How to Become a Cloud

Of all the concepts I have created to help people overcome feeling emotional pain stemming from manipulations by the people you love or have to deal with, this has been the most widely praised.

If a plane flies into a mountain, everyone dies and the mountain gets damaged. If a plane flies through a cloud, no one is hurt, neither the passengers nor the cloud. Thus the goal is to become a cloud instead of a mountain for a pain-free life.

If someone gives you a gift, and you do not accept it, who does it belong to?

It stays with the giver.

Any verbal attack is just a knife put on the table. You have to pick up that knife to take the words personally, in order to feel pain or anger or guilt. If you leave that knife on the table, then it cannot hurt you.

Being a cloud means to allow all attacks to pass through you like the plane, without being affected in any negative way whatsoever. You become totally immune to emotional attacks and manipulation, and simultaneously become pure in heart and filled with compassion that makes you the one everyone admires and loves.

To make my point, let’s talk about dealing with racism. Racism is stupid, there is no other way to put it. So if someone is being racist to you, a random verbal attack, that person is showing they are stupid. So why should you care or be hurt by a stupid person?

Let them attack, they can say what they want, a cloud will never be affected, only a mountain will. Let’s explore in detail how to achieve this emotional freedom.

Before I can present the concept, we first need to have a small preamble of principles to form the framework that we can build the concept on. There is nothing radical in this framework, but you do need to have an open mind and just take it all as an example in case you find yourself resisting any concept. All I can ask, if you disagree with any point, is for you to take each point objectively and think about it. I will state this obvious fact: if you disagree and just shut your mind down before we finish, you have found the cause of all the troubles in your life, you are closed-minded, so of course you are going to get into conflicts.

All your emotions; positive and negative, joy and anger, all reside in one place, which is your mind. They are not physical in the sense of a hammer smashing your toe like a physical attack, or an ice cream you eat that generates a taste sensation. Emotions are experienced by an event that you become aware of in your mind, which then results in an emotional reaction. This is clear because if you are deaf and blind, you could never hear or see anything, being totally oblivious to everything as if you are in a coma, you could not have an emotional reactions to anything anyone says or does, because you would not know it happened.

All humans are exactly the same, except that everyone is different. The basic function of the way the human mind and ego functions is the same, but individuals are different based on how they each formed their personality.

There is one common need in every human being, the need of companionship. This is another topic but if you think about it, everything you and anyone does, ultimately serves the need to be liked. Thus being all the same, we can understand everyone by understanding ourselves.

Being a cloud is based on the analogy that we are all either a mountain or a cloud. Simply put, you can hit a mountain but you cannot hit a cloud.

A mountain can be built through piling rocks upon rocks. However, becoming a cloud is by removing material. What are the ‘rocks’ or ‘materials’ to be removed?

Rocks and materials are metaphors for mental concepts; thoughts, opinions, beliefs, hangups, inhibitions, fears, boundaries, dislikes etc. all combined called in a word, your ego.

Unlike building a house where you would call a supplier to deliver the materials, mental concepts have been force-fed to you, and you willingly gobbled them up without checking if the fruit has been washed from the contaminated box it came in. You have been fed poison and disease thinking you were getting nutritious food. Hepatitis or any virus is often in a droplet of water that is in or on the surface of something you eat and gets into your mental and physical organism.

The source of this mental programming is from both obvious and subtle sources. Your parents and family, religion, books, courses, social media, political movements, activists, movies, TV, advertisements, famous people selling their opinions, etc. Basically, any information that reaches your mind in any way, be you aware of that or not, is material building your mountain. Of course there is material that is presented to help you remove mental material, but it can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The Cloud concept is not feeding you any material, but rather offering you a simple concept to differentiate what is removing and what is building the mountain. I know, sounds hypocritical, but as I said at the start, just read on with an open mind to the end.

The next concept: The part of your being that ‘eats’ these mental concepts.

To become a cloud isn’t actually becoming anything. It’s removing the opinions and boundaries which make you feel pain.

They are removed through developing true compassion. Compassion is not really about feeling sorry for another person, that just pity.

Compassion means to understand what is really happening within the other person, what they are feeling and why they are doing what they do.

Compassion is Understanding

With understanding, in the deepest sense of understanding, meaning objectively and not just with your opinion of what you think you understand, why another person is attacking you by knowing their pain is causing them to behave that way, your understanding becomes true compassion. This is: ‘becoming selfless’.

Compassion is therefore the same as being humble, being selfless, meaning, it’s not about you. This is mastering the ego.

