Sticks in the mud

It's got a light side and a dark side and it binds the galaxy together... no, not The Force... no, not duct tape.. love. Actually, there is so much confusion around this term that the human race has spent the better part of the last million years figuring it out. Over the years, some have shown insights and others have failed miserably, albeit spectacularly. So what's the deal here?

As usual, there is a conventional explanation and a conscious one. From the conventional side of things, there are a bizillion books about love (which I'm designating with a lower case "l" here.) The scientific side of it can also be found in those books, and it's actually quite interesting! The feelings we associate with love cause our bodies to release endorphins which activate the same receptors in the brain that addictive drugs like morphine and heroine activate! In fact, do you know how the word "endorphin" came to be? The person who discovered endorphins is Candace Pert, who is also now a spiritual teacher and an interesting read, and she came up with the term "endorphin" as a combination of two words: endogenous morphine. Basically, endorphins are the body's naturally made morphine. So hell yeah it feels good!!

When you fall for someone in this way, you are actually addicted to them just like a drug, because seeing them gives you that high in the same biological way that a drug like morphine or heroine would. Unfortunately, there are some side effects to all drugs, especially this one.

Eventually your body builds up a tolerance. Seeing that person will eventually produce less and less of a high, and this is totally natural. It doesn't mean that you don't "love" them anymore. Actually, from a biological standpoint, other hormones begin to get released after the endorphins go away, and these hormones are responsible for feelings of security and stability.

However, sometimes people get addicted to an image of a person, and not the person's true nature. Often this is the case. When you do that, you build up a mental image of the person and you associate with the mental image rather than the person. The mental image you have of the person is idealized, and when you are addicted to that image, you have no idea what the real substance behind it is. So the old scenario tends to play out: You move in with the person while addicted, or worse, you marry them. Then the addiction wears off. You still associate with the mental image of the person, but mysteriously that person does not live up to the image anymore, and you begin to get annoyed with them on a regular basis... you start to fight a lot, or worse. Violence erupts.

Keep in mind that the other person may also be going through the same thing. Their addiction is ending and they are associating with a mental image of you rather than the real you. That makes two egos fighting the battle.

Aw well that just SUCKS!! What's the point of love then?? *sarcasm there* (Right now everyone reading this is probably hating me, especially female readers!)

I've been though this, like most people. During one of the summers when I was training with Draja, I experienced a big breakup. I went through the regular stages of grief, but my habit of holding things inside and hiding feelings made my expression of grief incomplete. It wasn't until the NEXT summer, a year later that I had this conversation with Draja one night during our session:

"It's been a year and I'm still hurting. This really sucks. I'm so sick of it all. Not only is this happening, but my parents are also divorcing. It's all so dumb: love. What's the point? All it does is cause pain and suffering. What IS love, Draja? I don't get this."

Draja handed me a tissue because I was sobbing like a baby and began, "Love (as experienced by the ego) is the palest reflection of what a being feels for its creator. Your true self doesn't really desire anything except to realize its union with the Creator, with the One, with Consciousness. "

"So all these warm and fuzzy feelings are just that, bullshit?" I asked.

"Well it depends on what you mean by bullshit. Are they beyond the ego, meaning are they real? No. Conventional love is generated by the ego. Your ego doesn't really understand that even it is inexplicably pulled towards union with Consciousness, and it thinks that this love is the ultimate thing, when really it's just a poor substitute." he answered.

This made me a little angry, and I responded, "That's tough to believe. All these feelings and these wonderful things are really just our egos barking up the wrong tree? There's GOT to be something Real about all this. Love MUST have some purpose."

He smiled and countered with, "Josh, egos cling to things. Egos defend things, and they demand purposes. There IS such thing as True Love. You know what it is? True Love is acceptance of what Is Right Now In The Present Moment. When you enter the Present, and you accept everything and everyone just as it is, without letting your desires to change or control get in the way, then you experience Love. You experience the Love that Consciousness has for itself, for the Real You."

Take a while and think about all this.

Do a thought experiment. What is the logical or emotional conclusion to love? Union.

Males: What do you tend to want out of any love interest? A great round of sex, or ten. What is the end result of good sexual experiences? Orgasms. What do you feel after an orgasm? Ultimate release, complete stillness, even for only a few seconds. Union.

Females: What do you tend to want out of any love interest? A soul mate, and an emotional counterpart. What could be the physical conclusion of that? A fabulous dinner in a fantastically romantic location, where you wind up staring into his eyes or snuggling in his arms for eternity... maybe even sex too, but at the end of all that, what do you feel? Ultimate buildup to ultimate comfort and bliss, complete stillness, even for only a few seconds. Union.

