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

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

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

When life is perceived as unjust, the result is anger. When anger is combined with powerlessness, the result is rage. Rage can rest in love or hate. Let's dig deeper.

Why did those pig bankers, the very ones that caused the recession, get billions from the White House? And now those pigs are showing their true colors by taking huge fucking bonuses with our tax money. If I had the chance, I’d show him where I stand by puttin’ a bullet between their greedy jew eyes.

The government is takin’ away my freedoms. I knew this would happen when a black man became president. This is a white country for christ’s sake. There’s nothin’ wrong about taken things in our own hands and defending our hard fought liberty at the barrel of a gun.

For god’s sake, I’m a goddamn veteran and put my ass on the line to defend this country that isn’t even mine anymore.

The rich and powerful get away with everything. I wonder if Bush and Cheney have lost a wink of sleep over killing a million Iraqis? I bet not. They couldn’t give a crap. They aren’t even people to them and they call themselves christians. What a fucking joke.

As an Israeli, and a jew who has suffered centuries of savage hate and exile, we have every right to use whatever force is necessary to destroy the muslim enemy. This is our country and not there’s.

The presidents of companies that foul the environment and doing irreparable harm to essential resources need to be treated as criminals or even worse, for the harms they are causing by their very actions are more injurious than those committed by people we call criminals.

White america must come clean on both slavery and the genocide perpetrated against the native people of the americas. Until there is fair reparation, I will continue to harbor rage against these heartless bastards. The day will come when they will pay for their crimes. It is only fair.

What all of these examples have in common is this: there is perceived unfairness and there is a sense of powerlessness. The combination is volatile.

The Rage and the Fury

We live in a time where rage is common and intense ... and it’s growing. People, who think of themselves as spiritual, often retreat from anger. It reminds them of their animal nature. It’s a negative emotion. The Buddha spoke at length of the toxic quality of anger which contaminates everything it touches.

But we are animals and we experience anger, as well as love. Anger is often an expression of passion and even love. Hatred can inspire acts of incredible bravery and sacrifice.

For me, there is only one decisive distinction: and that is belief. Anger and rage are horrific things when they are based on belief. When I believe that jews and rats are the same thing, I am empowered to design the industry of mass execution and Auschwitz is born. When I believe that Black people are less than me, I can act with privilege and deal with them in ways I would never treat a fellow white person. When I believe that the Koran is the one and only word of god, then I am free to wage jihad against the infidels. When I believe that people are not apes, then I am free to support my local school board when they insist that creationism is given at least the same status of evolution in our school’s biology curriculum.

Mindless, unexamined belief is the element that makes anger toxic. And anger turns to hot rage when it is combined with powerlessness.

But anger and love can be perfect partners. It is my love for the economically disadvantaged that tells me that everyone must have affordable and quality healthcare. It is my love for the earth that tells me that those who poison it must be stopped. Love expressed as rage is righteous. It is selfless. It is based on connection with the all of our brothers and sisters and the source of life that unites us all.

In contrast, toxic rage is full of self. This is my country, the is my god, this is my land, etc. etc. etc. It negates our collective connections. It is founded in fear of loss and the use of force to express its inner belief in its innate powerlessness. It’s all about I, me, and mine. I’ve been fucked and now I demand justice on my terms.

When perceptions of injustice are based on direct observation, then we have the right and even a duty to act to make things just and fair. When a company knowingly fouls a community’s water, that is indeed a grave harm done not only against people, but against the whole of nature. Were it treated like a serious crime, I’m quite certain water pollution would be less of a problem. We can agree that slavery has never been addressed in the US. That reparations and large-scale efforts to balance the distribution of power and assets in the US, as well as formal apologies are way past due. We also know that the native people of this continent have not only lost all their land through naked violence, but have been victims of genocide intended and unintended. They are owed a very great debt.

