Liberation from the Lie: Recent Comments

I just finished Liberation from the Lie this instant.
It’s the only perfect book I’ve ever read.
You’ve seen the whole situation – humanity, childhood, civilization,
ecocide, spirit, the universe – in its entirety.
And I am very, very grateful. K.K. (Regarding Liberation from the Lie).

I’ve been about this thing for a while now, not that long. Haven,t read books about it but have sat by the videos of Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, Eckhart Tolle and others…None of them has said it so perfectly for me to understand as you – OR, maybe you said the last things I needed to understand, for that coin to hit the ground…I don’t know, this is such a strange world. Thank you. A.D. (Regarding this video - Who Am I?).

Thanks for the wonderful conversation. In a world where most people feel like “independent waves” disconnnected from the ocean these talks feel like a breath of fresh air. A.P. (From a very recent consultation)

You can see many other reader comments here.

I take some pride in these writings, videos and talks and it is in that spirit that I invite you to take a look at what is offered here.

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All that the Self Strives for is Here

ee for yourself.

There is the universe of things; thoughts, feelings, situations, people, and stuff. And, in the center, there is THIS!

This middle place, this now, this perfect calm, this warm and all-encompassing place.

And then there is a mind; a very special “thing” that forms a bridge between the universe and the perfect calm. This mind is an aspect of the living body and it loves to interact with the world. It loves coffee in the morning. It loves listening to this glorious performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, it loves writing these words to no one in particular … perhaps only to itself.

We are home when we end the struggle with the mind.

And what does it mean to end the struggle with the mind?

It means to bring what has been rent into the one that has always been whole. This nimble and active is everywhere. It is the persistent fellow-traveler with all that is. The person we believe ourselves to be, tends to be this same mind. That is the master illusion, for the mind is like a magician. Truly it is everywhere … everywhere but here, this one silent, all suffusing place.

When we are cast into confusion, doubt, want, and fear, know that we have taken refuge into the mind, into that which we are not. When we take ourselves to be lacking and fearful, we are that story-projecting mind. We have lost touch with the central, silence that over-girds all that can be seen and felt.

Right now fall back into that warm, delicious, limitless space and let the mind be as it is.

Where you are is here. Here is the silent pivot, the place around which birth and death happen and everything in-between. That which sees the mind finds its home here.

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Being the Self: Ending Seeking

The Question

Is there a key to well-being and happiness?

I believe there is and it is very simple. This blog post describes it as clearly as I am capable of writing.

The Buddha and Us

The only difference between “a Buddha” and everyone else is that the Buddha inhabits the Self, he is the self, while everyone else is in their heads and detached from their underlying self.

Thus a Buddha is the world, while everyone else is searching for this world, as they inhabit their minds. The Buddha is not seeking. She is.

Noticing the Difference

Notice the difference between looking for something and contrast that with the experience of seeing whatever you are seeing for its own, immediate sake. What is it like listening to music for its own sake as opposed for wanting something from the music?

I will put all of this another way.

The mind is connected to the world through its wants and fears. This connection becomes our psychological identity. We are this array of wants and fears. This is a learned identity.

For the “Buddha” the mind may continue expressing itself as wants and fears, but they are just happenings within the limitless field of the self. The world is not separate from them. A desire happens until it doesn’t happen. A fear happens, until it too doesn’t happen.

An Example

This morning I took my dog Lucy for a walk. The Self that got out of bed was the same Self that got ready for the walk. The steps in putting on a sweater and a coat, that placed the leash in the pocket of the coat and made sure that we had a ball to play with all happened within the field of the Self. All of this came and went, but the Self was continuous and content throughout the comings and goings of the mind and the actions of the world.

Discussion

This self-less Self is available to us in every moment. It exists below or before the level of thought. Thoughts are fast, energetic happenings on its apparent surface.

The seeker is a role of the thinker. Free of that role, the Self automatically reveals itself. There is no effort involved at all. This is not an esoteric process. It is utterly natural, rather funny, and effortless.

And here is the main point: the seeker is always looking for something already loosely defined and formed by the mind. Because it is OF the mind, the ONLY thing it can find is another thought! So, if you are a seeker for financial success and the security that it is believed it will bring, the mind will equate with money with security, and that security must always elude it.

