Following the Reactionary Paradigm

There are many internet spiritualists that claim that your mind, and its thoughts, must be sacrificed and denied if you wish to awaken from the "illusion." These paths inform that you must transcend the mind, which is cause of all your suffering.

But if it is cause for your suffering, might it not cause joy? Are we not first cause, deluded into acting as if second best?

Thoughts give great joy as well as suffering and this thinking is authentically honest and real. However, the teachers of transcendence would deny you your thoughts and the joy that allows you to extend and share that joy with others. Of course, they seek to eradicate your suffering and pain, yet thoughts of love and joy are equally discounted, unless they are the product of some enigmatic “enlightened” state of “no-mind.”

If the ‘self’ is a mental construct that you made up, shouldn’t it be constructed to provide the most peace and joy possible? Why should the peace and joy prescribed by the “enlightened master” be the only legitimate experience? Why is the joy of the 'common man' negated and marginalized while the austere joyful experience of so-called “pure awareness” or “direct experience” the only authentic joy? And just consider how much sacrifice and suffering are prescribed and promised before this bliss is available.

Transcendent joy has its price. No pain, no gain, right?

This is a theme of the world and will not serve to transcend it. The world will not be discarded because it demands you live through it as a construct of experience. But it can be seen differently within, thereby reconstructing experience causing radical changes to an "external" world. The "kingdom of heaven within" does not deny or eradicate the world, but magnifies it through the parameters you construct.

The problem with the world today is fundamental to a disengaged encounter with living in the world and in that disengagement you are estranged and alienated from the world, others and, most of all, your experience of 'self.'

Is the extension of loving joy from parent to child any different from the joy your master teaches you to seek? Is the joy between lovers less than the joy of these prescribed “enlightenment” or “awakening” experiences? Why are the normal joys of living contraindicated and illusory?

Throw it all away, they teach. It's merely a trick of the ego.

As long as you fear or hate the “illusion” of reality, and make this the basis of your “awakening,” you will remain bound to your perception of an illusory world and it can never be anything more than that.

This is the "reactionary paradigm," in which you react to suffering by seeking a means of escape, while the world continues to reflect back more of what you wish to escape from causing your meditative escape 'practices' to become that much more intense and even desperate.

What makes you think the masters "enlightened bliss" is any less an illusion than your suffering or fear? The choice is not transcending an illusory world, but a transformative engagement by deeply embracing the experience of living IN your world. The most profound spiritual exercise you will perform is deeply engaging the experience of your world and those whom you encounter in that world.

Reach out into it in a loving embrace and be awakened. There is no "I AM" separate and isolated from relationship. The I AM knows itself through relating to and extending into a world.

Stop hiding from your experience of living through spiritual and religious platitudes and austere mountain top practices. Come down from your mountain hermitage. The world cries out to become your home, if only you would engage deeply with your experience of a world and make it so.

You will know your truth by sharing it with me and I will know mine through you and that merely confirms the truth that we are ONE. You can encounter hell in your world, but only when you refuse to be part of it.

Being cannot be experienced without 'relationship.'

To BE is to extend outward to a world of your choosing and, make no mistake, you do choose. There is no such experience as "pure being" without an experience of a world for which to BE PURE FOR. God extends and experiences Being and therefore, you exist and will realize your Being through extension, not contracting into a world of religious and spiritual concealment and undisclosed meditative solitude. Tear down the monastery of your 'self'!

Disclose your 'self' to yourself by Being in your world with others experiencing the infinite game.

Love is an Infinite Feedback Loop

Love is a feedback loop that when extended, only comes back around to the mind extending, even when receipt of that extension is denied by the love object you are extending to.

This loop originates with extension TO another, but is not conditioned on extension FROM another.

To know love you must extend love, yet it makes no difference if love is extended back from another. In this way, one can BE love and this BEING is not conditioned on anything other than that BEING.

Nevertheless, according to your ego (the conditioned and socially trained part of your mind), for love to be experienced, all extension, or giving, must be conditioned on ‘getting’ in return. Therefore, your extension TO another is specifically conditioned on their extension TO you. If a return is not forthcoming, based on your extension, your egoic mind will purposely obstruct or even fully terminate the loop that originates from your mind.

Love requires extension to another in order to be experienced, but it is not contingent on another returning it. Mother Teresa was steeped in love for the sick and suffering in her care. Yet, the extent of their sickness may have made it impossible for a return extension. Nevertheless, her love to them magnified love within her experience of self and the loop was completed, and maintained, like an unbroken electrical circuit.

Love magnifies YOU and this magnification is contingent on nothing but extension. This is because the only way to experience love is to extend it.

Of course, you need not be a Mother Teresa, sacrificing your life for the sick, to experience such magnification within your own experience of “self.’ However, there must be another for which to extend. Those we extend to are often family or loved ones of our choosing. Unfortunately, the ego chooses primarily for what it can ‘get’ and less by what it can give. This impedes the feedback loop that is not contingent on receiving anything at all.

A feedback loop in the extension of love can have no interference for the impulses you send out to return to you in a magnified form. Love conditioned as contingent on return impulses from another only impedes what you extend from returning to you. Love is a state of mind and, although physical manifestations are available for observation, unconditioned love is an enlightened state of mind available to all minds.

Love is the nature of Being and extension is our natural predisposition. Demanding extension be contingent on return will cause the loop to eventually contract in upon itself. Many live their entire lives in the experience of a contracted and obstructed feedback loop and never experience the love that serves to magnify life itself.

The difference between this feedback loop and other forms of feedback is that your experience of love is contingent on the impulse you send out being returned in a magnified form, but that magnification requires nothing from anyone else and your only focus is extension. Therefore, you cannot obstruct this extension of mind through imposing conditions on that extension.

This requires a secure sense of ‘self’ in which your security is not contingent on a return of extended love. In this sense, your giving love to another is free and clear of the egoic imposition of any factors whatsoever. Love is not a dependent state and must be free of conditional dependencies that your ego defines.

