You’re walking down the street, minding your own business. Maybe you’re enjoying the feeling of walking, maybe you’re enjoying the sounds of birds or maybe you’re just day dreaming about your plans for tonight.

Then, all of a sudden, you’re face to face with an Doberman pinscher, snarling and bearing its teeth.

You’re scared (or so you “think”).

Did you plan the fear? No.
Did you intentionally make that fear? No
Can you say that it is your fear? …. Hmmmmmm

If you didn’t plan the fear and if you didn’t intentionally make the fear, then what is the fear?

Answer: It’s just fear. Fear happens. It doesn’t define you and it’s not yours. It’s an expression happening in life, like the blue of the sky that also happens in life.

It’s not even your problem to solve.

Yeah, you can pretend you’re not scared or you can try to be a Buddhist superman and say that one day I will transcend the fear (or I should transcend the fear), but in the meantime, you’re just having a life experience that’s also feeling kind of horrible. It’s a happening.

Are You Scared?

If the fear isn’t yours’ … if you didn’t create the fear … then can you accurately say “I am scared?”

No you can’t. You’re not scared. Rather fear is happening in life, just like the Doberman is happening in life and the blue of the sky is happening in life.

The real you is absolutely unchanged and unaffected and unfrightened!

The instant you realize that you’re not the fear and that you are not, in fact, scared, you’re free. You’re liberated from the shackles of the lie of the false self. It’s as easy as that.

Now apply that to every emotional experience in life and find out who you really are.

If we know, through direct experience, that we can never be happy, sad, scared, excited, or anything, then the pursuit of all any emotional state ends and we are free to just love whatever comes up. Also, when we are not identified with preferred emotional states, we are so much more resilient and powerful in the moment. This is what liberation is all about. You really are free.

Here is how it works. Dialogues will be conducted on Skype or Google Voice/Video. This is a  dialogue and not be a lecture from me to you. It needs to be defined by your questions based on your life. You are your own guide and healer. My role is as a facilitator and friend who has taken the journey. Only know your life, so let yourself become your own healer through our dialogues together.

While I will not charge for this service, some donation is expected. The amount is up to you. So, if you’re serious about getting unstuck, then take the dive. To schedule a session, just click:

HERE

My Skype account is hozho1.

I started this quest out of a terrible and gnawing fear of death a long time ago. I thought that if I became enlightened that I would overcome my fear of dying.

That’s not how it works or … to be more precise that is actually how it works, but not how I thought Nirvana would work when I first started off on this journey.

Let’s nail down this whole enlightenment/bliss thing!

Enlightenment/Bliss

99.9% of all people spend their lives acquiring and desiring stuff/content, whether it comes in the form of physical things, relationships, or feelings.

I just want to feel good and to feel good getting the new iPad with retina display would go a long way. Then when I get my brand new iPad I will be excited for at least 15 minutes and then the novelty wears off and I’m off to the next thing. This is the story of our sad lives.

And so it goes. Eventually we come face to face with our permanent extinction and we think to ourselves,

“Oh shit. What have I done with my life? I basically fucked it away and now I’m going to be dead soon!”

The pursuit of content, in any form, is temptation or as the fancy Buddhists like to say Mara.

The mind and its psyche know only content. That is why teachers have consistently said that “it” won’t be found through thought.

That’s really shitty news for nearly all seekers. The one tool they had going for them was thought and now some high and mighty teacher smugly tells them that they have been on a dead-end road all along. In other words, you’re kind of totally fucked. Oh well, back to the drawing boards.

Enlightenment, that most hated of words (and justly so), is the sudden realization that you and I are not content at all. What we are cannot be expressed in words, because every word must refer to some content. All that we can say is that we are not that.

Who Dies?

It’s a beautiful day, so let’s get back to our discussion on death.

If we are not content, then, “verily”, we were never born and, “verily”, that which was never born can never die. Done.

Content comes and goes. Mostly it’s repeating patterns that come in every flavor … take your pick:

1. Physical
2. Mental
3. Emotional

Now and then the content stops repeating and we’re struck with a unique experience, but then the patterns reassert themselves.

Meditation, which must begin with some purpose, shows us that our essence is not a thing. While it cannot be expressed in language, what we are is something like this:

light – presence – the vessel through which all content is fleetingly experienced – so that all expresses in this.

This essence is that which is always present. It is not to be confused with the function of attention, which is a thing and thus a type of content. Awareness is unwilled and unborn. It is, verily, the Unborn Buddha Mind.

Courage

The body has many scary experiences in its life. The period leading up to one’s death and demise (in other words – one’s whole life) may be the most frightening projection of all. So we act out of weakness and cowardice. We flee the scary stuff through our obessions with things (see relationships, sex, and iPads).

