a hump day haiku
mental storm in a teacup
nope, nothing wafts in

Is There Life in Second Life?

"My cartoon finds your cartoon attractive."

I'm exploring the consciously created, coded entity, the alternate universe known as Second Life, (or, alternatively, "SL" or "2L") to its denizens.

This is as opposed to "RL" or "1L" as I've seen them refer to real life...or, as I'm becoming prone to thinking of it as, "real" life.

SL isn't a metaphor for RL. It's a stripped down simulacrum. So, why is it I'm scared of emotional or moral freefall in SL...and yet I don't feel that way in RL, where things have very real consequences? DISCUSS:

Maybe the phenomenon of "crazies" and other lapses in self-control described by those who experience or suffer it here is the response of individuals to finding themselves in a place with few (and even fewer legal) boundaries? This vacuum is full-frontal stygian abyss, the gazing into which leads to madness ...or enlightenment.

While the truth and purity of liberty gives voice to exultation in some in SL, this world, by having a very explicable Creator, makes the existential angst when faced with absolute freedom and zero instrinsic meaning just too much for some souls to bear, causing them to miss out the wonderful opportunity to "scream the eternal "'Yes!'"

What Sl has Taught me about Real Life

What marvelous symmetry and yet how odd to reach enlightenment from the opposite direction: by sinking deeper into illusion.

Almost touched it

It was so brief, I nearly missed it entirely. Glance affectionately upon a dear image and a subtle sensation wafted through me. I became transfixed in its wake and it crystalised as certainty. Usually smooth and seamless, the overlapping plates of consciousness reconfigured at the very same time I looked up, exposing for a timeless moment a glimpse beyond.

"I am you. You are me."

So simple and uninflected, it came to me in exactly those words yet wasn't volitional. It flew straight to the heart of a ping I've had many times before; harking back to the original waking dream about the One I can't seem to recall I am.

Thoughts yet again about this term, "me". We all use it to refer to our conventional selves in the singular, but nobody seems at all perturbed about the unlikelihood of us all being "I" and "me," and yet still the parallel, isolated individuals we feel most comfortably terrified in supposing we are.

It was so close I nearly touched it. I couldn't stop myself mentally clutching at it, though, so it naturally dissolved. But not before warming me with its trailing edge of love and beauty; the simple, elegant truth of One, another clue lying naked before me, like the dream revealed to me once and which continues to tap at the window to this consciousness, even years later.

At this moment I feel the veil, microns thin, separating the me riding this fleshy sack, tapping away on this notebook, from the me, industriously playing with her new mobile phone across the bed and clinically skeptical about both my lightbulb sensations and the possibility of bumping uglies with the edge of the universe.

While I do wish to journal it, I choose not to force it...so to bed.

Grieving the Loss of My Daughter

My beautiful little girl, who woke up with a smile and a laugh and brightened every room with her presence and always saw the good in others...she's really gone.

And in her place is this...this...woman!

more recently...

Why is 'spontaneous' about as premeditated as a word can get...?

Republic of Westralia

Just as I suspected as a university student, way back when, it really IS all about the money.

Money for massive corporate (multinational oil/national retail) concerns; money for the laughable entity that is Australia's federal government; money for the bootlicking, seat-sniffing, mysogenistic yokels whose #1 priority is the dizzying sale of our state's birthright for a veritable mess of foreign pottage and bragging rights to a disgusting stat surplus.

Not one public figure or institution has got the slightest clue about what is in our nation's and our citizens' best interests. The focus is rather on employment figures, oil prices (my god! why DON'T all Australians drive natural gas-powered cars...?!?!)

We wring our hands about inflation...that is itself being fuelled by the massive demand for labour that oil, gas, mining corporations can't get into tankers and pipelines quick enough.

...not that anyone would read about it in "our" state's paper, the West Australian. Letter after letter to the editor never sees the light of day if questioning what federation has ever done for our state - or, god forbid, one should mention the word "secession".

I'm drunk. I'm disgusted and I'm tired...from working long hours and trying to keep a small business afloat in a state that doesn't give a toss about me and the many others like me, likewise struggling to remain afloat and sane.

Must sleep, but am glad to have squeezed out the time for even this incoherent post that nobody will read....Nevermind...it's a tonic for the writer.

We need a state government that believes in the same things as we do...not mere shills for corporate and federal interests.

If our government were real, they'd be threatening secession for the shafting we get from Canberra.

If we were real Westralians, we'd be disgusted by the level of representation we get here in WA. We are being taxed without representation.

It should be illegal.

Life Don't Blink

Hot night, face down in the pool. Holding my breath and lolling there, I watched dim shards of refracted light from the living room dance across the bottom. I felt the CO2 building up in my blood and idly imagined this as my end, but my simple desire for breath was more urgent than my intellectual curiosity about Death. If that ever changes then I guess it will be my time.

At some time in my transit through this life I will half-blink and never wake up. End of the line. I quickly raised my head for air, blinking water from my eyes: People must blink, but Life never does.

Flashback to an adolescent dream, still crisp and clear. An endless array of screens curved away- up, down and away into the distance, a massive sphere of which I could see only a single arc. Each screen was a life and when one flickered out, a new baby's face would appear in it moments later. Watching this process continue, I understood that all screens were outward manifestations of a central singularity. And I knew at that moment in the pool that, when my eyes eventually close for the last time, another's will open. Not mine, but another of Life's. Just as Life sees with my eyes, so does Life see with the eyes of all who live. It is the Big Continuity and does not blink.

I look to the stars and understand that the photons hitting my eye have traveled through time and space, in every direction, to do just that. If I move two meters to my left and look up again, the same stars shine down on me. I am connected to the stars and thus to all that is, everywhere, myself a node of matter in a seamless, rimless field of energy.

Certainty of this little life being not any "me" but a perceptual fragment of the greater Life is comforting, while I can sustain it. But I am more typically a frightened animal, clinging to the core beliefs of my grosser senses; of being a tiny blob of animated matter stranded on the fertile crust of this rock in space. This "I" will eventually wither and die and lives in fear and denial of that utter certainty.

I am a primitive, rudimentary type of intelligence, aren't I? Evidence of this is abundant: in the way I actively, heedlessly degrade my own biosphere, in spite of the fairly conclusive deduction that it will eventually cause extinction. Truly bright beings, at one with Life never behave this way. Maybe we are all just unwittingly reading a part in some larger, inexorable tragi-comedy, which script says Humanity is to "exeunt thus" from the universal stage...?

For whatever reason, we seem to find ourselves configured -by religion, society, whatever- to believe that our own bodies, our apparently isolated minds, delimit our existence. "I" begin and end with this flesh, these thoughts and am forever and fundamentally isolated from all others. Except for these briefest of epiphanies, I can't seem to maintain the consciousness that I'm part of the very weave of the universe. I wonder why it is that I appear to work this way...?

