I is the isolating thing. 

I must be free of it…wait…uhhh.

that thought…I must be free…is the thought of the I…and only strengthens it firmly in place at the center of being. What am I to do?

The question is how can one shift from illusion to reality? Can it be done by any of my tricks?

I have tried so many of them, those mental tricks, like I will search for a spouse and marry hoping that I will be free of my loneliness. I married and yet I was so lonely…maybe even lonelier than before. Let us have a child or two or more. Then I will not be lonely. I will have a family. Still I am lonely. What to do about it? I will take my family to a place of worship and attach to a Higher Self. Then, if I choose wisely, I will feel lonely no more. Lonelier than ever. Can anybody help me straighten out my thinking so I am not lonely? Straighten thinking? Thinking goes all over the place at once! Therapy has been tried and it did not work. Oh, so many more things have been tried. Still I am lonely. Tell me how I can be free of it. 

The I is the isolating thing but I cannot be rid of that. Why not? I have repeated over and over “I am the Whole” or “I love everybody” and still loneliness returns. Can you tell me what to do? 

There may be nothing to be done. What? Calling on the isolating thing to do something to be rid of it is futile. There seems to be nothing to be done that will make any difference for the self image is so deeply rooted that all attempts would be the action of the isolating thing itself. No amount of good deeds will matter.  No oaths to stop my bad conduct will be any different than the other tricks. Love, that may be the answer! But the word love has been so overused and abused it has no meaning as a fact. People all around the Earth have gathered to proclaim “I love God” and they mean “I am willing to kill anybody who does not love God”. That love is corrupt. That love cannot be of any guidance in reality.

Am I left with nothing to do? Is that a bad thing necessarily? They tell that if I accept isolation without the thought I can manage it, an unexpected change may result…out of nothing…the removal of self entirely will have happened…the presence of the sacred felt…reverence for it restored…the beauty of it seen and, then, in the complete absence of isolation the concept of a separate self is gone never to return. In the process true love is known as a fact. After that realization flows another..Love made the entire Universe from nothing! Freedom is. Suffering is no more.

It all goes to show that so long as I try to make the mortal immortal I remain fixed in mortality and only when I accept mortality as “I am dead already” does the self image vanish and is immortality found. No trickery, not the slightest, involved. Bob Dylan said once at a very young age “I stopped trying to figure things out a long time ago” and it means the same thing. So spoke also Billy the Kid.

Billy’s story means to the writer that the kid we all started out to be once lost to us begins for a teenager a struggle to become something that can survive in a competitive adult world of lost kids and for most it ends in a lonely tragedy. All would be different for any who turn inward at any age in search of the lost sense of no isolation at all first, as the priority, and then, after they find it, live as free human beings for the remainder of life. For God knows how many centuries humans have lived the other way postponing the search for the lost kid into old age, retirement, by which time they have very little strength for it. The belief has been hammered into the brains that God made a world where adults have to be sinners. Like it is a law that must be unquestioned. That’s backward, Man! Oh, so unnecessary. Question everything! Especially question this writing! The writer does not want your agreement but wants you to find out for yourself.

So, we may find ourselves at a regularly scheduled hourly meditation meeting with others. We have lately become quite a regular attendee at these meetings and become attached to the friends with whom we meditate. Or we pretend to. There is the introduction we all expect and a reading concerning what is meditation. I look about the room. It strikes me how very unlikely it is that any one of us is going to meditate. Our mission is to be rid of the self at the center that causes so much havoc. A terrible war is ongoing inside us and has been for many years. Who among us is really ready to abandon the old friend (enemy) and risk being nothing at all? It has been expressed as wanting to stay where I am for old time’s sake because though it is terrible it is familiar and “my own misery” coupled with a knowing I must leave and take my chances with an unknown place. We all know but seldom admit that we are kidding ourselves. We will stay put with some sense we tried at least to be free. As soon as we leave the meeting hall we will be totally back in the grip of me, myself, and I first!

That feels safer when compared to a trip into the unknown. But, is it unknown really? A part of the game was to plant in my brain a story about a world of individual selves each of whom have a chance to become the royalty of that world by attaching to some imaginary concept greater than the little self. As soon as they persuade me to attach to the concept they have me and in time will steal all I am. Along the way I will be doing things I never dreamed I would do to hurt others and make my climb on the ladder. I have become convinced I have the right to call the shots for others.

