Mastering the Illusion

Say what?

I’ve been talking self-mastery for quite a while now. Self-mastery taught me to understand myself within the experience. It taught me how to separate myself from the experience just enough that I could function and be okay in my life. Yes, there is a happy medium there. It isn’t all or nothing.

It also offered me a new way of seeing the world. Balance suddenly became important and it was something that self-mastery didn’t really offer me. Balance when used in self-mastery means learning to stand on the broken teeter-totter and not fall off. While that’s a great skill to have, it’s not true balance. True balance would be standing on a teeter-totter that isn’t broken.

Here’s the thing – the world is a broken teeter-totter. Systems, ways of being, ideas, beliefs, perceptions, and even feelings have changed dramatically over time. We still keep trying to stuff ourselves back into the same old boxes with the same old systems and they don’t work anymore. We can’t just fix the old teeter-totter (system), we need to create an entirely new one. The truth that I’ve come to is that fighting with the old teeter-totter won’t create a new one. We have to be willing to start again and that means dropping the fight with the old to allow the new to form.

Self-mastery taught me to perceive reality very differently than I used to. It taught me to see the imbalance in everything around me. It taught me to see the pain that people were holding onto and the fear people have of letting the pain go. That gave me the desire to talk about the imbalance head on.

I now believe that we won’t fix the problems in our world by fighting with them. I firmly believe we need to drop the fight and start again. I believe fighting with the old creates more imbalance and pain than simply starting again would.

Nobody likes that idea. Nobody.

Why? Because it’s scary to walk away from the old, comfy, broken teeter-totter we’ve gotten so good at balancing ourselves on. We keep trying to wrangle the thing and make it work. We don’t want to face the truth that it simply doesn’t work anymore. It cannot be fixed.

The pain and fear that ideas like this bring up is exactly what I want to address and work through using those same concepts of self-mastery that I’ve been talking about forever. Let’s talk about how to use self-mastery to maintain balance while tossing out the old to create something new.

I’m not interested in arguing politics with people. I don’t actually care which side of the proverbial aisle you’re on. I don’t care whether you watch mainstream media or get all your news from Truth Social and News Max. It doesn’t matter to me which reality you happen to reside in. My simple truth is this – both realities need to be tossed out. Both teeter-totters need to be replaced. Neither one is really true. They are both out of balance. They are both based on fear, control, and power. They are both crumbling equally in their own way. Both need to go. Both are equally afraid of what happens if we drop the fight and start again.

What fights do we need to drop?

The fight to convince the other reality to join us. The fight with the broken systems including government, education, money, healthcare, and all social services. The fight to make other people believe or live the way we want them to.

We need to drop all the fights.

What does that mean in practical terms?

Leave everything exactly as it is. Do nothing.

Don’t fix it.

Don’t try to change it.

Don’t argue with it.

Fighting doesn’t create change. It creates fighting.

Change creates change.

Fighting is what happens when we’re afraid of change. If we fight with it then we don’t have to change it. We can stay stuck in the fight instead. That’s easier. It creates less fear. Frustration is easier to deal with than fear.

Fighting doesn’t work. If it did, things would have changed multiple times over. We’d simply fight, somebody would win, the change would happen, and life would continue. But that’s not how it goes. That’s not what happens.

We fight, nobody wins because we can’t make people conform (even though we like to try), so we stay mad and fight some more. Eventually the fight gets old and minor changes are made. But nothing sticks, because nobody agreed on a winner and the proverbial loser just gets mad and rebels. Sounds like something that might happen in a pre-school classroom, doesn’t it?

It’s all because fighting is easier than change. Change requires us to walk away and do something completely different. Nobody wants to do that because everybody is afraid of what the other side will do when they aren’t looking. There is more fear of “what if” than of “what is”. Fighting is the “what is”. Everybody knows what that is and everybody knows how to do it very well. Change is the “what if” that nobody seems to want to think about. We’d much rather demand change via fighting, because we know that it won’t happen. That’s safer. It’s easier just to pretend we’re doing something by fighting about it (knowing nothing will happen), than it is to actually do something about it. Fighting is a cop out that gets us nowhere.

Self-mastery is what offers us the ability to balance while stepping off the broken teeter-totter. It’s trusting that the “what if” is not whatever the mind makes up. Self-mastery is trusting that balance will be found when we stop messing with the broken teeter-totter. It’s trusting ourselves to handle what happens next when we choose to drop the fight and stop trying to fix what we know is irrevocably broken.

Self-mastery gives us the tools to create real change because it teaches us how to balance ourselves without all the fear. That’s the work. That’s how we get from where we are to where we want to go.

Stable, systemic change is not going to be created doing what we’re doing. Nobody wants to hear that, but it’s just the way it is. Until we’re willing to admit that and do something different, we’re in for a really bumpy ride. The brick wall at the end of this path is not going to be fun to crash into. Unfortunately, by the time people realize this, they will have face planted into that proverbial brick wall. it’ll just be a bit too late. The system will crash anyway. The thing is, if we had just let it, we wouldn’t have needed to crash into the brick wall first.

We’re not avoiding anything. We’re creating more of the thing we’re busy trying to avoid. There’s still time to realize this and drop the fight. It’s not too late to just walk away.

Love to all.

Della

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