Our Great Human Ego

As human beings many of us hold the belief that we are the pinnacle of life. If life is a food chain, humans are on the top. If life is an evolutionary pinnacle, humans are the final mutation. If life is created, it was provided for us. I have often wondered why we get such a superior feeling as compared to other life on this planet. Human beings cannot exist without all other life, so to me, it is almost common sense that we are all equally important in the design of this planet.

Why is it that people think that they are superior to animals? Could it be that we appear to have superior intelligence? I am not certain that we are the most intelligent creatures. I think we measure intelligence in a very specific way, and in the standard of intelligence we set up, perhaps we are. But if we create the rules, it is easiest to think we are best, because we set the rules. Perhaps it may be that other creatures just refuse to cooperate with our idea of intelligence. Either way, I would put forth the opposite idea. What if animals are smarter than us? I could take it one step further, and say plants, or even a step further and say rocks. Why do people feel they are superior to rocks? This may sound silly, but I can put together an argument that to me, can be a logical reasoning why rocks are vastly superior to human beings. If you will suspend judgment, I would like to share this experiment with you.

We do not know how long rocks live. To our common understanding rocks aren't even alive, so therefore they appear to be immortal. You may think that rocks are not conscious beings, yet when you hit a rock it responds with a sound. Could this not be some form of consciousness? Perhaps rocks are conscious on a level that humans are not even capable of understanding. Rocks do not need to eat. They do not work. They spend all day basking in the sunlight. If they are conscious, I would imagine they spend all of their time enjoying life. They have nothing to do, no place to be, and all the time to enjoy it. You may say that they can't walk and must be bored because they are tied to one place, but think of all the people who skip rocks along the river, you throw rocks and send them flying through the air. I imagine this would be quiet a thrill. Now you may say well rocks cannot create, and look at all that we humans can create. Look at the possibilities that the human mind can put into action. But a rock doesn't need those things. A rock does not need symbols or words or culture or great works to understand life. It just does. Rocks don't need possessions, television, art or even sex to be happy. And if you are still unsatisfied with this idea, think about where human beings came from. If you subscribe in any way to an evolutionary existence think about where all life comes from. All animals, all people, evolve from minerals. From rocks. So still if you have any reservation, and aren't swayed by my hypothesis, then it is conceivable to think that in each rock there is potential for human life. So out of this lifeless mineral, grows the very creatures we revere so much. Again, this is just an idea. I'm not sure how much truth there is in it, but to me I find just as much support for this one as the idea that humans are superior. If nothing else, I think even the possibility is a great opportunity for humbling our great human ego.

Who Is Stopping You?

Who is it that is restraining you from being happy? From being at peace? From reaching enlightenment? From seeing right now the unity between yourself and all things? From understanding the great mysteries of life?

When I have asked myself these questions, the answer always come back the same. The answer is me. The individual. You are what separates yourself from the experience you desire, or the person you want to be. You are what separates yourself from what is eternal. There is no real separation at all other than that which you yourself create. If you go right down to it there is no real state of enlightenment other than that which you might create, nothing to understand other than that which you feel you don't. If you look for an understanding through words or symbols, something that can be expressed, you will not find one. Any state of spirituality cannot be experienced other than one you have already experienced. We are unable to imagine anything unless it has already been. You are the seeker, and you are the one who hides. So if you want to realize anything, all you need to do is get out of your own way. Nothing and no one can teach you anything unless you have the power of learning it and putting it into practice.