Our greatest obession is this thing called “me”. It is the “me” that we work on with the greatest diligence. But this is just more content interacting with other content.

We discover that this thing we’ve been working on for so long, is just a mask! The job we embraced with massive emotional fervor was just a kind of sick joke. Oh well. I guess you could say, “The jokes on us”. I hope you’re laughing.

This “me” struggled and grappled with fear till it became blue in the face. Then it died.

But not so with presence.

We are so dominated by fears which we don’t even know or consciously see, that this post will not be understood by most readers. Please take my word for it … you are nothing but fear. The “me” is fear! Until that is realized and directly seen, nothing will be understood.

So what is real courage?

It is the realization that the changeless is up to anything and everything, including the death of the physical body. This is Nirvana. It is courage. It is the power that enters every moment fearlessly. It is the warrior spirit with a great sense of humor because all content has been drained of its threat. You can’t hurt that which allows for any hurt. So, like, who gives a shit? Capische?

I wanted to add something that is very important to that post and it is this:

We are The Evil One.

We are drawn to the monuments of our minds as part of our evolutionary experience as members of the Earth community. Thus, to move past this devastatingly destructive era, we must first see the effects of our explicit love-affair with lack.

It will not be easy for most readers to understand what I am saying here, unless they have read and absorbed the message of Liberation from the Lie. This glittering, human-formed world is a product of our identification with lack. It nurtures our most ego-based ambitions that are adaptively designed to show ourselves and the world just how amazing we are.

It turns out that what we do out of lack turns sour and ugly. To overcome the energy of lack-based ego, first we must come face-to-face with its effects. This is the time we are living in now. This is the world of The Evil One.

Well … we are seeing it and we either learn or we die. The choice can only be our liberation from all that is false, based on our inner identification with lack, with never being enough, with always needing to be more and to have more.

Wracked by profound, sweeping insecurity, we are compulsively addicted to the pursuit of more … and we can never, ever have enough. We continue believing that only if we have a little more that we will finally overcome this deep, gnawing insecurity.

The fact is, we have way too much. Returning to the source is all about shedding the stinking  fat of our gluttonous lives. We must return to the beautiful discipline of that which is simple, connected, kind, loving, and inclusive.

Until now only a very small number of us have awakened to this reality. Books like A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, The World We Have by Thich Nhat Hanh, and my own book are powerful guides for awakening to all that is toxic and false.

But this is not the same as saying that is “bad” or unavoidable. This is a stage we need to experience in order to see the false as false. The only true learning is direct learning. Each of these voices plaintively ask us to learn directly and to end our Exile from the Garden and return to the life of the Heart. This is the Way of Liberation.

There is a monster on the loose. This monster has a name and his name is “Man”.

This is the Age of Exile. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden is real and if you want to see the proof, then look around. Read about the greatest extinction in the last 65 million years ago when an asteroid struck the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and many other organisms. We are living in the next great extinction and we are the cause of this extinction. We are the killer asteroid of our time. This is the work of the Evil One.

We have made a God of our assumed power, but that is all just a show of ignorance and force. It is a celebration of how disconnected we are from the Source. We know only force. True power we laud, but fail to possess.

This is the Way of the Civilized Human Being. He is a loner, a hungry ghost, who prowls every corner that his muscular tentacles can reach. This is the Evil One.

When we worship at the Alter of Force, this is the world we get.

We get drone technology where death rains from the skies as real life emulates a video game. We get the sexual exploitation of young women and the exploitation of women nearly everywhere. We treat the Earth and her magnificent skies as a vast trash can. We pour our disgusting refuse into the seas and then pretend that it isn’t there. We manufacture food and degrade, horribly the lives of billions of cattle, fowl, and fish.

This is the work of the Evil One.

Thank God for the Evil One, for the depths of his depravity is becoming so great that just maybe we will wake up from this dream of death and destruction. I’m not counting on it, but I wouldn’t rule it out either.

It’s Tentacles

We are all connected to the Evil One. There is no escaping our collective shadow. As we are all connected to Source, so are we connected to that which rages at Source like a monster unleashed from all that is loving. The tentacles of the Evil One reach deep into our skulls and bamboozle us with its shit and violence, for the Evil One has a fun side. He entertains as he destroys. It is his ability to entertain that is key to his triumph. The Evil One is the outlaw that makes our lives feel all charged up.

All Hail the Evil One.

But, alas, entertainment has its price. This show isn’t free. We pay for it with all the death and destruction and cruelty that abounds in this time and is an inevitable consequence of our way of life. We pay and we pay and keep on paying.

