Non-Linear Thinking

Alienation

2011-09-23T21:13:00.001-04:00

It was the strangest feeling, or perhaps perception is the better word. I walked into Sam’s Club (the grocery store/gas station I work at), through the store, up the stairs into the break room to clock in, and then I signed in at the COS (check-out supervisor) desk. Then, I walked out of the store and trekked across the unnecessarily large parking lot to the gas station to begin my shift. The strangeness was that I’ve worked there for ten months and I felt more isolated and alienated from everyone else that works there than if I hadn’t worked there at all. I saw them all: Angie, Sarah, Janine, Amy, Christina, Dartland, Jason, Ashley, Meagan, Caryl, Todd, Ricka, and others. I didn’t say one word to any of them and they didn’t say one word to me. It was like I was invisible, as they say, but on the other hand, I saw them as no different than the cereal boxes on the shelves. Of course, I know that they are people, or at least I perceive them to be people. Even so, they really just seemed like objects. I saw them this way, and so I was ignored just like the cereal boxes. They were indifferent to me, as I was to them. They were just objects. That’s what they were. They were just these soft gelatinous objects moving around making sounds. I’m sure they wouldn’t want to be equaled to simply objects, but that’s all I can really know about them.

I feel this way quite often. Even my own mother seems to be just this fleshy face with sounds emanating from her. What is she?! Sometimes I don’t even comprehend what people are saying to me because I’m so distracted by my own thoughts about what they are. I tell myself that this is real, but that doesn’t help. To say this is real feels meaningless. Yes, I perceive these objects (ie. Phenomena enter (enter what?) via senses) and I have my perception, but I don’ know what those objects are. I have my perception, but that is all. I am seeing objects, instead of egos. That’s why all the alienation. I’m always trying to be self-aware and egoless, and also trying to not see others’ egos. Since most of these others are not self-aware (I don’t know this, of course!), they are identified with the ego and so there can be no connection between my self and someone else’s ego. I don’t want to validate the others’ egos. I don’t want to pretend that they are the egos. I don’t want to join in on the lie, the deception, the bad faith.

So, is this just intellectualizing an explanation for my fears of attachment, rejection, closeness? Perhaps, but it is an explanation, none the less. I always seem to come up with some reason to not get close to people. At the same time my family life really cranked up the dysfunction, I began to drown myself in schoolwork. I could always just tell my dad that I was studying, so he’d leave me alone. Ever since I’ve isolated myself more and more away from people. I keep getting smarter, and they keep getting dumber. Why would I want to be with some dumb person? With this kind of thinking, I’ll never have to worry about getting close to anyone and thus never have to worry about loss and rejection. It’s like I can’t mess anything up if there’s nothing to mess up. At this point, suicidal thoughts begin to creep in. If I’m dead, what is there to mess up? But this isn’t all just psychological (a therapist would probably disagree). The so-called intellectualizing is not to be dismissed. I can’t ignore it, whether I’d like to or not.

These other people; they fascinate me and scare me at the same time. They are these objects that I cannot understand. I cannot be them. Even if I questioned them, how would I perceive whether or not they were lying to me? They themselves cannot even know if they are lying or not. How would I know if they are in bad faith or not? I cannot know. I can only perceive their lights and sounds. They are playing these roles and they believe they are these roles. How can I be sincere in talking with them? Am I talking to the character or the actor playing the character? And then it is still an actor (the ego) I’m talking to.

I feel that I do not have similar goals, dreams, thoughts, perceptions, motivations, and plans as these people around me. While they are building houses, saving for retirement, having babies, planning vacations, building careers, maintaining relationships, and the such, I am studying and writing about ontology. I document my thoughts and perceptions in a journal format while I sit at work in a booth outside a gas station. I am not planning anything. I’m just here, now, existing. I’m not running away (yet) or trying to escape. I’m fully conscious, awake, and sober, in all senses of the word.

Sometimes to question my own thinking, I ask myself if my thoughts would be different if I had a million dollars. Would I still constantly question, worry, and analyze? I can’t know for sure, but I think that my obsessions about reality, existence, being, and consciousness would persist; otherwise they would not be true obsessions. If I had a million dollars, though, my perceptions might not be so alienating and gloomy. Perhaps I could relax and not worry about so much. I might become paranoid though, afraid of being kidnapped, robbed, or killed (or all three) for the money. I would worry if peole only wanted to be my friends or lovers so they could get things with the money. And of course we all know that millionaires commit suicide too. So, I think my thinking would, at the root, stay the same. I would just be questioning everything from more comfortable surroundings.