Healthy rage is, indeed, healthy. It is, in fact, one of the very great challenges of our time - a time when the planet is dying, when the poor are sinking faster and faster into every more dire economic straits, and when the powerful possess for ever more influence to dominate and exploit the helpless and vulnerable.

We also need to see where we are unfair to others - when we act with undeserved privilege as a consequence of belief or just simple mental laziness. Anyone who has been a parent with more than one child, will have dealt with demands for fairness from one of their children - of charges of preferential treatment of one over the other. These are great mini-exercises in liberating ourselves from our own beliefs.

Liberation and justice are first cousins. Free of belief we are one with the world. Our touch goes to our brothers and sisters in pain and we begin the work of revolution - of justice. It all starts with simple and direct seeing. Let’s open our eyes together and begin letting the light of the Real illuminate our world. This light makes us Real.

Download post here: Rage

Tags: Belief, Anger, power

“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”̴ ̴ words attributed to Jesus Christ - John 8:32

Recently I have struggled with the problems that I have with neo-non-duality. But in the last several days a compelling clarity has filled me with its light and has shown me a powerful message that I would like to share with you.

I’m afraid that this post may appear disorganized and even random to some, but it contains the essence of what I have to say.

I have written before that I was trained in the Zen Mahayana tradition. A prominent teacher from that tradition wrote me that I had achieved awakening. At the time I did not believe it, for I didn’t sustain the glorious bliss that I’ve seen in the literature. I still had my moods, I could be crabby, and, although I dutifully meditated, I didn’t feel that I needed to meditate. I continued to think of myself as an unenlightened being. I now know that consuming ourselves with the struggle for personal enlightenment, is just another form of spiritual egotism. It isn’t for me.

On account of that hollow experience, I continued along that path and eventually found the teachings of Nisargadatta and Papaji. I was particularly drawn to the writings and talks of Gangaji, Mooji, Chuck Hillig and later to Scott Kiloby (and others).

Ultimately what they said and wrote never really “resonated” with me. Until several days ago, I thought that I just didn’t have the good fortune to have the fireworks and cosmic uplifting sometimes described in the literature. Several prominent non-dualists said that I just didn’t “get it”. For whatever reason, the message of neo-non-duality was not part of my authentic self, although it is a powerful pathway for others.

Perhaps they are right and, perhaps, it doesn’t matter.

I suspect that I did “get it” many years ago in that Zen Temple and my spiritual ego still craved the certainty that death to the physical body is an illusion. That was the very fear that first attracted me to the path described in several traditions of eastern spiritual philosophy.

That is now all behind me. I must say in full candor, that I have absolutely not the slightest interest in non-duality, although I also know that much of what they have to say is absolutely true and valid. It just is an area of self-expression that now fails to motivate or excite me.

This realization has brought me back to the very heart and soul of my own direct work, which I am now calling the Truth Way.

I am not concerned by philosophy. Talking about ideas can be fun, but it is not the purpose of this blog or my book Liberation from the Lie.

The truth is all that matters. This statement does not refer to final truths, but only to this truth. So unlike non-duality, where the core question is “Who am I?”, the core question of the Truth Way is, “Is this true?” I believe that Jed McKenna made a similar remark a number of years ago.

The power of this question is to liberate us from the whole galaxy of thoughts and beliefs that now make up our false self, what I call the “Fear-Selves” in my book. The Fear-Selves are natural and inevitable outcomes of our primal wounding that occurs in our first weeks of life and were sustained and often strengthened through our families of origin, peers, school, and work. The Fear-Self operates on both the individual and collective level and is the bulwark of modern civilization as well as representing the psychological essence of who we are not.

We cannot find out who we are until we:

• see the many fear-based constructions that form the self that needs to: control life/self, please others, appear tough/spiritual/responsible, and the many other forms of the Fear-Self that are described in the text; and
• to recognize the awesome power of the Wound to form our social and cultural universe.

This is a complex topic as anyone who has read my book has come to learn, but they have also seen how the direct truth seeking process is the key to individual and collective transformation. The resolution of needless suffering and struggle, those ceaseless repetitive painful patterns of our life, are healed only through the truth realizing process.