The Price of Admission

For most of us living in the “First World”, so far it seems like the price we have paid has been a fairly okay investment. We get our cars, 2000+ square foot homes, vacations, cable TV and internet. It’s all good.

But for most of the world’s people, it’s not been so terrific. They slave away in dark and dangerous work houses making the glittery stuff that makes our lives so wonderful.

They are actually less than slaves, for at least slaves were given a safe home to live in and a secure life. No so with our wage slaves. We can’t afford to give them such luxuries such as a decent community and a secure life. It’s just too expensive. We must hoard all that is valuable and workers just aren’t so valuable. Anyway, the fact is, is that they are expendable and they know it. Hallelujah to the Evil One.

The Sacrifice

Here’s the plan (Stan). We sacrifice the whole fucking planet for us. We’ll ride this baby for as long as she’ll take us. And if she sputters away and chokes on her own exhaust, well, we can say that it was a really good ride while it lasted.

Waking Up

People may be really easily conned and bamboozled, but a con, even the best con, can last only so long.

Eventually the price of admission just gets too steep. When only about 15% of US families can pay the piper, then you know that the jig is almost up on this Evil One.

For when we truly wake up as the pivot of this world, we fall in love with it and I don’t mean the motorcycles and jet skis so enjoyed by the Evil One, but in Source itself.

We love the Earth, the soil, the rivers, the rolling hills, the spreading plains, and the shining mountains. We feel the call of the oceans and when we see the wildness that still lives “in its deeps”* we are entranced and become connected to a far deeper source.

This is why I write. This is the revolution I so love. This is, truly, the Way of Liberation.

From my beloved Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Look around. You see the physical world. Do we observe a world struggling to “get” anything?

Look inside. You see the invisible world of thoughts and feelings. Who is it that needs to “get” anything through that observation.

Feel your body. That too is a world. Is your body okay, or does some energy (“you”) wanting to “get” something from your body?

None can be denied. They are all, the physical world, the inner world, the body’s world, sensations made real by awareness.

Is it not a miracle?

Then there is the story of you. Oh no, not this … again!

That too is a world that cannot be denied. Let it be. Let it all be as it must be.

Where is the problem?

I hate myself. I see problems everywhere. My mind won’t stop with its relentless grind.

Welcome to the “I Hate Myself” world. Welcome to the “I See Problems Everywhere” world. Welcome to the “My Mind Won’t Stop it’s Relentless Grind” world. The one quality that unites all painful experience is the underlying need to “get” something out of something else … such as these words.

It all appears and then disappears on the mirror of awareness. Free of the thought/identity cluster linked with “get” we are completely free in the moment. This is enlightenment.

See it all as sparkling, brief, images and mirages that make this life the way it is.

(Make sure you’ve read Part One of this post)

The Lecture

You are none of it. You are not an object. An object isn’t even an object. It’s just a sensation happening and appearing as awareness. You are that.

Here is what I invite you to do right now. Continue as you were but only as awareness.

That is your true and, ultimately, only home.

Weakness

Identified as an object or story we are made weak to the extent of the hardness of the identification.

Power

As awareness anything and everything is freely admitted and allowed. That is power. That is the only place completely free of fear. What would awareness be scared of?

Only identities experience fear to themselves and all identities are deeply fearful, for they are especially brittle and fragile projections … all happening and appearing on the screen of awareness.

Birth and Death

Only the body is born and only the body dies. Both its birth and its death happen and appear in awareness.

The Law of Love

When you can love your stories as they emerge and play out on the screen of awareness then you are love. Love allows any and everything. It allows anger, envy, frustration, and hopelessness … for they are powerful images and happenings.

It is only, absolutely only, our identification with anger, envy, frustration, and hopelessness that lend these experiences a special pain. The pain and the emotion are one and the same. The “volume regulator” is identification with the projected object possessing the identification.

Regression

The mind knows only objects. It will urge, time and again, for you to possess an identification with its authority. That too will and must happen. It’s just one more happening as image and appearance on that very same changeless screen. The mind will label these experiences as regression … for that too is part of the experience.

Neither This nor That

So are we, exclusively, the screen and none of the images that briefly, if repeatedly, inhabit it? Or, are we exclusively, the march of images and feelings that appear in this life and the screen is just part of the passing image?

Who knows. Both. Neither. Does it matter?

This I Know

Trees happen. The sky happens. Being late for an appointment happens. Stomach aches happen. Every emotion happens, but this felt sense of … something … around which it all seems to occur stays the same.

The Hub … The Space

We are the pivot of existence. Right now feel yourself as just that hub, that space that allows it all to happen as it must. There might be some free-floating hub hovering in the space before your body. This feels so different, but also so familiar.