Anyway, back to alienation. Do I create this sense of alienation or does the world give me this sense? It is, of course, a combination of the two plus who knows what else. My perception is that I don’t have any “real” connections with anyone. Am I afraid to connect? Sure, that’s a part. Do I even want to connect? That’s a part, too. If I did connect, then I worry that I’d be like them. Since I don’t respect them (because they are human, full of too many flaws) I ultimately don’t want to connect with them.

So, I’m lonely and afraid to connect and get close to people. The Nightmare.

I’m still special, separate, and unique though, but only because I don’t really even interact. I don’t share and compare notes with anyone else. This is not good science or philosophy. I’m sitting in the grandstands, watching, judging, analyzing. I question the players’ motivations, incentives, logic, and their philosophies. I analyze why they are happy (or at least think that) or why they suffer. I question their thoughts and behaviors. Then, I question my own thinking and perceptions of their thinking. Are they aware of themselves? Do they deceive themselves? Do they tell themselves lies in order to act like they are facing “reality?” What do they think of me and my constant questioning?

This attempt to understand people and what they do is ironically the most efficient way to quickly and soundly alienate oneself. I am studying them and myself as if I was truly an alien from some far away galaxy. Studying myself is really all I can do, as opposed to studying them, but it is not easy. Even if I set up cameras around my house and watched what I did, I still could not know what I was thinking at all times. Also, I would know that I was being recorded and that would affect my behavior. If I could document my thoughts and correlate them to times and dates and then have someone secretly record me at random times, it might help.

Being self-aware is a great way to ruin your life. I have been trying to always be self-aware, and the result is that there is no ego for others to interact with. There is just this object they see. No, they don’t see an object, they can’t! Their egos will create an ego for me. If I won’t play the game, they force me to play, or at least they will try. “C’mon, put on the mask,” they tell me. They will get frustrated with me because their words and labels keep sliding off of me. If I can maintain the courage and the will to stand by my convictions and what I know is right, then I will not let my life be destroyed. There will be ostracization, isolation, mockery, loneliness, contempt, anger, and perhaps some violence, but I must not give in.

Well, is this worth all the trouble? Yes, freedom is worth dying for, they say. Although, I find that kind of an odd statement since how do you enjoy freedom if you’re dead? Anyway, knowing that I am living a sincere life without self-deception, or at least consciously attempting to, is real freedom, freedom from dogma, guilt, lies, fakery, anxiety, anger, and all other forms of frustration. I can rest easy knowing that I have examined my thoughts and come to conclusion on how I should live in good faith.

Mornings of Philosophical and Psychological Distress

2011-09-23T21:12:00.002-04:00

Hypersensitivity seems to be the real explanation for my suffering. Rejection sensitivity in all its forms seems to be at the root of most of my issues. I wake up every morning and it’s this whole bizarre scene in my head. Some of the thoughts (mostly invalid) are: “Why am I reading these depressing gloomy philosophy books. This is what the pain-body wants. It wants me to go back to school and study philosophy. It wants me to get in so much debt that I will die before I pay it off. It wants me to justify being alone and miserable. It wants me to live ascetically. I can’t hold on. I’m slipping into the unknown. I’m going to be homeless. I’m falling apart. My mom is going to cry. My teeth are falling out.” Fear, panic, anxiety, dread, doom, and confusion are all rolled up. I think of my job and it seems absurd. I think of all the words in my head and they seem absurd.

The thing is that I believe that they actually are absurd. No matter how much spiritual work I do, I just can’t shake the fact that I cannot know for sure that life has any direct or absolute meaning. I guess I can assign meanings to aspects of my existence, but who am I to assign meaning? Do I have the authority to assign meaning to anything? Even if I do, I know that it was only I who ultimately assigned the meanings to the phenomena.

Regardless, I am here (whoever “I” am and wherever “here” is and whatever “am” means). You see, I cannot even write or even think about my own existence. Of course not. Existence can only be experienced. I am here experiencing existence. These words, of course, are not sufficient to actually and truthfully convey any experience. Also, my thoughts are not sufficient to actually and truthfully represent or convey experience. Everyone experiences existence in his or her own way. Everyone has a perspective and there is no ultimate authority to say which perspective is “correct” or “right.”

