So where does the flea come from?

I was really scared today. While taking my customary evening walk I got ambushed and attacked but all sorts of “what ifs” and “then whats”. My life was going to crumble and turn to dust, I was going to crumble and turn to dust with it and, as a result, die lonely and forgotten under some bridge or another. Now I would be able to explain and justify my fears perfectly, had there been anyone who would dare to question their validity. I have my own business, I generate the business myself, it is possible that the business will die out, it is possible that clients will go away and never come back, it is possible that I won’t be able to pay rent… I can feel my mind spin faster and faster even now, as I’m writing this. Today evening I decided not to listen to my mind however. I decided to come back to being the Goddess that I am, and THEN take a look at my fears. What I saw was the frantic little flea I described in my previous post. Running, jumping, moving, trying, doing… So where does the flea come from? It certainly causes a fair amount of problems, it moves too much for one thing, so why would I even have it? I believe that the flea (aka mind) is being created as a result of our responses to reality. In fact it IS our response to reality. I believe that we experience something – and make a decision. We decide that the experience was nice or bad, hurtful or pleasurable. Then we decide to either avoid or seek this experience in the future. This decision creates a little tear in the smooth, uniform fabric of reality (see my last post). It creates a division, separation. And what happens now? We have decided that this was something we didn’t like and don’t want to experience again. We decided that what we are is not that. We have separated ourselves from the experience, put it outside of who we are. But that didn’t make it disappear. It’s out there, always threatening to get us. We have to build defenses now to protect ourselves from it. Fear shows up, fear that our defenses won’t be strong enough. We start striving to escape the terrible experience more thoroughly – and that becomes the purpose of our life. To make enough money to escape the feeling of lack, to be in relationship to escape the loneliness, to always have lots of food to escape the emptiness… It works the same way the other way around, if we decide that we like something. Now we are in pursuit of it. With every decision, every definition, every distinction, every preference – we strengthen our mind by defining it, separating it from everything that we consider as being not ME. And so our mind moves more and more franticly to keep us safe, protected. And so the little black flea never stops jumping. It is all considered a “good thing”. Consider the expression: “learn from experience” – it is a right thing to do, isn’t it? But what is it exactly that we do when we learn from experience? We decide: “I liked it, I want to do this again” or “this hurt, I don’t want to do this anymore”. We create a separation, we create a mind, we give another reason for the flea to jump crazily around trying to keep safe. So what’s the alternative? As I was walking today looking at my fear without engaging in it, I felt my life becoming calmer, more spacious. There was a sense of peace and quiet, and spaciousness most of all. And a total lack of necessity of any kind. I realized that whatever I do is not for any reason, that my experiences are not in order to… anything. There is no “in order to…” at all. I do things. I experience things. That’s all. In many spiritual systems the way children experience reality is considered an example of the “enlightened way”. Their lack of attachment to an experience, the ease with which they let go. They experience the situation at hand very deeply and fully, and then they experience the next situation very deeply and fully, and then the next one and the next one… This is how it felt today when I thought about my life and what I do in it – I experience it. I experience it being alert and still.