Keeping Your Word

What we say and do is a reflection of what we believe. All beliefs fall into two categories, that which is practical and useful and that which is not. ‘All’ beliefs is another way of referring to the ego. Like all other aspects of reality belief has no true existence. All that we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, feel and think about is nothing but belief and belief has no true existence. What we see and hear etc is not a problem as it falls into the realm of practical and useful. What we think about is a different order of belief, but still falls into one of these two categories, practical and useful or not. When belief is practical and useful it is fairly straightforward. Communication is useful but can also be non useful. To find what is practical and useful it is important to know that all beliefs have no true existence. Once this part is clear it becomes easy to see what is practical and useful and what is not. It is because this part is usually not clear that all the negative aspects of belief arise. For most people what is practical and useful can be anything they prefer, this can be useful but can also be extremely un-useful. We can prefer to harm ourselves or others, we can lie, cheat, steal, or kill. None of these could occur without resorting to an untrue belief. Once all untrue beliefs are seen for what they are, harming ourselves or others becomes impossible. Because we are born into a world that uses untrue beliefs on such a large scale it is no wonder that we also will learn to use untrue beliefs. All false beliefs must sooner or later result in suffering. How do we begin to reverse this process? Most spiritual traditions attempt to answer this question but not always in a way that we can easily assimilate. The ten commandments for instance tells us not to do certain things and refers to these things as sins. This is not useful, if we tell our children that if they do certain things like lying then they are sinners, this contributes to them thinking and feeling bad about themselves. Once we feel bad about ourselves we begin to do harmful things to ourselves and others to confirm this belief. The part of us that is not real believes many things that are not true. The part of us that is real is pure intelligence and is unconcerned with that which is unreal. The more truthful we are the more we are aligned with our true nature. If we say we will do something and then do not do what we say we are not keeping our word. The more we do this the more we move away from our true nature. Not keeping our word means that we cannot trust ourselves or others and also that others cannot trust us. Inevitably if we do not keep our word we begin to suffer. There is virtually no limit to this suffering. The increase in suffering is only there to guide us back to truthfulness and pure intelligence.