Are goals important?

Why? I chose some, but it was more to give focus to thought, making it more pleasant, than for any other reason. My energy is low lately - still recovering from surgery and so on - so it does not make me follow through on my goals. But I know what they are. I decide not to add more, or to send my limited energy off in other directions. "Do these things, or rest." That is how goals are helping me, so I don't revisit the question endlessly. Goals help me not think. Very useful!

the All-Seeing I

Over a year ago I had an experience during a guided visualization that created a permanent change in perspective. I won't describe it, other than to say that it was about the Two Real Things: the Void, and Experience. This morning I had an interesting thought about how we perceive, and what our view means. Experience is seen in analogy by looking straight forward and noticing the round, seemingly edgeless window of sight. (Like what Douglas Harding describes in his book "On Having No Head") The Void is understood by analogy to the invisible realm "behind our heads" which is outside the field of view, all that we cannot be conscious of.

"With, not thro' the Eye"

This morning I was turning my head a bit to be aware of the inconspicuous boundary of my vision, and I felt that something within me was trying to stretch that edge as far back and around as possible. Could the Ego be wanting to see in all directions at once, to know and control everything? Maybe. But it is also true that the Third Eye is known as "the All-Seeing Eye". It is understood in the Astral Realm as including all forms of perception and thought itself: the "6 senses" described by the Buddha. At Enlightenment (or Liberation, or whatever the most exalted state is called) there is no unconscious, and all that can be perceived and known is present.

So maybe the pull I was feeling is the natural growth of the being? What do you think? Do the experiment, and become aware of what you see, and what you do not see.

less think then you smart

"Thought reveals alternatives. It was not meant to solve problems or decide things." - Zulaikha Mahmud

I have two perspectives for you:
1) you are not as smart as you think you are.
2) you are smarter than you realize. Ready?

This morning, while sitting on my porch, I reached to brush away a minute piece of fluff when it suddenly flew. It was an almost invisibly small pure white flying insect. This creature has a digestive system, legs, wings, eyes, other senses, a brain, and it can reproduce. Consider that next time you think of how great your iPhone is. But let's focus on the brain. How many neurons might it have? A few thousand at most? Clearly it does not engage in a thought process. This is a CPU that processes sensory input and runs pre-defined programs that find food and mates, and protect it from harm, whether a sudden downpour or a malicious child. It can learn.

No Story

If so few neurons can govern all of that, we have to pause and consider the nature of what we call "thought". After all, we have about 100 million times as many neurons, yet there is still sarcasm, gangs, obesity and genocidal war. We are not so far up the scale as we imagine. I would say that if we were even capable of being farther along in development, we would be. Nothing is holding back the tiny white moth, and nothing is holding us back either! A big brain does not make us smart. It might not even give us the capacity to understand ourselves, and without that, the cause is lost. We might as well accept that we are - largely - automata, carrying out programs. (and reading blogs and sites about Nonduality) (Filling out Tax forms... Designing tax forms...) (Shhhh, you'll ruin the story)

If this is the case, we have to deeply reflect on what day to day life is about. OK, I guess you are done with that now, so let's continue.

My idea is that neurons alone are not the thought-makers. The entire body has neurons and cells that produce and respond to neurotransmitters and hormones. The whole thing is one giant "second favorite organ". It is all response, all the time. Even while asleep, it is doing stuff, and managing without our "help" just fine, thank you! So expand your view of what constitutes awareness, response, planning or at least perspective. Reduce your worship of discursive thought within your mind. It is not so very important, or even useful.

Which brings us back to my porch. Last night I was watching the movie "God's Not Dead" with some friends and talking about it. The inevitable idea dominating all such discussions, of which I have learned not to blurt out my perspective, is: God is Over There and we are Over Here. There is a separateness that is not even worthy of noting. No one says: I am not God! (or, I Am God! except the Mystics) (mmm hmm) (and it would be redundant, as I Am and God are the same word) Why is this the unquestioned assumption? The entire basis of Religion and the despair of non-believers is due to that idea. It is just a thought. If we threw it out and started over with what we can observe, every person on Earth would see life differently, and it might just prevent all the above noted problems. So let's lead up to it with a more basic idea: I am my porch. My porch is me.