The first time I heard “Like A Rolling Stone” sung on the radio by Bob Dylan’s voice I was shocked at first but by the ending was completely lost in the unknown, or what I had previously thought to be unknown to me, and encouraged by the singer to find out for myself what life really can be. It was another 20 years until I took the chance. The singer to me was suggesting I dig into “nothing” and discover “nothing to lose” and to know a place where “I got no secrets to conceal” which place, on that day I first listened to Dylan was known to me. So briefly familiar was it I could taste its presence on my tongue. I may have seemed to put it aside and go on with my way of life as it was before hearing that song but deep inside I felt it there every time I looked thereafter. Finally I dived off the board whole-heartedly.

It became “Wow!” I came into the world without secrets, with nothing that was my own, a complete unknown and was talked into giving that up for an illusion everybody around me was cultivating, became lost in the illusion, only to find out those people who led me there were always going to take from me everything they could steal and leave me when they used me up. I had to dive off that board. There was no choice about it. It was clear. The unknown is the known! Self as separate from other selves is by its nature an isolating process incapable of love. When it happens jump! I now know that what dissolved the self truly is love. 

 

Let us speak of human beings for awhile. We have what we refer to as outer experiences here gathering knowledge of the world outside and storing the knowledge as memories. That is a way, one way, to become smarter. Science does this. And is proud of it. We also have experiences within us. We observe, feel, and think. In language, we refer to it as mind or brain or ego or personality or psyche or soul or something else. We identify with that. We all seem to agree we have outer and inner experiences. The two are related. The inner, we think, is who we are even though we know very little about it. Everybody has secrets stored in there. For most, a lot of conflict and confusion abide inside the body. It is another world than is the outer world. It is like we are vertical beings without form who are living in a body in a horizontal world where we all share certain basic needs- food, water, air, clothing, shelter. And we know not who we are nor why we are here at all. The beginning of a journey to recover a balance and harmony for all humans is a deep realization that absolutely none of us asked to be here. We only know we showed up. We have this in common. It is very important to find a beginning we all share. Let us take it with us.

The journeys we take in the outer world require time and space. This journey, to find who we are, is different. It is beyond time or space. And it requires us to go deep into the inner world. To do this requires a lot of courage and determination. A certain intensity is required.  

All began as children. Innocent. Open wide. There was no identified center with a name. All that had to be developed through a pattern of identification directed by whom? Other humans. In that manner was an original being locked away in a sort of dungeon never to participate in any important way. The world, as a manufactured center or self will come to know it, will never know the original. Once in a great while an original escapes the fate society intends for all its children. Everyone who meets the original being will have the same experience, “where did that person come from?” The Kid in the story of the Kid was such a being. He did not fit from the start. All others suffered a strange sense of loss that nags with the idea “I am a fake, a phony, they never even saw me”. I have a job, I vote, I am married with children, own a home, drive two late model cars, intend to send my children to college, am religious, respected, decorated even, but I am phony. The important, common thread among all is nobody in memory ever really wanted to find out what I might have had to offer them. They all wanted me to change and become someone they could admire as their own. I am property.

We have noticed there is an outer world of experience and an inner one. We have noticed the center or self or “me” installed in the inner world by society. We noticed the original inner being has been imprisoned below the self never to really live. So, let us consider how deep that may be. Give it full attention.

There is no method for finding reality. Methods, in fact, lead one away from what is there. Methods are aligned with becoming what you are not. 

Full attention, like a lamp,  exposes the truth that there is no self at the center. Full attention exposes the love which is always there like the scent inside a flower. It is seen the concept of a self at the center has displaced love. Whatever forces one to embrace full attention is mighty. A thunderstorm. A snake. A thrill. A death. A death can reveal “I have been living without loving that person who has gone away”. This has been known to happen when the deceased was a perfect stranger, especially when the deceased was a poor, lonely, forgotten bum. Something there is about a perfect stranger sheds light upon another stranger closer than the veins in one’s neck. 

