← Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Jung On Purpose Podcast by CreativeMind
Why You Are Still Not Happy (After Years of Personal Growth)
00:41:08
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- [00:01]
Deborah Maldonado
This is Yang On Purpose with Deborah and Dr. Rob Maldonado of CreativeMind. Join us each week for a deep approach to personal growth through our neuromindra coaching method. Grounded in Jungian psychology, Eastern spirituality, and current neuroscience.
- [00:18]
CreativeMind University Announcer
Be empowered to escape the trap of
- [00:20]
Deborah Maldonado
fixing yourself and step into your purpose to live a more conscious life. Let's begin. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Young On Purpose. I am Debra Maldonado.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
I'm Dr. Rob. Welcome to the program.
- [00:34]
Deborah Maldonado
And today we are continuing our series on Easter philosophy, non dual philosophy. And we're going to talk about the elusion elusive path of happiness, how we all want happiness in life and how life, you know, a lot of times brings us suffering and how do we deal with the difficulties in life in a very powerful way. And most of us, we find that are using strategies that aren't working. So we're going to answer that question of where to find happiness and how to be happy right now, right in this moment. Before we begin, I do want to request that you subscribe to our channel if you're watching us on YouTube helps us reach more people. And also on Spotify itunes, wherever you're listening to us on the podcast audio, make sure you subscribe so you can get every episode. That helps us a lot, helps us reach more people. All right, so, Rob, I want to be happy. What's the secret? You have all the secrets.
- [01:34]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's right. Yes. So when we talk about Eastern philosophy, especially non dualism, for those of you that are new to the program, just kind of a. A caveat. So Eastern philosophy, especially non dual philosophy, as we read in the Upanishads, it was written from a very different worldview than the one we have today. So that if we read it simply from our worldview, we might make some sense of it. But we're not really getting the spirit of the teaching of what they were getting at. We have to put ourselves in the state of mind that they wrote it in, which was the understanding that everything is consciousness. A simple way to understand it might be this way. Everything is mind, everything is made out of thought. Everything is including what we call the material world. And so for them, material was not the absolute reality. For them, material was an appearance of the universe. The absolute reality was consciousness awareness. Right. So that's.
- [02:50]
Deborah Maldonado
Now, can you distinguish the consciousness from what most people think of consciousness, consciousness and the materialistic point of view? Because that word is often misunderstood of what we're talking about. So I'd love for you to.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yes. And that. That is exactly what one of the misreadings kind of leads to that. For, for us in the Western world, consciousness means that we are aware of an object or an idea or we perceive it.
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Deborah Maldonado
Right. We're conscious of it. Right?
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, we're. We're cognizant, cognizing it. We're. We're kind of holding it in our mind and our brain is processing it. That, to us, is the definition of consciousness. For the seers that wrote the Upanishads, it was a very different way of understanding consciousness. To them, consciousness was beyond the mind. In other words, it wasn't the mind thinking of an object or perceiving an object or working out a problem in their head. It was a fundamental or the absolute reality. That is absolute meaning. It's always there, it's constant. And it. It is what allows the universe, the appearance of the universe to arise.
- [04:05]
Deborah Maldonado
I like to think of it as more like a universal consciousness or a universal intelligence, so kind of distinguished from consciousness. Now, you just said everything's mind. So that's not true. I'm going to call you out on that. You said everything is mind.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, I was using it more as a metaphor, as an example that points to how they were thinking about it. What we see the universe as is a part of mind, like a universal
- [04:38]
Deborah Maldonado
mind, more of an intelligence, not your mind in your brain.
- [04:43]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Right. So that in the west, we think of perception as seeing something that's already there. From the Eastern perspective, it would be what we're seeing is our own reflection, our own mind. So that the eye.
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Deborah Maldonado
What does that mean?
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
What's that?
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Deborah Maldonado
When we say our, you say we're seeing our mind. Who's the our? Who's the me?
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Whoever the observer is, which is typically what we call the ego or the I. What we observe as an eye, as an individual, is a reflection of our own mind. In other words, the objects, although they appear to be separate from us, they are one and the same as our mind.