Love Me, Love My Porch

On the face of it, this is completely indisputable. The porch does not ever "happen" for me without "me" being there. I never get a text message from the porch about how the wind has overturned the plastic chairs or whatever. But the same is true for the porch: I don't exist except for it. (Ignore the use of "it" as the common term for "inanimate object".) The porch sits there all day, with wind blowing across it, just as the wind blows over my skin when I sit there. Sun shines on it. Rain falls, exactly as it patters on me before I head inside. In short, there is no real difference. The same things happen. Why do I think that I am different from the porch? If I was anesthetized to unconsciousness and lying out there, we would all agree that it is the same. So, I and the porch are one. I am not saying the porch has thoughts, any more than my ear has thoughts. I am just saying that a meaningful distinction would be hard to put in words. The tiny white moth is on the porch. It is on me. It is flying in search of food. It is resting...

So let us take one giant leap for mankind and say, as our Preceptor did: God and I are one. Can't be otherwise, right? "What more IS there than the universe, Spock?" Exactly. And what is it made of? God had nothing else to make it out of than God's Self. As Rumi said, "There is no reality but God. There is only God." Maybe we can all hold that thought once in a while and see what happens as a result. But I doubt it.

recruiting

I was leafing through this book I bought for my father, "Waking Up - a guide to spirituality without religion". (I have not read even most of it, I thought my father and I could discuss it.) It seemed to relate to what I have been studying in the last year.  One bit that caught my thinking was the investigation of how there can be multiple "consciousnesses" or points of view in the mind, and one is the one we identify with at the moment. The simplest view of that is the well-known split-brain research. But you can research this all by yourself right now by closing one eye. Look through a railing or past a nearby object at a more distant one. Close or cover one eye, then the other. In one case the nearby object will seem to move, and the opposite side of your brain is the one that is "me" at that moment. Usually the left side of the brain is in charge of daily thought. But what if you could get the other side to be the leader? What sorts of things does it consider important? Doing less linear and verbal things will get the right side going, like painting, dance, sports, relationships, and most of what we do most of the time. Which of these two people is "really you"? Yes.

The book suggests that there can be several small centers of awareness going on at once, but they are silent to the main thread of consciousness, usually. I am familiar with this feeling from my work with personality facets. Most people resist the idea that internally they have several points of view and that they could differ markedly. So here is another experiment: find your blind spots. Look at a wall or something about 10 feet away where there are two small clearly visible objects on a horizontal line. Cover your right eye, look at the object to the left, then slowly move your gaze a bit to the right until the left object vanishes. The blind spot is inward on your eyeball from the center of view. Normally, your two eyes work together to have the blind spots covered by at least one eye, so that you see everything. But how many times have you turned while driving to look and then next thing you knew, someone was there that you had not seen before? If when you looked you could get only one eye on the scene, then unknown to you a substantial part of reality was simply not visible for a moment, and you missed the pedestrian, motorcycle or car that was nearby. It is called a blind spot because we are entirely unaware of it. If the brain would not try to hide the lack of information from us, it might be better, but also more uncomfortable. Try it with your other eye also. Is one blind spot larger, or more confusing or hard to deal with? Remember, when you are driving, you really need both eyes when you look, because part of your view is lying to you.

If the brain can lie to us about two halves of visual awareness, then it can certainly suppress multiple points of view in our "unconscious" minds. I would say that there are parts of all of us active much of the time that are completely conscious of themselves, but not heard from in the main thought track. This has two drawbacks: we don't really know ourselves, and the more that we are split in to small factions the less useful we can be. Much energy is wasted reinforcing the illusion of a single view - dominant thought, blind spots and all (your ego) - that could go into being happy and effective. Nonduality is learning how to "recruit" larger and larger areas of the continual awareness (which you can think of as parts of the brain if it makes you happy) in to a single unitive state of consciousness. If this is not a new idea, it certainly has not been heard about enough.

