Beyond fight or flight: Acceptance
When we perceive danger or a situation which brings a feeling of uneasiness, we could stay and fight. We need to “win,” we need to conquer the “enemy,” etc. On the other hand, if that situation is perceived as unsurmountable, then we need to “save face,” that is “flight.”
Our conditioning is heavily influenced by dualities: win-lose, fight-flight. This is the first aspect to observe, when making sense of our behavior. Why is that important? Because we are caught in a box of 2 possibilities, when there are many.
One of the heaviest conditioning there is in our society, is related with this duality of perceiving Life as the inner working of a computer: On-OFF, 0-1. In general, we see Life from this binary format. Duality. No wonder “our creation,” the classical computer works in the same way. We may need to switch our awareness to something like a “Quantum Computer,” where there could be more than just one choice, many possibilities.
Spirituality sees that ACCEPTANCE of “what is,” is indeed another way to meet Life.
This is not surrendering or an offshoot of “flying,” by slowly walking off like a dog who has been nagged by his owner. Acceptance is to be flexible in the moment to meet Life as it appears.
For example, every Tuesday I may eat spaghetti religiously. One Tuesday I ran out of it and couldn’t purchase it. Yes, I could eat something else instead, but that is not the type of acceptance that I am talking about.
Acceptance is to look with some sort of excitement at the opportunity for something different, that is the arrival of newness. Acceptance is an attitude of gratefulness for the new experience.
The above is something difficult to see when we are only caught up in our own stories, our own images that we want to protect.
For instance, Life sends a pandemia. The story is not just about human beings. Nature has the rare opportunity to rebuild itself. Caught up in our own stories in self-absorption, we cannot see the whole picture. So what Nature has to do with “me”? Nature is where WE live, what we breathe, Life itself.
The human story commonly shared is about lost jobs, lost lives, lost income, lost markets, lost GDP, and so forth. We do not see the unity of all. We do not perceive when we divide ourselves from everything else, that we create a duality between “us” and “them;” therefore, the survival of “them” depends on the extermination of “us.” We cannot see a sane balance of “us” and “them,” for our minds haven’t been conditioned to harmonize but to ‘win,’ to ‘conquer,’ to follow the “survival of the fittest” idea when paradoxically, the weakest of us are being killed through a virus (There is an element of human responsibility in every pandemia) and we want to protect them. Let us not go into the “morality” of that perspective. Let us see the facts. Animals, plants, the environment are the “weakest links, “younger brothers” compared to humans but the same moral direction to protect is not there, but to exploit.
Acceptance. That is the opportunity to end the stories of despair and anguish and look forward to newness, the opportunities.
There are different levels or interpretations of acceptance, but a deep acceptance will bring as a result what is known as a “detached observer.”
What Life “throws at us” is for our own inner development; thus, we may need to sharpen our ability to Observe, so we could assimilate Life experiences with acceptance rather than bitterness and opposition.
“We” cannot ‘win’ over Life. We are Life itself.
Exploring the Depth of Living 