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Deborah Maldonado
So this is a really big concept. So how can you break it down and make it very accessible to people? Because this is. I'm everything. I'm one with everything. I know. For me, it took me a long time to understand what this means. Can you break it down a little bit more practical if you can?
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yes, yes. So we're. Let's think of a stage, right. That the Shakespeare himself said, the world is a stage and we're all actors. There's something to that. Right. It's kind of makes sense that we walk onto these scenes that we can we can call it our social world. Work, relationships, home. They're all kind of stages that we. We walk onto. So the question would be, what is the stage made out of? And. And who created that stage? So in Western psychology, we would say we're walking onto a stage that's already built by others, like a house, a home, a work setting. It's kind of there already because we, we see that other people are able to walk onto that stage just like we do, and that way.
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Deborah Maldonado
So we're separate from them.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, we're separate from it. It's. It's a. It's an existence that predates our appearance. That from the Eastern perspective, is an illusion. That's not what. What is happening. From the consciousness perspective, what is happening is we're creating the stage as we walk onto it, and it's appearing to us in this particular way because we are the ones walking onto it and creating it as we do that. In other words, so our, our perception
- [07:13]
Deborah Maldonado
is creating the reality that we see.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's it.
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Deborah Maldonado
Would it also be. So here's another question, and I'm being the devil's advocate. I know people are thinking the same thing. And questions I asked myself. So are we perceiving what we're conscious of? We're. We're perceiving what we're. Because Jung had the personal unconscious. He had the collective unconscious. So what we're experiencing, is it more the. The whole psyche is. Is a part of this experience that we don't know why we have these things occur in our life or these type of people show up in our life or these events happen in our life. Because there's a deeper layer to our. Our individual self that's more than. Than just our. What we can perceive with our senses.
- [07:56]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, that's a very subtle question. So we can say it's both. Right? Because our perception, we can say, is conscious. I'm conscious of what I'm seeing right now. But the way my brain and mind interpret what I'm seeing includes both. Conscious are my awareness, my awareness of the moment, as well as all the conditioning of my past. Meaning, the unconscious mind plays in big time because it gives me the definition of things. So we know from neuroscience, for example, that the brain takes a lot of shortcuts. If it knows something from the past, it just kind of fills in the blanks. Even though I'm not perceiving it in a conscious way, it. It fills in the blanks and says, you know what that is? Don't worry about it. It's a, it's a curtain or it's a window and it looks out in a certain direction.
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Deborah Maldonado
So what you just said was, I know you had taught this before. So let's do a test for this. So let's say I walk into my office, I have this new office, nice background, and I ready. My mind has already calculated and brain has already processed what this room looks like. And then next time I go in the room, if nothing changes, it just fills in like, it's like I'm seeing a memory of what this room looked like when I first saw it and I first constructed it in my mind. And then only thing I really notice, or it's reconstructing is the changes I made. Like if I move a book here or my desk looks a little different. Is that what you're saying, is that we're not actually seeing the whole reality, we're seeing a memory of most of like everyone who's lived in a house for a long time. You're seeing a memory of your house, not really the house itself, which is mind blowing. And that's very much so confirmed by neuroscience, isn't it? They, they think of it that way as how the brain processes reality.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Again, you know, science gives us like a verification of some of these ideas. Does the, the actual neurology and biology support that idea? And sure enough, it does. What we see is not like a clear picture of what is there. Our, our brain is constructing it internally as an internal map of what is my environment, what environment am I moving in. But it's an internal construct that I'm perceiving or experiencing. So experience is always an internal mental experience, not an experience of the external directly.
- [10:42]
Deborah Maldonado
So two people can have experience or witness the same exchange, and depending on their own perception, they will have a reality that's different than an, than the other person. That's why they always say witnesses have mixed. It was a blue van, it was a brown van, it was two women, it was two men. Because we're always projecting. So, so what you're really getting at is that, well, this is the foundation is that what we're seeing is not as real as we think it is.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
That's right.
