Learning about Being in the Moment
In the normal run of things, the job I had at a bottle shop (liquor store) when I was 19 was pretty simple and uneventful, but it provided some unique opportunities to learn about self-knowledge exercises I was learning from a course I was attending by Belsebuub at the time.
When I was just starting out learning about self-awareness I found it quite difficult to be in the moment and aware in tasks that required a lot of thinking, but because the job was easy and I didn’t have to think about what I was doing too much, it allowed me lots of chances to practice being aware of my surroundings and bringing myself into the present moment.
I had some really amazing and very clear experiences, in an environment that I wouldn’t previously have thought you could have any kind of spiritual experience.
While I was serving customers I would try what I learned in Belsebuub’s course to bring myself into the moment. I would try to focus on my movements, and try to focus in the best way I could on just doing one thing at one time.
This would help me to focus my mind and attention on the present moment and to really feel myself being there, and I found that when I did that serving people in the bottle shop became really enjoyable.
I had never experienced life in the way I did when I started trying to be aware. When I was bringing myself into the moment it was almost like time slowed down. I wasn’t doing things any less quickly, but it was like I got more out of each moment.
Colours became much brighter and more vivid. I could really feel objects, the denseness and texture in a way that I wouldn’t if I wasn’t in the moment. It was almost like I could see the space in between things as well as the objects themselves. I had learned that as well as external awareness of surroundings, sight, sound, smell etc. there was also internal awareness – seeing thoughts and emotions.
In some of my experiences I could quite prominently see the difference between being aware and daydreaming my way through the day, meaning for example when my mind was running a constant commentary of ‘what I was or wasn’t‘ or ‘what I should be doing instead‘ in my head.
While I would often slip into unwanted thoughts without realising what was happening, sometimes I’d feel the shift, almost as if I was falling asleep and a veil was coming over how I experienced or perceived the world.
This was a very surreal feeling to catch, but it helped me remember to keep trying to practice awareness. It showed how much of life was passing me by while I lived in a sort of dream state.
And it was in this environment that I got my first glimpse of how I had an underlying anger sometimes in the way I went about my days, one that I had barely noticed previously.
Uncovering Some Unexpected Anger
In one week of the course the homework was to try and see how the emotion of anger affected us. I thought I didn’t really have any anger, so I was pretty much fine already, but I tried the exercises anyway, looking in the area of my solar plexus where Belsebuub had said emotions like anger would come up.
The only emotion I can remember feeling there previously was fear. It would cause a gripping feeling in my solar plexus that was really crushing, and then would spread out into my body in things like my voice and knees shaking if I was nervous.
So I was keeping an eye out for anger, and the week had almost gone by, but I hadn’t been able to spot anything. Sunday came around, and I went to my job at the bottle shop. We had a particular special on where you could get 24 of a certain type of a drink for a few dollars more than you could get six.
A man came up to the counter with six of this beverage, and I thought I’d help him out. I told him about the deal and how he could get 4 times the amount of the product for a few dollars extra. I was sure that he’d be interested, but his reaction completely shocked me.
I was trying to be helpful and he basically threw it back in my face, accusing me of getting kickbacks, telling me he didn’t want the offer and generally being quite aggressive.
If he had just been aggressive I probably would have thought he was weird, he would have left the shop and that would have been it, but because I felt that I was genuinely trying to help him his unexpected reaction sparked off egos of pride within me, and with them anger surged up inside me like I had never seen before.
I processed his purchase and he left the shop, but I was left behind the counter seething. I had felt the anger well up in my chest in a way that was totally overwhelming. I could feel my face had gone bright red, and I couldn’t even speak to the guy as he left the shop – it was almost like the anger was so strong it had paralysed me.
This was a terrible feeling and thankfully it didn’t last for long until it subsided to a level where I could function again, and while it wasn’t at all pleasant it was a bit of a breakthrough for me. I saw that I did actually have quite a lot of anger (different from what I had originally thought) and had more of a sense of what it felt like now that I knew what to look out for.
It was almost like previously the anger was behind a locked door in my psyche, there but hidden from me, as I had never really seen it so I didn’t think I had anger at all. This experience caused enough of a stir inside of me that it broke down the door, and I started to notice it for what it was more frequently and in more subtle ways.
It’s not that I was getting angry more frequently, but more that I just started to be able to feel it and to identify it when it was coming up, as well as why it was happening and how I needed to deal with it so I didn’t act or react with anger in the future.
Thankfully because of other techniques I’ve learned from Belsebuub (like how to get rid of states like anger when they come up) I haven’t had to experience another outburst of anger like that.
But without going through this experience using awareness and self-observation, I would not have got the same insight into anger and may never have had got a handle on it and how potentially destructive anger can be and how it was causing problems in my life without me even realising it.
Looking back to that situation, even though it was challenging, in retrospect it was definitely a blessing in disguise. Sometimes if I notice things like anger / fear I want to run away from them. But I’ve seen if I don’t confront them they’ll always be there, and I feel like it’s much better to have a short period of discomfort and to try to get rid of them then just to pretend they’re not there and have them always affecting me in an underlying way, which ends up being much more uncomfortable!
There’s a video by Belsebuub I like a lot where he explains how the egos and the subconscious work and the importance of being able to see them for what they are in order to change. It makes me wonder how many parts of my subconscious still affect me without me even seeing or knowing about them yet.
Hi David, thanks for sharing your experience.