In my experience I have found that there are very few sources that let us in on the secret. We are taught by the media, many of our elders, the religions, the government, and our peers that the answers to our problems, our questions is outside of us. That whatever it is we are seeking it cannot be found within. We are taught to feel estranged in our bodies, and that there is something that is just not right about us. That every action we take can be scrutinized, either praised or blamed, and this, among few other things, is who we are. We should not have the courage or the nerve to believe that you are god. That you are everything that is. No matter what you do, you cannot make a mistake. We are taught that each one of us is a small little you in this great big universe and you really don't matter much at all. You are so small and could never be so great. In our culture you should have to suffer and work and earn privileges like enlightenment or respectability or status or whatever it is that people desire to be. And if you haven't suffered, you have no right to reap good things. And that is true if you believe it. But you don't have to. If you want, you can stare right into the eyes of the eternal. It takes no time at all. It takes no effort. No work. No practice of any kind. Other people may tell you otherwise, but that is their path. It does not have to be yours.

You already know that you are the center of your experience. All life happens through you. But for some reason in our culture that sounds vain. Our life is our personal experience. It is you who turns the vibrations of light into images, the vibrations of sound into sounds. You. Not anyone else. So is it so inconceivable to think that you are all that is? Why is this so? I think that most people have the concept that whatever is eternal knows all, understands all, and controls all. Why? We do not know how we pump our blood, or move our legs when we walk, or even how we breathe, and yet we can do these things with the greatest mastery. We never had a single lesson and yet we are all masters. If this is true about yourself, could that not also be true about what is eternal? It is possible to have the nerve to see this. Children have this kind of nerve. That is until various people start to condition it out of them. Children see right through the games we play. You don't need to tell a child that they are one with everything that is. You don't need to tell a child to appreciate life. To them it is not a concept to be realized, life is already realized. There is not a self and an other, it all goes together.

So I say to you, if there is something that you want to realize, who is stopping you? If you find that is you, then simply stop standing in your own way. Go into who that person is. Who they REALLY are? If you can do this all problems will fade away.

Life Doesn't Make Mistakes

Few things can wear on the physical and mental being more than stress and worry. They creep slyly into our heads, root themselves with clawed nails, and slowly start devouring our peace of mind. But look deeply into the heart of these persuasive creatures, and you will find that their argument holds no water.

Often times we stress about events that are out of our control,  yet we make futile attempts to try and seize control. When we inevitably fail, this can cause us to spiral into greater stress. If we were to step back for a minute and look at the larger picture we could see that the event was out of our control from the very beginning, and there was no action we could take that could change the outcome. When something is out of our control, worrying about it is both pointless and futile. Worrying will not effect the outcome.

On the other hand, to stress about something that is within our control also is senseless. If there is something under our concern that we have the ability to effect, then act. To stress or to worry will not change anything, only action will. So take the necessary action.

Trust that everything in life is as it is meant to be. Life never makes a mistake, and unfolds as it should every time. 

Question Everything

We are not free. We only have the illusion of freedom. We are handed a brochure of options to choose from and within those options, there is freedom. But if there was real freedom, the options would be limitless. All of society would be on the table for discussion. Yet we have only two real political parties, one system of government and one way of life. You would imagine in a free society that everything, our government, our morals, our rules, and every way in which we live and operate in our society would be on the table for discussion, but in my experience I have found this not to be so. People can fight and argue all they want about the death penalty or abortion, but if you ask people to question democracy or education, the conversation will more likely reach a very abrupt ending. And these are just two examples, but the sad reality is that there are many more. 

Now I am not saying that democracy is bad, or that children should not be sent to school, but I am saying that they should be questioned. The only way that we can build anything great is by constantly testing it and scrutinizing it. No topic should be off limits. Every aspect of our lives should be under questioning. Just because everyone does live this way doesn't mean it is the way we should live. I would argue that there is no ONE way that anyone should live. We are all different and should all be allowed to live however and believe whatever we want. I believe that for all the good that education does it can easily breed conformity. 

