Today I wanted to talk about the flow of life, attachment, aversion and our truth.  In the yoga sutras truthfulness (II.36) is one of the niyamas which is one of the 5 attitudes towards ourselves. Truth has two main aspects, what you communicate and how you act.

Truthfulness  very simply put, is where you communication the truth and don’t mislead others; however, in this article I am looking at the moment by moment truth of what is before you at any one moment. The truth of action which can be overlooked in discussions of truth but is an equally important facet of the overall concept of truth. This will help lead us to personal harmony, and the development of non-attachment and non-aversion.

What ever situation we seem to find ourselves in requires some sort of action (including in-action), it can be easy to avoid one course of action through aversion because we feel a desire to follow another course of action. In this way we enslave ourselves by strengthening unhealthy desires to shield us from things we would rather not face, therefore strengthening aversion. By favoring actions that help us avoid unpleasant courses of action achieves three things, all negative in the long run. Firstly it weakens us in terms of self control, we go along with our desires as if a slave, and also by not allowing us to develop strength in dealing with things we don’t like.  Secondly we lose the ability to exert self control and discriminative powers that prevent a build up of karma which leads on to the third and final point, because things build up while we do something else, and this means we have wasted the time we could have dealt with the situation and caused a buildup of problems in the future which we still need to deal with, we become more enslaved. The third point can also be seen maybe not as a build up of something we have to do, but maybe problems caused for someone else that was involved in that moment, for example some one becomes upset because we were unkind.

When things come our way in the current moment, it is better to deal with unpleasant or neutral situations without succumbing to our desires or aversions, knowing that if something we like comes our way we can enjoy it fully all the more for knowing we have dealt with past events to the best of our ability. It’s perfectly acceptable to not like something, so long as we don’t shy away from it. This should not be confused with free will and saying no to something we have a choice in, but some times it may be wiser to choose what we would prefer not to be involved with even if we have free choice. This is termed as right action, what ever happens do the right thing. Thats not the right thing by yourself or in the expectation of another, but in terms of the situation itself.

Think of your life as a film passing in front a projector lens, each moment is a still that when animated produces motion. As each moment passes before you, try and deal with the moment appropriately and then let the moment go. The moment may be something difficult, or may be something pleasurable, either way acting appropriately will afford us the best future so long as we can let the moment go. Letting each moment go leaves us free to fully engage in the the next moment before us. Letting go of the expectation of results to each action allows us to be free no matter what course of action is open to us. We become free and liberated from all manor of things.

Obviously this topic could be written in to a small book, but this is the web so I shall end here.

Copyright © 2009 Russell Smithers