To me, nonduality is no more mystical, religious, spiritual or otherwise non-ordinary than is walking. We are born to use our awareness for whatever we wish. They just forgot to include the owners manual. If you think there is more to realization than that, I am here to tell you: there is not.

Growth - poem

I have a photo that I look at in my workplace,
to remind me where I am going.
It is no one I know.
Her expression says that there is nothing
in the past for me.
Knowledge, choices, relationships...
have no application to Now.
Now is not about freedom, because there is nothing
to be free from, or to.
Now is not about wisdom, or static decisions.

I am not trying to explain this to you. I can't.

Growth is the path which can never be seen

in advance, not even in theory.
It is only practice. There is no test.

-

(The photo is of Annie Clark)

"But it does move"

I have been pondering how there are still motivations sometimes, errors, false paths... I have never been one to hold myself to a standard, so that is not going to happen. The standard is that the "be-er" is experiencing and choosing. What looks like a still center of no-self - - moves. It dances with life. Far better than a static standard!

explanation

People are always wondering why the universe (or life) is the way it is. They ask why God would make things this way? "What kind of a God would..." and as far as I know, even the believers don't have an answer that makes sense or is convincing. But I have one.

Let's not get carried away

Someone I know says that Experience exists because "the Void can't know itself." So, presumably, the Void created Experience, and now Seeing is seeing Itself. That makes sense, right? Can we say that this is at least a consistent picture? If you were all possibility but no actuality, and no present awareness, wouldn't you create Experience in order to know... what you actually are? I would.

So, what kind of a universe would you make? Personally, I would have no clue where to start, so I suppose I would start with the fabric of space and time, then make some forces and particles. From there, as we know, particles can make choices, and we would be off and running. In other words, a God that knew nothing at all would do exactly what we observe to be the case. And a God that already knew everything would have no reason to do it in the first place.

Next question.

character story texture

Character is the "what" that plays a role. Nonduality sees this What as only a wrinkle in the fabric of Experience, a locus for energy and time to intersect. Ego wants to claim it as a separately existing thing, but it is simply part of the flowing wholeness. Character has a name (or several) and appearance and tendencies. But all of that is mutable, transitory and only for fun. Choose what you want it to be. This character decided several years ago to create personality facets and give them names and let them do what they wished. Later found that this is called Transpersonal Psychology, which is like inventing multiplication when I was 7... Endless creativity can create anything. Fear for nothing.

Story is something that gets stuck to the Character. Ego tells the stories over and over, to itself, and anyone who will listen. This is a dead end. Free yourself from the compulsion to believe anything about yourself.

Texture is the "how" Experience unfolds. Coffee. Sunrise. Biting an orange. Listening to music. Dancing on the beach. Every experience is unique in all of time. There are no repeats, so don't catch yourself being bored. Life is not a rehearsal. The hearse will come one day, and for now it is unimportant. Yours. Anyone's. Experience it now. Start with whatever is happening... Right... Now. What happens is beyond question. Texture is truth.

steering the sandworm

I have been thinking about dreams: it is fascinating that there can be this audio-visual and other-senses presentation that is fully convincing, made up out of nothing. Try closing your eyes and doing the same thing? It is nowhere near as complete. So what is going on there? My dreams have places, made up or based on real places, or actual real places, sometimes that I have not yet been to, or that I do not consciously remember. I described a house to my parents that we moved out of when I was 3, based on a dream I had when I was 45. There are people in dreams with complete histories, appearance, voice tone. Conversations happen. Unexpected things happen. Can you surprise yourself while awake? If you play both sides of a Chess game, can you beat yourself?