Sometimes we can be in self deceit thinking that we are not affected by a certain ego, but as you have shared all it takes is the situation to arise for a particular ego to surface.
I also enjoyed reading how you changed your perception on the situation and was able to take away valuable learning.
Thanks for sharing the video, its one of my favourites 🙂
Anger, pride and fear, I could certainly live without any trace of them in my life.
It’s so rewarding to be aware in the moment and in prayer to my Divine Mother.
Thanks David great story and video of Belsebuub.
Hi David,
Reading your description of awareness brought me into the present moment, one sense at a time. 🙂 Thank you for that.
Hi David,
It was very useful to read about your experience with anger and your efforts to be in a moment. I can relate to that feeling of being paralysed with anger and the experience of all those physical sensations that you describe.
It’s great that you managed to see it and act upon it by using the technique of elimination of the inner states. I can testify to the power of this technique that helps us to get rid of an emotion as it rises up inside of us. I also had had some breakthroughs with anger that now days is not so overwhelming as before thanks to the magic of these simple yet powerful techniques.
Looks like you were nicely set up there David, so you could see something new! I remember quite a lot of painful shocks during my first attempts to honestly peer into my psyche and a period of kind of mourning for the idea I had of myself! Now my general feeling of ‘who I am’ has changed, but I find it still requires a constant application of inner observation to catch the ‘veil’ when it decends, and it can so quickly and absolutely. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you David for sharing these experiences. I especially liked how you described the feeling of a “veil coming over” that you were able to spot as you were falling into unconsciousness. The only times when i was able to spot this were when doing a practice of eliminating thoughts at night. It is only at those moments that I have been able to spot how thoughts take me to a wonderland and how hypnotic/drugging they feel. On the contrary, I found out that it is indeed possible to still fall asleep and yet to stay psychologically awake, without that hypnotic feeling and heavy state, and to become conscious in the astral plane as a result. Your description inspires me to try more during the day, in daily situations, to feel that clarity, colors and as you say “to get most out of the moment”.
The anger experience was also quite telling. I can relate to this experience in the sense that anger often builds up within me when encoutering some unfair situations. In my case, I feel this seething you describe, but often end up crying as a result, I guess to release the tension. And similarly to you, because of the way it happens, for a long time I haven’t even considered this to be anger, as I have always imagined anger being something aggressive/attacking, and not the reaction to that agression. So thank you very much for sharing this as well, it just shows how complex our psychology can be, to the point we may think we don’t have something within while in fact, we are just not able to identify it correctly in our daily life.
What you say about the bigger outburst leading to then afterwards recognising smaller manifestations is something I have also experienced.
Those symptoms of paralysing occupation that you described is something I’ve also felt at times, such as in this case. Barely being able to move or speak, knowing that only that blob of the vilest negativity will come out, so you try to keep it in, and it paralysing you.
It is concerning to consider that some people have fed anger a lot in their life or past and have become an ‘angry person.’ Where even little things cause that big overwhelming poisoned state to take over irrationally. Quite sad actually as it is such an affliction for the person, as well as for the people who have to deal with them. Plus in some cases lonely as they make everyone want to not get close to such a person, or those are close to them relating to them out of fear. etc.
Thank you for the post David,
I can also relate to thinking that I do not have certain emotions in me. This opinion did not last very long though as once I went out of situations I was comfortable in, circumstances came up that I thought were unfair, or had attachments in, and so on and anger seems to manifest readily. I think that to be able to tackle anger in such situations I need to be aware in the lead-up to them. This helps my body not be attached to a result.
I also like what you say about confronting the emotions as opposed to running away from them. It is for sure not pleasant, but like you I also notice that unless they are confronted they continue to come back.
I like how you described the anger as being behind a locked door in your psyche – something that was always there but that you hadn’t recognized. I similarly remember thinking about certain egos and thinking that those weren’t a big problem for me, only to later discover that they existed and were very strong.
Interesting experiences gaining self-knowledge in an unexpected environment.
Thanks for sharing this David. I liked how you described being in the moment, how much more vibrant the world around you seemed to be. And how time seemed to slow down. I also used to think I didn’t have much anger, only to be proven very wrong 🙂 It was a bit shocking, disappointing, but freeing too.
It’s great that you were able to gain a good grounding in awareness from such a mundane environment David.
I can relate to what you mentioned about how certain inner states can appear to be absent from our psyche, until the right moment comes up from them to manifest. Without self-observation, it’s easy to think that emotions such as anger are not a problem. But I’ve seen how anger is actually a very broad state, which contains many smaller aspects, such as irritation, frustration, impatience, sarcasm etc.
There’s definitely a lot that can be learnt about the psyche by applying the techniques Belsebuub suggests. I’ve found this process to be very beneficial, as in addition to seeing these inner states, I also have a means to change them, so that they are no longer influencing me in an unseen way.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, David! Your analogy of the “veil” coming over how you perceive the world is great. I think I perceive the same sort of shift when I go from a state of awareness to one where the egos are taking over.
I’ve often found it interesting in the past, when talking to people about self-knowledge, how many feel that they don’t have anger. At such moments, my jaw would drop open and I would be in total disbelief… But this, for me, was after I had also begun a journey of self-discovery through Belsebuub’s courses. For myself personally, I’d now say that anger is quite a prevalent part of my psyche.
Not only is your experience a great example of how anger can work, I think it illustrates that self-knowledge is one of those things that without efforts and persistence, we don’t uncover what is really within us. So sadly many of us go through life not realizing the presence of nor the harm caused by the negativity within.