Surprisingly, (and many have experienced this), what actually takes place through this feedback loop is that, because there is no dependency on a return extension, that return naturally occurs.

When the loved one you extend to experiences that you have no demand for the extension to be returned, the natural predisposition is to extend as well. To experience diminished egoic involvement in extending love is to be inspired through it, and touched by it, instilling a desire to replicate the experience for oneself.

If you extend to me and all my hatred of you does little to impede or terminate that extension, I can only marvel and seek to emulate the experience I reckon you must have encountered. This is because deep down I know this experience and have wanted, longed for it, all my life. We all long for the freedom of an extension of love that makes no demands. This is bound up in our Being and is a natural condition of Being, in fact, it is the only condition of your Being.

In a spiritual sense, there is only one way to experience your Being, free and unfettered from egoic attachment, and that is through the extension of your Being (defined as love) to another, with no condition on whether this is returned or not.

This is the nature of your existence. But a more important point relates to the magnification of the experience of love. This magnification within the feedback loop is infinite. Therefore, increase will continue to occur as much and as far as the mind will allow, based on increasingly diminished conditions. Thus, if another agrees to join the loop you have extended, this serves as an addition to the wholeness you magnify through your own mindful extension and magnifies them in their mind as extension is mutually engaged together.

Love is always an increase to 'self' regardless of who does or does not participate. Yet, make no mistake, participation is naturally compelled in the minds of those so touched by the experience you model through your own secure feedback loop. Take away egoic impositions and the circuit cannot be broken.

See for yourself.

To Get "Enlightenment," Give It Away

Do you wish to be enlightened?

Why?

If the premise behind your seeking enlightenment is because the world sucks, most likely enlightenment will elude you.

This is because “you” are not separate from your “world" and your personal self-construct was manufactured in direct interaction and engagement with that world. You are a “you” because, and only because, the world is a “world.” The world defines “you,” as you define the world. Seek to disengage with that ‘experience’ and you only reinforce the very experience you seek to disengage with...an unenlightened world that often truly sucks.

Therefore, to have “enlightenment” you must first give it to receive it. Only in that way will you realize that it is yours and that you are "enlightened." If you don't experience it in the world, you don't have it. In truth, the concepts of 'giving' and 'receiving' are collapsed, since there is no separation and what you give must be received.

Unfortunately, for the ego, to give is to lose and this is because, for the ego existence is predicated on experiencing itself separate from its experience of the world. Therefore, the ego’s plan for enlightenment is to disengage from the world through its own personal transcendence in which its experience of a “world” is somehow left behind and negated in exaltation of a transcendent ‘self.’

Problem with this faulty logic is that the ego is not separate from its world, just an experience of separation derived solely from a delusional premise of individuality.Your experience of "you" and your experience of the 'world' are both an experiential construct of the same mind.

If you wish to experience "enlightenment," then it would behoove you to first experience it as in the world. This is because you can only have what you give away and only by giving it away will you realize that you have it. There is simply no separation between your ‘self’ and your experience of a world. This is what “enlightenment” ultimately informs. Truth does not differentiate parts, but illuminates an experience of wholeness.

Yet, this brings us to a nasty dilemma since, to give the world enlightenment, you must have it first and this is can be resolved in only one way.

You do have it because you are already enlightened.

Therefore, you already have what the ego seeks to attain. Yet, you have yet to realize what you have, because you fail to extend it or give it away and this is because, for the ego, to give away is to lose and no longer have. This is why the ego seeks to 'get' enlightenment and usually has little thought as to what the world might 'get' as a result. Mostly, the ego just figures that if it gets enlightened, then the world will merely be blessed with another enlightened ego presence.

Just what the world needs. Ha!

Nevertheless, only by giving the world enlightenment, can you benefit from the knowledge that it is yours, since you are not separate from your experience of your 'world.' There is NO separation and seeking to have enlightenment for your ‘self’ merely perpetuates the delusion that you can have something separate from your world. You are IN your world and your world is IN you. See enlightenment in your world and rest assured that it is yours.

To know you are enlightened, you must give it away and because in truth there can be no separation between you and your world, what you give in extension must be retained. Yet, you can only know that you retain enlightenment, when the world is so illuminated through that retaining extension of enlightened 'self.'

So, today, see the world enlightened in the knowledge that it must be, because you ARE. The proof of your enlightenment is out there in your interior experience of an exterior world.

Otherwise, you will continue to substitute suffering for enlightenment and, in your attempts to escape what the world reflects back, you will only make it more real. In your experience of "existence," the line separating 'self' from 'world' is truly imaginary, simply because you made it up.

EGO DYNAMICS: Hiding the Mind

Your ego fears abandonment and assumes that if I really knew you, I'd leave you. This is simply because the ego cannot deny that it is personally responsible for so many hateful and downright nasty thoughts and judgments. But also, the ego-self has no idea what the mind is and if it is truly locked away within your body like it's supposed to be.


Therefore, you can only give me so much of "you," while all else must be kept secret.

The ego relies primarily on separate bodies. It can't be too sure about the nature of 'mind.' It suspects that somehow thoughts may leave their source, since God made "the word" and "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us."

The mind is a suspicious entity to an ego and thus the ego is much more comfortable with bodies. It's very easy for you to doubt the security of your own mind.

The ego fears exposure. Somehow I might 'know' your thoughts and you might inadvertently expose the utter hatred that often lurks within your ego-self. The ego must insure that, even in those moments that you loathe me and wish me dead, this fact remain securely locked away with a smile upon your lips.

Because the ego believes it can never know the secret thoughts of others, it does not trust other egos and this distrust is the hallmark of even the most "loving" relationships.

Yet, although it seems that your mind is separate from other minds, tucked away in a skin-encapsulated body, there is the nagging doubt that somehow I might know more than you wish for me to know. You can't be sure, at least not with the certainty you have regarding the separation between bodies.

Are minds truly separate? The ego can never know.

