Stop

Stop. Stop. Stop. If I could use just one teaching, it wouldn’t be silence, because no one knows what silence is. In this day and age, silence itself feels like an admonishment to most people. Most people are so far adrift in the remembered pains of their lives, that all they really are is the surviving reaction to that pain. It’s so much now, that everyone you meet is literally living on a crack between the persistent impulse of pain that keeps them holding on, holding it all together and the slippery slope towards madness. Even with a little awareness one should be able to notice how the over reactions come as quickly as if there was no more thinking left in them at all. So yeah, that’s wild. That’s what you’re dealing with, not thoughtful human beings, people capable of rational thought, but reaction itself. The defensive layer is all that’s left no matter where you look or who you talk to. If you wanted to find a thoughtful person, you’d have to seek them out with great care, and even then, if you were to draw it out of them, you’d have to tread so lightly, so delicately even to get through at all. To touch anything below the surface of this charade, might actually be dangerous, that’s how thin the layer is. Rational thought is tenuous now. You never know what you’ll unleash, and yet, it seems simple enough and around here it often is because the feeling is different. The experience isn’t the same anymore but that’s not some gift that comes from outside of you, it’s the result of more than ten years worth of daily concentrated battles with none other than yourself and your own reality.

That people, most people anyway, are so quick to accept the false and turn away, or ridicule the mysterious, perhaps loudly exclaiming that if it doesn’t fit into today’s common reality it must be worthless is just a sign of the times because there were other times, times when writers worked by hand and candlelight to meticulously and painstakingly make their thoughts and feelings known. That’s how the ancient texts and the timeless classics that remain came about. They weren’t written in a day, or a week, or even a year, they were a person’s life work. Their lives though sometimes brutally lacking in the comfortable amenities of their time possessed something even more valuable, the inner life. The inner convictions of dedication to what stirred within were tremendous and it was this that made their works memorable, not that they were talented writers but that they found the stream of consciousness with which to express. This is how their works were able to transcend and survive the horrors of their times.

These days have taken another turn as words now are a dime a dozen, anyone can write a book and have it sell millions of copies, but where are the New York Times seller’s list books now? Everyone has forgotten them. They don’t come to mind at all. Even if you’ve read them, you’d have to look them up to even find out what they were all about because superficial words don’t last in memory. True memory can only come from something honest. It moves us in a way that we are not seldom moved, and that is where the Truth also comes from.

Life if we were all to know what it truly is, is more like a piece of music. A true life is a melodic pattern that is identical to a harmonic cadence. It is a progression of two or more themes that concludes a time period in one’s life, and when one is over, it goes on to create another one, or so it could be. We’ve lost this rhythm now, this flowing of thought from deep within. Now most of it comes not from us but to us from a million different modalities and directions, none of which are truly our own. And so most people are really just bundles of confusion now. They stay in whatever survival mode is easiest and stay there. It is almost unheard of to look within for what is surely missing anymore. Instead we feel the emptiness and fear where wisdom might live in us, and fill it with anything but that. Only a person who for some reason nothing satisfies will ever venture beyond the social norms he is accustomed to living in. If you want to venture anywhere real, then that’s what you leave behind, not for an hour, but for good. That is the only way it will ever work.

A person’s focus can not waver, and if it does, if you truly have the bug, it will always return to the search for Truth. There are many stories where a person might have been fooled for years sometimes their whole life by some teaching or even some teacher, only to find the Truth at the end of it all and see that it was all a waste of time. Instinctively we know that if something, anything is lacking, if there’s still fear or confusion, if you are only pretending to know where you are, none of that will do. The inner fires do not allow it if they are still going at all, even a dim spark might catch you on fire, kindling a roaring fire that consumes everything in its path if conditions are right. It is then, but it can not be up to you. In some strange way, that is the saddest part of this journey knowing as you must that everything a person is taught to reach for are really just buckets of icy water and oil slicks that will drown out their true knowing, which is themselves.

