Notes and articles tagged with “the-world”
Filed under Notes on 23. June 2008 » [1]
It’s ironic that in the effort to seek and maintain your own comfort, you are never able to relax or be truly comfortable. You give up the inner peace that is your natural state in favor of trying to derive that sense of inner peace from some external situation. So instead of resting in the inherent comfort of your own being, you look for a comfortable situation out there.
When you realize this, it seems utterly insane that we keep falling into this trap. That we’re really that lost. But we are. From an early age we are taught to look outside for comfort, and almost everything in our culture encourages it.
At the root of this search for your own comfort is the illusion of self, the ego. It’s a self-serving pattern of thought that makes you look at everything in the world in terms of how it affects you and your state of comfort. And because it’s based in the illusion of self, it is loaded with fear and suffering.
The illusion is that you will become free of the fear and suffering by gaining external comfort, but the truth is that the suffering is inherent in the search itself and has nothing to do with your situation as such. If you are in suffering and then suddenly win lots of money in the lottery and feel better, your comfort is based in the illusion that it is derived from an external situation. And it is only a matter of time before the effects of that illusion start to fade.
In thinking that inner peace and comfort can be derived from an external situation, you’ve separated yourself from that peace. And you then believe yourself to live in a cruel and unfair world where true comfort is only available to a select few who make it; a world that can give you, and therefore deprive you of, inner peace.
The exercise of simply disregarding your own comfort can help you see through the conditioning, because the illusion of ego relies on constant self-interested mental activity to maintain momentum.
It is truly an amazing realization that in order to find true comfort and relaxation, you must give up concern for your own comfort.
Filed under Notes on 26. August 2007 » [2]
What we are all looking for, in one way or another, is freedom from limitation. Freedom from the world; being able to do whatever you want, free from anything on the external level that could make you uncomfortable or limit your movement in any way.
The easy answer to this of course is money. And recognition perhaps, fame, celebrity, universal approval, but first and foremost we think that financial independence is the key to becoming free of the world. And in a way it’s true; with unlimited funds you could arrange your external situation in a way that is relatively limitless, on that level.
But this is the big misunderstanding. It is true that we want freedom from the world, but we make the mistake of looking for freedom exclusively on the external level. We think that freedom from the world of form can be achieved on the level of form, and that overcoming worldly limitations is to conquer them on the external level. And this is certainly what we are taught to believe, that one can achieve freedom from the world through external means.
What we are not told, however, is that freedom from the world has nothing to do with anything on the level of form at all. Being externally free of limitation can give the illusion of what we are seeking, for a little while, but the real salvation and what we are actually looking for is inner freedom from external limitations. Real freedom from the world is to be in a state of inner non-attachment to it, and this does not require anything in particular of your external situation. You don’t need to change anything on the level of form in order to become free of it.
And in fact, being faced with severe limitations on the level of form is for many people the key to freedom. Paradoxically, somebody who is completely free from limitations on the external level is much less likely to find real freedom from the world than someone who is neck-deep in worldly challenges. You are much more likely to find freedom in prison than a five star hotel.
When you realize this, you may even begin to feel grateful for the limitations in your life situation. They offer an opportunity for you to align yourself with what is, and keep you from getting pulled into the illusion that one can find fulfillment on the level of form. If all the worldly desires of the ego are met, it is very difficult not to get lost and completely identified with it. But when the ego is met with things not working out, the world not respecting its plans and ambitions, you are given an opportunity to go beyond the illusion of ego.
And what more could you want from the world? Indeed, we could see this as the only real purpose of the world of form; to present you with challenges and limitations so that you can overcome them. If you expect something other than that from the world, like fulfillment and salvation, you will suffer. But if you see the world of form for what it is, a teaching device of sorts, you become free of it without needing anything to be different from how it is right now, in the present moment.
Filed under Notes on 16. August 2007 »
Earlier this week I got an email from a reader regarding the post External circumstances and inner peace, asking for clarification on some of the concepts having to do with seeing the world of form as only the surface level of being. And believe me, I can see how these ideas can get confusing. They sound far-fetched, and I don’t really have a logical understanding of them as such, but they work very well for me as pointers none the less.
Ultimately they are only words, of course, and no words or concepts can ever really capture the truth; they can only point beyond themselves. The concepts can be contradictory, illogical, weird, and still fulfill the function of pointing you towards that which cannot be put into words directly.
And so the key to being able to use them is to not get hung up on trying to make sense of the concepts on the level of thinking and reason, but rather allowing them to sink in and do their work. In many cases, something you read today that makes no sense to you whatsoever may later hit you in a sudden flash of insight. Truth is beyond reason, and yet blindingly simple and obvious when you see it.
Following is the question and then the answer I gave in the email:
"Whatever problems you have in your external situation at the moment, they are neither better nor worse than any other problems that have or can ever come up in your life. On the surface level, this problem is worse and more complicated than that problem, but the differences are only relative to that level. If the surface level is 1% and the problems on that level scale from 1-10, even a level 10 problem will never exceed 1% of the totality."
