How to Deal with Life's Challenges

Life does not cease from challenging you. And that doesn't change even if you're awakened spiritually. You will get other challenges, different kinds of challenges. The only difference is, as you awaken spiritually, the way in which you respond to the challenges changes, and that is all important. How you confront the challenges of life, how you react to or respond to the challenges of life, determines how you experience your life.

How you experience your life, ultimately is not determined by what happens to you, because most people think that that's the case, but how you experience your life, or what you call your life, is ultimately not determined by what happens to you, it is determined by how you respond to what happens to you. And how you respond to what happens to you determines what happens in the so-called future, how you respond now. Some people, whenever they are challenged by life, they behave as if, there was something very wrong with their life.

That things are not supposed to go wrong or be challenging. This is not supposed to happen. And this works on both a small scale and large scale. And you might've met people, and perhaps you were one of those people in the past, people who are continuously complaining about things. They're continuously not in alignment, continuously out of alignment with whatever is going on around them, situations and people, and places and events. Either something is there that shouldn't be there.

Something is happening right now that should not be happening. Or something is not happening that should be happening. Or I should be somewhere else but I'm here, and that's a huge problem. I'm trying very hard to get there, but I am here. Now, this sounds a little weird when I say it like this, but the sad fact is that many people live like that, for most of their life.

They're not aligned with what they are doing right now. Yes, they are doing it, but they're not fully in the doing, because they'd rather be somewhere else, they would rather be already at the end of this particular activity. And when you're very much in that mindset, that means your life is stressful continuously. Stressful means there's a mental projection of where you need to be or should be, but you're here. So you're engaged in this activity but there's a, you have mental, you have certain thoughts that tell you either you already want to be at the end of what you're doing, or although you are doing this, you really should also be doing that, and that, and that, but you're doing this.

Dreadful way to live normal, by the way, it's called normal. And you see it when you watch the movies, everybody's like that in the movies, so it must be normal, they're all like. And people love to see the dysfunctional way in which people live reflected on TV and in the movies.

They see reflected their own dysfunction and that serves as a confirmation, that, okay, I'm actually okay because everybody's unhappy. Everybody is living in this way, in a state of almost continuous dissatisfaction, except for brief moments, sometimes to do with having a good meal, or (sighs) sex could do it for a while, this doesn't last very long. Or you get what you wanted, you get what you wanted, the thing that you said, oh, that sort of make me happy. And then you get it in for a moment you feel, (sighs) and you feel this happiness arising. And you think feel this happiness because you got what you wanted, but if you look more deeply, you would realize that you do not really feel happy because you got what you wanted, you feel happy because for the very short time period, the mind structure, that was always unhappy with the is-ness of things, there's something is missing here, I need that, I needed to get rid of that, I need to, that mind factor subsides, and for a moment, you don't want anything except what is here now. And that suddenly you'll feel more alive. You feel, ah.

And now then perhaps, you begin to understand why the Buddha talked about the greatest obstacle to spiritual awakening, being continuous, what he called it and in the translations, it's called desire. But a better translation of what the Buddha was talking about, is a more vital term is wanting. The continuous wanting, wanting this, wanting that, wanting, the neediness, wanting. And that is the mind structure that operates in humans that prevents them from experiencing the deeper dimension of reality, which we could call the timeless dimension.

The timeless dimension of consciousness. Remember, we talked about time a few minutes ago. We talked about time and yes, a few minutes ago. And we talked about the express train that you can't get off. We talked about the fire that is consuming you, that is time, that is true. But the good news is that there is in every human, a deeper dimension of consciousness. In many humans it's only a potential, a latent potential, like a seed. In others the seed has already began to sprout. There is the possibility in humans of accessing and living from the deeper dimension of consciousness.

And accessing that deeper dimension of consciousness is what we could call spiritual awakening, where you realize that in addition to being a person, a personality or a person who lives in this world of time, of past and future, in addition to being this person, there is more to you. There are other dimensions to who you are, or more specifically, there is a deeper dimension to who you are than the merely historical person. And that's why we are here tonight, because I want this not just to be a conceptual talk, although, of course, we're using words, but the aim is for you to experience at first, and even if it's only a glimpse, or to deepen, because for many of you, it'll be just a deepening because you already are sensing what it is that I'm talking about. You say, I think I know what he is talking about. You already sensing within yourself what it is that I'm talking about, when I speak of a deeper dimension of who you are, a deeper sense of identity of who you are.