Category: Liberation

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The Power of Powerlessness

Who is the seeker? Who is the one who wants to attain?

Are we not all trying to attain something? We want to have more. We want to be loved. We want to have an impact on our lives. We want our parents and kids to be the way we want them to be. We want things to go “our” way and when they don’t we often become frustrated and upset.

All spiritual seekers come to the point where it begins to dawn on them that the pursuit of enlightenment is just as toxic as the pursuit of financial wealth. Both have the same roots but are expressed by slightly different personas. Both ambitions are deeply rooted in the belief that as I am, as my life is, I and my are not enough.

What is this I? Who is this I?

The I is the seeker (whether it be for enlightenment, power, love, whatever). The I is the one that always needs a little more power, more money, more sex, more fun.

So it works hard. It struggles to understand. It struggles to gain mastery. It struggles to get attention. It struggles to become beautiful. It fights against aging. It fights against the decline of its body. It mightily struggles to get what it thinks others have, but it lacks.

Perhaps the most powerful belief we have is the one that says: “I am responsible for my own happiness. I must “do something” if I am ever to be happy.” Review your life and you’ll see that happiness and doing are not nearly as closely linked as this thought projects. Life and happiness seem to be quite independent of this thought, however, well intended it might appear. But this thought is very deeply embedded in how we think about our lives.

This is the life of endless dissatisfaction, endless frustration, and, ultimately, profound grief and disappointment.

There is another way.

Observe this struggling I in your own immediate experience. Watch it want this and that. Observe how it demands things to happen a certain way.

See the pain and suffering that all of this struggling creates. Notice how all of this work is tightly connected to the “As I am, I lack” belief. See it all as one complete suffocating energy, that creates its own distinctive life trajectory.

Now consider the alternative.

Give up. Let the I just evaporate. See it as a kind of madness … a kind of poison. Let it all go.

What remains when you see this whole process and cease investing one’s sense of self into this effortful entity?

Is it not this one perfect moment?

This dissatisfied “I” is everywhere. It’s not just in the ‘gross’ energies of one’s life. The sense of “I” is woven into so many moments of our life. See this and be free of the ceaseless struggle in that seeing. Watch how the “I” demands to shine and be wonderful and adorable and beautiful and special … and be done with all of it, for as you are, you are everything you will ever need to be.

And where does actual power reside, if it is not in the psychological self? That is for you to find out on your own.

This is the power of powerlessness. Freedom of the “I” is the one thing that all of us seek, but it is not a process of expansion, of adding onto what is already there. It is, instead, a seeing that that is not the way. This is the way of return. The return to who we have always been, before all the struggling to chase after this and that belief. It is not a process of finding the next electrifying insight, but seeing that the effort to “get” that one, cathartic breakthrough was, actually, the obstacle to that which you have always sought. This is the power of powerlessness.

Inspired by the title of the new book by Wayne Liquorman – The Way of Powerlessness.

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Can We Wake Up to the Call of the 27 Dead?

Heaven and earth are not out to make friends.

Thus they treat all creatures as straw dogs.

Verse 5 of the Tao Te Ching (Wilson, trans)

Adam Lanza and the 26 killed by his desperate, profound madness is a wake-up call from the Creator of all that is.

Those that he killed are a part of that same call shrill call.

Can you hear it? I wonder if you can.

Does this killing rampage give strength to your fears? Do you want every teacher armed with instruments of death as they read nursery rhymes to six and seven year olds? Do you want every school to operate in lock-down mode? Is this your vision of a healthy society?

Nothing is more generous that Creation. The crazier we become, the louder become her shouts. Those beautiful children and their heroic teachers who sacrificed their lives are telling us story.

The Newtown, CT massacre was one a great shout. Global climate change and the bleak dimming of our once thriving planet is another.

Do you wake up to these calls or do you prefer the deep slumber induced by your fears?

Can we see the madness for what it is? Can we take full measure of the depth of our fears?

Can we love the unlovable? Can we mourn the dead and feel a cathartic gratefulness to their terrible sacrifice? They have the capacity to rouse us from our collective sleep. Can we, at least, honor in their passing for making it possible to see with eyes made clear by the shedding of their blood.

Can we just stop and take a look around?

I know we can, but I don’t know if we will. Is it unreasonable to doubt that?

For if we see the insanity of our ways, if we ever have the courage to see with our hearts, then we will put aside all the division, fear, and paranoia that characterize these bleak times.

We will wake up from this carnage.

Since all of us are killers.

We need to end the insane availability of lethal weapons that make those, who, for no fault of their own, project their madness onto others and produce such immense tragedy.

We must realize that our whole way of life is killing the elephants, the lions, the forests, the birds, the seas, the oceans, and, eventually, the human beings.

We have our own powerful hands around our throats and we don’t have the courage to release the lethal grip of our own suicidal ways.

We are either doomed to a bleak extinction or we can honor Creation and wake up to what we can become.

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We Walk in Beauty (whether we know it or not)

I am This

I am changeless.

I am the spacious space that allows

Everything

I can trust what is changeless

For that is who I am.

This space allows for the ever-changing

To be, if only for a moment.

Feel this spaciousness in your own being.

It is being-ness itself.

We are that.

No matter how stressful life can and will be.

This spaciousness can and will handle it.

It is secure as itself.

We are secure as that.

Clinging

Nothing can cling to this spaciousness.

This spaciousness can cling to no thing.

Notice this.

The spaciousness is perfectly full and empty as itself.

It can have nothing, for it is already everything.

We are that.

The Ego Knows

You say, “I know this and I’ve heard it a million times, but it doesn’t make a difference. I don’t need to hear this again.”

Maybe you do, but you don’t know it.

How the Personal Self Happens Continue reading →

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The United States and the God of Violence: Or How Our Myths are Killing Us

What makes a belief powerful?

A belief is likely to become powerful when it makes us feel good. Whatever makes you feel good will have a very strong pull on what you choose to believe.

The same principle works on the group and national level. We are drawn to the powerful belief (myth) that the US is a caring society that nurtures peace and despises war. More than anything else, we like to define ourselves as a nation of law and due process.

I tell you now that this is, in its entirety, a myth. We are a nation addicted to violence and division. Our laws are expressly designed to serve the few against the many. Their wording may sound fair and sensible, but the ways they are enforced form a very different reality.

Adam Lanza and the tragic slaughter of 27 people in Newtown, CT is just a very small expression of a much larger machinery of violence that this country nurtures and sustains.

Let’s take a look at the obvious facts.

The US is first, by far, in the sale of automatic guns and rifles. Ammo for these machines, whose use is to kill people, is readily available on the web. In this country, the gun lobby is king. No president has ever challenged them and the Supreme Court has never reviewed the Second Amendment whose wording clearly stipulates that the right to own guns is linked to trained militias. We love our guns and it is the freedom we most vigorously defend.

At the same time, we have shredded access to mental health care and have extensively defunded it. Nearly any angry sociopath is able to buy a collection of lethal weaponry, but that same person or members of his family will have a very difficult time finding quality mental health care to address that persons needs. We are happy to spend money on access to violence, but are reluctant to spend on that which might reduce violence.

If that is not enough, our entertainment industry glorifies violence. Modern movies invite us into a universe where killing is shown as heroic, fun, and, more than anything else, easy. A complimentary world of video games (of which Adam Lanza was addicted) make violence profoundly satisfying. This is, in itself, a massive industry built on violence and the gleeful joy of killing.

It has been long known that massive income inequality leads to a profoundly violent society and there is no country on earth who has followed a path of such extreme inequalities in income as the United States. As the one-tenth of one percent multiply their billions and assume an ever tighter grip on the nation’s economy and government, the remaining 99.9% descend into ever declining resources inevitably creating a world of expanding want, violence, and insecurity.

