Comments on: 5 Misunderstandings About Spiritual Freedom

By: Jim Tolles

Jim Tolles — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 17:43:46 +0000

I'm glad the metaphor of the thread and yarn works for you, Dani. 🙂

By: Dani

Dani — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 15:26:59 +0000

Your comparison of untangling the ego like a strand of yarn resonates so deeply with me. As a macrame artist I am super familiar with having to deal with unknotting strands upon strands of tangled up string. The trick to really untangling it is to find one strand and follow it back through the jumbled up mess to its source end, and the yarn will essentially untangle itself. The reason they get tangled in the first place is because I have dropped my awareness of them and so I can't catch them when they start to stray and twist because of my carelessly tossing them aside. Blindly trying to pull them loose will generally not get me very far and tends to only create tighter knots which are that much harder to untangle, especially if I choose to get frustrated about it. The cord didn't tangle itself, I did!

Just a little thought.
Thanks for the trip

By: Jim Tolles

Jim Tolles — Tue, 26 May 2020 15:42:38 +0000

Let's take a step back. Where do your emotions come from? They come from you. Do you get to choose your emotions or do they choose you? If you think that your emotions choose you and that you have no ability to change that, then you will suffer every break-up, every job loss, and everything else that your ego has been taught to get upset about. If you realize that you choose your emotions but have lost the ability to influence them, now you can surrender and go on the journey of reclaiming your emotional choices from your unconscious ego.

There are harsh realities in life. They're things like famine and starvation. They're things like polio and the bubonic plague. These are the harsh realities I'm referring towards. How we emotionally respond to things is actually up to us, and the path to spiritual freedom liberates us from our unconscious suffering.

Thanks for the question!

By: Jim Tolles

Jim Tolles — Mon, 25 May 2020 19:01:25 +0000

You're welcome, Richard.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 25 May 2020 19:01:06 +0000

Thank you for sharing. I'm a little confused about how you say reality can be quite harsh, as compared to some other things you've written. In a previous post, for example, you wrote that it's ridiculous that people feel upset after going through a breakup. How can we change how we feel if that's how we feel, though? Isn't feeling heartbroken after a relationship an example of reality being quite harsh? It's almost as if you want your students to feel bad about feeling bad about life events but also to accept that reality can be quite harsh – seems like a contradiction and I don't understand how to balance.