What is in the Way of Being Simple?
Picking up from the last post, how do the qualities of simplicity, nakedness and straightforwardness - all qualities of true nature - influence how we move through life?
How is it to be uncontrived? How is it to not fabricate your experience? How does it feel to put down the burden of "having to be someone"? How does it feel when your experience-as-it-is is enough? What happens when you drop the need to embellish any aspect of yourself? What does it feel like not to have to prove yourself, or to seek any kind of external validation for the experience you are having? What is it like to embrace the radical simplicity that true nature invites?
In working these inquiries, you might encounter several forms of conditioning…
A sense (usually unconscious) that who you are (and by extension your basic experience of life) isn't enough. That something else "needs to happen" so that you can [fill in the blank]. This belief is a major contributor to the low-grade undercurrent of unease that marks the egoic state.
A sense of shame about the person you are, or at the least, about the existence of certain habits or parts of you. The shame is the "gasoline" for fabricating your personality structure so that others won't see how weird and awful you are.
A sense of being tired with the whole thing while simultaneously feeling unwilling to really let go of it. "I'm sick of this career and I have no energy for it, but I've worked so hard, and I'm not yet willing to give up the money and the acknowledgement. I worked too hard to do that."
We're just looking. Note it! Become conscious of the voices (selves) in you that say things can't be simple. That we can't live an undefended life.
If we don't make contact with those voices, hear them out, and submit them to inquiry, they just keep running the show in the background. That is samsara.