Aranya and The Pixies Mastery in this Lifetime

from Aranya


How do you get inner peace? You talk to yourself—a lot. You start an internal dialogue so that you first of all figure out who you are. The idea here is to do closet inventory—not closet cleaning, banishing, or eradication of demons. I don’t believe in what you call “exorcism. “ Instead, begin with, “Who is in here?” Look at all of those people you have ever been, all of those thoughts that have ever gone through your mind. They are you. And this isn’t a tidy picture. It’s not organized and it’s not internally consistent. It’s a loony bin.

One of the things you do to yourself that causes incredible quantities of threat, struggle, and pain is to maintain that you are supposed to have internal consistency and to make sense from one minute to the next. The first stage of inner peace is discovering who you are and that you do not make sense and that you are not internally consistent. Your belief systems are flaky. Part of you believes one thing and another part of you believes another.

The idea here is not to help you make up your mind—it’s realizing that you don’t have a mind to make up. Your mind is divided on stuff. You’re probably asking, “This is supposed to increase peace?” Yes, because if you at least admit that you are inhabited by a set of conflicting positions, opinions, and beliefs, then you don’t have to get the big stick out and beat yourself every time you don’t agree with yourself, every time you catch an inconsistency. Then you don’t have to have internal civil war going on all the time. Instead, you could actually agree to disagree with yourself.

Do not insist on being internally consistent. If you don’t have to be internally consistent, then you don’t have to beat up the half of yourself that doesn’t agree with the parts which are in the dominant position. You don’t have to spend your time beating up the wimp for being a wimp if you are being macho man. You can learn to become accepting of them as they are: “Yes, that’s me, all of those.” The less you do battle with them and the more you admit that this is who you are, the less energy you expend on internal warfare and the more energy you have to live your life and the less stress there is in your life.

An incredible amount of your energy goes into resistance and internal warfare. It’s really tiring, which is why getting through these times is so tough. If you could just accept and embrace all the facets of yourself, you would become much more patient with yourself about your inconsistencies.

No, you will not have clarity all the time about what you want. And you might actually start talking your internal wimp person. You might look more vulnerable, more fallible, and more confused. But you know, you won’t be. You will simply look like you have been feeling all along. You already are incredibly vulnerable, and you spend all of your energy saying, “Don’t touch me.” What we are talking about is admitting to yourself that you’re one incredibly defended, confused being.

And I hear the chorus, “But I don’t want to.” Fine, you don’t have to. You’re the ones who wanted to know how to make tough times not so tough. And I already told you that the way to make it tough is by saying, “But I don’t want to.”

Admit that you’re a loony bin. Eventually you come to the point where you realize that all the loons in the loony bin are really quite interesting. They have attributes that could be quite useful. Your cutesy little two-year-old can get anything you need just by batting its little eyelashes. Your internal obnoxious person is really useful when someone is rude and obnoxious and you want to be rude and obnoxious back at them.

You know, it’s very satisfying to have permission to be a pain in the neck when it is required in life. Then somebody who is nice doesn’t have to do it. The nice people are good in some situations, but when you take a nice person into a situation where an obnoxious person is called for, you have problems. But if you let the obnoxious one out they handle the situation.

Self-acceptance is really that—understanding and honoring the fact that even your most neurotic part has usefulness. And these parts did make sense back when you designed them, and maybe they need a little retraining, but there are positions for them in your life. Some of them you don’t need very often, and that’s fine, but when you do need a warrior, it’s useful to have one instead of having them locked away some place where you can’t use them.

Now, this is a hard one. For those of you who work on being holy or nice or pleasant or kind, this is difficult. Why? Because you have been told all along that the light will conquer the dark. Sorry. Ain’t what it’s about. If you look at that old yin/yang symbol, nobody is conquering anybody else. They are just defining the boundaries of the other. That’s all.

For those of you who find that your life is full of an incredible amount of nasty people or wretched things happening, I would propose to you that this might be because you refuse to admit that these attitudes exist inside of you. And what you refuse to see inside pops up out there. The world is created by mirrors. Everything you see out there is you.

If you can own that there are parts of you which are righteous and obnoxious, then you don’t have to have righteous and obnoxious people in your face all the time reminding you of who you don’t want to be. So accept those facets in yourself. They have their place, they have their role, they have their function. Honor them, and then when there are tough times outside, they won’t be so tough on you inside.

