The Difference Between Surviving & Thriving
Understanding the important difference between surviving and thriving
Becoming aware of when our engagement with our 'survival' is really just a justification for us becoming lost in the more phenomenal aspects of our lives
When you stop only trying to survive, it is then that you can really begin to thrive.
Our basic survival is a particularly relevant topic to look at when we are trying to develop ourselves. This is because our excessive focus on this particular aspect of our lives in more modern times should be a clear indication to us that we have become more focused on the phenomenal nature of the world and have lost sight of its underlying reality. We often hear people saying that they just “have to do” something, or if they do not do that particular thing they “cannot survive”, but is this really the reality of the situation being described or is it just something that many people have convinced themselves of? The truth is that the vast majority of our references to our ‘survival’ are very rarely related to us having to sustain our own physical existence in some way.
Although we may have convinced ourselves that a large variety of the phenomena we interact and engage with are essential to our ‘survival’ in some way, whatever form those phenomena take, the truth is that in most cases the notion of our survival being put forward is really just a justification for the various distractions that we have become attached to, and are therefore, in reality, things which we have often made a part of our own lives because we lack clear perception of what is actually needed for our survival.
These various different distractions play a major role in taking our focus away from our internal landscape as we become lost in these various different external phenomena, which means that little internal shifts may occur for us whilst we remain engaged with such phenomena in such a subconscious manner. This results in a variety of different internal conflicts remaining within us, which in some way arrests our development until they are able to be looked at. The irony of the situation being that the existence of these internal conflicts often arises as a result of our unintegrated interactions with these external phenomena in some form or another in the first place. Becoming aware of this helps us to realise how a vicious cycle can become active in our lives.