In a previous article you mentioned something similar with the 95/5 formula. I am not clear what qualifies as the 1% of the surface level, and what the rest of the 99% is? It's difficult for me to accept that the life that i experience 100% of the time is only 1% of my being. Please go into more detail about what the 99% is and what the 1% is. Is everything we experience on a daily basis filed under the 1% of our being and we shouldn't really mind what happens? Or are there things that we experience (relaxation, love, friendship) which occur on the surface but are filed under the 99% of importance? I'm really confused.
It's important to remember that even the surface is part of the totality, so I am in no way dismissing the importance of that 5% (or 1%, 0.001%, 10%, whatever). It's just a matter of depth. When you look at a human being and are only aware of the surface, what you see is only a collection of labels. Whereas when you look at a human being while aware of the totality, you see/sense much more. It's almost like the difference of meeting someone online vs. face to face; the former is a bundle of abstracted labels and information, while the latter is (potentially) a much deeper and richer experience.
Now, the mind cannot possibly make sense of what it means to be aware of the totality. It's impossible to try and figure it out, and the numbers are just a method of pointing towards something that doesn't really make any logical sense. It's not at all about the numbers, or about words or explanations for that matter.
To look at some other perspectives on this:
If you're in a relatively quiet environment, close your eyes for a moment and listen. Observe that there is silence, and then there are sounds that arise and dissolve out of that stillness. The more you are aware of the silence, the more you sense its depth and how the sounds that appear in it are relatively fleeting and insignificant. In fact, consciously being aware of the silence that underlies everything is a great pointer towards sensing the depth beyond the surface level.
Yet another way of looking at it is to use the sea metaphor. The totality is the entire sea, unimaginable stillness, depth and vastness, while the world of form is the continuous play of forms on the surface of the sea, the waves. Sometimes the waves are huge and restless, sometimes it's almost completely still, but whatever happens on the surface doesn't affect the stillness in the depths.
The whole deal with the numbers and all these pointers and tricks is to trigger shifts in awareness. Although I think it's a bad idea and not worth the health risks involved, you could probably do this to some extent with mind-altering drugs also.
Regarding what you mention with relaxation, love and friendship, I would suggest that in a way these can provide glimpses of what is beyond the surface. Remember also that everything is part of the 100%, and so everything is 100% important. So let's say an orange is a 100% important, but we only see the skin of it and believe that to be 100% important, overlooking the fruit inside.
I'm not sure how to explain it any better, but remember that you don't necessarily need to understand any of it on a conceptual level. In fact, trying to work it out on that level may hinder you in gaining the deeper level of understanding, the flash of insight where it everything makes sense on a much deeper level than the thinking-mind can comprehend.
Filed under Notes on 11. August 2007 »
See if this sounds familiar: “My life is problematic right now, but if ______ then I would be okay.” Mostly the blank space is filled with something to do with externally derived security, such as financial independence, a happy marriage, a solid career, a nicer house, and so on and so on. And no matter how often people get over that bump in the road, the initial feeling of safety and relaxation is soon replaced by the need for just this one more thing. And however many problems we manage to solve or stomp into the ground, it’s a game of endless whack-a-mole.
In essence, we are looking for home in our external situation; looking for inner peace in outer circumstances. And the reason for this is that we believe that inner peace, that elusive feeling of being safe, of having arrived, etc., can be derived somehow from the world of form. Furthermore we think that not only can it be derived from external circumstances, but that it depends on the external circumstances of our lives. In the conditioned and unconscious state most people still find themselves in, all they see is the world of form and so they simply cannot fathom where else to look. It is a case of only perceiving the surface level of life, and looking for fulfillment there while completely missing the vastness of depth beyond. It’s like picking up a single piece from a 1.000.000 piece puzzle, expecting it to show you the entire picture. You look real hard at it for years and years, tilt it this way and that, bang your head against it in frustration, and then pass on to the next generation that “yes, the picture is there, but you have to look really hard to see it.”
We’ve been conditioned to think that the surface is all there is, that the world of form is life itself in completion, and a side effect of that is the essence of human suffering, the problem behind all our problems; namely, our identification with form. When we are identified with form, our appetite for more forms is bottomless. It is a philosophy that assumes we are incomplete, and yet doesn’t have any real idea about what completion is. A feeling of lack and incompleteness is at the core of the illusion of form identity, and so merely feeding the appetite for more is an exercise in futility. On that level, there will never be enough. We can never find permanent satisfaction on the level of form, mostly because the satisfaction of our needs on that level is illusory. Any externally derived sense of safety is an illusion; we think for a moment that there really is permanence to be found in the world, until something changes or the feeling wears off. It’s like thinking that a really big hamburger is all you need to never be hungry again. Naive, sure, but this is what our conditioning is like.
Whatever problems you have in your external situation at the moment, they are neither better nor worse than any other problems that have or can ever come up in your life. On the surface level, this problem is worse and more complicated than that problem, but the differences are only relative to that level. If the surface level is 1% and the problems on that level scale from 1-10, even a level 10 problem will never exceed 1% of the totality.
When you perceive the surface level of life in context with the totality, it becomes very clear that nothing on that level can ever fulfill you. And with that comes the recognition that nothing that can ever happen on that level is all that serious. There are challenges, and when they are seen for what they are, instead of being turned into problems by the form-identified mind, you can deal with them easily and without effort. Challenges arise continuously on the surface level of life, but these only become an issue when the surface level is seen as all there is.
