COLLECTING material objects that we may feel is essential to our very existence is an obsessive pastime of the habitual mind. An easy test for us to take is: The more material objects we have cluttered around us, the more unconscious we are and the harder it will be for us to let them go. And let them go we eventually must.

No matter how hard we try, we can’t take it with us when we snuff it, that has been a joke for years but we don’t understand the truth of it. No matter how much we accumulate objects over our lifetime, we can’t take a skerrick of it with us, not even our cherished bodies – it also is doomed to remain in the physical world.

Although most of us are incessant collectors of things, a startling realization is, we can only own something in the past, after it has been named and the memory of it has been labeled and stored as an image in the egos library of the past. Naming the object includes its actual name, car, house etc and also calling it mine or ours.

It is also absolutely impossible to own something in the future – the future never comes, it is only a dream, you can only imagine owning something in the future, a new car, house etc. By the time you have it, it has become the past.

Before owning a new acquisition, we refer to past memories of similar objects and even if we are looking at the hoped for trinket, by the time it is registered in the egos library as mine or ours, which might only take a nanosecond or two – it has become old and stale. We are then looking at it through a set of images from the past.

Surprisingly, we are also unable to own anything now, in the present moment, whatever is now, just is – fresh and new and unlabeled. It is only owned once we name it and it is stored as an image in memory, then it is also from the past.

We can’t even look at something we think we own as it is now, for we immediately compare it to what it was before, in the past, so we are really looking at a memory of all that it was, not as it is now.

The same goes when we are interacting with people we call, ‘my’ friends, family or loved ones. We never see them the way they are now. When we look at them we automatically bring up their whole history from the past, what they were like yesterday, last week, last year, when they were born etc.

Also the memories of the way they treated us in the past, whether good or bad are also added to the mix of their past images, so we are really looking at a composite image of them, collated from the egos library of the past, not as they are now, fresh and new and uncontaminated by memories.

We must voluntarily let go of the old and owned (my stuff) before we can be presented with the new. That is what is meant by jumping off the precipice and into the unknown (the new). There is a safe landing below, but we have to trust and jump first to find out. Until then, we remain locked up in the prison of the habitual mind.

This letting go has nothing to do with physically letting go but letting it go mentally – letting go of thinking of our things as ‘mine’ and thus part of us. That is a big problem with our stuff – by calling it mine or ours, we infuse it with our identity and if we lose some precious stuff, we feel we are losing part of ourselves so we feel loss and sadness – we are bereft over losing material objects.

Even if we did physically lose our stuff – for instance, imagine for a moment that all of the material objects you own or call mine are magically taken away from you – you are suddenly standing there stark naked, stripped of all your worldly possessions, the essential ‘you’ would still be there, completely intact. Nothing vital would be missing.

Now imagine if your naked body was taken away too – the essential ‘you’ would still be there even then. The intelligence that once viewed the world from behind your missing body’s eyeballs would still be there, fully conscious and aware of self……

Dan’s Quote: “Abandon such things as planning, contriving, desiring,
____________hoping, yearning, speculating, demanding, straining,
____________claiming, influencing, dominating…..
____________All these things interfere with the natural flow of life.”- Vernon Howard

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