Mind is such an obscure and nebulous 'thing.' It's so completely different from everything you have come to know through the mind. It has no time/space coordinates and sometimes it seems as if it doesn't exist at all. How often do you think about your "thinking" before you act, as opposed to automatically act from your thinking? Awareness of actions is so much simpler and, as they say, "actions speak louder than words." For the ego, actions are much more significant than thought and much easier to predict.

Because the ego does not trust the mind, it is careful of what it thinks. In fact, it must hide some of its thoughts even from itself. You must avoid certain thoughts or feelings because you never know who might discover the 'real you.' Maybe even God.

If even you don't know the real you, how can anyone else find you out. Therefore, your ego grants permission to deny your hatred. Not only must the body be kept from exposing your thoughts, but the mind must be cloaked as well.

It is important that you often hide your mind from yourself and this is where spirituality can come in handy. Spirituality can aid in creating psychological constructs for which to channel your hateful thoughts away from you. Now the spiritual "you" can split off from the egoic "you," in denying the hell you are capable of creating for yourself and others. Unfortunately, this egoic attempt to escape the ego is destined to fail, simply because it is a hoax.

The ego IS you and "you" are an attempt to escape the unity of mind.


Deep down the ego suspects as much, but can't be certain. Nevertheless, it has no choice but to deny that we are unified only at the level of mind and no unity is possible for bodies. For why else would we have constructed an ego to maintain separation in the mistaken idea that only in our separation can we save our 'self.'

Your ego must avoid this truth of unified mind at all costs. It struggles mightily to distract from this truth, which demands that your separate body be more true than your unified mind. Therefore, we rely almost exclusively on physical joining and sex becomes the most holy and sacred of all engagements. Mind cannot attack mind. However, bodies can attack and, for the ego, this makes the body more important than the mind.

In this way we can remain free of the truth discovered through deep and intimate engagements realized through minds. Now the truth of what we are rests solely on joined bodies and the forms that facilitate that joining. The closer you have allowed my body to come in proximity with yours, the more joined we may feel.

Now you can hate me with your mind, but as long as we join bodies, I will never know.

Is it any wonder we feel so deeply alone.

The Ego's Fascist Existence

A friend from a discussion forum brought this article to my attention, Your Money or Your Life: A lesson On the Front Stoop, by Douglas Rushkoff.

Good stuff here! This guy's got an eye for the internal workings most either can't see or see, but deny. I read the entire article and found some very valuable points worth considering deeply. But, here's the quote I was waiting for from the moment I began reading this article:

This is the landscape of corporatism: a world not merely dominated by corporations, but one inhabited by people who have internalized corporate values as our own. And even now that corporations appear to be waning in their power, they are dragging us down with them; we seem utterly incapable of lifting ourselves out of their depression. We need to understand how this happened—how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and figure out what—if anything—we are to do about it. Like recovering cult victims,we have less to gain from blaming our seducers than from understanding our own participation in building and maintaining a corporatist society. Only then can we begin dismantling and replacing it with something more livable and sustainable.

The corporation is a socially created inhuman construct or entity unto itself (not non-human, but inhuman, lacking sympathy, pity, warmth, compassion, etc, etc) in which the chief premise and primary goal is to compete with other inhuman constructs to increase its self-assertion into the world as measured by monetary-value. This author claims that in our interrelating with others, we act through the same values as the corporation.

I believe this is valid, however, the corporate value-system is born of the extreme negative spectrum of individual and collective ego-based values. Therefore, we have essentially created corporatism and its 'inhumane' practices, in order to further perpetuate egoic individualism and separatism in opposition, and superior to, collective engagement and unity. The corporation has made our self-absorbed and often cruel actions justifiable (or, more often, our inactions). Why else would we have constructed it, if not to prove that we can disengage from the world, by opposing our natural human inclination to engage compassionately, and still find happiness. The question is, our we happy yet?

Could it be that we manufactured and implemented the corporatist agenda to serve in justifying our own individualized egoic self-interests? Are not individual egos just as capable of inhumanity as corporations?

The corporation is an extreme bastardized version of individualized egoic self-construct, writ large. We have not modeled ourselves after the corporation, but modeled and constructed the corporation from the worst of our own egoic self-absorbed interrelating.

This corporate model of dissociation from compassionate human values merely provides legitimacy and credence for the individual ego's micro-perspective and associated methods of negotiating a world of other egos, in which a system of monetary and fiduciary values has been deemed paramount in measuring our worth in comparison to other egos.

The ego-self is a psychological construct which seeks to impose concrete psychological boundaries around itself in order to know itself in opposition to other egos. The corporation is the same bounded construct, only further ordained through law. Yet, the difference is that the corporation has no illusion of extending itself simply for the benefit of others or perpetuating those concepts of love and compassion that we have become estranged from in our own separate lives. The corporation was constructed to legitimize our own dissociation from one another. The corporation exists solely to accentuate its existence by controlling ever more aspects of what it desires, regardless of the cost to others. The corporation is our guru and we are its followers (heck even so-called authentic spiritual gurus have become branded or incorporated through Limited liability Companies or 502c-3 nonprofits).

The corporation is the ego-self construct, sociopathically magnified a thousand times. We are not a product of the corporation, but the corporation is a product of us.

If the ego continues to experience itself as an increasingly more isolated individual entity, separate and detached from others and the world, it then must become fascist in its relations with the world, since it only seeks to control the world to further accentuate itself as existing in its separateness seeking its separate state of mind commonly referred to as happiness.

For the ego-self, existence requires a qualitative measure, since who wants an increased quantity of existence if existing is not accentuated by some measure of increased comfort?

It seems clear to my feeble mind, that in order to understand how we allowed corporate society to rule our social and cultural macro-existence, we must first understand how we allow this aspect of egoic dynamics to rule our micro-world functioning in relation to other egoic micro-worlds (persons/families/communities). This is a bottom-up approach as opposed to top-down and will require a collective understanding of our own personal ego dynamics.