So even our experiences of love in the world of form are trying to point us in the direction of Oneness. The problem is that we let our egos run them and this always leads to suffering.

Normal life

When awakening starts to occur, it's sort of a funny experience. You begin to pull away from your own emotions and become the observer, or the witness. The same goes for your thoughts. Depending on whether you are a male or a female, you may have more thoughts than emotions, on average, but many exceptions exist. Either way, you pull away.

You might find there are times when the world starts to look phony, like you are waking up from a dream. Ever see that move, The Matrix? That's a great analogy! In this movie, the world is really just a computer program created by robots who took over humanity long ago. The human beings are placed into incubators for their entire lives, so the robots can mine heat energy from them to power their gadgets. In order to keep the humans imprisoned, the humans' minds are put into the Matrix, which is a virtual reality copy of the world in the early 21st century. The premise of the movie is that some of these humans wake up from the Matrix and pull themselves out of it into the real world, and they then begin a mission to awaken everyone else.

In one particular scene in the movie, the main character, Neo, has been newly awakened and is going on his first mission back into the Matrix for some information. As he looks around at the streets where he used to "live", he is seeing them for the first time for the illusions that they are. Part of him is sad, and part of him is amazed. All of him is awake.

I call these "Matrix moments", and they happen frequently to those who are waking up, because that movie really is a perfect analogy for it. In the real case, the robots symbolize the collective Human ego, which is keeping all of us prisoner in its dreamlike state.

Drawing a blank...

One of the biggest barriers to realization of Consciousness is the chatter inside our heads. We all have it: that voice in your mind that never shuts up from the moment you wake until way after you fall asleep. The root of this voice is really one thing: fear. People's minds fear that if they shut up they will cease to exist. That is exactly what the ego does. It tries to preserve its existence by constantly reminding itself, "Hello, I'm here!"

Can this voice be stopped? Is there a point to stopping this voice? What can you really expect to do in the Present moment about this?

When I was living with Draja and training as his student, we would spend the days fixing up his house and running errands and the evenings doing exercises. Constant 24/7 training, basically. On one evening we went down into the classroom for our nightly session, and this time we were working on blanking that voice in our heads:

Draja opened up the discussion, "Josh, great power lies with those who can blank their minds for ten minutes. Can you do that?"

"Hellll no." I answered. "I think I can do it for maybe a second or two, and then it comes back no matter how hard I try to keep it away."

He nodded and smiled, "Ah, there's your problem. You are trying. By trying to blank your mind, you are guaranteed NOT to succeed."

I flashed him my usual confused look that I had been giving him for the last decade since that day when he sat me down at age 12.

"There's an old Zen saying. 'You cannot stop your own mind any more than you can look into your own eyes or bite your own teeth.' By trying to stop your mind, you are using your mind, and that takes thought. Therefore, your mind is not stopped. You may just simply be thinking, 'I'm not thinking right now. nyah nyah' To stop your thoughts, you have to observe them. Then after observing them for a while, you gradually realize that you are not the thoughts, but rather you are the thing that is witnessing the thoughts."

I nodded pensively and said, "Kinda like a silent witness, huh?"

He smiled and said, "Yes! That's exactly it. Very good."

Then I got a little bit worried, "But if my mind stops, won't I fall into a big black pit of nothingness or something? Could I cease to exist? Or die even?"

He laughed and shook his head. "No. That's what your ego wants you to think. It really believes that if it stops it will not be there, but actually when it stops you are more you than you usually are. But, talking about this is just more thought. You need to blank your mind, and I'm going to help. Take this..."

Draja then pulled out a small white box, like the kind used for rings or earrings, and he opened it. Inside was a nondescript looking stone. It could have been any stone that was picked up off the street, and was maybe three quarters of an inch long by half an inch wide. He handed me the stone and said, "Hold this in both hands and close your eyes."

Sitting down in a chair, I took the stone and did as he instructed.

Suddenly everything went black... because my eyes were shut! But seriously it was even blacker than that, and moreover, everything suddenly became ultimately quiet. I cannot describe how quiet it was... quieter than the quietest room I had ever been in. Not only was it black and quiet, but there was this feeling of enormous space. The space was more vast than anything I had known, yet I was not scared, and yet the space was also very small at the same time. Man, it was a relief, like taking off a tight shoe. All the crap that I had cared about was just not an issue. It did not exist any longer.

And in that vast blackness of ultimate peace, there came a teeny tiny voice that barely even had any echo, and it said, "Holy shit. I'm still here."

