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It’s ok not to want anything

Globalization has homogenized many aspects of culture. Many distinct, and organic approaches to economic thought have been coopted and in many cases out right replaced by the “Borg” of Ideas known as the constant growth model (No, I’m not above using Star Trek metaphors).  Under this conception of reality, contentment is the antithesis of what the cultural engineers desire for you. If you are content, then you won’t buy their stuff. If you are content, then you won’t be willing to slave away for them. Somehow we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that endangering our own health is the key to success. http://oem.bmj.com/content/58/1/68.full  Success is now defined as having a lot of stuff, and/or being know by lots of people, but there’s never enough stuff or enough twitter followers to satiate the craving for more. I once read of a billionaire who lost most of his net worth during the market crash of 08’ Even though he was still worth millions of dollars he fell into a suicidal depression because of the immensity of what he perceived as a loss. He took his own life, with millions of unspent dollars in the bank because he couldn’t bear the shame of having less than he once had. What a strange inversion of values which led this man to sacrifice himself at the altar of excess. To fall into complete despair because some digital zeros on an LCD display told a different story than the day before. If economic growth is God, then contentment must be the devil.

There is a better way, a way to have true satisfaction, right now. Not five years in the future, but this very moment. It’s called gratitude. Unlike material wealth, the more you have of it, the more contentment you will feel. If you just take a moment to truly appreciate what you already have, you will find yourself wanting less. Wanting less is the key to satisfaction, the infinite growth models problem is that its infinite. There is no end to it, like a perceptual black hole, even light can’t escape its event horizon, thus preventing you from seeing a way out of its grasp. Wanting less however, does have an absolute zero. You can actually inhabit a state in which you want nothing. At the moment you want nothing you instantly have everything. No longer motivated by desire, your hunger for more is replaced by a sense of playfulness and curiosity. The need to hustle and bustle and compete with each other assumes a backdrop of scarcity. The realization that scarcity is an illusion, that abundance is actually the prevailing reality brings true contentment. Let our only remaining desire be the desire to reduce the suffering in this world, the suffering of others and most importantly of ourselves.

The problem with rules.

“Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.”- Henry David Thoreau

Rules are not eternal. They have a starting point and an ending point, which is contingent on how long the “authority figure” or institution which set a rule in place maintains their standing. Rules are designed to maintain a particular type of order, and to establish a predictable status quo, all in service of the interests of the rule-makers. The rule-makers are people too. They were thrust into this world screaming their lungs out, covered in gooey stuff just like you. If their authority was real there would be something inimitable about them, they would possess some unique quality which would make them indispensable. In reality, this is not the case. Most rule-makers are simply people who were born into a situation of distinct socio-economic privilege.  The only thing inimitable about them are the size of their parent’s bank accounts. Yet they fancy themselves to be the architects of culture and society. Merely being wealthy isn’t a sufficient basis for these people to dictate how you live your life, and you being born less privileged isn’t sufficient reason to take their rules seriously. Rules severely limit your ability to find creative solutions.

The artificial shackles of institutional policy, governmental regulation, cultural expectations, and filial obligations can all severely constrain your ability to innovate solutions and optimize your own wellbeing. Authority is an illusion, an illusion reinforced by your adherence to it. When you embrace the freedom which you were born with as an individual, as an equal to all of humanity, then you will see how much the rules you have committed to following have hindered your development. The phrase, “That’s just the way things are,” should never be enough for you. You must demand reasons from those who expect you to follow them. If they don’t have good ones, then you must find your own. The true irony of our predicament is that the rule makers rarely follow their own rules. They design them for who they see as “common folk,” to artificially constrict the range of options, to keep them dependent on their systems, and their over-priced “solutions.”

Your rebellion must be a quiet one. You don’t have to declare anything out loud. You just have to pledge allegiance to your own subjectivity, to the authenticity of your own experience, to you own insight, to your own primacy. I am not advocating reckless selfishness. I am advocating conscientious self-trust.  Be open to change your mind, allow yourself to be convinced by sound reasoning, you must, however stand vigilant against coercion. Once you have freed yourself you don’t have to sit around hoping the rules will modernize. You can take action right now to strive for yourself and for those you care about. Always consider the consequences of your actions. Always consider how your choices will impact others, but beyond that, this world is a big playground. Play as hard and as free as you can before recess is over.

–When you wake up in the morning you realize that you were not just a character in the dream, but the dream itself. There is another awakening that happens when you commit yourself to discovering the truth, when you abandon all allegiance to any preexisting ideology or belief system. When you stand bare before the mirror of introspection. You realize that the dream never ended and that you aren’t just a character in it, but the dream itself.

–Our identities are simply a collection of beliefs and memories. Our thoughts, moods, actions and interactions are all pulled into alignment by our beliefs about who and what we are. Memories serve to justify our beliefs and we willingly pay a hefty retainer for their advocacy. This sordid game helps us sculpt a sense of self. It helps us find consistency in the face of an array of potential selves. We suffer for this consistency, for this sedentary loyalty, for this illusion of identity. We all want to change. We all want to become wiser, more compassionate, and more capable. How can we make these changes and retain our sense of self? We cannot have it both ways, because there is only one way.  We must let go of everything we believe, because the change is already happening.  Open your eyes.

 

In this series of aphorisms I am sharing the insights which arise during my practice of a meditation technique which I developed called the interceding space method. They are essentially takeaways from a conversation with the universe. I hope they can be of benefit to whomever is reading them.

–The deeper we probe into the cosmos the closer we get to realizing we have been looking in the mirror the whole time.

