The future is nonsense

Filed under Notes on 17. February 2007 » Comments [12]

I’ve been going through a bit of turmoil today, unease coming in seemingly from nowhere to slap me around a bit. And as this is an ongoing practice, with these old conditioned thoughts and beliefs coming up in waves again and again, I have certain methods that I use to process them. Writing in my journal, taking walks, reading books, and constantly observing and questioning the thoughts that go through the mind. And don’t think that it's nearly as elegant as it may sound; it is a backwards stumble in the dark, at best. But this is how it works, and usually after a certain amount of suffering I have a realization. Always the same, ultimately, but gradually the realization becomes deeper and deeper.

As I remember Wayne Dyer saying in one of his talks, that “when you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. And when you are squeezed, whatever is in there is what comes out.” I’m sure he said it more elegantly, but the point is that when you are challenged, in other words when the world gives you a squeeze, whatever you have inside will come out. If you have repressed anger, it will come out in one form or the other. Maybe in a sudden flash of energy, or maybe in a slow, painful seepage (yummy metaphors here). In any case, whatever is left in you of pain and attachment to form will be beaten out of you by the challenges of the world. Or we could say that the world will keep pushing your buttons until it gets the combination right and everything blows up and disintegrates.

After hours of journaling, walking, reading, listening, etc., I finally came to a peaceful realization, during my walk, about a certain thing I had been clinging to. Generally speaking, it was the realization that I had to let go of future and thus to let go of attachment to thoughts, plans, and beliefs. To be at peace with not knowing what will happen, and to give myself up completely. Not minding what happens, as Krishnamurti put it. And as I said, this is nothing new. We’ve all read about letting go of future — this is all I ever write about, really. But it is one thing to grasp it on a conceptual level and quite another to have a deep realization, to know it as opposed to merely knowing about it. It’s amazing how resilient the mind is in clinging to its attachments and thoughts about the future, and until you really feel that you do not mind what happens there is an attachment somewhere whether you realize it or not.

Shortly after having had this realization, or rather after having entered the beginning of that realization — it is still going on slowly as I write this — I reached for my little pocket version of the Tao Te Ching and begun reading immediately where I opened it:

A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.

What a beautiful thing it is to have no fixed plans, and to be free of the illusion of future. Not in a way that you cannot do anything, or have plans on a superficial level, but rather seeing that whatever plans you may have are utterly unimportant compared to the reality of life itself. That whatever thoughts you have about any situation could not possibly be more right than life, which is a realization that brings with it a sense of humility and gratitude. Humility that then replaces the old arrogance of believing that your thoughts and perceptions are superior to reality itself.

And when you see this, there is no need for clinging to future anymore. No need for having to figure anything out, simply because you see that it is all illusion anyway. Every thought you have about the future is nonsense.

Isn’t that great?

Abandoning the Pursuit of Happiness

Filed under Articles on 16. February 2007 » Comments [3]

When our minds are given the task of figuring out how to find happiness, the enterprise is doomed to failure from the get-go. The concept of happiness is rooted deep in our conditioning, in various states of distortion from person to person, and is the concept which carries perhaps the clearest indicator of our delusion of seeking for fulfillment in the world of form. The conditioned concept of happiness is always connected with something that happens, and is characterized by images of positive events and good fortune. It is at its core an externally derived sense of wellbeing; of feeling happy because of something that happens

Spiritual does not equal impractical

Filed under Notes on 2. February 2007 » Comments [1]

Often when people read about spiritual awakening, finding inner peace and becoming free of suffering, they tend to feel that the solutions presented are not practical or applicable in their own lives. They may read something that they know points the way to freedom, and even have glimpses of a state of deep peace, but then fail to see how it can work in modern, everyday situations. For many the concept of ‘enlightenment’ carries with it images of old masters, temples, and monasteries; an environment that seems more conducive to spiritual practice than their own. A concept that “sounds nice, but doesn’t really work in the real world,” as if spiritual wisdom only belongs to a fantasy land far removed from our own reality.

The Tao has a verse dedicated to this, which goes:

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

Much of the confusion, and the inability to see the teaching in context with what we perceive to be reality, has to do with thinking that our problems are much too complicated for such simple advice. Our social conditioning teaches us that reality is complex, difficult, and devoid of wonder — that the simple world we saw as children was an illusion, and that growing up is a process of disillusionment rather than the other way around. We also tend to think that spiritual awakening comes at the cost of losing touch with reality, and that being enlightened is to have separated yourself from the effects of the so-called real world.

These beliefs need to be questioned, and if you ever feel that a spiritual teaching sounds nice but impractical, ask yourself, in the words of Byron Katie, “honey, is that true?”

The Tao on good and bad

Filed under Notes on 21. January 2007 » Comments [1]

In addition to the longer articles published once or twice a week here on Everyday Wonderland, I’m going to start writing smaller posts that will be filed under a new section called ‘Notes.’ I plan on doing a few of these a week, mostly focusing on discussion about quotations and passages from books I'm particularly fond of, or just something I happen to come across online.

In this first note, I want to discuss a verse from the second chapter of Tao Te Ching that talks about the polarity of judgment; a fundamental aspect of the ego that is very easy to overlook.

“When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.”

The power of these words from Lao-tzu, as in so many other cases when dealing with spiritual texts, can easily be missed when they are not allowed past the analysis of rational thinking. He’s not telling us that we shouldn’t appreciate beauty, or that we should renounce all our preferences, but rather that it is important to see the polarity of good and bad only as relatively important. To see that while we may feel that roses are more beautiful than weeds, the true beauty of both goes beyond our judgment of good and bad.

The key is to honor our preferences, while appreciating that true beauty and true goodness, otherwise referred to as ‘the absolute’, are much deeper than our mental judgment of good/bad, beautiful/ugly. And the amazing thing is that, when we see that our judgment is only ever relatively true, everything becomes more beautiful to us as a result.