I am constantly changing, constantly recreating myself. A month ago, I was dead set on going to a Buddhist monastery and practicing the Dharma. I felt like that was the only thing I could do. All I thought about was anatta, anicca, and dukkha. The four noble truths and the noble eight fold path. A month before that, I was Hindu, reading the Bhagavad-Gita, contemplating the atman. Before that, I felt that all I needed was “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now.” Now, I’m dead set that I have to go back to college and become a philosophy professor… or am I supposed to be a high school science teacher. You see, of course, even now I am changing. Always. Anyone who thinks they are pretty much always the same is deceiving himself. Now, this is a good example of my hypersensitivity. I see one little nuance of difference and it is a dramatic change. But is it not? Is it not a completely different thing now? Was it ever actually a solid non-changing thing? No, of course not. Everything is always moving. The objects you see in front of you are moving wildly. If you can’t see that, you just aren’t looking closely enough. They are vibrating like wild at the atomic level. At the human scale, we have become accustomed to things being a certain way, but this is just our single perspective, and each person has his or her own perspective. For every perspective, there is a world, an existence, that no one else but the experiencing can visit. So, it seems to me that a psychotherapist can not really see (not just the visual, of course) things my way. I can try and use these feeble failing words, but she will hear them (I assume) and assign her own meanings to them. We could discuss the meanings of all the words, but by then I will be a completely different person, and we will have to start all over again. Now, you see, a therapist could say that this self-defeating logic is clearly a product of my “depressive brain” or my pain-body, both of which do not want to get “better” (whatever “better” means). Is this still my “sick brain” speaking, writing? Even right now? It does not know what “better” means. It gets thoroughly confused when someone says, “We just want to get you better. We just want you to do what you want to do, and live in more peace and happiness.” But it seems that all I want to do, in an obsessive manner, is to analyze and question and worry about everything, especially the very mechanisms that are analyzing and questioning and worrying. I don’t know how to be anyone else other than me. I obsess out of what feels like necessity. How can I ignore the giant elephant that follows me everywhere I go (physically and mentally)?

I guess I’m looking for absolute truths. I’m looking for a common thread that runs through wise teachings. I’ve studied what Buddha said, Krishna (I know Krishna is Divinity and is not a man like Buddha or Jesus) said, what Jesus said, what Muhammad said. Now I’m going back to studying books that I bought over ten years ago, my philosophy books. Perhaps because I’ve been sober for almost six months and have gotten out of a ton of debt I can finally think more clearly. I can actually read books and write now. I actually did not read literature or philosophy and I did not write anything other than school essays for almost eight years!

What I’m worried about (fancy that, me worried about something!) now is that I’ve gone full circle. Of course, I’m not the same person I was ten years ago. If I can actually face reality and study philosophy without turning to alcohol, that would be a great personal achievement. A therapist might say, “Well, why risk your sobriety by studying things that might make you throw in the towel?” I would reply, “I have to do what I have to do. I have learned that alcohol causes me to be able to write and read and think properly. It causes me to be happy and carefree. It causes me to have fun and meet girls and life is just a big old party. It causes me to commit crimes and to go to jail. It causes me to cut and burn myself and overdose on pills and put loaded guns to my head. It causes me to destroy all that I have worked for. It ruins every relationship. Alcohol is like life, but much more extreme. The highs and lows are exaggerated. One is not supposed to be that happy, at least not artificially. Also, one should not be so depressed… over what? Suicide? I cannot justify it anymore than I can justify life. There is no absolute meaning in life, so why would I think there is some absolute meaning in death?

No, I have not gone full circle. That’s ridiculous. I am a new person right now, sitting here writing. I am studying Sartre now. I will understand him, just like I now understand the Buddha. Every time I learn something new, I take that fragment and infuse it into myself. I keep morphing into new things, new selves. Every perception of phenomena adds to my ever-changing self. Who will I be tomorrow?

The Prisoner In Prison

2011-09-23T21:12:00.001-04:00

The conditioned mind sees things as good and bad, happy and sad, and everything in between. It sees dualities. It is trapped in a world governed by the law of opposites. In order to know happiness, it must know sadness. In reality, they are not dependent on each other. Happiness is just happiness and sadness is just sadness. The prisoner is, in reality, simply existing. She is in a place at a time. Why is this bad? Why does she feel so horrible? Why is the world seen as such a cruel and unforgiving place? “It is bad” is a thought. A prisoner thinks this only if they know of (based on past experiences) some other place and time that is “better” than the one they are experiencing at the present moment. What she thinks of though is not truly real. It is a place and time that is imagined, idealized. It doesn’t exist. She desires to be somewhere that does not exist, but that imaginary place and time is “better” than where she is now. She, of course, will never get there, even if she gets out of prison, and starts a new life, she will never get to that place and time that she so desires to be. She will forever be unsatisfied with her life. Nothing will ever live up to her dream.

