Getting Unstuck: Drowning in Familiarity

Let’s talk about this tendency we have to feel stuck, and examine what causes and conditions give rise to that feeling in the mind.

We don’t get stuck anywhere except in our mind. I think it’s very important to know that. So the first and most important thing to understand is that we are trapped only in our mind.

It often seems like we’re stuck in our life, stuck with our circumstances or with certain causes and conditions. And unless those external circumstances change, we feel we won’t be able to free ourselves from feeling trapped. But that’s a very old story, the same old excuses we’ve used for much of our lives. We just keep saying, “I only need this one thing to be resolved, or that thing to be put in place, and then I can move forward.”

I’m not saying these aren’t real feelings, but it’s all subjective. Interestingly, when we’re in this mental state, perhaps we’re not yet ready to move ahead. Somehow, in our subconscious mind, we want to hold onto our old attachments. And what are we attached to?

Often we’re attached to familiar situations, a familiar sense of feelings, a familiar sense of environment. Even if our environment or feelings or situation isn’t necessarily so wonderful, it’s familiar. Simply because we’ve adapted to the situation, the feelings, the environment, we feel attached to it. At least it’s familiar.

We cling to it because we don’t have to work with our mind. There’s already a mechanism in place in the mind for us. We automatically know how to react to a familiar environment, to familiar feelings, to the situation we’re in.

Now, when we look closely, we see clearly how much we rely on the automatic functions of our mind to actually take care of our lives. Instead of being determined to work with the mind, to bring a strong will to engage with life and its situations and the different feelings and emotions that arise.

When we look at this very closely again, we realize how much we would prefer to be more like a computer than a human being. How much we would rather be like an animal or a robot instead of a human. In the case of a robot, it simply functions automatically as it’s programmed to do. Similarly with animals, guided by their natural instinct, an animal will naturally move in that direction without any other discernment.

But as human beings endowed with intelligence, we should definitely shape our destiny more in accordance with that intelligence and the inherent wisdom that comes with our human mental faculty, rather than relying on our automatic programming or animal instincts.

Because of previous karmic seeds from the animal realm, or from having been born earlier in animal realms, the karmic seeds that are in alaya (base consciousness) to be born again in the animal realm, we often seem not to use our brain or exercise our mental faculty to really reflect clearly on what our potential is. And if we don’t reflect on what our potential is, we will never become clear about it. As a result, we simply remain stuck in our karmic situations. Whatever karma unfolds for us, we stay trapped in it, and there’s no sense of movement or of advancing in life with a sense of will or sense of determination that comes from using our mental faculties. There’s no sense of cultivating the intelligence or wisdom that is always available to be cultivated.

So this sense of being stuck is actually caused by nothing more than simply not wanting to let go of our attachment to what is familiar. This is the greatest obstacle of all, so we really need to look at our attachments and examine how we’ve created a cocoon for ourselves in various ways.

Originally published at Mangala Shri Bhuti