Journey of a Sikher:
A collection of thoughts, reflections and experiences. Documented for my children Baltej and Himmat.
What is guts? To me guts, or gut feeling is your inner dialogue, it is when your soul or something beyond your mind is telling you something. Your mind may be rational and have fight or flight response, but the gut is something different, it’s separated. Maybe the gut feeling is the soul, the inner voice that we mostly drown out as noise.
Often when we have an impulse, or a sense beyond rationalization we try to ignore it, when we have a thought to donate money, if we just pause at that moment we have the feeling to give, but within a few seconds we are reminded of our financial status and how that money, whatever amount it is, can be used for something better, or more rational. Our mind quickly but surely smothers any shot for our gut to have a chance. When we are doing something against the grain our gut is encouraging us, but our mind is holding us back, trying to get us to conform so that we do not have to have headaches.
The only way I have found to get above the mind is to do the opposite, is to rebel persistently to rationalizations in your mind. In my small understanding and life, I have often tried to go against things I have thought rational, even little decisions, like donating when I had the impulse even if I was not sure I had the money to fulfill it, in those experiences I felt that the mind does not have the control I thought it did. Its weakness becomes more evident with each revolt I organize against it.
To me logic is not something that is real; it is the illusion of fear and perception. When I look at nature there is no logic a flower blooms not from fear but it just does, a tree grows its roots expand, it reaches heights without worrying about what its limits are. Nature all around us lives in the very moment; the logic is irrelevant, because logic implies that there is something that is illogical as well.
Every person is unique, their life is set to the trajectory that it will ultimately go, we can try to live logically, and fear driven, or we can live in the moment without fear that each moment we have or issue, it leads us to somewhere, somewhere we belong not by accident but by our own thinking and action.
What is a life lived in fear and worry, sure there are things we need to be aware of, I don’t mean just walk across the street without looking both ways! But on the same token don’t keep looking both ways when you are walking on the side walk! Their needs to be a balance of the mind vs. the gut. Mainly most of us live in the mind, in the logic and in the fear that our actions will create misery or abundance for ourselves. When our gut talks we just try to justify our good ‘thought’ but then strategically erase it prior to our action. What are we worried about making a mistake? If that is the case then why have we made so many mistakes even while being so rational? Has it led to an error proof life? A life without hardship? Of course not, even being rational we trip up, we constantly make the wrong moves, yet we forgive our mind, we don’t say hey you got me in trouble last time, you get a time out. That’s how powerful the mind is in self justification. You will always remember that 2 dollars you gave to a beggar, but you will forget the 2 dollars you wasted on a video game at the arcade!
Realization that the mind is in control of not only our actions but our historical references of our past starts to free us a little.
The most important part is that the mind constantly is living in the future or the past. Its planning a course for you to tread or historically referencing something that you did. The gut, is the only part of you that is living in the moment, it’s the feeling in everything you do, in every split second you have something inside you guiding you, to do this or that, to act like this or like that. Its telling you to ask the person in need of help if they need help, its telling you to reach in your wallet when you see someone in need or a good cause, its telling you hey do this right now, you won’t hear it repeat itself. The mind works on constant nagging, it beats things into you, and it creates fear in you to make you obey.
When we listen to the mind we live life, but when we listen to the inner voice we feel life, we feel each moment, our emotions are triggered a deeper self is found and most importantly we experience exactly what we need to at that given moment or time. If the logic is taken out of the equation then no experience is good or bad, or negative or positive, it just becomes a moment where you felt something.
I dare myself constantly to feel something to try to do opposite of what the rational mind is telling me to do, most of the times I am unsuccessful, but there are those rare moments when a ray of sunshine and my gut feeling wins, and that’s when I know there is something beyond this, a higher self beyond what we are entangled in here, beyond our possessions and accomplishments which are worth very little in reality.
The spiritual journey is constantly putting yourself out of the comfort zone in the zone where you can be ridiculed easily because you stepped out of bounds. You constantly have people thinking that you are either brave, or crazy or a bit of both. When you are ridiculed, when you have stepped beyond what the ‘norm’ is, you should take a moment to thank your gut, because it put you there! :-)