Why Is It So Hard to Find One's Own Self? To me that question is decisive. It is the one question that can reveal to us what has been overlooked. Let’s take a closer look.

I wonder; does my dog struggle to find out who she is? Do the birds I hear chirping and singing this morning; do they work on their elusive identity? Or is this only a human problem?

Do the nomadic tribesman of Australia or Brazil wonder who they are? Based on my own research, the answer is “no”.

The problem of who we are is found to be only a problem for people raised in relatively recent civilization. So the question evolves to this: what is it about modern civilization that creates this crisis of identity? Now we seem to be getting somewhere with our inquiry.

Civilization is a dangerous place. It’s a place where we grow up with the understanding that this is a place with few winners and many losers. We must strive to win, for it is in winning that we obtain the validation from others and ourselves that we need to justify our self-worth. Losing is for losers and that is to be avoided in all costs. Even the spiritual game is one of very few winners and many, many others.

This world of winning and losing is unique to civilized life. Born as sacred beings we are ill-equipped to compete on the battlefield of modern civilization.

Tags: seeking, Belief, identity

So much spiritual searching and self-improvement is founded on the premise that I don’t like myself as I believe I am and need to use these proven methods to produce a brand new me. Some religions use the same ideology, that when we finally realize their god in our life, we will be re-born.

All such processes could not exist were it not for an even stronger belief in our innate deficiency. Without that belief the whole edifice of so much spiritualism and organized religion collapses. For those of you who have read my book, even the vast cultural structures of civilization are dependent on that exact same belief. We must first reject ourselves to accept the demands for obedience thrust at us by our parents, our schools, our government, and our jobs. Thus, the role of the family and formal education is to reinforce the deficiency belief until it is very deeply rooted in the self-identity. Civilization relies on self-negation. The details can get a little complicated, but they are fully documented my book.

So the bad news is, you will always be who you are and the great news is you will always be who you are. You see, there is just no escaping the self. No matter how well intended, no matter how earnest we are in our prodigious efforts at meditating 8 hours a day or conjuring up the most banal fantasies, we will never be Ramana Maharishi or even Napoleon. Conversely, no matter how hard they might have tried, they will never be you.

Consider that possibility - that if you were to become very famous, there would be many thousands of people “out there” working day and night to become like you. The insanity of it ought to show us the insanity of imitation and self-rejection.

All of this seeking, all of this needing to be someone different from who you are is, once it comes to conscious attention, the primary place of sustained discomfort in your life. Of course, seeing it is just the first step in our only authentic healing. Fortunately seeing it is also the final step in our self-healing.

Once we begin to relax into our primal nature, which is the very essence of our existence and getting very familiar and comfortable with that feeling - even the anxiety - if it’s there - the energy that has supported the self-contempt and the seeking that self-contempt gave birth to begins to dissipate. It’s really as simple and as challenging as that.

You see that all of your aspirations to become someone you are not have all been symptoms of self-rejection. Moreover, this self-rejection is a perfect echo of all the self-rejection we have received from other people and organizations in our lives - starting with our well-intended parents. Again, you will probably need to read the book to fill in all the gaps that I cannot cover in this short post, but, just for now, please take my word for it.

Your seeking was essential to get you to this level of self-discovery. It was a necessary phase. But now we can see that it was really the final stage of our self-rejection. Now comes the time of return, of going back to our essential selves. Quite literally, we reverse the energy of self-negation through relaxing with the primal being that we are. This is the time of nurturing our root being and preparing the soil for the flower that will, in time, bloom. I sense that it is blooming already.

Tags: Belief, seeing

There is a very common error that runs threw much of what is called spiritual teaching (I gag ever so slightly with the phrase – sorry). And that is the idea that passion, excitement, enthusiasm, sarcasm, irony, and joking are somehow a problem. These same teachings also tend to make the claim that sorrow, sadness, and introversion are also often a problem. Their many claims against the healthy behavior of human beings are based on the idea of attachment. That when our attachment to things and people is finally severed in the blazing light of enlightenment, we will be free of these all too human passions and we will, instead, burn only the cool even light of pure awareness. I say to these people – “get thee to a nunnery (or monastery).”

This is the very teaching of division. On one side are all of us defective people and on the other are these very few enlightened beings radiating light and living pure and perfect lives. The instant they got enlightened, their days of illicit thought came to a screeching halt.

Our bodies are built for passion – passion of all kinds. Those that aspire to be passionless are those who are frightened of their own humanity. This is fear operating as spiritualism.

See the rest of this post here.

Tags: identity, seeking, Fear, Fear Self, wound

Bliss – joy – contentment are closer to us than our thoughts. So why don’t we experience them? Today I’m going to shout my understanding of this conundrum ‘to the rooftops’.

The basic error is this: We believe we are the thinker.

This one core belief draws us away from the joy and contentment we so sorely want. Our experience their absence within our lives is the very call to truth that we are currently not living consciously.

Thus the lie is this one, solitary belief – that who we are is the thinker.

And so we do this endless spiritual dance. We are awareness. We are the portal of life. We are life, etc. etc. etc.

The problem with each of those sentences is that they bring us back to being a “something”. The moment we are a “something”, we bring to life our core belief.

See the remainder of the post here.

Tags: Belief, identity, seeing, thought

One of the first lessons of Zen is to see everything as if for the first time. The problem with that sentence is that we actually do see and hear and touch and taste and smell everything for the first time – there’s no as if about it. The now is always new. Of course the zen teachers know this, but they also know that we need to traverse the universe of “as if” prior to realization.

But what is seen/heard etc. is not new to the mind. The mind operates in the world of knowing. Of course, it is limited to its “knowing” and when we are tethered to the mind, we are also bounded by the same limits – for we live “as if” we are the mind and only the mind.

Think about the building (house/apartment) you’re now living in. Most of us will create a picture of this building with particular lighting, angle, and distance. This is like a mental snapshot. Now go outside and actually look at the building. Two things will happen.

See the rest of this post here.

I struggle with the challenge of expressing the meaning of liberation into the clearest language possible. And one of the reasons why I continue contributing to this blog is exactly that very challenge. But a recent conversation with someone who recently finished reading Liberation from the Lie motivated me to put the core meaning of liberation in an entirely new way.

Liberation means freedom from the attachment to any belief that is, prior to awakening, unseen. Until we are liberated from all beliefs, we will have much in common with robots.

The ultimate and final belief is that you believe you are who you think you are. Liberation means to be liberated from that belief.

You are not who you think you are. You are the presence and the creative light of this moment. When you are open to the living flow of that – utterly unconnected with your psychological self – you are free.

Who would you like to be? Do you choose to be yourself or are your behaviors, ideas, and ways of doing things and outcome of your conditioning and your culture?

Read the rest of the post here.

Tags: Belief, Freedom, slavery

Let’s start with the conclusion. The world, as it is, is exactly and precisely, as it ought to be. It can never, ever be different from what it is - and that includes your own sense of yourself. It must be the way it is. Struggling against its present reality is a form of madness and ignorance - and even that too is what is!

It is only in reflection that the belief that the world should be different from what it is arises and that reflection is also a part of this irrefutable life. The belief that things should be different is part of the process that motivates us to change. But to deny life, exactly as it is - is take refuge in an narrowly self-defined illusion. And, it is a very temporary refuge for if we can depend on nothing else, it is that the storms of life will assail exactly those self-created walls that we so depend of for safety.