Education for me is the big one. But if you even broach the subject about not sending your child to school with some people and you will find extreme resistance. You can't even bring up the conversation. Something is very backwards about that to me. It may seem like I am against education, but in fact it I am completely for education, but a more progressive form. Young children need to understand the rules of our society so when they get a little older they can adjust the model so that it may be better. Children need to understand our way of life so they can make it BETTER. If our way of life has any chance at getting better it is the newer generations that can do this. I look to my parents and I think of all the things that I could teach them to be happier in their lives, and in my heart believe that my son can teach me just as much if not more. I think that parents teach children, and then it is the job of children to teach the parents. Children has just as much to teach as to learn. The younger generations are there to teach us how to find happiness and follow our dreams, which our parents forgot. If nothing else, there can teach us how to stay open. It is unfortunate because more often then not whatever generation you belong to, everyone always thinks the next doesn't know how to live, or they are ruining the world. Just as you have no right to be told what to do, you have no right to tell anyone else what to do. This concept is not new, and has existed as far back as recorded history, and will exist likely for many to come. I say this not because I am still part of a younger generation, but because that is how life works.

Every spring new flowers grow and blossom in the garden. The old flowers don't school and scold the new ones on how to be a genuine flower, because the young ones already know how to do it. They are flowers. That is what they do. There is no chance they could be anything else. The old flowers say "How wonderful! New flowers!" They gaze upon them and are reminded how glorious and beautiful it is being a flower. Some grow short, others grow long, some come in different colors, have fewer or more leaves and so forth. The old flowers are reminded how wonderful it is to exist. 

We in this culture have such a negative view of children. People don't think so, but look at our culture. Everything in our way of life is guided towards degrees, masters degrees, and careers. Everything is about adulthood. That is the purpose of school, and it seems to be the purpose of life in america. Children are guided to be hardworking adults. Children are taught to follow their dreams, so long as that dream includes a job with a salary. Children are taught to be happy, so long as that happiness includes an opposite sex partner and a few children who they can raise in the same way that you raised them. Those who do not fit these models are outcasts in our society. We need to stop and ask ourselves is this what children want, or is that what we want? Do we really have any clue what is best for our children? We don't even know what is best for ourselves, how on earth can we know what is best for someone else. 

The beauty of life is in its diversity, but yet we are all conditioned to go to school, graduate with a degree, get a career, a spouse and a few kids, a big house with a white picket fence, slave away for 40 hours a week, get old, die and never, NEVER question it. Is this really what is best? Is this really what you want or what you want for your children? This may be how some people want to live and they are more than welcome to do so, but if someone does not want to, they should be encouraged to do so. People should not be culturally conditioned to a standard of living. There is no standard of living. Life is to be lived, and not lived only within the parameters of specific guidelines. Question everything. Find out what works for you. 

Self Addiction

I think that it is engrained deep in human nature the tendency for addiction. This is commonly seen in the realm of drug addiction, but the range of addiction is so unbelievably wide. People can addict to things of a sexual nature, exercise, other people, their job, eating, I mean the list could really go on and on. The one that I would like to focus on is the addiction of ourselves.

We are all endlessly and hopelessly addicted to ourselves and the roles we play in society. We constantly concern ourselves with how we see ourselves and how others see us. We spend our days trying to make the role of ourselves happier or more successful or whatever we think it should be. We may set ourselves apart from an evil and do battle. Every experience we go through is filtered by our consciousness and in a split second we cast our judgment upon it. The sort of what do I think about this? How do I feel about it? And we rarely take experiences for simply what they are. We are conditioned to analyze everything that we think or feel, and are taught that the mind, the ego is the real self. To me, this is all the doings of a creature that takes itself to seriously. The thought has occured to me before that perhaps every sense of frustration, anxiety or pain that we feel in our lives exists as a reminder to laugh at yourself and to stop taking yourself so seriously.

I would argue that this addiction is the largest cause of one's inability to find inner peace. Think of all the frustration and stress we cause ourselves just dealing with this role; the trouble accepting oneself or others, the fruitless self-improvement attempts. We are so addicted to the role we play that the idea of it being a role seems to be completely ridiculous and impossible. Even the thought of not taking it so seriously can rarely be realized. Like the actor who truly becomes the part he or she is playing we become completely absorbed with this character and ignore clear signs that may lead us to believe otherwise. The clear sign to me in this case would be death.