The prisoner who sees her situation as bad had adopted an identity that is seen as bad by herself and her idea of society. She sees society as this entity that has a consciousness. It judges people and what they do. Everyone has his or her own perceptions about the attitude of the society in which he or she lives. It depends on what level of pessimist or optimist you are. She sees herself as a “bad person” being punished in a bad place. So, it is deemed a bad situation. See sees herself (“herself” is the ego) as the same as the situation, as the labels (self-created in her mind). She is (ie. she believes, she deceives herself) a prisoner, a bad person in a cruel, ugly, and cold place. She has reduced herself to a single word, when in reality, she (self) cannot be described truthfully or even thought of. Her self (which is not accurate to say since she does not possess her own self) is. Perhaps consciousness is who she is (I don’t really want to get into what her True Self is exactly, but I do assume that she does indeed have something that is a Self and that it simply is existing. It is.

The point is she exists first as a Being. She is being. She is existing. So, if she can realize that right now she is simply where she is. She is at a specific place and time. She is here and now. If she can do that, it is a great success. Why? Because she is beginning to free herself from the ego. All those thoughts in her head that she must be miserable have been conditioned into her. Thoughts like, “Prison is bad. Everyone who goes to prison is bad. I must be and have to be miserable here.” Why? Who is this absolute authority which says that a prison must be a certain way? Of course there is no absolute authority that says this. There may be committees and boards which say a prison should be this way or that way and that the prison should accomplish this end, but that is definitely not an absolute authority. Most authorities are just people who sit around a table, discuss issues, and write things down. Then they somehow convince (usually with threats of violence and hardship) others to believe that they are indeed an authority.

Anyway, she has a choice, and for most people, it is not an easy one. She has a choice of what identity she chooses to identify with. Obviously, she cannot change her genetics, but everything else is not predetermined. She has the freedom to think and behave anyway she wants. This concept is difficult to accept and for most people it is impossible to actually do. It would be best for her to have the awareness that the identity she identifies with is not who she is. It is only a role she is playing, a mask to the outside world, to the others. This is not good or bad or depressing or silly. It is only reality. Whether you like it or not, you do not equal all the forms that you surround yourself with. By forms I mean all the entities that you say are yours. A job, residence, car, clothes, toys, gadgets, boats, family, race, religion, economic position, social position, health, academic level, intellectual capacity: These are all forms, the are all phenomenon (as Buddhists say).

Unawareness of the ego means that you and the ego are one and the same. You live in “bad faith,” in a state of self-deception, as Sartre says.

You see people at all levels living in bad faith. There is the hard-working man who only feels successful, who feels powerful because he is his job, residence, neighborhood, car, family, and many friends. His possessions ARE who he is. He is happy, confident, proud, and even a little bit satisfied perhaps. Then, you have the hard-working poor man. He has very little. He lives paycheck to paycheck and never has any money left over to save. He lives in an unattractive (his ego says) and unsafe neighborhood, and is often frustrated. He has no friends. He (the ego) feels weak and unimportant because he is his residence, his job, neighborhood, family. He is deceiving himself and reducing his self to an insignificant and powerless man, alone, fearful, perceiving the world as cruel and terrifying. The men have their own views of society and there own mind-made perceptions of society. Those “societies” strengthen, for better or worse, the men’s egos.

The prisoner can be whatever she wants to be. There are of course physical limitations of reality. But just because she is in prison, it doesn’t mean that all is lost and all is bad. She can read, go to school, and improve herself in many ways. She can have relationships. She can learn to play an instrument. All of this is not easy at first. She must make changes. She might need psychotherapy, medicine, support groups. She needs to read, and write and explore herself. Slowly, her thinking can change, and as a result her behavior and emotions will change. No, this is not impossible. People do it all the time. They decide that they don’t want the identity that they have right now and they take steps to change it. It changes anyway, whether they like it or not, but to have control over what identity you identify with is true freedom.

To have the realization that you can truly be what you want is very empowering. The hard part is sticking to it. Practicing everyday. Never giving up, even when it seems that all hope has been lost. There will be many “tests” of your determination. There will be many temptations, as they say. There will be many times when running away feels like the best or only option. It is not. You must stand there and face reality no matter how absurd, insane, painful, sad, wild, and deadly it may seem.

Can you do that? Can I?

