The hardest part of life is accepting how things are. What gets in the way of accepting how things are is our perception of how they are. Our perception is limited in many ways. We are limited by our sense organs, which perform sensory miracles by deciphering light, sound, taste, smell, and texture, but, as amazing as they are, they can only perceive so much.
Also obscuring how things are, are our ideas about things. Ideas are how we make a cohesive whole out of all the available sensory information. Ideas get mixed up with feelings, positive, negative, and neutral responses to the thoughts. All the senses, ideas, and feelings, in constant and rapid motion, combine to make the slowly morphing, but seemingly stable structures of our beliefs. Beliefs are like sandcastles, ideas in neat little piles, and carefully crafted big piles, that are the cornerstones for how we think things are.
Our consciousness is what watches all the the senses, ideas, feelings, and beliefs as they form, morph, and dissolve. The goal in becoming conscious is to merge how things seem with how things are. On top of the difference between how things seem and how they are, there is the added complication of how we want them to be. Our beliefs and ideas create strong preferences for how things should be. When we believe things should be one way and then they are another way, we tend to bend our perception to make them fit then take what we perceive as real. Perceptions bend because beliefs are strong enough to bend them but not strong enough to bend reality. The sandcastles can make people walk around them, but they can’t stand up to the ocean.
Practicing acceptance helps us counteract our ability to unconsciously skew our perceptions as we try to make the world fit our beliefs. We practice acceptance because the disconnect between reality and our perception hurts our feelings. In order to open ourselves up to acceptance, first, we have to accept that we don’t see the whole picture. We have to accept that our beliefs and our perceptions are flawed. We have to accept that our preferences distort our perceptions. The shortcut to accepting all of that is to accept a basic state of not knowing. Not knowing throws open the gates to clear perceiving. Not knowing lets us accept things both conditionally and unconditionally. We can accept anything when we think it might be how it is, might be otherwise, and might be both.
Our most basic essence is accepting. Our consciousness accepts everything. When we are asleep and dreaming, it accepts that we can fly and hang out with people who have been dead for years. These things occur as naturally as daffodils in our sleep, and our consciousness accepts it. When we are awake and sensing the world around us, our consciousness accepts whatever we think, whatever we feel, whatever we sense. If we feel awful, our consciousness accepts that things are awful. If we feel great it accepts greatness. It has no preference, it just accepts it all.
As we become more conscious we practice identifying more with our observing consciousness and less with our thoughts and feelings. We practice accepting. We notice thoughts and feelings while making space to remember that we are perceiving and don’t know the whole truth of it. That can help us to accept what we perceive. As we perceive and accept, and perceive and accept, we get better at both perceiving and accepting. In that way, the way we think things are moves closer to how they are. Accepting how we think things are, while knowing that we don’t know how they actually are, lets us reshape our beliefs, which clears away the painful feelings and opens us up to more amazing senses that we never knew were possible.
It is entirely possible to accept who you are, how you are, and everything about your entire circumstance, right now, as it is, and feel good about it. From that perspective, you can work with the world as it is, and more effectively help it morph into what you think it should be. If you don’t know how to do that, accept that not knowing, sense what is happening, and accept that. Then, let that go and sense and accept the next bit.
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