Even the sense of me is felt and seen as another object hovering around this pivot, this hub, this space. All very close, hovering, fleeting, changing, sounding …

No-Thing

All suffering is rooted in the belief that we are a thing … a something. We are not. That is the most wondrous discovery we can make. We can stop seeking to be any identity. We stop believing the stories that we have told ourselves for so long. They are just scripts that the body picked up as it was socialized into delusion.

What About Actual Life?

“Actual life”? … oh that.

It goes on. Choices happen. Consequences happen. But the more aligned one is with awareness, the greater will be the natural discernment that effortlessly arises in the moment.

Learning happens through awareness. Stasis, brittleness, rigidity reflects taking a position, an identity that actively rejects the real, that which is reflected in natural awareness.

The Next Step

Within seconds the old identification will assert itself. Just see that happening with the knowledge that its siren-like message is the basest deception in the universe. It is the lie, whose realization, sets us free.

Source is nothing but an infinite outflowing of happenings, ever-changing, never quite alike and you and I are the “no-thing” that allows it all to be without being any of it.

Mobius Strip

Today I speak of total liberation from all that is false.

If that sounds pretentious to you, then I invite you to read on, for what I say to you is only you speaking to yourself. What I know, you know. We are truly connected as one.

Recently I was reading several passages by Krishnamurti in his book, As One Is.

He was talking about the difference between real attention or awareness and false attention. He said that real attention is free of the need to “get” or obtain anything. When we are listening with the intent of needing to “get” something, then we are in conflict. We are not really listening. What we are really doing is expressing need. This is not awareness.

I reflected on this passage.

I looked around. I observed the sky, the calls of the birds, the sound of traffic, the various noises coming from the radio, and I asked myself this: “Is there any quality of needing to “get” anything from what I could observe in the actual world of experience?“ Did anything in the world express itself as self-rejecting?

What I observed was that quality of needing to “get” was no where to be found. Everything just is as it is, free of any overriding quality of needing to be different from what it is. Try this exercise for yourself. See if what I am saying in this post is true for you.

This compulsive need to “get” only comes from one place; the “me” thought. All the universe is free of this, except for “me”! There is only one enduring problem in our lives; us!

Yet, as seekers, this is the one entity on which we place much of our attention. We notice this “me” always needing to “get” something. Perhaps you are reading this post with the desire to “get” something from it. If so, that’s perfectly okay. This is a stage that we “need” to go through, so it is really not a problem.

We would never, ever need to “get” anything for this “me” thought if it weren’t first convinced that it is lacking in something essential. This is a topic that I have discussed hundreds of times. This illusory “me” is the expression of the Wound in our lives. This obsession with “me” and needing to “get” is the very activity of the Wound. It is the Wound (read Liberation from the Lie for much more about this).

This is the only obstacle to awakening to our true being-ness.

Unfortunately, that which sees this will also be the “me” thought, and thus it falls into despair and hopelessness when it sees that it is condemned to live its life on an endless loop defined by lack on one side of the strip and the hope on the opposite site. It is like a mobius strip. There is no apparent escape from this infinite loop.

But don’t despair. There is a way out. Many have written about it, so my words will not be especially original. But this is a topic that I will present in tomorrow’s post.

In the meantime, go about about your day and see when your experience is motivated by need. Ask youself, “Does the sky need anything? Does the ground need anything? Does this city need anything?” Yes, you’ll be able to project “improvements” onto anything, but the question goes much deeper than that. You might say, I wish the city was better designed or I wish the sky wasn’t raining today, but these are just personal preferences. The sky is fine as it is. The city is what it is … and you are fine just as you are … also free of any need.

But we will plunge into the core of Power and freedom from all need tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Just a very quick post that gets to the heart of the heart.

I am!

Questions

Who is aware of awareness? What is aware of thoughts and feelings?

Who sees, hears, tastes, touches, and feels?

What is the bottom of all experience?

What part of you is utterly uninterested in analysis, knowing, controlling, or obtaining?

What is always present and cannot be wished or pushed away?

What senses anger, attraction, resistance, but is none of them?

What is the ground of every experience?

What, possibly survives, even death?

Being

Feel it.

Let everything be as it must be and then ask who sees and gets all of this, but is not the seeing?

That it! That’s you.

It is not possible to banish unhappiness and sorrow from life, but it is possible that you can be, never again, unhappy or sorrowful. Please don’t take my word for it. This is something you need to see for yourself.

Also to say that it is possible never to be unhappy again, is not the same as saying that it’s possible to always be happy.

But first a very short biographical note.