Biology is our hardware template perfected, that which we are bending some of our very best minds to decipher. Rolling with this assumption, why not look instead at the very-buggy software societies that have blindly accreted over millennia as that which stands in the way of true understanding? Could it be that the very attempt to intellectually apprehend in language the inner workings of this existence also shrouds it from our subtler perceptions? Language does exert an insidious either/or influence, as we try in vain to label all phenomenon within which we are subjective component.

Intelligent design...? If I were The Big Creator, had crafted paradise and the heavens beyond... and then set Life loose within it... it would be more my intent for those into whom I had breathed life to be getting on with the grand game I'd set in motion than to sit around on fat, gilded arses, quibbling about Rules - and certainly not slaughtering each other's children over interpretation.

Occam's razor belies any such teleological excuse for our origins. Given our big brain, wanting to know "what's in the box" is quite natural. Defaulting to 6000, 2000 or even 800 year old campfire stories to explain things we haven't yet devised the tools to dissect, calling this "faith" and foisting generations of ecclesiastic denial onto the burgeoning empirical data of accumulated individual experience will one day seem rather quaint and funny. But for now the consequences of Faith are so sad and deadly.

That Life is a brilliant form of intelligence, who alive will dispute? I, for one, am happy as a clam being this little outcropping of Life, small and insignificant as it may be. But maybe the simplest explanation (what was it Einstein said? "something any five year old could understand"?) involves stripping away such embellishments as are embodied in words like "should" or "could". Why don't we accept that Life ALWAYS just "is".

To properly reduce that, however, observe what "is" really means: isn't it just a linguistic equivalent of the mathematical symbol "="? Seen this way, the statement "Life is" or, "Life =" begs a balancing item, but this is the trap of words and language and the illusion that they are somehow inherent in what they purport to represent. Philological tails wagging epistemological dogs - that mustn't be allowed to lie when conscientiously sniffing after The Truth.

Describing what "Life =" then becomes easy - just not simple: in the space to the right merely place the sum total of all within which life inheres - from birth till death. That is a correct answer. It may not be exciting, but it is nonetheless absolutely and unassailably correct. "Life is like..." many things, but -unfortunately for our enquiring nature- it is otherwise not reducible and that is why we can never really catch more than these odd glimpses of Truth about the whole thing... a billion reflections of the same object in the shards of the shattered mirror that is each and every one of us - except it ain't shattered. We just seem to think it is.

Maybe our destructive tendency is a valuable evidentiary manifestation of our inability to grasp that the universe really is perfect and has no gaps - that each of us is an integral, seamless component of a larger whole? Maybe for us to understand and really demonstrate such understanding we would need "the faith of a mustard seed," to make such a leap from "should" to "is" and declare, "we are not here to strangle this planet, to kill ourselves and each other. Such phenomenon is surely evidence that our perception to date about truth has been somewhat less than the whole and that now - more than ever- we need to come together; to strive fearlessly and relentlessly forward in search of The Truth."

***

 

 

 

Epistle to Philly D

"Remember, Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies."

                                     - From "The Shawshank Redemption"

Hey,

Brother, before anything: I’m real sorry to hear about your operation and a little concerned that you discharged yourself against doctor’s orders – and in the obvious state you’re in. But they do say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?

Don’t touch my advice if you don’t want it, but you might take a little time about now to look at your very real blessings, my friend. I can’t enumerate them for you, but am sure they include a fundamentally excellent position at a good school; an established writing career - with credible writing and other artistic talent and residence in one of the best areas in the city – if not the country – and certainly in the world. 

 I bet there’s much more. And speaking of the world…to offer a little more perspective: think for even just the length of this sentence about how many BILLIONS of people in this world do not enjoy the lifestyle most of us take for granted and you are apparently so miserable about, and the still BILLIONS among them who for whom your lifestyle, with all the latent opportunity it entails, are configured that such be beyond their greatest possible aspirations, let alone their wildest dreams.

 Caught your breath on that one yet…?

 I am certainly not trying to deny that your troubles have become a very real thing for you. Honestly, while my instinct tells me it would provide no benefit to offer you the “poor lad” treatment, I believe you and still empathize. I may not have shared your experience, but I understand the pain you’ve been busting your nuts to try and get your head around.

 And it’s also not a cheap shot for me to point out here that everyone goes through pain, to one degree or another. When pain is happening to you, though, there’s no such thing as relativity. It’s absolute. But, mate, it’s what one does when in the middle of such a shit storm that is both the ultimate test of one’s mettle as well the major determinant of what comes next.

 I have this very good friend, who taught me one of the most important things I’ve ever learned in this life. I’d read it before, in different and often elegant ways, but when you’re at or near rock bottom and it’s worded just so, at just the right time, it can hit you in the face like a slapstick frypan. It did me.

He said, “You get what you get ‘coz you do what you do.”  It really is that simple, but there’s more: he goes on to say, “And you’ll keep on doin’ whatcha doin’ until you’re done doin’ it.” He’s from Portland, Oregon. I dig the way he speaks, but it’s the very simple, diamond-tipped truth of it that makes what he says seem actually magical. …It’s a strange old world, isn’t it, when something as basic as truth should seem as unreal as magic?

 I understand the departure from the everyday needed to follow the thread I am laying out here. Because of that, I will understand if your first reaction is to recoil and you can’t make yourself give it the attention I believe it deserves. But if you do pause to consider until it hits you right, I promise that you will have found out The Big Secret – the one that the entire religious, corporate, political system seems hell-bent on keeping from us. They don’t want you to ever find this one out. They don’t want you to know, primarily because of the flow on to their profits and power plays. The real reason, though, is because of their fear, and that fear is a result of their own lack of understanding. They just don’t get it. To be fair to those caught up in that game and doing what they gotta do, very few really do get it.

 You know this – you’re as much a product of this system as I am. It’s so fucking normal in our society for us to hustle, hustle, hustle for all we’re worth – hell, we’re taught to, from the time our feet first touch the ground. We learn to medicate ourselves with our lifestyles, and then instinctively lash out at those around us, our situation and our environment when things seem all wrong. Everything in our society, our upbringing and education points us 180 wrong: outward, urging us to blame others for our troubles. Look at our so-called leaders: George Bush is doing it and so is John Howard, but they’re just the latest in a long line. It’s been this way for quite some time.

 With such learned bitterness eating away at us, giving us cancer and turning us one against the other, it was the hardest thing for me to do to stop my furiously churning mind long enough to listen to what I knew in my heart: I am the person responsible for all of my suffering.

 All of it.

