self, the problem with that statement, and what many Buddhist monks teach, is that one can't do Right anything, while under the control of your ego-mind. It will not allow you, regardless of intent, to exercise Right behavior,

For example, Right intention requires you letting go all worldly desires and attachments, cultivating goodwill towards all beings, and refraining from actions that cause harm to oneself or others. If you are in the control of your ego-mind—of your emotions, judgments, perceptions—you cannot begin to achieve these elements of Right intention.  The same is true for all elements of the Noble Eightfold Path.

Let me be clear, I am not disagreeing with the teaching of the Buddha; I am just saying that in order to practice the Noble Eightfold Path and thus end your cravings and suffering, one must first free yourself from the control of your ego-mind. See my post, "The Noble Eightfold Path," for a simple explanation of the path's elements.

And if you've been reading this blog, you know that freeing yourself from the control of your ego-mind is the subject of many posts I've written. It is a huge challenge, but one that can be overcome with discipline and faith. To get you started, see my post, "How to Free Yourself from the Control of Your Ego-Mind." 
​

One of the reasons why we all, why man, suffers, is that we insist on acting on our own volition, which usually means acting as our mind tells us to act.  We depend on our mind to offer us advice that is good for us.

The problem is that our mind—which is to say our ego-mind—virtually never gives us good advice, in the sense of being in our best interest, because it is totally controlled by our emotions, our insecurity, our perceptions. Because of that, we never see things as they really are, we have no idea what "reality" is, because our senses are filtered by our ego-mind before we make a decision on how to act or react in a situation. Often these emotions are inhibiting, at other times they create unreasonable expectations.  (See my post, "Reality - It's Not What You Think It Is.") And if one acts on emotion, rather than reality, problems are going to result.  That is the source of our cravings and our suffering.

As anyone reading this blog will know, the answer lies in freeing oneself from the control of your ego-mind, of being able to see things as they really are, free of emotion, and so act in a way that is in your best interest, which is to be at peace and happy, free of cravings.

Part of the answer to this problem, as I've written, is to connect with your heart/your true Buddha nature/the child of the universe within you.  And I've written about ways to do that.

Perhaps the most basic thought in this process, which I just realized I have never written a separate post about—and it is so important it deserves its own post—is turning your will and your life over to the care of your true Buddha nature/your divine essence/the child of the Universe within you.

This is so opposite to the way in which we are used to—trained to—operating that even for those who are serious Buddhist practitioners, making this change in our modus operandi is very difficult.  Even if you believe you have Buddha nature/divine essence/the child of the Universe within you, handing control over just doesn't compute.  

You may be comfortable seeking advice from your Buddha nature, but the decider has to remain you.  But this doesn't work, because your ego-mind will usually override whatever guidance you get from your heart.  And so you continue to operate as a creature of your ego-mind and suffer.

Even if you have gone through the process of understanding that your ego-mind is not your true self and that instead your heart/your true Buddha nature/your divine essenceI/the child of the Universe within you is your true self, if you do not hand your will and your life over to its care, you will not be free of the control of your ego-mind.

If your goal is to have a life of peace and happiness, then you must come to understand that there is no other place for you to achieve that goal than placing yourself in the hands of your true self.  

This does not mean that you are no longer a player in your present or future. You can still indicate what you would like to achieve. Indeed, its necessary that you put some skin in the game; you can't just sit back and wait for it to happen.  But how and when it happens will not be within your control.

I have written that I first became aware when examining my past that everything good that has ever happened in my life happened by happenstance, but later realized that that happenstance was not accidental but rather was part of the flow of the universe as it pertained to me,  See my posts, "Happenstance" and "Happenstance - Part II."  

This is very different from the intervention of the Old Testament God in response to prayer; the master puppeteer. This instead is the Universe acting in accordance with its laws as well as our being subject to the laws of man's developed nature.  The Universe presented me with opportunity—regardless whether I was in touch with my true self—and it was up to me to see it and act on it or instead be guided by my ego-mind and reject it or accept it but be filled with doubt.  See my post, "It's Just the Way It Is - Take III."

When the characters in Star Wars say, "May the force be with you," it is essentially saying the same thing—hand your will and your life over to the care of the Universe."  Don't use your mind to decide what to do; let yourself be guided by this natural force.  It sounds very strange to us, scary, and yet to be in that space is to be at peace, because I know that my true self—the child of the Universe within me—would never do anything that would hurt me.