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Deborah Maldonado
And if we're not seeing things as really as we think that they really are, then how do we address the idea of happiness? Because if we're not really seeing the world as it really is, including ourselves, how would we find happiness if we don't, we're not even seeing things correctly. And so Eastern philosophy gives us this, these, these kind of ideas to think about what is true, what is real. And, and now science is, you know, the brain, science, neuroscience is showing us these. Yeah, this is actually, it's not, it is an illusion. So I love the story of the snake in the rope because I think that's a real practical way to think about this.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah.
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Deborah Maldonado
You walk into the closet, it's dark, and you see on the floor what appears to be a snake on the floor. You get scared, you freak out, you jump, you look for something to kind of protect yourself. You turn on the light and ready to battle the snake. And it's just a rope. Now did the snake exist? That's the question. And yes, it did in your mind. Because you had an experience of a snake. The true reality was that it was just a rope. But the experience itself, you can't deny. You got scared, your heart started beating. Maybe you got fight your fight or flight. You thought you were going to die. Maybe your mind started flooding with panic. That's the, that's the, that's, that's how we look at reality, is that we're seeing what our mind projects onto it and underneath it it's just a rope, benign rope laying on the ground. So it's like the blank canvas. And then we're projecting what we feel is our, our experience in that.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yes. And so the answer is to the question, is it real? It's yes and no. It's kind of a. It can be both, depending how we're defining reality and experience. Right. Because if we understand what the brain is doing, that, that the experience is really an internal mental construct, then the snake absolutely exists because we saw it and we experienced it and that is what we call reality. Experience for us is reality. But if we ask, was there a real snake there or an actual snake? No, there wasn't a snake. Therefore, we can say it's illusory or apparent. It's an apparent reality because there was no snake. It was a rope. It was mistaken, a mistaken perception.
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- [14:48]
Deborah Maldonado
so if someone. Something happened to someone early in life, let's bring it down to practicality. Let's say you got in a car accident and you. You had this memory of that, and you start making up all these stories of it's not safe to be in a car and it's, you know, terrible, and you, you know, you. You get someone else to drive or you never step in a car again. And you live your life from that moment, from that experience. We're. You're saying that. Is it true? Yes. You had an experience. It was. It felt like a real experience of you almost dying or whatever that happened in that accident. But your mind is carrying it on and continuing to project that fear when there is no fear anymore. And you're creating a reality of fear and scarce, you know, fear of like someone being. Being harmed or being hurt that is not real anymore. Like you had the experience back there, but you keep projecting. And that's what conditioning does, that we have things that happen to us, we have experiences of it, and our perception makes up a story about what that means and who we are and how we are in the world. And we create situations or strategies to keep us from going back to that harmful place or that harmful time. But we're acting as if it's real in this moment when it passed already. And so we can't deny the experience because it happened to us. But the nature of that experience isn't as real as we think it is because we are not. We are. And this is the kicker, that we're like an. Also an object in consciousness. We're a part of the illusion like anything, like our body, our thoughts, our brain, our physicality is also an illusion in a way. Like we're not as solid as we think we are.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, Again, it's, it's. We are part of the. It's almost like the back to the theater. We are also the audience that is observing our. Us as an actor acting on the stage. Right. And so that, that is what is called the witness mind for the witness aspect of the mind that it's able to observe. In psychology, for purposes of research, it's called metacognition, meaning that it's above our ordinary cognition so that we're able to observe our actions, our thoughts, our behaviors, our emotions from that vantage point as a witness, not as the. The one that is enacting the action.
