FREEDOM FROM THE SELF

If you look closely you will see you have been serving and you are serving still the dull, gray stupidity of human beings lost in the tightly planted woods of their conditioned brains with no way out while believing themselves to be intelligent and free. Aha! Then you will know.  

And you will take an entirely new kind of action altogether never before open to you. Because we must take this step alone it is ours and that makes all the difference. I know nothing if I let someone else know it for me. I am still ignorantly believing in another. The record is abundantly clear: that has not changed humanity for tens of thousands of years or longer. When the step is taken the self has gone bye-bye. Love and freedom are present. 

 THE FIRST KILLING 

Let’s say it is at the dawn of human people on Earth however or whenever it happened. A man and woman have a child, a son.  They have daughters. Later they have another son. One of the sons thinks his brother is preferred above him. He tells no one but the level of hatred for his brother festers and grows large until one day he lays a trap and murders his own brother.

Those humans still living are in anguish over this tragedy. One asks “What shall we do when a human murders?”

One replies, “ We shall take the killer and kill him as a punishment for his evil deed and as a warning to prevent such a terrible thing  happening again.” 

Two or three agree. But one speaks out “No. That is not wise. We should not ask: “Now that this horrible thing has occurred what do we do to this one who did the killing”. The right question to ask is what truly can be the cause of one of us killing another? We should trace back to see how it came to this awful action on the part of one of us against another of us and make a correction within ourselves that might actually prevent the recurrence of such tragic occurrences in the future. The way you propose will leave the tribe  failing to address what may grow into more of the same. Don’t you see? In truth, were we to kill the one who murdered we are endorsing that act…the act of slaying…as a valid response to feelings of loss that will be so recorded in all our minds and the killing is bound to go on and on. You see, do you not, what must follow when the real wound goes undressed?

The one who had spoken first gave this retort, “I am an individual! We are all individuals. I wish you would deal with us as individuals.”

The one who had said “no” to the idea of killing the murderer spoke again, saying, “The word ‘individual’, of which you show so much pride, means ‘not divisible’. In pride you say ‘I stand alone!’. In truth you know not what you do to yourself and those you care about when you act on the belief “I stand alone!” and isolate yourself behind a wall of your own making. You will soon live in a cold, cold world without love.

In such a world people play a game where a few gather riches and the many starve. They called it “trade” in the beginning. The few with some of their riches purchase politicians to make it illegal to steal their loot. Some of the many without will try to rob the rich. In the attempts people will be killed. All Hell breaks loose. Society has gone mad. In fear and rage people demand something be done. So, people who attempted to rob the rich are arrested, tried, and executed. Nobody looks into the “game”. You know the rest of that story. You live by it.

People crossed oceans to find “gold”. They planted flags and claimed the land. As the new rulers they demanded the natives to spit out the gold or die. How did the world become so corrupt? It had become so before the ships sailed after the gold lying in another place. A little child could tell you. All one has to do is to recall with clarity how you were treated after your arrival here at birth and, if you can stand to be so honest, see the corrupt society for what it is and you will want no more to do with it. Truth is simple yet it is so, so difficult to admit one’s own part in it. But it happens to be so that until you do you will remain blind to the way to make a meaningful change. One has to cease pointing the finger and put one’s own house in order. You think the fire is “out there” but it is “in here”. 

 LIFE AND DEATH

Now, what we got here for livin’ is life. You might reply to the writer, I’m not stupid, I know it’s life! Well, I say, you do and you don’t. Life, for one thing is not bound by time, is not one straight horizontal line. Naw, Sir! You tryin’ to force it to be that is the source of your fear of death and  a lot o’ troubles. And you tryin’ to make death be the end of that horizontal is causin’ a whole lot more. Life and death move together as one thing by a timeless movement. A mouthful. The past and the future are in the now. Life and death are both tremendously vital. In fact, to die while remaining in a living organism is what it is all about. That requires an understanding of death. Death is the ending and the beginning. The most vital thing around the tragic death of a young person is the realization we must not let it be in vain. DYING, THEN, IS LIVING!

 MEDITATION AND CREATIVITY

Love is not yours or mine.

Compassion is not yours or mine. 

Love and Compassion bring extraordinary intelligence.

Meditation is a tricky business.

First, who is meditating?

Second, why would anyone need to sit down to meditate?  

Third, does that which is meditating hope to gain, becoming better,  by the effort?

Fourth, can a shallow and confused mind ever find clarity?

Is it possible something within you that is not meditating is watching  you meditate, or trying to? You may come to see that that inquiry into what is meditation anyway is very much a vital part of meditation.

The writer says that the something that drives us to meditation is able to reveal, not to you, but to reveal what is actually present as a fact and the meaning of attention. Finally, then, is it possible that the true value of meditation is not to improve the one who sits but to reveal that an image can never be made real by any method whatsoever bringing an end to the life being led by some personal image and allowing reality to blossom forth?

In the blossoming a gap is created between the truth of being and any image or ideal thought has determined one needs to become. The gap is compassion. One cannot cultivate love and compassion. They are present when self image is not in charge. In the dimension of love and compassion there is no fear, no anger, no resentment, no greed, lust nor hatred.