 Brother, pain is an inevitable part of this life. You can’t stop it. To even try to look away only pushes it underground; to fester, grow out of sight and then erupt where and when you least expect it. The good news is that joy, love and happiness are also inevitable. But, funnily enough, repressing our enjoyment of the good things in life has much the same result as suppressing our pain, so it seems logical that it is not the pain but the very repression that fucks with our minds.

But the option open to everyone is suffering. This peculiar talent we humans have for wallowing in our pain is entirely optional. This knowledge and the certainty it births is a true blessing.

Certainty of its ephemeral nature gives me the ability to really go ahead and feel my pain, to face it and get on with the process. But it also allows me to move on when I’m “done doin’ that,” because there’s just so much damned beauty in this world to waste time dwelling on anything that persists just because I’m perversely willing it to. Basking in my pain used to shut me off from this beauty, producing the worst kind of downward spiral.

 The thing is, as Tony Robbins says, I can’t control the wind but I can control my sails, and that’s what I’ve been learning to do. To me, this doesn’t mean changing who I am, it means revealing to myself who I am. That is my Rock and I get to watch the world break itself on me, instead of the reverse.

 No, it’s not easy, especially with all of the so-called life skills I had beaten into me before I came to know better, these learned reflexes that taught me to cringe precisely when I needed to be standing as tall as I could.

 …Now, to put all this in proper perspective: I most certainly am NOT holding myself out as any kind of role model here, I’m just trying to hold on to what I’ve got. The epiphanies with which I’ve been blessed over the years never fail to fill my open heart to surfeit, with all the force of Truth. But what beautiful nuggets I sift from this stream of Life then slip through my fingers, lost to the flow. A transient enlightenment I can recall but never recapture. I believe that my previous conditioning keeps running interference in this search of the ever-bigger picture revealed therein. Each tantalizing glimpse of Truth always seems independent of all others, all equal, never seeming to stack up towards anything discernible. Maybe they’re just too few, too far apart for such a large context. Maybe I’m just not ready.

Larry came yet again to my rescue. I had heard it from him before and thought I understood. But this time I saw Truth in his eyes, heard it in his voice as he said it and I understood - really understood: “All I know,” he said, “is that I don’t get to keep what I have unless I share it with someone. Whatever it is that you get from me sharing with you, I get it all back, sevenfold.”  And I understood, just like that.

 You see, I have been embarked on what has been, until this missive, an intensely personal, essentially private journey. Until quite recently, the very thought of sharing it with anyone but such a close friend as Larry was an unthinkable, embarrassing proposition. The reason I could share with him is that for the last few years he has been midwife to what has been a very grueling and totally self-absorbing pregnancy, some twenty five years long by my reckoning.

 I was suffering when we met, but I just knew that he had something for me. He must’ve seen the same because, as we began to connect, it wasn’t long before we sparked on the right topic. And then my pain was outed and he simply asked, “So what do you want?”

I felt myself poised, at one of those classic forks in the Life road. I felt compelled by habit to duck and weave backwards, away from this dangerous topic. But something wonderful happened, almost simultaneously. Something else inside me, some deeper aspect of my character suddenly awoke, put its foot irrevocably down and said to me, “Where do you think you’re going?”

Maybe it was wishful thinking at the time, but knowing even then that I could trust him gave me the strength to make maybe the most important choice of my life, to date.

“I wanna be happy.” I replied. “I wanna get better.”

Larry smiled at me then. “So, why don’t you?”

He told me later that it was only my own willingness, openness and -maybe above all and because of my suffering- the ability to be honest about myself that showed me the door. And how many among us are there who, having seen the door, just can’t bring themselves to walk through it?

 It hasn’t been easy at all, most of it, so conditioned am I to telling myself the same lies we all learn to sooth ourselves with as children. I’ve learned hard things about myself, but looking myself in the eye in the mirror now brings me joy. I’ve had to face my fears, only to find out they were nothing but phantoms, every single one. I’ve been learning to strip off the façade and, with ever-increasing focus and determination, burn away what I am not. In Buddhist terms, I have started polishing my mirror, so that I might better reveal myself to myself, and doing so with growing clarity and joy at what I’m finding.

 And that’s why I feel moved to share with you now. Like I said, I don’t claim to understand your pain, but I know what pain is, just as we all do.  I know I can’t make you understand, but I believe I’ve finally learned a way for me to keep what I’ve got - and I get to do that by sharing with you.

 The very act of me putting all of this down here has done wonders to further drive this truth into me. If it is of any use to you at all then I am glad of that, of course, but I want you to understand that I’m doing it primarily for my own benefit, just as Larry did with me.

 I really could go on and on here, but instead I’d like to finish this, with one of the most wonderful, most important truths I’ve heard expressed:

 “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness,  that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”                                   - Used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 inaugural speech

 

Interestingly enough, I heard it while I was in the act of writing this very missive to you. Coincidence? I don’t think so!

 You take care now, you hear?

Leap of Hope

God (and I use this word only as a place-holder. Substitute any you like – or better still none at all). Never has a conceptual construct summoned so much connotation, confusion and hatred. Certain ancients believed that to utter his name was blasphemy punishable by death, but therein lies the basis of many mindfucks about the idea that were to follow.

 

Why would a so-called loving god place such an awful punishment on a mere naming of him? Short answer is He did no such thing. The original injunction not to name Him was put in place by truly knowing beings, as a warning against the futility of any attempt to encase in words a concept which defies both words and mental conception. They knew that by sidestepping the mind’s urge to name what they knew to be absolutely unknowable, our hearts can remain open to communion with Him. Some, such as Buddhism, never allude to a god at all, which in hindsight seems to be a rather smart “middle way.” But of course, minds being as they are, those of us with god-centered religion settled on titles such as “He Who Shall Not Be Named” and “I am that I am”, which of course become names like Frank or Becci or Yahweh over time and we end up with God in a box.

 

Once in our mind box, it is only a matter of course that bibles, empires and fortunes begin to encrust around that box, as we search for ways of detailing the attributes of a god that is, from the time he is named onward, only ever a construct of the mind.

 

Such things are inevitable and no thought need be wasted lamenting it, but the one, glittering jewel buried beneath this mess has never changed. The Bible, the Quran, the Torah, the Tao Te-ching, the Bhagavad-Gita and so many other books of philosophy and religion have one quintessentially valuable thing in common. For all the Earthly controversy and turmoil that surrounds the meaning and interpretation of the words, all are unanimous in pointing towards something greater than anything we can know by mental effort alone. In Buddhist terms, all of these works are “fingers which point at the moon” and as such serve an invaluable function in raising the consciousness of those who study them, hopefully to the point were they stop being mesmerized by the fingers and turn and gaze fully upon that to which the fingers point.