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Deborah Maldonado
And so that's what non dual means. Is that there's not two. There's not me and then an audience out there or me and that supreme being out there that is separate from me. We're saying that we're one. You know, we're the audience, we're the actor, we're the stage. We're everything. And not we in the high sense of ego. But what helped me understand it is that the, that the I or the thing that we think is us, that's the identity is an object and we are the witness to it. So what I believe most people, when we do personal growth, and I was a, you know, I still am personal growth junkie, that what we're always trying to do in like the Western psychology is to build up this object that is the I build up this ego, this, this, this self concept to make it better, to protect it, to keep it happy. And so like we said, how we're, how are we approaching? So let's say we're alone. I was alone for many years looking for the partner. And I thought, when I find that other someone else to love me, then I'll be happy. Or when I make money and be successful. And as you know, as we started out leaving the corporate world, then I'll be happy. And so it's always dependent on something outside of myself to make me happy. And then if I realize that that's never gonna be enough for that object. It's always gonna be craving and, And I'm having an temporary experience, but it's never lasting because in essence, anything that's unreal, like we say, the object, the snake, the rope, those are all they. They change constantly. So how can anything, how can this identity of yours be real? If you look at, I'm three years old and I'm a certain. I see myself a certain way, and I'm 12 years old and I see myself a certain way. I'm 25 and I see myself or 45, like, who is the real you? And then we start to loosen up the grasp and, and these are deep questions. You're not going to resolve them over time. But we start to question what we assume is real, including ourselves. And I think that is the key to happiness is like to get out of this. Chasing and looking for a way to feel safe in the world and get to that happiness moment, those peak experiences that they say and have more of those. But that's also fleeting. It never lasts. Nothing ever lasts. Yeah, so it's like grat. It's like trying to capture air with our hands. So the Wind with our hands. Right. It's like. And so that's the definition of suffering. Not having the things we want, but desiring something that is never going to make us happy.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, yeah. It would be like the, the metaphor of the rope and the snake. It would be mistaking the rope for the, for a snake. Right. Thinking that life, the way it's appearing to me is a snake. It's causing me suffering, it's causing me lack, it's causing me a lack of love in that situation that you're describing. And it's a misreading again. It's thinking that the unreal is real, that the, that that there actually is a snake, when in reality it's simply a rope. Meaning it's my own perception, it's my own fear that that is creating the, the appearance of this lack.
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Deborah Maldonado
I think a really good way for me that helped me understand this concept is a dream. You're in a dream and there's this world that's created of buildings and people and situations and even feelings. And then you wake up and oh, that was just a dream that wasn't real. But this is sort of the same phenomenon I mean they talk about in Eastern philosophy, waking, dreaming, sleeping states. And so if we think of this world as a dream and you're dreaming yourself into this experience of life, wouldn't it be an easier way to find happiness than feeling like it's so real and there's so much at stake and it's do or die and every little thing in life is a tragedy. And, and, and it's not to say you don't want to experience, you know, be like putting like pretty light around everything and everything happens for a reason. You want to feel those emotions, but you want to get out of it and not stay stuck and chasing something that you think is going to help you, like running away from poverty or running away from lack or running away from loneliness or even running away from illness, you know, like resisting that illness. And when I get that, you know, doctor saying I'm cancer free, then I can relax again. It's like, do we. How many times in our life have we really felt truly at peace for a long period of time? If you really think about that question, there's always something that comes up in life, like life itself in being identified as this object, I is always going to suffer in some way because that's its nature is to chase pleasure and move away from pain. It's like built into us. And so we're kind of on a GERBIL wheel in life, trying to capture some moment of happiness just to have it fleeted again. Just like a vacation, right? We go on vacation and we think, wow. They say people are happiest the day before they leave. Than what? Actually they're on vacation because now they're thinking of going back and how many days they have left. And we're always trying to like, hold on to something, hold on to time. And in a moving world, we can't do that. So it can inherently can't give us happiness.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. What you're describing is the, the wheel of Samsara and from the Upanishads. Some, most of you probably have heard of Samsara from Buddhist philosophy, but it's a much older concept, comes from the ancient Upanishads. And idea of Samsara was precisely this, that when you mistake the unreal for the real, you're chasing the wrong object or, and, and expecting happiness if you catch that object or if you possess it. But it will not give you happiness because it's, it's illusory in a sense. It's, it's part of your dream appearance or the dream appearance of your, your expectations. You're creating it in your mind that there's some external object that's going to fulfill your happiness, whether it be a person, love, money, success, whatever it is, it can only give you that temporary fix because you're, you're expecting it to fulfill something that it cannot give you.