Of course no one knows what happens after we die, but to me the most improbable thing seems to be that I would be exactly the same and be in a similar place. It seems to me that even if my consciousness would remain in the same state, it would require the same culture to produce the same role. Even though everything about "me" would be the same, my role, or who "I am", would change completely based on the structure of whatever or wherever I was. So really who are you? I mean that is how we take on this role in the first place. It isn't self imposed, we are told who and what we are. This is done at such an impressionable age, and with such convincing arguments that we accept it as the foundation of our experience. But is this really who we are? Or have we played this role for so long that we have become completely addicted and attached to it? Maybe that is why death exists, to remind us of this. To free us from ourselves

Come Into Culture

It is not the world that we come into, but culture. We grow into the world in a natural way, eat natural foods, behave in natural ways, and it is only when we become conditioned by our parents through their culture that we as children start to lose our natural state of being. Children are not viewed as human beings but instead as candidates for the human race, and only if the child will cooperate with us and assume our culture will they be human. It is this constant conflict of our true nature and our culture which to me is one of the largest forces influencing who we are and how we identify ourselves as individuals.

The culture we live in is not one that is natural. The way in which we live is not a natural state of living, with my largest point being that if it was, there would not be so many individuals who have such a difficulty finding peace and contentment. I think that it is culture that makes us feel alienated and out of place. It should be completely obvious that we are an integral part of the world and could not exist without it. Our culture, however, tends to separate us from nature and in doing so creates a massive disharmony between us and reality which brings us to situation we find ourselves in, in which we are destroying the planet, and there is endless fighting, poverty and starvation. Needless to say I believe that we need a large shift in culture if we are to not only survive, but thrive on this planet and in our own skin.

Seeking

In our society I have found that we do not encourage contentment. We are instead told that we should always be seeking. Seeking for the perfect job, the perfection of ourselves, the perfect spouse, the perfect life, the list can go on and on. This is further complicated by our capitalistic way of life, but I shall save that for another time.

Advertisements on the radio and television give us the image that we would be happier if only we had a certain product or lifestyle, and what is unfortunate is that our schooling and our society are more often than not part of this conditioning. We find that if everything in our minds expectations are not met, we should not worry because something better is out there, and all we need to do is keep searching. Keep searching for something that we will never find. The idea that there is gold hidden away in those hills, and that is what we need to find. We must be searching for that goodie. It is somewhere for sure, but certainly not here with us now. 

Unless one has a job that is suited to their personality or preference one must search endlessly to find this unreachable place of employment. For if we one day reached such a place, we may find ourselves either dissatisfied with it, as it may not be all that we imagined, or we may find ourselves wrapped in the fear of losing what we have found.

It is no surprise that most of us have lives full of unmet expectations because we are told that although we may have not found such things, it is out there, all we must be is keep searching. I myself have spent much more time than I would like to admit doing this very thing.

I would like to propose a different idea: that yes that perfect job, spouse, mind state, situation or whatever it is you are looking for is not somewhere else, but right where we are. It can be found at this very minute. It is standing directly in front of us, and all we need to do is stop seeking. All we need to do is open our hearts and open our eyes. We have been conditioned that only through the mind and through thinking can we find happiness, but from my experience the quickest way to finding contentment, which I believe is true happiness, is through the cessation of thought. Simply be present, view the world with an appreciative mind, and have fun.

Consider the possibilities of how our lives as individuals or even furthermore how a society would be effected by just a slight change in perspective.