In the early 1960s two scientists working for the old Bell Labs discovered something very mysterious. They were listening to deep space radiation through a radio telescope. They noticed that there was a strange buzzing that lay behind and around all other sounds. This ever- and omni-present static was, for some time, a mystery to these researchers.

Actually it turned out this static was not distant at all. What these scientists were hearing (In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the cosmic background radiation while conducting diagnostic observations using a new microwave receiver owned by Bell Laboratories.[26] ) was the actual sound of the Big Bang - the origins of the observed universe. And this sound was everywhere!

The background sound of the Big Bang is a perfect metaphor for the background static whose source is the primal inadequacy belief! It is the underlying energy that colors, however subtly, everything in our felt experience as separate individuals.

This is something that was discussed in some detail in my previous post - How Do You Feel About Life? We can now see that how we feel about life is filtered through the inadequacy belief. This is the very energy that:

• Asserts a separate “I/me”; and
• Determines our general feeling about the overall nature of life.

Fear - the vast reservoir of underlying fear - expressed as insecurity, uncertainty, and just free-floating fear - is precisely like the buzzing static of the Big Bang. It is real to the extent that it’s exists as part of our psychological selves - but is it real of the world itself? Can we actually locate a place that can justify our free-floating fears?

Let me put it to you straight rather than beat around the spiritual bush.

Liberation from the Lie - asserts that we are all, to a varying extent, living a lie. This psychological buzz is part of that lie. It’s a projection rooted in our primal invalidation that asserts that the world is not right - but it is - it’s perfectly right.

The very assertion that there is a me reading this post introduces static into the immediate experience of this moment.

Your fears are grounded in a personal fiction. It is, literally, the wall that your infantile self constructed to protect its very vulnerable self against the pain of its own being. Therefore, it needed to create a new being - what I have called the Fear-Self. Ever since our primal Wounding, it has been the task of the Fear-Self to keep you insulated from the pain and terror of that event. You will probably need to understand this whole argument on a deeper level - and I therefore recommend you to read my book (I truly wish I was in a position to give it away, but I too have bills to pay and put food on the table).

Thus this free-floating fear is an ancient emanation from a terror event. It is real only to the extent that the infantile child that was you believed it was real. And for that very young, pre-verbal child, it was very real. You and I have retained this belief ever since and the generations before us have bequeathed it to us. So it is very old indeed.

If you can fully absorb the content of this post, you will see that the whole thought/concept of the self is, itself, a fear expression! It is something that needs protecting. It is vulnerable. It will die. It must be heard? It can’t ever control things to its satisfaction, etc. etc. etc. Can you see this?

The whole self is the distant and utterly close static of your very own big bang! It is the the very lie of existence.

Let me ask you this: can anything or anyone threaten your ever-present awareness? Reflect on that question.

With this understanding we can be life itself without the reference point of the restless and fearful self.

So instead of recoiling from this fear - just be open to feeling it. Feel it with your new-found knowledge. See the very, very young you in her/his bed at night, all alone and vulnerable to all the terrors that the night and separation make possible. Really see yourself. Dig deep into the fear and begin to make it your friend. This is the friend you have been truly seeking since the very beginning of your search.

You will discover that what you feared will become, over time, the bridge to your awakening into the perfect beauty that is this very now.

Tags: seeking, wound, Fear, Fear Self

Are you engaged in the war against the self? If so, welcome to our club. No one is excluded - so it’s not a very exclusive club. Welcome anyway.

The moment life pulls us into a spiritual journey, we are likely to enter the scary world of turning against the “I/me”. The very person we have thought of as who we are becomes our ostensible enemy. How fucked up is that (I shit you not)? Because we are told that this is not our true self, everything we have thought of as ourselves becomes an unexpected obstacle.

For those of you who have been following my many posts, you will know that the themes I emphasize the most most are invalidation and the resulting inadequacy beliefs that inevitably become primary to our unseen and underlying sense of self.

We need to repress what brings our primal Wound to light. So we are compelled to live a second hand and false life. Isn’t life grand?

In a very small nutshell, when we are persistently invalidated by well meaning parents and then told that almost everything we do is wrong or bad, except those behaviors that entertain our parents, we must loose contact with our authentic selves. You see, we are born as sacred beings, but our parents and our culture do not believe that. On the contrary, they believe they are tasked with the job of molding us into a domesticated human being that fulfills their expectations. Our contact with our Authentic Self is ruptured through enforced discipline, withdrawal of love and support, and punishment. The schools dutifully follow suit and the false persona is the inevitable result.

We learn the very harsh lesson that love is not a birth right, but is something we must earn by conforming to their expectations about what is good and right. All of this gives birth to the inadequacy belief. Because this belief is, for most of us, unseen and unnoticed, most of us live the whole of our whole lives bearing its considerable weight and soul numbing consequences. This is very sad.

The core inadequacy belief, which is unseen and unnoticed, manifests the struggles of the self and the danger we project about the world. When the Buddha said, “Life is suffering”, the First Noble Truth, I think it would have been more precise for him to say, “The invalidated self is suffering.” That is my First Noble Truth.

This belief expresses itself in countless ways, but the one I would like to focus on in this post is how we feel about the world. This feeling provides us with its usual self-centric energy and typically roots us in separation.

Remember that the Wound is fear - persistent and underlying fear that will burst into actual life under any circumstance that connects what is presently happening in our life with the the primal Wound event. Every one of us responds to this fear by creating a wall that becomes a central part of our psychological self. I call these walls Fear-Selves.

It must work in one of two ways. One, because we really want to be liked, it will most often express itself in ways that creates a psychological self designed to please others. Our task in life is not to be true to ourselves but to work to get people to like us. We must then project how others would like us to be and that’s the way we will be with them. In this way, we can coerce a threatening world into a place that is manageable and pleasant.

But when we are closer to our Wound (the primal invalidation event), we are more likely to be in contact with overt fear. The first response (above) is also a fear based response, but it is a life construct that is designed to address fear by engineering what we believe to be a happy life. But when we are closer to the Wound, we are more likely to see the world as holding the potential to re-express the actual trauma of our very early childhoods. Thus the fear is much closer to the surface.

If we are true to a real spiritual path, the primary purpose of that path is to bring the unseen to light and what is unseen is usually this free floating underlying fear and the behaviors it nurtures. This is why I would modestly assert that Liberation from the Lie presents a valid and powerful transformative path.

Religion thrives on fear. And in this second case it seeks to morph it into something it can use. So either through religion or, in some cases, intellectual analysis, the world becomes an evil, sinful place full of greedy, stupid people.

Religion, and, frankly, intellectual analysis, take our inner self-contempt and belief in our own sinfulness, greed, cupidity, and stupidity and reflect them outwards to the world itself. The inadequacy construct is always double pointed. The benefit organized religion has over intellectual analysis is that it provides a community of like minded fearful people to enjoy their spiritual superiority and separation from the masses of less evolved people. Intellectual analysis, on the other hand, can be a very lonely and existential experience. Fortunately there are colleges and universities that can attract this type of fear-based persona and thus these non-religious institutions can almost function like an organized religion.

I myself fall into the intellectual analysis group, but I don’t have the benefit of a like-minded community. We might seek a life partner that validates our well of life fears, and, in nearly all cases, this is exactly what we do. Our enduring relationships are those where such deeply personalized values are held in common.