The United States is number one in both the number of its citizens in jails and prisons, as well as the proportion of its population incarcerated. Not only do we assign people to prisons with such passion, but we are also number one in the severity of our punishments. We punish those who break the law with the express purpose of deterring them from re-offending and also to scare others from making the same choice. Yet the US has among the highest rates of violent crime in the industrial world. We are a nation that is addicted to punishment despite the obvious fact that is has nearly no actual effect on the incidence and rate of crime.

At the same time the US is, by far, the world biggest dealer of arms. In the depths of the recent recession, the one industry that continued to thrive in the US was the arms industry. In a country addicted to selling death and destruction, business is always good.

It is well known that the US leads the world, by far, in the amount it spends on arms. The US spends more on arms than the next 14 countries combined!

As a world leader in lethal technology, the US combines its immense arms spending on ever more terrifying and impersonal forms of death and destruction. Our super-sophisticated drones patrol the skies of countries all over the world. Each of these drones is capable of raining lethal violence with horrifying consequences. They have a long and well-establish history of killing innocents, often children. The development of ever-more sophisticated drone technology is encouraged and nurtured in the nation’s top universities, who are eager to work with government and industry to produce even more efficient and impersonal instruments of death.

As generous as we are in producing weapons of mass destruction to other countries as well as to our own citizenry, we are remarkable cheap in humanitarian foreign aid. We much prefer selling weapons than providing assistance to those struggling with the most basic challenges of daily living.

A country in love with its own violence and its gigantic capacity to produce the machines of violence must produce a myth about its love for peace. A nation who imprisons more of its people than any other with the most severe prison terms, must scream to the world that it is, more than anything else, a nation of fairness and law. A nation of great wealth and intellectual accomplishment must take pride in its great achievements in health, while it shreds access to mental health care. These are the great lies of this country.

Adam Lanza and people like him are just one more expression of violence and fear that is so a part of living in the United States. The very town of Newtown, CT has resisted any attempt to restrain the use of automatic weapons and has long waiting lists for the use of the areas firing ranges. It is more than ironic that one of its own, little more than a boy of considerable intellectual accomplishment, became the poster-child for violence and madness. He is one of the left behinds. While his life screamed out for care and just a little attention, his mother responded with fear and encouraged the use of guns to provide them with security. One of those weapons was used to kill her with four powerful shots to the head.

Waking up means to become conscious of the beliefs (lies) that make us feel good about ourselves and our society, while veiling the underlying truth. We are not a peace-loving society. To the contrary, there is no country in the world that cultivates and nurtures violence as does the United States. We need violence. It’s a very large part of our economy. We are addicted to the use of prisons. We use them to disempower our poor. The War on Drugs is simply another policy designed to promote the purchase of weapons in the service to the gods of money and violence.

The power of our national myths is made possible, in part, by our relative isolation. We really don’t know the fruits of peace and civilization as it manifests in most European countries or in the country to our north; Canada. We struggle to achieve some modicum of security, while we foster precisely those social instruments that produce fear and isolation. A nation of guns is a very dangerous place. The merchants of violence would like us to believe that a gun makes us free. To the contrary, it makes us scared and profoundly unfree.

Liberation from the Lie means to come awake to the truth. This conversation about guns and the right to own automatic assault weapons is just a very small part of our national reality. We live in a universe of fear and fear feeds on itself. Real freedom is seeing all of this. It is all of a piece.

Only when we wake up to this can we begin to consider a very different kind of society. I did not talk about our war against the earth. How our addiction to carbon-based energy will eventually kill and make miserable nearly all human life on this planet. Yet we are unable to come to any reasonable understanding on how to address this other issue of extreme violence. And, once again, the US is the per-capita world leader in carbon emissions (China leads the world in net carbon emissions).

We do see this, but we can’t seem to integrate this seeing in how we conduct ourselves and form our societies. There is a reason for this and it is this: those that make the most core decisions in world policy are the same people most addicted to war, income inequality, division, and environmental destruction. These are the people that run the biggest corporations and financial institutions. These same people live lives of unimaginable wealth while isolated from the suffering that these policies must create.

To the twenty children who died last Friday, my heart grieves for their families. I weep with them in this time of terrible grief. This post is my feeble attempt to explore this great well of violence and bring light to a world where so much light is shut out by our collective, desperate myth making. We need to use this grief to awaken us from our long slumber. We need to stop taking a road that appears easy and take the one that appears challenging, if we are ever to truly transform this world from one that is violent and crazed to one that is compassionate and caring.

To be strong, to be powerful, means to take up the challenge of the truth. Right now, let’s honor the memories of these little children and all the world’s children that live with terror and deprivation, by waking up to what is true and dedicating ourselves to a very different course. Let us acknowledge our relations. Let us see all of them as our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters.

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The Bitter Medicine that Ends All Seeking

Warning: This medicine will only work if you follow the instructions on its use detailed below.

Do you want to end, forever, the spiritual search? Few actually do. They only think they do. They are addicted to seeking.

This medicine is bitter. Most want only sweet medicine. They will only believe medicine that goes down easily. Their insistence on sweetness hardens their bitterness. Again, this is two sides of the same coin.

Not so this medicine. This medicine will get caught in your throat. You will want to spit it out. Most will spit it out.

This medicine is only prescribed for hard-core seekers. It’s only for those who have reached the end of the road.

This is a very simple medicine. Most bitter things are direct and immediate. This medicine is no exception.

Here is the medicine:

Me! The person you think you are. The person you believe you are. This person who has been seeking everywhere it can seek, this is what you call “me”. You must make this me/person your constant companion, but you must know it by another name, for it is not who you are. You may never again refer it to as me.

From this point forward, every time the me makes a mental or physical expression in whatever form, you are to insert this medicine formula any time the itch of seeking or contemplative knowledge arises in conscious*:

“This is the voice of self-contempt. This is the voice of ignorance. This is the voice of inadequacy and insufficiency. This is the voice of the one who depends on validation and love and thus seeks it everywhere and is already convinced they are lacking in both. This is my companion, but it is not me.”

You must take this medicine as often as possible. This is your mantra. There is no other medicine but this.

  • What is contemplative knowledge? It arises when the mind gets lost in “me” thinking and feeling. It is often expressed in some form of caring. It is usually attached to some psychological need. It is often expressed as an emotional judgment through which the “me” gets some kind of charge, however subtle and seemingly inconsequential, like: “I only like folk music.” or “People should always love their children.” or “I respect other people’s choices.” Do you get the idea? Me-based contemplative thinking is crap. It’s all the voice of the insufficient, self-hating me. When this voice arises take this medicine without delay and make this speaker your friend and constant companion.
  • This also means that when you hear the mental chatter about hope, fear, personal opinions, hear it as the mutterings of your constant companion and friend, but, absolutely, not your own voice.

One day the companion may or may not walk away and disappear in the cosmos. But whatever happens, you will know that her/his voice is not your own. It is false, conditioned, self-hating, phony, greedy, secretive, smug, official, authoritative, obsequious and manipulative. This is to be your friend and constant companion.

And the seeking … it will vanish all on its own.

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Make the Final Breakthrough … Now

How do I finally end this cycle of ceaseless seeking?

What fuels seeking?

It is the belief that as I am, I am insufficient. That is the core belief.

Because that belief is very active and forceful, it feeds the drive to become something different, something more, something better. Realize that this belief is strong in your self and realize that it attaches itself to your sense of who you believe yourself to be. Just acknowledge this. You don’t need to analyze it or do anything else with it. It is a simple fact. When you seek, this belief is expressing itself in your life.

Now take a deep breath.

Look deeply within yourself.