So whatever your current external situation looks like at the moment, realize that it will keep changing, shifting, doing its thing, and that none of it has anything much to do with your sense of fulfillment or inner peace.
Paraphrasing J. Krishnamurti, freedom from the world is not minding what happens.
Filed under Notes on 2. August 2007 » [1]
A big part of the reason why we get lost in the world of form again and again, get caught up in the stream of thinking and occupy all our attention with the things and happenings of the world, is that we believe on some level that there is something in it of lasting value. If we didn’t think the world could save us, if we didn’t believe so deeply that there is permanent security to be found in the world of form, we would not give it so much of our attention.
For example; when there is something on the horizon in your life situation that you either want desperately to avoid or to acquire, in essence if there is a possibility of a future event with high stakes of some kind, a situation of gain or loss, the mind goes hyper with trying to do something about it. If there is something you want to avoid, the mind will either focus on it almost constantly, reasoning that remembering it gives you a certain level of control over the situation; or the mind will resort to boredom, which is little more than a tactic to cover up thoughts you want to avoid rising to the surface.
Behind the stream of compulsive thinking that goes on in most people’s minds, day in and day out, is a deep seated belief that the thinking is a way of staying in control. That if you were to stop, everything would collapse around you and all your problems would grow out of control. Also in this belief is that by maintaining the stream of thinking, you are somehow more likely to arrive, or make it. Because the conditioned mind-made self is based entirely on identification with form, which always comes down to thought forms, it thrives on thinking. On a day-to-day level, this is reflected in thought patterns that revolve around staying competitive. Thinking that you gain an advantage by thinking a lot, preparing everything in advance, trying to solve every possible future situation you are likely to encounter, etc. — this form identified entity, the ego, believes that your survival depends entirely on the world of form being arranged in a certain way. To this entity, the world of form is all there is. And in this way, a situation of potential gain and loss becomes a matter of life and death. This delusion is then reflected in everything you do as long as you are identified with the ego.
When you realize that who you are is not the mind-made sense of self, your sense of proportion changes dramatically. The world of form will start to seem relatively insignificant compared to the vastness of being, or whatever you wish to call it. The world of form becomes like a small piece of driftwood floating in the middle of the Atlantic ocean; beautiful and interesting, but relatively insignificant compared to the vastness of the open sea all around it.
With this realization, the mind goes quiet. Because when the world is seen in relation to the formless, nothing that happens in it can matter all that much. It is still honored and given some attention, but the fear that drove compulsive thinking and future-projection isn’t there anymore.
The challenge, then, is to maintain that perspective. And this is easier said than done, particularly when there are so many things competing for your attention. But with every realization, your level of awareness will rise and you will become more firmly rooted in that place where you see the world for what it is.
There are some useful pointers and practices that can be used to directly bring about this shift in perspective, and in particular I am fond of using what I’ve called the 95/5. Basically it is a sort of mantra that says the world of form is only ever 5% of your total awareness, and the 95% is formless, empty space. It’s not something that can be summed up with numbers, of course, but they can help to reset your sense of perspective.
As a reminder of this, the desktop wallpaper on my computer has a visual representation of the proportions, with a colored stripe taking up 5% of an otherwise black canvas. You can download it here if you want, in size 1440 by 900 pixels.
Filed under Notes on 8. July 2007 »
There is a saying I’ve quoted before that goes: “There are two ways of being unhappy; not getting what you want, and getting what you want.” And although we are conditioned to believe that if we only get what we want — just this one thing and then I’ll be fine — we’ll be happy, finally and fully contented, it never seems to work out that way. It’s easy to make it seem that it does, and we do a great job of maintaining the illusion through movies, television, magazines and other forms of media, worshipping that proverbial golden calf of our age; the image of making it.
The belief in how the world of form can provide us with lasting security and salvation is very deeply rooted, which is why we cling to it no matter how many opportunities we are given to see beyond the illusion of it. It’s the reasoning that goes, “I know money and fame won’t make me happy, but I’d rather be rich, famous and unhappy than just plain unhappy.” Meaning that on one level you see the truth, but still deeper down there is the belief that you would feel more secure if you only had a little bit more.
What is commonly thought to be the formula for happiness, written in stone in the cult of society, is that getting what you want increases your overall level of contentment. Which would mean that those who get everything they want are continuously happy and fulfilled. Fairly simple, and very familiar, but if we let go of the fantasy for a moment and actually question it, we see that it is also utterly false.
The thing is, always getting what you want on the external level is potentially a path to more misery and suffering than anyone would suspect. We think that not having your wishes fulfilled brings suffering, and that is certainly how it seems on the surface, but when we look deeper we see that the suffering brought on by material excess is of a much deeper variety. Always having your wishes fulfilled leads you to rely on the world of form for your fulfillment. We all have as part of our conditioning the seeds of worldly desire, and having this desire fulfilled and catered to only works to increase the need for more. The nature of desire is that it cannot be fulfilled, and so no matter how much you gain, the void will only seem to get bigger and bigger.
The reason for why the suffering of excess is so much deeper than that of lack is that the more you have on the external level, the more it pulls you in. When you have very little, more of your attention is retained within, the only place fulfillment can be found, whereas when you have a lot, you are much more likely to be distracted and occupied exclusively with the external world. When we only pay attention to the surface, the glittering 1% that makes up the world of form, we lose touch with the other 99% of life which is to be found in that which is beyond form. It is a kind of spiritual starvation, and those who are sensitive to it will often feel exhausted and lifeless after a while of being lost on the surface.