I think that is enough for today, but I urge you to check in tomorrow when I conclude this talk about how we think and feel about life. Tomorrow’s post will be called The Big Bang. It will help us deal with some of the stickiest and most powerful obstacles to our own Liberation. Stay tuned. Thank you!

Tags: Fear, Fear Self, wound

I sense a sad mood. I feel sad. What to do … ?

Then I remember the central teaching. I am not my sadness. Rather sadness is just an object of consciousness. It is a state of mind that is visiting me today.

So I, as an object of consciousness, and sadness are one and the same.

Thus I am not I for that I is a temporary object of consciousness. I am that which sees or, to be even more precise, I am that which sees the seeing, hears the hearing.

Is there a who or what that I am? This is so confusing.

Find the whole post here.

Seeking

We spend the whole of our lives asking, is this it or is this it or is this it. Then we realize what was once inconceivable and unthinkable: that only I am it and I could never have been any different from what I am or what I was. The journey must end precisely where it began but with one decisive difference: there is nothing to seek and no one who would gain.

Believing

It can be said that every thought of personal gain or loss, EVERY one is rooted in an underlying thought, which is the thought that I am not okay as I am and it is precisely the inadequate self that is projected outwardly as real. So every thought of personal gain or loss is a gift because it points exactly in the direction of that which most urgently calls for healing and recognition.

Allowing

Once it is seen that there is nothing to seek and that every belief we have about the world and, most importantly, the self, is absolutely and utterly unreal, then we must weather the storm. The mind will continue with its insistent thoughts about everything, including who we are. It will relentlessly push and pull. This is the storm that we must weather. And as we weather this storm, we need to rest in the awareness of the storm itself. Let both the storm rage and the awareness shine. Storms come and go, but awareness is ever-present.

Commentary

It is the Allowing that is often the toughest key. Our thoughts are very compelling. But please consider this statement: a thing is never a thought - so no thought can tell us anything about the world or our life or about who we are. Thoughts are only about thoughts. Please consider this as well: the person who needs to believe their thoughts is itself a thought. The root - the shining awareness is not a thought and does not a generate a thought. Nor, unlike thoughts of things and the self, it does not come and go. It is both the source and manifestation of everything in our lives. Thus when there is someone who believes in a thought, she is experiencing, both the thought and the believer both of which are thoughts and, therefore, unreal.

Fortunately awareness reflects all of this. So when we weather the storm, we need to allow both the thoughts as well as the believer in the thoughts to rage on. They truly are a storm. Weathering them without reacting to them is not, necessarily easy. And to makes matters worse, this is a storm that will persist for quite some time. The more you are able to just allow it to be exactly as it must be, the stronger will be your place in awareness.

Download this post here: 3Keys

Tags: Belief, method, seeking

It’s easy to make a monster. Anybody can do it. In fact, nearly everyone does it - at least once or twice in their lives.

Sometimes I think that it takes a monster to make a monster.

But let’s get right down to it. Let’s make a monster.

List of Ingredients

• Anger - hate - rage;
• An object to project your anger, hate, and rage onto; and
• A willingness to persist with your subjugation (punishment - cruelty - negligence).

That’s it, in a nutshell.

Prolonged punishment, whether it be physical or psychological will do the trick. If you want to make a monster dog, then punish the puppy routinely. It’s really important that the punishment be kept up. To make a really good monster, it needs frequent reminders of how bad it is. Shouting, mean stares, slaps, pushes, and negligence will do the trick. Before you know it, you’ll have a monster dog.

You see a real monster needs to believe that it is just a piece of shit. Eventually, it will project its shitfulness and spread the infection to create more monsters.

Rage and anger are infectious. They are like a disease.

It even works on countries. After the first world war, France and the United Kingdom pushed Germany’s collective face into the dirt. They made the Germans pay for the whole of the war, even though when they surrendered they were on French soil. They wanted the Germans to suffer and to suffer badly. Voila! In strides one of the most monstrous people of the 20th century - Hitler. England and France worked together to create a monster. They knew the recipe, but they underestimated their abilities and wound up paying the price.

It would really be helpful if we had just a bit of foresight and realized what kinds of monsters we are creating in the world.

You see, this recipe really works.

And then there is just you and me. How often do we punish ourselves? How sustained are our efforts?

There are all kinds of victims in the world. In this post we’re talking about real monsters. But actually there are all kinds of monsters. Most of us are just plain old zombies. Stumbling through life avoiding feelings and fearful of life. We are like cowed puppies - domesticated, submissive, and just too beat up by their parents, their schools, their jobs, and their desperate need to get by. We do it all by ourselves for we have been trained well in the school of self-contempt. It all happened before we had the ability to form the words, “I am not okay.”

We inherit hardness and criticalness and are oh so willing to sustain the slow, erosive attack on ourselves.

If we know how to create monsters and zombies, then we should also know how to reverse the action - how to heal what has been hurt.

Here is the recipe.

• Find a monster or zombie (you could start with yourself);
• Be patient - it took some to create it and it will take some time to reverse the motion;
• Care and love the being exactly as he is; and
• Persist - persist - persist. Let your caring and love rule the day.
• A miracle will happen ... most of the time.

It takes time to make a monster and it takes time to unmake one. It’s one thing to make a monster in ignorance. We do that and are doing that all of the time. But it’s a wholly different matter to do it with intent. We call that evil. It is something beyond mere ignorance.

I think the time has come when we can fairly say that the choice truly is ours’.

Let’s heal ourselves and remake the world.

Download this post here: MakeaMonster

Tags: Fear, Fear Self, Belief

Those of you who have already read Liberation from the Lie will probably get more out of this post than those who haven’t, but I think there are those who will intuitively get what is said here.

First, know that the authentic self is always here. It must be. It is the light that sees everything as it is and is in perfect comfort and accord with what is seen.

Thus inner conflict, painful repetitive patterns, lack of resolve, too much resolve and anything which resists what is real and seen are manifestations of the Wound in daily life. It is the task of the Fear-Selves to deal with these problems in conditioned and ineffective ways. The Fear-Selves will push down pain - repress it - and substitute a tried and true behavioral pattern to try to cancel psychological distress.

Let’s make a short list of these maneuvers:

• Shop
• Turn on the TV
• Call a friend
• Buy a new ‘spiritual’ book (self-improvement)
• Get lost in the web
• Take a nap
• Rush (this is a subtle one - when we are rushing to get someplace out of unnoticed habit and conditioning, we are playing the very old game of goal seeking, i.e., life sucks in transit from one place to another, so I need to rush to repress that pain. Rushing is a red flag of fear and resistance
• Believing that you are the doer (another very subtle manifestation of lack - this will go away in time (read below))
• Get high
• etc.

You get the idea.

These are short term maneuvers, but there is a much larger category of Fear-Based responses, which are, the story of our lives. How do we recognize them?

Seeking - and we all seek - is often rooted in an underlying belief that we are in whole or in part, inadequate/insufficient/not deserving love.

So now reflect, what do you do to prove to yourself and others that you are adequate/sufficient/deserving love?

You’ll see that these lack based needs will find realization in our partners, career choices, angry confrontations with those who inadequately validate us (often parents and our children), and showing the world how great and wonderful we are in any number of ways.