Just for an instant, get a sense of the “you” that is changeless, that has always been present, that isn’t thrown by any circumstance. I have found that it is easy to get a sense of this energy while doing simple chores, like washing the dishes, walking the dog, or making the bed.

Just for an instant, pretend that you are like a Lakota warrior gazing out into the limitless plains of the Dakotas and knowing that it is all happening inside of this changeless, underlying energy. If the Lakota part doesn’t resonate with you, just feel yourself as an ancient being feeling the vast expansiveness of this limitless space.

Realization

Realization is an issue of identification. Nearly all of us identify with the stories our mind authoritatively tells us to believe. These are stories we inherited from our families, our friends, our education, and most of all from our insufficiency belief: the core belief, that as we are, we are insufficient (please see Liberation from the Lie to learn all the details about these stories and how the self-organize to form lives of struggle and suffering).

How can we sever this identification once and for all?

We see what is consistently real. This warrior self, that was described above, this underlying energy, that is always present, is who we actually are. There is nothing special about this energy. It just is. It is who we are. It is changeless and faceless. It is present day and night. It is not the seer or witness. The body and mind sees, but the underlying warrior energy embodies this seeing.

Everything that arises in experience, arises as this energy and within this energy. The difference between changing events, thoughts, and feelings is that they are ceaselessly changing and possess their own unknowable flow. This great river of experience happens within this underlying, but now overlying energy. This includes the persona we previously identified as ourselves.

When we see what is consistently real and consistently present and further realize that there is nothing especially remarkable about it, then we can release the identification with the mind’s many stories. The persona continues, but it is no longer seen as what defines who we are.

One of the key stories of the mind is that there will always be something “out there” that will heal our seeking selves. This story is linked to the core insufficiency belief. When the real you is discovered, perhaps while you are washing the dishes, you will then realize that there is nothing “out there” that will complete you or end your struggles. That too is part of the false identification. All you ever need to realize is this persistently present, impersonal, yet strangely person energy within which everything arises.

Warning

The mind will argue against the colorless internal energy that is our changeless being. It will call it a phantom and a lie. It will continue to assert its stories. This battle splits us into two parts; the mind-based false me and the unmediated, energetic underlying self.

That is a false dilemma. We can welcome this battle in our lives, for to resist it would merely assert one cluster of false beliefs against an opposing cluster of false beliefs. We welcome it because we now realize that there is nothing personal in any of these belief clusters. They are just happenings, little different from the weather. They come and go just like everything else.

The Outcome

The outcome is for you to discover on your own. But I will tell you this. When the personal investment in whatever is happening in your life falls away, everything changes. When we sought something to complete us in this external world, we were weak and vulnerable. Now free of any belief based psychological persona, we have the winds of nature at our backs. This is authentic power. We are standing on our own two feet. We no longer teeter on the uncertain foundation that is all belief.

Discover this for yourself. If you need any help with this very simple process, please click here.

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An Ending to Spiritual Bullshit

Do you believe you are a person with your own singular story?

Have you ever read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now? Have you ever wondered why its message eluded you, even though you fully understand the principals and ideas Tolle presents?

Life presents two,seemingly mutually exclusive, possibilities.

  1. You actually are the person you believe yourself to be. You are locked into a sequence of time with a beginning (birth) and an end (death) and in between those two poles all the stuff of your life happens. Most of it is ignored and forgotten, but here and there certain memories stand out from the otherwise nothingness of your existence.
  2. If now is all that is real, then you are not this person at all. You are not any of the stories. You are not the son or daughter of your parents and you are not the mother or father of your children. You are not the person with this job. And, you are not the seeker chasing after this or that. You are, instead, the now that sits in the middle of all of that. You this stillpoint that is both the center and the periphery of all that has been, all that is, and all that will be.

Consider the blazing contrast between the two possibilities.

But there is a third possibility and that is that we are both the story, as well as the now. We are a complex mixing of the two. Is there free choice or is everything determined? Neither and both, for we can see that the the dichotomy is a false one, since both conditions collapse under close scrutiny.

Many of us love reading mysteries. Sometimes what we love most about them is that they eventually resolve into some pleasing conclusion. Not so with this life. The combination of the persona with the now is profoundly mysterious and ungraspable.

With this understanding we can see that it is our very struggle to resolve this mystery that causes us the most suffering and frustration. It’s really hard trying to something that is impossible!

But like the best mysteries this life also resolves. It resolves right here and right now only to move on, instantly, to its next inevitable resolution. This is the mystery which has no knowable or fixed exit.

We don’t need a resolution or an exit because we are right where we need to be and we will always be right where we need to be without ever needing to pound this moment into some kind of bullshit spiritual meaning that’s all about your special journey.

What is there to do? Whatever you want to do … whatever you need to do. Is it really that complicated?

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To Have or Not to Have – That is the Question

This is the path to Heart Awakening. It is available to everyone equally. I shall assume that it can be realized in a moment and then unrealized. It could take 40 years. But it can happen for all.

The Obstacle

The one obstacle is identification. The persona identifies with its fears, desires, and its doings. Submitting to persona driven fears is what sustains their scariness. Submitting to persona driven desires sustains the pain they promise to alleviate. Identification with doing is the fiction that sustains the whole process.

Example

You need to walk your dog. Because you would prefer not to do this task, you hurray yourself and your dog. It is the very desire to ‘get it over with’ as quickly as possible that cements the heavy length of the task within consciousness. Rushing creates the experience of slowness! Explore this fascinating irony. Now apply this example to every desire that appears important within consciousness.

Tools

All jobs take tools and this task is no exception. Your persona, the very thing that stands between this moment and Heart Awakening is also the essential tool to provide access to the layer of being-ness that underlies all fears, desires, and beliefs. Continue reading →

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The Direct Path to Heart Awakening

This is the path to Heart Awakening. It is available to everyone equally. I shall assume that it can be realized in a moment and then unrealized. It could take 40 years. But it can happen for all.

The Obstacle

The one obstacle is identification. The persona identifies with its fears, desires, and its doings. Submitting to persona driven fears is what sustains their scariness. Submitting to persona driven desires sustains the pain they promise to alleviate. Identification with doing is the fiction that sustains the whole process.

Example

You need to walk your dog. Because you would prefer not to do this task, you hurray yourself and your dog. It is the very desire to ‘get it over with’ as quickly as possible that cements the heavy length of the task within consciousness. Rushing creates the experience of slowness! Explore this fascinating irony. Now apply this example to every desire that appears important within consciousness.

Tools

All jobs take tools and this task is no exception. Your persona, the very thing that stands between this moment and Heart Awakening is also the essential tool to provide access to the layer of being-ness that underlies all fears, desires, and beliefs. Continue reading →

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Primal Light: The Meeting of the Booda and Neecheh

Many years ago, a great philosopher arose in the East. His name was Booda and the philosophy he preached he called “Solidarity”.

This is what the Booda said:

All things happen and we can’t know why.

Cognition or awareness occurs after the cognized thing is seen.

Thus, it follows, all things happen all on their own.

All things are dependent on each other.

Suffering or delusion is a consequence of grasping after things, as if they were independent objects.

The greatest of all delusions was the belief in an independent self.

All is in ceaseless change and all meaning that are affixed to this great tireless river of change are fast emptied of meaning.

The beauty of Boodaism was that it vanquished the great burden of seeking to improve or “find” the self. In this moment everything just is as it is and there is a cosmic and mysterious beauty to that.

Centuries later another great sage arose, but this time, he was from the West. His name was Niecheh.

He said, of Boodaism, that it was empty of substance and that it said nothing that we don’t already know, but since there is a being that actually “knows” this, then the philosophy must be a false one.