Ultimately it is not a matter of the particular forms around us or whether or not we get what we want, but rather the level of our attachment to it. Due to the nature of our conditioning, those who have all their worldly wishes fulfilled are at a disadvantage when it comes to this, but then again the deep form of suffering they encounter brings with it a tremendous potential for awakening. And it is usually at the extremes of lack and excess that the suffering is the most intense. Being somewhere in the middle like most of us are, the pressure of either material lack or excess never really gets intense enough in either direction to make us suffer properly. There are nibbles of promise here and there, enough to keep us clinging to the illusion but not enough so that it starts eating its own tail.
For those that are in the middle, being pushed around by the world but not enough in either direction to make a lasting impression, vigilance is needed to maintain perspective. As an experiment, observe what it feels like when you get what you want, and when you don’t get what you want. What may surprise you is that the feeling can often be inverse to what you would expect; gaining something on the level of form can sometimes feel empty, tense and even vaguely stressful, while being let down by the world can feel peaceful and good. This is usually covered up with conditioned responses and mental commentary, and breaking through it simply by paying attention could significantly alter your relationship to the world, realizing that your feeling of contentment has nothing at all to do with gain or loss on the level of form.
Filed under Notes on 30. June 2007 » [3]
And indeed they do. A week ago, the hard drive in my laptop gave up the ghost. I had everything more or less backed up, so suffering was kept at a minimum, but it reminded me of how we always expect things that work to stay the same. If things are going well, in our judgment, we feel that they should continue going well. And if things are going badly, we want them to change.
Although it may sound overly dramatic in relation to the hard drive failure, and really it has nothing to do with that as such, but there is one thing we know for certain: things change. That is the law of the world of form and time. Things change; either for better or for worse, as we perceive it. Things go wrong, things get better. It is an endless cycle of growth and dissolution, same as the cycle of birth and death, the sea and the seasons.
And despite it being such a well established pattern, a fundamental law of nature pretty much, we are still surprised when things change. We try to control how they change: pushing things along when we're dissatisfied with the current state of something, and then resisting change when we finally get things to be as we want them to. Pushing and pulling, attempting to manhandle the universe according to our personal preferences.
This stubborn way of approaching things can go on for a long time, and even after a lifetime of having little or no control over things a person may still keep resisting the inevitability of change. Sometimes, and you can see it very clearly in old cats and dogs, after years and years of change from this polarity to that, there comes a point of surrender to what is. Not a defeatist shrinking back from life, but a recognition that what is simply is as it is. Pithy enough for a bumper sticker, and as simple as simple gets, but seemingly near-impossible for most people to realize.
Surrendering to what is — it is a way of being in alignment with life. You can still act and attempt to change things, but only when there is no attachment to the result of that action are you in alignment to what is. The default attitude of our conditioning is to argue with what is, hoping in some way that the world will feel guilty and change things back, but in order to be at peace with the law of continuous change, or birth and death, growth and dissolution, one must step back and allow things to do as they will. Taking action if needed, but in a humble way that more resembles a suggestion than an order.
And maybe that is a good way of looking at it. We can make a suggestion, but never issue an order to the universe. Knowing this, we are at peace with the world.
Filed under Articles on 19. June 2007 » [7]
Part of life in the world, and especially the western world, is that we have lots of interesting things around us. And part of what makes up one’s personality, the form identity, are particular worldly interests and personal preferences. John is into vintage medical illustrations and Lisa rides motorcycles. That sort of thing.
Now, because they make up such a large part of our form identity, of who we are on the surface and in comparison to others, our worldly interests are part of the ego and as such vulnerable to its foibles. We tend to identify with objects, for example, and so when the objects are linked with something like expertise, community, or a lifestyle, the identification can become very strong.
In seeking mode
There is a good chance you will have experienced how the ego goes hunting for something to identify with, even if you may not have been conscious of it at the time. Usually when there’s a lull of some kind in your external circumstances, when you’ve just recently finished something, lost something, quit something, or when you suddenly find yourself with more free time for some reason, the mind goes into seeking mode for the next thing. The ego has just lost something it had identified with, and so needs to find something new to fill in the gap.
These seeking episodes can be almost too subtle to notice, or all-out desperate attempts at reinventing your identity from scratch. The subtle ones can come in the form of suddenly becoming very interested in a particular television series, for example, where you find yourself identifying strongly with the characters, having daydreams in which you act out roles or somehow project yourself into the show, and even adapt behavioral traits from your favorite characters.
Fantasies where you imagine yourself to have a stronger identity, either through association with some object or person, or through approval and fame — basically where you are “special” in one way or the other — are also an indicator of this seeking pattern.
The lure of “reinventing yourself”
But while identifying with celebrities or fictional television characters is an easy way of finding something to identify with, in times of desperate need the ego will want something more concrete to work with. Personally I have experienced this in the form of becoming absolutely obsessed with different hobbies or specialty interests; mainly communities of enthusiasts that center around some sort of object or industry. It is an urge to become part of a scene, to become that kind of person, all in order to find security in an externally supported identity.
