Hundred and One Monkeys

How many of these things were initially paradigm-shattering discoveries, knowledge reserved for a select few?  How long was each regarded as Special before spreading wide enough to reach the Tipping Point:

• Building huts instead of living in caves
• Purposeful cultivation of crops
• Understanding that the Earth's seas are continuous (the Earth is round)
• Travel by flying through the skies

Each of these signaled a turning point in humankind's development, one from which there was no turning back.  And each bit of knowledge necessary to make those achievements commonplace had to pass the 100th Monkey mark, the point where the number of people holding that knowledge went from a select few, to the masses.


But what about the basic Mystery of Enlightenment, the clear seeing that there is no You, No Self, anywhere to be found?

There's no need to see No Self as an entitlement held by special "enlightened ones".  It's a fact simpler to discover than any of those now commonplace life-altering Paradigm Shifts listed above.  Why? Because it is already the case, and has always been the case.  There's nothing to develop or learn, no skill to acquire.

So the thoughts about "reaching enlightenment", "practicing to reach enlightenment", or "earning enlightenment" are all just plain false.  All of that is bullshit.  No guru, practice, time, or method is necessary.

Go Ahead.  Before googling your next guru, stop and do a simple check right now.  Point to the self, the thing that's credited with reading and digesting this message.  Was it here while reading the start of this post, or did it appear just now, after reading that last sentence?

Unless you're in love with seeking, don't dismiss the obvious.

photo credit:  Mugshotsocial on DeviantArt

Bullshit Enlightenment (Just B.E.)

This is a trip, going nowhere, and without any markers. No one's navigating. There's no crew. The map's been burned, there's nowhere to dock, no terrain. Yesterday's midpoint might as well be today's starting line. Or near finish. Hard to tell, and it doesn't matter. It's not a race anyway and You can't win.

Forget getting your bearings. They don't work here. They don't work "there" either, which ends up being the same frigging difference. Where "you" are in seeing This is fine, until it isn't, and then the next seeing through may appear to happen. Or not. Of course, that's the state things appear to be in now, anyway.

photo credit:  JulianNulian on DeviantArt

Erasure

Note:  This post is written to dovetail This Excellent Commentary by Rikki Winchester.  Check it.

The most ridiculous idea that circulates post seeing no self is that it's a cure all.  Yes, this next statement is true:  Once seen No Self can't be unseen. 

But that's not the end of the self.

What it is, at first, is a relief.  A huge relief from the seeming burden of constantly creating a self, or of holding onto useless identity-based baggage.  Abused as a child?  That wasn't you.  Made several awful mistakes?  There's nothing for it to be attached to.  If the thought now pops up that the deed done was especially abhorrent, then should the opportunity to act similarly again arise, the behavior will most likely not be engaged in. 

All those mistakes or unfortunate things from the past aren't following a You around and so don't have to be repressed.   Good news, right?

On the flip side, if you're known to go around performing charitable acts on par with Mother Theresa, after which you play the Humble Card by proclaiming humility, the mouthful of false humble pie is unnecessary.  There's no one to take credit.  This time it's really true when you say, with a dismissive wave, "Aw, it was nothing, really."  Yeah.  Really.  It wasn't.

So you see, everything outwardly seems to remains the same.

Except it's entirely different.  And the difference is in an altered perspective within thought.  Your friends and family may not notice anything unusual at all, except that the neurotic behavior may have eased.  Or maybe the constant clinging to storylines start to fall flat.  Other changes?  The incessant chatter about your problems and your worries ring hollow, and it's possible that the image-propping monetary purchases begin to slow down.

Maybe.  Hard to say.  There's no one controlling it.  But the personality is likely to largely remain. 

Personality is a thought pattern, and the Self is still recreated with each new and habitual selfing thought that pops up.   What's more, that self is always created within the current moment even when that new thought is supposed to be accessing a cherished "memory".  The memory isn't past, it's happening now. When it's gone, it disappears completely, taking that just-created version of You with it, until next time the brain's electrical impulses take a similar route and produce another thought like it. 

But it won't be the same thought.

In that way, "You" have always been a Tabula Rasa.  Clean slate.  But that's a truth which still requires seeing through the false selfing thoughts as they arise, each time they arise.  This is especially true for the selves newly liberated.

No Self is not a one-and-done, not a cure-all.  Keep questioning, keep looking.  There's a whole lot more of the slate to clear.

Photo credit:  ThereXandXBackXAgain on deviantart

As This Story Had Gone...

How it seems, presently, is that I started this looking, this digging to figure out what All This is all about, probably as a child.  It goes back as far as I can remember.  And there have been iterations.  


There will be more.


In the past few years, all of my searching for answers intensified as I perceived a self who would face greater and greater personal challenges to that fictitious state called Happiness.  My initial relentless pursuit was to establish a real coping mechanism to handle my story's "less desirable" aspects, those I imagined were coming soon.  Lots of people do the same, thinking that a spiritual or truth pursuit will spare the pain of a difficult situation.


There's no such thing.  Everything appears fully as there's nothing, no self, to prevent it.


