A Prescribed Life
The Fundamental Point.
Withdrawing Attachment from a Prescribed Life
Your life in large part is prescribed. I am not sure who writes the prescription, I only know it impacts your life.
Another way to think about the prescription is to see it as the conditions of your birth and everything that follows, until you realize something else.
The prescription is often overlooked because it is generally accepted by you through unrelenting and insistent reinforcements to conform.
You may look at the prescription implacably only when you begin to realize that there is more to your life than conformity to the prescription.
Before this realization you may have some vague sense of the impact of conformity but in general, you accept the prescription as worthwhile and see it as a plan for your success or faliure in life.
The “American Dream” is one such example of a prescription for living life. The basic plan includes finding a mate, getting married, having children, having a career, buying a house and building a white picket fence.
On some level we know it is as the photo suggests, an ‘illusion.’ Why else is it called the “American Dream?”
It leads me to ask what is the “Danish Dream” or the “Chinese” or the “African?”
The list of dreams of the illusion goes on and on ad infinitum – because we continuously create another and another and another dream hoping the next one will be perfect.
The prescription includes universal qualities such as health, gender, country of origin, family history, religious and secular education, ethnicity and the zeitgeist at the time of your birth. And this list is not the complete list.
These qualities effect how well you adapt to the prescription. Good health, for example, aids in fulfilling the prescriptive plan. And so it goes. Study yourself to see your prescription.
The better and stronger the qualities the better and stronger are your possibilities at fulfilling the prescription.
Your strengths may help to fulfill the prescription - however, they actually impede your spiritual awakening.
Success is a strong ally of illusion.
In any case, your strengths may require equivalent strength to disappoint you enough for you to see through the prescription.
Disappointment is actually a little “luck.
Disappointment gets your attention away from the illusion. This is luck. Lucky for you if you see a rip in the fabric of the prescription illusion enough to get you to seek spiritual knowledge – which up to this point might appear to be stupid. Worst than stupid is if you lose sight of a spiritual life altogether because you are disappointed with your choices.
Suffering in the form of disappointment is a lucky event.
You will want to call it something - “luck” is a convenient word to use until you know it for what it is.
Knowing disappointment is an awakening to the Beloved Eternal Unborn.
Much of the prescription is handed down to you through traditions, stories, fashions, education, religion, and peer pressure. In this century it is cranked up at an exponential rate by the digital exposures in hand. Making the illusion quite complex and bound together and upheld by others.
The prescription is rooted in conditioning.
The pervasive influence of the prescription makes it quite difficult to abandon. But should you be fortunate enough to fall out of the prescriptive sway even for just a moment, you may be able to see something that is generally overlooked. It is overlooked because the prescription is the focus and anything that threatens the prescription is quickly reinforced as a glitch and remedies are procured to repair the glitch.
We want to fulfill our prescription.
The glitch may come to you through the doors of failure, loss, or some sort of tragedy. In other words, something in the prescription was supposed to work but didn’t. The malfunction or fault in the prescription gets your attention.
Disappointment in our ally.
The malfunction generally comes with some sense of disappointment or letdown. It doesn’t have to be the end of the world, it just feels as though it is, for you.
The awareness of the malfunction is a moment where the prescription is undone and you see something beyond the prescription. You get a peek into another realm past the plan that was given to you and held together by the social situations of your life.
If you are able to resist reparation and blame, you see that the prescription isn’t working and get a chance to see something else, maybe for the first time.
Disappointment is an opportunity to see beyond the prescription. It does not mean that you have to dump the prescription altogether but you might.
What is most important for you is to recognize the realization that comes through disappointment.
You may feel you did your best to follow the plan but it didn’t pay off. You come to reckon with the truth that the promises of the prescription never unfold as planned.
It is mainly because the prescription is like betting your life on ice cubes. The more you handle them the more they melt away. The melting away is an opportunity to see the vanishing nature of what you counted on.
POOF! It’s gone and you are left empty-handed.
Relax. It’s the nature of being human and happens to everyone. What you do with empty-handedness, however, makes all the difference.
All prescriptions of conformity are of the nature to change and disappear. They by nature cannot hold you because they were never meant to do so.
Breathe easy it’s not your fault. It’s no one’s fault. But it is a chance for you to find out who you are but not in the terms of the prescription, but in terms of something far more reliable.
You know the prescription terms, the limits and liabilities, the warrantees and loopholes and you begin to see the vagaries of the prescribed life. All the wanting, liking, disliking, pleasure, ups and downs of the delusion.
Disappointment, in one or more of the social features of the plan, is a chance for you to see who you are in terms of reality. Realization tends to require some sense of disappointment with the prescription (the illusion).
Feeling let-down is an unmatched time to seek & beg for wisdom that exceeds common prescriptions for a good life. This refers to not getting, & keeping what you want.
No one else is able to give you the wisdom you need, but others are able to attest to the direction or route that may assist you in acquiring intuitive knowledge that goes far beyond the social remedy for a good life.
The first pointer is to STOP!
Stop counting on the ice cube approach and allow yourself to tote up the disappointments as wise ambassadors in your mind.
In order to do this toting. you must be willing and able to see the disappointments for what they are. They are messengers to help you wake up the sleeping knowledge of reality in you.
The requirement is self-investigation of the disappointment but not against or in comparison to anyone else or even to the prescription.
You must outdo yourself in investigating the habitat of your own mind.
Disappointment suggests that you counted on something unreliable which often leads to some expression of blame, shame and suffering.
Pray and beg for wisdom to STOP the blame, shame and suffering. See beyond the wish for life to go according to some plan.
STOP making plans & accept what comes into your life as your life.
Seek wisdom without ceasing.
Begging for wisdom is for your own well-being so there is no need to feel embarrassed. When you ask for something your attention is drawn to it and the mind begins to tally the record of response to your request. The tally is not important, but the drawn attention is. Attention allows you to see the response to your request.
Begging is an old and human characteristic that arises when you recognize the feeling that you lack something. Disappointment or a setback is a sense of lack or condition and may easily trigger your human ability to beg.
Yes! Beg to surrender. Yield to the Unborm, Undying, Immutable.
If you use it well, it leads to the treasures of humility which are quite hard to come by given that most prescriptions are held together with pride, gain, fame and pleasure.
Drop the prescription that leads to disappointment which has the goal of “…becoming somebody important.”
All efforts that lead to humility need to be harnessed and employed in the service of letting go of the prescription and living an unassuming life. A meek life.
A meek life is a life of discipline, respect, training and acceptance. It is the life of a war-horse - where you use and change your power towards selflessness, acceptance and letting go of the mental prescriptions of your conditioned life.
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Thank you. Very well written.