You know what reality is:  you see it, you smell it, you experience it.  It's pretty straight forward.  It is what it is.

Ah, but that is not the case.  The reason is because what you experience, what you see, what you smell is filtered first by your ego-mind before it goes to your brain. Your ego-mind sorts, identifies, judges, etc. before the experience goes to the brain for reaction.  So since your ego-mind has been conditioned by your life experiences to see things a certain way or react to things a certain way, that is how you will see or react to something.  That is what forms your mind's—and thus your—take on reality.

Since your ego-mind is the home of all your feelings, emotions, perspective, judgment, etc., it means that everything you experience is never experienced by you neutrally.  Your senses are neutral—they just transmit without any judgment—but your ego-mind is anything but neutral.

In order to experience things as they really are, one must be able to experience them neutrally, without any judgment, emotion, or perspective.  And that requires freeing yourself from the control of your ego-mind and rediscovering, reconnecting with your true self, the person you were when you were born—which can be thought of as your heart, your Buddha nature, the divinity within you, or the child of the Universe within you. (See my posts, "True Self" and "Buddhism and the Divine.")

Why is it important to see things as they really are rather than through the filter of your ego-mind?  When you act or react to something, you usually think you are doing something that is in your best interest.  But if you can't see things as they really are, there is no way of knowing what's really in your best interest.  Our mind often, if not almost always, urges us to do things that are definitely not in our best interest and cause us suffering.  Our ego--mind thinks, from its perspective, that it is helping us, but that's the problem: it's perspective is warped.

So if you want to live in reality and end your suffering, you need to free yourself from the control of your mind.  But how to do that?  Your ego-mind is deeply rooted within you; it's all you've known of yourself and the world for your entire life.  This whole blog is basically about this topic, which is an indication of just how difficult it is to accomplish.  For starters, you might read the posts, "How to free yourself from the control of your ego-mind," and "Freeing yourself from suffering."

Regardless how challenging, keep at it. There is nothing more important to your future than being able to live in reality and be at peace and happy.
​

So often in life, we feel that we don't have a choice—whether it's how to react to something or what to do with our lives or whatever.  That is because we are captives of our ego-mind; it's the only thing we know, it's what we have identified with our whole lives.

But the teachings of the Buddha, and indeed the mystical traditions of all the world's great religions—both Western and Eastern—teach that you do have a choice.  Though it's not easy to realize it.

The choice lies in the fact that in addition to our ego-mind, there is a true self inside each of us.  Whether you call it Buddha nature, the divinity within you, or your heart, this is the person you were when you were born, before being impacted by the negative aspects of so much of your life experiences.

Not only is your true self full of light, love, and joy, (the full list of attributes is: light, love, faith, trust. compassion, humility, gratefulness, joy, strength, courage, and wisdom), but it is still there and will always be within you, waiting for you to rediscover it, to connect with it.

There are many posts on this blog that address the issue of how you separate yourself from your ego-mind and reconnect with your true self, your heart. Because of the power of the ego-mind and its deep roots within you, this is not an easy matter and takes courage, discipline, and time.

As a motivator to take on this task, it's not just a matter of being able to realize you have choices, it's about ending the suffering that results from being under the control of your ego-mind's feelings, perspectives, and cravings.  All the frustration and anger you experience results from the cravings and feelings of the ego-mind. And that is suffering.

For starters, you might read,"True Self."  "How to free yourself from the control of your ego-mind," and "Freeing yourself from suffering"

I just realized that although I have written many posts that talk about aspects of the true self, I have never written a post that explains all aspects of true self in one place.

My understanding of true self has been an evolving process, which I will describe.  It started with the Buddhist teaching that we are all born essentially perfect with the Buddha nature inside us.  This is how we started life—as little Buddhas filled with light, love, faith, trust, compassion, gratefulness, joy, contentment, strength, courage, and wisdom.  This is our true self and it resides in our heart.

But from the moment we are born, and often even while still in our mother's womb, we are impacted by negative experiences.  Initially these experiences do not have a permanent effect on us.  Think of all the smiling toddlers that you've seen.  These are not children who have had no negative experiences in their short lives, but children who are remarkably resilient, because the ego-mind has yet to be formed.