The Buddha has realized this as is the fatal flaw of all seeking. The only purpose to seeking, ultimately, is to see its futility. When this is seen, seeking, itself, falls away. But seeking is more than just futile, it becomes the obstacle to feeling and connecting with the underlying Self.

The self, that was always a hair’s breath away, reveals itself when this identification with seeking stops.

Note

Watch how the mind actually does stop seeking, only to search for another issue or goal on which to organize another spout of seeking. It is like a dark hunter whose quarry must always elude it.

There is nothing wrong with seeking, per se. One of the most powerful activities of the mind is to seek, but when, out of an underlying identification with lack (the core illusion of the false self) that seeking is designed to improve or discover a new identity, that is when the endless confusion arises. Just notice this phenomenon as is happens. That is all you can do.

The True Parasites

Today’s New York Times featured an article about how so many Chinese families struggle an sacrifice to make it possible for their children to go to college. We are told just how profound the levels of industrial poverty in China are. The article begins:

Wu Yiebing has been going down coal shafts practically every workday of his life, wrestling an electric drill for $500 a month in the choking dust of claustrophobic tunnels, with one goal in mind: paying for his daughter’s education.

His wife, Cao Weiping, toils from dawn to sunset in orchards every day during apple season in May and June. She earns $12 a day tying little plastic bags one at a time around 3,000 young apples on trees, to protect them from insects. The rest of the year she works as a substitute store clerk, earning several dollars a day, all going toward their daughter’s education.

Mr. Wu and Mrs. Cao, who grew up in tiny villages in western China and became migrants in search of better-paying work, have scrimped their entire lives. Continue reading →

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INT_listenup_origListen up!

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been posting at my new site and have laboriously copied its contents to the Liberation from the Lie site. Those days are over. No more duplicate posts will happen.

If you enjoy this site and want to continue reading its amazing, timely, and life-changing posts, then head on over to the Trust Liberation site.

The Meaning of Life

Hyalite-Lake-Reflection-4webThe are no final formulas. The purpose of seeking is the realization that nothing enduring can ever be found. Life was never meant to be figured out. The seeking for a final formula is nothing more than upholding the belief in a separate me that needs to be saved from itself. Ultimately, that is seen as work in the service of a desperate and fearful ego. That is the primary illusion.

Life will move from complex and challenging to simple and easy.

Life demands only one thing: to be lived. We are part of the dance whether we like it or not. There is no solution to death and decline. We all will decline and we all will die; that too is part of the package.

Living well means to cultivate resilience, grace, courage, honesty, appreciation, compassion and, perhaps more than anything else humor.

The key to wisdom is the direct seeing of connection that binds everything that is in time and space. We are that. Nothing else needs to be said.

Why Awakening Teachings are Rarely Sustainable

LiberationCoverCIt’s easy to be drawn to the beautiful, uplifting pronouncements made by well-meaning people like Scott Kiloby, Jeff Foster, and quite a few others. They sound really good and make us feel hopeful about ourselves. They appeal to us because they make us feel good and who doesn’t want to feel good? I often enjoy their writings as well.

But until we recognize the full depth and breadth of our own personal Wound, any esoteric teaching will be impossible to sustain. In fact, the persona with needing to sustain it, will be a Fear-Self; a fake spiritualist. This is why I wrote Liberation from the Lie.

These beautiful sounding phrases really do connect us with the wholeness that underlies the surface textures of our life, but they just have nothing for them to hold onto. The reader of these words is a Fear-Self; one seeking to improve themselves and this entity, although it feels very real, is not who we truly are.The habitual echoes of the Wound and our Fear-Selves will always return and reassert themselves in full force. The personal psychological entities exist much closer to the surface of our lives than does the underlying wholeness pointed to in these nice sounding phrases.

If this were not true, then all of us would spontaneously awaken. It would be a relatively simple and easy task available to all of us. But life doesn’t operate that way.

More than anything else, waking up means to be totally grounded in what is real. As a seeker, there is nothing more real than our Wound and Fear-Selves. Even reading Liberation from the Lie is not nearly enough. You need to absorb what is written there and then investigate your own life with the lessons and exercises that are described, in detail, in this book.

That is the way. There just aren’t any shortcuts. Time is short and each days it grows just a little shorter. The time to find out who you are is now.