Lately I’ve been struggling with boredom and fatigue. Because I have been feeling so physically bad and emotionally empty, I have done what I usually do in such circumstances, I question my capability and even my right to write about such blissful states as awakening and enlightenment.

My inner critic has roundly called me a phony, if compelling, bullshit artist and I, the object of his criticisms, have accepted his harsh words with some reluctance, but decided agreement.

I said to myself, I appear to be good at analyzing this stuff, but I am, like the people I seem to enjoy criticizing, a fake when it comes to actually living it. There is an especially low ring of hell reserved for bullshit artists like myself.

Repeatedly I’ve asked myself the question, “What am I misunderstanding? What am I missing?”

Brief Inquiry

Recently I’ve been pondering the Buddha (and others) remarks that life is a dream. What he meant by this assertion is the veil of understanding, that we take to be true and dependable is false. Because we place our belief and faith onto that which is false, our experience of life is, essentially, no different from the experience of a dream. What we assert onto the seamless flow of life is arbitrary and dream-like. We say that our understanding is real, when it is in fact, a lie.

So I’ve experimented with experiencing *everything I assert as reasonable and true as dream-like; neither truly reasonable or truthful. I combined this practice with my own work on the falseness of the fear-based self, as described in great detail in my book.

Life will always provide us with the perfect laboratory and in my case it was dealing with my feelings of boredom and fatigue. What follows is this life-changing realization.

Boredom

As I said, I’ve been feeling rather bored lately. I find it difficult to get especially interested in anything.

Boredom is a fairly painful feeling. We would prefer not to feel bored. What we want is to feel alive and energetic and I have not been feeling very alive in recent weeks. So I explored this issue of boredom. I was confident that if I could “figure out” boredom, then what I learned about that experience could be applied to any experience.

Here is the process:

1. I am experiencing the sensation of boredom.
2. I re-contextualize this sensation as dream-like.
3. I notice that I connect “I” with and as the boredom sensation, thus producing the statement taken to be true, “I am bored.”
4. But I also see that asserting “I” with the sensation was producing something unreal and unnecesssary.
5. On one hand, the sensation of boredom is observed and, on the other, the inference of “I am bored” is made real through the psychological me, who is bored.
6. But when I experienced the bored sensation as dream-like and unreal, then and only then, I realized that the “I” is not any sensation.
7. It is, as the Advaitsts are fond of pointing out ad nauseum, empty of adhering to any sensation.
8. The “I” is not, in fact bored, rather, it notices that sensation without taking the next step of linking the sensation with the dream-like persona.
9. When the sensation is noticed, as opposed to identified with, it takes on a different quality.
10. It is less intense and less engaging.
11. What makes it expand and become powerful is the assertion of “me-ness” to it.

The mind rebels mightily over not having the position of “I and me”. The last position it wants is to be nothing or empty. But this place is neither nothing or empty. In fact, to the contrary, it is always full and complete. It is, in other words, nothing less than perfect.

Am I merely being clever here?

To find out for yourself, you’ll need to experiment with this. Take any unpleasant emotion and then re-experience it as dream-like and not really real. We don’t need to make this very complicated. It’s really quite simple. Then go through the steps outlined above.

You will discover that the melding of the sensation with the psychological persona (which is, in fact, the melding of all “personal” sensations with the sense of self) is a kind of add-on. It is the way we create and sustain suffering.

I suspect that most people will have trouble with this. The identification with the body is so deeply ingrained that it is very difficult for us to really challenge, but I urge you to do just that. Really see if any sensation is actually who you are.

You might wonder about “positive” emotions. Would we ever need to go through this exercise when we are feeling happy?

No, we wouldn’t. The moment we say to ourselves, “I am happy” is usually the moment when happiness begins to erode. Happiness accords more closely with our basic nature than does unhappiness sustained through delusion.

When you truly realize that you are not any sensation, including physical pain of any kind, then you realize that you have it all. You don’t ever need to struggle to achieve any social condition of psychological state. You may want to be rich, but you would never stake your happiness on that condition! I hope you can see the difference, because seeing that difference is decisive.

As it is said in Verse 11 of the Tao Te Ching

Thirty spokes of a wheel all join at a common hub
yet only the hole at the center
allows the wheel to spin.
Clay is molded to form a cup
yet only the space within
allows the cup to hold water.
Walls are joined to make a room
yet only by cutting out a door and a window
can one enter the room and live there.

In my last post, I addressed how we can see the Wound operate in our daily lives. One of the clearest and most direct ways we do this is by noticing the energy of force in our moment-to-moment experience. We saw that force expresses itself in many obvious and subtle ways. The more we observe force, the more we realize that nearly everything we think of as ourselves is, in actuality, an expression of force. Very importantly, we see that we will nearly always assert some expression of force to “solve” experiences of unhappiness, whether it be forced against the world or our ourselves.

