The first cause within my bubble of limited awareness is my intention to be whole. This intention presupposes that I’m not whole – lacking. Lack dictates that my thoughts and actions have a debt to pay to achieve wholeness.
I must defend lack to support my intention to be whole. Defense of lack limits my awareness to something short of whole. Therefore, I can never achieve wholeness. Instead, I’m forever in pursuit of it.
ANY intention is an acknowledgement and so defense of lack. Perhaps I might investigate lack for the purpose of celebrating it. After all, my defense of lack supports my cause to experience limitation. Because lack supports my intention, exploring it may help me appreciate it.
Fighting against lack is a fool’s errand. Embracing and investigating my lack helps me understand the intention that drives it. This empowers me to better apply compassion, where the Aha Zone expands awareness to possibilities that promote adaptation and evolution.
Exploring Lack
What is the purpose for perception of lack? In a world of limited awareness, everything would appear limited – lacking. This would create motivation in the form of pursuit of fulfillment. For example: Thirst must be quenched, hunger must be satisfied, death must be followed by life, and etc. Psychologically, thoughts and emotions seek resolution.
I live by reactive programs based in lack that I obey without question. There is no allowance for questioning. no need for understanding, only following the program. I obey my intention to create wholeness in a world of lack.
I use these programmed defenses of lack to perceive myself whole:
- What form I take validates lack. I perceive my form validates the limits I place on what I can be.
- How I think, feel, and act to validate lack. How my form functions validates the limits I place on what I do.
- Why I must validate lack. Why I perceive my form and function validates my need to defend lack.
- Who I am in terms of lack. Who I believe I am as a limited being validates my lack of wholeness.
In the bubble, my existence depends on the attention I pay to my program.
Questioning Lack
The old belief was that one must overcome lack through the use of force and defense. This required a sufficient sense of need to generate sufficient effort to achieve a worthy goal. One must earn their way through life. This makes life a reactive experience based on values I assign.
To change, I might seek to understand the process I used to acquire the old belief. Maybe a start might include appreciation of lack as it has served me. This change may take some redirection of my natural persistence and focus. Sweet – an evolutionary rather than revolutionary change.
Questions might help me break into secrets my needs hide from me. I’ve accepted my defense of my needs as who I am without question. Probably because when I did, I was unaware I could ask questions. In effect, my only question as an infant was (maybe), “how do I feel?”
Further, as an infant, I was unskilled in communicating my ideas. Those I might ask were of that same acceptance and defense – and so unable to assist me in that way. Thus, we continued the pattern of old beliefs about lack without question.
Today, I’m capable of asking questions that challenge my acceptance and defense by acknowledging them. For example, I might consider a goal and ask:
- What do I need to fill this sense of lack?
- How can that need be fulfilled?
- Why does that need fulfillment bring me a sense of wholeness?
- Who do I believe I am when I feel fulfilled?
Targeted self-inquiry brings insights that can lead to deeper understandings and appreciations of lack. Rather than fighting and avoiding lack, we might instead look at it as the medium for change that it is.
