Time Is A Fiction

Time is a complete fiction. There is nothing that makes any sense when it comes to time. Memory is relative, ten years ago can seem like yesterday and last night can seem like an eternity. Human beings are always attempting to quantify existence. It makes no sense. Reality, what is, can not be quantified. To quantify reality is to remove oneself from it and exist in a pseudo-world, a realm of concepts, removed from actual experience. Direct contact with reality is something that is immediate. There is no time, whatsoever. When time has ceased, thought has ceased to be an unbridled whirlwind. Thought then assumes the role of a tool for operating within the field of form. It is not the definer of reality through the past.
So, up to this point, life has moved, and it is only the mind that has had an opinion about all of it. The mind generates the identity that suffers and feels the sympathetic pain from the past. It is the identity that sets up the fears and walls that creates the misery that is rampant throughout the world today. It is the river of human suffering that is flowing since time began. It is the river of the dead human past. It is the collective human being.
The human being as a collective? There’s something new. So much emphasis put upon each person to be separate, that their thoughts are truly from their own experience and from their own heads. That we are not swimming in a network of human experience and often, human pain. The robotic programming to react in certain ways is all pre-loaded in to the emotional DNA of every person. The perception of the environment selects the genes that are activated. Who is it then who is perceiving the environment? Is there a perceiver? Is not the perceiver the perceived?
The answer to that is the end of all suffering.

Life Is Not Personal

Life isn’t personal and I have made it personal. I have a personalized identity and a personalized way of looking at everything in life through this identity. The identity is rooted in fear. It can be threatened. It exists in duality so it has good and bad, love and hate, fight and flight, hide and seek, known and unknown etc. The identity is contained within something – call it space – and it exists there. Space is infinite, so the size and scope of the identity is relative, meaning that it can be my entire universe or it can be an infinitesimal speck, depending on how much space is around it and that is determined by where my awareness is. I have been focused on my identity for just about my whole life. I have grown myself around it, my language has developed around it, but throughout it all, my awareness has not changed, that I can tell somehow. I can feel it there, something that is unchanged throughout my entire life, the one thing that remains constant. It is like the feeling when driving in a car and the car feels like it is perfectly still, it is just the road and the scenery that is moving along. My awareness feels like the car and passenger that is perfectly still and my life and everything in it feels like the road and the scenery. More often than not, I feel like my identity is rushing around and everything out there is crazy too. It is all a matter of withdrawing attention from the identity and its thoughts, reactions and habits. To catch them as soon as the awareness can, and release the habitual identifiaction to them. It is unlearning the past. It is letting go.

Hurt

Hurt comes in, awakened by a trigger… something that links the present moment experience to the past, a memory, a feeling, something similar, and it is aroused and reconstituted by it. It is a raw energy that is undifferentiated, like electricity before it is channeled into something and in the case of hurt it is the concept of ‘I’ and 'me'.

I am aware of the hurt, the energy that is seeking release, the stored up bomb of potential waiting to be detonated. I immediately have to become intensely aware at this moment. As aware as if I had been dropped into a pit of cobras. I must make every movement a conscious one, and I cannot lose focus on my internal state and how it is relating to the external world. I cannot be distracted for a split second, lest I lose consciousness and get bit. Hurt, if left unchecked will turn into anger, hatred, punishment of both the self and others, and it will be unreasoning and irrational. It is the ego in its most opaque state, its most narcissistic. The gravitational field is extremely strong and once in it, every resource of awareness must be put into watching it and not falling further into its depths.
I have found that when I begin to move out of it, there is an argument that wants to stay in the hurt. This argument seems to have a few statements:

One, is that it feels like the other who hurt me must be punished so as not to hurt me again. The punishment to the other is for me to remain in the state of hurt and anger and withdrawal. This is a, "that will each them" lesson.

Two, is that if I was to snap out of it in an instant (which is always the case), then the other might not think that they truly hurt me, and that makes me a ‘faker’. Therefore, they will surely not take hurting me seriously and continue to hurt me in the future.
It is all based on and rooted in the ‘me’ that needs to survive and be defended. The ‘me’ is the identity that suffers.