Read what one person had to recently say about they’re reading of Liberation:

I just wanted to drop you a note. I recently re-read your original book after a couple of years. It gets better every time I read it. As an “achiever”, self-diagnosed before I came across your work, you described the nuances of this pattern type so well. Your work gives me almost instantaneous relief while reading. It’s like my subconscious can relax and ease up its forward pressing–the lever of wanting, seeking the answer right around the corner, accomplishing, doing, working, striving, straining to be better, more, maximize my potential, etc. Your analysis and theories help elucidate the origin, manifestation, and proliferation of the fear self/ego domination extremely well..I think labeling and outlining the process helps put the mind at ease–giving one the sense that they’re not alone.

When you spoke about your search for answers in the beginning of your first book, and how the search always circles back, it was like you were describing my life story from 21-35. I am 35 now. This journey is not for the faint of heart. Just wanted to say thanks. I’m grateful that you continue to raise awareness about this very critical issue in our human psychology and society. You’d think educators, PTA, government officials, would have consulted with you to integrate some preventative methods to give our children some of their life back. What a waste of human potential? You grow up. And then spend 18 years undoing just about everything you were taught.

The journey is only for the courageous and those willing to really dedicate themselves to this exploration. Only you will know if you possess the commitment that is essential for this task.

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How Might Your Life Be Changed If …

In this moment …

How might your life be changed, if there wasn’t the slightest effort to feel secure – if that person who needed to feel secure does not truly exist?

How might your life be changed, if there wasn’t the slightest effort to obtain more power – if that person who needed more power does not truly exist?

How might your life be changed, if there wasn’t the slightest effort to understand more on what is happening – if that person who needed more understanding does not truly exist?

How might your life be changed, if there was the slight effort invested in being loved or validated in this moment – if that person who needed that validation/love does not truly exist?

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Final Liberation and the History of God

The Primal God

The lives of human beings and of nature are more than just intertwined, they are one. We live on what nature provides and we honor that giving by trusting nature, giving thanks to her generosity and giving back whenever and wherever possible. This vast flow of self-regenerating existence is the God in all things. Everything is God and there is no place anyone could ever draw a line of separation what is the Primal God and what is not.

The wildness of the oceans and the mountains is the same wildness in the play of a child. The quiet of the night sky is the same quiet of the elders. The perfection of God’s work is everywhere. It is in all things without exception. This is the universal field of God.

We cannot build a structure for the primal God because no place could hold him. The idea of such a structure is preposterous for this God is in all places. God is the emanation of all things. Thus the Primal God is without form.

The formless God cannot be envisioned as any form or within any form, since this God is experienced in every form and as every form.

The God of Power

The God of Power arose in the great river valleys. Along the bank of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus, and Yellow River, the warm coastal regions of Mexico, and the calms Pacific headlands of Peru. In these places, the God of Human Power was birthed. Continue reading →

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I Need My Fucking Teddy Bear!: The Tao of the Path

Don’t take away my teddy bear. If you take away my teddy bear, I’ll be alone with all my fears. I must cling to my teddy bear and if you take it away, I might even have to kill you.

My teddy bear is my analytical brain. This is what I rely on to find security and structure in a world that is neither secure or structured in the way I prefer to think of it.

Inquiry is the dislodging of our very own teddy bear.

Let’s take this metaphor one step further.

The teachings gradually or forcefully rip the teddy bear from our fearful grip, but it doesn’t remove the teddy bear from the universe. Rather after it yanks it from our hands it tosses it across the room. There it waits for us to pick it up again and return to it again and again and, for nearly all of us, eventually it returns to us on a very permanent basis until we die. This is why so few of us actually wakes up from the illusion of fear.

Spiritual discipline demands that we resist the urge to pick up the teddy bear whose relentless stare seems to burn a fiery hole in our hearts and minds.

Who or what is your teddy bear? Continue reading →

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How to Become a Hunter-Gatherer: Throwing Off the Rags of Domestication

Today’s post focuses on the source of all unnecessary suffering and the doorway to complete and full awakening.

Since moving to New York, I have been struck by the amount of walking and climbing I need to do everyday. Walking the dog is not only about 1.5 miles of walking through city streets and Central Park, but it also demands a three floor walk up. Traveling around the city demands extraordinary amounts of walking and stair climbing as one one enters and exits various subway stations. Meanwhile, I cart heavy loads of groceries and odds and ends in back packs.