 What is called life is the pursuit of happiness over time through thought. Actually, life is a timeless movement arising from beyond thoughts.Thinking is good for something like remembering where you left your keys but thought must never be allowed to interfere with one’s life. It only brings conflict and confusion in that arena. 

Problem solving sets up patterns and is mechanistic which life is certainly not! Life is in motion and is always fresh and new. So, whenever one approaches it by thinking to problem solve one will be stuck in the dead past repeating the same mistakes totally absent from life which has moved on without you. In that way every war is the same war so thinking concludes: “war will always be with us”. War is practiced by people who try to live in the past. It is so unnecessary. It is a tragedy.

Two nations are arguing over territory. Unable to agree, war begins. Many on both sides will die, many will suffer great losses. At the end one will receive the territory by violent force which means it has acquired one half of many dead babies which can be likened to the one Solomon agreed to divide between the two women who argued before him over who was the rightful mother of a child. The dead bodies means there will be another war, just a matter of time. And more dead bodies. Dead in past wars are memorialized to mandate another war. When will we ever learn? Solomon was wise and knew the true mother would give up her baby to see it live and that mother would act in the timeless realm where something brand new is bound to happen. Is anyone getting this?

 Learn about a beauty without object…a state of mind and its absolute freedom and peace. Such beauty is not personal. When it is the priority of one’s life, the moment eternal, there is an intelligence far beyond that otherwise thought to be intelligence. In that state, what you perceive is not loved and admired by you personally for its beauty, rather it is beautiful because you love it. With personal beauty there will always arise desire to possess the object of beauty while in the state of beauty without object desire never emerges. All that is beheld is beautiful. Can you feel the difference? Speaking of a power to transform, in that state of beauty without object, being is able to make everything beautiful merely looking through the eyes of a god.

 There is something fresh happening all around us now. 

Surprises are everywhere apparent.

These are becoming more and more recognizable as coming out of realizations suddenly that crack open a new human being right where one made of accumulated knowledge stood a moment ago. Many commentators will arise to explain the change in the old way by the old conditioning which no longer applies at all to these new faces. FOR THEM, NOW, EVERY DAY IS FRESH.

An example can be drawn from the college football scene. There is no attempt here to explain that scene nor to limit the discussion to a single arena of human activity. This is happening all over and is likely to grow and grow into God knows what.

Much wealth is involved in college football. Television rights, stadiums, large complexes for training and practicing, rapidly rising salaries for ever-expanding coaching staffs, rapidly evolving economic benefits to make wealthy college football players and much more. But what is intriguing is that enormous switches in players and coaches from team to team accompanied by higher and higher financial payoffs are producing teams that have almost overnight come from obscurity to fame with sudden abilities previously unknown to knock off and discredit teams claimed by experts to be the best of the best.

There is a new drive afoot to buy the coaches who are undeniably bringing some wild new ability from the kids who play the game. These coaches have tapped into something that is real. What can it be? 

It may well be that the coaches themselves are surprised and are not certain what they are doing or why it works so well. They come from marginal teams long looked at as losers suddenly blossoming to challenge for championships. It is like time is not even a factor in the matter anymore. And nearly all the teams long held to be winners are seen scrambling like mad to get one or more of these new-type coaches under contract. A bidding war is happening. What do these coaches know? A look to see how many of the coaches of well known college football teams are from Texas Tech, for example, a team that never has been on anybody’s list of dynasties, is hard to explain. That phenomenon at least bears looking into. The change spoken of here is about a lot more than winning games. It concerns more and more so a new breed of human being.

For many thousands of years people on Earth have been conditioned to rely on a form of intelligence that is minuscule when viewed in terms of the vast intelligence all off us were born with naturally. Almost all people walk around with a view of who they are handed to them by others which has taken the place of natural intelligence. It is based on accumulated knowledge born of experiences and then recorded as memory in our brains. It is a very limited brand of intelligence indeed! I am taught to believe I am a composition of the circumstances of my life. I am who I think I am in other words. Not who I actually am. That has been our world for too long to estimate. All recorded history was compounded by this limited intelligence. 

The saddest thing is how it cheats a human of its natural intelligence as “all of mankind”. Whatever introduces any of us to a glimpse of the fact I am not what I think I am…I am much, much more than that… obviously makes a big change almost overnight. The quickness factor brings overnight excellence at whatever is undertaken to be done. The new being suddenly acts from that vast native intelligence rather than from a truly-self-walled-in-cage of ideas about how I remember I am. 

These new players do things unexpected by their very talented, well trained, hard working  competitors. The games take on a whole new ambience. The game is fresh today and each one will continue to be so and the old-fashioned future pros will have to adapt to a new way of seeing themselves or be antiques. This is where the coaching becomes a premium for all teams. How do you out-play a bunch of kids who no longer think you are a bit better than they are, or, for that matter, anybody other than they. A switch psychologically makes a huge difference in not only sports. It is applicable to all aspects of humanity. The United Nations for instance.