My point is that the conscious verbal mind is only a tiny bleb on the surface of our total being. So much is happening without awareness that one should hardly be amazed at the wild and outrageous things that people do. If we cannot even create a daydream consciously that is anything like the dreams the Basic Self manages without effort asleep, then it says a lot about how much of the being the ego really is: very very little. Why do people think so highly of their own thought process? This is epic vanity, like Ecclesiastes described, worthy of reciting for thousands of years! Get off your pedestal, imposter!

If you really look at how life functions, and how unconscious or delirious most of waking awareness is, you will probably agree that the egoic self we cling to is often nothing more than an observer, or witness to events. I don't like those terms. Sometimes people write about that point of view as some kind of attainment. I think it is the view of a drunk lying in the gutter. Evict the witness, it is just the ghost of a specter. The being does its thing, on many levels: cells need no help from us. Organs and systems are perfectly capable. The body can find food and shelter, defend itself, reproduce... all without words or planning at all. The mind can capture information, recall, design things, find solutions... without an ego stepping in and micromanaging.

The ego is like trying to steer a sandworm. It goes where it wants to. It is far bigger than we are, and it will take care of itself.

no best self

Who wants to know?

Have you ever felt like you were calling on the self-phone, trying to reach your higher nature? For me, the calls go through, but Customized Service can't always give me an answer to my questions. I have had this experience since I was a child, and have discussed it with a friend of mine, that there is a Main Voice that talks with me, but it is not - as I see it - part of my personality. My friend admits that the voice is there, but says it has no special knowledge. I would say it does, but it is a perspective of what I am experiencing right then.

I do not aspire to be that "better self", because to me, it does not represent a self, or an improved version of me, or anything at all, really. It is just "a thought having a thought", which is perfectly fine, as long as I am clear about it. (I don't have a Thinking problem, I can stop any time.)

It irks me when I read magazine articles about becoming my true self or best self or whatever. The assumption seems to be that I just need some improving and more experience and I will have it all down. A few false beliefs pruned and some right view, and I will be much better off. No, the point is to realize that the thought process is a mechanism, and it is not special, or permanent or important or an identity... It is just something happening, really. It is like worshiping a tree: what happens in a hundred years when the tree inevitably dies? Did God go away? How then is reality still unfolding? (I guess if we are standing there pondering, it is alright, but if one's own tree dies, then that would be a problem.)

I DO use the phrase True Nature, which I first heard from Deborah Westmoreland. It sounds similar, but my distinction is:

1. It is not MY nature, but the nature of Experience
2. It is true in the sense of being free of wrong ideas
3. It is impersonal
4. It does not point to a higher reality, but the one we observe

So, "True Nature" is like a placeholder that defers questions until one gets beyond the need to have them answered. No one ever takes it to the bank. That's much better than the temptation to believe in a better version of oneself. For what will that self do? What will it want? This is the childish belief in happily ever after. Heaven exists, but it is still limited, still impermanent, and one must still face the fact that one is special, just like everyone else. There is no trophy for being so wonderful. What do you want this better scenario for? It just kicks the same can down the road. Throw the can away now.

True Nature is the realization that the whole idea of specialness was a fabrication. Things are good how they are. Life doesn't need frosting, or any dessert at all. The main course is fine.

[Pay no attention to this post]

I found out that the main content of my site (on the tabbed Pages at the top) is not indexed for searching unless I link to it. So this is just a set of links to the six main pages of the site. "Move along, there is nothing to see here."
Perspective - getting a handle on Awakening
Stages - tendencies that make Awakening easier
One - a self with Ego "off-line": the Neo state
Gone -  the no-self stage of development
Return - everyday life as the Nondualist hobby
Ocean - Why you are precious to me
All except the Ocean page were written June 17, 2014, the day before I went in for open heart surgery.