I say all of this for a reason. Sometimes I get very tired from the strain of all of this and I start to think. My thoughts focus on two things. First, they start counting and measuring just how much I have walked and climbed and then they start focusing on the misery of my life. I can become quite bitter and I start to internally rant about my age, the cold, the demands of life without a car, and that everyday stretching out to infinity will be filled with these physical demands.

Let’s stop there and switch directions. Don’t worry. We’ll return to the theme of “me” in a moment.

These rambling observations raise an issue that has been very important to my work and especially about the ideas that brought about Liberation from the Lie, which is this: is there a decisive difference between modern people and hunter-gatherers that could shed some light on these investigations?

First I want to state a principle that I ask you take, for now, on faith and it is this:

The psychological assertion of the I/me/my/mine as the center of experience is a fallacy and is the source of all suffering.

Let’s place our hunter-gatherer in the heart of New York City and ask him to walk my dog and do all the chores I do through the day. How does he experience the very same “life”?

He takes the leash into his hands and feels the texture of the rope. It is black and has some heft. His eyes meet Lucy’s and their lives begin to intertwine. Her joy is his joy. As he walks down the three floors to the doorway that leads to the street, she bounds ahead of him and then playfully races up the steps to join the slower man.

As they walk to the park no one actually walks, rather walking, its feel, the breath that accompanies it, the weight of the feet feeling the pavement, Lucy’s intense sniffing … all simply happen as they do. They are seen with a kind of intense vividness of which no person can ever lay claim. The buildings rise up around them like butte-like monoliths. The roar of the traffic is just what it is. The smells of engines soils the air and there may be a kind of sadness in that. As they enter the park, they both feel the sturdy earth beneath their feet. Fields, rocks and trees … all are seen in the light of the sun or filtered through the clouds stretching to the horizon.

Things happen. Light changes. The weight of a long walk is felt in the muscles, all of this happens … but very little personal narrative arises from the field of simple awareness. The amazement is in this living moment and not in the ceaseless repeating, neurotic stories of the modern, domesticated man.

There is really only one difference between modern man and our hypothetical hunter-gatherer. Modern man is the heir of hundreds of generations where the focus of life slowly migrated from the immediacy of awareness to the story of “me”. This is a cultural story that we cannot avoid or deny. It is our lot. Seeing through the illusory core thought of “me” is the greatest challenge we will ever face.

When we are immersed in the story of “me”, we inherit all the rest of our stories; poor me, wonderful me, unlucky me, smart me, dumb me, fucked up me, unhappy me, sad me.

But when all of that falls away as mere story, fiction, the light of shining awareness is revealed free of the weight of this “me”. The point is not to try being aware. That’s just the “me” in its role as spiritual ego. The light is always present. We never need to become it. The whole challenge is seeing time and again the falseness of the “me” story.

The structure or edifice of the “me” is an overlay to the light that resides beneath it. As this “me” story falls away, what is revealed is truth itself. This is what makes it so wonderful. Awareness is truth and truth is awareness. There is no one who is aware. There is just this simple seeing free of the glue-like weight of the “me”. This is the core of trust and connection.

So as you go about your day, see the “me” story. It will always be one or two steps away from immediate reality. It is an add-on to direct experience. As I tromp up the stairs for the umpteenth time and my legs are feeling like they can’t go any further and my breathing is labored, it is not me who is weak and struggling for wind, rather there is just tired legs and working lungs and there can be even a joy in that! The only thing that can drain the joy from any experience is the asphyxiating overlay of the monotonous “me” story with which we cover so much of our living experience.

Immersed in the story of “me”, we live lives obsessively focusing on all the wrongs done to us, as well as to always be looking forward to that next vacation, that next break from the ruthless monotony of our me-filled day-to-day lives.

The hunter-gatherer did not live this life and they didn’t have the internet, TV, or artisinal gelato to fill the vacuity of their days. They did not live in such safe, suffocating comfort. They needed to be alive with the fire of awareness. Thus they knew the sky and the clouds. They could read the air. Their senses pulsated with the immediacy of life. In one word, they were alive.

In contrast, we seem to search, in circles, for this same vivid life and it eludes us except for those moments when the heart is touched by unexpected beauty and connection.

