What are we chasing? by Marcus Antebi
What are we chasing?
Are we chasing material possessions because we really think that we need them? Probably yes, at least in the moment. Are we chasing bad chemistry in our bodies and trying to make it feel better? Sometimes. Are we chasing cravings that need to be answered? Oftentimes.
Deep deep inside, aren’t we all just chasing the connection to a feeling of wholeness? That feeling was lost when the umbilical cord was cut. And the memory is there. Each and every day that followed, we either kept the connection going or we looked for a distraction.
And the world is an incredibly exciting and distracting place for a child. Some of the distractions are painful, such as when you pee in your pants and it starts to hurt because it is itchy. Or when you’re feeling hungry and you just start crying. Those are enormous distractions for children, because the pain of the body overwhelms them and they can’t see anything else.
That’s normal for children. But as we grow up our consciousness should be expanding. We learn how to self-soothe. If we learned properly, we can soothe our cravings without having to chase after them at all costs. When we’re older we can make choices; we can choose what to connect to. We can choose to connect to something constructive or to something destructive.
Our choices are limited if we haven’t done much work on ourselves. Some who influenced our lives had negative behaviors that they passed on to us. Before we can get on to positive work, we have to unload a lot of negative things that have been installed in our brains. The more you read material such as this, the more you are unraveling the negative things, and the more you’re putting words of truth back into your head. And there’s so much truth out there. There is so much knowledge to be acquired on these subjects: Please develop a passion for that knowledge and never give up seeking after it.
One of the things that we are chasing throughout our lives is the need to fill what feels like a chasm in the torso of our body. If you were to lay back and relax and really try to feel where that emptiness is coming from, you’d find it coming from right behind the chest cavity from the solar plexus to about 2 inches below the nape of the neck. You’d feel a tingling sensation. If you try to trace it, you’ve got to make yourself very sensitive to the tingling sensation, which is actually physical.
Your body is producing hormones such as adrenaline when we are feeling low, and serotonin when we are feeling too up or too excited. The body as a whole knows when to release hormones to create balance. The body is trying to conserve energy, even if the mind is careless. A chain reaction happens when we are feeling emotionally charged either up or down, followed by eating the wrong kinds of food or ingesting too much coffee or another substance like that.
When you combine that state of being with how our emotions might be on any given day or at any given time with the consumption of the incorrect substances, we just set ourselves up for a total tailspin, and it’s hard to recover from it without sleep. The following day, even if we’re feeling better, we are still longing for the repetition and the pattern. If we train ourselves to go get a cup of coffee every day in the morning, even if we don’t want one, we still have to go do it because it’s part of the pattern. The pattern in itself brings us comfort.
So, several things have to happen. The first thing is that we have to really take interest in, and stay interested in, what we put in our bodies. You’re not reading this just to pass the time; you really want to achieve this, and you will. It’s important, not just for your six pack abs but for all of your consciousness.
By cleaning up your chemistry and dealing with emotional problems you will reach your potential; you will create and fulfill a purpose. Your life will have greater meaning. You can’t control the weather or natural catastrophes. Those things happen. But you can control what you put in your body. You can control the choices that you make. You can control the things that you do each day to keep you close to your practice. In this program, all the things that have to be practiced are detailed.
There are some things that one could say I left out, such as making connections with friends and family. I left that out because it delves into an area that might actually be a trigger point for some people. Friends and family are things that are outside of yourself that are beyond your control. Your diet and your lifestyle patterns are within your control.
I also did not go in depth regarding building a relationship with God. I work to avoid using that word because it has too many limitations for me, and I don’t want to exclude anyone who might have a problem with the God word from the information that I have to offer. I have a relationship with God. I also call God my higher power, but both of those terms seem a little hackneyed to me. So I just refer to what other people would call God or their higher power as the creator. From what I understand at this point in time about physics, something bigger than what we can imagine is going on here. I believe that somewhere behind all of creation is a conscious being of some kind that my mind cannot explain. The purpose for me in life is to try to understand more. I want to learn more about this creator being without using my mind. I want to feel it.
So, that’s my own personal work and I don’t know that it’s for everyone. I do know that it’s rather simple if you just have a religion that you were born into and that you follow. Believing in something is beneficial for your chemistry, provided that the belief is compassionate and a positive force.
I am writing a book on God, but it’s really all just humor. I don’t believe I have enough digits in my IQ to write something really sensible and intelligent about that topic. But I would like to write about things that I’ve experienced regarding the subject, and most of those things I find to be funny.