The ego, which is really nothing more than a pattern, a dramedy of illusions, is an error-finding mechanism. That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. Seeing right isn’t given to the dummy, so seeing wrong, or not at all, is all that’s available.
Seeing error everywhere is the survival strategy, the one-direction, of the oblivious false self. The sound of silence cannot be heard in a head full of complaint.
This seemingly entrenched tendency could be utilized in the way of lucid dreaming. A recommended trick to become lucid in a dream is notice the errors. A light switch doesn’t work, a hallway that leads to nowhere—something isn’t quite right. What doesn’t look right is the prompt to wake up, and become lucid.
I had a dream the other night that students were dressed in rabbit suits and lobbing snowballs at each other across a walkway on campus. I knew something was funny, and creepy, about the situation, but sadly, did not wake up. I did think, “…this looks like a trap,” and wisely took another route, and so escaped without harm.
So yes, there is something wrong. It’s only natural a contrived character would suspect as much. But it isn’t the rabbit-suited students, or the snowballs in July. It isn’t “others” or the scary circumstances. I wasn’t on any campus.
What is outside cannot be known, only projected and interpreted. “Be still and know that I am,” is a pointer to what is behind consciousness, the experiencing capacity. Experience is the dream; the dream is experiencing. Identity erroneously comes from experiencing perceptually from the POV of a seer, experiencer. Behind experience is the true identity.
There is an underestimated reason why meditation is helpful. It is a break from perception, from engagement with the world as subject/object. Perception, as it stands, cannot be anything but a separative perspective. In one sense, it is the basis of experience. Which is I guess, why we’re here, why we’re dreaming. On the other hand, it divides what is seen from the seer, necessarily. And therein lies the “problem.”
This is all rather dry and in some ways, the scientific rendition in that it is an attempt to explain, which is useless if not lived. You learn about gravity by learning to walk, not be having it explained or understanding the concept.
What is lived, emerges in childhood, is a sense of guilt, a loss of innocence. Because we are pretending to have separated from our source, and somehow become split off, individuated, and autonomous, like Pinocchio going off on his adventures. But there is a conviction, a knowing deep down, that we have fallen from grace. Yet it’s impossible.
Coming out of innocence, as a child begins the conditioning of separation, we start to think we are inherently bad. I am a bad girl, or a bad boy, is what is internalized. Not intentionally or maliciously, but in the inevitable sense of pretending to be something we are not. We didn’t really pull this separation thing off; we are only pretending. But the pretense has become so real that we are frightened, and feel guilty.
This is not what a child does, it is what Mind does. It goes out to explore and become and experience. That’s all there is. All mind; only mind. Yet somehow it gets lost in this adventure and believes it is truly here as this character, surrounded by other nefarious characters.
“There is something wrong; I need to do something,” is the alert that drives everything we do, in the dream. And it is true in that there definitely is something wrong. I am not this, and not here. I’m only sleeping. The only thing that needs to be done is to see this, and stop pretending, become unmesmerized by the dream. So this feeling of wrongness, of sin, and the hope for redemption looks like crazy cartoon characters, continuously and repetitively, trying to get something, to achieve something, to prove something, in the dream. But like Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, it is all in vain. And no one ever really gets hurt, or dies.
If you’d quit trying to fix yourself for one minute, you’d see this as false programming for a false sense of identity. The wrongness is not in you. It is in the game of pretending to be something you are not. Pinnochio is not a real boy, independent of his father’s carving a puppet from a lump of pine. The Coyote does not really want or need, or ever capture, the illusive Road Runner. It is all a fiction that can look pretty crazy and make you laugh when truly seen.
You are neither the Boss of Everything, or the Hapless victim. The world is not as it appears. Nor are you. Wake up!
When I wake up early in the morning Lift my head, I’m still yawning When I’m in the middle of a dream Stay in bed, float up stream (float up stream)
Please, don’t wake me, no, don’t shake me Leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping
Everybody seems to think I’m lazy I don’t mind, I think they’re crazy Running everywhere at such a speed ‘Til they find there’s no need (there’s no need)
Please, don’t spoil my day, I’m miles away And after all I’m only sleeping
Keeping an eye on the world going by my window Taking my time
Lying there and staring at the ceiling Waiting for a sleepy feeling
Please, don’t spoil my day, I’m miles away And after all I’m only sleeping
Having witnessed and experienced the brain fog that generally settles back in, both after nondual realization, and seemingly mind-blowing psychedelic trips, yours and mine, the question arises:
What is the nature of the elasticity of mind, the snap-back from the clarity and expansiveness of inseparability, to the inevitable sense of danger and imprisonment of the separate self?
