The Dance of Trigger and Cause

My terror of heights limits my career as a window-washer on the Empire State Building.  The building isn’t the cause of my terror.  The cause is my inherent sense of unsafety at any distance off the ground more than the thickness of a comic book.  My relationship with the building only triggers that reaction.  In a larger sense, our lack of appreciation of the distinction between trigger and cause may be the most immediate instigator of just about all human conflict.

There are few principles more valuable to our well-being than how we define our world actually creates our world.  In that light, one of the vital learnings is understanding what triggers our reaction to something, and what is the actual cause of that reaction?

There may be no more harmful addiction than our addiction to the belief that other people and outside circumstances are responsible for how we feel.  My sense of things is that no event or other person has ever been the cause of our response to anything.  Circumstances and another’s behavior may trigger in us every opinion, emotion and action known to humankind.  But they don’t cause a single one.  Only we do that by how we define reality for ourselves.

To believe that the events of our lives cause our feelings and opinions about them is a misperception with significant self-destructive consequences.  It is the foundation of victimhood and its loss of recognition of our infinite capacity to love in the face of anything.  Feel free to underline that sentence.

Overcoming that ignorance requires embracing the humbling reality that how we define our world is the cause of our every response to it.  No one other than ourselves has ever pissed us off or made us happy.  To the extent that that notion can seem all but impossible as we reflect on the devastation we have experienced and witnessed suggests how difficult it can be to consider that our opinion of that devastation is ultimately self-created. 

There never has been a good day or a bad day, a good time or a bad time, a good burger or a bad burger.  There are only days or times or burgers we like, or don’t like, or have no firm opinion about whatsoever—all the result of how we have defined reality for ourselves.  

A convenient example is Donald Trump, who triggers all sorts of strong opinions throughout the world, yet is not the cause of a single one of them.  I mention Trump deliberately to help you experience your own response to him, as well visit within you how willing or unwilling you are to embrace that how you define reality is the cause of that response.  Trump does not “make” one feel or think or do anything.

We are so powerful.  Simply to entertain the possibility that we are the creator of our every response to life is among the most consequential actions we take, not only on our soul’s evolution to enlightenment, but also in our creation of an innate sense of well-being in this worldly-world.  Nothing except our own sense of reality has ever been the cause of our anger, disappointment, frustration, fear, joy, happiness, security or anything else.

Living from this perspective is perhaps among the biggest nuts to crack in our awakening to our True Self.  The issue is not the legitimacy of our feelings and judgments.  That’s a whole other question.  The issue is where and how those feelings and judgments originate.  

The next time you hear yourself say, “This makes me so happy,” or “This irritates the snot out of me,” for a moment play with the possibility that there is a bigger picture—that your happiness or irritation comes only from the world you have created within yourself.  Ask yourself, “What world have I created that makes this real?”