Niecheh celebrated the knower. He said:

Be not ashamed of the knower you are.

Never favor any belief over what can be seen.

Realize that what is seen is limited by the capacities of the seer.

Why resist life, when it can be loved?

My religion, truly is one of kindness and celebration.

Be not afraid of War, my friends and comrades, for the forces of darkness and repression are always among us, and we should never shy away from the endearing, albeit false pieties of Boodism.

I am both lover and warrior and I celebrate my blood, muscles, eyes, mouth, and mind.

Our power is the power of life and our weakness is the ebbing away of life.

Vulnerability is courage, for behind vulnerability is true power.

One day a student approached Neecheh and asked him:

Who do you trust?

And, with a twinkle in his eye, Neecheh said:

Can I trust you, my young comrade?

And the confusion in the young man increased and he asked himself that same question.

Can I truly trust myself?

And shining Neecheh embraced the man and said:

If you cannot trust yourself, who can you trust?

Thus Neecheh preached the power, perfection, rhythm, love, and sensuality of the self, in love with itself which he sees reflected in all of nature.

“But”, he said, “I fail to see it in the monuments of the believers, for they are lost in the fantasies of a fearful mind. It is nature, her immediacy, her mystery, her power, her fragility, her perfume, her lust, her food, her mountains, her valleys, her lakes, and in her oceans, her high plains, and her forests that I see and do love myself.”

And Neecheh, a rather small man with unkempt hair wandered back in the mountains and valleys and was never seen again.

But there, in the deepest of mountains lairs, he found ancient Booda and in Neecheh Boodha recognized himself and the two became fast friends.

Many years passed and, one day, Neecheh left the mountain lair. He was old and wild and he knew not the name Neecheh.

He laughed heartily mostly at himself and called himself Laffing Phool. He said when asked what he knew:

I know only to love and laugh, laugh and love, ponder and laugh, question and laugh. Oh the joy of the fool, the burdens cast away. I’m hungry and want to eat. I’m sleepy and want to sleep … but let’s eat first and then do as we do as we do as we do.

 

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The Answer to Every Question

If we could collect every aspect of our own life and condensed into its most basic parts it would appear as a series of temporary, fleeting questions and answers.

We make sense of our world through asking ourselves, like: “What is happening?” Most of our questions are unconscious sparks of light and our equally brief answers are produced through memory and our senses. Everything we can think about ourselves is reflected in this ever-present flow of questions and answers.

Of course some questions seem more important than others. One of the most challenging questions, in my own experience is this:

What should I make for dinner?

But there are so many other big questions, like, “Should I quit my job?”, “Should I try kissing her the next time we get together?”, “What movie should I see this weekend?”, or “What is the meaning of this bizarre life?”

It’s easy to see that all of these questions and answers just happen all on their own, flickering through time like little lights that go on and off. This is the most elemental aspect of our lives.

But is there an ultimate answer to life as one complete singular whole?

There is!

Would you like to know the answer to all your questions? If you already know the answer, then great. You don’t need to read on.

But if you’re still wondering, I will tell you the one ultimate and final answer to all your questions.

I won’t play coy and delay the answer. I’m going to go right out and announce it right here on this blog.

The answer is … drum roll please … YOU.

You are the answer to every question. End of story. End of seeking. End of everything. It is the end of self-improvement. It is the end of needing to, ever again, need to be anything different from what you already are.

Everything leads to only one place; YOU.

You are God and all of his/her creations.

If you’re still wondering what this wondrous YOU is, then just get a sense of the wordless, mysterious YOU in all of its immediate REALITY and nowness. Realize that this is not the thought of you. It is deeper than any thought. It is you as the living is-ness that is you! It is that element of existence that is unavoidable and immediately present. I fear I’ve already said too much.

Where do all things find resolution? It can only be in YOU. You are the perfect union that you have always sought.

That’s it.

What is there “to get”? Only one thing: YOU and you already got it.

You are the alpha and omega to everything that has been and will ever be. YOU are IT.

This is what the Buddha woke to … himself! This is the wordless truth that is. It is utterly trustworthy and complete.

Right now realize this YOU as the answer to every conceivable (and inconceivable) question. Everything finds itself in YOU … even you!

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War, Gaza, and Awakening

The Israeli/Palestinian war in Gaza, what can it tell us about the awakening?

It can tell us everything!

We can argue forever about the rights and wrongs of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We can talk about how Hamas has showered Israeli with rockets or we can talk about the brutality of the Israeli blockade or we can talk about the legitimacy of Palestinian land rights in the occupied territories or we can talk about the negation of those claims by the creation of new Israeli settlements in those lands or we can talk about anti-semitic values lauded in Palestinian and Arab media or we can talk about the horrors of the Holocaust and how Jews needed a homeland they could call their own and we can keep on talking till the end of time while people suffer terribly in this war and all wars.

War cannot happen in awakening. When all the personal and psychological identifications vanish, serious conflict isn’t possible. We are, literally, no longer individuals with an axe to grind. We are, simultaneously, nothing and everything.

War happens when people are identified with a label. “I am a Jew”, “I am a Palestinian”. Our values, needs, demands are separate and different. Keenly identified with our labels, we have a history and a future. We are people nested in time. “You are now my enemy for you are a Palestinian/Jew.” Or, conversely, “You are my friend, for you are a Christian or Arab.”

Wars occur between labels.

Awakening is profound. Everything we thought was real and enduring falls to the wayside. We seek nothing. This moment resonates in that nothingness and keeps it full and perfect.

In war, everything “we hold dear” is at stake. So we hold on as tightly as we can to all our personal labels, all the stuff that makes us feel real, everything that positions us in the flow of time. It is said in Judaism that “we are a people of the word”.

Awakening is a total reversal of this seeming reality. Before awakening, I could say “I am a Jew or a Palestinian or a Martian.” After awakening, those labels are emptied of their meaning or relevance. They just don’t make any sense. They might be briefly interesting, but they are a secondary happening within the Source of all happenings.

Identified with labels, we can’t help but live a life of almost ceaseless worry and concern. Labels are very easily threatened. They are brittle conceptual constructs. Thus identified with labels we are easily angered. When we see the interplay of label-identified groups, we see the eventual probability of war. What happens between individuals, will happen between groups and nations. Power is never equal. One side will oppress another and thus we have the endless stories victims and their oppressors. That dialectic is fundamentally unstable and will reverse itself. Oppressor receives “his just desserts” and becomes a victim, while the victim must, eventually, become an oppressor. We see precisely that in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Jews were victims in Europe and eventually became oppressors in the Middle East.

Free of all labels, we are free of all war. Because we have bodies and minds, conflict will continue to happen on the physical level, but it can never escalate to the massive field of war, although I am reluctant to assert this as a truth.

We can say this about the universe; it is a place that admits to everything. War, violence, the explosive death of whole galaxies are all realities on the physical realm. Such violence, if extreme enough, ushers in a new order. What appeared real and enduring is replaced by something entirely new, until that too is destroyed.In this way, we can understand extreme violence as a part of how change works, for change is the one reality we can always embrace as real, constant, and perfect.

War, peace, good times, and bad times, are all resonances in the perfect flow of absolute inter-relatedness. You can’t have an oppressive Israeli without his oppressed Palestinian. You can’t have a black hole without a galaxy being sucked into its unstoppable abyss and from those same abysses new galaxies are born. Such is the interplay of all forces on the physical level.

Where does this great flow of happenings happen?

Only one place: here.

The “you” you seek to improve and enlighten is just one more happening flickering on the screen on which everything else happens. This “you” is quite unreal and it is quite real at the same time. All that is simultaneously real and unreal make up this great flow of happenings. Free of all identifications it becomes a show free of all beginnings and endings.

What is liberation?

