Acceptance

To accept one's current situation does not mean that one cannot work to change it. I wanted to get that out right away because I see that this is the biggest, if not the only thing, that keeps people from coming over to acceptance. Acceptance is probably the greatest achievement that you could ever accomplish in your life. I don't care what you do in your career; I don't care who you are. If you cannot accept reality, you haven't done anything yet.

If you can accept and do accept what is happening to you, then you have already achieved one of the greatest things that you could possibly achieve in a lifetime. Everything else is a bonus. Our dear friend, the French philosopher Simone Weil, says, "To not accept an event in the world is to wish that the world did not exist." Not to accept an event in the world is to wish that the world did not exist. But the world does exist.

So, if we do not accept the events that are currently happening in the world—to us, to anyone else, to everyone else—we are essentially trying to deny reality. We resent reality, and who's going to win that fight? Are we ever going to not accept an event in the world and then have the world change as a consequence of it? Never. To not accept reality is just that: to not accept reality.

But reality must be accepted for the very fact that it is reality. That's all the reason it needs to be infinitely stronger than any resentment, any anger, any wish towards it being different that you might have inside of you. It's an impossible battle, and it's an utmost useless battle. There's nothing to gain from it and everything to lose from it.

And I mean lose in the true sense. Normally, we don't talk like that, but this is the interior world. This is your beliefs and opinions and your resentments and your anger. This is losing. To not accept reality is a big loss, and it's the ultimate loss.

One might ask why we should even accept things. Why can't we just not accept it and deal with the consequences? It's exactly because of the fact that wishing for reality to not exist or to be a different way—which it's not going to be by the very fact that it already isn't that way—is the major and biggest and eternal source of your anger, resentment, hate, fear, and anxiety.

Every feeling that you have inside of you that you wish not to have comes from not accepting an event in the world that is currently happening—in other words, reality. That is why we want to accept reality.

It's easy to accept so-called good events, right? You get a lot more money than you thought you were going to. It seems easy to accept that. But why not just as easily accept the loss of money or more money than you thought of any amount? Why not? It's reality. It's going to happen. If it's happening right now, it's going to happen. There's no way around it.

If it's happening, it's happening. So your only choice is to accept or to not accept. You do not have a choice available to you of not losing that money if you're losing it or you've just lost it. That's it.

If we would accept all events and not just the ones we deem good, we would completely get rid of our anger, our resentment, our frustration. Every sort of feeling that we think keeps us from happiness is tied to our inability to accept reality.

Now we can get to the point that I started this video with, which is that accepting feels like giving up. To accept something almost feels like barring oneself, excluding oneself from the possibility of ever doing anything about the current situation.

We're in the process of losing money. We think if we don't accept this reality, we think we can stop it. If we get angry, we think that might give us the energy to do something about it. If we lash out and we show a lot of resentment and fury, we think that might be necessary to impress someone, to sort of change their mind.

But that's not the case. Everything that you can do with anger, you can do without anger. Everything that you can do with fear, you can do without fear. Everything that you can do with resentment, you can do without resentment.

In fact, everything that you do without anger, you can not only do like you did it with anger, but you will do it better. As Seneca points out, anger is temporary madness. Angry people act like they have some sort of a mental issue, some chemical imbalance in their minds, and it makes them act out in these irrational ways that don't seem to conform to logic or even their own best interest.

That's how angry people act. Just look at any road rage incident. Does any of that make sense? That's where anger gets us. So how do we think that anger is going to do anything about our current situation? How is anything going to get better? Why would we ever need anger to do anything?

That's the point. We can accept reality. We can accept the simple fact that this thing is happening, whether we judge it good or bad. It's just about accepting the reality that it is happening.

Once we accept, all the anger, frustration, resentment, and all the other things—fear, anxiety—will go away because we've accepted it. We're one with it. We're flowing in the same direction; we're not going against the current—a current which we can never ever withstand.

We're going with it. So that's an ease, that's a tranquility that this gives you to then apply to the solution of the problem, whatever it may be. You can use that tranquility, that rational mind that is left to you when you don't let it get affected by anger and resentment and frustration.

That much more rational mind you can now go and apply to see, "Hey, okay, this is happening. What can I do about it? What's the best that I can do?" Could you possibly hope to do better than the best that you can do?

With anger and frustration and resentment, you can never do the best that you can do. So acceptance will get rid of that, and all that space you can use to let your rational mind expand, to let your logic expand, to let your good sense expand into the situation.

There's no telling what kind of ideas and solutions you might come up with. The thing is, there might not be anything to do about the situation, or there might be some part of a solution, and you'll go and do that, and that'll be the most that you can do.

