The human being of the current moment, faces a complex external environment, where stimuli overcome it, generating imbalances of the cognitive-emotional order. This state of contradiction, meaninglessness and emptiness of self, is the form that suffering takes to express itself. From this situation, the need arises to carry out internal work as a personal development, to give new responses to a changing and unstable environment.
This proposal is an invitation to face suffering through inner exercise, in order to achieve personal development through contact with the original and authentic that we have as human beings, in an act of managing the meaning of life. What management and what sense?… The management of my own life and the meaning that I can give it. Take the case of a person who realizes that she is confused, lives in tension, suffers, feels bad, and for that reason is interested in her particular situation. Such a person observes and reflects on her condition because she wants to change.
As you reflect, you realize that you are dependent on the environment. She realizes that when she responds with violence, the violence turns against herself. It takes into account that whatever you do, it depends on the environment, therefore; She initially cares about her surroundings, not for others but for herself. Finally, she realizes that the act of transforming her situation implies transforming the environment that surrounds her, and to achieve this, she identifies the situation she suffers in others.
However, how can such a person transform the environment around him? In the first place, taking care of your own situation, looking for the root of your problems, understanding the climates, tensions and compulsions that overwhelm you to become a positive being.
It is about being attentive to your negative performance, because every situation, no matter how bad it may seem, has a positive side, and to the extent that the positive act is repeatedly called, the power of acting to do negative is transformed into positive.
Let's see what happens to the medium. If I look at the environment, I see people who complain. So, I apply the same principle of assuming the positive aspect. For example: If a person approaches me to confide in me their misfortunes, I seek to orient their situation towards the positive side. If she just wants to make me her accomplice, I'm not interested. In this way, I affirm a clear direction of being in the world, in this way, I move in the middle…, and that will be what the environment will give me back in one way or another.
"An obvious reason for the proliferation of pain and suffering is the social inclusion of competition between people". Why, if human beings are unique, do we incorporate the feeling of annihilating others, of defeating them, of feeling superior? We simply do it to create states of superiority and inferiority, which are the standards that indicate how successful or unsuccessful you are. And this notion, assumed as a vision of the future, has generated contradiction, incoherence and emptiness of being to do, because the source of success is not outside but inside each human being.
The management of suffering like all management, is something that is mastered, that is achieved, and in our case, that transforms. Internal work helps to free yourself, in a world where competition to be and do is stressful. Managing the tensions and stress that they produce becomes an experience of transformation, inherent in the transformation of the person. The person is not something static. The person is in continuous possibility of individual and social change.
When it comes to change, it is valid to assume that "old ideas are not a sufficient foundation to establish new ideas", because with the passage of time, the new will become a continuity of the old that you want to overcome. In the sense of true change, when we disconnect from ourselves to overcome the old, we are performing an act of rebellion, and it is only valid, that moment when we break with everything to start a new life, from a new starting point and new goals to build a new future. This is the case of the change of partner. If there are ashes left, it can hardly be done
In the same way, internal work not only has to do with the change in each of the people, it also has to do with the change in the groups in which the people operate. Groups are not something fixed, like things, and are in continuous transformation. The consequence of managing pain and suffering influences changes in people and groups, because human beings have individual memory and collective memory, carry out personal and group experiences, possess individual intelligence and social intelligence, and also coexist in society.
Performed permanently, internal work becomes a lifestyle, because it is a way of communicating people with themselves, without divisions between what they think, what they feel and what they do, because the person who handles his tensions, he achieves coherence, and by assuming this management as a life option, he only seeks to be a better person from the development of himself, which as a tool of inner peace and search for his own being-doing, performs an act of conciliation with himself herself. Hence, facing pain and suffering is condensed into a single concept: "Having freedom to be oneself, in order to affirm the ability to function in a stressful world".
The pedagogical value of this work constitutes a practical way of knowing who and what you are, learning to recognize yourself as what you truly are, in order to develop creativity for personal change, and thus enjoy the value of yourself, achieving inner peace, releasing tensions, overcoming negative states by reconciling with himself, because the best human being is one who enjoys his own life, and through his integrity, acquires the ability to take responsibility for the consequences of his personal performance.
Likewise, we do start from the concept that "life is the result of the tension between opposites"We will always be influenced by tension and the search for balance will be difficult, not only to achieve but to maintain, because the wrongly oriented balance will become a manifestation of neutrality, which is repeated over time; It will turn into indifference, and indifference is inactivity, by force of reason or of no reason that imposes it.