There is yet a third category of behavior which is also rooted in lack/insufficiency and this is persistent depression (self-contempt). This also assumes many forms, but often we can notice it when we have little or no energy, persistent melancholy, irrational fears, and withdrawing from contact.

If you experience depression, the Liberation book can be particularly helpful. There is a special beauty to depression. What makes depression special is that it:

• reveals in the hardest way possible the failure of the Fear-Selves to hold back the tide of fear in our lives; and
• with the collapse of the Fear-Selves, we are brought in much closer contact with our primal Wound and it is in the seeing of the Wound that our Fear-Based personalities begin to dissolve all on their own.

See that all attempts to realize the Authentic Self must end in failure. All such projects are expressions of the very lack/inadequacy that sustains the whole cycle of moving from one Fear-Based behavior to another.

But the situation is far from hopeless. Remember that the Authentic Self is always there. So in seeing the patterns of Fear-Based behavior and the Fear-Selves in our life and in allowing ourselves to sink into the scary world of the Wound is exactly what we need to do if the whole edifice of fear to lose its power over us. When that begins to happen, we are well on our way to our own unique liberation.

Slavery is that attachment to beliefs that we invest with our safety and solidity. The path of Liberation, what I sometimes call the Truthway, challenges those beliefs. The moment they are seen as false, the thrill of liberation will fill our being.

As so many of the old ‘masters’ were fond of saying, realization is a matter of removing and not of adding on, as in self- improvement. You will never manufacture a better you. You were born perfect and whole. It is that perfection and wholeness that you are now asked to re-discover.

Post Download: AuthenticSelfPaths

Tags: method

Hi my name is Howard Cosell and I’m here at the Cretaceous Paleogene boundary line (65.5 million years ago) from the far distant future, even your future dear reader, for time machines do not yet exist in your time.

We’re standing on a place that will, one day, be called eastern Nebraska chatting with Mrs. Teresa Rex who prefers going by the catchy name T Rex.

HC - How do you do Mrs. Rex?
T - Oh, please call me T.
HC - OK T - so how are you on this fine, sunny and oh so warm February day? It looks like you just had your lunch.
T - Yes, I just finished a particularly scrumptious leg of Iguanodon. Really yummy. Of course, I shared some of it with my kids over there. They loved it. So what brings you to our neck of the woods. I don’t believe I’ve seen your kind around here and I’m wondering how you taste. I could still use a morsel to finish things off- you know with the sharing and all.
HC - Well, let’s say that I’m from a very far away place and I’ve been told more than once that I taste like very spoiled Plesiosaur - so do don’t say you weren’t warned.
(I grin very broadly hoping T Rex buys my line - she has even bigger and sharper teeth than I expected).
T - well you are looking tasty, if you don’t mind my saying so.
(she winks in a terrifying manner - who would have thought that dinosaurs winked?)
HC - Thanks T, but could we move on - I gotta get back home pretty soon and this trip cost me a chunk of change.
T - OK - if you insist.
HC - Thanks. I was wondering, do you know what an asteroid is?
T - Yeah - it’s like a big rock floating around in space - am I right?
HC - Yes, that’s pretty much it. But I was wondering, did you ever hear about the Great Permian Extinction?
T - I remember some of the old timers talking about it. Would you mind refreshing my memory?
HC - Well about 185.9 million years ago one of those asteroid hit the earth and killed off almost 90% of all life on the planet.
T - How horrible.
HC - Well, yes and no. Because if that asteroid hadn’t hit the earth, well scientists say that you dinosaurs and your marine and flying reptile buddies would never have evolved. You see the extinction of all of those other animals provided the ecological niche that allowed for the ascent of the dinosaurs. So maybe that asteroid was the best thing that ever happened to your species.
T - Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Well easy come easy go I always say.
HC - Well I have some good news and bad news for you and your family, as well as your friends. I really don’t know if dinosaurs have friends, but I thought I’d throw that in. And, I should mention there’s a lot more good news than bad news.
T - Of course we have friends. Although I do remember a particularly tasty one, if a little fatty named Solly. He kept us full for months. I really liked him.
HC - Well, you should know that one of those asteroids is, right now, heading straight toward earth and will hit in what will be called the Yucatan Peninsula sometime tomorrow. It’s going to heat things up a bit.
T - Oh dear. What does that mean for us?
HC - Well if it doesn’t sound all that good for you, please consider that you’ve had a terrific run. Dinosaurs have been the dominant species on earth for about 165 million years. That ain’t bad by anyone’s measure. You really have a lot to be proud of.
T - Are you saying what I think you’re saying?
HC - Wait, I’m not done with the good news. Sooner than you can blink a geologic eye, the mammals will become the dominant species (such as yours’ truly) and some of these mammals are so cute that it would raise an archaeopteryx’ feathers. Of course I’m talking baby sea otters (and the adults aren’t too shabby either), cuddly little bears, puppies, and who wouldn’t fall in love with a bonobo?
T - OK funny man, so what’s the bad news?
HC - Hey who said I was done with the good news? In the not too distant future, dinosaurs (and I’m talkin’ dinosaurs - not those creepy flying reptiles like Mr. Pterosaur gliding awkwardly up there) will fill the skies. There will be dinosaurs of all kinds - including such oddballs as Empire Penguins and ruby throated hummingbirds. People, who can be creatures of habit, not unlike you know who, will insist on calling them birds, but you and I know them as dinosaurs. Won’t that be great?
T - You know I’m getting more than a little peckish.
HC - Well, this asteroid, is going to hit the earth. It’s going to create an explosion that will knock your socks off if you wore socks, which I know you don’t, and will send up a huge crapload of dirt into the atmosphere, which will make it really very dark and cold here for more months than I care to mention, and, well, you know the drill, nearly all of the dinosaurs, T Rex included, and all of your flying and marine reptile buddies will go the way of the mesosaurus.
T - And that would be the bad news? Just thinkin’ here.
HC - Well it’s clearly not all that bad. I think I’ve done a more than decent job listing all of the goodies that will come out of this brief if rather super intense conflagration.
T - You know something?
HC - What?
T - I’m starving.
(Sounds of juicy chomping can be heard on the recording - and that was the last time Howard Cosell was seen or heard from. Bye Howard - we’ll miss you).

What’s bad for the goose is often good for the gander - or is it what’s good for the goose is often bad for the gander. Well, you see what I mean.

Good ... Bad ... It all reminds me of the song, you say tomahtoe and I say tomato.

So when I blab on about people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, know that the sands of history blow every which way, but the dust always settles only to get blown on again.

Download this post here: DinosaurInterview

Tags: Belief, judgment

Last night the last veil parted. What Bankei called the Unborn Buddha Mind opened for me and it can open for you. Feel free to ask me any questions. you would like.

Tags: seeking

A number of years ago I was conducting a research project on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation in the Southwestern US. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of a Navajo developed program called Peacemaking to prevent and reduce interpersonal violence.

Part of my research included the distribution of a survey. One of the questions on the survey asked participants to identify their religion. This seemed like a pretty straightforward question, but I needed tested the question and when I did this I found something I could never have expected.*

Going into this work I knew that not only were Navajos relatively traditional compared to many other Indian communities in North America, but they were also going through a revival of core traditional values.

Yet the responses I received for this question were: Catholic, Mormon, Baptist, and Native American Church (a 20th century developed faith that blends some common elements of Native American beliefs with Christianity). Do you notice something missing?