It is the freedom from all identifications. To add one more word would be one word way too much.

Shadowy_Figure_by_sande74

The Healing of a Rapist – Part 1

This post was written for Trust in Liberation. Click here to read the post there. It’s been added to this site because of the value I believe it has.

The Rape

There you are. Sitting comfortably at home watching one of your favorite shows on television. It’s an especially cozy evening as you nestle close to your spouse, when the phone rings. It’s your daughter. Her voice is breathless and choking. Instantly you know something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

“What’s going on sweetie? Is anything the matter?”, you gasp into the phone.

“I’ve been raped and beaten Mom.”

“Omigod, my poor girl. Omigod. I’m coming right over.”, but then you realize that she lives far away.

You discover that she was at a friend’s house and on her walk home a strange man approached her and all the rest followed. You learn that she was able to drag herself to a hospital where she is currently under “observation”. Continue reading →

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The Healing of a Rapist: Conclusion

NOTE!!! – It is not possible to understand or appreciate this post until you read the previous post which details the first part of the Navajo healing process. Click HERE to read this post.

And then the process must go deeper.

The healer says, “You are a person of power. I can see that. In your power you chose the act that bring us together on this day.”

What does the healer mean when he says, “You are a person of power.”?

From the Navajo perspective, a person makes choices. Healing requires us to be accountable for these choices. But unless we are fully conscious of the choices we have made, authentic accountability will not be possible. So when the healer tells the man that he is a person of power, he is saying, to all of us, that the choices that we make often have powerful consequences.

As long as we are unconscious of our choices, we will be lost within a life that often doesn’t make sense, feels random, and leaves us feeling like a victim of circumstance, bad luck, and the usual ton of crap that everybody has to endure in this terrible life.

When we fail to recognize our power we make one other vast error; we minimize the effect we have on others, we are all but unconscious of how our actions, even the tone of our voice have on those whose life we touch. Especially in those choices that we understand as harm-causing and deviant, the person that makes those choices will minimize both themselves as dynamic decision-makers, as well as to minimize the effects these choices have on others. This has been observed consistently in the criminal justice research.

The man, still quite confused, asks, “What do you mean that I am a person of power?” Continue reading →

TaoHeart

The Final Post from Liberation from the Lie: The Authentic Revolution

[contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"] We start to bring about this world when we commence the inward exploration of the radiant spirit and find out who we truly are. There is where we discover the love and creation that binds us all to it. We are that creation. You are that creation. The sky, the oceans, the mountains, the vast plains and you find your source in that great truth.

What we must begin alone, that same journey ends with us together. That is the circle of life itself. The solo life blends with the collective and we are a tribe once again, in love with life and life in love with us.

Do you remember taking the college SAT. Each test had several questions that required the student to provide the best title for a very short story. I remember being stumped at the answer possibilities that the test provided. I could make a decent case for any one of them, but I knew that there was only one right answer.

I evaluated each of the four possibilities (A.B.C. or D) and I suspect that any story title that I preferred would probably be the wrong answer. So I had to “psyche” the test and try to figure out what the test wanted me to say. I could either be true to myself and probably get the question wrong or I could try to figure out the mind of the authorities that designed the test and hope to get the question right.

This is exactly the predicament that each of us face in our daily living. So often we can either be true to ourselves and fail at life or we can try to figure out what the authorities want from us and, at the same time, betray our own selves. In fact, we do this so often, that it becomes an ingrained part of our personalities. Over time, we loose touch with who we are and spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out what these same authorities expect from us in a million different situations.

SAT scores are mailed to each test-taker. So you can never find out what questions you got right or wrong. So I was never able to find out if I answered those confusing questions correctly. And that’s also my point. We never can really know if we’re getting it all right. Yet life, in its way, gives us a score. And thus we stumble through life, our footing never especially secure or enduring.

Even very little children face the same dilemma. At a very early age we realize that if we stay true to our selves we risk getting punished by our parents and teachers. If we’re going to succeed at all in this life, we need to figure out how to please our authorities. It turns out that the price for success is very high indeed.

Little children learn the one terrible lesson that will stay with them the whole of their lives; that they are only as good as their last accomplishment. And even more to the point, they learn that love is something that they must earn time and again and was never was a birthright.

What does all of this have to with global revolution?

The moment we become compelled to win affection, validation, and meaning from exclusively external sources because you have come to realize that as you are, you are not adequate, from that point forward we become disowned from who we actually are. We become, in effect, slaves to the needs attached to a false persona.

We take on a series of masks exquisitely design to counter the primary underlying fear. The remainder of our lives becomes dedicated to a ceaseless drive to please others (so that they will validate us), manipulate others (because as we are we are not worthy of effortless dignity and respect), to impress others with our brilliance (because inwardly we feel that we need to prove ourselves time and again that we are more than we think we are), to control others by force (because people are naturally shitty and need someone to control their baser desires) and on and on it goes.

We are always struggling to psych out an external authority. We never leave that testing room where we were required to calculate what “the other” wanted from us. It is absolutely no different from the empty promises of some enlightenment teachings. We look for salvation in all the wrong places.

The journey back to the self begins and ends with the self.

The authentic revolution happens when we discover our shared, individual, and collective personhood. It is recognition that we are not only connected with everyone on earth, but with everything else as well. As the Buddha pointed out centuries ago, we do not exist independently from everything else.

The authentic revolution is an individual experience. It is not a mass movement. It does not have the sweeping drama of history. It does not seek to solve great social issues.

Rather it is about you and me. While we can meditate in groups, the journey is always solo. Only you can discover your own Wound, the great vat of pre-verbal traumatic experience that became covered by many layers of compensating psychological process that I have called Fear-Selves in Liberation from the Lie.

The moment we cease needing to please everyone, because we are so desperate for their approval, to control our lives, because we are so tormented by insecurity, to use our bodies and appearance to obtain power and admiration, because we know that if we don’t look superficially beautiful people won’t be drawn to us, to force people to do what we demand they do, because we know that only force works and we are always right, on that day our world is transformed.

The abyss of lack knows know limits. Until we completely and utterly disidentify with the person we believe ourselves to be, founded on the core thought of inadequacy, our search can only embitter us further. No amount of external validation can come close to filling this vast abyss. You will continue seeking the right amount of security, power, spirituality, and love and never, ever find it. The beautiful person can never be beautiful enough. The spiritual person can never obtain the enlightenment he desperately seeks. The Tough Guy will only face an ever-diminishing amount of force and vitality. The Expert will bore his audience. And the Pleaser will live in a universe of tenuous support, but ever-present resentment. This is the way the game of inadequacy is played.

We all have been played thanks to our original invalidation. There is simply no escape from that … except this: the Authentic Revolution. Can you be an Authentic Revolutionary to yourself?

Nearly all the acrimony, substance abuse, violence, and inequality we observe in the world is a direct outcome of our underlying identification with inadequacy. This is why the Authentic Revolution must address the root process first. We have already seen how this root process is what nearly all the ills of our world have in common.

The Authentic Revolution is a return. It is a return from the Exile. The Exile is represented by our lives spent in the psychological realms of lack and want. It is finding out who we truly are now and forever. It is not about setting up the newest worker’s commune or leading the Wall Street executives to a great communal guillotine where the angry hordes can cheer as their heads are lopped off.

The world of lack awards cunning, calculated intelligence. It is the ugly world of Ayn Rand where every man is, ultimately, out for himself.

In contrast, the world of the Authentic Revolution is one of wisdom, as opposed to smarts. The key to wisdom is the living recognition of our endless connections; that when I exploit the earth for my own advantage, I despoil it for everyone and everything else. In this way, everything is changed in the world of the Authentic Revolution. We return to our natural selves. We enjoy the good and fresh air, delicious food, meaningful work, music, dance, and art, as well as scientific inquiry. We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Civilization has produced so much of value. This is, rather, civilization contextualized within the whole world as one, self-organizing being.