The corporation cannot engage with human values which seek to accentuate the value of life and end man's inhumanity to man. That's not part of its charter. If the corporation were to significantly alter its creed and reason for existing it would cease to exist. Certainly corporations give to charity. But then, Fascists like Mussolini were known for their social works initiatives and the seeming portrayal of compassionate dictatorial rule. Yet, in the end the illusion became apparent when the goal was seen clearly for what it was.

Compared to the huge profits of some of our major corporations, their charitable giving is equal to a drop of water in the Atlantic ocean. This is because the corporate construct is completely absent of any purpose but self-assertion at any cost and is constructed in such a way as to easily ignore human values or to merely provide 'lip-service' to compassionate actions. Bill Gates's 45 billion multiplies exponentially every 4 seconds. So what's difference will a few charitable billion make to him?

However, the ego-self construct (that package of beliefs you insist is "you") can come to realize the individual self-destructive capacity of separatist goals. It can replace individual separatist values with values that accentuate it along with other separate egos in a unified perspective of itself as one with others, all seeking to enhance themselves through collective engagement. It can come to understand that its full engagement with others for the common good actually serves to enhance itself and will enhance itself in ways it has yet to realize as truth.

Yet, the individual ego-self will need to recognize that such an interdependently engaged path is viable and valuable and most likely that will only occur when the corporate agenda has been seen as completely unsustainable.

I hope we make it to that point, since I'm not sure we may not have much time left.

The Guru Wears No Clothes!

Your ego-self is nothing more than a composite or package of beliefs you attribute to as “you.” Those beliefs that make up the 'self' are nothing more than associations to the past. Your ego-self has extracted from the past the information and experiences it has decided best assert itself into its experience of a ‘world.’

Because of this, the world is a mass of confused associations, all claiming to be the map to truth. But which one is true?
If you choose to rely on the great wisdom traditions, essentially you rely on the past. But can reliance on the past give you a present moment? Can information from the past give you NOW?

When you quote the revered ones, have you simply recreated the past in the moment? Do their words from the past, often quoted from centuries of interwoven interpretations piled one atop another, liberate you from the past? How can you experience the “now” based on what the past teaches?

They all claim to show the way to freedom from the past, but how often do you ever stop to consider that the teachings you have been following all came from the past? Are we not simply traveling in circles?

When will we finally proclaim that the guru wears no clothes?

The ego-self certainly loves the past and, let’s face it, without an experience of ‘memory’ who would “you” be? Therefore, the ego really isn’t interested in evolving or freeing itself, from the past. No, your ego’s sole objective is to develop the ‘self’ based on past instruction. In following the ancient maps to the “now,” the ego has merely made sacred its journey to NO WHERE.

Today, all the modern maps are simply the old man dressed up in the latest styles?

The ego-self certainly does desire change, but only if the road to change is charted from the comfort of the old maps.

Yet, from following those maps, has the world changed at all? Have the old maps taken us to a place where we no longer destroy each other any less than before? Have the old maps shown us how to preserve our home and hold all life sacred? Have the old maps shown us how to love one another?

If not, then why follow them?

Shouldn't we be constructing a new map?

Peace Angels,
mikeS

Non-Dual Me, Baby!

I’ve been checking out my bookmarked “non-duality” sites again and I’m always amazed at the self-absorbed and self-interested bloggers advocating that we all follow their lead and sink into ourselves in attaining the insight that we are not a ‘self.’

If you spend 10 to 20 years in self-absorbed meditation (and these are the authentic zenners and advaita jockeys, as I no longer read the 'instant-awakening' folks) you will eventually attain the insight that there is no subject/object division.(yet, in the meantime, your experience of a regressing and eroding world will continue to regress and erode as usual)

Here’s a quote from Ken Wilber’s "Spectrum of Consciousness":

"Similarly, the dualism of subject vs. object is as illusory as that of the past vs. future, and its illusory nature can be as easily demonstrated. For, at this moment, can you actually find a separate self, a separate “subject” apart from its “object”? When you hear a sound, can you ever hear yourself hearing? When you taste something, can you taste the taster? Smell the smeller? Feel the feeler? When you see a tree, can you at the same time see the seer? As you are now thinking about all of this, can you simultaneously find a thinker who is thinking about it? Is all this not the clearest demonstration that there exists no separate subject apart from objects? Invariably, the sensation called “yourself in here” and the sensation called “objects out there” are one and the same sensation. As we said in connection with Yogacara, at this moment you are this page reading itself!

This type of teaching ignores an existential aspect of living referred to as “facticity.”

In the works of Sartre, "facticity" signifies all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited. For example, these may include the time and place of birth, a language, an environment, an individual's previous choices, as well as the inevitable prospect of their death. For example: currently, the situation of a person who is born without legs precludes their freedom to walk on the beach; if future medicine were to develop a method of growing new legs for that person, their facticity might no longer exclude this activity. Wiki.

Non-dualism denies the "facticity" of the human experience by deconstructing that diverse experience into an anonymous cauldron of homogeneity, in which experiencing the deep joy of intimately engaging with others is minimized against an anonymous subject/object clumping together of all experience.

Why do we hate the ‘self’ so much? Why do we so deeply wish to experience homogeneous anonymity?

Non-duality seeks to escape authentic existential experience by deconstructing that experience down to nothingness rather than reconstructing it in discovery of what it could be together in our diversity. The intimacy of two or more becomes nothing but a mere aspect of the dualistic "illusion," even though it gives us more joy than any other existential experience.

Non-duality is not so much an escape from self as it is more an escape from other selves. It is a way to offset guilt for the collective experience we all partake of and that the ego-collective constructs.

Non-duality seems to inform that since we have done such a lousy job of constructing our collective experience, best to just trash it all and seek anonymous bliss through an equally anonymous mass of subject/object merging. In other words, fuck the self and give me the bliss of anonymity. Now I can deny that I hate you for all that I’ve done wrong and completely disassociate from you as the vehicle I must seek to engage with in order for us both to know the ‘self' fully in an enlightened evolved state.

Meditation, with the goal of non-duality, is a defense mechanism against reality and attempts to deny our mutual "facticity."

