Falling Asleep

I think at some point I finally came to see that everything was working just the way it wanted to. I just don’t mean that in the way everyone expects. It’s not really an outer world type of thing but an inner one and yet they go together. Basically what you notice are these little clues that tell you or confirm for you that the trajectory of your dream which is just your earthly life is right on track. It’s almost like it has a sort of agenda which is exactly in line with what you’d want for yourself, how to live, what to do, where to go, or what to look at. Instead of there being a “you” that is causing anything to happen or not happen, it’s more like a providing of events and experiences that always only serve to deepen your connection to that thing that can’t be named or even seen. If you can’t even really name it, although everyone does, and you can’t see it, how do you know anything is actually there? What even is there? And that’s not just your awareness but it’s almost like a thread of movement that your awareness is on. This is how I really say it’s not enough to know you’re awareness or consciousness or whatever you call it. Just knowing this is really just the start of your journey because there is a journey. It’s not a oh that’s what life is and just stop, withdraw, or let everything fall by the wayside. That may be the usual instruction, but that’s too lame if you ask me. If you ask me the point of life isn’t awakening at all, it’s both the physical actions you engage in coupled with your power of awareness. Life which is a dream was meant to be dreamy. You’re not obligated to participate in this dreaminess but it’s more fun if you do. As long as you’re still seeing a body there, you might as well do something with it.

A lot of teachings teach that your only job is to maybe further some message of awakening to the sleeping masses but I think that’s a misunderstanding of sorts. That’s basically just a reaction to worldly events just one issue, those events are basically just your own imagination on steroids. That world that everyone wants to save or steer towards something more divine, isn’t actually there, only your life is. This I think is still just a trap of the ego structure that learned being loving, sweet, or nice was better than other scenarios, that’s how it’s promoted as the way things should go more than anything else. Thinking you know how things should go is just some arrogance you might get rid of. I’m not saying that obviously something like war would be a horrendous display of ignorance that many might participate in dreaming up, that’s some pretty gross shit to be doing if you ask me, but it’s still just an illusion so what is really going on there? Mostly nothing. Time and time again if you’re not getting back to the business of just your own life, the false structure that dreams a world is back up and running your awareness. Of course, there are many traps it has to capture what is just an aversion in it, it uses aversion to gain the upper hand. Attention is really your only commodity in life so anything that highjacks that away from focusing on your own life is basically a parasite. Yes, we walk among parasites wherever we go, but eventually if they have no way to sway you in some direction they move on to easier prey. That sounds strange I know, and I use the word parasite as just a metaphor for your own lack of serious focus. Your mind might be your own, not something to be highjacked by anything, don’t you think? Well, I suppose that’s how we do think, and why we should do it. If you’re not really thinking, something else is and if it can use you for something other than your own agenda it will. Everything around here, depends on the cooperation of attention, not for your own sake of awareness and the journey it wants to take, although they will almost always frame it that way, the whole, “this is for your own good” gets used widely and consistently, that’s how almost always someone else knows better than you do about everything. Once you figure out once and for all how no one actually knows shit, and they just believe they do, it becomes a lot easier to say, “Thanks for the heads up or the advice, and drop it as if it was a ticking bomb about to blow your head off.” That’s not to say you can’t receive help from “the world” but you have to be very clear about what that might look like and what it’s not, otherwise you leave yourself wide open to intrusions and excursions of all kinds of distracting natures. For most people, that’s actually their whole life, they are just like those little red and white bulbs that fishermen use to know if anything is pulling on their line, and at even the slightest nibble their attention gets pulled down or out and away from themselves. The strength of your own focus of awareness is something you had once, but lost, and regaining it is actually a process you have to go through that’s a lot harder than just saying you want a coffee and then driving to Starbucks to get it. In fact, you might not realize it but that whole trip to the coffee shop might just be another thing pulling on your string. Of course, it might not be, I can’t really say what is or isn’t something for anyone else. It’s impossible to make some type of general statement about what is authentically anyone’s path, just my own. I can tell because I can feel it, but even I can still be fooled. The goal is maybe to get to the point where you can’t ever be fooled again about anything. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Is that a state of total unknowing though? Obviously you got to know something right? To know something, you’ve got to have thoughts right? You can’t just be devoid of inclinations of any kind at all, can you? I don’t think so, I think this is where you actually hone in on yourself, and decide which direction you want to go in. Of course, you might choose unwisely, we all do much of the time, but we also learn, so we don’t get fooled again. We will get side tracked again, in the beginning it happens all the time, maybe even once or twice an hour if we’re not watching our awareness and the traps it learned to fall into.

