The End Of Two

I know where you think you are, and just telling you that it isn’t true won’t help you one bit. Nothing that is worth shit is something anyone can tell you. You have to do the work.

But what is that work? What does the work mean to someone just starting out — someone who doesn’t know the first thing about being released from all the inner turmoils that haunt them day in and day out: the petty annoyances, ill health or just flat-out apathy, the insecurities, the other people, the state of the world, politics, economy, the war machine — need I go on?

Have you seen the news lately? Does anything look rational or sane to you? Does any political affiliation care about you? Is it really trying to keep you safe? How obvious will it have to get until you see that something’s off here? Are you actually sure this is reality? Does it seem like a good day to be born anymore?

You’ll be born, immediately subjected to a kaleidoscope of rules — suppressed, convinced, cajoled, probably brutally punished at least a time or two. In your teens you’ll wonder and fantasize a lot about love and become even more confused, or depressed, maybe you’re ugly.

You’ll learn to compete, you’ll learn to disagree with and degrade others. People will most certainly betray you — usually your own parents for your own good, no doubt. Then you’ll find work. Money will become the sole objective and object of interest in your life, or alcohol, usually both.

You’ll be led to believe a love relationship will fix you and probably try that a time or two, or hundreds of times. Then maybe you’ll become successful in your field of work — probably not; the chances are slim.

Did you know that most children will not surpass the financial success of their parents? Yeah, the numbers are staggering.

Now you’re just passing time, trying to hold out for holidays and the occasional concert or football game. How exciting — no, it’s not, not really. You’ll wonder how anyone thinks they are if you have any sense left by that point — and chances are you won’t.

If you’re one of a million, you’ll start some spiritual quest, join a church or a meditation group — you heard that was good for you. Maybe you just need a few more friends. You might start jogging, or yoga, but probably not. It will be intermittent at best. You start out strong but that only lasts a week. Then it’s back to the couch and the beers.

You start to age and health problems surface. You’ve got a condition now. Maybe you can blame everything on that if it makes you special enough. You start to think of retirement and how you should have started saving for it when you were twelve. Inflation dashes your hopes there. Maybe just another five years — or maybe you’re set, you did all the right things, you got the house, and the pension, so you’re comfortable enough.

But still your health fails. You’re not young anymore. The life is slowly creeping out of you now.

What was your life about again, you might ask? You have no idea. You’re still fantasizing about how the future might finally fulfill you. It won’t happen — but you can dream, or just lie to yourself about what a fantastic fucking ride it’s all been.

I mean, that’s most people right there. That’s how it usually goes.

Maybe you start to read some spiritual books there towards the end. Surely there’s a God, so it’s fine. Of course your God is best — those other people are going to hell, that’s what you read anyway. You don’t actually know about it. You haven’t seen anything. You haven’t talked to God face to face. The one-sided conversation in your own imagination is all you got.

Is there really a way to know what life is — what it actually is? Do any of the stories you learned and lived through actually make sense?

Would it be worth all this, all you’ve gone through, just for this — to die still afraid, still nervous, still anxious, still worried about what’s happening now or what’s next?

Where will you go? Is it the end, the end of you? Did you make the most of it? Did you truly live or just watch the exciting lives of those on the TV set, following the gossip of this or that movie star?

Do you think you did your job on earth well because you got your offspring through college? Everyone is evolving through education, it’s just a matter of time — another couple hundred years maybe?

We’re all getting smarter. Life is physically less demanding but mentally challenging. That’s all part of the plan; it’s how we learn.

Just a few more questions left here: did you live? Do you think you truly lived a majestic, magical life?

If your answer is no, then could it all have been for what it was — maybe the career or family? What was it for? Do you know?

Is there even an answer to this question? I think there is, but who cares what I think — only I can do that.

If you wanted to know, where would you start? You’d start by thinking about all this shit — that’s how I wrote about it. You’d start by asking yourself, “Does my life make sense? Did I do what I wanted with it and if not, why not? What the hell happened?”

So what’s the conclusion? Isn’t it this? Either life is meaningless and stupid, or we don’t know what it is. Whatever we learned it was, wasn’t it.

No one could tell us what it was because they didn’t know. They either never took the time to find out, or the opportunity to find out did not occur to them. It didn’t enter into their awareness.

It has entered yours, however, because by reading this, it has entered.

Only you can think about it — whether it’s worth the trouble to find out the Truth, or you can live without ever knowing. Things are just fine as they are. Only you can decide; it doesn’t matter to anyone or even anything else whether you do or not.

Not even life cares what you do. There’s no wrong way to live. It’s simply a matter of what you’re comfortable knowing or not knowing.

Sure, you can settle — millions do. But that’s not living; that’s the herd mentality announcing it’s conquered your mind.
It tells you you’re done when you haven’t even begun yet. It tells you this is it, this is all there is. Why do you always want more?

You know why you always want more — because the human story sucks, and there is more. This isn’t it. There is something else to know, and somewhere deep inside every human is a piece of Truth that says, “We can achieve this knowing. Get up, you fool, why do you settle for bullshit when you don’t have to?”

The lies are all around you — a human’s entire life is built on them. And there you are like the lone ranger wondering, “What the fuck happened here? This can’t be life. This is too stupid to be anything but a cheap imitation. There must be more. I’m missing something and I will not stop till I find it.”

That’s the type of intent you need — the type of intent that is so thoroughly disgusted with the way humans live that it’s willing to take off over the mountain all alone, come death or rain or snow. Nothing can stop you. It’s do-or-die time, and that’s when the forces of nature rally to your side.

It will pick you up when you’re too tired or too confused to go on. Indeed, it won’t leave you alone — there’s a splinter in your eye now that doesn’t come out. It only pokes and pokes, making your eyes tear, making your brain swell within the confines of the world you learned to live in.