Hypersensitivity and Intellectual Identity

2011-09-23T21:04:00.003-04:00

I’ve known for many years, but I am now aware of my hypersensitivity. I can be the awareness behind the hypersensitivity, but, of course, not always. Certain songs, movies, clips, situations, natural phenomenon, poems, stories, people, etc. can greatly affect my whole being, my whole existence, in ways that cannot be described. It’s very beautiful and frightening at the same, and all I can do is cry sometimes. The emotions within that I must repress in order to function in this world permeate my whole mind-body. They consume me and I no longer am conscious. I am unaware that I am thinking thoughts. The song, for example, causing me to react, cuts straight to my inner Being and forces it to be expressed. I think I get scared because I know it won’t last, or perhaps I am afraid of how I may react. Maybe I’m afraid (or rather the ego is afraid) of those ethereal forces within me because they threaten to annihilate one of my popular identities, that of the tortured intellectual who cannot enjoy life, who must always be philosophizing from the grandstands. The identity of course has a romantic appeal, but it is ultimately self-destructive and selfish and stupid. When I got to college, I had all this anger (and I still do) and I needed to sublimate it somehow. Ah, I know! I’m become an English major and minor in Philosophy. I could attack authorities and power symbols from the comfort of academia. Anyway, this identity that I’ve attached to for many years is, like I said, self-destructive. If I actually acted out the behaviors of this identity fully, I would be dead by now, most preferably by suicide, but close behind is accidental death by drugs and alcohol, and then you have being murdered by either street punks/thugs or cops. Ah, how romantic! Dead, alone in a puddle of my own blood, track marks, vomit, flashing red and blue lights, crying family and friends.

Why would I attach to this identity? Why would I want to life this life? Why would I want so much suffering on a day to day basis? You see people all the time acting out self-destructive identities. I guess it’s just because that’s all they know. That makes sense to me. Growing up, our house was in a constant state of extreme uncertainty, instability, and inconsistency. I would dent the car and dad would laugh saying he did stuff like that when he was a kid, and then two days later, he would be kicking my up the stairs because he thought I shut the door too hard. This went on my entire childhood. So, you see, I was conditioned to want to suffer and to want instability. I saw love as anger. Violence and destruction were taught to me as how one deals with situations and problems. Running away was always a better solution than facing reality. Alcohol was how I mainly ran away. Of course, the demons that I tried to run away from only were fueled by the alcohol. How can a messed-up mind fix itself? All of its ideas to make things better have ulterior motives of self-defeat in order to keep the drama going. It’s just how the alcoholic mind keeps thinking that it needs to drink more alcohol to solve its problems caused by alcohol. The dysfunctional mind unconsciously thinks that more dysfunction will solve its problems caused by dysfunction. So, it goes to therapy, gets on meds, and becomes addicted to support structures. It hasn’t changed, and in a few years, it will be right back where it was, a miserable suffering mess.

It’s not like one fine day I consciously attached myself to this identity. A good deal of this identity was created and molded over time and involved thousands of factors and causes over many years. Severe anger towards my dad, a propensity towards existentialism, self-medication, acting out anti-social behavior, committing misdemeanors such as vandalism, disorderly conduct, driving while intoxicated, high intelligence, profound insight into human natures flaws, imperfections, beauty, artistic, and a very self-critical and perfectionist attitude have all contributed to the creation of this identity that I’ve lived with for over a decade. I think a lot of started around April 5, 1994. I was going through puberty and fighting with my dad constantly (he was my nemesis and I often thought of him as a domineering, controlling, despot like Hitler). The first concert I ever went to was Nirvana, October 30, 1993. Kurt Cobain shoots himself up with heroin and lead. I obsess over the mess he must have left. A shotgun is so powerful and so destructive. I can help but imagine Kurt’s head exploding into a pink mist. A little while later I’m in the hospital, not knowing where I’ve been. The last thing I remember is being in the van riding home with my mom and sister from Dayton. We had been visiting grandma. It turns out that I had suffered a concussion. I tell this story to myself to reinforce the identity. My dad of course was responsible. Evidently, according to my mom, my dad took me down to the ground and I hit my head. This was my second concussion. I had had one a year or so earlier while kneeboarding on the Ohio River with the Greenes.

Anyway, all this history that I constantly remind myself of keeps the identity alive. The fear is losing this identity. The pain-body obviously wants me to keep it going, as does the ego. But unless I actually want to suffer over and over again and die a horrible self-centered death, then I must relinquish this identity.

Ah, but then who would I be? That’s the fear. Fear of the unknown. Perhaps the scariest thing there is.

Society As Mentally Ill

2011-09-23T21:00:00.003-04:00

Society will act to stop an individual who wishes to cause harm to another individual. The individuals are part of society. An individual is not society, just as a tree is not a forest.

I said it years ago. Society is mentally ill. (Which society? All of them? Certain ones?) But this can only be true in relative terms. There are many societies. Can you point to something and say that it is society? It is like the idea of self, this society. Only those who feel suffering attach to the idea of society being mentally ill. Otherwise, why would you think your society is mentally ill? Someone who is not currently suffering, will most likely not see his or her society as mentally ill. It is very easy, though, for someone not suffering to see that his or her society is mentally ill, either through sympathy or empathy. For example, when a government murders millions of its own citizens, it is easy to label that government and its created society as mentally ill. The mentality that caused millions to be murdered is sick.

