What Is
“Letting Go”?
“Letting go” literally means releasing your close or
tight fist in order to abandon or give up something that you are holding in
your hand. If you are close- or tight- fisted, you also cannot receive anything.
“Letting go” is detachment.
The opposite of “letting go” is “attaching to” something
that you are stubbornly holding on to.
The
Wisdom in Asking Questions
There is an old proverb that says: “He who cannot
ask cannot live.” Life is all about asking questions, and seeking answers from
all the questions asked, including questions about “letting go.”
To live well, you need to ask yourself many
self-probing questions as you continue on your life journey in order to find
out: who you really are, and not who you think or wish you were; what
you really need, and not what you want from life; why certain
undesirable things happened while certain desirable things did not
happen to you. Without knowing the answers to those questions asked, you can
never be genuinely happy because you will always be looking for the unreal and
the unattainable, just like the carrot-and-stick mule forever reaching out for
the unreachable carrot in front.
In many ways, the human brain is like a computer
program. Your whole being is like the computer hardware with the apparatus of a
mind, a body, and its five senses. The lens through which you see yourself, as
well as others and the world around you, are the software that has been
programmed by your thoughts, your past and present experiences, as well as your
own desires and expectations. In other words, it is you—and nobody else—who have programmed your own mindset. All these
years, you may have been trapped in a constricted sense of the self that has
prevented you from knowing and being who you really are. That is to say, your
“conditioned” thinking mind may have erroneously made you "think" and
even "believe" that you are who and what you are right now; but
nothing could be further from the truth.
By asking relevant questions, you may have the human wisdom
to "change" that pre-conditioned mindset, and thus enabling you to
separate the truths from the half-truths or even the myths that you may have
created for yourself voluntarily or involuntarily all these years.
The important thing in questioning is
to experience everything related to all the questions you ask concerning
yourself, others, and the world around you. Live every question in its full
presence.
Always ask yourself many “how” and “why”
questions regarding whatever you may do,
say, and want in your everyday life and living. Ask questions not just about
yourself, but also about all those around you, whether they are connected to
your or not.
Be patient toward all those questions that you cannot
find the answers right away. Enlightenment may dawn on you one day when you ask
fewer or even no more questions, because by then you may already have got all
the answers; that is your
ultimate self-awakening to the
truths.
Empower your thinking mind to increase its wisdom by
asking questions to initiate its intent to learn, to discover, and then to
change yourself for the better.
Asking self-intuitive questions may help
you find out who you really are, and not who you wish you were. More
importantly, you may discover how and
why you have become attached to so
many things in your life that define who you think you are.
What Are Attachments?
An
attachment is basically your own emotional dependence on things and people that
define your identity, around which you wrap your so-called “happiness”, and
even your survival. Attachment is holding on to anything that you are unwilling
to let go of, whether it is something positive or negative.
An
attachment is no more than a safety blanket to overcome your fear—fear of
change and of the unknown from that change. To cope with that fear, all your
attachments become your distractions.
We are
living in a world with many problems that confront us in our everyday life, and
many of them are not only unavoidable but also insoluble. To overcome these daily
challenges, many of us just turn to attachments as a means of distracting
ourselves from facing our problems head on, or adapting and changing ourselves
in an ever-changing environment.
But human
attachments are the sources of human miseries. Worse, human attachments may
come in many different forms that we are unaware of, such as careers,
relationships, adversity and prosperity, success and failure, and among others.
The Wisdom of Letting Go
The
human flaws of attachments can be discerned and even overcome with human
wisdom, which is no more than knowing and understanding the ultimate truth of
human existence.
In the
Christian tradition, truth begins with God, and not with the self, just as Jesus said: “I am the Way, the Truth,
and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
However,
in Eastern cultures, the understanding of the self is the first step in
the pursuit of the ultimate truth, which is human wisdom.
Simply
put, no matter what, humans are given a physical body, a mind, and a soul or
spirit. The body lives in the material world, and is equipped with the five
senses to live and survive in the physical environment. The mind, as the
mediator between the body and the soul, is given the gift of free will, which
is the freedom to process any input in the form of thoughts and sensations from
both the body and the soul.
The
ultimate truth: whenever we wish to do something, the soul intuitively provides
the instinctive judgment, the mind then gives the analysis and the interpretation,
and the body eventually executes the appropriate action or decision of the
mind. In other words, what we want to do and how we are going to
do it are all in the mind. Therefore, the human mind plays a pivotal role in
understanding the ultimate truth about the origin of human attachments, and how
they may create the false ego-self that often leads to human flaws as a result
of an identity crisis.
The TAO
wisdom, which is the ancient wisdom of Lao
Tzu, the ancient sage from China
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
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