It seems it’s not enough to see, for a shining, clear moment, to know the truth of the inseparability of existence, and the obvious lie of separation and the separate self story. Clarity becomes clouded and troubled, as if the fog of the everyday is real, and the clarity is the illusion. Why and/or how is that?
Mesmerization. The definition of mesmerize is to hypnotize. Hypno=sleep; tize=state. Or to enthrall–to hold in mental bondage. So, mental bondage, or asleep instead of awake. In the case of psychedelics, when the Default Mode Network (DMN) is inhibited, the result is often metanoia, or the “spiritual experience,” the dissolution of limits and boundaries. Having experienced this expansion, why contract back to the default mode of little me, little mind?
The easiest answer is to say, “It is what it is, man,” rather than to make personal, or conceptual, the quirk of mental tyranny. This was the thought that was behind the giving-up-on pointing to the silence behind the mind, rather than fighting the trend. This snap-back tendency seemed just the way of the mind and identity. Wouldn’t the human form that is clucking and pecking like a chicken have some awareness of the confusion of identity? Maybe the hypnotized subject doesn’t have the capacity to snap out of the trance?
The hypnotist creates the illusion of chickenhood in the same way that the mind, the voice to which we listen and unquestionably attend for further instructions, creates the illusion of a separate self trapped in a body, apart from other bodies and minds. Can the false voice be detected before the confusion of identity takes hold again?
The hypnotist/mental narrative simply begins to speak, and we drift off to sleep in a false identity/story. There is an ongoing, repetitive, sonorous, mesmerizing voice in our heads muttering all the time, telling us we are something we are not. If it were truly “my” or “your” voice and thoughts, wouldn’t we choose more liberating and sane thoughts, and less self-deprecating, limiting thoughts?
Why go on listening, believing, conforming to this false narrative, when a cursory investigation, even opening one eye to peek at the sourceof that voice reveals an unreliable narrator that has taken up residence in our heads, and wants to f**k with us where and as we live.
“We’ve traced the call…it’s coming from inside the house!” is the chilling line from the horror movie, When a Stranger Calls. This is the movie being lived…except that it is a masterwork of fiction. Be entertained, rather than enthralled. You can put down the phone and check to see what’s going on. The impugning voice can no longer hold you hostage–with a little bit of looking around, in the light of day.
If you let go of that question, that complaint, that frustration, that need, that anger, that belief/assumption—-its all mental, right? Let it all go by. And make no demands upon the bodily reactions to those mental instigations, just acknowledge how the body is playing its part in the scene building. If there is this pause, this intervention, two things can/will happen. Continue reading →
Here’s the unequivocal thing: Nothing in this dreamstate makes sense. It is made, as an appearance, by an incoherent, split mind, exhibiting and manifesting nothing but fragmented reality from fragmented thinking. The experience of living in this incoherent world is then a striving to make sense of, and find solutions for, the “problematic” situations in which we appear to find ourselves. Like Don Quixote and his giants.
Doesn’t matter if you’re done, faking it, or you’ve given up–this book, The Triune Self, Confessions of a Ruthless Seer, by Mike Singer, is worth a read. Worth reinvesting any time you’d be spending doing anything else. It is a joy and a thump-to-the-chest kind of read.
Perhaps you might, out of habit, respond–“There’s nobody out there,” or “I already get that,” or some such equivocation like, “Another spiritual book? Really?” Yes, really. Something about these words truly pierces to the heart of the matter, and I mean that almost literally. There’s something about Mike…
Such a totally and unflinchingly honest and earnest reflection. It might bring joy, or it might scare the ever-livin’ spiritual pants off of you. Perhaps a more suitable subtitle would be, “The Reluctant Sage,” though my guess is Mr. Snider might quibble with the “sage” handle.
Here are a few quotes, though I hesitate to parse it out ineptly, when the whole speaks for itself:
On life:
“I find the whole of it is benevolent imagination any way you cut it, no matter how crooked it appears.”
On effort, non-effort, pointing:
“It means nothing to those who have their most essential nature pointed out to them if they haven’t struggled for its recognition.”
On self:
“He seems to be more interested in his objectified universe than he is in the mysterious wonder that registers it.”
On the spiritual marketplace:
“All the theatrical drama that enshrouds this obvious and simple Truth we all are, pissed me off when I finally came to See.”
The Kindle version is available here. I cannot remember the last time I bought a book, or even how I landed on this listing, but for whatever reason, I downloaded the sample and when it ended, I just wanted to keep reading. And though I don’t seem to have much spare change these days, if there was an audio version, I’d probably buy that as well, just to hear Mr. Snyder sing it. It’s what we’re here for.