But why is this considered sick? That’s morality. Something within us tells us it is wrong. We’ve been conditioned by X, for the sake of social control, to have certain beliefs of what is right and wrong. Most people don’t want to have any kind of pain inflicted upon them. So they agree to deem that as wrong or bad or evil. Morality is an agreement among individuals.

Mental Illness and Failure of Words

2011-09-23T20:55:00.003-04:00

In typical depressive identity thinking: I wake up and think, “What is going to go wrong today?” Because of my perfectionism, things always do go wrong. It is hopeless to think that things will go smoothly and that reality will be exactly how I want it to be. So, the perfectionism is a root cause of the depression. For so many years, living in hopeless pursuit of perfection, I have unconsciously conditioned an already depression-primed mind to be even more hopeless and insatiable. Dukkha, complete dukkha. Non-acceptance of reality (what is) directly affects my amount of emotional suffering. The intensity of the suffering, from annoyance and unease, to clinical depression, all the way to self-mutilation and suicidal behavior, is directly related to how much I resist and try to fight whatever current reality I’m experiencing. Thinking that I can think myself out of a situation that thinking got me into in the first place is well, sort of crazy.

I am not absolutely mentally ill, only relatively, as is anyone else. The seven different diagnoses that I’ve been given are all just words that attempt to represent descriptions given by myself of my own thinking, behaviors, emotions, sensitivities, and such. I use words to try and convey the indescribable and formless. That doesn’t work: using form to convey the formless. The ever-changing, perpetually being conditioned essence of my own existence is uselessly trying to be explained by me via ambiguous and vague words. The doctor or nurse hears my words, then immediately attaches his or her own meanings to these words. It’s really quite silly.

When I told a counselor that I sometimes feared people’s faces (their eyes, nose, lips, teeth, wet tongue, mouth, ears, hair (eyebrows, facial hair)), he took those words I had uttered and interpreted them to his fancy. I left his office being diagnosed as schizo-affective disorder. It absolutely amazes me (severe non-acceptance) how individuals in a specific line of work can sometimes be so ignorant of some of the details of that very line of work. What I’m thinking of is when I went to see another counselor about a year later and told her about how I was diagnosed with the schizo-affective disorder diagnosis. She agreed with me and said that she didn’t see any psychosis either. I said, “yes, I don’t have auditory or visual hallucinations.” There is a difference of course between schizo-affective disorder and schizophrenia. This counselor did not know that schizo-affective disorder does not include hallucinations. Maybe she just wasn’t listening very close to me and thought I said schizophrenia. Perhaps it was just a detail that really wasn’t that important, and yet that was the very point I was trying to make to her about all this crazy diagnosing stuff. I was telling her how I have had all these different diagnoses and how I had really become upset (voluntarily crashing my car into a telephone pole) after receiving the schizo-affective disorder diagnosis. I basically felt so crazy identifying with the schizoid role that I acted out behaviors that were indeed “crazy.” I have always known that I am not crazy. But of course the statement, “I am not crazy,” is really quite meaningless. Do I really need to explain why? First of all, who is the “I” in the statement? What does the word “crazy” even mean? Well, I guess the statement is not really meaningless, but instead very ambiguous. It has very clear meanings in certain contexts. The meanings are all slightly different to different people, and that is why it is ambiguous.

When I said, “I sometimes fear peoples faces,” that makes many different interpretations and thus meanings. Words are tools, like paintbrushes and screwdrivers. Some people can paint a near perfect representation of human form. Some can build intricate and complicated machines and systems. Words are tools used to try and convey something which is truly unconveyable. There are many languages (verbal and non-verbal) and they all try to do the same thing, but they can’t quite do it. The truth or reality that they try to express is of course not the truth or reality. When I say “dog,” it is only meaningful if someone else who attaches an agreed upon meaning to the sound emanating from my vocal cords. So, obviously the sounds or the scratches on paper are not the truth or reality, and even the thoughts about the sounds/scratches are not any closer to the truth trying to be conveyed. The truth is the truth, it does not need words or thoughts. The unconditioned mind knows truth and reality. Truth is beneath the layers of delusion that have arrived from centuries of conditioning passed down through the generations.

Thus, I cannot be truly diagnosed. I can be relatively diagnosed in relation to the current reality of the society in which I presently exist. That diagnosis will not last, of course.

Love and Self-Destruction

2011-09-23T20:43:00.001-04:00

Love is like this delicate little flower that I happen to discover while walking through the woods in the winter. There it is, so indescribably beautiful. So rare…I should want to leave it be, let it grow, live, be natural. Enjoy its vibrant life, its beauty, its wonder. I should want that.

For some reason, either I want to avoid the emotions and the risk of loss and rejection or it’s something hidden deep in my mind….

