Wheels Within Wheels

So this next topic isn’t one I know about. It’s really just a hunch at this point, a sort of taking experience and noticing what works and what doesn’t but at the same time, looking very closely at what arises for me to look at or even think about, almost like there’s a line open and I’m able to follow it when I shine my attention on it.

So when I was around sixteen or so, my mother and I used to frequent the public library and for some unknown reason, I ended up coming home one day with a book on Kabbalah. I knew nothing about it. I had never even heard of it before. I don’t even think I knew at the time that it was connected with the Jewish faith, but there you go. I had this book because I had picked it out off the shelves of thousands of books. It wasn’t a huge library, not the main hub but a local one but let’s just say this very fact is significant, not to you so much, but to me, if only for the action of singling it out from all the other books. It doesn’t matter if I read it and understood it or read it and didn’t get a word of what it was saying. I have no memories of anything it said nor whether or not I ever even opened it up to have a look but I think I did at least that much. My sense is I had a look and that was about it. My life continued as it was. There were no changes from this action that I can make out.

Years later, we are talking many years, close to forty years, is when I find out about my mother’s DNA connection to Judaism and therefore my own. There was a giant upsurge then of interest, on my part, on the parts of my children in the Jewish faith. We then purchased books, and tried out many of the practices but by and large, I can tell you I’m not an actual Jew, not in the sense that the faith defines it. My mother has no memory of the people who made up this history. It might even be that my grandmother buried the information because given the historical facts of the era she thought life would be easier for all of them that way but who knows. A lot of Jewish people had converted to other faiths by then to avoid all the drama that went with being one as well. To my knowledge there was never a conversation or even an inkling that we had any connections there short of the fact that we obviously hailed from an area that would be targeted during the war. I think the way it’s passed down is through identity, and our main identity wasn’t that we were Jewish, but that we were German even though there was some confusion as to whether my aunt who was born and raised in the same place as my mother might actually be Polish. In the end, when they moved to Hamburg, German it was and that’s all. We also fancied ourselves Catholic, though any actual practice of the faith or its practices were certainly non existent in my family. I would then say we maybe used the term on paperwork, and occasionally attended a midnight mass on Christmas which is kind of a hauntingly ethereal event for anyone. My mother did send me to a Catholic school when I was in second or third grade but it only lasted a few months. I can’t remember whether I liked it or not and I don’t know why she did it, maybe it was her way of trying to connect with something anything that seemed divine. I actually have very few memories of my childhood that I can consciously remember. I think we are able to remember based on what consciousness wants us to examine, so this is one of those deep dives.

At any rate, how this all ties in is that the other day, I had the thought of the Kabbalah. It appeared quite literally out of the blue, but it was there in my mind. Look at the Kabbalah again it seemed to be prompting me. So I did. The first thing I did since I was at work at the time was ask Chatgpt to tell me everything it knows about Kabbalah, and I emphatically emphasized everything. So yeah, I got this very lengthy but simplified sort of explanation about what it was and what it believed in. So I read it, but what stood out to me most were three words and I didn’t necessarily read them there first, but I remembered the phrase “the will to receive.” In the story of the Kabbalah, the reason for creation is that God or the all that is, was everything and so no differential was there. So it dreamt itself up into these vessels which are humans, and erased the memory in the vessels that it had done so. The intent behind the whole endeavor was to be able to bestow its goodness on us, but something went wrong, the light which was everything was so intense that the vessels shattered and we lost the will to receive along with all the other stuff we were supposed to contain. The divine light in us scattered into a million points of awareness. To me that coincides with Carlos Castaneda’s description of assemblage points, if the light scattered into a million different points, then each point would contain its own measures of what the light was. This would explain the different states that a person experiences along with how I’ve noticed that different states of awareness absolutely come with their own rules of engagement or capacities which determines what you will experience and how it will seem to work for you. We usually think that we only imagine these states are different, for instance, things might work more beneficially or more easily, like things just falling into place without any effort on your part but what if we don’t just imagine it? What if there’s some reliable almost mechanical properties that coincide to which point we’re currently living from? I’ve been aware of this for some time so it doesn’t just seem like a thing to me, I know this exists. What eludes me is how to access it all the time and not just sporadically. Lately, it seems to have become a little more consistent but who wouldn’t want to live from there all the time? I do. Life wasn’t meant to be difficult, and I don’t think it has to be. Whatever the obstacle is, it can be destroyed with the light of our awareness. I’m basically sure of this now, so this isn’t a willy nilly trip we are on. No one can say we don’t have the power of awareness, and where and how we focus this might be the entire key to our own puzzles, to that life we’ve always dreamed of living.

