One thought that has been a piece of furniture in my mind all my life is that “I am not doing enough” or “What I am doing is not measuring up.”
It doesn’t matter where this thought came from, but it makes it so that many of my days, many of the moments I’m awake, are haunted by a sense that I’m too lazy and I’m not being a productive member of society—not contributing enough. Not fulfilling my purpose. “Do something,” plays in my head all the time.
At the very same time here’s what also plays, in response, in my head: “I don’t feel like doing anything. There’s nothing that really interests me to do.”
Back and forth, like a tiresome tennis match that nobody wins, playing on a perpetual TV in some distant room of my mind.
Thanks to recent circumstances, however, I have realized that, hey, wait a minute, both of these voices are coming from the same source, and neither one is real. They’re both just conditioned thought—detritus of the personality, the human vehicle. They don’t belong to me. Their purpose has NOTHING to do with accomplishing anything or creating anything or not creating anything.
The purpose of those voices is simply to keep me identifying with them in order to tie up my energy so I don’t remember that I am not the vehicle, I am not the conditioning, I am not the memories, the personality, the body.
During the pandemic—when the things I usually do to still those voices, or which I feel like doing, are not necessarily available to me, and the things I don’t feel like doing, or perhaps think I shouldn’t be wasting my time on, are quite available—the voices revealed their true nature and became visible as the same old biting dog they’ve always been.
The personality, the ego, bites. You are not it. You are not any thought that bites.