Why It’s So Hard to Let Go

In previous posts, I explored in some detail where the source of all problems in a person’s life arise from.

They arise from the thing you call your Self. Your manufactured identity. All your dreams, hopes, and expectations.

It is the existence of this entity that engenders all the issues you face. It is the existence of this Self that prevents you from living life as it is—and not how you wish for it to be.

Think about it: The only time you feel any ‘negative feelings’ is when there is incongruency with how your life is, and you wish for it to be.

What I’m saying may sound simple. However, this is deeply troubling stuff. If you are not unsettled, you have not understood what I am saying.

When I first encountered these ideas myself, I felt like spitting at them. My dreams, desires, hopes, and personality: Collectively, these things made me, me. (Or so I thought.) Abandoning the idea of my Self did not only seem impossible, it seemed wrong.

Our whole lives, we are told and taught to strive. To achieve. To dream. To be ambitious. To view life as one big opportunity to acquire, experience, and succeed. To strive is to ‘make the most of your life.’ To spend your life not doing much is, therefore, to waste it.

I don’t like ‘theories.’ I don’t like spitballing. These things require belief and faith. Far more powerful, I think, is to observe and understand. Because when the truth is observed and understood, it grips your neck with both hands and says: “Look at me! This is the truth! This is the answer!”

Man spends his life fleeing from the truth, and this is why he has problems in his life. This is why a settled mind and peaceful existence allude him. The requisite conditions for truth to arrive in a man’s life are rare enough; rarer still is the man who has the resolve to look at the truth in the eye when it grips his neck. To accept the truth, and the way things undeniably are.

Striving, changing, progressing, getting somewhere in life: These notions are drilled into every person from infancy. To dream, hope, and desire is to be human; in fact, we are told to celebrate and cultivate such qualities.

If one sees things for the way they are, they will see this dogma as the architect of all the misery in their life. Of course, man doesn’t tend to see things for the way they are. Man creates abstractions and models to follow.

And his most sophisticated creation is that of his Self.

It is so hard to let go of this Self not only because it is all you have known and been told to celebrate, but also because you’ll be reminded of the so-called good times. As you attempt to extinguish this Self, your mind brandishes a trump card at the eleventh hour.

All the times your plans worked out. All the good memories. All the accolades you’ve amassed. All the people you’ve impressed.

Is your life really so terrible? Don’t things often work out? Have you not made it this far?

Moreover, why not look at the horizon? All the people you are yet to meet. All the places you are yet to go. All the things you are yet to achieve. All the experience you are yet to have.

Are they not worthwhile? Will they not change your life? Won’t things improve?

The one who answers “no” to this is a rare individual. They have seen through the game; they have seen through the charade. They have understood, in the purest sense, that nothing has — or ever will — do anything for them.

To many, such a realisation is a harrowing one; indeed, the masses will gasp in horror.

It is so difficult to let go of your Self, because hope still emanates within you. Hope for a better tomorrow. Hope that things will improve. Hope that things will change. Hope that life will bend to your will and desires.

But life hasn’t done this for any human that has ever existed. It won’t do it for you either. Life just is. But you just hope.

The equation will never balance. One will never equal two. But fragments of hope remain within you that, by some magic, it one day will. This hope resides within you because you haven’t seen things for the way they are. Your life is messy and abstract; it is difficult to unravel.

If you walked into a classroom and saw “1=2” written on the whiteboard, you could immediately identify this as wrong. You would immediately know that, if this is the starting assumption of whoever wrote this, the mathematics that will follow from this person will be wrong.

The trouble is, you do not see the starting point of “1=2” in your own life. You do not see how your Self and your desires are the erroneous spring from which the entirety of your life flows.

When you start to see things for how they are, hope remains as your final enemy. Hope that what you see on the whiteboard is not “1=2.”

Hope is why it is so hard to let go. Hope stands as the final hurdle between you and freedom.