Another clue is I possess is a necklace that my son gave me. It’a a heart shaped locket that opens. He picked it out because he liked the tree image on it which was The Tree of Life. I already had some earrings with this same design on them. I didn’t buy them because I knew what the tree of life was though, but probably at the time I thought they looked spiritual and this was all before we had made any Jewish connections here, so we can say, I was either drawn to them or they were drawn to me and just showed up as clues that I’m only just now starting to piece together. The Tree of Life isn’t a big plant, or something we see in the forest but a design. It’s a symbolic arrangement of the ten Sefirot, the channels or modes through which the Infinite becomes manifest. Anyway I’m not going to go into an explanation of Kabbalah, I’m hardly qualified for that, I’m only qualified for my own journey, as you are qualified to for yours, the only thing that really interests me is how does the flow work. What is the will to receive actually pointing to?

Let me put it this way, how I understand it so far. We are receivers. We are receiving right now, whatever our life is has been received. Our breath which continues on is being received. Our thoughts are being received. Our emotions and sensations are being received. We are that which receives the light or life, and when we suffer it is only because what we’re receiving is obscured or there’s an obstruction. If we were truly in the flow, then whatever showed up would be received, gracefully I might add, there’d be no resistance to what that was no matter what it was. Clearly however, this is not how humans have learned to behave or be but why? What happens that we don’t learn to be in the flow of life? What do we learn instead? First of all, let’s just say it, we don’t even learn there is a flow. Instead we learn there is earning our keep or at best there is manifestation which we must by our own initiative whether by thought or actions facilitate in some way. We are taught then that we are the doer, we must do things, take actions, this is solely on us, but what if it isn’t? What if taking actions is a quality we come with but instead of letting action flow through us unobstructed, we learn to try to direct it and in doing so we actually curtail or obstruct it? Let’s say the direction it takes for our highest or happiest life is already in us, and our only job is to discover what those actions are through our interest in doing them. Aversion then would mean it isn’t our action, but a learned response that doesn’t serve us, and liking something would be the opposite, a type of navigational tool that’s uncovering what we’re here to do.

In awakening and non dual circles we are told, don’t worry about your life anymore, just let it do what it wants to, but no one ever really elaborates on it, probably because they only heard this and don’t actually know what it means. Instead, what most people do with this idea is stop doing anything. They learn that kindness and compassion was the whole reason for living so if you’re just nice or totally loving from now on, that’s good enough, whatever happens then, just go with it there’s no need to investigate further but I think there is because this whole movement has really done nothing, and the flow isn’t stagnant or ineffective, if anything, it’s effective in ways no one can actually comprehend. That’s how effective it is, it’s so effective it defies what we think of as reality and how it currently works which by all standards ought to be the miracle of awakening.

So back to why we don’t learn flow as children. Remember when as a child you’d get an idea and instantly go with it? You’d maybe think of a fort and start removing all the cushions off the couch, rearrange tables and chairs, pull blankets off of beds and just start building. Then when you were done, you’d climb inside it totally satisfied, and you’d maybe spend the night in it or a few nights until it lost your interest and everything went back to where it came from. And then the next idea would come. It was literally non stop ideas back then. Maybe now you’re out in the backyard and you just start digging, you’ve got some makeshift plastic pots or containers, you’d gather up stones or dirt, and you’d be absorbed in your own doing. Yeah, but no one was really interested in any of it were they? Probably not, but you didn’t care. You weren’t having any thoughts that said anyone had to approve of what you were doing but then they did. Actually, they’d kind of mock or humor you saying, “Oh, aren’t you creative? Look at this wonderful thing you made, I’m so impressed.” Honestly, they’d give you sort of a false type of attention then. Maybe they think children don’t know it, but this attention was probably more than you were getting otherwise, and you kind of liked it, so the next time you go a little bit farther and a little bit farther. At some point though, you go too far, and you hit a boundary where what you are doing is not okay. Maybe you start painting the walls in the living room, or discover all the stuff in the pantry and try to make a dough or something, whatever it is, it’s too much now, and now you’re in trouble. One minute you were getting the fake accolades and the next you’re sitting in your room totally bewildered as to what the hell happened. Of course, as a child you are totally confused. You have no idea what’s going on, no concept of this was cute but this isn’t. That’s when you start to contract inside, and you lose a little bit of the flow you had when you got here. Before everything was just coming to you, and you’d go with it, and then it all becomes something you have to think about first, or at least you ought to. Eventually planning comes in, the activity of deciding now what you will do later on is introduced. You will learn to weigh the pros and cons of all sorts of things when you get much older, but as you do, flow isn’t flowing anymore, it’s really just a trickle or some drops until usually it dries up all together. Also you learn to wait, now is not the time but maybe later is if you plan it perfectly. Excited behavior needs to wait until you’re at the park where your voice won’t seem so loud. Then eventually you learn to manipulate, before you just do life as it arises and now you see that you might have to be deceptive to get what you want since no one is really giving you the freedom to discover, explore, and act anymore. Once you’re in school, all spontaneous expression will come to a sudden halt. Now there’s none of that, and instead, someone else will tell you what to do and when to do it. Creativity dies then but it’s worse than that. Now you’re being judged and watched, so you learn to judge and watch yourself until you don’t need anyone else to do it, you can do it for yourself. Maybe of course, you rebel, you’re just like fuck this, I’ll go out on my own and do what I want. That’s great except you really are on your own there. Everyone you’ll ever come in contact with will be a servant to the non flowing system you just ran from and there’s nowhere to escape that because by then your own flow is gone and you’re already in resistance mode. You’ve still got a load of energy but nothing to do with it because its authentic directions are gone and many troubles are sure to follow. Well, that’s one scenario that is probably pretty common.