Not one respondent said “traditional Navajo”. I had to figure out why this was happening. After a little exploration I learned something that astounded me at the time. The Navajo language (Dinè does not have a word for “religion”. Thus, traditional indigenous life ways are not thought of as a religion. Christianity is a religion. Navajo is not. Rather, Navajo is a way of life.

Further exploration into this matter revealed that no North American Indian language has a word for religion. This amazed me. The religion concept is relatively new to them and is not part of any native culture. I needed to find out what was going on, because, as an anthropology major (as an undergraduate - I was a Ph.D student at the time of this research), I had thought that pre-mass agricultural societies were, if nothing else, religious and mystical.

One of the people that indirectly guided me in my investigations was the great American sociologist Morris Berman and, in particular, his book Wandering God.

Every word has a story and the story of religion is a fascinating one. It is a story that has immense power of self and group liberation. Gather around and listen carefully.

Prior to the develop of intensive agricultural most people were hunter gatherers. Hunter gatherers have a lot in common. They live in temporary communities and they have very few manufactured items. One item they lack is containers designed to store food. Everyday they are faced with the task of collecting or hunting enough food to keep the group alive. Imagine what it would be like living with this potentially deadly fear in your life every single day. Imagine how heightened this fear would become in the cold depths of Winter.

Were these people living lives of fear and insecurity (like modern people with all of their technology and convenience)? Essentially everyone who has lived with and studied these people say a resounding “no”.

How could this be among a people who lack religion - who have no god to appeal to in times of want, darkness and fear?

They had something we lack. They had an implicit trust that the world would take care of them. They didn’t need religion. For them the world itself was alive. It blazed with its aliveness and their awareness was intensely sharpened and equally alive.

About 10,000 years ago, in the part of the world we call Iraq and Iran people figured out how to harness the power of nature through intensive agriculture. This was not only the seed of a new agriculture, it was the enduring seed of civilization itself. And it is at this point that religion gets its start.

Prior to the development of intensive agriculture, people depended on nature. But now with the creation of large-scale farms the secure relationship with nature was ripped apart. Life depended on the success of the farm. With a stretch of bad weather or the failure of system of irrigation, the people would face starvation and death. All of a sudden people needed a way to control their world.

And it was religion that stepped in to fulfill this task. Religion created a pantheon of gods that needed to be kept happy. To placate the potentially unreliable gods, people developed complex ceremonies, they performed animal and human sacrifices. The powerful priestly class became the conduits between the newly helpless men and women to express their pleas to the gods.

But something much bigger also arose in the development of intensive agriculture, permanent towns, city-states, the ruling class, and war; and that was the development of life as suffering. The vast majority of men became powerless workers on the fields of the priests and ruling elites. They worked from dawn to dusk to make sure that the people had enough to eat and that the ruling class could live in extraordinary luxury and that their armies could be powerful and well armed. Thus the workers who did all of the hard labor of civilization also died in its defense as the various rulers planned and carried out wars to increase their power and control - for unless we nurture our need for power and control that power and control would just wither away.

Women, who were once key to their group, now became baby makers for many more people were needed to work the farms and staff the armies. So instead of the 1-2 children of the hunting/gathering family, women were expected to be pregnant from 4-10 times in their lives and often more. They toiled day and night raising their families and helping out with the farm labor. Truly the life as suffering was now well established.

So religion took the next essential step. It declared that this life is indeed suffering, but that a much better life awaits us all after death ... if we are obedient to the authority of the church/temple and to the ruler who is the son of god, if not god himself (I intentionally used the masculine pronoun).

Thus (and please hear this carefully), the role of religion became one that coerced order onto people by helping them transcend this world. From the perspective of religion this world became the world of sin, of the dream, of the illusion. To be happy, we must transcend this world! Religion and transcendence became one and the same. No duality could be more powerful or crippling than this one.

Now look back at this story. People started from a place of trust and community and evolved to a place of fear and insecurity. They started from a place that adored this world and were profoundly connected to its rhythms and touch and evolved to a place where this world was just one of endless toil and insecurity.

And it was the task of religion to make all of this possible.

We can now understand these Navajos who answered the “religion” question with any answer except “Navajo”. What a breakthrough this was for me. It changed my life and even provided me with an understanding that such relatively sophisticated religious systems that one sees in Buddhism as still one of control.

This understanding, thanks to Morris Berman and the many traditional Navajo counselors and healers who aided me with the writing of Liberation from the Lie informs this work with this realization. If we are ever to find our Authentic Selves we must first understand our own culture, which includes all religions that reinforce the underlying beliefs that we far too often take for granted as normal. They are not normal. They are instruments whose sole purpose is to domesticate and doom our essential selves. The moment our families, our churches/temples, schools, and government became the instruments of our own ruthless domestication, we have abandoned our true selves. Waking up means to wake up to this profound understanding.

This is not a simple understanding. It goes against nearly everything we believe we know yet it is the voice of truth. This is exactly why I wrote my book. It is the manual to finding yourself prior to your self-negation through the well intended ways of your family, your religion, and your culture. A new birth means a birth as only and exclusively yourself, cleared of these influence.

If this post ‘resonates’ with you, then you have taken a very large step in your own liberation. Your Authentic Self has never ever left you. Her light fills everything in your world. The moment you see that light as yourself, fully divorced from the social and cultural constraints of this world - on that day you are free.

*Before the formal distribution of a survey, survey items (questions) are tested on a much smaller population.

You can download this post here at the bottom of the post.

Tags: Belief, religion

I can truly say that I despise everything about Sarah Palin. I hate her voice, I hate her facial expressions, I hate her smug self-satisfaction. I hate the way she willfully distorts the truth. I hate how she scorns science. I hate how she encourages division and conflict (as in this post). I hate her mannerisms. I hate the way she relates to her family.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

When we look back on history, we can see that it has its own power and thrust. It inspires trust and mutual cooperation and it inspires hate and division.

Sarah Palin is representative of the thrust of hate and its working.

In my book, Liberation from the Lie, I explore, in depth, the legacy of what is called the Wound. The Wound refers back to our primal invalidation; an experience that leaves us with a persistent sense of lack and dis-ease. How it manifests in each of us is always unique, but it must find expression and most often it finds its expression as fear.

The whole purpose of Liberation is to bring the Wound to light. Every chapter guides the reader to see the manifestations of the Wound in our daily lives - for through our seeing of it, we are able to bring the healing energy of light and understanding to what is unseen. This is the only sustainable path to self-healing.

But the followers of Palin rejoice in what festers in their inner-most selves. The Wound, in their case, informs them that they are unworthy. This underlying belief in their innate unworthiness first manifests as self-hate. But this self-hate is, ultimately, unacceptable and uncontainable. It must resolve its own inner agony by reflecting itself outwards - as well as to find identity with those who possess a very similar internal Wound. Thus the Palin followers must hate those who reject them - the liberals, the gays, the non-whites, the intellectuals, the socialists, the big city people, the animal lovers, the environmentalists, the vegetarians, the progressives, the jews, the ....

And their shared hate allows for the coalescence into a large monolithic political and cultural force.