Suddenly again, everything came swarming back to "normal". I realized a few seconds later that it happened because Draja took the stone out of my hands. He smiled at me and asked, "So, how was it?"

I pointed at the stone, "What the hell was THAT??"

In a pedantic tone he responded, "This stone has an interesting ability to teach people how to meditate by blanking their minds. Someone found it and gave it to me a long time ago. I use it to teach people when they are in need. The great thing now is that all you have to do to blank your mind in the future is simply remember the stone and your experience, and your thoughts will zip away."

After thanking him, I asked him a lot of questions. The main one I asked was, "When I was blanked out, there was something STILL THERE. It was a huge presence, yet not so huge. It didn't do anything except watch and hang out there in the background like a big black expanse. What was that?"

He nodded knowingly, "That's the Real you."


More later!

Good. Evil, and Relativism

This is a favorite and highly charged subject for a lot of people. Pretty much everyone with an ego (which means everyone) bases a significant portion of their identity on their ideas of what is right and wrong, and they often use that basis as a means of strengthening their egos by condemning those who do not believe as they do. So, hey, why don't I light a few fires here?

Obviously, religions have the market cornered on definitions of right and wrong. Governments are a close second, and most governments are based on religion anyway.... In general, religions are about black and white takes on good and evil. They say, "THIS is good. THAT is evil. The end." The funny part is that when you look inside the religion at the people who practice it, they either don't all agree with the dogma or they have a completely different interpretation of it, yet all of them swear that there is a universal definition. Sufis call that hypocrisy.

Then you have a newer version of the definitions which is called relativism. Though relativism is probably a bit closer to Reality, it still doesn't quite hit the mark. It's missing some elements.

Relativism is a good start though, for showing where the logic of good and evil that religions talk about breaks down.

One night, Draja pulled me into a classroom he had in the basement of his house, and told me we'd be doing some inner self work that night. During this particular time, most of the IS work we were doing was based on contacting the IS's of other people and making them do things, and this night was more of the same.

"Ok, Josh, " he said. "Here is our target for tonight." He then held up a small scrap of paper with a name written on it. I studied the paper and began to contact the guy's IS as Draja lit two candles on a low table.

After I made contact, I said, "Ok, got 'im. What are we doing?"

He took a second to also make contact and then said, "We're going to make this guy impotent!"

"WHAT?! Oh come on!" I blurted. Draja just nodded in response, so I followed up, "What the fuck? Why would we want to do this? Hell, this guy must be about 60 years old. He probably doesn't get it up much at all, and we're going to take that away?"

Draja nodded. "Bad for him. True. But not bad for the lady he's raping periodically." Draja named the woman, and it was someone we knew.

Relativism is based on the thought that every action is both beneficial and harmful to someone. On a situational level, that's absolutely true, and even the most hard core religionist would have a hard time denying it. However, religionists like to explain that some higher power is directing everything and that there is some huge plan that we cannot understand, and that by doing "good", i.e. their definition of good, we can help that plan. Eh... like many things, that's another distortion.

So what's the deal?

The deal is there is no good or evil OR relativism.

Everything just is the way it is. Once you put a judgment onto it by saying it's good or bad, that judgment is a thought. Consciousness has no judgment, only acceptance of what is. The relativists and religionists both judge, albeit on different scales and with varying degrees of tolerance. But they are both judging rather than experiencing without naming.

When something happens in your life, you will eventually judge it, and that's fine. You will judge it according to your past conditioning. However, before you do that, try to take at least a second or two to just look at the thing as it is, with no words or thoughts. Taking a deep breath when you feel yourself starting to compulsively judge something will work to disrupt your thought flow for the second or two that it takes to just take a quick unobstructed view.

Fundamental(ist) response to the Oprah/Eckhart Classes

I've been posting links and watching the Oprah Winfrey presentation of Eckhart Tolle and his materials, and I've also been combing the internet to look at the responses to the videos.

They are absolutely fascinating. There are those who agree and those who disagree. The response from the people who disagree goes something like this:

Plumbing Tool Expert: Oprah, I'm warning you. You are leading people astray and it is unacceptable. I am appalled at what you are promoting, and I want to give you some examples of where you are wrong:

1) You say, "The Golden Wrench is not any different than the rest of us, only that He realizes he is a tool being held by a Being that works through Him."

Nonsense! The Golden Wrench is a special wrench created directly by the Great Tool & Die Maker. Nobody can be like Him. I mean look at him, he's GOLD. You also say that he is held by some Being and that he is not actually a wrench? How can you believe that when it says clearly in the instruction manual that he is a wrench?? You are deluding people.