After enough times of traveling down the road of hurt, I begin to see the signs and no amount of temptation to defend my identity or prove another ego to be wrong, can keep me from focusing on staying calm and remaining empty. I have experienced the pain of being in a state of hurt too many times.

The Brain Keeps You Safe

This tiny brain is designed to keep the physical organism safe. It has been preprogrammed to do so. It is also designed to learn about the current environment so it can adapt its hardwired presets to allow for new dangers to avoid.

The problem emerges when this moves into the realm of the psychological. Over time, after say the first three or four years of our lives, we begin to generate a psychological sense of self. This self, that exists only within the mind, begins to experience a phenomenon known as fear. Fear can also be called hurt, or pain.

Now the brain, which is wired to take care of a physical entity, now has developed a psychological entity that it has to take care of, the psychological identity, or ego. This psychological sense of self is threatened not by fire or by physical harm, but by the ideas of such things, the possibility of such things. It is also threatened by imagined hurts that do not even exist.

Now the brain attempts to deal with psychological stresses and threats like it would physical stresses and threats. It will attempt to avoid them, run away, hide, or fight them. There is a problem here. How does the brain fight an imagined fear? How does it run away from a hurt that has taken place in the past? How does it avoid a sense of despair?

It doesn't.

It becomes neurotic. It tries to wall the identity off from threat. It also attemps to destroy any threat 'out there' that is creating fear for the identity. It tries to run away from those psycholgical threats that are fragments of memory from the past.

The brain keeps you safe.

The physical you, yes.

The psychological you, never. The brain is not designed to do that. There is no such thing as psychological security. It can never be found. Life is uncertainty. The brain tries to invent a certainty through tradition, religion, ideology, and so-called culture. But it is all unstable and ever-changing.

So if the brain keeps you safe, what can set you free?

Could it be this thing that is called the heart?

The heart is not the organ. It is a gateway. It cannot be explained. It is a feeling. It is wordless. Soundless. It doesn't speak. It knows. It transmits information holistically, completely, entirely. There is no confusion. It is an energy that is intelligence, that is love, that is joy, that is space, that is emptiness.

It cannot be spoken of.

It sets us free.

Egoic Holograms

To absorb all of the conceptual words (in this blog, for instance) and to take them on as truth, is yet another concept along with countless other concepts that ultimately create madness, confusion and unhappiness in the world.
Then, the egoic mind wants explanations, more concepts to explain the concepts. How to get out of this dreadful mess that the mind has got us in. Concepts fighting concepts. Ego fighting ego. It is a vicious circle. A syndrome.

This is the old mode. The old human being. It is the seed of violence within us. Violence is there within us as individuals and within us as a human race, growing, flowering and dying, sometimes in the span of seconds, sometimes in the span of generations.
There is no how. That is what the egoic mind would have you believe, that there is a how, a way, a certain series of steps that will take you to freedom, peace and happiness. But that is obviously not the case, otherwise we would have figured it out long, long ago. The world is still insane. We still continue to murder and kill one another. We cannot solve this problem of self-destruction with the mind. With technology. With intellect.
Not only is the world insane, but we are insane ourselves. We are the parts and the world is the whole, just like the cells are the parts and the body is the whole.
We are holographs, in that we contain within us the blueprint of the whole. A single cell of our body contains the code of our whole body. A single ego contains the concept of separation and fear that creates unhappiness and violence for the entire human race.

Words

Words allow the human awareness to skip across the mystical, the sacred and the actual.

All words are empty shells.

Even a word as simple as 'tree' covers up the actual occurrence that is a 'tree'.
Look at a tree, and refrain from assigning any names or words to it. Look closely. Observe it. Your mind will struggle with wanting to name and describe, but just keep looking, not using any words and see what happens.
Now you may think that this is unimportant, but conceptualizing people, places and things, is the gateway to human beings murdering and killing one another and destroying the planet. Go into it. Follow the trail and see where it leads.
Because we conceptualize through language we can somehow believe that concepts are the actual. We allow inhumanity to come into being.