ICE (In Case of Emergency)

• Derail Deficiency Thinking. Replace it with Being.
• Always turn away from Story.
• Remember that no one will understand or relate.
• Stop idolizing Choice.
• Think less. Merge thoughts.
• Meditate. (yes, start doing it again)
• Hobby? ("something that doesn't talk back")
• Go "Uh" more often.
• Strive to impart info, not a point of view.
• Don't tell Story.

attributes

The other day my girlfriend said something very profound. She was talking about someone she knew and she said that "he realized he was not his own God" or something like that. What an amazing phrase!

I still have not fully seen the implications, but of course the first thing to come to mind was that one certainly must be beyond ego to have that awareness, and beyond Neo also, because the Neo state still has a center. As long as there is something to hang attributes on, the hope persists that it can be "improved".

Which building am I in?

This morning I was thinking that the idealization of others is part of the ego's program for self-deification. The ego sees people with desirable characteristics, and it tries to emulate, copulate, counterfeit, steal or whatever it has to do to climb to the top of the great hill and be God. Not so much from a cause of having power, or being seen, but because a self cannot help but feel lack. Anywhere the shoe pinches, it is not satisfactory, and the self wants perfection. So Buddha's foundational statement, "life is unsatisfactory", is the absolute truth of the ego perspective.

I have admired traits and achievements in others, like my friend with 2 PhD's and 4 patents and a 500 page book. My idealization of her is not truly seeing her, it is me seeing how small and insignificant I am. Cheering her on is me wishing someone would cheer me on. My point is not that there is something wrong with her at all. She is fine as she is. My point is that my view of her is from standing in a hole in the ground, looking up. I am the one with the problem. Psychologically, this has already been explained. But I do not think it has been addressed in terms of spiritual growth.

The answer is not to dismiss others, or the self's frailties. It will not help to reason or re-condition myself, or fault the culture. Everything is what it is. The only fault, is in the "star" inside myself that is its own God. Knock that idol down, dethrone the self to its rightful position as an agent, not an agency, and all will be well.

The Naughtism Spectrum

I was thinking that people (yes, I know they do not exist...) seem to vary in their experiences of nonduality, from: maybe happened a bit as a young child, to a few adult experiences, to some awakening but still integrating, to "fully involved" (A candle was made to become entirely flame - Rumi), to beyond comprehension. So, I created the phrase, the 'Naught'ism Spectrum, since it is another one of those things we thought was a lot of things, but it is really just one big hairy ill-defined thing, and lets get it over with. (I think that is actually the definition of "normal variation", but OK.)

Peace of Mind - 25 cents

Apparently the word is used in a variety of other contexts, so I probably could not get away with introducing it in to my writing. I looked at Not-ism (w/o hyphen) instead, and it is the name of a design and collaboration tool. Not so bad, actually, but likely to result in a lot of wrong search results. Like my "Bare Eyes" name being the same as a brand of makeup... oops. One person said that Notist Art is about trying to preserve some personal history in the face of everything going ephemerally digital. Interesting coincidence.

The WWW is just too darn big and popular these days! Huh.

But back to my point: there is a spectrum of nondual experiences. One satori doth not awakening make. I found a nice article about "Premature Claims to Awakening" and it said that there is a "head awakening" and then it has to move through your being / personality and all the old crap has to get worked through. Otherwise you have "masters" going off and doing bad things. (Bad things? Nevermind... Never... mind... That is funny. Stop talking to yourself! OK, jeez! Wasn't there another article about having a Voice that leads us through the growth process? Hmm.)

The Yoga of Everyday Life

I wrote this list down November 17th:

• get up anyway
• eat anyway
• go to work anyway
• do the ordinary things now, today
• stifle the urge to be special
• be interested, not interesting
• watch the story unfold, forget Story

"Story" is a term from Byron Katie referring to what we tell ourselves over and over. I often neglect to eat, which is not helpful. This list is a set of prompts to remind myself to "get on with it" and stop making issues of nothing, or wishing to draw attention to myself. I find it uplifting.