The great philosopher Confucius from ancient times explained that being "dazed and confused" or “stupefied” is how most people experience life. He was simply making a keen observation of the society in his time. He integrated other philosophies passed down to him from even older generations of enlightened hunter-gatherer tribes. It is said that the most important work of our elders is to master themselves and pass on good information to young people. When our minds are malleable is when we need the most direction and wisdom. Asking the question, “Who am I?” and working to "Know thyself" are the great endeavors in life. What do these questions mean? We must meditate on this for at least a decade to reveal that these are self-help inquiries that lead to self-mastery. To know thyself is to understand our character, including our deepest flaws and our most critical positives. To know what triggers our anxieties is deep self-knowledge. How can we know ourselves without devotion to daily writing? How can we understand ourselves without diving into our cloudy and stormy past? We must gain access to our deepest hurts and learn to truly release them, not gloss over them with phony spirituality. The great sages taught that knowing thyself is knowing feeling right now. But this alone is not enough to relax us from our day-to-day anxieties and the past traumas and pains that build up to more and more stress and discomfort. This is the nature or origin of our mental suffering.
This suffering is habitual for modern humans. It leaves us on the edge of our coping mechanisms indefinitely throughout our lives unless we become aware of it. Usually, we break through with the help of others, the great sages said. However, meditation that includes focus on the breath is the true way to liberate ourselves in these busy, busy times. How do we control our anxieties and subsequent reactions when they are triggered? How do we deal with reactions when we feel humiliated? How do we control our reactions when something makes us angry or afraid? The fear of financial instability feels like brain damage—uncomfortable feelings from our gut to the top of our chest. How do we control these exact reactions? How does one control their reactions when someone they love leaves the picture? With practice and with the practice of meditation.
If you understand this and deepen your level of consciousness, the deeper into consciousness you must go. The more we start to understand the meaning of the word ‘passion.’ The more we are capable of experiencing and giving love.
As we expand our consciousness, we feel relaxed. We don’t feel smeared by sensations of anxiety. Consider your personal history, starting from your great-grandparents at least. What was the relationship between your parents like? How did your mother feel during her pregnancy? What was your birth like? A critical tool is to write out your history in a journal and not miss any details. What were the major sources of trauma? What were the major sources of discomfort? What negative things were you exposed to that adversely affected your emotional world? Many human beings that have come before you did not have the good fortune to discover this type of work. Some people had to wait their entire lives to resolve all the conflicts, while others got right to the point and lived their maximum potential for their entire lives. That is you, at this juncture because you have read this now and you understand the ancient secret, which is to know thyself and to use the breath to relax the mind from our anxieties moment by moment. Keep practicing, then take the next right action. Make sure this action is born from compassion and does no harm to anything in this world.
Start your journal today—don’t delay. There’s nothing more important. Breathe your anxieties away. Make sure you return to nature often and breathe surrounded by plants so that you can absorb pure oxygen with less contamination from the pollutants of man.
In terms of learning, there is archery, calligraphy, poetry, math, martial arts, carpentry, computer sciences, dance, and musical instruments. There’s also physical fitness to learn, diet and nutrition, how to rest, how to breathe, how to be of service, and then of course there’s E=mc², and then there’s the physics of the universe, which is a long-term study. The trivialities of our ego structures and our emotional damages must be out of the way first. Then we can expand with relaxation as the force multiplier that makes our lives greater than they already are. Find your talent. Get into the present moment, get into the sensations of the body, look closer and closer at the world you’re in, merge the external world with the internal world through the practice of deep breathing and meditation, and the external world emerges as one. They are not separate—what you see affects your mind absolutely. What your mind thinks affects the external world absolutely. But that doesn’t mean you can define physics with your mind.
There are rules by which this philosophy must live. Remember the lesson of breathing and start writing, if you choose.
Also, we must strive to lead highly virtuous lives.
There are no masters, there are only flawed teachers. There are no more divine humans, one from the other, and humans are no more valuable than any other creatures.
Boredom, low self-worth, distraction, hunger, exhaustion, etc., are all drivers of the anxious reaction. The anxious reaction becomes a lifelong habit that many of us do not know how to end. It starts with mastering the breath. Master the breath early in life, and the mind becomes easier to control. We are jumping around on the subject matters here because we don’t have much space. The idea behind this writing was to give the next generation a sense of hope, the feeling that you are on the right path, and perhaps a quick trick to accelerate positive feelings.
So, in this next part, we’re going to quickly touch on the idea of anxiety and how to relieve it. Anxiety is a natural state for humans, serving as a survival mechanism to assess and remove ourselves from danger. The problem with anxiety is that it requires us to find the relaxation state again. For many of us, given our life circumstances, the anxiety state remains a habit and a pattern. It’s so familiar to us and to others that it has become normalized. It’s going to take a lot of psychological work to unravel, but in the meantime, on a physiological level, one could say that to help facilitate a state of relaxation, one has to learn how to breathe properly.
Now, you're breathing somewhat properly because you’ve been alive your entire life and you’re reading this, but that doesn’t mean your breathing pattern is enough to facilitate a relaxed central nervous system. When we breathe shallowly, we get less oxygen. When triggered by something, the heart rate increases to prepare us to deal with danger, whether emotional or physical. In this physical state, the heart signals the brain that there’s danger, and the brain's response is to shift into a different modality—from a relaxed state of mind to fight-or-flight.
We do this in our relationships, at our job, when we feel bored, crowded, hungry, or lonely; we do it every day, throughout the day. When we feel a tinge of anxiety, the way to alleviate it is to give ourselves more oxygen, which signals the brain that we are out of danger. This can bring us into a relaxed state, or the best version of relaxation that we’re able to achieve at any given moment. A long, slow, deep breath through the nose with an equal amount of exhalation is the simplest way to describe a good breathing exercise. When you become aware of the sensation of anxiety, take that deep breath, release it, and keep doing that. Don’t be upset if you don’t experience a radical shift in your mindset the first few tries. It does take time for most people, depending on many different factors. Learning to breathe properly is the doorway that leads us into meditation, which we will discuss another time.