Around age 3, though, the ego-mind forms, gathering all the experiences we've had and giving them names, labels.  This is when our emotions, judgments, and perceptions—above all, our insecurity—are codified and become our frame of reference.  And it is this frame of reference that determines how we react to future experiences. 

Because of this process, most of us are filled with negative feelings about ourselves through no fault of our own.  Our ego-mind has absorbed the negative things that have been said or done to us—often by family—and the negative messages we've received in the broader world and made that negativity our self-image.  If there's a way of interpreting an experience negatively, that is what the ego-mind will usually do.  The ego-mind becomes the source of our cravings and resulting suffering. 

This self is sometimes called the "false self."  False in that while it certainly defines who we appear to be and who we feel we are—it's all we've known our entire lives—it comes from outside us and is vastly different from our true self.

Many people think that regardless what they were like when they were born, that purity and innocence is irretrievably loss.  Not so. Our true self, regardless how obscured by the detritus of our lives, is always there for us, even as we lose all conscious knowledge of it.  

Think about the experiences you, like everyone else, have had of conversations within yourself, which are often thought of as being between the good you and the bad you.  In cartoons, these conversations are depicted with an angel sitting on one shoulder whispering in one ear, and the devil sitting on the other shoulder whispering in the other ear.  Where do you think those voices come from?  The good you is the guidance coming from your heart; the bad you is the guidance coming from your ego-mind.  So your true self is still there; it's guidance though is usually overpowered by the force of the ego-mind.

For years I believed in the truth that my true self is my heart, but it did not move my practice forward.  I just couldn't wrap my head around what that was.  Then one day when I was meditating an image came to me of me as a toddler, smiling and laughing for no reason at all, just for being.  As soon as I saw that image, I knew that was the avatar of my heart, and I wept.  (I was able to have that image because my mother had sent me photos from my baby book just days before.)  That image is still with me today, every day, and is helpful in grounding my practice.

Since that time, my connection with my true self has undergone an evolution.  The first was my realization that the elements of Buddha nature are really aspects of the divine (see my post, "Buddhism and the Divine').  Thus, not only am I born with Buddha nature within me, but with the divine essence within me.  This, by the way, is the teaching of the mystical traditions of all 3 Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (Kabbalah, Sufism, and Gnosticism). 

For those of you shaking your heads who were brought up in churches that teach that man is born with Original Sin, that was a concept that developed in the 4th Century and adopted at that time by the Catholic Church and 10 centuries later by many of the Protestant churches that developed after the Reformation. It was not a teaching of early Christianity and is not a teaching of the mystical traditions.

Many years later, I was developing a project to help children who felt bad about themselves in a middle school where I was teaching.  The idea was to help them feel good about themselves by teaching them that all the negative feelings they have about themselves are not aspects of their true selves.  But I had to do this in a secular way, with no reference to any religion or spirituality.

And so I came up with the concept of tying the idea of true self to the miracle of creation.  We, as well as all plants and animals, develop from a single fertilized cell; everything about our body and all aspects of its functioning are contained in that single fertilized cell.  That is a miracle of the Universe, and so each of us is a miracle of the Universe.

How can it be otherwise then that each plant, animal, and person is born essentially perfect with the force of the Universe embedded within them?  This is your true self. While one may be born with abnormalities caused by things that happen while in the womb or from genetic sources, spiritually we are all born essentially perfect.

The final thing I want to share with you, you might find somewhat strange.  One day I remembered the scene in Close Encounters of a Third Kind where the little boy comes out of the mothership and returns to his mother's arms.  When I watched that scene again, and saw the beatific smile of that child, it became for me the avatar of the child of the Universe within me.  And like the image of me as a toddler, that image is with me every day when I meditate/pray and is an important element that grounds my practice.

Your true self is there to guide you; talk to it, have faith in it, listen to its guidance. Let the force be with you. You will attain a level of peace and happiness, a quality of life, which you never felt was within your reach.
​

When most people set out to do something, regardless the nature of the project, they want to have a feeling of certainty that their effort will be successful.  And the more someone is invested in the activity, the more needed this sense of certainty is.

This is an inevitable component of a craving.  Because a craving is something that you feel you must have.  There is no equivocation.  And so when something happens that removes this feeling of certainty that you need, it is devastating.  And you suffer.  What you feel is beyond frustration because this was something you felt you must have ... or else.