This lack of our own connectivity to the actual, is at the root of all the atrocities throughout human history.
When we label someone or some group of people as the 'enemy', we cease understanding them, we cease to care about them, all our thinking about them is through the filter of 'enemy'. One does not attempt to understand the 'enemy', insofar as to understand how to destroy them. One does not attempt to feed the 'enemy'. One does not attempt to aid the 'enemy'. One does not attempt to love the 'enemy'.
Love thy enemy.
If we do not 'love thy enemy', mass murder is possible. Genocide is possible. War is inevitable.
This is how important it is to wake up.
But don't take my word for it. Find out for yourself. See in your own life where you create enemies and where you become violent, and aggressive.

It will be real for you only if you find it for yourself.

From Conceptual to Actual

To wake up from the dream of the conceptual to the actual could be called lucid living.
To have a lucid dream is to 'wake up' within the dream. You are aware that you are still in bed, asleep and dreaming, and yet you remain in the dream and are often able to control the dream.
Lucid living is 'waking up' out of the reactionary prison of the conceptual into the wakefulness of the actual. To live lucidly is to no longer be a personality. It is to no longer be an ego, which means, to no longer to be a robot - a complex, finite system of preprogrammed reactions to stimuli - which is what almost all human beings on the planet are.
It is an evolution.
It is a metamorphosis.
Do not try to conceive what the actual is, for it would be like trying to find the moons of Jupiter with a microscope or to see a single cell with a telescope. You cannot find the actual by thinking, which is conceptual. Thinking may lead you to the threshold of the actual, but it is not of that world and can never enter it. Thinking is the wrong tool.

We are like a caterpillar that finds itself slowly beginning to feel the urge to cocoon itself, but we are a caterpillar that is self aware and attached to the way we have always been. If a caterpillar could become attached to its caterpillar ways and resist being a butterfly, that would illustrate how human beings are resisting the actual and clinging to the conceptual, or resisting lucidity over the dream-state, clinging to thinking and ideology, resisting the natural flow of what is and trying to force what the mind thinks 'should be'.

There are many ways to put it. Resistance over acceptance. Noise over silence. Stress over surrender. Hate over love. What 'should be' over what is.
At some point, the caterpillar begins ceasing to be a caterpillar. We could say that it is dying as a caterpillar. Perhaps, in its final days as a caterpillar, it begins to feel the stirrings of the butterfly within it as some strange feeling or vision, an unknowable urge that it can barely comprehend. The caterpillar does not resist this movement toward transformation, and it begins to make a cocoon. There, the metamorphosis takes place.
We humans are undergoing a similar experience in our own way. We are evolving out of the conceptual into the actual. They are two completely different ways of being human. Just as the caterpillar and a butterfly are two completely different ways of being an insect.

As conceptually oriented identities, we do not like the idea of being actual as it means the death of the identity, the ego, the personality. If a caterpillar could have human consciousness, it would go into the cocoon as a man goes to the gallows, or not go into the cocoon at all.
We have undergone physical metamorphosis in the womb, and a metamorphosis in consciousness when we begin to form memories and generate an identity. We are being pushed again to another metamorphosis from a being, trapped psychologically in concepts, to a being that is at one with reality as it is.

A complete transformation of consciousness.

Death and Meaning

We are all going to die. You are going to die. I am going to die.
We don't want to face this, to really go into it. We want to laugh it off, or get upset at it, or toss it aside, or create the concept of an afterlife. Somehow, we try to deflect the fact that we are destined to expire, rot and decay. We are all destined to be thrust, willingly or unwillingly into the unknown that is death. Death being, the entire content of who we are and what we know, coming to an end.
What happens when we live with this fact day to day? The closer one lives to it the closer one is to the actual-ness of life itself.
Life is actual. Life is not conceptual. The identity is conceptual. Who we are as identities and egos and personalities are all conceptual. It's a big story, isn't it?
If you have ever experienced death of someone close to you or your own near-death, then you quite possibly have experienced a moment, living in the realm of the actual. It is that moment where the world falls away and all the so-called 'important' things of society become insignificant. Time ceases. The world goes on around you and you remain still. It could almost be said that you are not there. There is just awareness and what is.

Then...

Someone cuts you off with their car.
You get mad. Perhaps say some choice words. What the hell is the matter with that jerk? It reminds you of just how stupid people are, all the stupid people in the world. Idiots. They shouldn't be allowed to drive. Your blood pressure raises. Chemicals are released into your bloodstream, affecting every cell. It dominates your thinking. You are upset by it.
Yet what is actual in all of this?
One car moved in front of another car. You pushed air through your vocal chords, making them vibrate. Your blood pressure elevated. That's it. The rest is conceptual. To get mad is conceptual.