 

It is when these great works of men become attributed to God himself, however, that we make the first leap away from the core function of the word itself. The word – these “fingers pointing” - can never be God or his words and the proposition that this or that finger is the moon itself is a crucial and fundamental misconception and the reason why things are the way they are in such matters.

 

Words are only ever the tools of humanity, as my mind sets about its chosen task of slicing and dicing the universe into manageable chunks I can then label. God has no use for words, as his “language” is the universe itself; a sunset, this flower, my daughter, if you choose to break it down. We are in communion always because I am also part of the universe and cannot but otherwise, but not through the workings of my mind operating alone.

 

If I am my mind then I will always mourn the absence of God and look vainly for his signs, like a fish swimming around in search of water. The truth is that we are never outside of his embrace, but to live in the head means being alone and it is this incompleteness that explains why my mind can never be satisfied and why it does the things it does because of that.

 

A declaration of “atheism” is merely an admission that I am living in my head and have closed myself off to the blatant expressions of a universe of intelligence beyond my intellectual capabilities. Using the limitations and contradictions between the word and behavior of people who act in the name of this or that religion to rationalize a closed mind is an excuse, albeit satisfying to the ego for a time. I know because that was very much me. “They are wrong, therefore there is no God.” Or “who could love a God who creates/tolerates such miseries as abound in this world!” This is of course a reflection of the fundamental misconception that religions and their books have direct agency agreements with God – or, the atheist is lending religion the very credibility it claims and merely chooses otherwise.

 

If I am looking for proof of God in the outward encrustations of form then I am using the wrong tool. I am looking with the mind for that which my mind isn’t equipped to “see” unaided. It is the same as the eye looking for color in the ultraviolet spectrum. The eye is simply not configured to do it.

 

Of course, we now have tools that can see ultraviolet for us. The good news here is that we also have, at our ready disposal, tools for communion with God. But, because of the delicious irony that these tools are slapping us in the face 24-7, we almost completely overlook them or -accustomed to and expecting the complex as we do- simply cannot minimize our focus to “get it.” Having been steeped in God by interpretations of teachers who know Her, we respond with “Oh, ok. Yeah” and yet, because of its apparent simplicity we think about it, rather than actually doing, and thus experiencing what they tell us.

 

Jesus told his people to “consider the lilies of the field.” Many others have invited us to do similar. Stare at the night sky and, instead of focusing on the stars and the patterns they evoke – as awe-inspiring as they should be anyway- try looking instead at the forever around them. These invitations to open the self, to stop not-experiencing God first hand have been with us forever and yet in the simplicity of their divine perfection we almost completely miss it.

 

Almost.

 

Laughter is another tool of enlightenment. Certain types of humor take me outside of my normal, sober mindset and offer glimpses of the sheer magnitude of absurdity that abounds in everyday life. As such, it is a truly spiritual experience. One of the greatest aspects of comedy and our ability to laugh is that, we tend to laugh at things the loudest which are otherwise too unpalatable to focus upon when sober. The very best comedians are people who take the world that we have made and confront us with it in ways that very pointedly demonstrate our collective or individual folly. As such, comedians have a recognized social dispensation to speak the unspeakable, to throw back in our face the consequences of ego. They are real journalists, who go to war zones and come back to tell it like they see it. They are the little child who stands up, points at the emperor on parade and says, “Hey, he’s naked!”

 

And now I understand why my ego keeps chattering, for it is only in those rare moments when it shuts the hell up that I stop trying to shut Him out.

 

Ego this!

 

Being of the mind yet located nowhere within it, my ego is also the only aspect of my mind capable of taking the mind beyond itself. In the unenlightened mind, the ego paddles around its confines, remaking the universe every second of every day to keep itself at the center of its finiteness ("finity"...?) – a Herculean and yet ultimately pointless task.

 

Its pointlessness is in the fact that it will one day die. The ego knows death is out there and feeds this fear into the mind daily but, being ego-centric, we assume this death means the end of this organism. This is not quite the same as Ego’s definition of death, however. To Ego, because it is the very root cause of its universe, death merely means its own extinction, regardless of what happens to its ‘host’ organism.

 

For Ego to admit of a universe outside of itself mean its own death, because it cannot conceive of a universe without itself as the center.

 

But Ego is by no means my enemy. It is merely operating within its parameters of knowledge and assumptions. Having once experienced it for ourselves, we can all know that “attitude is everything” and yet this is a completely ego-oriented tool. If I can convince myself that something I once called “bad” is now “good” or at least “a valuable experience, in and of itself,” then what I have experienced is an inversion of my reality. The key to this that is often lost is that, if I can do this with one tiny thing then I am really capable of turning the universe completely upside down –which is what I do everyday anyway, except I call it “learning,” or “growth” or “maturity,” which allows me to sidestep any annoying inconsistency issues. “I just don’t feel that way anymore.” “I know better now.”

 

But even refusing to admit of a universe beyond the mind, who can say that they have never experienced anything which they can admit at least may be beyond possible intellectual comprehension? In ancient times, lightning, thunder and sudden and inexplicable events were handballed to the gods as a means of explaining, or at least comforting us about the unexplainable. But becoming able to explicate so many of these very natural phenomenon has been syllogistically seized upon as a basis for debunking religion and spirituality.

 

And yes, we do seem to know so much more now about the universe, but we still really have no idea about how much we simply do not know. Even applying logic here, if we do not know some things then we also have to admit to having no idea about the magnitude of this not-knowing. How many things don’t we know? Therefore, although we can feel good about the hard nuts we have managed to crack with the power of focused intellects,for all we know all of that may just be as a drop in a very vast ocean.

 

This reminds me of the story of the chief of the US patent office, whose hubris led to the bold claim over a century ago that “pretty well everything of importance has now been discovered.”

 

Even a drop of cleansing humility would allow us to wholeheartedly admit that true knowledge is therefore very limited.

 

So how is Ego also then the tool of my salvation? Simple, but earth-shattering – in Ego terms. The mere admission that “there’s a whole lot more out there than there is in here,” is a sufficient starting point. It was the first step towards my awakening, from a very deep and troubled slumber.

 

Having understood this seemingly small but significant truth brought with it new troubles of its own. Having accepted the above as possibility slowly opened my eyes, to the point where it wasn’t long before it became incontrovertible fact. Have you ever noticed how, when you buy a certain type of car, you suddenly start noticing them everywhere you go? It is exactly the same phenomenon, which I explain this way: Ego makes its living out of breaking down the otherwise (to itself) indigestible universe into bite-sized morsels. It categorizes and classifies things, comparing and deducting points of similarity to bring its focus onto points of difference. Therefore it is basically a tool of discrimination, in the true meaning of that word. It tells things apart.

