Beauty

Trying to hold it all together is a stress.

Trying to be perfect, trying to constantly look good.

Trying to do the right thing, say the right thing.

Trying to please everyone, making sure not to offend anyone.

Trying, trying, trying.

Then the massive failure, and it all comes crashing down.

A mind-made illusion of perfection - "how it should be" - comes to an inglorious end.

And what is left is an honest human being in all its imperfect glory.

Don't pick up the pieces. Don't try to glue together the false image of oneself. Let the fragments fall away. Take a deep breath, and feel the relief of being real. The relief of not having to pretend to be something that we're not. 

The relief of being exposed for what we are.

Underneath that is beauty.

Finding The Good

When we are in emotional pain, we have to find a way to be free of it. 

Emotional pain for me has been my salvation, it taught me what I had to let go of. My emotional pain was my barrier to loving myself and my life. My anger and resistance were my gurus, showing me what I had to release to live a happy life. 

It's not an easy road but the alternative sucks waaaay more. 

The important part - they key - is taking the immense power of our awareness and focusing it on finding the good. 

Finding the good is a muscle. 

The more we use it the more powerful it gets until we are finding good in everything, even the things that most people would consider bad, challenging, scary. 

Negative images of reality drop away because anything negative becomes an access to salvation. To finding the good.

Finding the good is using the power of awareness to transmute reality - burn away the veil of our mental projections. Our egos are rooted in fear. Our egos are a bundle of thought-forms that have accumulated together to form an identity designed to keep us psychologically safe. Our physical safety is hard-wired into our biology. We don't think about dodging a thrown rock or a moving car. 

The ego projects its version of reality on top of what actually is. That's why some people are afraid to leave the house - the world isn't actually that terrifying, but to the ego's projections, it is that way. 

To find the good is to look beyond what the ego is projecting, to burn away the screen that the ego projects its images up on and to see reality as it actually is in the moment. 

That is what perceiving truth is.

(Modified from a letter to a friend)

Radiate Love

I sent a letter to a dear friend of mine. I think what came through is important to everyone. 

I edited it slightly.

The main thing is practice looking for the good. Practice loving people. 

Watch how your mind operates and the mental/emotional bullshit it tries to pull on you to get you riled up or feeling low. 

Start taking notes and notice how there is a staff of high-powered, internal mind-lawyers who are lobbying for your own personal misery and failure. Those are the dudes that you have to recognize as being your mortal enemy. They are the enemy of your happiness, your evolution, your joy, your success and your experiencing real connection to others and love.

Radiate love. Radiate kindness. Radiate your own unique take on life. Bring joy to others. Compliment them. Acknowledge their beauty. Be a light.

Good will come naturally to you. Everyone wants good. Everyone wants a taste of real peace, realness. Get in that space yourself and people will respond. 

That is your primary purpose, to experience that sense of oneness and peace for yourself. Everything else is secondary.

Dissolving All Hurt

It's all about being.

It's all about seeing. 

I am noticing how those two things interact. It is yin and yang. Being and witnessing. The being is the unconditioned space and the witnessing is the Self. They are connected and one thing. 

I had an old hurt bubble up within my being. I instantly felt it unfold, became conscious of it and held it in a space of witnessing presence. 

I saw it for what it was - a memory, an emotion, the past living within me, a movie projection. 

I saw the truth of it - how false it was, a replay of an old hurt, a dead thing. 

I saw the mind-made invented reality of it - the story that my ego had made up about it, old internal monologue, resistance, fear, all of it strengthening the ego further.

 

It was so clear. So apparent. I saw the whole structure of it. It is a machine. Mechanical.

Through constantly bringing my mind into awareness, not resisting, allowing what is to just be, I have gathered an enormous amount of energy that pours into my witnessing consciousness. This is what I would call meditation.

The more I am present, the more my awareness, naturally and without effort, pulls me into the moment, like putting energy into a gyroscope - it becomes more stable and coherent. 

Initially, there is fear which repels everyone when we start to come into the moment. 

Fear about such a commitment, such a path, because it leads to a door through which we cannot return. The ego always wants a back door, an excuse, a reason, a way out. It does not want to be put on the spot. It always flees into the concept of "tomorrow", "soon" or "some other time". The ego is rooted in fear.

The moment is the most gentle but most powerful thing. The ego is terrified of it because the space of the moment is the end of the ego and all its nonsense. The ego cannot exist within the moment. All things that are not truth dissolve in that space. 

I just watched fear move through me and dissolve. The same with an old hurt. Nothing that is false can survive in that space. 

From that space everything is possible.

Let Go Of Thought

Have you ever noticed how one day everything feels off and the next day, even though everything is the same you can deal with it?

I have noticed this innumerable times throughout my life. How my thinking creates my reality - my relationship to the present moment.

When I find myself in a state of suffering or resistance, it is always because I have fallen into the trap of believing in what my thoughts and emotions are saying about the present, the past or the future. I have bought in to what they are saying and I am trying to "figure it out". 