What is the next step?

That which sees force is not force.

The best way to get in touch with this seeing is through regular meditation. Through meditation we get acqainted with the whole manifestation of force in our momentary experience. We don’t meditate to get enlightened, that would be force expressing itself in a false spiritual channel. We meditate to see. We meditate to disengage ourselves from the thrall of force. Alas, many meditators try to use mediation to achieve something. That is a dead-end.

The Perfection of Every Being

That which made the forests, mountains, rivers, oceans, and the sky, made you. You and I are of this same source. Thus all things become complete in you as you are completed in all things, whether that happens in the contact between your partner and yourself or in the communion between water and your being-ness. In each of those moments the partner and you … the water and you possess no line of separation. They are experiences of perfection … of the One.

Contrast that with an identification with force. Identified with and as force, it’s always us versus the world. I need this to be happy. I need to rid myself of that to feel good about my life. I have to be a different person than what I am. I need to know. I need to be in control. I condemn myself.

All of this is the world of force. It is a violent and unhappy world. Yet, when we see that we are not this force, then force itself is transformed. It becomes okay … perfect … and inevitable.

Function and Being-ness

There is another way to get a sense of one’s Authentic Self.

Just as we can see, directly, the connection between force and discontentment, we can see that force is always aligned with function. We use force to achieve an outcome. Our many roles in life are functions. I am a “writer”, “father”, “son”, “statistical analyst”, “man”, “American”, “getting old”, etc. etc. etc. All of these roles are functions. Each has a proscribed set of instructions, methods and purposes. They are an essential part of my living in this world. But no function describes my authentic self.

We are not a function. We are being.

We can easily see this in the world and life of a baby. The baby is pure being-ness. Yes the baby’s body does a whole array of functions, but most of us don’t identify a baby with any of these functions … at least not at first.

That which sees is neither created or destroyed. It just is. Being-ness is the ground on which all functions happen.

Me

Me is the container of all one’s functions. Thought and function become deeply entangled. Functions are generated and assessed using thought. This is how our identification migrates from being-ness to the many functions of our body and life. We say “I don’t feel well” or “I feel great” when we are identified as our body. We say, “I am a nurse” when we are identified with our job. We could say, “I am a human being”, when we are nearly fully disidentified with all passing and changing functions.

The one great hopeless function is working on the “me”. This is, once again, force inhabiting its role as Knower. This is all part of the world of function. When it is realized that we are no function, then the task of working on the “me” ends. The “me” just is and that’s perfectly okay.

The task of working on the self can end right now. The “me” will be what it will be, just as those mountains and oceans will be what they will be. Perhaps a better metaphor for the “me” is the weather because it’s more obviously changable than the seemingly changeless mountains and oceans. The “me” is very much like the weather; sunny and hot one day and cold and dreary on another.

But the qualities of the “me” change greatly when the forceful assertion of personal identification with it ebbs away. Then, just like the weather, “me” really matters so much less. When it matters less, its forceful impact on the quality of life diminishes in proportion to our disidentification with it.

What others have called enlightenment is just the momentary disidentication with the “me”.

Love

The opposing state to force is love. Love allows all. Love is always present.

We don’t need to, necessarily, use the emotionally colored word “love” to connote this all allowing-ness. We can call it being-ness. This being-ness sees force and knows it as a part of life, but as not something through which it finds its identity.

Summary

• That which sees is not force.
• The perfection of every being is seen as true because that which ‘makes’ the mountains (Source) makes you.
• We are not a function. We are being-ness
• The “me” cannot be changed through force (this undermines the whole spiritual quest).
• That which allows for any happening of force is love or being-ness.

Action = Force: Source of Action = Wound

Action = Power: Source of Action = Love

Observe force in your life. It is expressed in a thousand ways, from a gentle, but arbitrary judgment to extreme violence between people, groups, and countries. Ambition rooted in the grandiosity of the Wound-based self is force. For the most part we raise our childen using force. We want (demand) that they be a certain way that conforms with our ideas of right and wrong and we use manipulation, guidance, and coercion as ways of getting what we want.

That is force in action.

Schools do exactly the same thing. The first rule of education is obedience. Everything else falls in line with that. Get your assignments in on time. Do what you’re told! If your homework is late, you will receive a correspondingly reduced grade. If you fail to do what you’re told, you will be punished. The quality of work will always be downgraded if obedience isn’t obeyed. This is how we punish the most creative students.

