When Nothing Happened

It’s hard to imagine that everything I just wrote about never really happened, like none of it, nothing went down even if our minds record it all. It feels real, it may even stay around, the bill comes in the mail or your mother still calls. To see what life really is doesn’t wipe away what you and everything around you thinks is going on. The only real question is, “How am I going to deal with it now that I know what it is?” And what is it? Just stuff, right, fantasy, shit that gets created and expressed on the screen of life. At this stage in the game, we’re all swimming in it, not just sometimes but all day long. You can wake up, turn on the You Tube and watch the bombs drop. There’s a war in Iran, those people are crazy they say, but that’s not what you know, what you know is everyone is crazy, all of them, and all of it. Nothing makes sense when you rip it apart into all the little pieces, no, because what you’ll find is all the little pieces are just strands of memory and bogus interpretations of those memories. It didn’t exist while it was happening and it still doesn’t and yet, millions upon millions of beings walk around every single minute of every single day, as if what they know is the absolute Truth. I do think there is an intelligence behind it all, just it never seems random or chaotic to me, even when it looks this way on the surface. It might look benign or utterly useless, and on one level, it really is, if isn’t actually allowed to do what it is meant to do because ego blocks it or highjacks it for something else. The other level is too ingenious even for our minds and thinking, I get a deep sense of rightness in what most might call wrongness, but that’s only because I see everything as something that is releasing, or pushing one towards the ultimate surrender of ideas humans have a death grip on. I can tell you this from here, those things that are hardest to let go of will actually benefit you the most to do so. This isn’t some fun task though, usually it’s painful, but the pain is necessary if only that you might never forget what hanging on to something cost you.

So where can you go to get away from it? No where, right? The only away from anything is just your own mind telling you what is here and what isn’t. Your belief system is like the million headed hydra where to suppress one belief is to create two more in its place. Resistance is the monster, not what’s happening. That’s how to believe anything is true except for Truth itself, no matter how loving or right you feel it is, is just to double down and create more untrue things. Almost all spirituality falls into this trap. Everything you embrace, you embrace for a reason, because of your belief, and the reason you embrace it is because you want to avoid its opposite, but you don’t, that’s not what ends up coming around. The minute you embrace anything, even some loving rightness, you expose the fact that you fear its opposite and usually end up creating it. So you’re really still beholden to your fear, and this fear emotion is still creating no matter how good a game you can talk about loving things. I can’t really explain this right, because it still looks more like loving when you’re not doing this. I’d say in the end, if you aren’t motivated by some selfish self image, things tend to do other things. There’s no person doing them, but it’s easier, because there’s not going to be anything there to fight with, nor anything to fight over. All that stuff has basically vanished. You can’t see what it is, and think it’s still actually here. You can still get sucked in, but you’d know about it which is not the same thing.

Just take a good look at common beliefs and how they have evolved to multiply what they were designed to correct. Poverty is bad, prosperity is good. Health is good, sickness is bad. Peace is good, war is bad. Laughter is good, tears are bad. Education makes you smarter, and without it you’re just dumb. That one is pretty obvious, did it work? Not from here, all these smart guys got together to solve the “bad” elements and now look, they’ve all proliferated. We’d have been wise if we’d just forgotten these ideas all together and just allowed life to do what it wanted. On its own, life does a pretty good job of placing you where you need to be so you can go where it will have you going. The very idea that we can help life along or steer it towards some things and away from others will one day become our demise, you know if it hasn’t already. I can only really speak for myself, since whatever world I think is out there, doesn’t seem like it’s really there anymore. There’s a world all right, but it’s not that one, the one most everyone thinks is here. Nowadays I’m not sure that life is going to go anywhere, not up or down, nor sideways. Evolution looks like a bad joke, something someone thought up just to take the edge off of how things were really going. Humans are prolific liars especially to themselves and it is only that they believe their own lies that they are so good at it, so convincing, but maybe look a little harder and you too can see just how much energy goes into upholding a lie like “I am Joe”, and that’s all. Maybe the secret to how no one really relaxes around here will become very clear. Myself, I figure, I’ve taken a little trip, something shifted, I was the recipient of a jolt and found myself in this strange galaxy where nothing is at it seems it is, and yet appears to be only that. Maybe, I surmise, when it’s over, I’ll take another excursion to some other strange imaginary ball in space. Or maybe I’ll just stay home and that will be the end of all my fantasies. It’s impossible to know what if anything comes next.