Okay, I can’t explain this right. I’ll tell you this upfront that I don’t know Kabbalah well enough to explain it but I see a connection in it that I have experienced directly time and time again over the past nine years so I think the model is either the Truth of our situation or very close to it. Mainly my premise too is that it’s not enough to lose the false self, yes all the obstructions are in the false self, the wrong thinking, the wrong intentions, the wrong everything, but there’s also a learning curve to utilizing what is left when that is no longer in the way. Mainly I’d say what you would have just naturally used to live and thrive from have sat there dormant and unused for many years, so they’re not exactly as accessible as they would have been had they never been denied or suppressed to begin with.

One point I’d like to make is that we learn that awakening looks like love all the time or compassion all the time or some extraordinary concern and giving of yourself or what you are to the rest of humanity, but what is never emphatically highlighted is that while giving is nice it isn’t the whole picture. A person who only gives will shrivel up because the process of life is two fold and receiving is as much of the equation as giving is. Things come in and things go out, but things going out with nothing coming in because “who cares there’s nothing actually going on here, life is just a meaningless dream” isn’t a viable formula for life either. Actual flow would require both, something coming and something going continuously. If everything just flows out, then the river dries up. If everything just flows in then the river turns into a lake, or worse a disaster, it’s destructive. It kills the trees and vegetation and all the animals except maybe the fish. So it’s not enough to get rid of or transform the ego/identity, and getting rid of identity altogether will do nothing for your life unless you replace it not with another identity, but with something. I call it capacity. Yes, you understand. You have the capacity of non reaction because you understand that whatever is happening can’t be blamed on something called a person. Even if there is another person, you would understand that while under the spell of delusion whatever they are doing is all that they can do. They don’t actually have a choice in the matter because there are no choices available from this state. Just because someone thinks they are choosing really just means that’s what they think is happening. But thinking you know what’s happening isn’t an accurate depiction of reality. Obviously if you are awake at all, you know this, not because you think it, but because you’ve seen it and you know it to be true.

So the capacities have to be developed. When we learn to walk, we develop the capacity for moving, when we learn language, we develop the capacity for communicating, thought and insight. Non duality would have you think that all thought is bad or just don’t do it, remain completely still and silent, that’s all you need, but is it? And what purpose would that serve? Was Nisargadatta still and silent all the time? If he had been would he have had anyone coming to hear him speak in his living room? No, of course not, and how would he have run his smoke shop if he had been? Wouldn’t his family have starved or been turned out into the street from lack of funds? So really it’s a ridiculous notion, Jed McKenna may be a fictional character but someone wrote those books by utility of their capacity to do so. And for what purpose would one be silent or just sitting in meditation for the rest of their life? Wouldn’t it be a selfish act to do so, to ignore all that was going on around you so you might enjoy the bliss of resting in this state continuously? The purpose of meditation or silence is to get you out of the trap of your false identity, but once that’s happened is it of anymore use? Maybe, I still doing a sitting breathing meditation four or five times a week for about 20 minutes but I don’t live my life from there. I just use it to tap in, to get a sense of the actual reality, but there’s no way to live from there. Why would you want to anyway? For what because you think it’s a holy way to be? Holy by the way is just a word humans came up with, if things are holy, for the most part humans don’t even see it. The real tragedy here isn’t that some things are holy, but that everything isn’t.

