What’s Motivation?

I hear it every day from someone. I have no desires..no motivation…I’m lazy…bored with life. I don’t know what to do.

The curse of the illusion is hard work.  Some do hard physical work.  Others do hard mental work in order to figure out how to avoid doing hard physical work.  People who seek freedom are sick of hard work.  We discover letting go; then we turn it into hard work.

The freedom we desire is freedom from the physically oriented, fallen perspective.  When we fell into the illusion, we accepted lots of beliefs that made creating very hard and slow.  We became feminine to a false God (a slave driver).  We became slaves of his system.  Doing became boring, routine, and uncreative.

The popularity of motivational speakers, prosperity preachers, and life coaches is proof that people aren’t in touch with their natural inner motivation.  They pump people up and generate lots of emotion by telling them what they want to hear.

However, what we want to hear is usually the opposite of what we believe.  So their motivation wears off quickly; our established beliefs usually win in the end.

Reward and Punishment

As we let go, we’re all a lot like my oldest child, who was imprisoned in the educational system for six years before I set him free with unschooling.  He’d already become institutionalized.  He was accustomed to outer direction and rewards.  I asked him to look inside for his true desires. He had no fucking clue how to do that.  He begged me to tell him what to do, but I didn’t.  Eventually, his desires for outer motivation, direction, reward, and punishment died since he stopped feeding them.  He was left with inner motivation after about two years of tears.

Inner motivation is different from outer motivation.  The True Self knows the future, without going to psychics.  It’s not going to learn cursive writing unless it plans to be a calligrapher or old fashioned letter writer, but it will learn texting or typing.

The True Self hates spoon-feeding and memorization.  It wants to understand and experience everything.  But most schools ruin that innate desire.  Children learn to walk with very little assistance. They absorb the understanding from someone who already knows how to walk; then they figure it out.  They don’t read “Walking for Dummies.”

When my children wanted to learn something new, I’d point them toward the inventors and innovators in their field of interest — people who found their own wisdom.  I wanted them to trust their own ideas and to see that true desires always seem crazy to others because they’re not their desires.

Most people memorize and copy what others have discovered.  There’s no life force in that.  Beliefs, traditions, stories, knowledge, and rituals get passed down from generation to generation.  It’s old and dull.  In the beginning, such information was minimal and useful — like how to make fire.  Now we pass down useless knowledge, political persuasions, and antiquated religious ideas.

It’s habitual.  In ancient times, dead ancestors were labeled Gods.  Few people in the past have questioned their ancestral teachings.  People got used to being told things that felt bad or sounded illogical.   Sacrificing our desires for the sake of keeping the family and collective illusions alive became normal.  We stopped discriminating when we heard something from an elder, teacher, or expert.  After awhile, we’d believe anything.

Creation

To understand true motivation, we must understand the creation process. Creation starts in our mind as an original idea.  We think about the idea, and it grows.  Eventually, we desire to share our idea because sharing gives it life.  Then we’re inspired to action. The whole process is organic and enjoyable if no beliefs get in the way.  But invariably beliefs do get in the way, and we lose our motivation unless we let those beliefs go.

If our desire is true, we’ll be inspired toward the next step and the next step; but we might not know the final destination.  We might not have support from our mother or friends, but we’ll find support in the form of validation, clarity, or insight.

Roles disappear.  No one can impose their beliefs on us if we know the difference between the truth and a belief.  The world is a mess because people think their beliefs are true.  Then they spew their beliefs on others because they think everyone needs their truth.  We already share the truth; we’re born with it.  Beliefs must remain temporary and personal.  They support, rather than dominate, creativity.

Action

The false self is action driven toward rigidly-defined goals. It seeks rewards and avoids punishment.  It avoids the creative process because it’s focused on end results and approval. The True Self’s ideas often look risky to the false self.  Beliefs about insecurity arise along with a lot of emotion.  If we don’t let those beliefs go, we’ll find our inspiration too difficult to follow.

The key to living from our True Self is to focus on our own mind.  The false mind is always  in other people’s business.  It believes that it gains status by mentally or physically pushing others down below it with it’s knowledge and conviction.  It fears others stealing it’s ideas; it’s competitive.  The false self judges, debates, and takes sides.  I know these things look normal; but normal people are deep in the illusion.

We must get to the place where we’re always watching our mind, discriminating, and letting go.  Eventually, it becomes automatic.  Our false self is blindly obedient.  It will be obedient to others unless we retrain it to be obedient to our True Self.

Yea, when we live this way, we’ll look lazy, unmotivated, or too happy.  Others will think we’re playing too much.  That’s their problem.  Finding our True Self and expressing it is what we all really want.  It’s finding the kingdom of heaven and eating from the Tree of Life again.