Another Facebook dialogue:
Ed Conley
TAKE AN ACCEPTANCE PILL. Accept your life and it won’t bother you.
Mouna Zaatour We can always bring change to our life! no acceptance pill for me!
Ed Conley Interesting. If life is change, then how can one bring change to change? If life is not change, then that definition runs counter to experience. So the belief or idea that I am not changing or need to change is an illusion. So I say accept change, and life is no longer an illusion. You are suddenly and radically alive and real.
Thank you for walking with me on this inquiry.
Mouna Zaatour What if I don’t define life as change? Seen from this angle, I understand what you meant Ed….but if we are discussing here it is to have a change of scene, of angles of view! so all definitions of life could be possible;)
Ed Conley Well, you can define life anyway you want. You can define a river anyway you want, but when you step in it, you feel the flow of change. When we feel stress, what we are actually feeling is our resistance to the flow of life. Stick you hand out the window of the car and you can feel its resistance to the wind. The mind does this by thrusting it’s belief of how things are or should be into the flow of life and feels tension or stress, and then blames the flow of life for the pain. It then tries all the harder to stop change. But the flow continues. So until we recognize that life IS impermanent, change, we continue resisting change and experiencing stress and discomfort with life.
What we are looking at here is direct experience, not something I’m just saying or something I read someplace. Not some teaching. But this is direct experience. Check it out. The next time your feel irritation because someone called you out of your peaceful state: Will you do me this favor, or something like that. Or someone says a harsh word to you. There is a conflict here between what you believe reality should be and what it is. You believe you should be not stressful, but here is this stress. We blame the circumstance for our pain instead of looking directly and seeing that we are creating our pain by resisting change. Our environment is always changing. We are not standing on solid ground. We are standing on a flowing river of form. Thanks.
Nadim Bouderbala · Friends with Mouna Zaatour
sorry to get involved in this discussion : If you are talking about change, then you should read the small booklet called “Who Moved My Cheese?” It will explain much. An I can add, if all the people will accept their life, we will still be living in prehistoric times without tool and fire. 
Only our ancestors who did not accept the way life was, made a change. A lot try and a lot fail. But without trying you already failed.
Mouna Zaatour Nadim welcome into the club:no acceptance pill for us;) but it is interesting to see different opinions about life! Where can i get the booklet “who moved my Cheese?”
Sanjay Guha Request also to read ”The Book of Life..”by J.Krishnamurthy
Ed Conley It’s Sunday Morning and I pour another cup of Facebook. Okay, the Acceptance Pill…..Acceptance is a paradox, or maybe a metaphor for something one must do for no reason. The way we understand and interpret Acceptance is that one must do it for a reason, and if the situation is painful, accepting it means accepting pain and not accepting evolving or moving out of the pain. This is, of course, not acceptable.
Yet, in all therapy and religions there is the commandment to accept. Accept that you are an alcoholic, accept God, accept Jesus, accept that you are stuck and spinning your wheels endlessly, digging a bigger hole while you think you are getting out. In other words, you can’t do something new, you can’t change unless you stop doing what doesn’t work.
So, one has to accept that you are stuck, that you don’t know what to do. The Cloud of Unknowing. And then what you should do will be revealed to you through the ashes of your acceptance.
Again, acceptance is a paradox because it is both death and life. One accepts death in order to live. Christ on the Cross…this is a formula of Acceptance, the greatest paradox of all.
Mouna Zaatour It is really nice discussion, I think we should classifiy what is to accept what is not to accept….everything what is a human invention could be discussed and not accepted the way it is or the way it used to be! so an acceptance pill for all humanity doesn’t work, as you said you need to understand what doesn’t work! in other words the disease….so we shloud start thinking about the disease before the pill:)
Ed Conley Mouna Zaatour Yes, thinking about the disease before the pill. Okay, how does one think about the disease and accept it at the same time? Do I accept that I have a disease, like , Oh, shit, I have a damned disease. I didn’t choose this. Why me?
That is not the right kind of acceptance for the pill to work. I accept the disease is paradoxical in nature, because I must accept what I don’t want to accept. I must choose the disease. That’s what acceptance means, in this paradoxical way. Acceptance means opening to something without changing it. If I change it, then I don’t accept it. If I want to change it, I don’t accept it. So I must accept without changing what I accept, which means I accept the disease as disease.
Now what happens? This is alchemy. Instead of being separate from the disease by trying to avoid it, I don’t resist the disease. And what I don’t resist then is not separate or a problem. Non-acceptance means I am not this. Acceptance means I AM THIS.
If I don’t accept the disease, I maintain the disease by holding it as separate. If I accept the disease, then I allow it to change. (Mind you dis-ease is a metaphor) and I am then at-ease because I’m no longer in conflict with what is, or the dis-ease.
The Acceptance Pill transforms dis-ease into at-ease. Life is good.
Mouna Zaatour The disease I’m talking about is a metaphor! not a real disease, of course a real disease you have to accept it!
Ed Conley Mouna Zaatour Okay, lets say that no disease is real. Oh, the body has a change in it, and we call it disease. But the disease is a name we lay over a slice of the whole that we don’t like. But the whole remains as the ground beneath the slice we have abstracted and called “disease” and then we want to get rid of it. We don’t accept it……This is a paradox.
Healing is bringing the part back to the whole, the slice back to that from which it came. Healing is accepting the disease as not disease. The paradox is penetrated and one is whole again.
Posted under Facebook Dialogues
This post was written by ed on October 30, 2011