So if you are walking the Buddhist or any other spiritual path to end your suffering, you must remove the need for certainty from your life.  You need to be able to say, "If it happens, great; it if doesn't, that's ok too."  Which means that it is no longer a craving.  You approach whatever the project or thing is with equanimity.

Ending your suffering is, of course, the goal of Buddhist practice and the Buddha dharma; it is not a quick and easy thing to accomplish.  It requires much work and discipline, because you are entering a worldview very different from that in which you were raised and the culture within which you live.  I have written many posts about ending cravings and suffering, but perhaps the most useful in this connection are, "Craving 'Survival' Condemns You to Suffering," and the "End of Suffering Cheat Sheet."

But there is something you can do as you are working on this long-term project to help change your perspective: the things you say to yourself.  It is very common for people not only to focus on whatever is negative in their life, but to verbalize that negativity and how they feel about it.  The problem is that when you do this, it increases the impact on you of your negativity, it becomes a kind of obsession and increases your suffering.

What you must do is stop saying negative things to yourself.  I do not mean that you should lie to yourself about what you are experiencing, but you should express your reaction to it in a very different way.  For example, instead of saying, "I'm going to be ruined,"  or "I won't live this way," or anything similar, you should say to yourself, "It's ok; I'll be ok; it's not what I wanted but there are other options I can pursue." 

Even that statement will be difficult if you are dealing with a craving.  But by purposefully saying to yourself that you'll be ok—numerous times—you have the ability to change the way your mind is reacting to your experience.  Lessening its force as a craving without actually freeing yourself from it.
​

The common approach to faith is that it is something that one needs to acquire, you have to learn how to have faith.  Indeed, I wrote a post titled, "Faith - What Is It and Why Is It Essential?"

My comment today is, "Yes, but no."  Let me explain.

I have long understood and written that we are born with Buddha nature/the divine essence/the force of the Universe within us.  That we are all born essentially perfect, meaning in a spiritual sense, not necessarily physically or mentally.

When a friend said recently that faith is like your baby—nothing should be more important to you than your faith; you should let nothing take you from your faith— the light went on in my brain.  Faith, like all the other spiritual qualities that we are born with, is part of us at birth.

What happens to our faith is the same as what happens to all our spiritual qualities.  Our life experiences, which are frequently if not mostly negative, are taken by our mind as the way things are, and so whether it's acquiring insecurity, feelings of inadequacy, or low self-esteem, these negative perspectives are absorbed by the ego-mind and made our self-image.

So to, when the reality of the world does not reflect our faith, our ego-mind takes that as a refutation of our faith, of showing the danger of faith, and so our faith is discarded by the ego-mind.  This is why so few of us experience faith, and why, if we do, it is so hard to hold on to because our life experiences constantly say to us that our faith is misplaced.

But there is a way out of this vicious cycle.  The first thing is to understand what faith in the Buddhist context means.  Faith has nothing whatsoever to do with the actions of other people.  It has nothing to do with how you are treated or whether someone responds to you appropriately as you deserve, or how the world conducts its affairs.  Faith does not mean that some particular material outcome, some achievement, that you desire will happen.  This may be the common idea about faith, indeed most prayer is asking for some material outcome, but that is not faith and indeed it is not an appropriate subject for prayer.

Faith concerns your belief in your qualities and your belief that you will be ok, spiritually, regardless what life provides because you will always return home to your true Buddha nature/the child of the Universe within you and so be at peace and happy, not because things will be a particular way.

Having lost our faith—just like our inherent goodness and peace and joy—we must rediscover it.  That's why the post noted above is necessary, even if you come to believe that you were born with faith within you; you must rediscover it.

For me, the most powerful element that allowed me to reclaim my faith is the mantra, "things are the way they are because it's just the way it is; it's meant to be and it's all ok."  Each morning when I pray/meditate, I am very aware when I say this mantra what it implies regarding how I react to things in my life, how I feel about my life as it is at that moment, and I ask the Universe to give me the courage to view things that way.