Sarah Palin, through her small-town hucksterism (aw shucks), her suggestion of sexual availability, and her brazen self-confidence built on a ramshackle structure that is proud of its contempt for complexity, brings this hate together. What was a disorganized energy that festered in the small towns and places of stress in america, she has been able to bring together as a movement.

The media plays its role by bringing so much attention to her and thus performs a decisive role in her ascent.

This is the very expression of the unattended Wound in our world. It is the celebration of fear and division. It is, the triumph, of our own collective invalidation as a people.

All of this is explained within the structure of Liberation. Often the greatest challenge of awakening is not our own awakening, but the awakening of a whole people. Until we bring what has ruled a universe of darkness to light, we must pay the price of our own self-contempt for the propulsion of history will express itself as it will.

You can download this post here: PalinFear

Tags: wound, Fear, Fear Self

How many of us have not suffered as a direct result of believing that they were not enough? Isn’t all self criticism, all self-contempt link back to a belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with me?

Also, when we are disappointed with others doesn’t the same theme apply? That other person should have been more trustworthy, they should have been more kind, they should have been more considerate, they should have more generous, they should have been brighter ... and so it goes.

This is the universe of deficiency - of not enough - of lack.

Remarkably, it is this very belief that both creates our self-misery, as well as provide the essential fuel that leads to our awakening.

Like everything else in the universe, it is a paradox that provides no ready-made or predictable understanding. Ah - how messy is the real world!

Let’s dive into Verse 44 of the Tao and see how this understanding applies. Today I will be using the translation by Derek Lin.

Fame or the self, which is dearer?The self or wealth, which is greater?Gain or loss, which is more painful?

Anytime we seek lasting contentment through possessing anything external to our essential self, our infinite presence, we are begging the universe for misery. In this way, the universe is a generous companion, for misery it will provide. It is something we can count on. Our mind projects how happy and content the fulfillment of a particular need will be, but this is a double edged sword. We are driven to pursue our psychological needs and sacrifice ourselves int he pursuit. If we obtain what we believed will make us happy, the very quality we sought will not only become bland, but will, one day, be taken from us.

So when the Tao asks, “Fame or self - which is dearer?” - it is pointing us to what both comes and goes as well as to what is always available. This verse presents a choice. We can spin our wheels chasing what we believe we lack - a chase that only lasts a life time or we can see what we are really doing and return to the root - the source of our being. This fertile source is not only available, it is our essential being. Every moment presents this decisive choice - but with realization the challenge of choice vanishes, for the mind as been tamed through clear seeing and the wisdom it imparts to us.

This understanding applies to every externality. Notice that every idea and thought you have about yourself also comes and goes - no exceptions! Yet you somehow remain, radiant and ready? How utterly wonderful!

But the line about gain and loss, that seems a little trickier. Isn’t it obvious that gain gives us pleasure and loss must be painful?

When we gain, another must loose. When we gain, we will need to look over our shoulder worried that we will loose what we have struggled for, for riches come and go. When we become addicted to gain, we become slaves to our needs. Can you imagine a more painful life?

Yes, loss can also be painful - it can be very painful. But when we see that gain and loss are completely external to our essential beings, we can allow them to come and go. Today our possessions grow and tomorrow they are dispersed. The cycle continues in ways that we cannot know. But when we become centered in our essential being opportunities for authentic wealth and joy become so much more available.

The Verse continues:

Thus excessive love must lead to great spending.Excessive hoarding must lead to heavy loss.

When we fall in love to anything external to ourselves and establish it as a need that we must possess and control, we make ourselves into a slave. We are compelled to service this need and bleed ourselves dry in our addicted drive.

A greedy and dead spirit is driven to hoard. It looks out into the world and sees danger and loss around every corner. It must cling to what it has like a wraith. This is the very life of fear and contraction that is most pitiful and sad.

The Verse concludes:

Knowing contentment avoids disgrace.Knowing when to stop avoids danger.Thus one can endure indefinitely.

When we know what sustains anguish, what makes us appear desperate before others, then we know what to avoid. With this knowing we can allow the contentment that is not only our birthright, but our essence to flower. For the Authentic Self will flower when the layers of need, addiction, and lack are finally allowed to wither away. Living as the contentment we truly are, nothing can threaten us. Our essential being is permanent. Nothing can threaten it. Thus we truly endure indefinitely. We can finally live free of fear.

Download this post here: V44_Lack

Tags: seeking, deficient self, Lack

I live in eastern Pennsylvania. If I travel west, it wouldn’t be long before I would enter the world of the gently rolling hills of the Appalachians. It is a soft, undulating landscape dotted with farms and small towns. Yet geologists have shown that 100 million years ago these unprepossessing hills were towering, craggy mountains not unlike today’s Rockies in Colorado. Even today these long lines of ridges are being eroded down by the forces of chemical erosion (rain) and wind. These ‘invisible’ forces have all but leveled these once mighty mountains.

A problem arises in consciousness. We must “do’ something. We are driven to take action. If we don’t do something, things will just get worse.

Isn’t that an interesting belief? Things will get worse if we don’t do something.

There is a beautiful story contained in the Chuang Tzu:

At the origin of things there was Thunder (Shu), ruler of the Southern Ocean, and Bolt (Hu), ruler of the Northern Ocean. And in the Middle Realm, PrimalDark (Hun Tun) ruled. Thunder and Bolt often met together in the lands of PrimalDark, and PrimalDark was always a most gracious host. Eventually, Thunder and Bolt tried to think of a way to repay PrimalDark’s kindness. They said: “People have seven holes so they can see and hear, eat and breathe. Only PrimalDark is without them. Why don’t we try cutting some for her?” So ThunderBolt began cutting holes, one each day. On the seventh day, PrimalDark was dead.

Today I would like to introduce another translation of the Tao. It is by Robert Hendricks and is strongly recommended.

He translates Verse 43 -

The softest, most pliable thing in the world runs
roughshod over the firmest thing in the world.
That which has no substance gets into that which has
no spaces or cracks.
I therefore know that there is benefit in taking no action.
The wordless teaching, the benefit of taking no action -
Few in the world can realize these!

It’s seems really hard to trust Life (Tao) just as it is. The mind takes its snapshots of Life and when any of these snapshots are judged as bad, the mind seeks to whip the self into action. What would happen if we could just watch the whole process unfold without the compulsion to act on any snapshot?

How many times has something we have judged as bad been later seen to have been a wonderful gift? Even those who suffer with terminal illness have often said how it is has re-awakened a dormant love in their hearts and has brought them closer to the fleeting beauty of this life.

Everything changes - nothing stays the same. Even great mountains are brought low, only to rise up again. The highest Alps were once a sea floor. Marine fossils in the tallest peaks are not difficult to find. Life and death are partners in an eternal dance and gives birth to each other.

Non-action (Wu Wei) is not really non-action. It is, rather, seeing the danger and often the foolishness of judging this moment as if we ‘know’ it. Actions cannot be taken back. Have you ever said something really hurtful to another, perhaps your own child, and, as a result, caused unnecessary suffering and resentment. Those hurtful acts cannot be taken back.

Verse 43, for me, is really about learning how to trust Life. This invisible hand of Tao cannot be read by any person. Instead of parsing it into bits and pieces, this one good and this one bad, why can’t we just relax into it with a heart full of trust knowing that in the larger view we really are now are embracing the flow of LIfe just as it is?