Let me give you an example. My daughter cut her hair to have some bangs. Now she doesn’t like them, actually she’s obsessed with whether or not they are perfectly aligned, is each strand of hair perfectly symmetrical and all that, and she comes to me. Actually first she called to me and said, “Mom, come here and tell me if they’re laying right?” I was like, “How about you come here if you want me to look, since we’re both sitting down right now?” She groaned. How dare I not just respond to her whim of fantasy, I guess. Then she came in my room and I said I liked them, I thought they were super cute. She’s like, “Yeah, but what about”, and I could tell she wasn’t really interested in my opinion, in fact my opinion doesn’t matter to her, how could it? That’s not what’s bothering her right now, it’s her opinion she’s struggling with. Well, she doesn’t know if she likes them, but they are there now so kind of have to, you might as well, those hairs are not going to grow back over night. So she kept at it. Let me tell you, she can be a real drain on the old attention when she wants to be. That’s all kids for you, they have already learned this, but if they have they learn it from us. Getting someone’s attention is how all drama starts and works so you can’t really blame them for picking up the habit when it’s all around us all the time. So I told her my opinion was they don’t need to be perfect, in fact a certain amount of imperfection is more appealing to me, I like it when they’re just doing what they want to do. She didn’t like that at all. Basically I think she probably sensed I was gaslighting her, maybe just spouting off some platitude to get her to drop this whole fucking train of thought. Maybe I was but it was still my opinion. Personally I think she looks adorable no matter what her hair is doing. She couldn’t even look ugly or slip out of this adorableness if she tried to induce it if you ask me, but seriously, I wasn’t giving her the type of attention she was really looking for which was a type of seriousness about the whole bang cut, maybe it was a little lopsided, she said, and you know maybe it is, but I can’t really tell because I’m not a professional hair dresser with an eye for that. In frustration, she basically turned away from me, almost, a few minutes later I hear, “Mom, come and help me move this TV back.” Now I groan and say, “What’s your brother doing?”, but he’s busy so I get up and we move the TV out of her bedroom and back to the living room where we usually keep it. You can’t move it by yourself because it’s too big for that. She tells me she’s getting her room ready for departure, since she’s leaving for my mother’s house the morning of the day after next.

At work, it’s the same thing. I encountered it last night repeatedly. “Are you going to let us win”, this whole group of thirty something men all said at once. I might have groaned silently to myself, I’m pretty sure I did. Then they said, “The last dealer made bank off us, we win, you win”, and my mind just went, “Fuck, if you knew how many times I’ve heard that tired old shit, you’d be embarrassed.” Then they all proceeded to bitch about every single losing hand and as soon as they start this, I already know it isn’t going to go the way they want it to. Let me tell you, the guy in the middle thought he could beat fate. He went all in, said he could feel it was time for a win after more than several losses. Comically enough the guy next to him who wasn’t a part of this entourage of morons picked up on his excitement and made a bigger bet and got a blackjack while I beat him with a 19 to his 18, but yeah, he still wasn’t defeated so he went to the ATM and came back with another $500. I think I took that in two hands, three tops. I made a little money, not bank, probably just what I was supposed to make there, and cleared the table. Only the guy who wasn’t with the group was left. On my last hand he bet for me and we got a blackjack, but I had an ace up so we took even money, which just means you take even money like a regular hand and don’t hold out for the 3 to 2 payout because if I have blackjack too, you get nothing, you’re just going to push. Good thing, because I had one too but this isn’t about blackjack. This is about the highjacking of attention. It’s the fact that I can remember this whole charade so well, it was irritating and is always a little destabilizing which is how it stood out to me so clearly. If you read in Jed’s book about the time he attended the discussion group on the Bhagavad Gita, he remembers the details as well. He also mentions how he avoids this kind of shit like the fucking plague, but why? Attention harvesting, that’s why. Ego needs attention, yours or something else’s, it doesn’t matter, a person who thinks they are a person needs it to hold themselves together, and it will use whatever is available, if that’s you, your energy is going to be drained just by the mere contact with them. This isn’t some evil force, it’s mechanical. It works the way it works, that’s all, and all the silence in the world can’t help you with that. Pure avoidance is the only way if you ask me. You go for the mountain retreat if you can figure out a way to get one. Plant energy is beneficial to our configuration, a whacked out false configuration is not. Maybe that’s the real reason societies get madder and more delusional when cities start going up, not enough plant energy to sustain the equanimity. In this respect, too many humans with too little access to plant life doesn’t bode well on this planet. We should have went with the whole “Shire” look, and just started planting. People are drawn to things that grow, and if there’s no gardens they will just grow whatever shit is available to expand. That’s the real reason Lisa in the books lives up a mountain, and Brett lives on a farm, close to nature, and away from the eyes of man. This is the easier way to go. Jed’s not a recluse, he’s an energy saving, energy producing force of nature, living in a world that doesn’t know what that is. He writes because that’s the output valve for the creative force that he now is. Maybe that’s why I do it too. Maybe what spiritual autolysis really is, is a direct link to this creative force that you don’t have, but you actually are. That’s the discovery, not that you’re non dual or living in a dream, those are facets of the creative force itself. Awakening then is not the act of looking for consciousness, or becoming aware that you are aware, that’s easy since you are that no matter how it’s expressing, true awakening then is the releasing of this creative force, it’s freedom to be as you really are but that doesn’t mean you cultivate or generate a storage unit of silence, it’s closer to riding the pony, you get on board with what you are, you climb up on this pony’s back, you take the reins of this force of nature and go on the ride of your life, which is just your life.