Insight is available for experience, but only through others and the world.

However, these non-dual teachers and advocates are certainly an interesting lot. With all their non-dual principles, ideologies and practices, they still seem to get a big kick out of engaging with others in constantly discussing the theory of non-duality.

I just hope this type of consistent engagement with others doesn’t mess up their practices in achieving the non-dual state.

; )

mikeS

I Am "Spiritually Humble." Therefore, You Must Love ME

Everything another does is a direct reflection of your ‘self.’

Oh sure, we’d all like to detach from the context of our perception of others and, thereby, minimize guilt for past actions or inactions, but the fact is that the world is a reflection of the contents of your mind. Your experience of the world is a reflection of your belief system and the world reflects this system in flashing neon colors.

The concept of an individual “unconscious” simply makes it easy to detach from what we perceive by denying responsibility for our own perceptions, "I see hell, but it ain't part of me. Sorry I ain't taking no responsibility for making it real!"

It is so easy and comforting to know that it’s ‘others’ who cause all the havoc and chaos in the world, since your fear and hatred are quietly tucked away in a safe place (unconscious) and your "spirituality" aids in this denial of responsibility.

It’s their greed, insensitivity and ignorance that makes the world a truly despicable experience (notice I didn’t say “place” since space-coordinates make it easy to dissociate from experience). It’s their lack of love that creates a world of violence and cruelty. If they would just get their act together we could all live happily ever after. It’s not you, it’s them!

I mean, for crying out loud, can’t everyone see how spiritually humble you are? Geez!

The idea that you need simply detach from your perceptions of others, or the associative belief system that determines your judgments of others, and be free of their crap is an idea bordering on absurdity. As if that were even possible. Ha!

But this is your knee-jerk response and this type of spiritual bypassing is no different from the ‘I got mine’ consumeristic attitude which has resulted in our current economic collapse and quite possibly the end of the world as we know it.

If you see aspects of hell, then clearly you believe hell is possible and therefore, it is your experience, no matter who you perceive as manifesting a particular aspect of hell, thereby, permitting you to blame them for your experience and massage your humble innocent egoic self.

The ego’s need to insure and prove its innocence is downright nauseating and it's all over the damn place.

Time to get real.

The Awakening Classroom

One thing the ego does realize is that it's out of its environment. This is because it has never truly felt at home in its experience of a ‘world.’ Why else would we have so many egoic-based religious-spiritual ideologies, all mapping an exit or escape from the world? Few map out a transformative engagement with our mutual experience of the 'world.'

The problem is that ego-self must remain homeless, since it’s very nature denies attachment to anything but itself. The world is an outer reflection of inward condition.


Nevertheless, as much as the ego-self tries to extract some sense of joy from its experience of homelessness, it is forever thwarted in that endeavor by circumstances that seem completely beyond its control. Not only is the ego-self homeless, but it distracts from that fact by alienating from this condition through compulsively trying to extract some sense of satisfaction from its homelessness.

Eventually it may surrender this attempt at control (which is the “no-control” method of control) or decide that it must work harder, struggle and sacrifice more, to attain the fruits of its control in the little time allotted it to do so.

However, occasionally rather than surrender or assert more control, the ego will seek to closely examine both of these premises. It asks, why surrender control to the world or why attempt to control it, since neither of these approaches provide any consistent joy and reduced suffering is limited and sporadic at best.

To question the two most basic premises of its existence is to stare into the abyss of nothingness. But who wants to do that?

However, the ego does have a belief that a consistent state of joy or bliss is possible to it, if only it could find the means. It believes that there can be an end to all suffering if it could only learn the correct path to ‘realize’ such liberation.

Therefore, it believes it has little choice but to examine its premises through ancient spiritual ideologies, which it further believes are the tools that can lead to transcend the very experiences of homelessness it constructs.

Yet, it tends to deny that it has also constructed the paths of escape.

Unfortunately, the ego cannot teach itself what it does not know, even when that learning comes from other egos that it evaluates as smarter, wiser or more "awakened" than itself. It cannot learn anything beyond itself and its parameters of collectively agreed on "knowledge." Problem is, reliance on its “knowledge” is what causes all its problems, so in that sense, it really knows nothing at all (or at least nothing that can save it from itself and its experience of being homeless).

Thus, in its experience of a collective, it explores entire libraries of specialized “salvation” concepts and ideologies that tell it only what it wants to know and so, it learns nothing new. In fact, the ego really doesn’t know what it is trying to learn from all the teachers that teach it. This often makes it seem as if it's merely spinning its wheels and going in circles. Teacher after teacher, concept after concept, each new 'path' it adopts merely reflects an old idea wrapped in a new package.

Finally a few egos accept that the world has nothing to teach that it doesn’t already know and so it seeks to learn from a teacher not of the world.

Is there a teacher outside the ego and not found in the world? But who listens to this teacher if not the ego? Who interprets the teaching that is taught by that which is not ego?

Or is ego teaching itself, what it already knows but refuses to recognize as truth?

The ego does NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS TRYING TO TEACH. It is trying to teach you what you are WITHOUT KNOWING IT. The ego is expert ONLY in confusion. It does not understand ANYTHING ELSE. As a teacher, then, it is totally confused and TOTALLY CONFUSING. Is there ANY possible reason for choosing a teacher such as this? Does the TOTAL disregard of ANYTHING it teaches make anything BUT sense? The ego has never given you a sensible answer to anything. Simply on the grounds of your own experience with the ego’s teaching, should not this alone disqualify it as your future teacher? (ACIM URTEXT).

The idea that ego teaches itself, demanding ‘teachers’ materialize based on egoic learning objectives, begs the question, does the ego already know what it demands must be learned? If this is so, then learning is certain, because what must be learned is already known. Therefore, no teacher is necessary because the curriculum has been learned.

However, if the curriculum is already known, then the only thing necessary is the classroom because the ego demands learning as the only true means of 'knowing.' The ego-self will not access what it knows outside the classroom, because the classroom is the conduit to experiencing what it already knows. The classroom is the means to access truth.

