How It Seems
The code is so very simple that it escapes our notice. It seems too small and insignificant for us to grasp its magnitude. We may have heard it a thousand times already, but it doesn’t mean anything to us. This is because we are blinded by some pre-conceptions that we hold dear. Our confirmation bias will not allow us to see the real cause of all the chaos and uncertainty that seems so endemic to life.
You think that someone or something is making your best laid plans to go awry time after time. You just know that as soon as your ducks are finally in a row, they will burst out of the shadows and scatter them again. You feel oppressed, trapped, angry, and ready to explode.
If you could just find them and kill them - all of them - this would finally be over and the world would be right again. Someone has to do it. Some vigilante has to take matters into their own hands and rid this place of evil once and for all.
Questioning Your Assumptions
But wait…. what if the dark forces that you want to be rid of are really inside of you?
Remember that part of you that you turned away from because it was so ugly that it made you sick to look at it? What if that is “them”? What if that part of you that you deny with such determination is really “them”?
I know this is a terrible thought, too painful to bear. I am just asking you to consider it one more time because nothing else has worked. I don’t want you to do anything about it. Just look at it directly.
This is the unbearable thing that most of us don’t have the courage to do yet. But our time is getting short here and the bodies are piling up. So I am asking you to remember that despicable shadow of yourself that is lurking beneath your awareness, because there is a fix for that.
If the evil is truly out there somewhere then all hope is lost. We will never succeed in rounding them all up and throwing them overboard. We have tried that one over and over again, and all that it ever does is to cause endless suffering and make this earth a living hell.
But if the root of this destructive chaos is inside of you - then you can do something about it. You have agency. You have a purpose, a focus, and a responsibility. And this gives life its meaning, for now.
Breaking the Spell
Let’s suppose for a moment that you and I are truly under a spell. We could think of it like in the ancient fairy tales. Something has power over us that makes us do things that are self-destructive and prevents us from ever being truly happy or at peace. If we could finally see it, we could perhaps do something about it and free ourselves.
That is why you have to look at your own dark side - the one that you have been trying so hard to hide. You have to look at it long enough to find its source. Once you have found the source of that, you will know what to do.
I can show you what to look for, but I can’t make you see or understand it. You have to do that on your own. We each have to face the chaos and delusion inside our own mind until we can see it clearly for what it is. That is what we are here to do.
Exposing the Cause
I will tell you in simple terms, but don’t try to understand this. I know that sounds absurd to say, but thinking about it simply won’t work. It can’t work that way as you will soon see. So it is best to just hold this idea as a paradox. This is the riddle, or puzzle that you are here to solve. And you will solve it finally with your awareness, not with your thoughts.
You have mistakenly identified yourself as your ego. We don’t need to go into why or how that happened, or even what that means. That will all be revealed later if it is necessary to know. For now, just consider, as ridiculous as it may sound, that this mistake is responsible for all the chaos, dysfunction, and impotence that you experience inside yourself and in the world.
Once you confused yourself with your ego, you granted it access to your vital energy - your source, if you will. And now everything that you do is to serve the ego, because you think that your life depends on it. It has usurped your true power and reduced you to a beggar waiting for crumbs of attention from others in order to get fed.
The ego is a parasite demanding all of your attention and diverting your energy to feed itself. It has programmed you to think in a mechanical way that constantly weaves and reinforces the idea of you as a solitary isolated person fending for yourself in a hostile world. This story is so convincing that you blindly serve the interests of your ego, even as your vital energy is drained and you lose the capacity to take care of yourself.
There is more that can be said, but this is the essence of it. If you wrestle with this idea directly, using your thinking mind, it will never make any sense to you. You have to learn to see another way before it becomes clear. You have to learn to see with awareness, instead of thought.
Learning to See
It will help you to have some tools to use in this endeavor. In order to see inside your own mind, you will need to learn how to make it still and clear. You have to reduce the interference from your chaotic and random thoughts.
You may not recognize your thoughts yet as random and chaotic, but that is simply because you have not learned how to stand apart from them and observe them. At first this may sound absurd, irrelevant, or impossible. But I assure you that it is entirely possible, and is the most relevant and sane thing that you could do
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These tools have been around human civilizations for ever it seems. The ones I found came from the teachings of the Buddha in India over 2,500 years ago. The essence is a simple practice of directing awareness called Insight Meditation or Vipassana. Practicing it enables you over time to disengage from your thinking mind and become aware of awareness itself.
Behind the relatively thin veil of chronic mental chatter, is a depth of conscious awareness that is breathtaking to behold. It is vast, eternal, and infinite. It is the sacred and divine that we are all searching for. And it is there inside of your own mind waiting for you to discover it.
As you practice, you will gradually be able to sustain awareness for longer moments. And in those moments of relative stillness, you will be able to see clearly. It is a kind of seeing that most of us didn’t know we had. It is insight, or inner seeing.
And in that clarity of seeing an astonishing revelation occurs. You recognize yourself as the awareness itself, and not the stream of thoughts occupying your attention. As the thoughts fade, you gradually come into view as the grand whole field of consciousness that you are.
As that mind-blowing revelation begins to sink in, you see that there is a small version of you that we could call your ego. It was once who you thought you were. Your whole life and universe revolved around that little idea of self. And everything you did was to feed that false pretense of a self that you called you.
But now, from the expanded perspective of eternity, you can see that believing you were the ego was a simple mistake. You are so obviously part of the continuum of life, and not the small vulnerable isolated self that you once thought you were.
And from this vantage point, you can see how much pain and suffering that you caused yourself in your delusion. You thought that your survival was up to you and you needed to struggle against everything - against life itself. But now you understand because you are experiencing yourself as part of the flow of life, not separate and apart from it.
Once you touch the sacred realm of pure awareness with your mind, you will never see life the same anymore. You will see how you are related to all things, to all people, and to all of life, and could never be apart from it. The fear of annihilation disappears as you recognize the eternal nature of this field of awareness. It is always there and always has been. And you have always been part of it.
Tune into our next Blog episode in May, where we explore how science has revealed reality in the most unexpected ways, and how it can be applied to our own conscious mind with astonishing results.