The process of learning to expand is prompted by an energy that says, “Change yourself. “

And you say, “I can’t get any bigger.” And the energy says, “Change.” And you say, “Well, maybe a little bit.” And the energy says, “Change,” and you say, “ooookaaaay.” Getting bigger seems so scary because you think it’s safe to be small and it’s dangerous to be big. You know—if you’re a bigger target, you’ll get shot at.

What is true here is that once upon a time, long, long ago, when you were an unlimited being, you were maximum big, and then you embraced judgment, and you’ve been very sorry ever since. It’s not something that is externally produced. When you decide that you’re wrong, you have a tendency to groan, “Oh, shit, that was really stupid.” You still associate big, powerful, and expansive with wrong.

You, as a soul-being, were the biggest of the big, but you decided you were wrong, and it was the biggest “mistake” you ever made. Therefore, you think that being big is dangerous, because it got you into this little space. Like I said, you people are dumb!

Big is not dangerous. Big is big. Your big problem is that you judge big. If getting big is just getting big, then it’s not so awesome to think about getting big enough to hold all of yourself. Right now, in your internal warfare, you are constantly trying to eradicate the parts of you that you wish weren’t there. You’re saying, “I’m not big enough to hold this. I’m not a big enough individual to hold an obnoxious portion of myself. I can’t cope with being unpleasant; I must be nice. I can’t cope with being righteous; I must be nice. I can’t cope with being wrong; I must be right.” Being big is being big enough to hold all of those people you already are.

But if you can embrace your righteous person, then it becomes a little easier to understand how somebody else could have a righteous person and to embrace their righteousness: “So, big deal. I’m righteous about being vegetarian, and they are righteous about buying American. What difference does it make? I’m righteous about accepting everyone, and they are righteous about rejecting everyone. So, we are both righteous.”

The idea is to get big enough to hold yourself. You look out in the world and see an incredible amount of suffering out there. You look at it and all you can think is, “I can’t fix it. It’s insurmountable, and I can’t fix it.” The point is not to fix it. The point is to be big enough to own it. The bigger you are to hold all of you, the easier it is to look out in the world and to honor the choices of those out there rather than needing to fix them.

You decide that it’s holy to wear only a particular color, to eat only a particular thing, or to fast, or to become celibate. Now, instead of looking at it as having to be big enough to hold all of that stuff, all you have to do is be big enough to hold all of you. That gives you enough pain already. You don’t need to take on anyone else’s. You've got sufficient.

If you will own that internal rage and internal desire to wipe out half of your internal population, you will be big enough to hold it. You don’t have to become an empath and hold all of others’ pain. The pain that will need to be absorbed over the coming years will be enormous. Don’t try it. You will end up exiting stage right really quickly: “If my job is to absorb all the pain of everybody out there, I’d rather die.” You might do it painfully, but you will decide you’d rather die.

You are dealing with your own struggles in these tough times, so when you look out in the world and see your friends, relatives, and co-workers staggering under their loads, do not decide that it would be good to take their loads and put them on your back because you, after all, have it together. Believe me, you’ve got enough in your backpack already. Being big enough means that you honor their right to have their backpack and all the stuff that is in there.

There is a marvelous quote about learning to let people you love do things that look stupid—letting the people you love carry their backpacks, get their diseases, blow their brains out, or decide that you are an impossible person and that they are not going to let you in their life any more.

You can, if you want, become a victim of someone else’s game: “Oh, it’s just so hard. My mother is dying of cancer and I know she could choose otherwise and she just won’t listen to me.” Hey, it’s her choice. It’s her life. It ain’t yours. She wanted to have cancer. It’s her business. She is one loony bin; you’re a different loony bin. Her choices look different from yours. All her life she has been looking at you and saying, “Ah, if only she would change. If only she would buy sensible shoes. If only they wouldn’t change their jobs so much. If only they would have a family. Then they would be happy.” Or whatever it is. And now she is busy dying the way she wants to die.

Who the hell do you think you are, you who are so helpful and have got it so together—that you can take something from somebody which they worked hard to create? It takes years to get cancer. It takes a lot of energy. So how dare you walk up to them and say, “You’re wrong for getting that. How dare you! I don’t want you to die.” Well, that’s nice.

Being big and powerful means that you acknowledge, “Ah, what an interesting place.” You don’t need to know why they chose it. Honor their choice. Even if they are playing a victim’s game, you must honor it. Initially this is tough. Do it anyway. Over the long run it will make these times easier for you.