To find one of these “worlds” to enter and become part of is an easy way for the ego to reinvent its identity. Like dressing up in a new costume, it is also a way of finding somewhere to belong; something we do in more subtle ways when choosing how we present ourselves to the world externally through clothing and such. Seeking to become this kind of person or that kind of person, experimenting with different externally derived identities, is of course very noticeable during adolescence, as we know, but the same pattern of seeking goes on long after that.
This idea of reinventing yourself is a favorite one to the ego. Starting the year with a clean slate, turning things around, becoming the person you want to be, etc.; it’s seducing, and entertaining these ideas is almost the equivalent of comfort food for the ego-identified mind.
But even if you become someone else on the surface, take up golfing or buy a Harley, all that’s really changed is the content of your illusory identity. The same clunky old projector playing a new film.
Attachment to being a somebody
However, there is nothing inherently wrong with having preferences or particular worldly interests. You can live in joy and inner peace and still have hobbies and belong to the national association of something or other. Even the game of reinventing yourself on the surface can be fine — as with other aspects of the world of form, the crux of the matter lies in your level of attachment to it.
It is unavoidable that as long as you are in this world, you will have an external identity. Even if it weren’t for social conventions like names, roles and other labels, you would still be in a particular human body. This is not problematic in and of itself, and only becomes a problem when you identify yourself with this external identity. When you say “I am this body” or “I am a basketball player.” In effect, the world of form is not a problem until you become attached to it. Having a Harley Davidson is fine, but basing your entire identity on the concept of being somebody who has a Harley Davidson is problematic.
There is certainly a correlation between strongly emphasized form identities and the level of attachment to them, simply because if you are free of attachment to the world of form you will have little interest in projecting a particular image of yourself, and vice versa. But the outward manifestation of something like a personal preference is still just an effect, a symptom, and not the cause, and so there is no reason to avoid or resent your form identity. In fact, making an effort to deny your form identity is really an indication that you have an attachment to another kind of form identity, perhaps as “the spiritual person who has no worldly interests.”
When it comes to hobbies, preferences, or other things having to do with your form identity, it will only be counterproductive to try and deny or resist them. What you can do however is observe, and allow them to be as they are. Fully embrace whatever the worldly interest is, and investigate in what way you may be deriving an identity from it. If you’re identified with something, there is an attachment to it because the ego needs it for its survival. In mild cases it may be enough to just notice the identification, and then allow it to fade away on its own, but in some cases it may be best to simply drop whatever it is you are attached to, at least temporarily.
There are also some pointers you can experiment with, ways of looking at things that separate the element of identification so that you can see it more clearly. For example, you can approach the thing, whatever it might be, as if you weren’t there, removing yourself from the mental picture. Or, if the interest is heavily based on community, a group of like-minded people that share a particular interest, you can try contemplating questions like “if I were the only one interested in this,” or “if nobody could ever know that I own this/did this/am interested in this, what would change?” If you have expertise in something, ask yourself “what if nobody could ever know that I know this?”
In essence, it is about seeing the things in your form identity that make you feel special, feel like you are a somebody, because these will be your points of attachment. The attachment to being a somebody is probably the main aspect of our identification with form, and observing how this plays into our worldly interests and preferences can be enormously helpful in becoming free of attachment to the world.
Filed under Notes on 31. May 2007 »
Our primordial identification with form, and as such a very common obstacle in spiritual practice, is identification with the body. The idea that I am this body and you are that body, both completely separate from everything else. Then on top of that come the labels we attach to the body, a physical description, judgment in comparison with other bodies, and of course our name, which, lumped together along with an endlessly complicated string of more concepts and labels, makes up who we think of as ourselves.
Breaking this identification with the body is difficult — simple in and of itself, but difficult because of the momentum of the idea that “this body is who I am.” It is the very foundation of our conditioning, deep seated and stubborn, and most people would probably find it absurd to even question it. “Of course this is who you are, just look in a mirror,” they might say.
The illusion starts to fade away when your level of awareness rises, and the more you go into stillness the deeper the recognition that who you are is beyond the body. So it’s not really necessary to address the issue on this level, as simply becoming still quietly resolves all doubts and form-based conflict, but using inquiry and pointers can be helpful and speed up the process.
The other day I came across a quote by Nisargadatta Maharaj, from the book I Am That, which is a useful pointer towards realizing who you are beyond the body. He was talking about how you are not anything that takes form, whether it be a thought, an experience, the body, etc., and that who you are is the witness to all of these. Everything happens and you are simply there to witness it, “look[ing] at everything as from a distance.”
Looking at everything from a distance is a way of detaching from the body and the world of form. Stepping back, observing how everything happens, how the body moves, how thoughts come and go. The idea of distance brings a bit of space between you and the world, between you and form, and points to a way of experiencing the world of form without being bound to it. Wearing the world like a loose garment, as St. Francis put it.
The idea of looking at everything from a distance is a sort of mantra: an idea that you return to over and over again, every time causing a tiny little shift in perception. Eventually, all this nudging at the foundations of the conditioning will cause it to crumble. And when you create space between you and the world of form, between you and the body for example, you will find yourself increasingly able to simply relax into it, abiding in peace within and looking out at the world from a distance.