Laughing Medicine

One day a while back I was thinking about all the concepts that created the image of who I was. I thought about my name, the way I look, my beliefs and thoughts, my past and everything that “I” am, and unexplainably started laughing. This deeply serene and calming feeling filled my entire being. I realized that all the ideas of what I am and how I identified what was me, were nothing more than concepts. They are just part of the puzzle. What we are is so much deeper and more beautiful than we can understand or express, and in that moment I was reminded of that. This laughter reminded me not to take this conception of myself and all the opinions or beliefs I have so damn seriously. It taught me that this image is just a role that I am playing, so I should play with it. It was one of the more powerful moments in my life.

So long as we live right now in this moment, there are no problems. As long as we do not connect our being too fiercely with the image or the idea of ourselves, we will not experience a state of disharmony within or to the world we are a part of. I have found that more often than not if I was to step back are take a more complete view of things as they happen, many frustrations and troubles could be avoided. For example if something bad was to happen, I may feel upset or angry not that it happened but that it happened to ME. If I was to take a wider perspective I might find that it isn’t happening to me it is just happening, and I am witnessing this happening. The question once came to me whether or not negative experiences exist solely to remind us to let go of our complete identification of ourselves with the “I” concept.  I have found that one of the most beautiful and healing things that we can do is to laugh at ourselves from time to time. Not only can laughter alter our mood and bring us into a state of happiness, but it can remind us of what is truly important in life.

From there it led me to an idea that at the time I called laughing meditation. There is a yoga or meditation for nearly everything these days and I thought this idea fit perfectly within this group. My idea was pretty simple. All you do is think about all the concepts, ideas, pains, memories, desires, etc. that you think make up the basis of "you”. Go as deep as you can, and let it build. When it all starts to get overwhelming, simply laugh from your belly and let it all go. Imagine all of yourself dying and fading away, and yet you will find that there is still so much left. Beyond all the concepts there is still so much left. Look at yourself in the mirror and laugh at yourself. Laugh at how serious you take yourself. Remind yourself to be fearless and to play. Be flexible and open. To me has been more of a medicine than a meditation, but I feel that there is great power in this simple idea.

All Mixed Up

Why do we not trust ourselves? Why do we look down at ourselves and put ourselves down? And why is it that we get the idea that other people have their shit together somehow better than us?                                                                                                           To me it is common sense that every single one of us is just as confused and mixed up as everybody else. Nobody is better or smarter or more evolved or closer to the ultimate reality or anything else that you can imagine as a competition. I don't care if you are a priest or a guru or a scientist with an endless number of degrees or the president of the United States. To me, you are not any better than anyone else. But don't run too far with this thought either, because I do not think I am better than any of them. Now the truth is that from time to time I cannot help judging people. Sometimes I will get the sense of superiority or inferiority, because that is part of the culture I grew up with, but I understand that just because I may from time to time think it so does not mean it is. And anyone that truly believes they are superior or inferior has a false sense of identity.

We must stop competing with everyone else, especially with ourselves. We get the idea that we could be better and that we should be a better version of ourselves. Why is this? Is it something that we truly feel or is it an idea that has been put into us by something outside us? You cannot be anything other than what you are.

Stop competing with yourself, you are wonderful the way you are. Don't look up to anyone because they are no better than you are, and don't look down on anyone because they are just as good as you. Everyone is just as fucked up and mixed up as you are. We all have the same thoughts and fears and hopes. This is a bridge that can bring us all together as a people.

Quiet The Mind

One of the greatest things that we can do for ourselves is from time to time respectfully tell our mind to be quiet.

It is the nature of mind to wander, but that does not mean we must follow it. Watch the wandering of your mind, the sensations of your body, and the world as it enfolds right in front of you.

I find from my personal experience that as I do not follow my mind, I begin to distance myself further and further from the idea of "me". Even the idea of a separate self seems like an absolutely impossibility. The thoughts that run through my brain and even the actions of my body do not appear to be things that are under my control. That is not to say that they happen TO me either, because there is no individual me at all. Things just seem to happen. Life happens both through and around me. I have found that experiences like this may not only be the real nature of the cosmos, but is an absolute necessity to promote any sort of harmony within oneself.