We start to bring about this world when we commence the inward exploration of the radiant spirit and find out who we truly are. There is where we discover the love and creation that binds us all to it.

What we begin alone, that same journey ends with us together. That is the circle of life itself. The solo life blends with the collective and we are a tribe once again, in love with life and life in love with us.

Thank You – Now My Swan Song

I know that I’ve said this before, but this truly is my final post at this site. I’ve said everything I can say, especially in how it is connected to my book Liberation from the Lie.

While I will stop writing posts, I will continue answering email and participating in talks. Currently I am planning a course in Navajo Peacemaking at New York’s Learning Annex. Part of this will be a web course and if you are interested in learning more about Navajo Peacemaking, please send my your email and I will make sure that I keep you informed of developments. If you live in the NY area you will be welcome to attend this great opportunity to learn what it means to use conflict as a gift.

I loved writing for this blog. There are thousands of pages here, nearly all of the written from a place of passion, commitment, honesty, and, more than anything else, love. Some posts are better than others, but I think the quality has been rather good.

I will keep the site up until my current contract expires with my web hosting service. I’m guessing that it’s about another six months or so and then it’s over and it will be gone.

Please accept my sincere and humble thanks for spending your valuable time here together. I am so grateful that we could take this journey together.

I intend to continue supporting my new site trustliberation.org that is designed to supplement my new book, Trust in Liberation. An invitation is extended to all of you to continue the exploration there. This books stands on its own, but it is especially valuable to those who have enjoyed this site. I have demanded a low price for it so that everyone can afford a copy.

I should tell you that I don’t intend to make regular posts to that site, but there will be occasional contributions.

Thank you again … a thousand times over.

 

MRTA LEADER "ALEJANDRO' FILE PHOTO.

The Global Revolution (Part 2 of 3): The Failure of the Traditional Revolution

Our previous post talked about the root problem facing people all over the world. The melting ice caps, political dis-empowerment, the oppression of women and many minorities, the mass extinction of plants and animals, each of these are linked to a single, dominant process.

The process that links them all is the human identification with lack.

Today’s post takes us on the next step of this long journey; how can we heal the terrible damage that has happened to our collective spirit and to this planet … for that too is a single process.

First we must recognize the fundamental truth of this root cause. This means that we need to see how lack effects how we think on the level of the individual, as well as the group. We need to see this directly and not conceptually many thousands of times.

This is not as difficult as it might sound, for the process of lack identification is everywhere. It’s in our ceaseless sense of insufficient self-worth and our grasping at anything that will give us a momentary charge of excitement. We see this on the individual and the group level. What people do individually, nations, groups, religions, and classes do as groups.

This is the first step. But it is the next step that heralds the start of the global revolution.

The term revolution is likely to create images in our minds that have the qualities of rage and violence. Perhaps we think of taking to the streets en masse, shouting our demands in a vast unison and bring the whole edifice of exploitative capitalism to its knees. These are habitual images of large-scale revolution.

But if history has shown us anything, it is that these mass, organized, and often violent episodes have never created a fundamental change in the way people exploit themselves and the planet. Mass movements have created positive changes in the past and they have also created terrifying descents into political madness (Nazism was also a mass movement). They are, in the end, also expressions of lack. They are born from an identification with insufficiency and inadequacy.

Traditional mass movements have, like Buddhism, been inspired by a recognition of lack and inadequacy, but their response has been one that uses the one energy and method that lack knows best. It goes like this.

Because my identification with inadequacy induces rage and frustration (remember on the individual and group levels), then I will respond to the problem with the very same energy. I will use methods that are forceful and direct against it. I will, in effect, counter the anger induced by inadequacy with the same anger.

This is just our close friend, Lack, in its role as savior. Since everything in the universe has two sides (see the Rule of Two in my new book Trust in Liberation or reproduced at the book’s site here). The violent and forceful mass movement revolutions are expressions of despair. The likelihood that these movements can produce consequences that elevate human freedom are roughly equal to their ability to reduce human freedom. No matter what their outcome, the root process of the inadequacy identification remains essentially unchanged. Children continue to be invalidated in their earliest days, the normative demand for obedience and compliance continue as they have for many centuries and the war against spirit continues unabated by whatever social changes have occurred.

We can also see that recognition of lack, as in “me or my group” lacks the same advantages and remedies of the dominant group, is a wholly positive event. Attempt to bring balance and harmony to society, such as the Civil Rights, Gay Rights, the Feminist Revolution, Animal Rights, are all proud movements organized to redress systemic wrongs. They are expressions of truth and they are courageous acts of liberation. They are close relatives to the process that I will advance in the third and final post in this series. I admire these movements and I am very grateful that they have actually happened and have attained many of their goals. But none of these movements address the root problem, as outlined yesterday.

In my view, the bifurcation of human society into the two classes of ruler and ruled, that began 10,000 years ago in the aptly named Fertile Crescent is either a stage in the human play on this planet or it is the concluding episode after about 3 million years of species evolution. The great revolutions of the past have not changed this fundamental truth. The explosion of individualism that occurred beginning in the Age of Enlightenment and now sputtering out in our current era of economic and environmental collapse, was an exception to this over-arching rule.

Mass movements are responses to despair, which is what makes them appear so filled with hope They are something we can easily relate to. They are a part of our shared experience. But they are not the Way.

The questions that now need to be addressed are these.

How do we reverse the effects of invalidation? How do we bring healing to the near-universal condition of inadequacy and invalidation?

We will see that this is also a process. It is a process of reversal and return.

And what is it we return to? The field of return is described in the Tao Te Ching (translated by William Scott Wilson) Verse 15.

The men who practiced the Way effectively in the past
Were unfathomable and beyond description;
You could not get a sense of their depth
And although you could not get a sense of their depth,
I will persist and try to create a picture of them.

Hesitating, like crossing a stream in winter;
Wavering, like fearing demons with clubs on all sides;
Respectful, like being a guest;
Unpretentious, like rough lumber;
In plain view, like a valley;
Mixing and mingling, like muddy water.

The meaning of all of this will be described in the third part of this three part series on what is being called The Healing Revolution at this site. So, please stay tuned.

 

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The Root Cause of Our Struggle: In Dishonor of Columbus Day

The Root

We live in a world of countless problems.

Our political institutions are dominated by ruthless financial interests whose overwhelming priority it is to make their very small cohort of owners and self-designated royalty to become even wealthier and more powerful. Over population is depleting the planet of nearly all of its natural beauty and biological diversity. Most of the world’s people and an even greater number of its children live in extreme poverty because of vast disparities in how resources are allocated. Global climate change threatens the viability to much of the world’s remaining plants and animals. We are, truly, living on the edge of a great abyss.

As the ice caps melt, as it is observed that between 200 and 2,000 species become extinct every year, as emissions of carbon continue to foul the atmosphere, and as participation in the facade of democracy declines, we are compelled to ask ourselves:

Is there a single root cause that links each and all of these phenomena?

There is, but it doesn’t really have a name. It is really a process … a process that began 10,000 years ago.

What is this process?

The Process of Subjugation

Plants and animals evolve. They adapt to changing environmental conditions (or become extinct). They have also tended to become more complex over time.

Human culture is not different; it too has evolved.

One day, about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent (present day Iraq), someone observed that it was possible to cultivate plants to increase production through human intervention.