2) You say, "There are actually lots of different kinds of tools, and all of them can be used by people to build things, which ultimately serves a much larger entity called the Universe."

Sinner! There are only wrenches! Wrenches are the only tool! The Golden Wrench is the best of these tools and any true work that can be done can only be done with That Wrench! If these so-called Beings holding the wrenches actually do exist, which I doubt, you can bet that they are only able to use wrenches. Wrenches can build the Nice Clean Shelf that we will eventually all go to, and if I had my way, I would make everyone use wrenches and disallow any discussion of other tools.

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Like I said in an earlier post, do not become enamored with the tools we are given. Realize that you are the Presence that is holding the tool, and not the tool itself.

One of the reasons why i find these responses interesting is because they allow us to examine our own behaviors. This chatter is similar to a type of teaching story used by the Sufis, like the famous tales of Nasrudin. The point of these stories is to jolt us out of our egos and make us pay attention to what is by making us step back and look at what we are doing.

Examining your own behavior and trying to see how you are doing the very things you scream against is a powerful tool.

Catching up on re-runs

I posted a link for a YouTube presentation on Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle talking about his book, A New Earth. However, that link leaves a little to be desired. There's actually ten chapters of the discusson and only the first two or three chapters are on YouTube.

So, I found a link with the whole thing:

Eckhart Tolle and Oprah Winfrey Discuss A New Earth.

Enjoy!

One thing I can say: Eckhart has a lot more presence than I! On that first chapter, Oprah wouldn't shut up! LOL I kept thinking, "Let Eckhart speak, will ya??"

I hear that she does that because of her broadcaster training, which loathes dead air. However, it also really messes up some of the silence needed during transmission of teachings in certain cases.

I haven't watched the later chapters yet, but I hear she tones it down.

One thing that I haven't figured out yet is when to use the two different schools of thought I posed in an earlier post. Remember, one school talks about tackling your emotional hangups head on to clean up that window to the IS, and the school which Eckhart is from talks about acknowledging the dirt and allowing it to be, and while being that knowing, you realize the Consciousness behind it... and the dirt becomes irrelevant.

My problem is with people who have absolutely no training whatsoever.

Eckhart would see if they are capable of stepping back and observing their emotions, and if they aren't, he simply would say they aren't ready to awaken yet. He would tell them to go off and suffer a bit more and come back when they are ready. Someone who is ready would simply be able to step back and see the silence from reading his material.

In the way I learned, there are different amounts of unconsciousness. Most people aren't ready to do what Eckhart is suggesting, and in the way I was taught, there are things you can do to get ready. There are things that can facilitate your waking up. When I was learning this stuff, we did not even TRY to pay attention to our DS until years after starting IS work. By doing that, we prepped ourselves to be able to step back from the emotions. Although not anyone could do this training, (some people are just too unconscious) a decent number of people could work on it.

So, again, I'm not certain what the best scenario is. Do we train people in the preliminary stuff in the hopes that they might awaken in this lifetime? Do we leave them alone and let the momentum of others awakening carry them? Is the training process that I spoke of an outdated method that is no longer useful?

I can't answer these questions.

Uh, can you repeat that?

It is amazing how many times people can see/hear/read things and still not absorb them. I am talking about any kind of information, spiritual or not. I have been involved in many examples myself. I can't tell you how many times I have been in karate class during a training when one of my senseis would say something that would sound amazing, and I would go to them after class and say, "Hey! You never said that before! That was exactly what I needed to hear!" Invariably, the answer would be, "I've been telling you that for YEARS, dummy! You just finally HEARD me."

A lot of times, it is not the teaching or the student's inability to learn but it is often two other things:
1) The student was not ready to learn it before, and once the readiness arrives, the student learns.
2) The *way* in which the information was said was not the way in which the student needed to hear it.

Some people are better at giving information. Sometimes, people just need to hear things in a certain phrasing or tone and they get it. That is why you see a lot of different books on spirituality out there that say the same thing but say it in different ways. Everything that there is to say has already been said with regards to spiritual development! There is nothing I can say here that is new, and there is nothing that Dan Millman or Eckhart Tolle or any of those guys have written in the last few decades that is new. All that is different is the teachers, writing styles, phrasing, and accompanying anecdotes, really.

So my advice to anyone looking to read books on spirituality is to simply get guidance from someone who's been there before and ask them what books they like. Then try out a few different ones. Maybe you don't like the way Ken Wilber writes? Maybe Idries Shah is more your cup of tea? Who knows?

At the very least, I try to write things here in the way that I think of them. In a way, the things written here are a distillation of lots of other teachers. The intent is convenience.