If we just think about this one thought for just a moment, it might give us a tremendous pause for contemplation. What might a life feel like? Seriously, here you are alive, in the flesh, for only a certain prescribed moment in time so what might that feel like? Does it feel like what you are currently feeling? And what are you currently feeling? Does it feel even remotely sublime, or exciting? Do you even know? Can you even feel yourself right now and the life that must be there for you to exist at all? Remember, this is your one in one billion opportunity to live and for all you know it’s not going to happen again so this is it, your chance. Your chance to do what exactly, you might ask? Your chance to experience life in all its fullness and splendor. Okay maybe you’re like, what splendor, have you seen the news today? Yes, but who cares? Is that any reason to rein it in or is that much more reason to really live? Now maybe you’re saying, “Well, my life doesn’t feel like that, it’s not exciting, all I do is work and pay bills, that’s reality.” Look at your thought process here, if your thoughts create your world than is it any wonder you’re not feeling so great and certainly not sublime, probably you’re just tired? I mean I don’t know how you feel but by looking around, the sentiment I gather isn’t what I’m feeling, just lucky as hell to be at all. You didn’t have to be born you know, it might not have happened but it did and you’re here now, so is that it? Is this all you came for, the bare minimum, just going to trudge along and not question anything? If it’s good enough for you okay, don’t come here anymore then. This writing will just agitate and annoy you. Maybe you think I’m just some silly unrealistic dreamer, life was meant to be dull and repetitive but do you really in your heart of hearts believe that? I don’t think you do. I think you’re tired and don’t know what to do so you just keep doing what you’ve always done. Whatever your life situation is right now, you settled for that, at some point you decided that your current reality and understanding of life was all there was, but just let’s be clear here. If you ask yourself whether it could possibly be enough given the mystery and miracle of life, is it? Or could it be something else and you just missed it because humanity missed it?

That’s really the shocking part, isn’t it? We’ve had people throughout millennia describe altered states of consciousness and absolutely reverse forms of reality and yet strangely enough the majority of people remain not only uninterested but somehow averse to such things. Even though too many people constantly suffer under hideous afflictions and delusions that continue to bring untold miseries to everyday life, still no one bats an eye. That even the numerous teachers and movements to explore such things consistently miss the mark, should raise an eyebrow or two, but it doesn’t happen. It seems that people are completely programmed to steer clear of all of it. Maybe life is just suffering in as many forms as you can think of. As a species we are now the proud owners of more than 26,000 diseases. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? When will it end? Since we’re looking, how many more can we find? Or does “seek and ye shall find” maybe hold the clue and while we’re here, what are we looking for? Anybody really know? What’s it all for then? Do you really even stand a chance anymore? The unequivocal answer is emphatically no. Your chance of breaking out of the current reality are basically nil or if you want a real statistic, not even one in a million. The real problem with breaking out of what you now call life and finding out what it really is stems from the fact that it’s a war in the truest sense of the word and your whole life up till now is the enemy. You won’t fight it because you’ll never find out there is a war, not out there on some foreign battlefield but within you, within your mind and your own heart.

The real tragedy if there is one, isn’t our experience for this flows not to us but out of us, but the fact that we never find this out. Most are content to take whatever life hands them, they aren’t creators but just accept the crumbs of those few which are. They are content to let anything else but their own inner convictions shape their world and their children’s worlds which just naturally follows. It’s not a lack of capacity then for we are all born with it but then allow it to decay from misuse and disuse. It lies in wait of resurrection, hidden under layers of emotional debris and the lies this web weaves in vain, unused and untapped. Those that might tap it are led astray into other worldly things not just by the media but by their own families. That’s the real reason on one does it for to turn away from the false means you’d turn away from your own parents and that’s a sacrilege. Everything they taught you and stood for must hit the bin, discarded as the ineffective, useless knowledge that it was. Nothing you learned will survive if you’re lucky, because everything you learned is what’s holding you hostage to all these human miseries.

So what happens then is most wait it out, and yes, we can always wait it out, but in my experience giving life a little help by actively removing what stands in the way of our best perception and experience sometimes has an incredible effect. Even to lose one lie, can do much, since they are all tied together. Personally, I feel we should and can do whatever we are capable of doing in this regard. Most of the spiritual practices we learn talk about surrender as if it were a passive activity, indeed they sometimes frame life itself as something that happens to us and not through us, by our own hand/imagination. That’s how my own mentor created his own techniques and now, I am able to create my own. Of course, it’s fine to just see what comes of it’s own accord, but I think it’s also good to know that we are powerful creators and nothing has robbed us of our power. It is just waiting for us to claim it and use it. I know here, I learned my sense of helplessness and I set myself right by unlearning it. I want to give this life my best shot, even if I fail, who cares, I will have no regrets then for if you can ever say, “I might have done more”, then you really ought to have done more and your first clue, your first task is to uncover why you didn’t. What stopped you? If I had any advice at all from this juncture it would be this: Stop right now and find out because here’s what I really know: There is nothing here, there, or anywhere to actually stop you from just about anything. Yes, there are certain limitations that you might be stuck with for instance if you lost your tooth, don’t expect it to grow back, go with the implant. (I actually heard that they are doing experiments on people growing their teeth back but right now the algorithm is against it.)

The thing is this: changing how you feel and subsequently interpret life in general is an ongoing and very pliable process and the only reason we don’t do it is because we think it’s not. So maybe question that first or ask this: How real is reality if it’s always changing? Where does permanence actually reside outside of our own interpretations? Where do interpretations occur? Isn’t all our knowledge but an idea, thoughts we are reluctant to ever question? Is your world an endless delight or a burden you bear right now and who other than you might make this distinction?

I’ll leave you with this quote:

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.”

― W. Somerset Maugham