The truth that we all recognize, is that we are indelibly joined in some way. Although this joint aspect of our mutual existence is minimized and made subordinate to our experience of individualized separation. Yet, we sense that this is not true, otherwise why have so many religious/spiritual paths for centuries advocated the path to this nebulous experience of “unified oneness”?

Deep down ego ‘knows’ it’s salvation is in joining and not continued separation, but it refuses to enter the classroom. However, upon entering the classroom all the knowledge available to it will be made apparent, but only through joining with other students.

Obviously that classroom is in “relationship” and entering that classroom is your only reason for being. Enter the classroom by engaging deeply with one other 'person' in an intimate awakening that will change your experience of the world. The reason you have failed to awaken is simply because you refuse to join with others by entering the classroom of awakening.

This is because you cannot “awaken” alone.

Depth of Relating is the Ground of Truth

Keep in mind that your 'awakening' will be directly correlated with your personally assessed value. Therefore, if you seek to have truth transmitted from master to student, then clearly you do not value yourself as you demand that another must be of more value than you in order to save your pitiful 'self.'

Furthermore, even though you may receive your blessed "truth-transmission" from the master, you must never reach the master's level which means that there can never be an 'equality' to the engagement. Which then begs the question, what was transmitted?


However, if the master you choose to engage with is authentic, then there will be no hierarchy between you, no ranks, levels or degrees. Contrary to popular opinion, absolute truth does not conform to hierarchies, since this only confirms the "truth" of relativity, which is not truth at all.

Truth is the great equalizer and therefore excludes no one. Hierarchies must exclude based on relative approximations of what is true and false. Truth does not contrast through values, but is the ground of all relative value. Therefore, the master must be relinquished the moment you meet, else a 'difference' will come between you and inequality will be contrasted and relative truth is what you have attained.

The authentic master knows this as fact and would never allow you to sit at his or her feet.

• The authentic master would not sit upon a platform surrounded by a shrine of flowers facing an audience of the anonymous.
• The authentic master would not write books giving you worn-out old platitudes, thereby, intellectualizing an experience that can only be directly encountered with, and through, another.
• The authentic master would not create a lexicon of specialized concepts requiring years of arduous study.
• The authentic master would not teach you practices that serve only to absorb you into your ‘self’ where truth is not found.

Yet, the authentic master would deeply engage with you in an 'intimacy-of-awakening' and from the depths of that relationship you would know Truth... as so would the "master." The true master has no truth to pass on, only the truth to engage with together so that both may have it the same.

In the depths of relationship you will find the Ground of Truth and together create it. This is how reality is 'created' and our current 'reality' highlights our relative alienation as opposed to intimate engagement. The macro-world merely reflects your micro-world experience and just as whole populations are adverse and alienated with one another, so are you and the ones you profess to "love."

We are a world of relative strangers drowning in a surface pool of adverse alienation.

The authentic master knows that no “master” is needed and you are just as likely to experience this intimate awakening with anyone. Christ asked that you "love thy neighbor as thyself" because only by loving "thy neighbor" can you love yourself. This is because there is no division even though, in the delusion of relativity, you made one up.

The problem is, you require the “master” be sought and found, simply because you are less valuable. An authentic master will play that game with you only so far, waiting for you to realize that Truth is not from him, separate and apart, but is a closing of the gap between you both, from which "awakening" is encountered and, in fact, created.

Relative truth makes you dependent on another. Absolute Truth does not compel dependency, but it does demand union.

Otherwise it is just the transmission of somebodies relative “wisdom” and wisdom is not Truth (although it can masquerade as truth). The world is full of relative wisdom, but this barely dents the delusion of relativity.

Truth is known to all or no one. We are all waiting separately to be enlightened. But this cannot happen until we all agree to wait together.

So before you seek out your master, free yourself of all fear and prepare yourself for an intimate awakening by fully engaging in the depths of an engagement not yet experienced.

Better yet, forget the master and turn to the one next to you.

You have come close before, but always you denied the master was there with you and so it was lost and you went off on search of your true "master." How many "masters" will it take before you realize that the master is you, but only when joined with another?

God Is Yo Daddy! (but relationships are your truth)

Have you ever noticed the obvious overabundance of ancient and modern MALE "enlightened masters"?

Of course, there are a few identified modern female teachers. But, clearly, males seem to dominate this career choice and, since it’s the students that determine who is "enlightened" and who is not, I suppose it logical that such a choice would conform to the status quo.

But can status quo choices lead to “awakening”? Can the status quo save the world?

I doubt it (at least, based on the last 2000 yrs).

I always find it surprising how attaining transcendent insight, supposedly not available through conventional means, is taught in strict conformance to conventional paradigms. Therefore, to attain your blissful self-transcendence, seek out the male teacher. Let's face it, yang has dominated yin for centuries and male truth transmission is the accepted method of 'awakening.' Who am I to suggest otherwise?

As everybody knows, God is yo Daddy!

Of course, there's Hicks and Katie and that Buddha lady, but every paradigm needs it deviants to further strengthen the paradigm.

But what about the ancients? There are loads more male truth transmitters than female. So, waz up widat?

Transrelational Truth

Several years ago there was a medical study that demonstrated that if you give group therapy to women diagnosed with terminal cancer, they will increase their longevity by statistically significant levels. Simply through a depth of engaging with each other they seemed to have slowed, and for some even halted, the progress of disease (samples consisted of chemo and group, chemo and no group).

Statistically, women have always lived longer than men and that has been determined to correlate with an ease of relating that many women seem trained to engage with, as well as the depth of engagement women seem to initiate, often spontaneously (whereas, statistically speaking, men engage around football). Such relational processing seems to increase longevity and women seem to have a better grasp of this therapeutic 'talking cure' for stress.

However, that gap seems to be closing as more women enter the male dominated work force, where depth of engagement is avoided unless an outcome is sought. In the world of male work, engagement is essentially manipulative and outcome, rather than process, oriented.