This is force. And the person that we assert with the greatest force is, of course, ourselves. Why is my life so crappy? I’m really smart, but society only rewards jerks. Life will always be shitty for me. Why are my kids such assholes? My parents totally screwed me up.

This is force … but usually it is expressed much more subtly and persistently than how it is described in this post. It is, truly, insidious.

It is the question Why, itself, that blocks any potential answer.*

Force is rooted in the Wound. When inadequacy is  our underlying and unseen identification, we will turn against our original nature. It doesn’t take much time to become severed from original nature. This identification ‘forces’ us to lose touch with who we are. We become, literally, disembodied. The Self becomes invisible and the personality-driven self becomes dominant.

Because we don’t know who we are, we will make demands on others and ourselves and our tool of choice to express those demands will be force. It won’t be the overt force that this word conjures in our minds. It will, instead, express itself through judgment. People should be nicer. I need people to notice me. I won’t be happy unless I’m making a lot more money and get the respect I deserve. People should be better drivers (like me).

We can also see force by the pressing need to always be in a rush. We push ourselves with force and push others through force. People should move faster. Why is this person in front of me in line so slow?

Persistent boredom and the demand for excitement is an expression of employing force to heal boredom. Addiction to reading spiritual literature and then imposing what we read forcefully onto our lives (I should be like Ramana) is also force.

Force manifests in a thousand different ways.

Driven by what can be called “normative” force, we become slaves to our Wound-based desires. I need this. I demand that. I won’t put up with this. Our sense of self is defined by our desires. The person we believe ourselves to be will be expressed as a projection rooted in the desire or its opposite aversion. Desire and aversion are the two sides of the same energy.

This is the life of the Wound and it is the life of nearly everyone living in this Wound-based civilization. We are driven by need, desire, and demand. Force will be our exclusive tool to “work” on our desires and aversions.

So see force in your life. See it in its most subtle forms. It’s everywhere. Notice how discontentment and the expression of force are, essentially, one and the same.

Notice the absence of force in nature, where contentment is everywhere. Yes nature is full of carnivores eating herbivores, but they tend to hunt the weakest, least vigorous, and oldest of the herbivores. That is just life expressing itself as it must. It is true and it is valid. It is not force.

In the next post, I will describe a life free of force. This is the life of power. Power is always rooted in love. You are power, but you don’t know it, because you are so entranced by the root identification with inadequacy. But this will be explored, in depth, in the next post.

*Thanks to Steven Harrison for inspiring that statement.

Me

There was a time when I was burning with inspiration. An idea for a blog post could strike me any time of day and I would start, feverishly, jotting down the idea and then developing it. Then with typos and all, I would upload an extraordinary post and expect the world to be dazzled by my remarkable ability to express the inexpressible.

Frankly, I think I’ve done a very good job of that in these last several years. Anyone who knows me personally would also know that I am a very modest person … just honest and rather analytical, perhaps to a fault, but in my own “humble” view, my first book, Liberation from the Lie is the best contemporary book on self-understanding. There are others I like and admire a lot, but this is my favorite. Because it isn’t shallow, it has considerable “staying” power. You can re-visit and discover entirely new layers of meaning. It is the medicine for the disease of self-improvement; the phony spiritual scourge of our times.

You are fine as you are … certainly as fine as you’ll ever be. You can’t improve. How many people have been killed in the name of “improvement”. It’s really a horrible word and even a worse concept.

But I have grown weary of the endless lectures and I suspect you have grown tired of them as well. I have pondered several new paths and, to be perfectly honest with you, none have any special appeal for me. Yet I do enjoy writing and maintaining this website. So I will do something.

You should know that I am, pretty much, a loner. I don’t cultivate new friendships and I don’t even spend all that much time with old ones. I like my aloneness more than anything else … but that’s just me. Frankly, not many people like me especially. My closest neighbor thinks I’m too politically radical. Other neighbors fear my very sweet dog and thus fear me a little when they see us strolling through the neighborhood. I am the quintessential non-joiner (with Facebook as the embarrassing exception). I don’t fit into any group. Spiritual writings, for the most part, bore me to death and I would never consider myself a Buddhist or an Advaitist, whatever that is.

There are people who just don’t fit in and I am one of them. I’ve never been interested in fitting in and I’ve never cultivated that quality as a special badge. I am what I am and that’s quite enough about that!

I really am struggling to change the tone and flavor of this blog. I would invite you readers to start a dialogue of sorts, because that is a form that appeals to me, but no one ever responds to the few inquiries I have made. I think that some readers want me to assume the role of authority on something (I trust it doesn’t have anything to do with spirituality), but that is really quite awful.