While the world burns up in the minds of many, I still live my life. I’ve been accused now for many years of not wanting anything for myself, I shouldn’t give so much nor work so hard not for my own benefit but for my children, so that they might live free while I’m still able to provide whatever freedom I can from all the insidious shit that accosts a person these days. Of course, accusations are just misunderstanding, a regular person imagines that I’m here making choices when in reality, no choice is ever made, yes you can be moved but that movement is beyond some individual agency. To want something for oneself isn’t wrong, I still have many desires that I think might one day be fulfilled. What that looks like from the outside in however doesn’t always add up in appearance the way we are conditioned to think it will look like. In Truth, many of my desires are fulfilled on a daily basis without me having to lift a finger. To my own thinking, I’ve already received more than the average person ever gets, far exceeded, like what a normal life looks like and what I’ve lived don’t even come close. In terms of lived experience, the gift of my life while it looks mundane or even burdensome from the outside, still working the craps tables, can’t even be described in terms of what anyone might see. Life isn’t actually lived this way. Life is an inner journey no matter how you slice it and in this way, my life has really been the best. I have zero regrets, zero self recriminations, and zero blame. Yeah, you might say my life is a big fat zero, but that’s only on the level of the usual parameters most humans use to measure life with. I only bring this up because I’ve been asked, “Don’t you want anything or something for yourself?”

I just don’t say I know what that is. You may think you know how life should be, what might happen, what you might avoid and so forth, but that’s more work than I’m here for anymore. Here I’m open to what this life presents, the choices are probably already forming or have been set in motion, not by me, but by forces that go undetected by the average person. To say that you are in control of your life or your destiny isn’t saying much, more like nothing. To those who think they have control I say, “Let me know how that works out for you.” Probably, you’ll wear yourself out way before your time to be worn out but maybe not, maybe it’ll be great. I just don’t know about it anymore. My knowing of what life will or won’t do only come to me on a moment by moment basis because that’s what it’s doing but I will say this, it doesn’t disappoint. From where I stand these days, I see things that no one else ever suspects is even here, but it is here, always.

That’s not to say that I’m not still learning either. To be this way is a learning process, or really an unlearning process because it’s not that we aren’t this way but that we learn how we really are is always wrong when it’s really right. The way out of all this wrong learning isn’t a walk in the park, but more like a series of hard lessons that one must think and feel long and hard about on every level. Well, they don’t call it annihilation of the false self for nothing. If it was as easy as popping into Walmart for some groceries everyone would do it and almost no one does. No one even wants to contemplate what it will really take and what it will take away, what it will take with it, which is just everything you think you are but that doesn’t leave nothing either. Those who exclaim, “It’s all nothing”, just haven’t seen the something, and the something is what it’s all about, what life has really been about all along, so if you miss that you haven’t gone anywhere, you’ve just maybe imagined you have and that’s not the same thing. That’s like getting on a plane to Spain, you’ve bought the ticket, arrived at the departure gate, and even boarded the plane only to never take off. You can literally imagine that you’ve taken flight and landed in another country without having made the actual trip. Your mind is very powerful by the way, it can fool you into thinking anything has happened when nothing has. I would say there’s only one way and it’s a long one but at the end of it, you know what you know, not because you heard or read about it but because it was right there in your face and now you know it for yourself. At this point, you need no more guidance, no suggestions, no nothing from anything outside of your own experience. Whatever you need is coming from you just not that “you”, or it isn’t coming. No one can take you here nor lead anyone to anything. You do this all by yourself or you don’t do it. That’s the only way it works from what I can tell.

That being said, there really are special people who may be able to influence things in this direction. Jed, the invisible guru Jed, was one of those people and there are a few others. Basically, what’s going on there is they are operating from an entirely different reality or emanation, and coming in contact with them puts you in the vicinity to be swayed by the energies or forces this other reality has, which are not present in the current “normal” sphere of perception, the common spell that most are under. Let me just say this: I was at my job on break listening to the chapter on Moon landings in the book Dreamstate because it always amuses me to be reminded of just how much bullshit humanity is spoon fed every single day. When my break was over I went upstairs to the craps table and noticed a guy hanging around. He was wearing a worn out Nasa T-shirt. I thought, “Yeah, that’s not curious at all now is it?” After watching for a bit, he finally stepped up to play and when it was his turn to shoot the dice, he rolled without a seven out for over an hour and a half. I think it might have been the longest roll I’ve seen in the last few years. Almost all the chips in the bank were either on the layout or in peoples rack of chips. The table was full. The dealers had a lot of bets too and were making money. It seemed like an anomaly. The supervisors behind the table were eyeing everything suspiciously, maybe he was rolling the dice cleverly or something, perhaps not hitting the back wall like they are required to do, but no, it was all just happening naturally, because in another reality that’s how it actually works. Things tend to work, for everyone. What we don’t notice is how things don’t work, we are so used to things being hard or difficult that we think that’s normal when it’s anything but that. People’s stress levels exert a type of resistance to the natural movements of life. It’s all energetic. Forces act on other currents of energetic forces to create well being or the opposite. In the end, it’s sort of like a dance without there being any dancers. You do not however make anything happen. The very thought of needing anything to happen or trying to make something happen creates resistance basically ensuring that it won’t or worse, you’ll create the very opposite. That doesn’t mean don’t do anything, or don’t work, or something like that. It doesn’t mean there can’t be effort in your life, obviously you need effort as well. Your life force is meant to mindfully focus and emotionally fuel your life. It’s not a nothing affair, but a love affair with life itself. Here you are in your one precious life, is it dull and monotonous or full of nuance and surprise? Are you God forbidden bored of it? Does it just irritate you to keep living? I mean that’s most people, that’s how being asleep to your life is called being dead through it all. You’re stuck in this fragile little character you call “me” and this little “me” must go out and navigate this huge thing called “the world.” It’s afraid this little “me” so it erects all these shields and barriers which we call the “personality.” All its toughness and coldness is basically erected to ensure it doesn’t get deeply hurt anymore than it has to but what this does is keep most stuff out and just a little life is allowed to trickle in, just enough to keep you moving and alive. It’s not really life but for some, that’s enough, they never really realize or sense that they are missing anything.