I unconsciously begin the self-destruction. I begin to study and analyze the flower. I question its existence. Why is it here? What is it? What is it purpose? The sickness flows. I’m completely unconscious, completely inside my own head, trapped in a bizarre painful labyrinth. God is the Evil Demon in this drowning state. It’s all just thoughts about the past and future.

The flower is picked. It immediately begins to die, although it is not noticeable. I dissect it and make wet mounts. I want to see how it works. I see its cells still functioning for now.

It’s already dead. I’ve killed it. I’ve killed it with my thinking and analyzing and worrying.

Hell is very real. It’s right here, right now.

The flower lies in pieces, dead, just as the ego wants it, like Sylvia and Kurt.

Self-destruction is not romantic, no matter how much my ego thinks it is. It is selfish and stupid. Sylvia and Kurt, yes were suffering, they couldn’t step out of that egoic mind-made identity. But I understand. It’s so dreadfully sad. Of course you want to die. You see no hope. All you see is wretchedness, death, evil, lies, suffering, cruelty, hate, absurdity, confusion, meaninglessness, absolutely no hope.

Of course you want to die. You are in pieces under the microscope of your own mind. Utter insanity the mind trying to think its way out of a maze that it created itself.

To feel trapped, unloved, alone, seeing nothing but the grotesque egos of the horrific others.

Of course, I understand.

But you were still selfish and stupid. And I know (I think it myself) that you will say,”Well, more reasons why I did it.” If only you could have stepped outside and glimpsed the ego, if only for a moment. If for only a moment, you could have separated yourself from that crazy beast. Maybe you could have seen how silly it all is and how it’s not worth the trouble. Such a mess you made.

You have to just keep going, even when it hurts, because it’s temporary. But I know, believe I know! Never give up! Even when they are laughing at you and you feel like no one cares or recognizes you, especially then. Even if you’ve relapsed and gone back to jail/rehab/hospital and you’re around those unconscious fools again. Never give Up! Keep going, even when you’re dripping in blood and criticism and disrespect are ripping you apart, keep trudging along like a dumb old stubborn mule. Don’t give those fuckers the satisfaction of your suicide.

The flower is dead, but I’m still alive.

Life Summary up until a couple years ago

2011-09-23T20:40:00.000-04:00

For the first thirty years of my life, I believed that through worldly wisdom I could “find” happiness and peace. I had made it my duty and my ultimate quest to find the Truth. I thought that if I read enough books I could “figure things out.” If I studied enough science and philosophy and psychology and “self-help” books, someday I could become smart enough to handle anything and anyone who crossed my path. I was told “knowledge is power” and that if I studied and worked hard enough in school, then happiness would come and that life would be easier. I wanted to find the Truth. I never had much interest in searching for money or love or anything else unless it had something to do with the Truth. I believed I could find this Truth through knowledge, that is, worldly knowledge.

So, that’s what I tried to do. In school, I became obsessed with getting A’s. I participated on the Quiz Bowl team (the school trivia competition team) and something called Future Problem Solvers, which was a team-based competitive event that solved hypothetical social, economic, and moral issues of tomorrow’s world. I tried to study and learn and memorize everything under the sun. I memorized scores of poets, artists, writers, scientists, and mathematicians and all of their poems, paintings, novels, plays, theorems, and formulae. I memorized eons of history and important dates. I memorized speeches and quotes by famous generals, prime ministers, and presidents. At one point, I knew every capital of every country in the world. I was like a machine, just recording bits of knowledge as they came my way. I was not understanding or feeling the importance of what I was recording. There were times when I felt that I had stumbled on something that resembled the Truth, but I just recorded it in my mind and didn’t really appreciate the significance of it.

Also, during high school, like many other kids my age, I became a big fan of the music scene which was labeled as “grunge” or “alternative.” I thought that because the songs seemed to be “real” that they were perhaps a portal to the Truth. It was, for the most part though, quite a negative scene made up of egoic false-selves and active pain-bodies. There was an air of depressive and lackadaisical attitudes. The music and lyrics of most of the songs were filled with negative emotions such as fear, depression, hate, anger, discontentment, anxiety, and confusion. Back then, I was unaware of the harmful effect that this music had on me. I was unconscious to the fact that pain-bodies made those songs and that I was letting them fuel my own pain-body. I don’t blame that music scene for “ruining” me. It just happened to be around and I (or rather the ego) attached myself to the negative mentality that it expressed. I know now that a lot of the music back then was not negative at all, but my pain-body was only attracted to those songs of pain and suffering. I had formed an identity of pain and suffering and if I didn’t suffer, if I didn’t feel pain in some form, then I would lose my identity. Until recently, I was completely unaware of this. I see now how I had identified with these artists who had immensely suffered through drug addictions, depressions, and severe angst. I wanted to be like them for some reason.