So stop the seeking, the search for a better me, a better this, a better that. Instead relinquish this noisy separate voice to be as it wants, but not to be your master. Isn’t that what seeking really is? Is it not a rejection to LIfe as you think it is? Let your master be Life - the Tao itself.

Download this post here: WuWei43

Tags: Belief, trust

Awakening does not mean that the passionate, informed person we were prior to awakening dies. We don’t become spiritual spouting zombies upon awakening.

This really needs to be understood because it returns us to the essence of awakening itself.

Here this loud and clear - awakening means:

• waking up from the illusions of the deficient self;
• waking up from the belief in a separate I;
• waking up to the realization of our immediate and profound connection with everything;
• waking up from the dream of deficiency;
• waking up from the false-selves we effortlessly create to compensate for the underlying deficiency belief; and
• waking up means that the belief and force that drives seeking exhausts itself in the realization of the essential - true Self.

If anything, waking up unites us even more powerfully to what moves us passionately. It is, precisely, our slumbering disconnection prior to awakening which kills and dilutes our passion. Please, please know this.

When we realize (not think) that we are connected to everything, we become intensely alive. There is simply no choice in the matter. Our heart expands exponentially. We love ourselves as everything.

Thus when we see and read about the destruction of the environment through production and consumption, the destruction of life through war, the horrible ways we treat animals to make cheap animal protein, and the lies the powerful propagate to keep the less fortunate living a life of suffering and pain, we understand that all of this is us. We are not removed from the immediacy of life through the veils of thought and prevarication. Instead we are alive to the vast play and drama of the world that unfolds before our eyes and hearts.

Understand - this is not an issue of ego. It has absolutely nothing to do with making a “better me” that people will respect and love because I know that underneath it all I am not deserving of their respect or love. This is about the realization of connection.

How it manifests within each person is entirely individual. This is simply how it manifests in this body/spirit. There are as many paths as there are people. And this is exactly why awakening is ultimately an individual process. It does not yield a vast field of zombies, but a field of diverse, alive, and connected energies intimately engaged in life as it unfolds everywhere.

Download this post here: AwakeningExpression

Tags: self-expression, Belief

Bill arrives by mail
my mind says this is scary
across the way friend smiles

This enlightenment
I just can’t get it- no way
no way only way

Outside the wind blows
Inside my heart sad and heavy
ring - my Julie calls

Crows squawk, shriek, and caw
How annoying they can be
How they soar - beautiful

The brook outside streams
It takes me back to the root
Got to make the bed.

The four directions
Holy space in its center.
This land once was theirs’

The high plains I yearn
Bison everywhere streaming
Me and this small room.

Seeking is a dance; it takes two.

The first dancer is he who harbors and itch-like belief that he is insufficient as he is. This is a painful itch and it’s an itch that needs to be scratched, so he goes out into the world to find a partner.

His partner is the answer he projects will cure his itch. It could be a book, a satsang/retreat/class, or it could be a special relationship with a teacher.

This is the dance of seeking. It is our journey to relieve our spiritual itch.

But the itch persists.

Is there a cure for the common deficiency itch (CDI)?

There is a cure, but it’s not something you can obtain from a book, class, or teacher (guru). The cure starts with becoming sick and tired of the external seeking. You’ve read this a million times before. Well now it’s a million and one. We really have to become totally sick and tired with ourselves.

We have to give up the belief that our thought based self can save us. An illusory doctor cannot cure an illusory patient.

The outward moving energy must be seen as utterly hopeless and useless. Feel that energy now. Feel it streaming outwards. Know, to the very depths of your being, that it cannot provide relief for your itch.

In fact, it can only sustain the itch.

Have you ever taken an over-the-counter nasal spray when suffering with a cold? If so, you’ll know that it provides near instant relief. Wow, I can breath again. This stuff is great. It’s the cure for the suffering of the common cold.

Ah were it only true. The problem with all of such sprays is that after two days of use, you will get a rebound effect. The spray will actually cause your nasal passages to swell even worse and your breathing problem is now worse than ever.

The same applies to spiritual seeking that goes outward to cure the itch of deficiency.

The only answer to this problem is to stop grabbing the spiritual nasal spray. Throw it out. Trust no thought or feeling. Toss it all out in the very large trash bin of stuff collected through seeking.

Then be brave with the itch. Let it be. Rest in silence as it carries on. Give not an ear to its cries for help. It’s like a baby who needs to cry herself to sleep. We need to reach a point where we stop attending to it.

This is the only reliable cure. We have to go through what the mind believes to be the insane darkness of utterly not knowing. Eventually, something much more powerful emerges in the darkness of directionless not knowing. It will happen for you, for it has happened for me and I am no different from you.

Download this post here: 2toseek

Tags: seeking

Know that no thought, no insight, no experience, no special practice, and travel to no other place can invoke awakening. There is no where to go and nothing to do.

The whole energy and motivation to seek comes to a crashing halt.

What is left when this is truly realized?

Know this to the bottom of your heart, mind, and soul. There is simply nothing you can do.

Once that is known and once it is truly known, your journey is done and you will have found yourself.

I am not now and never will be a guru or an advice giver. I can only speak from my own experience. While much that brings us together we possess in common, there is also a part of us that is unique and thank goodness for that. So, I want every reader of this blog to know that my purpose here is two-fold.

One, it is to invite you to check out my book, Liberation from the Lie. I believe the book offers a resource to all seekers, as well as those suffering from periodic or persistent depression and unhappiness to find a way out of their hardship. I know this book “works” from the great reviews it has received at Amazon and the many letters I have received from readers. Also, the book is entirely different from other books written from a Buddhist, Advaita, or other spiritual perspective. It uses ideas culled from these traditions as well as those from modern psychology and my own direct experience training with Navajo (Dinè traditional healers. The theory and path it very clearly lays out is entirely innovative. There is no book like it.

Two, I write these posts as part of a conversation between equals. It is my way of sharing my own experience and perceptions in a way that I try to make interesting, engaging, and even fun. I know that I really need to work on the fun part, since the tone of so many of these posts is altogether too serious. That is a bad sign. The highest of all emotions is (per my Navajo friends) laughter - but often the portal to this place is grief. If you knew me personally, you would know someone who is very prone to laughter and never takes himself all that seriously. The tone of this site is really rather different from the living nature of its author.

Know that we truly are equals. I am not a teacher. If anything, I am well adapted as a kind of researcher of the human condition. And I invite you to this same path, for this is really only your path. This is your life and this is your journey. The only journey I can take is my own. Your path must be and will different from my own. Each of us is unique.

So please hear my words as just part of a conversation. Your voice is always invited to participate in this dialogue. I don’t receive many comments on this blog, but I am always open to your experience and your perspective.

Thank you - Eric

Tags: journey

What does awakening mean?

It means to awaken from the trance imposed on consciousness through belief and thought.

And what is the trance of belief and thought?

It is the belief that we are the authors of our lives. It is the belief that I am the body and I am the mind. Both body and mind are real appearances on the field of the seen - but there is no personal possession of them. They are each occasional happenings on the field of all happenings. There are possessed by no one.

Both the body and the mind yield a personal story, which, we believe, belongs to us and us alone. It tells us our place in the world, it tells us who we are, it tells us who we have been, and it tells us who we will be.