It wasn’t long before intensive agriculture became the foundation of this new form of human organization: civilization. Because nature is unpredictable and, more importantly, people had become dependent on their production, large-scale irrigation projects were developed to provide a predictable supply of water essential to keep the fields fertile. Farming demands labor, lots of it. This labor need to subject itself to authority and thus was born the laborer. Men experienced the transition from the relatively free roaming nomad and core decision-maker to slave.

These fledgling city-states needed workers; lots of them. The need for more workers and soldiers changed the role of women from co-equal leaders to home enslaved baby makers.

Civilization

We have very imprecisely labeled this process with the ennobling term “civilization” as if it were the only direction in which human culture could have occurred. Because reality is truth, we can say that our human story could only have taken this course, since it did. But that is not the same as saying that civilization can only assume the form in which people are debased for the benefit of their few.

And it is that sentence that sums up one of the most conspicuous qualities of this process; that it is exquisitely designed to disproportionately benefit those that have acquired the most wealth and influence. It is not designed to lovingly bestow opportunities for happiness. To the contrary, it is designed to appropriate the labor of the many to benefit the few. Its ceaseless demands for productivity at the lowest possible cost has caused a plague of unhappiness.

In my view, we needed to move through this era of relentless production as a way to understand a value system that is, ultimately, lethal to the whole complex of life on this planet, but also to itself. We learn the errors of our ways and, hopefully, adjust to what we actually see.

The Main Features

The first main feature of this process is the unjust concentration of benefits that industrial civilization produces. The second main feature is that this unjust distribution depends on the unquestioning obedience and compliance of the workers that support this edifice designed, ironically, to maintain their powerlessness and poverty just as it streams power to their overlords.

Great concentrations of wealth and authority can only happen with the willing acquiescence of the many!

As culture has evolved, the most advanced industrial societies have briefly redirected wealth to a larger class of mid-level workers, but when the ruling class is threatened by the ever-shifting winds of economic change, this leveling stream is stopped. The Overlords re-assert their dominance and demand austerities that primarily affect workers. In this way they re-assert their own class as the sole beneficiary of the wealth created by the labor of the many. We are seeing just this process in those societies that briefly flirted with ideas of equality and fairness in Europe and N. America.

The Costs

Wealth is finite. When the pie of wealth is divided among the many the opportunity for amassing vast wealth (and thus authority (not power) cannot happen. Workers and baby makers must be ready to embrace the absence of their authentic authority and dignity for the sake of the overlord. And, even more to the point, they must be willing to do with without realizing they are doing it.

The Essential Lesson

This debasing civilization relies on its ability to convince people that their innate dignity is something that must be continuously earned and is not a consequence of mere existence. As long as every child learns the hard lesson that love and value are earned and are not a right of birth, then the channel for a lifetime of exploitation is established.

As I have argued at this site and in great detail in my book, Liberation from the Lie, the child must be traumatically invalidated. They need to be the first to know that, as they are, they are not all right. On the other side of the not all right coin, the child must learn that their parents are right. They must transfer their own power and dignity to an external object.

When the child is very young, that object must be a parent (or parent figure). In this way, the child embraces his powerlessness and externalizes objective power. This external objectification of power starts with parents, but then moves on to teachers, bosses, flags (patriotism), and Gods (religion). The desperate craving for bliss and enlightenment are all part of this process of personal self-debasement and the externalization of power and bliss outside of the personal identity of the human being.

As long as we are identified with inadequacy and insufficiency, we will welcome and sustain our exploitation! It is this identification which keeps the whole process of exploitation in place. It insulates it from the possibility of change.

The good and compliant child, whose goodness is dedicated to receiving the “gold stars” from power figures (parents, teachers, etc.) become, effortlessly, the good and compliant workers of the world. Disowned from who we actually are, a world of unhappiness, substance abuse, constant over-striving becomes real and self-sustaining.

Of course, there will be those who see this process thoroughly and are able to embrace their own beauty and dignity and there will also be angry rebels committed to the violent dismantling of the system that causes their pain, but the primary flow of the subjugation process has shown itself to be sufficiently adaptable to squelch all such collective efforts. As testament to its adaptive power, it transforms the efforts of rebels to replicate the very systems that gave birth to the revolution in the first place!

The subtlety of the dominant political paradigm is breathtaking. Rulers will celebrate the very qualities that our collective invalidation have negated. They will thus speak enthusiastically of our fundamental right of dignity, respect, and empathy, while they sustain the very processes that strip people of these same qualities. The world of endless toil is rarely talked about. Instead, the rulers will speak in a coded language filled with platitudes and lying ideology whose purpose it is to disassemble the real and the true. They will talk of the *common” man and woman as if they are one of them.

This is how The Process is sustained.

The Great Questions

Can we truly change this Process? Can we change ourselves? Can we forge a revolutionary vision? What is the next step?

My next post will address these questions. This is the new direction of this site. We will discover that an age of transformation is truly happening and we can participate in this transformation as men and women, as parents, and as members of the great community of life.

But before this rather long and complex post, let me address one key question.

What is the primary action of liberation?

Liberation means to rediscover our primal selves free of the identification with lack and insufficiency.

That is our quest and mission in this life.

 

Legend-of-the-seeker

You Will Love This: A Letter to a Seeker

This person is struggling with all the stuff that all seekers, the writer included, struggle with … or, at least, I used to struggle with. Many of you will discover that this letter will give you the clarity that you have sought.

The brain cannot “know” this world. It can’t “know” you and it can’t “know” your parents. Also, the brain cannot awaken from its own beliefs in its ability to conquer, once and for all, these problems of definition and selfhood. Life does not allow it to work this way. The brain is not suited for this task.

The more you struggle “to work” on your problems, you‘ll just sustain the very suffering and struggle that you so want to end.

Like me, you are brain reliant and that is the error. The brain is an amazing tool, but it’s job is not to KNOW, but to navigate through situations when it serves  awareness. It is simple seeing that is the key that brushes aside the false and incorrect pretenses of the brain.The brain is a tool in service to awareness.

When we rely on the brain to know stuff, we are placing it in an untenable place. We are forcing it to be and do things that it is not designed to know or do. The result will always be a kind of craziness that manifests in countless ways, but they are usually a form manifesting as existential insecurity. Since nearly everyone does this shit, we have the world we have; a universe of confused and terrified people wearing their best make-up and most refined masks to cover over the deep fear that underlies their facade of security and invulnerability. Your father relied on his patriarchal authority to give him the security he sorely needed in his life, which makes him rather insufferable to others.

What happens when you realize that the brain is the wrong tool for the job of knowing?

You realize that the whole venture of struggling to “know” is the decisive error. You realize that all of your struggles were the method you used to address your own insecurities. And what are these insecurities?

They are the belief that you INSUFFICIENTLY KNOW THE WORLD TO BE SUFFICIENT TO IT. And what do we call this belief?

It is the core belief, the Wound, the self-organizing thought that trumps all other thoughts. It is to this thought that blocks what you (and me, from time to time) have called awakening.

It’s very scary to give up on knowing. After all, it has been your religious-like belief in knowing that has been your best mask and most thoroughly used tool throughout your life. It has been the strategy on which you have relied on for so many years. How can you live without this tool? That is the question that will haunt you.

Ultimately it’s an issue of having the knot undo itself. As it is said in the tao (very loosely translated), people of the world learn everyday, the person of the tao unlearns everyday.

You only need to know one thing, the effort to know has been your shield, your protector, but it is also has formed wall that sustains the very life you’re sick of living.

Give it up and bow in gratefulness to the immediacy of this life – the Buddha-Mind.  What you’ll discover is that there is fleeting knowing happening all the time The you that worked so hard to reduce suffering by achieving a kind of “final” knowing, but was actually the primary cause of your psychological anguish all along, will demand to be heard. Is there anything in this universe more addictive than the false-self? This is like going cold turkey, for we are all addicts of the self.