Full attention is enlightened being. Love, which has always been, seems to burst forth for such people. It is everywhere. All there is is love! A monk hiding away in the desert avoiding people never finds this. What this is is the silence inside noise. Not the silence found in the absence of noise. This life we have is all so perfectly natural.

Thinking, that has made a self at the center of the body is constantly changing, contradicting itself, double talking. So, it tries to identify itself with anything that might give it security or stability. Name, religion, nationality, occupation, family, school, and many more are there. None have brought security at all. Yet, the reality of the original being is flooded with the tremendous energy of all life. This freed is so mighty it can do what must be done now. Absent the self at the center, one sees clearly that the basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, etc. are no big deal and there is plenty for all. The idea to fight for “my territory” “my food” would be rejected out of hand. No. We are not going there, thank you.

 What is meditation? Really? Full attention. Full attention is always present. There is no method for finding reality. Methods, in fact lead one away from what is there. Methods are aligned with becoming what you are not. 

Full attention, like a lamp,  exposes the truth that there is no self at the center. Full attention exposes the love which is always there like the scent inside a flower. The concept of a self at the center has displaced love. Whatever forces one to embrace full attention is mighty. A thunderstorm. A snake. A thrill. A death. A death

can reveal “I have been living without loving that person who has gone away”. This has been known to happen when the deceased was a perfect stranger, especially when the deceased was a poor, lonely, forgotten bum. Something there is about a perfect stranger sheds light upon another stranger closer than the veins in one’s neck. 

Full attention is enlightened being. Love, which has always been, seems to burst forth for such people. It is everywhere. All there is is love! A monk hiding away in the desert avoiding people never finds this. What this is is the silence inside noise. Not the silence found in the absence of noise. This life we have is all so perfectly natural.

 Observation Only

To observe without observer

at some point where there is nothing 

I’ll meet you there

And know together

Who we are.

Immensity.

This does not come about

They have lied to thee

Some observer wanted you not to be free

In the same room with is, was, will be.

No congratulations please.

Cannot pin a medal on an absent observer, you see?

Do not fall back on “my mind will not let me stay here”
You are the consciousness of all humanity.

Is, was, will be.
 

 PRISONS AND PALACES AND TAKING YOUR CHANCES

Even a Palace can be a prison. If a human be given it all there will remain an empty longing that wants to take chances. That has been called the soul of man. Jesus, it is told, advised a rich man to give it all away not to deny himself but to be free. He added, what is it going to profit you to gain the whole world and lose your soul? Free means, really, when all the bull is taken away, as I am. There is no way one can add to that! Adding is denial. The Kingly Man is the Unknown Stranger. Draws all unto himself by staying far away from wealth and honor. 

If a human be given it all can he add to that?

 

 ON SUSTAINING A WAY OF LIFE

You might ask, “Why am I not able to sustain my commitment to self fulfillment from within me like an artesian well of energy leading ever onward to a deeper and more adventurous experience of life as magical existence?” 

Why do you want that sustaining? Let us consider what is an ordinary life?  Is there such a thing? Have you considered it? Could it be that your wish to sustain some thing you like is your real problem? Can anything that is real be “sustained”…need it be…ever? Is that not hogwash?

Is it not so that sustaining anything is mere “thought” and one more attempt to control according to your self interest what is uncontrollable ? Why have we divided life into “ordinary” and “magical”? By thought? Again, what is an ordinary life as opposed to a “magical” life? Is a “magical” life to you a thing you want to sustain because somebody told you that you can have that?  Or, is it because you have discovered for yourself the true nature of life is “magical”? Which? If the latter, of what possible use can be an effort to sustain? It is real! We humans have merely concocted a “magical” life and then have challenged ourselves to have it. Most religions teach you can only have that in an after life. But if you discover life itself to be “magical” you need not await an afterlife to have it. That is what this has been all about. Life. Here. Now. 

Anyone who is postponing the full attention to life as it is now in reliance upon an afterlife can be said to be busy dying, don’t you see? Anyone considering through thought an “ordinary” life is thinking about life. Is “life” a thing that is acquired through practice? Or some psychological exercise? Or, is there “life” and "life" only?