This is because indifference towards oneself or towards others, neutralizes the reason for being and existing as a potential for individual and / or collective fulfillment, which is the name taken by the act of thinking, feeling and acting to do, assumed as an inner power that is called integrity, or self-awareness…
From that condition, one will be in equilibrium not when negative actions are neutralized with positive ones, but when negative actions are understood in order to affirm in positive ones. This is because the negative and the positive in the human being exist as one… They are one at the same time, and are part of the way of thinking, of the way of feeling and of doing to act human. Being one, none predominates. Hence, the human being needs sadness as much as joy, requires doubt as much as certainty, because it is in doubt that certainty arises and it is in certainty that doubt reappears.
In this way, balance does not consist in avoiding extremes, but in not choosing any of them to stay, for that reason, the expression of balance is dynamic, it is configured in thought, it is consolidated in the ways of commitment to what it is desired to do, and it manifests itself during acting to do it.
For those who acquire that state of expression in the thought-intention-action balance, internal work forms a simple proposal to achieve their integrity, and it manifests as a step within themselves, which must be taken at some point in life., and that at the present time, more than an idea, it is the search for a new sensitivity in relation to a new feeling on the way of educating the act of acting to do.
In this way, if the person is going to change, it is because a human sensitivity (wanting to be) is also going to change, which has been consolidated in them. So it is useless to start new ideas because behind that people suspect that these new ideas have nothing to do with the daily dealings with them. This cry that is increasingly rooted in people, exists in a diffuse way and dominated by uncertainty, this cry needs to take direction, and the internal work can be one of many directions.
To clarify this concept, if we look at each person, we see that that person has a great void, that person has an internal division between their ideas and what they want to be. Those isolated and internally divided people have the same sensitivity that will surely gain space over time. This space cannot be considered in individual terms because it has a social scope, and internal work; it constitutes an intention of the educational process to penetrate and express oneself in that social space.
We speak of an inner search on the basis of not knowing themselves, because whoever knows himself does not need to search for himself, and therefore, neither to explore his inner world. In the same way, if we believe that we already know ourselves, we will never be able to re-know ourselves through the search within, because it is obvious that the reason and the motive for said search cease to exist.
In the same way, if the knowledge of the external world predominates over that of the internal world, we will never know each other and furthermore, we will understand very little what happens to us. We will live with a shell that will prevent us from searching for ourselves, starting with ourselves. If we think that we already know ourselves, this "knowledge" will not allow us to truly know ourselves, and if this prevails in our daily being-doing, it will be difficult to acquire self-awareness.
This fact, which seems trivial in the eyes of those who have started the path of inner exploration, is incomprehensible to those who, from logic and reason, worry about "knowing" the reality of themselves, because from cognitive action it is not easy to understand the inner-outer relationship as a whole.
When the internal world and the external world make up an intimate and coherent relationship, we enjoy living, because this relationship of coherence shapes personal psychology, from which it implies ways of changing to understand what happens to us and why it happens to us. In turn, when the worlds are divided, one suffers from anxiety, fear and fear, even inaction. It is worth noting that the act of living is often an action of extremes. Hence, it is difficult to preserve for a long time, the harmony and coherence of the acts.
From this cognitive-emotional state, disproportions arise, such as the contradiction between what is thought, felt and then done. For example: While looking for material value, spiritual value is generally forgotten, ignoring that: “everything must work together and not in isolation”. In this case, you are successful but you are not happy.
In this way, we become so full of knowledge, to the point of not knowing who we are, sometimes we believe we are superior and other times inferior, while we move away from being ourselves, ignoring that there is no superior as well as no inferior, because each one is for himself. His being is unique and his talent is unique. From this recognition comes the valuation of respect, which leads to participation, and conciliation for coexistence.
Considering the internal work as the possibility of exploring both the outer world and the inner world of the human being, implies assuming that if the human being responds in an integral way for being a whole mind-body, pain and / or suffering will attack everything its being-doing, or if it is the consequence of many separate parts, then strength and dignity will be nullified, because tensions produce a feeling of frustration, contradiction and emptiness of oneself. A condition that will lead to stressed states, where positive energy is transformed into negative energy to give way to the conflict between your being and your environment, between your being and others, and between your being and your self, a state in which to free yourself, each one must necessarily explore within himself.
"By fulfilling a meaning, the human being realizes himself"
Víctor E. Frankl.
OSHO. The Great Book of Revelations. ALAMAH. Spirituality Collection. Bogota 2006.
OSHO. The Great Book of Revelations. ALAMAH. Spirituality Collection. Bogota 2006.
Rodríguez, Luís Gerardo. For An Education With A Human Sense. Installation Words of the I District Congress on Humanist Pedagogy. Bogota 2001.
OSHO. The Great Book of Revelations. ALAMAH. Spirituality Collection. Bogota 2006.
Works consulted
- OSHO. The Great Book of Revelations. ALAMAH. Spirituality Collection. Bogota 2006.
Rodriguez, Luís Gerardo. For an Education with a Human Meaning. Installation Words of the I District Congress on Humanist Pedagogy. Bogota 2001.