There is no proprietary truth that you must have transmitted from the male master (or any master, for that matter). There is only the truth of deep engagement and that will aid you in negotiating the world and in transcending the world.

In other words, "It's the relationship, stupid!"

Thanks,
mikeS

TransRelational Awakening

IS THERE A WAY TO TRANSCEND THE EGO?

The ego-self, or separate individual identity seeking to transcend itself, is committed to a hoax. The 'self' cannot transcend it 'self.' Nevertheless, the self attaches to past teachings that continue to inform it that self-transcendence is the end of all suffering and the beginning of infinite bliss. This keeps the self on a treadmill of self-reinforcing through the 'spiritual' projects it attaches to in order to transcend itself.

However, there is a way to dissociate from an exclusive egoic identity by immersing in other egoic identities.

Through deep engagement with another ego-self, the individual egoic identity can be essentially extinguished and awakened to a reality no longer exclusive to itself. The evidence for this is clear, since your most blissful and “enlightening” moments have been in loving extension to, and with, others. However, as soon as the exclusive self-identity resumed control, in opposition to mutual depth, such bliss through self-extension was gradually dissolved as the ego-self agenda predominated.

WHAT ABOUT THE ANCIENT MASTERS WHO “AWAKENED” TO TRUTH ON THEIR OWN

Most authentic past “wisdom” teachers have reported intense experiences of love from individual practices. This may be a mistaken interpretation of the individual ego, which subsumes the entire shared experience for itself when, in fact, this love was a “direct experience" correlated with a yielding extension to others. Most biographers of authentic ancient masters focus entirely on the master’s individual enlightenment ‘episode’ and fail to recognize the relationships from which this episode is directly correlated with and emerged from. Even today the focus is on some linear transference of “truth,” while the deeply engaged teacher-student relationship is ignored or minimized as subordinate to the transmission of proprietary truth.

I suggest that nothing is ever transferred. However, truth is encountered simply because it is touched, or engaged with, through the intimate depth of relationship to one or more others. In other words, love or enlightenment is an emergent creative truth, solely contingent on the relationship between teacher student and having nothing to do with any linear transmission of truth. Truth is experienced IN the relationship. relationship is the content and the type of relationship, teacher-student, is merely another of many forms relationships take.

The deeply engaged and intimate relationship is not conduit to truth, but is the truth itself.

ARE YOU SAYING THAT I HAVE TO BE IN LOVE WITH SOMEONE TO BE ENLIGHTENED?

Love is unknown factor of 'reality' and only exists as a relative approximate interpretation based on the conditions determined by each separate mind (6 billion minds, to be more exact). Therefore, to seek love with another is merely an opportunity for the ego-self to apply its own conditions based on its own conceptual interpretation of love. This negates an absolute or non-conditional love or the Truth that we seek to awaken to.

Therefore, you cannot be “in love” with another, but you can seek to encounter love, with the understanding that you have no idea or accurate concept of absolute or unconditional love. Your only option is to seek to encounter an ‘experience’ of love by extracting your conditions from which this love can be encountered or “awakened” to and this would be an “enlightenment” episode from which insight, not of this world (truth), would be realized.

Keep in mind that the forms of expression are unimportant and confining love to specific forms only restricts the experience. However, you can employ the forms (parent-child, marriage, etc) that exist in your life presently to engage in the depth of intimacy through which you can be “awakened” to this truth. Nevertheless, romantic relationships are unnecessary and one could engage in the depth of intimate awakening through other relationship ‘forms’ such as parent-child, siblings, coworkers, friends, etc, etc, etc. The content is available through whatever form the deep engagement occurs. However, demanding that only certain forms are required to experience enlightenment (love) is to impede the experience and this is exactly what we do in seeking out the “teacher-student” relationship as the only means of awakening or enlightenment.

Therefore, as with the Christ message of "love thy neighbor as thyself," the reference to neighbor would include any relationship form you are currently involved with. This message is also presented in “A Course in Miracles” and the recommendation is to seek this intimate awakening, or “Holy Instant” experience through all relationships, no matter what form the relationship takes.

SO ARE YOU SAYING I SHOULD JUST GIVE UP MY MEDITATION AND ENGAGE INTIMATELY WITH OTHERS?

Absolutely not. However, you may wish to restructure the ideological premises of your meditative practices to take on a new role of facilitating shared extension as opposed to, or superior to, individual seeking or awakening. Now instead of facilitating self-awakening, meditation may serve as a means of clearing blocks that impede relationship depth. But it will be through relationships that impediments to love are realized and not solitary practices.

As such, meditative practices allow a calm, centered-self that facilitates a deeper engagement with others. A depth of engagement with others facilitates a depth of engagement with the world. Thus, nature no longer becomes a means of spiritual bypassing or escape from a world of others, but becomes a “spiritual” experience only to be shared with others and not to be simply engaged with alone. The more nature is a shared experience the more we no longer use it as means of escape to protect the psychological self, but as a means of enhancing a collective shared self.

The theory that mediation allows for the identification of self-defects or shadows is a flawed theory of egoic proportions. This presupposes that the self-concept was established separate from relationship and the constant flux of engaging with and fearing intimacy or deep understanding.

TransRelational awakening is an encounter with truth through understanding that your only purpose is to engage deeply with others in order to engage with your 'self' and the world since there is no division except in the egoic mind.

Collective Enlightenment

Recently I came across a very interesting thread “The Next Buddha Will Be Collective”. The essay is long and I would suggest that anyone who resonates with the quotes read the article in full.

“In this essay, we will claim that contemporary society is evolving towards a dominance of distributed networks, with peer to peer based social relations, and that this will affect spiritual expression in fundamental ways.”