Filed under Notes on 7. May 2007 » [6]
A defining characteristic of our conditioning is a stubborn, illogical and counterproductive habit of resisting what is. The ego always wants to be against something, and the default mode of approaching the world is that of resistance, denial and avoidance.
Among spiritual seekers, this can manifest as a desire to use the spiritual path as a means of escaping or avoiding challenges they are faced with in the world of form. It can be subtle, sometimes so much so that it turns into a difficult obstacle. The mind is very clever when it comes to future-projected promises of salvation, some magical solution to all your problems that will get you to a point of arrival or “making it” sometime in the future, and the spiritual path can be seen by the ego as a means to that end.
It can be seen as a way of constructing a safe story for yourself, basically the same old “story of me” but without all the problems. And in this way, you approach the spiritual path as an alternative story line you can use to replace the old one.
And in a certain way this is true; spiritual awakening is indeed the end to all problems. But not in the way the conditioned mind thinks of it though. Becoming free of problems is not about one day finding yourself living in a world where you are free of the polarities of gain and loss, birth and death, success and failure. Things will continue to come and go, but it only becomes a problem when viewed through the filter of conditioned thinking. To quote Shakespeare again, “nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
I will go more into this later, in-depth, but for now let me leave you with a little exercise that deals with the issue directly; a pointer that shifts you from being in a mode of resistance, which is more or less our default response to challenges in the conditioned state, and on to being able to work with whatever you are presented with in the world of form. What this entails is simply to act as if you had chosen whatever arises in the moment. It already is, and so you might as well work with it instead of resisting it.
In this way, you can face all challenges completely without turning them into problems that you then want to avoid having to deal with. When you face everything fully in this way, you will begin to see solutions and opportunities instead of problems and obstacles. And so not only will the challenges seem lighter and less serious than before, you will actually be much more able to deal with them effectively.
Practicing this is particularly useful to overcome the obstacle we talked about earlier, of wanting to use the spiritual path as a story device, and can help you shake loose from what can sometimes be a very subtle trap of conditioned thinking.
Filed under Articles on 29. April 2007 »
In the world of form there is pleasure and there is pain. Everything in the world is subject to polarities, and so we could say that all things already contain their opposite; you cannot have good without bad, and every high has a corresponding low. In the very nature of gaining something lies the possibility of losing it, and we know this intuitively. And so if we look closer, we see that pleasure and pain are really one and the same: they are the two polarities of suffering
Filed under Notes on 15. April 2007 »
Lately, and you may have noticed by the dip in my writing output, I have been busy with things. I've had my attention occupied with things coming, things going, things changing — all the while feeling this vague sense of discomfort and absence, for lack of a better word, that comes with having your attention consumed by the world of form for too long. It is a draining sense of being away from home somehow, so I guess you could say I'm feeling a little road weary.
When you’ve been away from home like this, the return is so welcome and comforting that you wonder why you ever went away in the first place. But this is what we do. We leave home, leave ourselves, first of all as we grow up and take on the burdens of social conditioning. This is what most people must go through, and then try to find their way back. Back to innocence, you could say, or back to their natural state of being. Whatever you want to call it, it feels like returning home. And this is what all spiritual teaching is about; to lead you back to that place, providing signposts that point the way back to where you came from.
This process of becoming lost in the world, the process of growing up, is then repeated as a pattern throughout one’s life. And to those on the spiritual path, this ebb and flow of finding your way and then becoming lost again will probably sound very familiar. Taking two steps forward and one step back, we all know what that is like.
When we become lost in the world, it is because too much of our attention is given to the surface, and not enough to the essence. We become fascinated with noise, and forget about the silence that lies beneath and beyond it. This then takes the form of increased mental noise and compulsive thinking, which gains momentum and keeps us floating on the surface.
At some point, because you have already known what it is like not being lost, there will come a time where you feel a desire to return back home. Being more or less lost like this is normal to the majority of mankind, and many people can be away from home like this all their lives while remaining relatively peaceful and happy. But when you have had a glimpse of freedom, it will be impossible for you to be lost without suffering. The desire to return home can be felt as anything from vague unease to a painful sense of pressure, and however it manifests there is absolutely no way of ignoring it.
Nor would you want to ignore it. Because you know that being lost in things is not what you want, however easy and comfortable it may seem in movies and magazines. Travel down that road and you will always find yourself disappointed, frustrated and uneasy. Which is most likely why you are reading this right now.
This pattern I mentioned earlier, the ebb and flow, is the strangest thing. It’s amazing how easy it is to get distracted, to get lost, over and over again, even if you know that it is not what you want. The world has a very strong pull, and the momentum of thinking we’ve inherited in our conditioning means that it doesn’t take much to send us wandering off the path.
Ultimately, the suffering we encounter when walking in the wrong direction is what keeps us coming back, and the more lost we get the more we suffer. At first, we tend to get completely lost, suffer greatly and then find our way back in a flash of insight, perhaps. All very dramatic. But further along the path, there comes a point where the movement is relatively gentle. As I’m experiencing it now, I don’t get lost enough in the world so that I hit a point of suffering that then bounces me back. The movement is slower. There is peace, and presence, but a persistent tendency to get carried away with form.
