Building Fences!

I have been investigating the reasons why is it that we feel hurt, dissapointment, sadness, misery, anger and all other negative emotions. I particularly focus on the negative emotions because they are the most disturbing and disruptive to my living as I am sure it is to most of other people. Happiness and joy will never bother us and keep us up through sleepless nights of despair but anger, hurt or misery do. So, I have tried to look at why these emotions arise in the mind over and over again. How do we begin to understand them and then find a way to rise above them.

I realised that these negative emotions arise because we engage in an activity which I termed 'Building Fences". This is not something that I only do myself but something that we all do with zest and we all have very valid reasons and justifications to do them. So, in that we lose any sense of higher functioning thinking! Now how can this possibly happen?

Well, when we get angry or miserable the object of our anger is NOT our anger. It is the person who is responsible for our anger. It's always out there, in the other person. So, what we try to do in this instance is to get rid of the object of our anger in order to protect ourselves. I need to create a boundary in order so that the other person can no longer make me angry or hurt me now or in the future. So, we define a boundary, which I call a fence. So, we build a fence. This is for our security. These are not physical fences that any of us can see or touch. They are all mind made and invisible. But there is a fence, a boundary that the other person cannot penetrate. This boundary is not in the other person. It is in us. The boundary is called "hate", 'resetment' or all the words that we are so familiar with.

But the critical part is that the fence is around us. While it prevents the other person from entering our surrounding area, we are restricted by the fence that we have built around us. This is the foolishness that we never see. We never see the harm we do to our ownselves in building fences because the only thing we can see is keeping the other person out. But in doing so what we fail to see, to our own detriment, is that we have boxed ourselves up in our little allotement because of someone else who has complete freedom whereas we don't. Isn't that a shame!

I realised and was so bewildered as to why I have done this to myself for years and continue to do this to myself again and again even now. It doesn't make sense. We love ourselves above all and yet here we are in the name of protecting ourselves, we limit our own freedom in life. Basically we lock ourselve in a prison. We give ourselves a sentence. What a shock!

Why do we do this? Well, we get to this point because we think we are protecting ourselves. The greatest mistake of all. The only way we can protect ourselves is not to build a fence but NOT to build fences. Also to find fences that we have already built and break them down. But I will tell you that this is a very difficult task.

Why? Because, somewhere deep down there is a belief that freedom can be found in the restrictions that we surround ourselves in. Isn't that incredible?! I am baffled. Is the ego this non-sensical? We are scared of freedom that we want to stay within self-imposed shackles. Cannot fathom what rationality lies within this thinking but it happens in all of us. See for yourself.

The only way to take the fences down is to see and feel the tightening of the breathing space and the closing in of our own freedom which would make any living creature want to break out of it in a mad dash. But we have to feel the pain of the limited space that fence builiding creates. Without that we will never strive to take any fences down. Instead we will live in the false security it brings while it will keep eating away our freedom until escape becomes too late for us.