Be yourself. There is no one else in the universe who can do that except you, so why bother trying to be someone you aren’t? There are few things more tragic than the rejection of the self. There is only one of you.

I would invite your ideas, but no one would respond, and probably for very good reasons. This is, after all, “my” blog! If you want to know about waking up, it means to come alive to your own bullshit. Very, very few people ever would want to actually do that, so they sustain the trance of self-contempt and wanting to be a card-carrying member of the humanity herd. Good luck with that.

If you want to know the Way (Tao), then just be yourself and be kind to the world by giving up any notion of “self-improvement”. It’s a fool’s game and who willingly chooses to be the fool? Could you imagine a snowflake saying: “I hate the way I look. I want to look like that snowflake.” We are twisted into complex knots of existential confusion. Untie, clear up, simplify.

Isn’t it true that inquiry is based on the belief that it’s something we need to do to gain understanding of who we are?

Who needs to gain anything? That’s the question. What is it we lack that years of inquiry will fill?

If we cease obeying the call to inquire, what remains?

See that the promise of inquiry is that we will have some modicum of control. It’s based on the hope that if I get this, then I will be free of the burden of the self! What is this self that you need to be free of?

What is this struggle against the self? Who is struggling against what?

The self is not a belief. It is this.

Isn’t inquiry a convenient way to avoid living this simple moment? The struggle with the self is that action that cancels the opportunity to be in grace. We realize that this moment has already been lived. It’s happened. We seem to produce all of this stress and anxiety over what? Is it not self-rejection that lies at the very core of this anxiety and stress?

Are you obsessed with doing the right thing?

Since no one knows what’s right or wrong, then what is the problem? It’s all happening and no one has a clue how or why it’s happening. So why ceaselessly evaluate?

Take a walk and get the sense that you’re not doing anything – nothing! or … you really are doing it all. See that the line of demarcation that identifies “your” doing from “other” doing (like what makes the sky blue) is arbitrary. It’s the insertion of a learned belief based on nothing but fabrication.

Inquiry is an effective way to sustain the belief in a separate self. It tends to appeal to analytical, intellectual types, like me, but I’ve now seen it as more of a detour … maybe an essential detour, but a detour nonetheless. Can you see that as well?

If inquiry has a purpose, then it must be this: to inquire into the belief that one needs to inquire at all. Who is that person? When that identity is clearly seen as something unreal, merely a lingering belief that’s hard to shake, then a very large step toward real freedom from the search has happened.

Let’s keep this very simple.

What blocks contentment is the most changeable aspect of our lives; “me”, for all that changes is “me”.

This “me” wants, fears, opines, fears, craves, complains, loves, hates, and everything in between.

Then something really terrible happens.

We get all spiritual and so begins the endless war against poor, little “me”.

We can love just about everything in our lives (with the possible exception of dentist appointments and having to speak amicably with our Mother-In-Law). But the one thing we can’t love is “me”. “Me” becomes our problem. It’s like a horrible parasite that gets fat sucking our blood.

So we meditate, chant stupid mantras, scour the web for that one “spiritual” post that will finally free us of this moronic, repetitive, predictable, boring, insufferable “me”.

What makes this “me” so horrible?

That’s a very easy question. We believe we are this “me” and maybe we really are this “me”. What if that were true? I know you’re going to give some predictably spiritual answer, like “We are not any ‘thing’.”

But, down deep, don’t you suspect that you just might be this agonizingly idiotic “me”?

What if you are? What then?

If so, then “you” haven’t made any “progress” at all, have you? You’re right where you started after the years of meditating, imitating the wise pronouncements of gurus you’ve been told to admire and all the rest.

In other words, you really are this “me”!

Now you’re really fucked. Game over. Me 1 – spiritual You 0.

Sorry. You see in every game there is just one winner and any number of losers.

So what is the solution (if any)?

The solution is seeing through the spiritual catch–22.

What you reached out for as the time-tested resolution for your existential crisis turned out to be a mirror reflecting the insubstantial nature of your own questioning instead of the perceived life-saver, you desperately sought.

In the war against “me” everyone loses. The questioner, the seeker, becomes, inevitably, their own worse problem.

Drop that struggle and the light will shine through.

While mantras are just more useless crap, here is a mantra that I can suggest to you. Every time poor little “me” emerges into consciousness in an especially irritating guise say this mantra:

This annoying “me” is just the Wounded “me” and I can love that just the way it is.

It might help to have a picture of you when you were quite young, maybe between the ages of 5 and 10 and keep this image in mind when you say the mantra.

Forget the spiritual and embrace the real.

“What is the real”, you ask?

This prior to thinking about it. And if a thought appears as this than that too happens without needing to think about it.