- [24:19]
Deborah Maldonado
Well also too like chasing this. I know for years I spent, like Western psychology is all about fixing the wounds and repairing the damaged psyche and the dysfunctional family and trying to fix something. And so what we're doing is we're actually using illusion to create more illusion that we've been harmed in some way. And again, we're not denying the experience. We're assuming in Western psychology that you are. The experience was real and it was physical and it's solid and it's in your cells, it's in your body, and you have to find a way to move it through. Those are great rituals and they, they may help a person, but it's not the answer because it, it returns back again because we're still in the wrong understanding. Like then something else will happen to us. And here we are back again. I gotta work on this now. I'm getting divorced. I gotta work on that. And it's this constant striving for like, almost like I call it rearranging the furniture. We keep spinning around, chasing, using the wrong strategies. Not wrong, but Longer strategy or inaccurate strategy to find happiness. And that's really what we want. We want to relieve ourselves from suffering. That's why we do personal growth. That's why you go to therapy. That's why people get coaches. I'm suffering and I want to relieve it. But we still think it's out there outside of us or by fixing ourselves, this, this little object in consciousness that is constantly changing, that it can ever reach a point of being completely healed and fixed because it's, in essence, it is always changing and always having more karma and. And patterns show up in our life.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. There's two concepts from depth psychology that are useful here. One is the understanding of introjection.
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Deborah Maldonado
Hmm.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Now, what that means is that our mind takes these experiences that we have from early childhood. And let's say, let's take a traumatic experience.
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Deborah Maldonado
We.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
We absorb it, we internalize it. Because that's the nature of the mind. It internalizes our experiences and says, I might need this to learn from this experience for my future survival and future strategy, which is perfect. Right. It helps us survive. The other one is projection that we tend to project. Then those introjects or interjected experiences, we tend to project them externally, like you said. So now what I experience as traumatic in my early childhood, I tend to project it externally. And I'll. I'll begin to see it in many, many situations. Perhaps not all right. But anything that reminds me of or has a hint of that early experience, I will tend to project those expectations of that introject onto the external or what appears to us as external. Now, what that does, it sets us up for re experiencing the same. The same trauma, the same experience. It doesn't have to be a trauma. It could be anything else. But just as an example, right? Because it's so popular these days, this idea of that we're. We're all traumatized by our past experiences. And in a sense, that's what continues that pattern, that we're projecting it. Therefore, we're re experiencing it continuously, even though it might not be there on the stage of life. So what that does, when we don't understand it, it fools us because we're thinking, I'm seeing an external reality. And it's showing me that indeed the world is a dangerous place. It can re. Traumatize me. I can experience that again. Once we understand its nature, then we understand where the work is. It's an internal work, not the, you know, I can't. In Buddhism, they talk about this covering the world with leather so that we don't step on hard surfaces or thorns
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Deborah Maldonado
or the glass and the thorns.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Right. And that's what we're trying to do when we externalize things. We're trying to protect ourselves from this external world that's dangerous.
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Deborah Maldonado
Our own making.
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Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. And that's an impossibility. All we have to do is wear shoes. And it has the same effect. We cover our feet, meaning we. We do our internal work and restructure our internal mind so that we're no longer projecting. Right. We learn that projection is a defense mechanism or a way of existing, the way. The way our mind makes sense of the world. But that if I work with that internal structure of the mind, I can change it. And I can change then my perception of what reality is.