The thing is what if everything that comes to you is there to be received since you are the vessel that is designed to receive it? What would that really mean? What exactly is this word “receiving” pointing to in a practical, ongoing sense of living your life? Would it mean internally embracing all events, all feelings, perhaps even all thoughts that arise to be witnessed by your awareness? If so, what if anything would the word “embrace” be pointing to? Is it just an allowing or some sort of inner admiration for the displays this life form we are made of is showing you? How many times during the day do we actually recoil or contract in response to our lives and what we are witnessing? Is it just a couple times or is it really thousands of times a day? What do you feel when you look at the news, the doomsday reports You Tube is full of now? Can you feel the tension in this learned response? Think of any problem, or anything that you don’t like and what do you feel? There’s a contraction, right? It’s subtle but it’s there, you sense it internally as aversion, or some unnamed fear, but what if it’s just an energy, an inner stirring of sensation that is central to what you are? What if it’s meant to be there as part of our intrinsic design? Perhaps it’s really an energetic current, something that is there to move us along a timeline or event horizon? What if it has a life of its own, an agenda even to bestow goodness upon us, but we don’t let it because our resistance, all of our aversions and contractions skew where it wants to go, sapping it of the energy to perform the feats it might do for us? What if all our directional motivations and all our misguided effort actually hinder its natural perfect functioning? In meditation, we think we need to shut ourselves down, turn ourselves off even, but what if this is also misguided? Maybe we don’t need to turn ourselves off, but turn ourselves fully on. What if that’s the real rebirth process, dying to what we learned but coming alive to something else, something we just don’t fully understand yet?

Most literature or advice on waking up advises you to enter a type of seclusion. You are instructed to distance yourself from not only the elements of your current life but also yourself. Monks enter a monastery to do just that. Awakening circles include some but exclude almost everyone and everything else. What if that was backwards, useful for a time to get some needed perspective, but detrimental if done indefinitely? What if this movement was only meant to be temporary, not as a way of life? What if you’d actually miss your whole life, whatever this life force had in mind for you if you stayed this way, inside a type of contraction where the world is seen as hopelessly delusional and therefore unworthy of your participation in it? I mean really how many spiritual teachers advocate for just such a thing? Osho tried to build his own compound, basically his own world so to speak, but that went disastrously wrong and ultimately failed miserably. Satsangs are basically the same movement, the people remove themselves from their lives to go and get some peace and understanding, but as soon as they return to their lives, it’s basically ten fold chaos, because they haven’t learned to receive what their awareness is trying to show them. Instead they develop a type of aversion to the mundane or stressful aspects of their lives. Usually peace is highlighted as the most beneficial or elevated way to be, non reaction to daily phenomena sure, you don’t freak out, but people take this to an extreme, instead of developing non reaction, they just develop aversion and more contraction by seeing that as wrong and this non movement non participation in life as right. Maybe that’s just the incubation period, a type of growth happens, like here how I’ve been writing for years now, but then, something else emerges, you get bored, you still aren’t really living. You haven’t banished your desire for excitement and movement just minus the usual drama, because you aren’t supposed to. They are still arising within your mind, maybe you want to go there or do that, travel and explore, before you really are out of time. My point is this, while everyone in the awakening communities are looking for something else, a different state, a more loving demeanor, or whatever it is they seek, the joke is always that what one is seeking is exactly what is showing up, and the only trick is that you just don’t see it. So it isn’t that you need to change your life or yourself, it’s always only that you need to fully enter what is already there. Life is never, has never, worked imperfectly. It’s only that you’re not appreciating what it’s showing you, right here, right now. You aren’t seeing yet how this piece fits here and that one fits in with this one, and the whole configuration is some type of masterful clocklike display of apparitions and matter, flowing endlessly, synchronistically, in alignment with itself, because there is nothing else but the all that is. There was no imperfection.