In seeking, the assumption is that there is something else, something more–that there is some other way of being, or something or somewhere to which one gets or arrives.
There is perhaps another way of seeing, but nobody goes anywhere. It’s not out there somewhere, or down the road.
There is this appearance, or what seems like a variety of appearances, including the apparent self, or most notably some kind of feeling state, that is perceived as this way or that. Usually, some version of suffering, or not. Awake, or asleep.
There are appearances…and that’s it! To talk about “false” and “true”, or real and unreal is misleading. The false is just the way the true appears as something it’s not, through an amazing feat of creation that appears as me, as the world, as many apparent things and circumstances. But it’s all as true as it gets.
So it cannot even be said that appearances are false, and awareness, the backdrop and creative force behind appearances, is true. Because what else is there?
Form is the expression of the otherwise inexpressible Formlessness. That’s all there is. Like “all there is” to a dream.
There’s no way out of this expression. But maybe the mind just tires of its drivel, gets weary of the whole ruse of seeking. It wears out, so to speak, and sees the futility of keeping up the charade, attempting to prop up the eternal emptiness, of form. Ever been close to an elderly person as the mind and body wears out?
Yet here it is, anyway you look at it. No one ever went anywhere, like in a dream, but the dream appears to go on. Because it appears to still take some kind of form.
Isn’t that just marvelous? Nobody has to go anywhere or do anything, because there’s no parts or places. Suffering is believing there is something else, something more, something better, when here it is.
The entrance to the tunnel is seen in and from the same place as the light at the end. There is no distance. It’s an illusion, but it’s all we’ve got, for now.
In the post, What Remains, the point was made that nothing, no circumstance has duration; nothing is fixed. So what makes any situation, problem, or identification appear to have duration and substance? What makes it seem real and seemingly long lasting?
Attention.
Seeing this, that past and future are nothing more than random images and thoughts happening now, changes everything. How you can have a solid sense of self, or anything else, if there is no fixed past or future image for it to have been or to become? Attention to, to the point of what could be called “fixation,” is what appears to give it (anything) life. Experience is quite literally determined by the wolf you feed.
The wolf is the problem or the identity. Attention is how it is fed.
Attention to fearful thoughts and emotions, creating deeper and deeper reality tunnels–is no different than being in the midst of a dream, a nightmare, and forgetting that you are asleep. If there is, for instance, a medical issue, by all means, seek medical attention. But then what? Is a diagnosis what you are? Or is it what you think about, and feel all the time? There is a mental proclivity to do just that, of course, but who or what are you absent the fixed attention on a thing apart? Shift attention away, from everything. Catch that, even if just for an instant. The sky is still wide open above you. Attend to that openness.
Max in his wolf suit, in Where the Wild Things Are tells the whole story. There really are no wolves, only kids in wolf suits, imagining things to be a certain way. But eventually it’s time to go home, to your own room, where dinner is waiting, and it’s still hot.
So it’s as if there is this imaginary line between you, and me, and everything else. The line creates loops, and looks something like this: (Me and others and experience)The wonder is that each loop tends to mistakenly believe in its own isolated identity. The interior of the loop becomes crowded with ( or )images, feelings, ideas, beliefs, and everything seems to be experienced entirely within that loop as a function of those inner fluctuations. “I” live within, and am defined by, this loop.And all this from an imaginary line that seems to divide the world into parts. It feels very real within the loop, but it’s still a part of the imaginary line.
Loops, by the very nature of the line, can and do change all the time. One loop (within the continuous line) can look look, at any given time–when a belief, opinion, or perspective is changed, or it just changes shape, or loses volume:
—–>Not discrete parts, or other than.
What you think you are–name–is this ever changing, expanding, contracting loop, that appears to interact with other loops. How can the illusion be maintained that you are this loop or that, given its changeability, and its unreality as a discrete entity, separate from the imaginary line that creates that loop?
What happens when you pull the line taut, and all loops disappear, along with their specific qualia, left to float free, attached to no body and no thing? No loops. No parts. Just an imaginary line that is done playing loop de loop.You are not that loop. Nor are you defined by the or contained within the loop, that only seem to define you.
Please contact me if you wish to discuss your loopiness, or other distractions. Thank you.
The wonder is that each loop tends to mistakenly believe in its own isolated identity. The interior of the loop becomes crowded with 
Loops, by the very nature of the line, can and do change all the time. One loop (within the continuous line) can look look, at any given time–when a belief, opinion, or perspective is changed, or it just changes shape, or loses volume:
You are not that loop. Nor are you defined by the 
The Deepest Peace 