"Worldly doesn't mean that you have money or stature. Worldly means that you think the solution to your inner problems is in the world outside. You think if you change the outside, you'll be okay. But nobody has ever truly become okay by changing things outside. There's always the next problem. The only real solution is to take the seat of witness consciousness and completely change your frame of reference."
- Michael Singer
I recently started reading the book The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer... again. It's the second time I'm reading it and it's a book that I think anyone could read over and over again to tap into who we all really are and what our spiritual purpose is.
I picked out this quote from the book in the chapter called "Your Inner Roommate". I think it's something important to talk about because it is something that affects every single one of us. The inner roommate Singer is referring to is the voice inside our head; our inner consciousness, or our psyche. It's basically your inner dialogue. Maybe you are more aware of it than some other people are, but we have a voice inside our head that talks to us constantly. It's the thoughts and conversations and scenarios we play out inside our heads all day every day. Some people have learned to deal with it and not listen to it as much through practice, but maybe you're someone who hasn't really practiced disconnecting from this inner roommate, and you allow your thoughts to control your life.
The most important take-away from this point and quote is that we can't fix anything permanently by trying to fix anything in the outside world, in reality. We can only truly solve our problems by changing how we observe the world outside. There will always we problems in our reality, in the physical world in which we live. When we allow ourselves to become submerged in these problems and we try to fix everything on the outside we aren't really getting to the root cause of freeing ourselves from stress or anxiety.
Do you feel like similar problems tend to surface in your life? Do you feel like you're always trying to fix these problems but no matter what you do, they keep happening? That's because you're trying to control the outside actions instead of learning to fix your inner view of the world and what's happening.
When we learn to start to ask ourselves, or that inner voice/roommate questions about why we feel stressed, or anxious about a certain problem. Or why we have a problem with it in the first place. We start to look at things objectively. We start to learn to because separated from the problem, and we are just observing it. We are aware of it, but we aren't it. As Michael Singer says we need to be able to "let go of the part of you that has so many problems with reality". Our life isn't really ours if we let our inner psyche to control it.