If you stop now, you die with your dreams still in you. And if you go on, as you must now, then who knows? The world transforms, and you might realize in the span of ten seconds that everything that held you in bondage were only the beliefs you were too stupid or too lazy to challenge.

So where does all this insanity come from? From the way the mind has split itself in two.

A person has two minds, or two attentions. You can verify this for yourself.

Some say there’s the installed side — your conditioning or everything you’ve learned since you got here. That’s the fear-based mode of thinking, that ruminating voice that starts talking when you’re trying to sleep, warmly called the false self or the imposter.

Then there’s infinite mind, or what some call the true self, or spirit. This is really what, over the ages, people started to call God — even if they don’t know that now and think there’s a separate entity somewhere in the sky that’s watching over them. There’s not. Everything is just what you are, and every person who’s ever been born comes with two sides.

It’s possible to get rid of the first completely but not the second. I don’t recommend that, but don’t worry about it. You can’t make that happen; it goes on its own or it doesn’t go. You can’t stop it if it wants to do that, and you can’t start it either. It will never destroy itself.

There’s nothing wrong with this design, by the way, except that one side has taken over the other to the point where the other isn’t even detected anymore. It’s still there, working under the hood, so to speak.

Without it you wouldn’t even be alive, because then you wouldn’t exist — but you do, so that’s good. It pops up and out, making itself known when you’re not even looking for it. In fact, if you look for it, it tends to hide.

You need a certain level of ease available within your overall makeup for it to function consciously — and almost no one has that anymore, so they never become aware of this.

Tension keeps the false identity in high gear, so that’s all you’re using. There’s so much to do: we must achieve our goals, the house needs cleaning, the bills need paying, keep those kids quiet, I’m working here or I can’t hear my movie — on and on it goes like a train stuck to the tracks of what we now consider “normal human functioning.”

Regardless of how much havoc it causes, you do need the false self, because otherwise who are you? You can’t be anything or anyone without it, and that’s not life. You can’t play any games without having a person/personality/character to play the game with.

It’s not bad or evil to have it; what causes all the trouble is that this one side of your mind is delusional, so basically it believes in lies, and these lies form the basis for your life — holding you hostage to them and basically making you a walking miserable schmuck.

Welcome to life as most know it.

The false mind is logical, social, and obedient — it organizes the world, but it also traps you in its stories.

The true mind is wordless, direct, and vast. It’s not “quiet,” but silent only because it can’t be described. In order to describe something, you have to go back to the false mind, because that’s what it does. That’s what it’s for.

In most spiritual movements, since people have been taught to equate truth with silence, they mistake stillness for enlightenment when it’s only the false mind trying to imitate the other one.

The false mind says: “If I shut up long enough, maybe I’ll find peace.”
But it’s still the same mind playing its game. It’s pretending to be awake by muting itself.

The real shift is when the false mind stops trying to control experience at all.
Then awareness (the true mind) moves in naturally — and that’s not silence, it’s aliveness.

Interesting tidbit — when I first came up with the name The End of Two about eight years ago, I thought I was talking about the end of separation between living beings, since I knew then — I saw for myself — that existence is but one.

There is only one thing that has ever existed which, for obvious reasons now, I cannot ever tell you about. But that wasn’t it. The actual movement is the end of two minds — the two sides actually merge into one functioning unit, and that might look like anything, but it’s not just full-on silence. Silence might be woven into it at times.

I know I went through a phase where I stopped responding or commenting on anything that was happening around me, and I’m still pretty much this way most of the time, but not always.

Sometimes something else comes up and out — like the word, “Stop,” and some sentiment that states, “Come no further,” and it was a forceful expression. It was quite frankly new for me — a sort of drawing-a-line-in-the-sand thing, creating a boundary between what I am and the madness of some aspect of the world I was encountering.

I don’t have to explain it, because I know there’s nothing to explain. But in many ways, it’s easy to see this silent thing is really a sort of meekness — there’s fear behind it, not strength.

The task, this inner war, is instigated and designed, however, to unify the two minds without letting either dominate. It’s not to reject language, thought, or expression, but to see them as the instruments of the infinite.

So you’re not dissolving thought — just the lies that contaminated it. Then the integration of both sides can be reconciled.

If you are well versed, you’ll remember that Ramana Maharshi once said, “The mind is a thorn used to remove another thorn, and after removing it, both are thrown away.”

He never said thinking was the enemy. He was saying you have to use it as a thorn to remove the thorns — the lies, the ignorance — in your thinking.

It’s only after the thorns are removed that you can throw them both away. That means once your thinking is removed of thorns, it can become quite useful again.

People keep trying to throw both away before they’ve even started digging.
They want silence without excavation. But silence that hides confusion isn’t peace — it’s paralysis.

Well, maybe think about that, because that’s what you have at your disposal to use until you also have the other.

Silence is therefore the result of deep understanding, not the method. You can’t simply suppress thought to find truth — you must use one clear thought (self-inquiry, awareness) to uproot the tangled ones. And just a heads-up there: they are all tangled at first.

In the beginning, you use thought to reveal what’s underneath, because that’s all you have to use since the other side isn’t reawakened yet.

Remember this — you haven’t used it since the other side completely took over and dominated you, so since childhood, maybe two or three years old. It hasn’t even walked yet, but it will, and it does.

Once the other side is reawakened from the deep recesses of your consciousness, it gets wild — but that’s another post.

That’s where language ends and life begins.
The ferris wheel has stopped. The conductor opens the carriage door, and you get in — there’s no seatbelt on this one.
With a wave of his hand, it starts to move, and up you go.
You look around and don’t recognize anything yet, but you will.
You will.
It all comes back to you eventually.