Given the world we live in, faith requires great discipline, just like almost every aspect of the Buddhist/spiritual path to end suffering and experience peace and happiness.  It thus becomes essential to be in touch everyday, if not several times during the day, with your faith as with other aspects of your spirituality through meditation/prayer.
​

Most people tend to obsess about the things in their lives that aren't the way they want them to be.  This negative thinking, when it becomes overpowering and all-consuming, which is not unusual, results in a loss of energy and stamina; it results in a shutdown of the mind.

This is a terrible place for a person to be.  It is enervating and debilitating.  It leads to lethargy.  It is suffering.

Most simply put, this is what happens when people have cravings—something you view as a must have.  The Buddha's first teaching was that cravings are the source of our suffering.  There is a clear path to freeing oneself from cravings, but it is long and arduous.  Part of that path is acceptance of your life as being the way it is right now. For someone in the grip of a negativity crisis, they are not open to hearing about the path, and even if they are aware of it, they aren't in the mood to implement it.

Unfortunately many practicing Buddhists experience this because their practice is not very deep or disciplined.  It's a real challenge to get past one's cravings.

The short and easier answer for someone's breaking the grip of negativity is to think of all the things that you are grateful for.  Every person, no matter how down and out, has things that they are grateful for, even if they don't often think of them.  If a person is prodded with the question, things will come to mind. One may be grateful for people in one's life, for experiences, for nature, for whatever. 

But people are often quite adamant about the self-righteousness of their negative position; they are angry. And they feel that to not be aware of the hopelessness of the situation is delusion.  So the prodding will need to be repeated.  They are not in the mood to be grateful.

But it is vitally important to remember what one is grateful for; to focus on that, rather than all the things that disappoint you and you feel negative about.  When you remind yourself that all is not negative, when you remember that there are positive things in your life that you are grateful for, you experience a life in balance.  

Your gratitude will give you renewed energy and stamina.  And it lessens the craving for what you don't have. It won't free you from the craving—that requires much hard work—but it lessens its hold on you, allowing you to proceed with what you feel you need to do.
​

recently read an article in The New Yorker about the use of AI companions by people to counter feeling lonely, to feel that there is someone there for you who understands you.  Certainly, loneliness, whether short- or long-term, is a major problem in our modern society.  And with the increased use of technology and social media by people to feel that they are part of something rather than relying on human contact, the problem is getting worse.

What I found interesting is that the spiritual solution to feelings of loneliness—whether resulting from truly being isolated or loving someone who doesn't understand you—is not even mentioned in passing.  This reflects the fact that most people are divorced from the spiritual underpinnings that over the millennia provided people with solace and a feeling of not being alone.  God is dead for most people, even if they say they believe in God.

But for the contemporary person who is spiritual, there is an answer.  Because for him, God is not the person in the sky to whom one prays and who controls life; god (with a small "g") is instead the divinity within him, the child of the Universe within him, the Buddha within him.  This is his true self.  (See my post, "God Is Not Dead, We Just Look for Him in All the Wrong Places," in my other blog, PreservingAmericanValues.com.)

When you are in touch with your true self, you are never alone, regardless what is happening around you or being done to you.  I embrace the child of the Universe within me every day and invite him into my subconscious, to be my subconscious, and so fill me with abundance and light, faith and strength, humility, freedom from fear, and joy so that I radiate light and am a light unto myself and others.

I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I have an image of the child of the Universe within me that comes from Close Encounters of a Third Kind. it's the little boy (Terry Garr's son who had been abducted by the aliens) who truly radiated light.  The experience is similar to the photo of me as a smiling toddler being the avatar of my heart. Both these images have proven to be a major support for my practice.

Every night when I go to bed, I say to the lord (the child of the Universe within me) that I am so grateful that I am not alone, that he is here with me now and I invite him into my subconscious, to be my subconscious and ask him to bring me the wisdom I need to live my life well. which is to be at peace and happy.

And in the morning when I do my "mirror time," I greet myself by saying, "Good morning, I love you.  I rejoice in the lord and am happy.  I am awake and am happy.  I sing and am happy.  I am grateful and am happy.  I am filled with wonder and am happy.  I know that things are the way they are because it's just the way it is, it's all ok and I am happy.  I am humble and am happy.  I forgive myself and am happy.  I have faith and am happy."  (See my post, "Mirror Time.")

I am never alone.  My child of the Universe, my true self, my heart, is always there for me.  I turn my will and my life over to its care—his will not my mind's—knowing that he will never give me guidance that will harm me and cause me suffering.
​