That world is inviting you right now. Just follow the light. The door is open and is waiting for only one person: you. Become who you already are; a hunter-gatherer. Throw off the rags of your pitiful domestication and become the wildness of this very moment. Then, and only then, are you the warrior, the lover, the vehicle of life itself.

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In Search of Me

Most people love to explore. They hear of a place they want to see and then make some kind of plan that will take them there. It might be a nature walk or a trip to the beach, but whatever it is, it is something that excites the heart and makes life fun and interesting.

One of the things I’ve heard a lot about and that stimulates my own curiosity is “concepts”. I wanted to find out if I could find a concept and maybe take one home with me and place in a special place in our home.

One of the concepts that sounded especially appealing was the one called Freedom. Wouldn’t it be great if I could find this concept in the actual world of experience, take it home and show it off to my friends and family? I couldn’t wait to get started on my new journey.

But before I began my trip, I wanted to do a little research to help me find this concept. So I googled: “Where can I find freedom” and my computer came up with about 2.35 billion possibilities. It turns out that Freedom is all over the place. You can find it anywhere!

But as I started to go over the list of 2.35 billion possibilities, what seemed so easy started to feel a little murky. This Freedom thing was something that people describe and talk about all the time, but it is not nearly so easily found and possessed. I really wanted my own little piece of freedom and it was beginning to feel like getting even a very small piece of Freedom was going to be a little more tricky than what I first thought.

I decided to consult with an expert. So I called my local university and asked to be connected to their Department of Travel and Leisure Studies. But when I was told that there are not actual fields of study with that name, I asked the friendly person on the line, where I could get some help in finding Freedom. I could tell that person on the other side was sounding a little confused about a question that seemed very simple and straight-forward to me. With a growing sense of frustration, she asked me, “What are you searching for?”. I said, “I just need a little direction in finding Freedom.” I could hear a little anger seeping into her voice when she demanded, “Is this a prank call?” I said “No, I’m sorry you have that impression. I just wanted to find out if I could locate a common concept in the actual world and was looking for a little help with that.”

She hung up on me. Maybe I should have called the Philosophy Department directly or maybe the Department of Hospitality.

It occurred to me that maybe I’m not asking the right question. So I went back to the drawing boards.

Freedom, even with its 2.35 billion Google hits had proved to be an elusive target. So I decided to lower the bar a little. Goodness seemed to be a simpler concept to find. I wanted just a little piece of goodness to place in my still completely empty Concept Collection.

I decided to skip the whole computer thing and just got into my car and ventured out into the country in search of goodness. First I ventured South to the land of cotton and gracious plantation houses where kindly gentlemen and ladies reclined in their woven settees and imbibed in colorful highballs. I did manage to see many men and women in towns that grew very dark as the sun descended just as the hard lights of hundreds of fast food dining establishments turned themselves on, as if to fight the night … so I did find hamburgers a’plenty, along with motels, highways, piney woods, and gas stations, but goodness eluded me.

So I went North to the land of ice and snow and then I went East to the land of great cities and finally I ventured West to the mountains and valleys. I saw a world filled with sights. I saw parents walking their children hand-in-hand accompanying them to their school bus stop, I saw millions staring into bright blue screens inside tight, little cubicles, I saw old folks wandering the brightly lit aisles of vast, palatial discount stores. I saw paper and plastic blowing across the roads, I saw deserts and mountains, I saw seabirds flying and seemingly laughing their way across blue skies, I saw millions of cows marching through black, fecal fields to their slaughter to make product for the hamburger stores. I saw all of this, but I could never find any actual goodness.

It had also occurred to me, that I could not locate any actual badness either. As confused as ever, I decided to end my grand search.

I sat on the edge of a canyon and pondered my many questions.

Above me lay a great field of stars twinkled in a crystal clear, cold Vermont night-sky. I saw everything around me, everything, seemingly, inside of me.

And then this question happened onto me, “Can I find myself in this great world?”

I looked around and something stirred from deep within.

Just to my right, in the bright sunlight of a Pennsylvania mid-July stood my deceased father. I was a very little boy and I looked up to him as I might look up to a God. He looked straight ahead with a smile on his face. He was holding a golf club, for he loved golf. I could feel him next to me.

I lowered myself to the living ground and felt it in my hands as I sensed the story of me, of my dad, of my mom, of my brother, of my relatives, of this world. Many of them are dead and yet here all of them were assembling in the clouds of memory, need, and exploration.