A word that keeps coming to me in relation to this is vigilance. And what I recognize I must do, and what you may want to do also, is to increase the level of dedication. Cultivate discipline; not in the sense of forcing it using willpower — that is the ego at work — but rather as a sense of sobriety and deliberate intent.
It feels good to return home.
Filed under Notes on 2. April 2007 » [2]
When we say that something is ours, be it an object, an opinion, a social role, we are speaking as a person, a separate entity among other separate entities. My opinion is only mine if there is a me, and the me in this instance is the mind made sense of self.
Of course, this is all very useful and practical when participating in the world of form. If I purchase a car, it is registered in my name and I can refer to it as my car. The structures of the world require these distinctions, and it’s easy to see how things would get bent out of shape without the systems of ownership and individuality.
What we are addressing here, however, is not really the outer manifestation of these concepts, but rather the psychological attachment to them. And how the thought of my this and my that fuels and perpetuates the egoic sense of self. There’s nothing wrong with saying “my name is David and this is my house” — the issues arise when these concepts are identified with, and the house becomes part of a pile of thoughts in a form identity labeled ‘David.’ When you feel that ‘David the homeowner’ is who you are, the inherently harmless concepts of me and mine have become part of the illusion of ego.
A good indicator of when you are identifying with something you own, a car for example, is a feeling of either pride or shame. If you are extremely proud of your car and want to be seen in it, or if you are ashamed of it and don’t want to be seen in it, then the car has become part of your sense of self. It is no longer just ‘my car’ in the practical sense, on paper, but a part of what you see as yourself.
In a world where our relationship with objects is so heavily based on ownership, simply going about your daily life can provide the ego with plenty to keep it going. It’s built into our social conditioning to have this subtle sense of identification with the things we own, and just becoming aware of it can be a great opportunity for spiritual growth.
It can seem a little strange and esoteric at first, but try reminding yourself, when you are looking at or using something you own, that this thing is not yours. This computer isn’t mine, this bed isn’t mine, this tea cup isn’t mine, and not even this body is mine. Nothing is mine, because ‘me’ the owner is an illusion.
The next step is then to see that what you think of as ‘your life’ isn’t yours at all, after which all concepts of ownership are recognized as mere surface phenomena. Practical, but ultimately nothing more than a thought in the mind.
Filed under Articles on 12. March 2007 »
One common denominator for us human beings is that we are all looking for home in some way. We want to get to some place where we can finally come to a stop in our search, somewhere we can relax and feel at ease. We are looking for comfort and safety.
Filed under Articles on 26. February 2007 » [2]
Even when compared to other first-world problems, addiction to entertainment may not seem all that serious. It isn’t as newsworthy as alcoholism and drug addiction, and certainly not as destructive on the face of it, but entertainment addiction is a ‘silent killer,’ so to speak. It is more or less socially acceptable, and even seen as a mark of success in its sneakier manifestations (e.g. stock tickers and multitasking), so it is possible to get into a deep pit of addiction to entertainment in modern society without yourself or anyone else even noticing
Filed under Notes on 13. February 2007 »
I’m sure many of you recognize the symptoms of being mentally over-stimulated; email, RSS, instant messaging, forums, blogs, podcasts, social networking services, etc., together working to create a constant stream of information that demands your attention all day every day. And we become really good at keeping up with all of it, expanding our capacity for dealing with rapidfire input of information all day long and taking pride in the ability to do everything at once.
Speaking from my own experience, all of this — let’s just lump it as information technology — has proven to be a great challenge in my spiritual practice. I spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer, and so my mind has become very good at processing information. This is a valuable skill to have these days, but also a great liability; not in and of itself, really, but rather because it amplifies the preexisting dysfunction of the mind. It speeds up our thinking, and when the mind stream gathers momentum the easier it is for the ego to play out its destructive thought patterns. The mind is only a tool, of course, but continuously feeding it more and more noise can cause it to spin out of control.
I’m going to write a more in-depth article on this, but for now I’ve made a list of potential remedies for this self-inflicted attention deficit disorder so many people are finding themselves having to deal with now. Small exercises that only require you to set aside a couple of minutes per hour, but need to be practiced diligently in order to work over the long term. The difficulty is in establishing them as habits, but once that has been done the overall effect will be much greater than the time commitment would suggest.
In order of difficulty, easiest one first:
1. Observe your breath
Consciously observing your breath, even if only for a couple of minutes, is much more effective than it sounds.
2. Listen to silence
If you are surrounded by noise all day long, and rest assured you are not the only one, try sensing the underlying silence beneath the noise. The silence out of which the noise arises, the emptiness, the stillness that is always there no matter how noisy it may appear on the surface. One method of getting closer to this is to try and notice a sound that is really far away, something barely audible (or only in your imagination, as it were).
3. Feel the aliveness within
This is about feeling your body from within, to sense the incredible aliveness in your entire body (and it is amazing once you are able to notice it). To start off with, hold out your arms and, eyes closed, ask yourself “how do I know my hands are there?”
Another way of looking at this is to move your point of ‘beingness’ from your head and into the rest of your body. Sensing yourself as being centered in the abdomen, for example, and focusing your attention on that area.