Then...

Someone calls you a name.
You get hurt and sad, or you attack back with a ferocity of a wounded animal. The event may stay with you all day and be replayed over and over, perhaps inventing new outcomes where you are the victor. You may shut down and hate may saturate your system.
Yet what is actual?
Sounds came out of someone's mouth. Not words with meaning, sounds. Words are all conceptual.
What you are reading is conceptual.
This whole blog is conceptual.

Wanting

Wanting is a collection of thoughts, attached to a feeling. Perhaps it is also attached to memories and the desire to repeat those memories. The desire to repeat a pleasurable experience. I feel that wanting has an element of suffering to it, for it is not complete.It is a suffering for, and a desire for a future moment, the moment when the desire is satisfied, and the mind obsesses with images and thoughts that are centered around that future moment and are drawn away from the present moment. The present moment is filled with the hole that the wanting and the particular thoughts that surround it are seeking to fill. The mind sees the present as "not having that" and thus it is no good. There is also something self-fulfilling about wanting. It is entertainment for the mind. It adds something to the ego. It gives some empty, pseudo-meaning to life.

Competition

I woke up this morning and somehow, the topic was competition and how it affects the human being.

Many might make the claim that competition makes our society great, or how we would be in the stone age if there wasn't competition driving our technology forward. It occurs to me, however that most of the societal ills that are present in our world are due to competition. Greed is the major symptom of this fear of surviving that feeds competition. It is a part of the old, Darwinian model that is being phased-out by a new step in evolution. It is a step into symbiosis.

It is not something that is new, the human body is an example of it. All the cells work in harmony to achieve work. If these cells became competitive, then the body would fail and become diseased. Perhaps cancer is a form of this, for as far as I know, cancer is a ball of competitive cells that attack and infiltrate the body, robbing it of blood and destroying its surroundings.

Psychologically, competition is a sense of separateness that is the core of violence. Violence is not possible unless there is a sense of separateness. I must survive over you. This is also the root of suffering, this sense of 'I' on the level of form and ego. The 'I' is alone and afraid. It must survive. It sees others as either aiding in its survival or threatening its survival, both physically and (more frighteningly) psychologically.

I think that the cult of competition will ultimately fail.

Life Is Freedom From Me

The ego does not love life.

It is the resistance of life.

It is attention paid to a made up image in the head.

It is really non attention.

It is a lapse of attention.

Can I stop paying attention to the identity?

Is it possible?

Can I not pay any more attention to me?

Can I let go of me as a reference point?

An Initial Step

What else is there when life stops being about me? What else when life is just a game that is being played? When there is nothing really that important to achieve or to accomplish as far as the universe is concerned, there is only an empty vessel, there is only what is. There is only the world as internal and external, both words describe one experiencing that is life. Life and the world are a reflection of each individual human. Like a hologram that has been shattered and each fragment has an image of the original.
Amazing. There are so many examples in nature and science (which is nature) of the truth that is emanating, it just seems like our minds do not want to see it or just cannot understand it as it is alien and non-linear. It seems alien and unpalatable to a mind that is dedicated to the ego and serving the master of fear and separation. The content of the mind is the obstacle or the illusion that is obscuring the light of truth. It is the content of the mind that contains hell and suffering, or rather the access of the experience of hell and suffering. To drop all content. To see it for what it is. To see it as relative, as false. To see it as something that is temporal and fleeting, something that has no true reality to it, a phantom and yet we all see it as who we are and invest all our energy into it, hoping to make it certain and real. When it falls apart and the structure that is imagined to be there collapses, what then is there? What then is taking place? Can it be described? Perhaps it could be said that it is simply being itself.

Beingness. It is aliveness. It is now. There is no descriptor following 'I am'. No I am "this" or I am "that". Just I am, and the mind cannot grasp that, and its content empties as it cannot dwell within that. The content is a linear story that has a past and a future that it is trying to get to or away from. The content cannot exist in now, with no future and no past. Something else is there, something else shines through and moves from stillness. Being is there.