The exercise to make you able and efficient at this process is to repetitively observe yourself when you are getting angry or attacking anyone. Even if you feel your anger is justified, you must still look for the reason you are really angry. Obviously there are going to be times when you feel justified, but let’s take a couple of examples to show you what to look for.

Your child runs into the street. You scream and yell and get angry. But you are not really angry, you are scared, you do not want to lose the child you love. The other and most important type of expression of negative emotions to observe for the point of this transformation, is when you give shit to someone that is not justified. Everyone has yelled at a server in a café or a co-worker or your partner or child and realized that it was totally unjustified, leaving you wondering why you did such a horrible thing. It is usually caused by something else that is bothering you, often unrelated.

By deliberately observing your own instances of anger, finding what is really bothering you that you are venting, you will understand how the human mind and emotions really function by understanding yourself. Then you will understand what drives another person. This is the way to overcome feeling pain or other negative emotions when you are attacked, as the ancient aphorism says; ‘Know Thyself’.

The problem is you’re self-centred, you’ve got an ego, you love self-pity, you’re the centre of your universe thinking everything revolves around you, and you don’t want to know that because if you admit the truth about yourself, it’s not a pretty site.

It’s not always about you. In fact, it rarely is actually about you.

All the current hype is about loving yourself, accepting yourself as you are, you are perfect, awesome and wonderful as you are. The problem is that means you are going to ignore the truth about yourself. Therefore, you will never truly understand how the human being functions. That means you will never have true compassion for another person, and that means you will always take things personally and feel attacked and hurt. You will be a mountain. It is a poisonous concept.

By observing yourself and accepting that you have these self-centred egoistic defects, and that the cure is to see what drives you when you are expressing anger, you will have the understanding and ability to change simply with the knowledge of the truth. “The truth shall set you free.”

When you become free by observing and acknowledging the truth about yourself, not in the personal sense but in the sense of the human species, because every human being is exactly the same in the self-centredness and self-pity and egoistic feeling of being the centre of the universe, you understand what drives everyone: fear, pain and suffering. The need for companionship.

You don’t have to know what their pain is but you know that their attack is due to their pain. Then you will be more understanding and compassionate to let them vent, without you feeling attacked. The plane flies through the cloud instead of crashing into a mountain.

It’s never really about you. They are just venting their pain.

This is how we become a cloud. The exercise is that simple. Observe yourself every time you are angry, rude, insulting, intimidating, manipulating, and realize or observe yourself to see what drove you to do that.

Admitting the pain and suffering you are in, whether it is money, your job, being single or lonely, a bad relationship, bad health, scared of a hopeless future, and that all of your pains are really what make you lash out to people, whether it’s the person serving you coffee or the ones you love the most – your child, parents, spouse. And that the more you observe your own actions and true feelings from the point of view of a scientist or an alien from another world studying human beings, the more you will understand the species, and that will develop the true sense of compassion and selflessness within you. This in turn removes the magnet which draws pain and suffering into your life. In this way you become a cloud.

To give you a bit more encouragement, the part that feels the pain is not natural like the emotional heart. It is an implant. It gets implanted in your mind through the process of trying to control a child with guilt.

As you grow up, your parents, your religion, your culture make you feel inferior so that you are easy to control. If you observe this objectively you can see how religion obviously does that. Parents do that by telling you that you owe them because they gave birth to you and raised you. This is how that organ is implanted into your mind, so what you’re doing is removing an implant that is not natural to the human being as you were born. You are removing the material that built the mountain.

It is very important to understand that this implant is NOT connected to your ability to love and have attachment and care for anyone. That is totally separate. One is love and the other is guilt. It’s like a pacemaker that limits the heart rate so you can never run.

Removing guilt does not remove love and affection and caring for the people in your life. It merely removes all the negative feelings that you have which causes you the pain and suffering. Guilt is actually suppressing your ability to love and be emotionally free. Removing this allows you to love unconditionally, without being manipulated so that your so-called expressions of love and devotion are actually out of avoiding feeling guilty.

This is not a simple thing. To see change may take months or years, but it doesn’t take any time out of your day, so you can easily practice observing yourself and others without any disruption to your normal life. You must be devoted to this path for at least six months to one year or maybe even two years before you start to feel a significant change.

It takes this acceptance of how long the change will take because it is so gradual. You have to fight your habitual pattern of how you function in order to make this change permanent. If you can make the desire that you really want to end the pains you feel, then it will work, but it will take time.

In summary

It’s just breaking a habitual way of behaving through understanding yourself, which is the key, and thus understanding others. That is the first step which leads to an automatic mastery of the self-centred ego which is the cause of all our troubles and pains, and arrogance.

It’s not actually about you, it never really is.

Source by David Samuel