Do you find it easy to be still, quiet, and centered—whether in the presence of another person or on your own?

Many have great difficulty tolerating sustained silence and stillness.

To avoid having to deal with what arises when there is just pure stillness, it’s common for humans who are unacquainted with their silent center to generate drama whenever there is a risk of this center coming into the focus of their awareness.

People may say they don’t enjoy drama. At one level this is true: no human really enjoys drama at their core.

Yet people seek drama. In families this tends to become ritualized: there’s usually one member of the family who can be relied upon to stir up drama for everyone else when things become too quiet.

Often this role falls to one of the children. In a sense this child becomes the scapegoat for the angst of the whole family. Such a child can be counted on to orchestrate turmoil at the point everyone’s anxiety is building because the various family members can’t handle the peacefulness that’s naturally present whenever drama is absent.

What we are suggesting is that we humans choose to fill our life with drama. Life doesn’t have to consist of drama. It can in fact be peaceful.

To reiterate, since this is so crucial to becoming free of drama, the reason we fill our life with drama is that when we are caught up in drama, we avoid having to feel our essential being which is grounded in the stillness of universal Presence.

In other words, there is a certain “comfort” in drama—a sense that we are not alone in life. The drama keeps our mind occupied, focused on “what’s going on,” which usually involves other people, so that we never become acutely aware of our aloneness.

However, if we look closely at this “comforting” aspect of drama, it’s actually more a familiarity with discomfort than true comfort. It's a familiar state but it's not a peaceful state.

Many humans simply cannot keep still for very long. Take away their distractions and they become antsy. Drama then serves as a way of distracting everyone from the stillness so that they don’t have to experience it. Just observe sometime and you will see how few people are comfortable with being really still.

Our true being is peaceful and relishes stillness. But we don’t generally live from our true being, but from our ego—the image of ourselves we carry around in our head, which is a pseudo sense of self.

To connect with our true being, free of ego, feels unfamiliar, even strange. We are so unaccustomed to being who we really are that our true self may even feel like something we want to push away from us. Hence we generate drama to avoid this uncomfortable feeling.

Once we realize that drama doesn’t generally just emerge out of the blue—once we recognize that we crave drama as a way of filling up the void we experience when things become quiet—we are in a position to begin eradicating drama from our life.

This we do simply by observing when drama begins to arise, then putting space around it rather than being caught up in it.

The more deeply we allow our life to flow from our true being, the more detached we become from the need to generate drama or even be around people who thrive on drama and situations that foster it.

Opportunity for Self-inquiry and Sharing:

A.  Can you identify an area in your life in which you experience drama?

B.  While the drama is taking place, are you able to identify the difference between your true self and that part of you, either your ego or your pain-body, that is engaging in drama?

C.  Describe a time when you experienced being able to put space around drama as it arose.

This ends section 1 of part 4

Section 2 will be posted on Monday, August 23