It’s actually astonishing to see this, to watch the confusion, the petty reactions, the endless little hurts that keep firing in a person, just the way they say hello can tell you an awful lot, but it’s all the same story, different details sure but in theory not different. It’s literally the same malady no matter where you go or who you talk to you. How can this be you might wonder? It seems absolutely impossible that this is all it really is, just a dream, with lots of intersecting dream stuff. Of course, if your mind isn’t perceiving it as a dream, it will filter out anything that presents itself as if it is one. You might be looking straight away at some clue, but it doesn’t register. Why doesn’t it register? Because you have to first have the capacity to know what you’re looking for as far as tell tale signs of dreaming go, and two, your mind is thinking of other things, it’s absorbed in it’s own story to the exclusion of everything else, so much so that a person might walk down the street and if you ask them what they saw, they won’t be able to tell you anything. If they have any memory of the area, they’ll use that, and say there were trees, houses, and cars. They won’t be able to tell you what kind of cars, what colors they were, how the lawns were either mowed or unruly, no nothing, because the mind didn’t actually walk down the street, instead it was off in never never land wondering about this bill or other, or this relationship or other, or whatever story is most prominent in their head on that day.

Reducing life to a dream isn’t enough either though, dreamy as it is these days with everyone off fascinated by their own inner dramas to the exclusion of what is actually here presenting itself as a dream. The underlying fabric of our life-force goes totally unnoticed and is verily lost altogether. You see this in missing intensity that everyone has lost, not urgency per se but wonder, wonders of how this whole spectacle gets pulled off, gets orchestrated at all, is also gone. It’s only in some horror that anyone pays attention and even thinks to ask the questions of how this and not that? Why do we fight, why do we degrade, why do we blame, and punish our visions as if they hate us, where does this come from and what can we do about? If it is all dream, we think nothing. We think we are at the mercy of the Gods, or providence to either provide for us or let us down. At this juncture, most humans are deeply disappointed in life and so usually accept that life is too hard to do anything with. People don’t change, history repeats, and the whole cycle cycles through only to start again. That you can’t use the character, not as it is to solve something because it’s how this character developed that has caused it all to appear the way it does, never once occurs to anyone. If the basis of the character itself is completely confused and befuddled, what results can we get, only more of the same right?

Some solution of denying that we even are people proliferates through most non duality teachings. There’s a sense of denying one’s impulses all together in favor of what though? What are you going to use to discover this missing intensity just the sky or the clouds, but not yourself? It seems to me like yet another cleverly disguised form of self hatred, you throw the baby out with the bathwater type of sentiment as if there was nothing within you worth salvaging when without this inner force, you truly not only have nothing but are nothing. Only those who really have no interest in dealing with and delving into the deepest darkest parts of their own mind want to bypass this process. Of course, it makes sense to me how they’d want to but it doesn’t lead to life. Life isn’t what’s left because you’ve denied it exists at all, or that your own life on the surface doesn’t matter, since obviously it does, it matters to you what you think about, where you go and what you do. Saying nothing is real however isn’t correct. There’s something very real about life, and your day to day life doesn’t exclude it, it’s actually a living representation of it. If that sounds like nothing, then maybe you’re not ready to see it.

When the character itself becomes obsolete because you’ve seen through it, there’s still something here and this something isn’t inactive. Instead a type of intensity breaks through the surface and now there’s even more energy, the strings of life finally have access to pull you this way and that, just not by your own volition but by its volition. To say that I’ve done this but not that, doesn’t even make sense anymore, nor does to say I want this but not that, and yet desires still arise more like gifts than wants. What you see then is that life has its own great imagination, far exceeding anything you ever developed in your own little mind. It also has an agenda to experience beauty wherever and whenever it can. It loves to love, not as a trying or some niceness, not even as a giving freely, but as a field that allows all things within it to be cleansed of the past, as if they were just this, this aliveness, and nothing else. It is a world unto itself then.

I dreamt I talked to my mother yesterday and it was as if nothing had happened because nothing did. We dream. That is what we are made to do. It doesn’t actually matter what we dream, since it is clearly all fabrication, but that we do dream, this is still always required of us. May I do it well then, is all I ask of myself.