The ultimate truths are simplest. To realize them we need not trek to mountain tops or travel caves, but just open our behaviors of seeing by being aware that in the ordinary lies the extraordinary.
Ironically, as we move into a state of alertness and initiate to peel away our lifetimes of masking, life become simpler and glad.
Most of us pursue the extraordinary – in either or both the material and spiritual paths. Certainly the mantra of modern living is to seek the extraordinary. As seekers on the spiritual paths, a spiritual setup that we want to be mindful of this mysterious yearning for that magical moment of perfection.
In other ways, our ordinariness is the core that holds the promise of fulfillment and contentment.
Throughout life we fear of being ordinary. As the ordinary upsets us. Trusting as we do on identify based on outside labels and accomplishments, we try to stand out from others. Unluckily, trying to accomplish our need for being special through external means is like filling a bottomless pit. No matter how successful we may be in our livings or how much fame and glory we may attain, our sense of self will be unsteady. After all, there is always somebody who has accomplished more than we have. In the meantime in our fight to be better than the other we distance them, for there is nothing that substitutes the stuff of our interconnectedness and interdependence as sensation of superior to others.
Self-assured as we are on the edge of new drawn of mindfulness, it’s time to reinvented ordinariness and opened ourselves to the experience of being ordinary – means to reclaim and reconnect with our original nature.
Not surprisingly the spiritual journey is all about being comfortable with our ordinariness. On the aspect of it, it looks illusorily simple and feasibly even simplistic.
What exactly means being ordinary??
To begin with, ordinary is not to be likened with being average. To do so would mean to fall into the trap of splits, mutually special opposites that only divide and fragment. This is the unseen trap of evaluating, judging and tagging both ourselves and others, “me v/s them” intellectually. The journey of course becomes one of the self v/s the others. The quest towards being ordinary is all about discovering the joy of being oneself.
People who have involved their ordinariness are loved for their naturalness, sincerity and simplicity.
A Question of Identity:
The reinforcement of the fear of ordinariness is the issue of personal identity: who am i? What I am? We attain our personality through the essential others in our lives. We never told who we are but we always told what we have to become. As our social pressure, we have to build our own identity – our own self – on the base of becoming somebody, when we fail to accomplish our extraordinary goals; we familiar to a fear that similar to the fear of death. Many of us develop an untrue sense of individuality through over identification with the egoist self.
We need to understand that we are not just a physical body or our thoughts, emotions or the mind but a spiritual self then the awareness motivates us out of our inactivity. Actually the fictional identification with the physical body, the emotional or intellectual self leads to fear and struggle culminating in competition.
Surrender
We don’t need to carry burdens. We need to be our own self. We carry work for us; we only carry which works for us. If we wish to obtain ordinary path to live, we need to elude this excess baggage and travel light. This is the surrender of our disempowering beliefs which weight us down and no longer serves us.
In terms of spirituality “Surrender” is used, for to elude which is false. The actual ourselves is that which has always been and that which will always be.
When we are truly ordinary, we are broad in our approach to life and people. To become ordinary we need to go beyond the human trend to brand and label people and events as “Ordinary” to “Extraordinary.” We need to accept people as they are not with their influence, recognition or success. The mission we assume as ordinary could also be done in an extraordinary way. We often meet such simple people but we fail to recognize the extraordinariness in them or the work they do.
The writer is an alternative medicine practitioner