At that point, acceptance is already forced on you. Of course, most people still go on denying reality, saying, "No, it's not over. I can still be angry. I can still fight. At least I can humiliate the people that did this to me. At least I can call them names. At least I can do this and that."

But that's no good. That's resentment. That's anger. It damages no one other than yourself. That's what acceptance is.

Notice that whenever you don't practice acceptance, you are angry, you are resentful, and you're anxious. What does that do? That anger, resentment, anxiety takes you out of the present moment, out of the moment in which reality is happening.

Reality is not happening in the past or the future. That's done or not here yet. Reality is happening primarily now. Now is what decides what the past is going to be, and the future is not here yet.

It takes you out of the present moment. It takes your attention away from the actual issue, the actual event, the actual problem. Let's say that you really might be able to solve it, and it puts your mind into past resentments or future worries.

"What if I don't figure this out? What if this really is happening? What if I can't deal with it? What if this person does this and this and this and that?" All that does is add to the situation.

You are your attention. Think about it. You are exactly there where your attention is. You can be in no place and in no time where your attention isn't. You can be in the past; you can live in the past if your attention is on the past. You can live in the now if your attention is in the now, and you can keep living in the future if your attention is in the future.

By the way, there's nothing wrong with that. We talked about this before. There's nothing wrong with having your attention on the past or the future because, as I said before, it's quite enjoyable to go back to past pleasant memories or to things that you're excited about looking forward to in the future.

There's nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is if we're not in control of our attention. We'll never be in full control of our attention. That's the whole point.

When we see something catch our eyes, something that might be dangerous to us, that's something that's happening outside of our control. We're not deliberately putting our attention there; it's catching our eyes, literally, as the phrase says. That's a good thing; that's a survival thing.

But if we are not in control of our attention most of the time, then we are not in control of our own being most of the time, and we're not really living most of the time. To have your attention randomly scattered is not living; it's being alive, but it's not living.

This is why acceptance is important because it takes away all the things that push and pull your attention into the past, into the future, into some other place in the present moment that you don't want it to go to.

That's what it's about. You are your attention. You are your awareness. People who are physically in a room but whose attention is somewhere else, we call them unaware. Or even if it's a medical condition, if their awareness is not there but their body is here, we call that a coma.

Whenever you're not in control of your attention, you're not in control of yourself. When you're not in control of yourself, you're not in control of your life. When you're not in control of your life, you're not in control of your happiness.

So essentially, when you're not in control of your attention, you are not in control of your happiness. Your happiness is the one thing and the best thing that you can control.

This is why acceptance is important. Acceptance is merely recognizing reality, and recognizing reality leads to the banishment of anger and resentment and all these things that we think keep us from happiness.

But really, it's us keeping us from happiness by not accepting. Acceptance is also freeing up all that space that anger, resentment, and frustration used to take and giving it back to us to do whatever we want with it.

We can apply it to find a solution to the present event that is happening in the world, if that is a possibility. It depends on the situation. Or we can apply it to further acceptance if there is nothing we can do about it.

What's better than to accept it, to not add to the situation? We can apply whatever we want, meaning we're in control of it.

That's just what I wanted to talk about this week. I know we talked about this before in pieces, but I think it's good sometimes to repeat these things.

If you haven't read Simone Weil, I highly, highly recommend it—both for the books "Gravity and Grace" as well as "Waiting for God." I've recommended them before. I really think you should read them; it would add a lot to your understanding of acceptance. It did for me.

Whenever I recommend a book, I put it on the website, so you can always go to acceptingtheuniverse.com, go to my book recommendations, and you'll find it there.

What you'll also find there is a weekly newsletter. Videos like this come from my writing, really, and my writing is in the newsletters. It's sort of a written version of the videos, but much, much shorter. I do think sometimes more effective, actually.

My writing is really just my journal entries on Seneca's "Letters on Ethics," which is part of our book club. If you want to join the book club, the book club is the newsletter. We read a letter from Seneca's "Letters on Ethics" each week, we journal about it, and I put my journal entry out on the newsletter for everyone to read.

That's how you can read it as you write yours, before or after you write yours. That's just a way to do it together. It feels like we're doing it together to me that way.

What is also in the newsletter, other than my writing, is the newest video, my favorite quote of the week, and the newest reading recommendations of that month.

So I encourage you to sign up. You will never get anything other than this newsletter, and it's free. That's all it is; that's our book club.

I encourage you to practice some more acceptance. As soon as it clicks, you almost can't help but practice it. That's what philosophy helps us to do. It helps us understand that the things we thought were contradictions before were paradoxes.

If I accept, I can never change the situation because I've accepted it. No, you can accept and change the situation, in fact, or try to change the situation. Work on changing the situation if that's what you want.

In fact, you can do it much more effectively. That's true acceptance. Remember, to not accept an event in the world is to wish the world did not exist.