4. Stop thinking
Which is really the wrong way of saying it because you can’t really stop it, or at least not with force. It is more a conscious decision to allow thought to subside, which can with practice start to work in a way that you are able to simply stop thinking, so to speak. You step back and observe the thought stream until it fades away by itself.
The main difficulty with all of these is to simply remember to practice them. It’s so easy to get dragged into a stream of thinking, especially with these modern and information addled little minds of ours, so as long as we keep using information technology we need to be vigilant in keeping it at a certain distance.
Filed under Articles on 8. February 2007 »
If you were to read a transcript summary of your thinking over the course of a normal day, you might find that a lot of it centers around what you want for yourself; looking at things in terms of what’s in it for you, what you need to do in order to ensure your own comfort, how you can turn situations in your favor etc. And while you may not have many obviously self-serving thoughts, on a deeper level the general theme may still revolve around them to a certain degree
Filed under Articles on 26. January 2007 » [7]
In spiritual teachings, the word ‘attachment’ is widely used to describe our relationship with the world and is often talked about as being the root of human suffering. Basically, it is said that the more you are attached to the world of form the more you will suffer. And thus to become free of suffering, you must relinquish attachment
Filed under Notes on 23. January 2007 » [1]
A Course in Miracles says in its discussion on detachment from worldly values:
“Your whole perspective on the world will shift by just a little, every time you let your mind escape its chains.”
And when I read this, I realized that it is a very accurate description of the process of spiritual awakening as experienced by most people. For some, the chains will break off once and for all in a blast of realizations, as in the case of teachers like Byron Katie and Eckhart Tolle, but for most people it is a matter of iteration. Two steps forward, one step back, repeat. This is a process that many of you will probably be familiar with, the process of realizing a deep truth, see a quick glimpse of freedom, and then getting lost in the world again. And although you may be tempted at this point to think ‘easy come, easy go,’ you will find on further inspection that you haven’t really become entirely lost again. Every time you glimpse freedom, your level of awareness heightens by just a little, and when repeated over and over again the light of consciousness starts to gain more and more momentum. It will be difficult at first, but once your level of awareness reaches a certain tipping point, characterized mainly by your outlook having become predominantly positive, your practice will become easy, playful, and almost effortless.
At times you will experience giant leaps forward, for example after having just gone through a great deal of suffering, but most of the time it is a matter of patiently repeating your practice and heightening your level of consciousness in small steps. And this, as I see it, is the true practical value of meditation, because even if you only have 15 minutes of peaceful introspection in a day otherwise filled with noise and activity, your awareness will gradually become higher and higher as you go along.
Filed under Articles on 18. January 2007 » [3]
Most people will be familiar with the ebb and flow of interest and motivation, and how frustrating it can be to swing from one thing to the other without ever really committing to anything. This can apply to casual interests and hobbies, consumer goods, career options, places, situations, and even friendships
Filed under Articles on 13. January 2007 » [36]
So, you want your life to be stressful? Didn’t think so, but it’s amazing how many people consistently apply habits and actions in their daily lives that guarantee stressful results. They repeat the same things over and over again, expecting different results, which is, if I recall correctly, the textbook definition of insanity. After hitting the same wall every day for 20 years, people think “okay, if I just really hammer it this time then maybe it suddenly won’t be there.”
Filed under Articles on 2. January 2007 » [10]
A common issue on the path to spiritual awakening is balancing outwardly focused activity with inner stillness and introspection. The world has an enormous pull, and especially early on in the transformation process it is very easy to get lost in ‘doing.’ The conditioned thought patterns that are the main characteristic of the unconscious state tend to have great momentum, and remaining active in the world while maintaining balance can prove challenging
Filed under Articles on 28. December 2006 » [9]
In this world, some things that happen can appear to have no meaning or purpose. Mostly these are the things we judge to be bad, like being laid off from one’s job or having an accident of some kind. People are at a loss to understand how war, hunger, natural disasters and human suffering can possibly have any meaning, and why these things happen
Filed under Articles on 22. December 2006 »
Do you have a problem? Chances are you have several. The car just started developing a strange noise in the wrong place, you have three different bosses at work and none of them seems to like you very much, the NASDAQ is taking a beating, your back hurts, and so on and so on
Filed under Articles on 18. December 2006 » [7]
One thing that we know unites most people who are really good at what they do, is that they love what they do. Yo-Yo Ma loves playing the cello, and Tiger Woods absolutely loves the game of golf. And this is obvious to everyone. However, when we think about people like that, people that are at the top of their game in something, we usually have at the top of our minds an image of the glory of success. The triumph of their public performance is what we see on television, and so it’s easy for us to see how they love what they do
Filed under Articles on 4. December 2006 »
In the normal state of consciousness, it can be said that our attention is almost continuously occupied with form. Thoughts, objects, situations, and externally derived sense experience, leave us almost no room at all for looking within and being aware of that which is beyond form. If we were to look at life in terms of balance between inner and outer, the formless and form, the habitual ratio between the two is almost always in favor of the outer; something like 95% things, thoughts, and noise, 5% stillness and peace
Everyday Wonderland is a weblog on the subject of spiritual awakening, creativity, enthusiasm, inspiration, and generally everything having to do with the higher levels of human consciousness. The author is Helgi Páll Einarsson, 24 years old and currently living in Iceland. He likes books in the morning, making things, and taking long walks.