–We process our experience the same way we process food. We taste it, chew it, swallow it, metabolize it, and expel that which is not useful. Let us not seek after only the sweetness of experience, for like candy, too much bliss renders us bloated and immobile. We must seek balance in all of our pursuits and processes. None is superior to the other; all aspects are the expression of essential unity. We must become peace. We must become war. We must become silence.

— You can spend your life waiting for some research institution to legitimize your intuitions or you can conduct your own
experiments in the laboratory of moment to moment experience. We are all born being aware of exactly what our capabilities are, but this awareness has been systematically stripped from us. We must return to an awareness of our true connectivity with all things and all processes.

–The danger of the ego is that it is a static representation of an ongoing process. It is a perpetually inaccurate depiction of who and what we are. We exist as an emerging process, not merely as fixed objects which can be defined and understood. We exist on the verge of infinite possibility, which is why knowledge of self is ultimately a false pursuit. Water must be frozen before it can be sculpted, and sculptures are nothing more than a monument to one moment in space time, or one line of possibility. To abandon the ego is to refocus your attention to the flow state. Let your attention surf on the waves of fractal emergence. Smile as they guide you to the precipice of creation and jump willingly into the void of the unknowable. This is the treasure map to freedom.

–Ultimately, all labels and identities inhibit you from seeing clearly. It forces a bias onto your perception because the starting point of analysis becomes the category you have identified yourself with. This is a process which enslaves us all. Stop thinking of your selves as black/ white/ Gay/ Straight/ democrat/ republican/ male/ female Christian/Muslim etc. These identities will only preclude you from seeing the whole picture because they all represent a very narrow snapshot of potential experience. As an exercise take a sheet of paper and write down all the labels you identify with. As you progress you will soon notice that the paper you are writing on, once clear and untarnished is now covered with words. Do you not see how the more you write on the paper the less visible the white backdrop becomes? You are that piece of paper, and the more you write labels onto yourself the less clear your real essence becomes. if you want to know who you really are then take out your eraser. Become empty, become truth. We wear labels like armor, hoping that the guild of identity we join will provide us protection and stability. The labels themselves are actually what we need protecting from.
After this renunciation of labels, if someone ask you who you are, simply look at them, smile and answer, “I am”

–If you conduct an honest and conscientious audit of your past behavior you will notice the degree to which you are imitating the behavioral patterns and neuroses of characters in books, movies, or shows. Our brains have been hijacked by these character archetypes and they inform our perceptions of reality. I strongly caution against the consumption of fictitious media, it has convinced us that harmony, serenity, peace and amicability are mundane. it makes us believe that life is simply a series of conflicts only to be mitigated by death.
Reality however, is much kinder than we are led to believe. All those fireside tales of great warriors and heroes we tell our children builds in them expectations of violence. This is the mechanism by which atrocities are made possible. We have romanticized the battle field, we have esteemed the warrior class. Everything which relates back to the preservation of life has been devalued as “boring,” while the most destructive and dangerous aspects are put on a pedestal. This sinister inversion of values, Orwellian in its scale, is why we are spiraling towards destruction.

–All fictitious media, whether it be TV shows, plays, movies, novels, short stories etc., relies on conflict as its essential appeal. We have all spent thousands of hours throughout the course of our lives taking in media that is uniform in its message of the necessity of conflict in human relationships. What we must realize, actively and consciously, is conflict is only a necessary aspect of entertainment media, not real life. We have been systematically conditioned to manifest conflict in our real lives based on the subconscious tapestry of expectations woven by our exposure to entertainment media. We sit in rooms, cut off from the outside world, being taught how to interpret reality by glowing screens, and printed words. Art doesn’t imitate life, art distorts life. It imbues it with the expectation of drama and misunderstanding. If you want to experience reality then go out and experience it with fresh eyes. Go for a walk. Go have a genuine conversation. Go meet someone new or become reacquainted with someone you already know. Stop allowing yourselves to be told how to react, what emotions to feel, what to think. Make up your own mind. Be your own person.

–In the end, all of our suffering is self inflicted. My message is one of radical responsibility. There are no victims in this world, only dishonesty and misplaced blame.

–To be offended is to be at odds with reality. Offense is fueled by taboos; taboos which exists in a primary sense as a collective rejection of reality, and in a secondary sense only to fetishize reality.
Being offended is one of the worlds most ubiquitous and destructive behavioral patterns. I would speculate that under FMRI we would see the same brain activity in an ‘offended’ person as you would a person who is about to eat a slice of cheesecake.
Ask your self: If I accept reality, and reality encompasses all phenomena, how can I deem anything unacceptable? When viewed through this lens offense becomes an impossibility. If you find yourself being offended often then you don’t need to look out into the world asking why things are the way they are, you need to look into yourself and ask why do I stand against the flow of existence and its experiential contents? You must embrace the ugliest most vicious and most deplorable. For, the shadow gives character to the light.
The basis upon which you can make any value judgement is duality. Do you understand?
The only way you can be a non- violent person is for violence to exist. The only way you can be a non-gambler is for gambling to exist. The shadow provides the contrast by which light is defined.
Duality is requisite to creation. Against the canvas of undifferentiated reality, the brush strokes of creation are sometimes sharp and sometimes soft. You are a product of varied brush strokes, and an amalgam of many different organisms, all of which have different natures yet accept and embrace each other because on a microscopic level an understanding exist between these organisms that they exist merely as contingencies of each other.

–Particulate matter is an illusion. Ultimately there is nothing but seamless continuity and solid state connectivity. This is the only God that has ever existed, a God which we are all equally part of. Nothing is expected of us, nothing is demanded from us we are free to exist as we are.