What Is “Letting Go”?
“Letting go” literally means releasing your close or tight fist in order to abandon or give up something that you are holding in your hand. If you are close- or tight- fisted, you also cannot receive anything. “Letting go” is detachment.
The opposite of “letting go” is “attaching to” something that you are stubbornly holding on to.
Marriage may become problematic if you continue to hold on to the past, whether your pleasant or unpleasant life experiences. Remember, your marriage life is in the present, and in the past. So, let go of the past and live in the present.
The Wisdom in Asking Questions
There is an old proverb that says: “He who cannot ask cannot live.” Life is all about asking questions, and seeking answers from all the questions asked, including questions about “letting go.” Ask yourself many questions about why you should let go of anything in your marriage life.
The important thing in questioning is to experience everything related to all the questions you ask concerning yourself, others, and the world around you. Live every question in its full presence.
Always ask yourself many “how” and “why” questions regarding whatever you may do, say, and want in your everyday marriage life and living. Ask questions not just about yourself, but also about your marriage partner as well as all those around you, including your children or step-children.
Be patient toward all those questions that you cannot find the answers right away. Enlightenment may dawn on you one day when you ask fewer or even no more questions, because by then you may already have got all the answers; that is your ultimate self-awakening to the truths.
Empower your thinking mind to increase its wisdom by asking questions to initiate its intent to learn, to discover, and then to change yourself for the better.
Asking self-intuitive questions may also help you find out who you really are, and not who you wish you were. More importantly, you may discover how and why you have become attached to so many things in your life that define who you think you are.
What Are Attachments?
An attachment is basically your own emotional dependence on things and people that define your identity, around which you wrap your so-called “happiness”, and even your survival. Attachment is holding on to anything that you are unwilling to let go of, whether it is something positive or negative.
An attachment is no more than a safety blanket to overcome your fear—fear of change and of the unknown from that change. To cope with that fear, all your attachments become your distractions.
We are living in a world with many problems that confront us in our everyday marital life, and many of them are not only unavoidable but also insoluble. To overcome these daily challenges, many of us just turn to attachments as a means of distracting ourselves from facing our problems head on, or adapting and changing ourselves in an ever-changing environment.
But human attachments are the sources of human miseries. Worse, human attachments may come in many different forms that we are unaware of, such as careers, relationships, adversity and prosperity, success and failure, and among others.
The Wisdom of Letting Go
The human flaws of attachments can be discerned and even overcome with human wisdom, which is no more than knowing and understanding the ultimate truth of human existence.
In the Christian tradition, truth begins with God, and not with the self, just as Jesus said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
However, in Eastern cultures, the understanding of self is the first step in the pursuit of the ultimate truth, which is human wisdom.
Simply put, no matter what, humans are given a physical body, a mind, and a soul or spirit. The body lives in the material world, and is equipped with the five senses to live and survive in the physical environment. The mind, as the mediator between the body and the soul, is given the gift of free will, which is the freedom to process any input in the form of thoughts and sensations from both the body and the soul.
The ultimate truth: whenever we wish to do something, the soul intuitively provides the instinctive judgment, the mind then gives the analysis and the interpretation, and the body eventually executes the appropriate action or decision of the mind. In other words, what we want to do and how we are going to do it are all in the mind. Therefore, the human mind plays a pivotal role in understanding the ultimate truth about the origin of human attachments, and how they may create the false ego-self that often leads to human flaws as a result of an identity crisis.
The TAO wisdom, which is the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu, the ancient sage from China
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
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