The whole of this narrative is tied together to the belief that we are the body and the mind. The moment it is clearly seen that this is a belief based on conditioning and habit, we awaken free of the story. From that point forward, our essence is the light of presence. As the light of presence, nothing is done by us and everything perceived is seen as a vivid happening on the plane of presence.

If we only believe that we are not the body and the mind, then we are still mired in belief. Out of want, we transfer the belief that we are the body and the mind to the newly minted belief that we are NOT the body and the mind. That is not awakening. It is merely a revised belief. However, it is possible to straddle both conditions. Sometimes we are free of the narrative and the network of beliefs that keep it together and sometimes we fall back into the story of which we contend we are both author and victim.

We find freedom through clear seeing. We see that the narrative, to which we are so attached, is just a story - a happening, no different from any other happening. The tether that keeps us connected to it consists of only one word: “mine”. This is my (variant of “mine&rdquo story, we assert. That is the only belief that needs to be seen as false.

Once awakened from the trance of the self, we are free of all beliefs. How this finally happens within the body/mind consciousness - I do not know. But it does happen and it will happen for you. We just depend on our seeing and, in particular, our clear seeing of belief that we are (or are not) the body/mind. Once we see that this belief that we are the body/mind is founded on nothing but conditioning, and habit, it slowly ebbs away. As it weakens, the light of presence grows stronger. The day of full freedom is not far away. Take heart in that.

You can download this post here.

Tags: Belief, thought

You can download this post as a PDF by clicking here.
Today’s post is another chapter from my book Liberation from the Lie. If you have been following these posts, you will already know that the key to understanding our search for purpose, meaning, and even awakening, is fueled by an underlying belief in our own inadequacy. In this chapter we discover the roots of that belief in a primal trauma that I have called the Wound. The Wound develops very early in life and is, over time, covered over by what is called the Fear-Selves. If we are ever to find our Authentic Self, that energy that is always there even underlying the Wound, we need to see these processes first hand in our own immediate life. That is the primary purpose of this book. See if what is described in this chapter is not true for your own experience and knowledge.

Beyond living and dreaming
Is what matters most
Coming awake.”
~ Antonio Machado

Are we born fundamentally perfect, or are we born wild and imperfect, requiring the graces of civilization to become good, productive human beings?
One advocate of the theory of primal inadequacy is Aristotle. In his treatise Politics, the Greek philosopher argues that we are born as savages. People without laws and permanent settlement need to be subjugated and ruled over, he claims; they are like children who are not habituated to civilized society. Our goodness, if it is to manifest in our lives, is solely a consequence of our exposure to the fruits of moral and ethical culture. We are, in other words, born insufficient. Most of us have accepted this belief without exploring our own childhoods, our relations with our children, or our view of humanity.
If we believe that all children are savages, then their transformation into civilized, moral beings should simply be a matter of teaching them the ways of civilization. Do our observations of everyday life and our knowledge of history support this statement?
When the “civilized” nation of Spain landed on an unknown island in the eastern Caribbean in 1492, Columbus noted the remarkable grace, positive spirit, and extraordinary kindness of the “savages” he encountered. He also noted that they would make excellent slaves.
When the Pilgrims were starving during their first, long New England fall and winter, not only did the “savage” Wampanoag Indians feed the “civilized” European newcomers, but they taught them how to plant and grow maize and beans, enabling them to survive future winters. When the “civilized” Portuguese first entered sub-Saharan Africa and encountered the “savages” who lived there, it took them less than 10 years to organize the first slave trade by paying off tribal leaders.
Earlier we examined the lives of hunter-gatherer children. Contemporary anthropologists consistently describe their placid but alert natures, their deep connections to their communities and the natural world, the absence of sibling rivalry and temper tantrums, and their easy smiles. These children possessed a sense of stability and balance that has attracted note from observers from the 17th century to the present.
When Europeans first landed in North America and Africa, they were greeted with kindness, curiosity, and care. They responded with ruthless violence, including genocidal massacres, cultural intolerance, and total subjugation of the native peoples who had lived on those lands for countless generations. Invariably, they used religion and God to justify their murderous intents and actions.
Who, exactly, is the savage?
Certainly these painful interactions occurred between two very different peoples. The Native Americans and Africans were relatively content. The Europeans, in dramatic contrast, were not. Their discontent was rooted in their sense of inadequacy, a quality the natives did not share. The Europeans sought to fill their empty feelings of “lack” with power and possessions. But their insufficiency was a bottomless abyss. It could never be filled. And the very actions through which they sought to fill the void inadvertently sustained its gaping emptiness. This is why the Europeans related via force, while the natives related through curiosity and care. The Europeans were already wounded by their culture. They were a restless people, always on the lookout to augment their riches and control. Their response to the gentle, satisfied souls they encountered in their explorations was to kill or enslave them. The taste of power created a rapaciousness for more power and possessions, a quality of imperial civilization from the dawn of history to the present.
Invalidation is born of a significant imbalance in power, and the consequence of that imbalance is violence. Secure people are not motivated to apply force against others as a way of expressing their inadequacy. The European settlers’ attitude and actions toward indigenous populations were paralleled in the relationships between parents and children in their “civilized” society. When adults see their children as “savages,” they project their own experience of self-contempt onto their children. In this way, the wound of invalidation is passed down through the generations.
Aristotle correctly points out that children act in a way that could be described as “deficient.” But he fails to understand the source of the deficiency. The “savage” children he observed had already experienced their infantile trauma, their emotional separation from their mothers, and pressures to change; thus they were already insecure in their standing with their parents and had begun to exhibit behaviors to compensate for their internal feelings of low self-worth. These characteristics are part of the price of civilization.
Because this phenomenon is both unintended and little understood, it is not surprising that we have adopted a belief system that seeks to explain what we think we are observing. By accepting the belief that children are savages, we justify the role of civilization to transform their “savageness” into more manageable personality traits. We do this through coercion, hard and soft. We remake people into the images projected onto them by civilization.
The collapse of our original sense of self occurs at a time before communication can occur between child and parent; the original person is already covered over by the Fear-Self before the child is able to protest. Children develop a sense of their inadequacy well before they can ever express their dissatisfaction in words. The child’s “savage” behavior is simply his expression of his despair. Some children will really persist in their “savagery,” acting out with “unacceptable” behaviors. But even the most docile child will express her anger and frustration in some form. The family uses the power of repression to control this anger and frustration, just as the larger society later uses its authority to manage her as an adult.
It’s time that we moved on to a more loving and accurate understanding of who our children are and who we are in relation to them. Children are not savages. They are human beings who already have been cut off from their Life Force. A child’s anger and frustration come from the struggle to learn new abilities in order to establish an identity designed to mollify the emotional pain she has experienced.
Keep in mind that not all children display in this way. Resiliency varies greatly from child to child, as does the fear of expressing one’s true feelings to parents who might be perceived as threatening or whose connection to the child is so tenuous that he fears loss of love if he is honest. Most of us become experts in the fine art of repression early in life. The problem of repression becomes much more serious when we begin to regard it as normal and rational—which is, of course, what most of us do.
Savagery, therefore, is in the eye of the beholder. The term “savage” is useful mainly to those who would like to manage another person or group through the use of the pejorative.
The next two posts will focus on the actual phenomenon of invalidation. Through these posts will you be empowered to see, precisely, how you yourself have been invalidate and in that seeing there is a powerful glimpse toward your own liberation.

Tags: invalidation, wound, Child-raising