Religion is a false buffer if it's used to shield.  And so is No Self. Everything that life is, is faced fully. There is no other way. The false shield of thought, the overlay, is a mask, a pattern of thinking that claims to try to alter the story. And yet within that fantasy, this masking is ultimately felt as more harmful than good.


So what do I mean about ending suffering with regard to seeing that there is no tangible self?  It's not that there is no pain, no anger, no anxiety.  Those are elements within Life Itself.  The freedom is in the fact that there's nowhere for it to stick.  Because when it comes up for any of us, the suffering is in hanging onto it as part of an identity, or trying to push it away as part of a desire to have it not be part of our identity.


Once it's seen that there is no identity except for one arbitrarily constructed in wisps of thought, there's no either clinging or pushing it away.  It just is, as it is, nothing more.  There's no one there to hold it or carry it.
.

photo credit:  everRiviere on Deviantart

Fantastically Real is Better Than Fiction

One of the most interesting side effects of realization is when the stories we create are clearly seen for what they are.  In this case, it's the story of a ride in a Time and Space Machine.

Warning:  After realization it gets more and more difficult to lie, even to "yourself".  


And everything is just a story.


Here's one:

Just yesterday (a concept I have more and more difficulty parsing), I flew home to South Florida from Atlanta.  It's a relatively quick flight which lasts less than two hours by the clock.  The trip reminded me of another flight, a long one from New England to Hawaii involving multiple planes and a flight pattern over the Pacific to land in Oahu.

Or so the memory goes.  In another version of the story, I  flew high and fast through the night skies, over a massive body of ocean and under billions of stars, then hours later, arrived in another place, another time.

Both stories are good ones.  It's all in the telling.

But without those two particularly interesting conceptual overlays, what was the more immediate experience?

In yet another version, there was a sensation called "walking", of moving through an opening, sitting in a cramped area, warmth, feelings of discomfort, odd sensations of pulling and pushing, moving pictures on a white screen, a few big bumps, loud noises, then again the sensation called "walking" down an aisle, where people stood to say,

"Aloha!  Welcome to Oahu!"




There is another version that seems more fantastic than most, but a check of reality proves it out as the truest.   In this one there was nothing happening, not even time.  Thought and sensation arose from nothing, out of nowhere, seemingly following each other.  They arose to no one.  They appeared neither inside nor outside.  The entire experience had no beginning and no end, and was Life Itself.... no experiencer ever necessary.  


Fantasicly real.






photo credit:  bosniak on deviantart

Mom's here for her yearly Thanksgiving visit.

And that's quite a good thing considering that lately, life's been throwing herculean challenges in this character's path.

Listing them out, while tempting, is too much like wallowing in a story, a Me-ing. Yes the events exist as story, but seeing through the mind's attempts to claim these things as "mine" is both amusing and irritating, simultaneously.  Because mom's here, there are also old patterns of Me-ing  resurfacing, especially those which would turn to a mom for comfort or consolation.

Obviously, there's still some post-no self transitioning going on here.

But watching mom's thought patterns from the other side of the threshold is interesting.  It's easy now to see where those in this personality have come from.  Sometimes it's endearing to watch her familiar gestures just to see how they match up to this body and brain's thoughts and movements.  And observing as she processes events as either an insult to the self, or a compliment to the self, is an exercise in waking up all over again.

Then there's just listening to her dole out advice on handling life's changes.  Some of them come from a place so deep in wisdom that I'm in awe.  I hear the words, but the message just doesn't apply the same way it used to.  Instead, the advice is appreciated for the moment spent in her presence, knowing that the mom I always assumed was there is instead an amazing expression of life itself.

There's no point to this entry, actually.  It just wanted to be written.

Photo credit:  LakeRoad

The Map and the Terrain

Yesterday afternoon I sat at a sidewalk cafe and had a beautiful salad, a glass of wine, and a frigging amazing piece of chocolate cake... by myself. I sat under palm trees watching the sun fall across the buildings as it sunk low in the sky. The colors of the buildings changed as time passed. The people walking or driving by changed, the taste of the salad changed with each bite, and the thoughts changed with each sip of wine.

At least that was the interpretation.

I began reading this article right then, at the table, and saw clearly, experientially that it was all an unbelievable and completely indescribable experience once I separated it from the map. It was all just incredibly beautiful in my version. And I looked at the people walking by in groups (it's a tourist town)... many of them completely involved in stories, bumping into other passers-by as they talked about past or future events, seemingly blinded to the actual terrain. And as the article pointed out, it was true!... They had no concept of the map exactly as I'd constructed it. Their entire worlds were other than "mine".

The waiter stopped by and we chatted. We didn't talk about the article specifically, but he "got it". Got that there was just this whole world of reality in front of our eyes, and that it's possible to miss it or rewrite it entirely when relying on the maps in our heads.

It follows that even while being aware of the reality of the experience, and of seeing it without words, each of us still went home with concepts of the events, with separately mapped worlds. It's impossible to take the actual terrain with you. as it's completely gone once the experience has passed. All that's ever left is the constructed model with all of its subjective attributes, none of which are wrong unless they are mistaken for the reality.

And that's when I really appreciated the fundamental difference... the true EXPERIENCE of the terrain as it is, when it IS, Reality separated from the conceptual. It's incredibly more open and free than the map can ever convey.


photo credit: James Stark