Was this me?

As I saw all of this around me I sought to obtain just a very small piece of this me, something I could keep and hold, something I could place, with reverence, on our mantel. This too eluded me.

Who was it that is so eluded?

Who was it that could not possess anything? Who was it that could find only nothing … yet everything?

I went home.

I could conjure these concepts in this mind. I could conjure up those old memories, the world seemed to conjure itself before me, but this “thing” that resided in the middle of it all, this thing I have long referred to as “me”, what was that? I had to wonder if “me” was the right word that could describe this sense of being in the middle of everything.

There was a man who called himself a Guru who said that human beings need to realize the power of love in this life to usher in what he called an Age of Aquarius. This thing he called love was, to my level of understanding, no different from freedom, goodness,badness, or even me. Each is only a concept.

But before you draw any conclusions, please consider this.

You are the first person to ever have been. You are surrounded by the wild world. Can you find badness as opposed to goodness? Can you see freedom in contrast with enslavement?

In this world no such entities exist. These words, these concepts are just stuff of a psyche cut-off from its own direct experience.

What is there then?

In this wild world there is just this free from of any projected concept, judgment, preference or evaluation. There is just the world itself. Is the world enough?

So if you get into your car and take a ride to find yourself, I can tell you what you’ll find, no matter how carefully you look. You’ll find what is already here.

One day a young man named Eric went out in search for enlightenment. He read all the guide books. He spoke to people who claimed that they had found this elusive place those same people who claimed that they new that pathway there.

Eric was given many instructions on how to find enlightenment and he followed them all. And just like the search for freedom, goodness and love, there was no where in the whole universe where enlightenment could be found, for a concept can never be found. It is just a passing thought, a non-thing, an echo of a need, a odd-knocking about from the land of Lack.

As a seeker, this “me” was on the periphery looking at this world, as if from the outside looking in. Now, with the seeking put aside, it is the world itself that is like a vast periphery with me in its elusive center.

And then I found it all.

I found it in the one place where I had never searched. In this place I found enslavement, freedom, hate, love, badness and goodness and everything else.

And so it is said:

We had to take the journey that starts here and ends here.

As long as we on the circular road, the truth was everywhere but everywhere was way too easy for us hard-working seekers. We knew better. Life is a poor substitute for the “me”!

Goodness, love, caring and patience exist in two places; they exist as ugly shadows produced by fearful egos who demand that they appear better than what they believe they are and … they exist free in this moment when all seeking, when all concepts, when all beliefs are seen as the phantasms they truly are.

The greatest and most perplexing phantasm is the “me” itself. The lost soul in search for itself.

The seeker is inspired by concepts and he will find none. Until that is seen, the seeking will continue. The search for what exists exclusively in the mind is an infinite search. Both the seeker and that which he seeks are concepts … mind stuff. The seeking for happiness, security or enlightenment … they are the veils. Forget the phantoms and find out what is real.

If you have to, imagine a world free of all concepts, including love and happiness. What is that world like? This is the actual world, but the world of concepts is the fiction.  There are no winners or losers … there are NO CONCEPTS. Your seeking is done.

Do you truly want to “go with the flow”? I can tell you where that stream is, but you need to abandon all your dream and hopes to find the one true stream, you need to realize that every concept, no matter how beautiful and spiritual it might sound to your ego-brain, is a phantom … especially the one that goes by the false name of Me.

It is here and its name is This.

Ponder deeply this post and all questions will have been answered.

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The New Year’s Pill of Happiness

If you’re anything like me, and I’m guessing that you are, then you can see how the mind loves to draw conclusions about people, life, beliefs, and one’s own self. A conclusion feels like a final knowing. It possesses a self-certainty about it.

In this post, we are talking about conclusions that are negative, bitter and persistent.

When I’m walking on the streets of New York, I am often irritated by the seemingly constant and stupid honking of car horns. The barrage of noise makes me angry. My mind draws two, seemingly inevitable, conclusions.

  1. These people are jerks; and
  2. I hate living in New York.

Negative feelings are perfectly okay. We all have them. The Buddha had them. But a conclusion is different. It is a self-certainty. Conclusions are the way we draw a hard line separating us from the object of our contempt. Conclusions possess the roots of hate.