It is like being in a movie theater and getting involved in the plot to such a degree that I think that it is real. The dream becomes a reality.

Thought can invent any number of realities. Realities that are fearful, pleasurable, excited, sad, grim, hopeful - the list is endless. But what do those realities have to do with truth?

What is truth? 

I have found that thought is a generator of realities but those realities have nothing to do with truth.

Truth cannot be touched by thought. Thought can only generate shadows. 

Let go of thought and perhaps truth is there.

Breaking Free

I had this insight the other day while walking.

I imagined that I was a creature that was inside an egg, ready to hatch. 

I was struggling inside the egg to crack the shell. My muscles were getting stronger and I was growing larger but I still hadn't broken free.

Suddenly I was mesmerized. A movie began to play on the inside of the egg shell and it occupied my whole mind. I simply became absorbed in the movie. 

The movie was about me and my worries, fears, future and past. How was I going to make it? What will I do? Where was I going? Why didn't I do this or that? It was an endless stream of self-centered thinking.

The creature that I was forgot all about cracking the egg. The movie was so important to it. If it cracked the egg the movie would stop playing and it would never know what to do, where to go, and how to be. It had to keep watching. It felt its survival depended on it.

The creature eventually became weaker, its muscles atrophied. It forgot all about breaking through the egg. But the egg was not enough. The creature still grew within it and it needed space. It needed another kind of food. The egg was running out of resources. 

The human dilemma is like this. Our concerns are projections of the mind. Our emotions are what keeps us rooted to watching the movie, keeps us attached. 

However, no matter how real it seems, the movie of our mind can be seen for what it is, and our perception of life can transform instantly like clouds being blown from the face of the sun.

Break free of the egg.

Deepening Aliveness

I have found when I am in a rough place - having to struggle to maintain awareness, applying all my energy to see the folly of reacting to my own negativity - and I eventually come out of it, I find that my capacities are increased. My capacity for holding a space of peace, my capacity for love, my capacity for compassion, for aliveness, all of it is increased.

Maybe it works the same as a muscle, I don't know, all I know is my experience.

I also know that when I feel like I am on top of the world and I have reached the pinnacle, within 24 hours I will crash and burn in some fashion. Hubris is a real thing.

Here is a caveat.

To hold the space of awareness with the intention of reaping a future reward will get me nowhere. Believe me, I have tried, but feel free to find out for yourself. It is the ego desiring or wanting to aviod and it is the ego that is suffering. There is no logic there. The ego cannot be free of itself, only awareness can be free and awareness has no goal, no agenda, no self-concerned intention.

Simply watching the turbulence without any intention, desire, or direction. That is what opens the doors and deepens aliveness.

A Key To Ending The Ego

I think that the last weapon in the ego's arsenal is fear.

It seems that fear is the foundation it was created on and if I dig enough into the ego it is the last thing I face.

It hits me with the same vibration that it was created in, a deep, non-verbal terror that my now adult brain tries to interpret, but I have found that believing my brain's interpretation is a mistake and can lead to all kinds of upset, fear, uncertainty, you name it.

This last barrier of the ego is opaque and feels tremendously real but I feel like beyond it is something else, I feel like it is that state before I invented the ego. At some point there was that state - a clear and direct perception of reality through a non-conditioned mind. A childlike state of grace and innocence.

I am at that wall of unknown dread and fear, looking at it, watching my brain attempting to interpret it as if it is something real. My brain feels that fear and then it automatically begins to interpret that fear and put it into my future. My brain is trying to keep me safe, but it doesn't realize that in doing so it is robbing me of my power by generating a fearful future filled with all kinds of doubt, uncertainty, upset and things to be avoided and be hurt about. 

I think that is a serious blind spot for the brain - how it reacts to psychological fear. I think it does it in a way that is similar to physical fear which is great for survival, but it is terrible for psychology - it puts phantoms in our future. 

I think the brain treats emotional hurt in the same way it would treat the fear of a sabertooth cat. It hasn't made the distinction between physical fear and psychological fear. I feel like only our conscious awareness can make that distinction and be free of the autonomic mechanics of the brain. 

The brain then becomes an amazing tool and serves awareness.

Independence

Independent. The dictionary says:

Free from outside control; Not depending on another's authority; Self-governing.

Free from outside control. 

What must the quality of my mind be to be totally free from outside control of any kind? What is the quality of my mind when it is being controlled, swayed or bullied from some outside experience?

Not depending on another's authority.

What is the quality of my mind when it no longer depends on something or someone? What is going on within my mind when it seeks another's authority? Do I need comfort or reassurance? Do I feel not capable? Do I want to fit in?

Self-governing.

What is the quality of my mind when it is self-governing, sovereign and completely autonomous? What is its quality when it is caught in seeking and fear?

Explore independence and find out the depth of it.

Happy 4th of July.