 

My heart on the other hand is always likening one thing to another. It knows beauty in my daughter, at three and a half, sitting on a rock in a field with disheveled hair and morning eyes, singing her own little song as she waits for me to make breakfast and it equates it with the rain, a flower and all of God’s manifestations we can manage to split from the undivided whole for our analysis.

 

Taking the car analogy just a little further: in the instant I see another of my car in the street, my first response is Heart’s “Oh, look, another one!” which is then quickly supplanted by Ego’s “He got the one with all the options!” and a little resultant pang of jealousy.

 

Faith. We hear of the “leap of faith” and the image is very clear. In whatever situation it applies, it necessarily involves looking into the abyss and, without being certain of the outcome, we launch ourselves into it anyway. It is most conspicuously present in religion, where non-believers are told that they must exercise faith in order to open their hearts to a god they can’t perceive with their senses. The very act of making this leap is to deliver themselves into God’s loving embrace.

 

This is where the mind-centered person has the greatest challenge, and if I am even open to the possibility of God, then I have already begun the transition towards a heart-first life. But if I am one who is only open to the data stream of his mind and senses, to me there will be no evidence. Therefore I would not exercise faith in that first step, but rather hope and so my leap is rather one of hope.

 

Faith arrives only after hope has opened me to allow in more of the data stream. I ‘increase my bandwidth’ so to speak. To do so is to become receptive to more of the data stream of the non-material universe, which is presumably one with the intelligence behind the material universe as well. When I do so, such phenomenon begins to register. It is at this time that faith begins to replace hope, and that faith is in that what I am now experiencing is both real and of a significance such that I am then able to invoke a possible first cause: God.

 

Faith then is not something we leap into, it is rather a bridge that takes us between our leap of hope and knowing; between mind and heart. Faith is the word used by so many religions to shepherd their flocks into the grazing ground of their particular doctrine. They dangle the carrot of knowing God as the end of putting our very souls into the service of those doctrines, but -somewhat perversely- usually only after our physical death.

 

It is what lends authority to popes and prophets and separates humanity into hierarchies of communion with God. It is also the very thing that keeps the ‘faithful’ from ever coming to truly know God. They are trapped on that bridge, trying hard to be faithful and having to make do with the occasional spark hitting their heart from the far side of that bridge. Because they don’t know God.

 

They can be absolutely sincere in their faith, but they see the way to God as being through conditions of faith and codes of behavior determined by the very leaders and sages responsible for keeping them trapped there. The faith of the leaders and sages is also not in question. Nor their strength. It takes a very great will to remain faithful in the absence of knowing.

 

If I hold in front of me a book, I can see, feel, smell and even taste it, if I choose. It is real. In this case I do not need to exercise one jot of faith in that book at all.

 

It is, of course, the very same with God. If everything around and in me is one with God, in reality is God, then wherein such circumstance is the necessity for faith? It is indeed an essential step in the journey back to conscious communion, but falls far short when it becomes an end in itself. Many religions counsel that the notion of such utter communion with God is reserved for the elite, the Christ the prophets and some or all the dead. Further, some would even go as far as to label heretic or apostate the unanointed who would assert such as truth. Of course there are very explicable political reasons for such a result, for to realize heaven as being already here, with us on this Earth as well as everywhere else, would simply put a lot of people out of work.

 

I understand that offering such as I have written herein collides with much of established religion. I do so without disrespect for the faith and intention of those adherents to which such is just wrong. I assert no claim of absolute truth for the things I write, I merely seek to communicate my personal journey towards oneness with God, which would feel incomplete to me without also visiting with the well-established and widely-publicized journeys of others. For others may have started with similar questions, longings and data streams. Pragmatically, I believe that it is just such contributions as this, from individuals everywhere, which serve all humanity by keeping spiritual matters fresh and topical in a world where fresh and topical is what engages the ego-driven mind. Fresh and topical strikes sparks that catches Ego’s attention. In such things, I must agree with the minds behind advertising and promotion that “there is no such thing as bad publicity.” But rest assured that I am not interested in another church nor do I offer any doctrine as the basis for one. This is just my journey.

 

And I need not burn these bridges of faith behind me. Rather, I must remain open to the new flow of traffic between heart and mind, conjoining the two in union with what is then known and making them one. It would be an apostasy most insane for me to, once having come to know God, to then and for whatever reason fall back into the madness of egocentric living.

 

So why am I here? I believe it to be no coincidence that we are that we are: born into mind-centered societies that, with often so many good intentions to the contrary, create so much misery by and for their citizens and neighbors. Dogs never birth kittens and so it is inevitable that egotistical individuals will build egotistical societies, which can be easily defined as any which overlays an “us and them” mentality in its citizens and sub-divides itself further into hierarchical strata. That obviously encompasses every society on this planet!

 

But this is no accident, for we are configured this way, yet not without our heart-beacon, that will guide us if we can but surrender our ego to it. The question is then, “Why would God do this?” and the answer is neither original to me nor at all complex. N.D. Walsche put it very eloquently in his work and so I will use that as a source. He wrote to the effect that, being one and at the same time everything gave God no reference point for being able to experience Her magnificence. To enable that to happen and using Herself as the raw materials, He created this universe as we find it. Also, rather than make our oneness with Him a given, how much more beautiful is it for each tiny spark of that magnificence to have as its prime motivating program the journey to take it home, back to the re-discovery of the one Self; the return to the ocean of which we are each but a tiny thimbleful of water and separated only by this thin veil of flesh?

 

To experience this as a human is the very highest order of sublime. Imagine, then, God’s joy every single time one of us finds his or her own way home? With death of the ‘host’ organism the final outcome of this life, we all eventually find our way back to the Source anyway, so all experience during this life is then of no ultimate consequence. As Shakespeare said, “all the world’s a stage” and there is no ultimate “good” or “bad” except in our thoughts. Transcending such duality in this life and coming to know God before our physical death is of an order of magnitude beyond any other possible human experience and an event such that must change one’s life forever. Kierkegaard believed that any person with a true knowledge of God would spend the rest of his life on his knees in prayerful supplication to Him, but that seems framed in typically Christian way.

 

I cannot imagine a god who would spend the time She has building such a universe wanting that of His creations. Why then would we have been given legs? He has no need for our devotions or piety. Being God, who is all and created all, what is on or of this tiny Earth that we could ever offer Him, that He does not already own? My young son taking my hairbrush, wrapping it and giving it back to me on my birthday is touching and sweet, but it is the hug I get with it that gives me the only joy I feel. The gift is a needless gesture and I surmise that God likewise has no such requirement.