When we construct a conclusion about another, we are saying:

I am better than you.

When we construct a bitter conclusion about ourselves, we are saying:

I am hopeless.

We can be irritated by something we don’t like; whether it be drivers honking their horns or piles of uncollected trash, but we don’t ever have to add the rock-hard condition of a conclusion to that negative experience.

We can feel the quality of a conclusion in our body. I feel it in my lower jaw. It is the very muscular contraction that prevents a smile from happening.

A conclusion is, always, untrue. It is the triumph of belief over reality.

Free of the process of conclusions, a joy and light immediately begins to fill our life, even when life is hard. The negative judgments and conclusions we have constructed about ourselves and our life fall away.

What remains is the joy, contentment, clarity, and tranquility that you have sought through all of your hard, determined and resolute efforting.

Right now try this: think of something that you’re not happy about and create a strong negative conclusion about it. Then release just the quality of this feeling being a conclusion. What does that feel like in your direct experience?

This is a beautiful and enduring New Year’s resolution. When you give yourselves this gift, you give the world the gift of your own wondrous, shining self. This is not a conclusion. It is an observed truth.

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Examples of Awakening: The Door is Open

I am temporarily living in midtown Manhattan. It’s dirty, noisy and just unpleasant.

Every morning I need to walk my dog in this completely paved world. My dog really needs just a little grass and earth on which to pee, but there is no grass or dirt anywhere, so our walks are long and labored in weather that is cold, windy and wet. It is often a rather unpleasant experience.

So my mind judges the experience as “unpleasant”. I can have thoughts like: “I hate living in midtown Manhattan” or “I hate New York” or “Why did we get a dog?”

These thoughts happen. Prior to the realization that interest in the “me” has just drifted away, I made have gotten down on myself for having these thoughts. I would judge myself negatively for having them.

I would think: “I am such a poser. For someone who has dedicated his life to Buddhist meditation and ‘spiritual’ exploration, I am a failure.”

But, with this realization, this first group of thoughts may or may not happen, but they are not grasped by an ambitious and judgmental ego. They no longer define who I am, because who I am is not defined by ANY thought or ANY group of thoughts. So if thoughts, that the mind labels as “negative” happen … who cares? They happen. Everything happens. Genocide happens … anything that can happen will happen. We never need to fall into the error of belief that says: “I shouldn’t be doing this thought.” because you are not the personal one doing the thought.

It is, precisely, the thought, “I should not be having this thought” through which the false “me” is created.

“I should not”

“She should not”

“They should not”

Any “should” statement is fantasy. It creates a false line of separation, where the personal ego judges what its own body/mind is doing/thinking and it also rejects what is happening in the world.

When interest in the “me” dies all on its own, we are free. This dying can not be forced. It needs to happen on its own.

We see ten thousand times how all of our working on “me” just does not have any pay-off. It is just a self-sustaining spinning-like motion whose projected pivot is, itself, false.

Let’s take a much simpler example.

I look at my dog. She is beautiful and calm. I have this thought:

I am looking at my dog.

What is happening in that thought? Prior to waking up to the truth on the absence of the “me”, the emotional emphasis is on “I”. This experience is happening to me. After waking up to the realization that this “me” is only a psychological projection, the emotive happening is on the event of seeing itself. It is free of the gravitational pull of the me.

You can apply this example to everything “happening” in life. Notice how the “I/me” pulls every experience into itself and drains life of its living immediacy. See this often and you will be free. Just notice this gravitational-like pull. Feel the emotion. Notice the energy.

Now go to a mirror and look at your face and body. Feel the energy being drawn into the ego-like “I/me”. Feel its pull. Now take this all one step further … try perceiving the pull itself as merely another inevitable happening. It’s all okay.

Remember that everything that is observed has already happened. It’s past … ancient history … gone. The living moment is untouchable and free of weight … of any kind.

If life feels dead to you, know that what you’re really experiencing is the ego’s twist on immediate experience. You’re feeling the boring, monotonous weight of the psychological “me”.

This gravitational pull of the “I/me” is invisible. It happens so fast, we can barely notice it. But it’s there. It’s happening. You get free by just seeing it (maybe ten thousand times!!!).

For me … I just lost interest in me. It became something I could no longer trust. I found the psychological me quite boring. But the living, immediate me … well that’s another story!