Frankly, it is realized that you really don’t ever need to give a shit. What is freedom? What is liberation? It is that.

It is the capacity to be with this life no matter what form it assumes. It is not to contract into a mental prison cell of our own making, which is what you have been doing all along. This doesn’t mean you’re supposed to be “happy” or “lovey” all the time. It has never meant that. It’s to be free of the veneer of false knowing that we constantly throw up on the ever-changing canvas of life.

Freedom is freedom from all false needs. When you’re free of the demand to possess (like a rare jewel) a final solution to life, then you really are free. You’re also free to tell your father to fuck off if he really is driving you crazy OR you’re free to get where he’s coming from and just show him a little love, what I’m very sure was in VERY short supply when he was young. It’s all life expressing itself as THIS life. This is what you were born for.

brighter-tomorrow

The Illusion of Spiritual Practice: A Post for the Advanced Seeker

Part One – Memory

We believe that we remember, most accurately, those situations, thoughts, and feelings that are closest in time to our present experience. I wonder, is that true?

Do you remember exactly what you were thinking and feelings an hour ago? Can you even remember exactly what you’re were doing, thinking and feeling ten minutes ago … or even just a minute ago?

The more we try to pin it all down, the more elusive it feels. Meanwhile, with every passing second, the situation, thoughts, and feelings drift further and further away from present experience.

What was actually happening a day ago? Can I even remember what I was wearing or what I had for lunch?

The exact nature of experience flows away from our grasp quicker than we usually imagine. Even this very moment can have an elusive, watery quality to it that often feels vague and uncertain. The more we attempt to pin down the past, the more it seems to flow away from our efforts.

In the midst of all this confusion, what am I? Where does this experience come from? What happens to this vast array of happenings? Where does it all go?

Permanency is absent from all of it.

Where does this understanding leave the observer?

Part Two – The Present

We have noted in quite a few previous posts that everything we experience has already happened! Yet, the tenets of self-improvement and much of what goes for “spiritualism” suggest that it ought to be different from what it has been.

How can anyone change what has already happened? Can we alter our past?

We can’t notice anything that hasn’t happened. Even delusion is noticed after it has happened. Nothing can be stopped!

The person we think we are has also already happened! You can’t change or improve what has already happened. Thus all spiritual disciplines must fail, for they are based on the premise that what has happened should be happening differently from how they are actually happening.

When we realize that everything we experience is part of the past, that vast entitiy of experience that flows away from us at ever-increasing speeds from its position as immediate experience (and thus mirror, perfectly, the nature of the observed universe from the perspective of the Hubble’s Law, then we see, first-hand, the futility of all so-called spiritual practice. Or, we can say, that it is, precisely, this practice that takes us to this new realization.

Tolle’s Now

If everything we can ever observe belongs to a fixed and unchangable past, then what is the now?

We can see, effortlessly, that the now can never be known, grasped, or perceived. It is a total “black hole”. This ever-receding past appears to spew from this perfect darkness. It gushes, as it were, from this mystery that is the unseen now.

Where can it gush from?

Does it gush from “me”? It does feel that way. In my own experience, it feels like it is gushing from the general vicinity of my head. Time, space, and all that they contain flow from that. But we will see that it is this utterly unknowable now, the alchemical now that is the generative source of transformation.

We know that this perfectly elusive now is utterly and completely unknowable and mysterious. But because it is so closely linked to all but immediate experience, the mind is able to predict its likely content and feel based on the very recent past, even if that past is only a micro-second from this black hole of the generative now. Thus we can navigate our way through life, thanks to this observant mind.

Suffering

I am, by personality, a rather “political” person. This “political” personality was formed in the midst of the Vietnam War and was given depth by my readings of Karl Marx and other marxist philosophers (like Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire. I often process experience through this lens.

Last Sunday, my wife and I were shopping on the Upper Westside (New York City) farmer’s market along Columbus Avenue, just behind the American Museum of Natural History. I couldn’t help but be struck by the painfully bourgeoisis quality of the experience. From the perspective of my personality, so many of the shoppers had the look of the utterly pampered class, living in unspeakable wealth as they labored to pick out the perfect jersey tomato or that wonderful NY State Macoun apple. They they were with their “adorable” ultra-mini toy dog breeds, with their little winsome bows, that I could easily imagine walking on and squishing them into bloody oblivion, as I stood by, accessing them all from the position of poltical righteousness and smug superiority. In other words, the biggest asshole in the crowd was me!

I noticed how my ceaseless evaluations were creating a fair degree of suffering and bitterness in my own experience, while everyone went about their shopping, quite unmindful of the extremely superior person in their midst.

It was this experience that gave rise to this post. I noticed how I created suffering, a category of suffering quite separate from the goings-on in my immediate experience. It felt like it was spewing from “me”, which it, in fact, was. I saw how the observed experience and my evaluation of that experience was producing suffering and it was all in the past.

I pondered this.

And as I reflected on all of this, I came to realize something that felt rather profound. I realized that nearly all of human striving points to a projected, wonderful (or disastrous) future, while, in fact, it all points to a partially projected past. One simply cannot strive for a future because one can only experience the past. Even if we project a future based on reasonable and sensible suppositions, we will only experience that future as past when and if it actually happens, which, of course, it won’t, because the future, even just five minutes from now, will be different from what we imagine it to be! Our whole lives are based on yet another fiction (the first fiction being the projected “I/me/mine/me” which explore in depth in Liberation from the Lie.

The future is the biggest illusion of them all. Can you see that?

Here is the massive irony … we organize our life, especially our spiritual life around some desperately hoped for future, when in fact, we can now see, directly, that we can only have, theory, an “effect” on our past! We never experience the future … it is the persistent illusion.

I know what you will be thinking. You will think, “Didn’t Eric say earlier in this very post that the past was unchangable and immutable since it has already happened?” I did say that, but now, with this observation at the Farmer’s Market, we can see that the past is not quite as fixed as we once conceived. Or, to be much more precise in our observation, we can see that we can modify a portion of our observed experience; we can, in fact, change the quality and nature of its source.

Transformation

We can see that it is our mutable personality that shapes our very recent past. When we see into the source of our suffering, we discover that it is paritally of our own making. Of course, there is physical suffering that is real and there is life suffering that is real (some people are total assholes, as noted above), but there is a very large class of suffering that is of our own making. We see that directly.

It is through seeing and seeing alone that the alchemy of transformation can happen, but, ironically, it can only have an effect on our immediate past, NOT our projected future. It was this realization that rather “blew my mind”.

But where does the alchemy of this transformation actually occur?

I suggest that it occurs in the mysterious black hole of now. We don’t know how it happens, but we do know that can happen.

We see the very recent past in what we believe and assert as our immediate experience. Learning occurs through this seeing. If we see very clearly, we see that a substantial part of our suffering is self-induced. And when that is clearly seen, the door way to the alchemy of transformation is opened, even if just a little. We open our own pathway to transformation through direct seeing of how we produce suffering in our immediate past.

It will be different for each of us, but the process is really the same.

We realize that will never live in the future, which the totality of our life has been based on. This is, perhaps, the greatest illusion of all. If we believe that self-improvement or spiritual exercises will yield a “better” future, then we are living in ignorance. There is only one spiritual exercise and that is awareness. It is awareness that is the source of any and all transformation. Unless we can see how we produce a large part of our suffering, we will be stuck in the hopeless loop of ever-repeating experience for the entirety of our lives.

Note

It is my sense that this post says everything that I am capable in this ‘field’. So, unless I get a sudden inspiration (which could happen anytime), I’m going to try using a little self-restraint and stop posting on this topic. I am, however, always open to your questions, comments, and inquiries.