 

Furthermore, She cares nothing for the games we make of our socially embedded selfishness, suffering, sickness and slaughter. It is I who create and manifest these things, as a part of the utter free will with which I was born and thus is it I who must either suffer or transcend them, but transcendence first requires the help of heart-centered thought.

 

To then curse and deride such an apparently callous, unloving God is to entirely miss the point: we are here that we might re-discover our fundamental oneness, or not. Either is fine with God. The pain and suffering – as much as the joy and love- is the path I have chosen to get there, not God. On what basis would He ever choose to intervene in my exercise of the free will He gave me?

 

The path of the ego divides and isolates us from one another and thus from our ability to know God, yet who among us has never shared even the most fleeting moment of oneness with another human, in whatever form that takes? These are clues about the true power and glory inherent in God meeting Himself. Such communion is a manifestation of God, an open revelation to all who see with their heart. To recognize this and then turn towards and further foster these small acts of communion will lead me away from my ego and into my heart, where all will be revealed.

 

It is the exploration of this experience which forms the basis for some book I might write, were I able to focus myself for more than these blog-sized fragments of time.

 

One of the greatest acts of love we can offer another human is our absolute and undivided attention. Parents often do this with their children. Lovers do, for a time. In effect we put these others before ourselves. If people did this as a way of living, unfettered by ego-centrism, then whose Earthly needs would not thus be met? We would all become the parent of every other, we might all be the lover of a collective humanity.

 

Heart-centered living offers a much different set of priorities to those of the ego. Ego is by nature insecure and thus craves security, where Heart feels no such thing. Just look at the immense security apparatus of tribe, ownership, nation and empire with which ego-centered societies have subjugated others who had no need! These others are perceived as “weak” to the ego-centred power, but this so-called weakness is only ever manifested by the exercise of domination over it, it is not at all an inherent quality of such a society itself, certainly not a “flaw.”

 

But even with these empires, the need for security grows more dire, to protect “us” from the other empires that are still there. The end game of this trend is the subjugation of all under one flag, but even having accomplished such an awful thing, with the ego still in place, the inevitability is that it will eventually disintegrate and start all over again. Who cannot see the truth of this?

 

Pain. It seems such a fundamental thing. Buddhism says it is “inevitable.” But there seems room for an alternative interpretation, one of pain as a secondary sensation.

 

If I feel physical pain, at base I am experiencing an intense sensory input that terminates where all nerve endings meet, in my brain and which serves by demanding my attention. There are as couple of evolutionary functions of pain: it informs me of trauma to my body and slows me down to prevent exacerbating it. If my pain is to the extent that I scream out, then it also advertises my situation to both rescuers and predators, so at least somebody ends up happy. In response to pain I can choose to act according to my learning and experience of pain or, by exercise of will, discipline or habit, push it into my subconscious. We generally equate physical pain with unpleasantness, but some people are known to associate pleasure with even intense physical pain – as happens with certain religious and sexual practices.

 

If I am feeling emotional pain, then at base I am experiencing an intense emotional sensation that serves by demanding my attention. All emotional responses are in accordance with my interpretation of phenomenon, which is why not all people respond to a given phenomenon in the same way. Some cultures, for example, see death as the final liberation of the soul and thus rejoice when a member of their society departs, while others feel loss and sorrow. So pain’s demand for my attention will result in me acting according to my learning and experience or, by exercise of will, discipline or habit, push it into my subconscious. We often equate emotional pain with unpleasantness, but if it is possible that some people associate pleasure with even intense emotional pain – as happens with manic depressives and others said to be in some way psychotic – then it is also possible that all responses to emotional pain are learned, not inherent.

 

And if I try to use my head to intellectually conjure up suppositions of another’s pain then pain of any sort that results will also be in accordance with my own understanding of pain and not necessarily relevant to the pain experienced by the object of my compassion. It is a projection. In such cases, I am merely trying to “imagine what it feels like,” and not actually empathizing.

 

These all point towards pain being a mental phenomenon, primarily, and not something of the heart. If the heart is really our “love-muscle” then, while it may empathize to the point of feeling another’s pain or joy, that response is not “native” to the heart, rather it is the one, true compassion. If God is love and my heart is the interface between God and this world, then it is also possible that, while the heart itself knows no pain or suffering, it may nonetheless feel compassion for the pain and suffering of my own mind, just as much as the pain and suffering of other minds, via other hearts. The heart as fiber-optic jack into God’s data stream!

 

 Like so many before I would offer a deconstruction of what Jesus was reported to have said. “Wherever two or more are gathered in communion of the heart then God is there.” Look around our world and see what communion of mind have wrought. Our hearts are spiritual nodes. When two or more hearts find their connection, that is God. It is why we are here. It is what we are all looking for and what we shall one day find.

Mindfuck, Mea Culpa

I am insane. I have been this way for as long as I can remember, but until now have never been able to adequately label it. Not a Travis Bickle, "You lookin' at me…?” kind of insane, but quite diseased, mentally. Terminally, in fact.

 

The work you are reading is the attempt to understand or at least come to terms with this insanity, during the process of which I feel I have uncovered startling similarities between my symptoms and well accepted characteristics of a lot of humanity that has moved me to want to share.

 

But I’m not writing about you, of course. It’s those other, crazy people.

 

And where what I write engages your critical faculties to the point of dismissal, please do so, with my blessing. What I would wish for you, the reader, is to discover for yourself any points of similarity between my story and your own and allow it to be an access point to your own truth. I feel as certain as I have ever been about anything that they exist.

 

What I offer herein is a profound message from my heart to yours. But it is not my message and nor do I believe Divinity stoops to using words. Not when there are so many more immediate ways of communicating. However reductionist and distorting, though, words are the only tools available to me to try and communicate with others I cannot otherwise hope to meet. They are also the most comfortable tool of my mind and this makes my job here even more challenging, when that which I wish to examine is my mind itself, where my disease resides and wishes to stay.

 

My hope is that the sum of their total might be exceeded if these words can evoke a response in the reader that transcends the words themselves. I underscore this with the caution that any message for you will not be found in the words, for it is a truth most paradoxical that everything I write is false.

 

But please don’t allow that to choke you off from going forward for, “evidence of contradiction is merely the universe’s way of showing me that I’m not framing the question quite right.”[1]

 

But you do have the option, to read on or not. For me, however, there is no turning back. My disease is killing me so I‘m making the commitment to carry through with it to conclusion. Not to do so at this point in my life would mean my death.

 

Why am I afraid? I’ve been lying to myself and lying to the world. I’m afraid of the truth behind the lies. The lies stem from trying to conceal one big lie. The Lie.