- [29:23]
Deborah Maldonado
And I think, for me, I think the most practical way and the most powerful way these concepts are. Wow. They're big ideas. And. And so you can't really understand it intellectually. You have to have direct experience. And for me, shadow work, that entry level into individuation, is just the entry level. It's not about healing the past or changing limiting beliefs as some people are healing the inner child. Shadow work really helps us understand this reflective part of our mind because what we're really dealing with is those projections on others, how they trigger us. And then we're reclaiming it and examining it and going, oh, now I. I created that in some way. And I feel like that is really the goal of shadow work, in my opinion. It's not about healing psychologically, it's about healing spiritually. It's about understanding. I am in control of my own reality. There's no other out there. And for me, that's the most profound, is that when you realize that you're seeing yourself, then you have power over it. And if you. So, for example, years ago, I talked about this before, is that, you know, I thought my father was unavailable and, you know, and all this stuff. And then I realized, like, I didn't want to even get close to him. I didn't want to reach out to him or talk to him about deep stuff. And I was like, wait a minute. I'm. I'm kind of holding back, too. And when I recognized in myself what I was projecting onto him, does he have some. Did he have some of those qualities? Yes. But I was making that. He was the one that's carrying that shadow. And I am so open and so loving. And then I realized how much of my single life I pushed people away that really liked me. And I always wanted the elusive person, because I just felt like I. And I realized I was the one who was unavailable. And I started to see that mirror effect. I was like, oh, I'm seeing my mind. And it gave me such empower, like, a feeling of empowerment, because I've been working on myself all these years to make myself more confident and not be attached if someone didn't call me back and putting myself in the right place and trying to be impressive and not screw up and be too clingy, all those things that they tell you not to do. And I realized, oh, my God, I was the one pushing it away, not other people. Everything changed. I mean, I met you a couple weeks later, and I was like. And so when we. That's really where love comes from. When you start chasing it and you realize you are the source. You are the one who needs to be. You know, you are the one in your own way. And I find that so empowering. And. And we spend so much time trying to. In our childhood trying to fix it when it, you know, if we understand the simple truth. Maybe I need to understand why I was so unavailable. That might help me. But the fact that I see that it's in me and that's why I'm creating it is a powerful step. And that's where shadow work can really give us. It can give us this. If we do it right. And we're not doing the pop shadow work that some people teach, you're doing, like, real shadow work. It's not comfortable. It's really taking responsibility for your life and not pointing fingers at other people and really saying, this is my creation. What am I doing here? And also not to blame ourselves, not to say I'm a bad person because I created all this in my life. It's, oh, I was unaware, and now I'm more aware. Now I can have a choice. Now I can have freedom. And that's really, I think, the power of this idea. And we have to do it with, like you said, the Witness Mind. We have to work with ourselves by not seeing ourselves as us, but seeing. Being in the audience, watching ourselves on stage, and it's easier to look at it from a. A little step back. And we could see ourselves and be like, oh. And we don't take ourselves or this character that we're playing in this life so seriously. And we're really free to start examining in a truthful way of what we're really creating, what we're seeing.
- [33:19]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. The cultivation of the Witness Mind appears to be a universal many, many spiritual traditions. Psychological traditions around the world have used this method in different ways and in different kind of understandings of the psyche. But they all operate in the same way that they give us the ability to observe our own thoughts, our own emotions, our own behaviors from kind of a non attached perspective that we're not caught up in the emotion that we're having, we're witnessing it, it's still there, it's still, we're allowing it to arise. But because we're not caught up in it, we're able to observe it in a detached way or a non attached way. That experience is very powerful for people because it gives us a freedom from the conditioning effect of that emotion or that experience.
- [34:18]
Deborah Maldonado
So you can watch yourself go through suffering and happiness without being caught up in it. You know, without being so caught up in it. I heard someone tell me years ago that it's like a rushing river our life and if we try to see ourselves drowning that we're going to jump in with it. It like a saving a drowning person that ever works, they pull you down with you. But you can stand on the bank of the river and watch the ups and downs of life and the rushing of the mind and be non attached and, and we, we could still get to enjoy the joy of life and even get juice out of the suffering because the suffering gives us the tools to work with becoming more aware. But we know that for me, anytime like the external world is showing something I don't want to see. I just get into that witness mind and I watch myself think and I watch my ego try to like wrestle with these ideas and just to step back and just go, wow, look how caught up I am. It just immediately brings you to peace. You could feel it in your body. You know, a lot of people talk about the somatic work, you gotta clear the body. But you can actually step back and your body will be immediately at peace. If you stop feeding the mind the narratives and the, and the stories that this is so real. Like seeing the rope and the snake. You see the rope and then immediately your body relaxes. You get that phone call finally from the person that you thought you was mad at you and you're obsessing over it. And then they call or they say their phone died and you're like oh, okay. And everything leaves your body because you know what you experienced wasn't real. That's the key to freedom. I think that's the key to happiness is to, to not discount the world and think it's all an illusion. Enjoy it. But have that place that we can go to where we're not so caught up in it that we lose ourselves in it and we lose our mind and we lose our happiness and then dampens our joy of just being alive. We should be here having a great time versus making everything so heavy and serious.
