Quote:
Originally Posted by inverse Paranoid  What's more empowering? Being able to control your environment, or being able to control how you interact with it?
By holding a mindset that stresses you out whenever your environment is cluttered, or the people around you are ornery, aren't you then giving your power away to your environment?
What exactly are the best parameters for personal growth? Is it existing in an environment where you can control everything? Or learning to leverage the variables you have unconditional control over by exposing yourself to uncontrollable environments? Would you grow more from spending the rest of your life on the Holodeck—where EVERYTHING is under your control? Or by vagabonding and going wherever the wind blows you?
Just as no one can make you feel inferior without your consent, nothing can stress you out without you focusing on it in a way that creates resistance. If you can make peace with any environment, you can find peace in any environment. If you can make peace with any person (no matter their attitude), then you are free to focus on any aspect of any person in your environment and create interactions accordingly, because you're making what resonates with you most the topic of discussion, not what annoys you most.
Growth is everywhere. The better you can get at controlling your focus, the more freedom you'll have from the need to control your environment. You'll be able to enjoy yourself in the finest of restaurants seated next to the most conscious of people, and in the dingiest of prisons seated next to the most bitter of prisoners. Because the Oneness within us all means that the good within everything we love exists in every particle of the world around us. And it is there for us the conscious to find it, embrace it, and reap its benefits. |
These are wise, wise words and so spot on! I know many "conscious" (I think this can mean many different things for many people) people who live in very stressful environments - full of dirt and crime. Some people who live in cleaner places(homes and neighborhoods) even glamorize these environments looking to come someplace not so sterile where they feel that many people are down to earth, more human and real. Some even "consciously" choose to live in these environments because they've seen them on TV and thought they were "cool." A lot of people who live in environments such as these form strong community connections. Some even have to dig into deeper parts of themselves to become more conscious in ways that make sense for their own lives and the lives of the people in their communities. Happiness and being conscious is full of so many nuances. We allow the media, including new age media, to influence us as to what being conscious and happy really means. But this is something we must discover for ourselves. I don't think that because a person lives in an environment that we judge to be unconscious that this is necessarily a reflection on the person but more a reflection on the person doing the judging.