 

The result of The Lie is that I’m very ill at ease with what I have created to cover it up, this outward fiction of who I think the world wants to see occupying this space. “Big deal! My whole life’s a lie!” snorts the now legendary George Costanza. But I feel my own immediacy more than his and I can’t do this anymore.

 

With really no idea where this goes, nor any of the tools I normally use without a second thought, I am forced to either hope or give up and die. To truly hope is no small feat for someone so used to living in and from his head and used to relying on a diseased mind to guide me, for better and worse. I am powerless to beat my disease, so tight a grip does it have upon me. So tight, in fact, that until I appended the label to it, my disease and I were one and the same.

 

So who am I? Until this story began to make itself apparent, I was this body, this mind and a nebulous “something besides” that eluded my attempts to mentally apprehend it, to the point where it was just easier to just avoid it altogether. This I managed without too much effort, so what about the rest?

 

I was blessed with inoffensive looks and the double-edge sword of a fairly clever mind. For most of my life the path of least resistance still kept me above much of the crowd, to which I learned to compare myself. I was never forced to learn or exercise any particular mental discipline to get almost anything my mind fixated upon. This led to the same kind of complacency and structural defects that allow companies and empires to collapse. With inherent weaknesses amplified by time they become decadent and collapse from within.

 

The little lifestyle successes allowed me the extra luxury of thinking mind was really all there is to life - and everything else is voodoo or hallucination. This flies directly in the face of experience that absolutely contradicts that assumption, yet it persists. Because I didn’t know how to question my mind and its motives, it was simpler anyway to just sweep it under the carpet and carry on. Well, of course, over time I’m either walking around that carpet or tripping over the elephant stashed underneath it.

 

I’ve learned that I can’t lie without consequences, to myself included. I get what I get because I do what I do. And the simple truth is that I’ll keep on getting what I get as long as I do. It is the most common form of insanity to expect a different outcome.

 

So what it my lie? First, walk with me a little and see how my mind chews on this particular piece of gristle. Not The Lie: mind, but rather my lie.

 

My lie is this: that I am coping.

 

My lie says that I have the knowledge, skills and power – or access to those things- to do and be the things in this life that I need and want to do and be.

 

I attended schools and universities and, later, took well-meaning, logically structured courses intended to exercise my mind, to trim and tone up this “decision-making muscle” in my head. While they have not been without effect, they’ve all either overlooked or marginalized the core that to which those tools would be actually useful, but without which have actually accelerated my own annihilation. This I now know to be a good thing.

 

Insanity to hope for death as a way to rid myself of my disease? Or is it insanity to keep doing the same things, over and over, cloaking it in different names and hoping for a different result?

 

This mind knows it’s a lie and is afraid. While indeed a sharp and often useful tool, my mind is incapable of both making real decisions and then following through with them with any consistency. I am only as resolute as my mind. That it is pointedly inadequate at this it demonstrates, time after time. My only consistency has been my inconsistency.

 

Why is that? Because my mind lives to chew on things, the more gristly the better. There is not a thing that it has not taken, used and then chewed up and discarded, often with contempt, in its inexhaustible search for newer, better, faster. It is a stimulus junkie and what satisfied it yesterday seems old and stale today.

 

As Eckhart Tolle[2] writes, for my mind it is the chewing itself that is the outcome. This means that situations past and suppositions future only exist for it to chew on. There is no other outcome for which it operates and it will chew as instructed by my ego, the “little me” that lives up there in and of my mind trying to run the show. Being that, the mind is all ego feels safe with and, even in its uncertainty, it is certain that every little instruction it gives to mind is to be carried out. And even though ego is a by-product of mind, my mind is its willing bitch and there is no shape it will not try to take to please its master.

 

Ego is not the dirty word that many would have us believe. To the extent that there is a congruency between what is inside the mind and the reality outside, an ego can be said to be “healthy” or otherwise and do the job for which it evolved. Mine is neither healthy nor does it mirror the world on which I find myself at the brink.

 

And what is this ego? Ego is simply my mind having reached a critical mass that is manifested by its awareness of self. It is evidence of the sum total of my mind being greater than its constituent parts. You can dissect my brain to the cellular level and never once see my mind, yet who would deny its existence? It is the same with ego. My mind, being fundamentally a tool, can only ever grapple with the things upon which it focuses. It is an uber-complex, electro-chemical network and is the terminus for everything that occurs in the portion of the data stream to which it has access. It is the ego lens which brings the disparate functions of this mind to focus. My experience likens a healthy specimen to the pilot of the ship of the mind. Using its knowledge of an area, it guides that ship through dangerous straits to the safety of port or deep water, then gets off. Mine however has hijacked my ship and guided it onto the shoals, yet it remains both the source of my troubles and, I believe, the tool of my salvation.

 

But my ego has finally found the edge of its operational capacity. It has come to the brink of the abyss beyond mind where such answers as it can comprehend no longer exist for the questions it can no longer avoid asking. But even as it follows the rim around, desperately looking for any kind of mind-based bridge, my mind continues to serve. A solution isn’t even of great importance, Ego merely wants a way for it to remain the center of the universe, rather then confess that it is a little island thrown atop the raging and finite waters of my mind.

 

What my heart has always been happy to demonstrate Ego wants nothing of, as it jumps from sensation to science to savior – any distraction to keep from admitting the truth that this is a never-ending process. It will never, ever be satisfied with an answer that takes away its own primacy. It cannot see past thought itself as both alpha and omega. For that to happen would mean its own death and so, for my ego, there is no such thing as “enough.”

 

And what is it that my heart is saying? Wait, let me flog this horse just a little further here…but I’ll leave a clue here: “Not a thing”.

 

Living in my mind and believing that I am my mind and that the thoughts which populate it are mine makes me subject to the whims of those thoughts and mental impulses, that are only relative to each situation and Ego’s shifting perception of the meaning and relevance of the data stream.

 

Other minds and their own patterns of logic too, play a big role in this too. Without any referential baseline; any core so-called mental or intellectual principles, being what is commonly referred to as “open-minded” merely makes my mind susceptible to the cleverly worded arguments and logical framework of other minds when exposed to them. These minds can just as well be my best friend as president, media mogul or pop star. Such a mind bends whichever way the wind blows.

 

On the odd and unpredictable occasion when some meteorite of truth or beauty manages to shower down from the heavens onto this little island, it hoots “Wow!” and partakes of the joy of such phenomenon. It senses the overwhelming magnitude of what it has witnessed, but as that spark represents an entire universe beyond thought and word - and far beyond its own very limited consciousness - it almost immediately sets out to destroy it, lest a fire start in its wake.

 

So it is that, precisely when these little sparks strike, my mind ramps up its resistance, to ensure no further illumination takes place. It senses the power and it is afraid. It is afraid because hidden from my mind, in that small fleck of light, is a secret too awful for my little me to accept or even comprehend.