- [36:19]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah, that's part of the. The journey of our life is to figure out what is it that I'm experiencing.
- [36:28]
Deborah Maldonado
Hmm, that's a great question. What did I experience?
- [36:33]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
What is the nature of that experience? Is it an absolute reality? Or is it more of a perception of my own mind, a kind of a misperception. And also it goes to this idea, are we over identifying ourselves as this body, this individual, this personality, this ego? Or are we understanding ourselves in the larger context of consciousness as in the Eastern philosophy that if. If we are more than our body and our mind, we are that absolute reality ourselves. And that's the ultimate message of the Upanishad says, is that you are that pure consciousness, pure awareness that is able to observe your mind, body having these human experiences. And therefore it gives you a sense of freedom that you're not what is going to happen to your individual body. You're something much grander.
- [37:35]
Deborah Maldonado
But yeah, you're not gonna like the fear of death. And you know, all those things go away. Not, they don't completely go away. So I'd like to end with just an exercise for people to think about is that idea of the stage and that you are in the audience watching your life unfold on stage. And if you can kind of use that as kind of a way to step into the witness, like where, where. And like you said, what is my mind making up about this story of my life, this character that I am of, who. Who they are, what, how worthy they are, how successful they are, how lovable they are, how perfect they are, how beautiful or in shape they are. Like all that stuff, building up this character. And you could sit there like as the audience watching this beautiful life and having this experience, but also have one foot in this beautiful potential that's already there. So there's a lot more to talk about this next time we'll go deeper in like creating from this place. I mean, we talked about getting out of suffering. So what do we do when we're out of suffering? How can this non dual philosophy help us really create happiness or create things and desire things in life? It doesn't mean that we don't want to be successful and find love and all those things. How can we do it in A more enlightened way, in a more conscious way.
- [38:59]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
Yeah. So we'll end with this passage from one of the Upanishads, which says, there are two birds sitting on the same branch. One is jumping around eating the sweet and sour fruits of life. The other one is still simply absorbing. That's our life. When we identify with our body, our individual life, we're experiencing the bitter, bitter and sweet fruits of life. Good and bad, right and wrong. The awareness in us, the pure consciousness, is observing, observing ourselves, our ego self experiencing the sweet and bitter fruits of life. But it's still. It's at peace. It's always steady. That's the absolute reality.
- [39:53]
Deborah Maldonado
And that's really where lasting joy has always been. And we don't experience a lack of joy. We feel a suppression of it. That's really what our mind does. It suppresses joy. Something beautiful. And then the mind kind of disturbs us and says, but you know, you had that great award. But you know what? Your colleague got a bigger reward. Or you got this beautiful house. Well, guess what? Your neighbor has a new extension to their house or a bigger car. This person has a great relationship. Oh, but this per. I have a great relational. This person has even better relationship. And it's like the ego's always trying to disturb our peace. Not because it's mean, it's just because it's. It's in that state of constant craving and hunger. And that. That's not our true self. Our true self is complete, whole, at peace. And so be, Be. Be the witness to your life and see what happens. And we'll see you next week on Jung On Purpose. Take care.
- [40:50]
Dr. Rob Maldonado
See you soon.
- [40:51]
Deborah Maldonado
Thank you for joining us for Young On Purpose this week. Don't forget to subscribe. And if you want more information on our work, go to creativemindlife. Com. We'll see you next week. Take care.