“If we accept the new ontological and epistemological convictions that there are no absolute reference points or frameworks, no objective reality out there on their own, can we still accept fixed cosmologies and religions? If we accept that knowing is a matter of co-creation with other humans, holding different frameworks, and that approaching truth is a matter of confronting those differences in frameworks, and how they illuminate realities in different ways, can we still accept fixed methodologies and pathways, leading to inevitable conclusions about the truth? Or would we expect co-created truth to be open-ended? If we want to act and live according to the peer principle of equal worth of all persons, can we accept the deep-seated rankism that is part and parcel of traditional approaches to religion? The questions are suggesting the answer, and the answer is that in all likelihood, the forms of spirituality that we are striving will have the open and free, participatory, and commons-oriented aspects which the emerging p2p forms of consciousness are desiring to appear in the world.”

The important point elaborated is that peer-to-peer spirituality may not accept proprietary modes of knowledge transference. In other words, master to student transmission is abolished for student-to-student creation of enlightenment (he doesn’t employ the term “enlightenment” but I do). P2P refuses copyright restrictions impeding alteration of the ancient ‘bibles’ or great books. There is no secret knowledge as it’s all dumped into the pot and cooked up together.

“A commons-oriented approach would lead to co-created knowledge to be available in a common pool, for others to build on and to be confronted with.”

The master is demoted and now becomes part of a network of truth seekers none holding credentials above another in an equality of understanding in creation of truth. Everything is “communally validated.”

“Equipotentiality suggests that we should not judge a person according to one purported essence, say, as a spiritual master or an enlightened being, but as a wide mixture of different skills and abilities, none of which by itself elevates that person to a higher human status.”
"Individuals are free to explore this guidance, but the individual, and the communities, are still in charge of building collective spiritual freedom, without a priori fixed path."

“the spirituality of persons is developed and revealed primarily in their relations with other persons. If you regard spirituality primarily as the fruit of individual practices, such as meditative attainment, then you can have the gross anomaly of a “spiritual" person who is an interpersonal oppressor, and the possibility of “spiritual" traditions that are oppression-prone. If you regard spirituality as centrally about liberating relations between people, then a new era of participative religion opens up, and this calls for a radical restructuring and reappraisal of traditional spiritual maps and routes.”

This peer to peer sharing is already happening and the author identifies the elaborate sharing of knowledge through Wikipedia and other share-tools. Yet, it is also happening within spiritual forums scattered throughout the cyber world.

The last quote encapsulates my thoughts on this matter quite nicely and has even defined for me the reasoning behind my starting this blog, as well as defining my distrust of proprietary "masters" and their modern equivalent's resistance to sharing without a fee.

Enlightenment is not a linear extension of finite knowledge master to student, but an infinite relational creation requiring a high magnitude of collective participation for that sharing to build upon itself and create truth.

Therefore, the “Great Masters” are dead and we need bury them, since no more are needed. However, we can and will use the information, but it is no longer proprietary nor is it sacred.

Time to shatter some myths!

Thanks,
mikeS

Mutually Creating Truth

Here is a typical quote I extracted from one of those enlightenment-awakening-guru-MasterTeacher-websites that the internet is teeming with

“Detach from who you think you are and realize the Truth that God is your Beingness outside the illusion of time. You are the bliss of eternal nothingness attached to an illusion of identity”

Whaaaaa? What the frig does that mean? Or better yet, does that help you one tiny speck in dealing with the conflicts and dilemmas of your actual life experience?

When I read this platitudinal balderdash I usually just snicker a little and move on to the next holy one where I’ll be sure to find the same senseless blather. This is the “modern master’s” attempt to regurgitate ancient “wisdom” thereby perpetuating the compulsion to repackage the past, which the ego insists will save it.

Truth is not found in the past as that only makes one a victim of time. It’s created together in a present which constructs a future thereby recreating the past.

Yet, they advocate that you need to have “direct experience” of it. Obviously, they’ve had “direct experience” for why else would they give you this gibberish so that you can eat it up with, “wow, dude, I wanna talk righteous-cool like you!”

Remember a long time ago when you first realized that you had fallen in love with someone? Remember the psychological and emotional high you got from that and how long it lasted? Recall the deeply intimate moments with friends, children, parents? What individual pleasures could compare to this?

Well, my friend, that was “enlightenment”! Unfortunately the ego-self soon minimizes the experience so that it can then install its own agenda, or ‘conditions,’ to the experience, which clearly dilutes the experience, thereby making it chiefly void of meaning. Enlightenment lost!

Do you really think that you can go off to your corner and sit on your cushion for a couple a years and get “enlightened” alone? Do you really think that this “infinite oneness” is available in piecemeal portions to separate individual minds?

Many believe just that and thus fail to see how the separate egoic mind has completely co-opted the mission. That’s what they want you to buy into (with their books, retreats, seminars workshops, CD’s etc, etc, etc). Why? Because this advances their egoic agenda and nothing more than that.

Seems to me the whole Buddha/Christ message has gotten so watered down over the centuries that it no longer makes any sense. The ego twists and bends truth to make it fit the relative ego agenda. But what’s really happening is, “other people really suck sometimes, so let me repackage this message so that I don’t need them and I can get the “Truth” (cap T) on my own through the "master." Then Truth becomes my proprietary knowledge and I can provide it to other “individuals” and even make a living off Truth."

You don’t have to be “in love” to be "En-lightened” and you certainly don’t need to be coupled off in some sort of marriage or be engaged in any kind of sexual relationship to encounter the deep intimacy required for an ‘awakened’ experience. The form is not important, but the content is everything. We have no idea what “love” is, but together we can learn and together we can create Truth.

Enlightenment is a “direct experience,” but not the kind you can summon up all on your own sitting in some solitary corner doing your asanas. No, “enlightenment” is experienced through and with others. Enlightenment is deeply engaged in the sharing of your experience of a world of others. Because, lets face it, without others to define, and who define you, who would you be?

“You” exist BECAUSE “they” do and they exist because of you.

“Relationship” is what you’re here for and nothing else. It’s your only purpose and your only function. Time to surrender the myth of the solitary seeker once and for all. The “Heroes Journey” is a collective pursuit not in finding Truth, but in creating it.

Thanks,

mikeS