So you realize, there’s still an obstruction. You’re not always in the flow. So what exactly is the issue then? It’s always the belief that what is arising isn’t it yet. I think experience has to be allowed to move through the human being without the separate self continually attempting to possess, reject, control, or redirect it. There is no right way to be then, it’s always just whatever it is that is arising. If you want peace all the time, you’ll definitely reject anything that looks like something else. The flow then goes like this, you receive whatever is happening. The emotion that is stirred up by that happening is the fuel. Attention or focus then directs this energy or fuel onto one’s desires. Intention, what it’s for, gives it a direction or alignment with something. Actions express this direction. Giving it up releases it back into the world or the flow. Remember receiving must also contain its opposite for the flow to work. The opposite of receiving would be giving. You give your idea some attention. Then receiving begins again and the whole flow of life is one continuous movement. You’re always in a state of flux, because there’s no beginning, nor an end. You never arrive nor depart.

The false self interrupts this cycle continuously because we learn to reason. We think about it. We think, “Wait, will this be good for me?” Or “Where will this take me?” Or even “How would it work?” But especially, it always asks, “What will I have to do? How can I make this thing happen?” And then it relies on all the structures it learned to do something, I’ll take this but not that, it can go this way but not that way, it has to look like this, and not like that. It should always feel good, if it doesn’t it’s wrong. And as humans we not only reject but we grasp, we want to hold onto things and people and situations. We are loathe to let anything go and be however it is.

The real point is this: The will to receive isn't merely the desire to receive pleasant things. It is the capacity to allow experience itself to be received. So whatever it is you are experiencing, the capacity to allow this is relearning the flow. So if fear arises, it’s not the bad guy any more. It’s just a sensation which is a type of fuel. It’s how you process this fear that matters, because you can either do things to alleviate it or you can use it. Anything you do to alleviate it will strengthen the situation that causes it to arise in the first place which puts beings on a kind of loop because experience is always only a hallucination. So awakening isn't learning to produce the right kind of energy. It's learning not to obstruct the energy that's already arriving, that’s always been arriving. I think that is the will to receive unobstructed. The real premise is that life doesn’t need to know what it is doing, only the false self wants that. It wants to know what is happening and why but that’s not something we should have to know because ultimately you can never know this. And yet, there is something that does. There’s a larger context to life than anyone realizes, an organizing, event building, a movement producing mechanism already built into it. We can understand or even witness this phenomena first hand, I know I have, but we can never direct it or tell it what to do. Yes, we are here with our little steering wheel but this wheel is always a wheel within another wheel within another even larger wheel and so it goes out into infinity. Or as Jed says so eloquently, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

So you don’t need to figure out what you are doing. You can know something but not everything. Whatever you do know is all you can know right now and you’ll act on that however you do. You can know for sure what the next step is only after you actually take it. How do you know it’s the next step? Because it’s the one you took. You can make plans but you can’t carry them out since the false self isn’t the doer. The actual doer is always above human understanding. That sounds totally backwards, I know how it sounds but I also know how it works. It sounds like don’t do anything when it’s closer to do whatever you want to and see what happens because if you’re not supposed to do it, you won’t be able to do it. That almost sounds like a cop out, and to be sure, it can be. You can be so paralyzed with fear that you don’t move at all. Anyone can encounter this if the actual understanding isn’t fully developed that what you experience as reality is already what you are. You’re not experiencing reality, you are reality as you know it. You are basically a product of your own imagination and knowing anything beyond that is impossible. If you think you do that is simply more of your own imagination.

How I got all that out of studying the Kabbalah is anyone’s guess but I felt like a new twist was revealed. I think maybe you just come across the next right thing and I’m reminded how Jed was able to see some fundamental truths in “The Course in Miracles” text he went over with Maggie in Dreamstate. Everything is basically written for the eye’s closed state to make sense of but there’s still some underlying mechanisms that seep through if you are willing or ready to pick up on them. I’m not saying that we should all study the Kabbalah either. Even the Bible has some truthish layers to it. Ultimately, depending on your disposition the next right thing for you might come from anywhere but it’s there, you just have to keep looking until you find it.

When we read about the guy, who missing a shoe, felt he had to travel to the library in New York, without any money to get there, in the dead of winter, traveling with one bare foot through the snow to pick up the next piece of his puzzle that doesn’t mean everyone needs to lose a shoe or be stranded in a snow drift but you do have to make a trek. And there’s no stopping, done is not done, done is only what’s next. The journey moves ever on. The turtles are not going anywhere, and there will always be another one.

Just know this, your clues can come from anywhere. We each have our own ways of sniffing them out, for me this time, it was the Kabbalah, probably that’s in line with my family history, but you don’t have my family history so yours might be some other thing but you don’t get stuck there either. You don’t need to adopt any system, religious or otherwise, what you really do is make up your own, one that works for you. It’s your life after all, shouldn’t you make it uniquely yours? I should think so.