How do we know when something is true? We know the truth when it cannot be debated. It is the “isness” of life, here and now. Let me present several obvious examples. One - it is cloudy outside right now. I can say that it is cloudy outside. This is true. Connection with the actual and immediate truth of life is powerfully liberating. This example may appear trivial to some of you, but its power to transform is vast.When we are connected with the immediate truth of life shorn of all belief, we are fully awakened. Here is my second example. I love music. I didn’t choose to love music. It is just something that is real in my life. My love of music is not based on any belief system. It is not something that can be questioned. Like the clouds in the sky, it is real and beyond dispute. I express my uniqueness as a human being through music (as well as other channels). Finally, I don’t love music to inflate myself or to impress others. That love is part of my authentic being.

The whole purpose of the Truth Way is to find the authentic self. This is the revolution of the self. We cannot be free until we find out who we are. This is part of who I am. It is true. What is truly true for you?

When this self is found one’s life is truly transformed. Now we are connected to not only the immediate flow of life as it is, but we have found our own unique song. We become ourselves! The whole second-half life of the person whose value is ceaselessly dependent on the assessment of others or one’s own internal tyrant is left behind. This is what liberation is all about. You are alive and vital not only to your own life, but to your own innate self.

Now let’s look at belief. We find out what is false in our lives by exploring beliefs as they arise in our Fear-Based self. If I say that it’s very important to please people and to be well-liked and respected, I would say that a powerful, fear-based belief system is at work. Why must I please others? Is this need to please others true? Why do I need to be well liked? Why do I need to be respected? If you read my book, you will discover how this line of inquiry will take you back to your own Wound and you will discover who you are not.

This is how we investigate our beliefs. You should discover that every belief, no matter how central it is to our core personality, is linked directly to the need not to experience your Wound. Beliefs are like walls. To find the authentic self, every wall must, ultimately, come down.

Also, beliefs can be seen as immediately different from our first two examples. They are debatable. They must be defended. If attacked, conflict will ensue. The cause of nearly all conflict between people and even between countries, is a difference in belief. If you tell me that it’s not cloudy outside, we won’t have a conflict. Instead, I will assume that you either have a serious vision problem or are crazy. If you say that there is something wrong with me because of my love of music, I will have no idea what you’re talking about and excuse myself from the conversation.

Beliefs need to be defended, but the truth is just the truth. It is the truth that will set you free. This is also a great way to locate our beliefs in our immediate life. Anytime we are called to defend something, we need to ask ourselves, “is this true?” It is likely that a belief is at work.

Let’s look at one more example. Let’s say that I support a woman’s inalienable right to have an abortion and I encounter a conservative person who calls me a “murderer”. He believes that abortion is murder and by my agreeing to a woman’s right to have an abortion upon request, I am furthering murder and evil in this society. In this case, who is right, what is true in this disagreement?

The clear answer is no one. This is disagreement between two belief systems. We can summon evidence to support either position, but we must understand that in such issues there is no firm and undebatable truth, no matter how passionately we might feel about the topic.

But there is a deeper way of exploring the abortion issue and it is this. We can explore what are the likely outcomes of allowing women to have abortions and contrast that with the likely outcomes when women are prevented to have abortions. As long as we use facts (data) and not mere belief as the tool of our investigations, we are likely to find a deeper truth through our shared exploration.

This is why I do not call myself a non-dualist. It is not true for me. This does not mean that it shouldn’t be true for you. What I write about is my journey and my explorations. Each of us is unique. What is true for our own self will always reflect the authentic self and your authentic self will be different from my authentic self. Perhaps our ‘eternal Self’, transcends these discussions, but I’m really not interested in transcending this life. Life is not to be transcended, rather life for me, and possibly you, is the channel through which we discover who we are.

Download Post here: TruthWay

Tags: Fear Self, process, nonduality, wound