 

So it reacts with the best weapon it has: the mindfuck, to the death. From the point of view of ego, remember, it is all there is. It is supreme and therefore any threat to that supremacy must be met with as much force as can be brought to bear. Thinking itself to be me, my ego sees its role as that of savior of me so, as with any creature which demonstrates symptoms of life, it will do everything in its power to prevent death from striking it. To accomplish this it must use the tools it as and so tries to mentally or verbally pigeonhole with its logic and language whatever phenomenon led to the spark being ignited, with the inevitable outcome of extinguishing it – or at least pissing on the burning edges of the holes left by their passage.

 

It is a cat playing with a pigeon, pouncing and batting it around till the latter is still and lifeless. Life is what attracts the cat’s attention and leads it to strike, yet the result is death. The cat will keep tapping it, look at it for a while and then wander off looking for new “toys”.

 

It seems a kind of mystery then that, with its obvious attraction for bright little chunks of light, my mind should have built a religion of trying to silence, sidestep and slander the billion-watt beacon that is my very own heart, the true center of my universe and the ultimate destination to which all these sparks proceed, without pause.

 

My cleverness this way allows me to play almost any game that is going on – even this one of cutting my mind loose on this mind’s own situation. As mentioned, the mind loves gristle to chew and, with ego to boot, is almost always glad to be the centre of attention. Sound dumb? It gets dumber!

 

But this mind is on a fairly short leash right now. While it trots out herein to show itself and take a bow, I must sheepishly also admit that the opinions expressed through it is not the one it held a few days ago, nor likely the one it will have within a week…but of course, how can I be certain when it is not a thing within my control?

 

I know that I can’t control it because I can’t make it shut the fuck up.

 

I used to think such shifts in evaluation were called “wisdom” or “learning” but my mind is a complex, clever little mechanism with its own rudimentary, self-centered consciousness – Ego. I have no idea where it comes from or what evolutionary function it fulfills. Maybe due to the amazing complexity and power of our brains, the ego is a level of primal, body awareness that just needs to be taught that there is more to life than itself…kind of like a small and selfish child.

 

Left in command of the entire being it experiences fear of the unknown if it seeks to venture beyond itself and so it keeps itself as its center. Filtering the data stream through the senses it has access to and the memories in its mind catalog, it is on a second-by-second basis re-inventing and repositioning the entire universe to keep itself in that centre.

 

For example, I mask this almost incredible capriciousness by the further game of taking the thoughts and opinions of other minds around me, or those I have read or otherwise absorbed, then playing them back to the minds around me. I usually tweak or twist them a little to personalize or otherwise “contribute” and leave my mark on them. Or sometimes I’ll play devil’s advocate and pick at points or even refute them entirely, if it serves my mind to do so. Opinions are great things for minds to play with, and I rakishly adopt, change and seek to destroy them on a daily basis. I even do exactly the same things to myself, when gristle is nowhere else to be found, alternately praising and beating myself up over the most trivial things.

 

But none of it matters because I don’t really care one way or the other anyway. It’s a game, this mindfuck, and my ego is hopelessly addicted to it.

 

The result of this addiction has been to eradicate any ability to stick with something long enough to see it through, unless faced with a really big stick or very sweet carrot. So many times I’ve started something, only to have the sands of thought shift and bury it, like the foundation of some lost temple. “It wasn’t important,” or, “I don’t feel that way anymore” are its rationales.

 

The cumulative effect of these follow-through failures, however, leaves a stain. It diminishes what successes I attain because, over time, I’ve come to believe that “If I did it, then it must be of little or no significance.” But on top of this is that powerful ego, that cannot withstand these repeated assaults on its sense of self-worth and so the lies, the rationales, the excuses and blame flow thick and fast.

 

Coupled with this ego, over time what has developed is a mind that suffers (really suffers!) from “delusions of adequacy.” What this is, is a situation where on the surface I appear to exude confidence and self-assurance, this is merely the deep down mask of my mind’s understanding that I am a hopelessly quivering mound of useless jelly; whose real contribution is only ever minor, undeserved and likely the product of someone else’s thought or effort anyway.

 

This has lead to the very deepest of fears: the certainty that I will be unmasked.

 

…And this is about the only thing that this unassisted Ego has understood correctly, for I am here now to do that.

 

“My heart” is what I refer to when I am talking about the part of me which feels and to which feeling – not thought – is primary. Although inclusive of it and every other part of my whole (mind included,) it is not specifically the blood pump in my chest and it derives its feeling from a source to which my ego, like a hot stove, refuses direct contact.

 

My heart has been pushed almost out of sight by my ego-enslaved mind, to the extent that the “me” construct of my mind doesn’t even know how to communicate with that – and is wary of it besides because Ego’s propaganda. Truth is that, if I am indeed my mind, then I am most certainly cut off from most of what my heart is trying to tell me.

 

In trying to break down these barriers the challenge is that my mind has all the words, my heart the feelings. Heart can only ever communicate with feelings. What comes out when I try to express my feelings is words, but they only become words having already passed through the quite selective filter of my Ego-owned mind. This is putting the cat in charge of the lizards and trusting that she will take good care of them. “Of course I will!” she purrs happily, “Watch and see!” It is this apparent conundrum that is the source of so much frustration and self-deception and I now perfectly understand the paradox involved in the statement, “Anything I say is false” yet can assert it as truth.

 

The way I am configured, with Ego as the seat of my sense of self, the center of the universe and with the mind its willing and ignorant slave, the only way my heart has made its presence felt is the constant low level of unease that has been building and building, as I steadfastly ignore its input on what I consider and choose to do in this life and which removes me further and further from what it wants.

 

This all sounds utterly psychotic, and it is. I am of course a person, a single unit of mind, body and consciousness, not two or three. The psychosis with which I am afflicted is actually laughably simple. It’s not so much that this “little me,” my ego, believes that the it is real and that it is all I am. The root of this sickness is that I accepted that as truth for so long.

 

And this little me has played a fairly good game, considering it has been trying to run the universe as long as it has, without being aware of anything beyond the data stream flowing into my own head and its own perception of history and phenomenon.

 

I’m taking the blue pill. “How do I feel?” The stream of words that followed my original answer to this question were based upon that answer, yet that answer was false. I am not afraid.

 

My little me is mortally afraid however, because it is being exposed. And, while it will dodge, duck and throw things to avoid the light, I know that there is no need to do anything about this, because my mind is not who I am, it is merely a tool: a screwdriver that would be king.

 

And all I need to do to rectify this situation is to surrender to the fact that I can never control it – not as long as I AM it.

 

[1] Robert Pirsig, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[2] The Power of Now

 

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