I think the real trick to life once you know what it is and how it works is basically knowing what it is and how it works. Longevity is really the key because in some instances (like mine) some very deeply held beliefs feel like they take forever to dissolve, but they do dissolve and once you see this, you’ll know that all that shit is on it’s way out. You don’t believe this though, belief in itself is not enough. The way it works is experience has shown you the truth of your situation and the more you trust what you know, because you know it, the easier it gets. Believe it or not, the universe in some strange twist of fate actually does revere you more than anything or anyone you’ve ever met (actually that was the universe too, just colored through your foggy lenses) and it works according to that. Why? Because it’s experiencing life through you. On your end, you just have to live this. How do you live it? The answer is by knowing it. This can’t be something you’re hoping for or even guessing at, it’s either you know it or you don’t. There is no other way that I know of, which doesn’t mean there isn’t another way, just that it’s not how it worked here. It’s mind boggling and interesting beyond measure just how intelligent this place really seems to be. It’s uncanny in how it seems to know long before you even have a clue what it needs to do in your exact case and how that will appear to you so you can grok it. I think it’s wildly intuitive because it actually knows everything, yeah weirdly kind of like AI does but before you have ever even formulated it in your own mind. If you have done so, you’ve done so unconsciously so without access to the awareness that already knows it. Of course, that’s the strange thing about thinking there’s time, for us in our experience there seems to be time, but there isn’t so maybe that’s how the mind is able to present things that seemed like they needed time to know what to do and when to appear consciously to what you’re calling your own awareness. Of course, if awareness is everything, then awareness knows everything so of course it will have already written the whole script and dialog. It knows exactly what it will have you doing and how it will have you doing it. So if it needs to send you a life line on Thursday at 8:00 o’clock, that’s when it will appear in a form you can understand. We call this a coincidence, but that’s just a term we use when we don’t know how something lined up so perfectly. We only use that term because collectively we doubt anything could be so perfect and yet there is one thing, the one thing that is everything. Doesn’t get more perfect than that.

So why all the bad dreams you might wonder. Why all the troubles? They are of our own making, all based off faulty beliefs such as “if things can go wrong they probably will” man toss that one, nothing will ever go wrong but you can make them seem wrong anytime you want to feel like life will probably wrong you. It won’t but if you believe this, it can sure seem like it can. Here’s another one, “Money is hard to come by”, wrong again, only so if you believe it is. “Other people are dangerous”, nope, only if you believe they are. “Life is hard.” Now there’s a truly terrible belief, I’d get rid of that one first if I were you. “Life is unfair”, another gross mistake there. “Things don’t work out.” Get rid of it. Toss it. Everything has basically already worked out just fine, your vision just hasn’t caught up to this fact of life. “I can’t because”, totally untrue and baseless. That’s a mindset usually tied up with the false identity. “Life is cruel”, I mean do you want to keep that one? I don’t, hell no, that just means you’ll keep seeing cruelty where it doesn’t actually exist, nothing exists but awareness so that ends that one. How about “I’m too old” and then add “for my dreams to come true”. This one is personal, and completely false, absurdly untrue on so many levels. How about this instead, “I’m just getting started, my life has just begun.” Much better, I’m starting to really get excited now. I start to think of all the places I have yet to go and see. Yet but what about his one, “The world is in my way, consensual reality has the upper hand”? I don’t think so, another gross miscalculation there since you’re only ever standing in the middle of your own imagination, right smack dab in the middle of nothing but your own dreams. So what can you dream then?

I aim to find out. I have a new belief about that and it goes like this: If I can imagine it, I can dream and experience it as if it was real. You see I wasn’t trying to wake up, I was already awake. What I’ve been trying to do is fall back asleep so I can have some nice dreams. Life might still test you, don’t think it won’t. It will show you things just to see how deep your resolve is but it’s not really a test, there’s no fucking exam. I call it a type of strengthening. The less you can let anything get to you, the more you can override the original programming so you can write your own program. Am I just dreaming? Yes of course, that’s what you’re supposed to do here.

And yet, where does it go? Where do I go? I can't know that. There is no knowing before arrival, when your feet step off of one thing and onto another, something else, maybe you're only now seeing that it exists. Can I get to it? I'll know if I do.

This is a sweet song that came up here, and it's not wrong. Maybe we don't have to change, we just have to stop believing so much stupid shit. Or we can change if we want to, because we no longer know anything is impossible, and we can know whatever we want to.