In the background of all this Truth searching and adolescent fandom, was a home- life that was less than perfect. I don’t want to go into all the details of it mainly because I don’t want to awaken my own pain-body. Also, I don’t want to give the ego the satisfaction. I will simply say that what happened at home was not pleasant for me and there was almost always some form of emotional, psychological, or physical abuse. Relatively, I know it wasn’t that bad. Many kids had it much worse than I did, but I was, and still am, very sensitive to all forms of negativity. My mother and father both had quite dense pain-bodies. Almost all of the emotional pain that was felt in our household was simply my mom and dad not wanting to be hurt anymore.

My dad grew up, like so many other people, in a dysfunctional household. His parents had never dealt with or were even aware of their own pain-bodies. They were unconscious of the egos controlling them. They had no awareness of their True Self, which was already at peace. They acted through their egos, which are never satisfied and are always finding faults in others. Peace and happiness would never arise, because the false-self that they were identified with didn’t really want it.

I used to always think that most of my dysfunction and pain-body residue came from my father’s side simply because he was the most visibly aggressive and violent. It wasn’t until my grandmother on my mom’s side died that I realized that, more than likely, most of my pain-body was passed on to me in the womb from my mother. After her mom died, a family secret had been let out.

I grew up always believing that my grandmother had a sister named Ruth. She lived only a couple a miles away from where my grandmother lived. My grandma had many other brothers and sisters, but they all lived further away, but Ruth lived close by. They spent a lot of time together and I would hear them laugh and bicker with each other about different things. One day, Ruth’s body developed cancer and she soon passed away. About a year later, my grandma died of heart failure on October, Friday the 13^th, 1995. She had always been a superstitious person, so it was interesting that she died on the most superstitious day of the year. I don’t know who knew the secret or who let it out, but I’m glad that the truth was revealed. I found out, after both of them had died, that Ruth was actually my grandma’s daughter and the reason they hid this fact was because the father of Ruth was also the father of my grandma. She had been raped and became pregnant by her own father when she was only fifteen years old. On Ruth’s birth certificate there was simply an “X” put on the line for the father’s signature.

So, my mother had initially “inherited” quite a dense pain-body from her mother and then, when my mom was only two years old, her dad died of cancer. So, my grandmother was a single mom with five children living in a three-bedroom house.

I, of course, will never know everything about my ancestors and past generations. I will not know why my great-grandfather raped my grandmother and eventually killed himself after he developed cancer and was forced to use a wheelchair. I will never know specific reasons why my dad’s father was so violent and angry. The details are really not important.

Despite all this background negativity in my homelife, I still did fairly well in school and won academic awards, scholarships, admiration, and such. On my diploma, it said I graduated with “High Honors” and it had a mark saying I was in the “National Honor Society.” The ego in me was ecstatic. It now had proof that it was “better” than all these other people. I was “smarter” and “more cultured” than these other people. I never realized how much negativity was in me back then.

After high school, I went to college. My first quarter, I took a philosophy class titled “Eastern Philosophy.” I find it interesting that I took that class my first quarter in college and yet it wasn’t until twelve years later that I would come back to texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching and actually understand the Truth that they were pointing at. I learned concepts and ideas and beliefs, but I did not “see” or “feel” the Truth. Unfortunately, at the time I took the class, I was still in my old mind set and I simply read and memorized all the foreign words and tried to get the best grade possible. If I got an A, then that I meant I understood it. I see now that the reason I missed the Truths in that class was mainly because I hadn’t suffered enough and was still unconscious. One doesn’t have to suffer to realize Truths, but unfortunately, that is sometimes the only way for people to see what is important, and thus Real.

Back then, books like the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching were seen by me very differently than the way I see them now. They were just another book that I (the ego) could add to my list of “heavy” philosophy books that I had read and therefore could impress others by knowing things that they did not know. Oddly, I thought that I would somehow make friends by making other people feel “dumb.” I see now that the ego always has to be right and always wants to make others out to be wrong. I constantly complained and criticized everything, especially myself (or what I thought was myself) and my life. Everybody was “something.” Everything had to be labeled and categorized. If I saw someone driving an expensive car, my mind immediately created this whole identity and history for that person. I didn’t even know his or her name, but I “knew” that he or she was this “type” of person who just cared about money and his or her own selfish, greedy life. I had to make him or her into a person who was “less” than me in some way. Even people who were very nice and humble, I had to “make” them into manipulative and cunning. I thought they were only being nice so they could get something in return. To me, “being nice” was no different than pointing a gun at someone. Either way, it was a means to a selfish end. I believed that he or she was not being “truly” nice or “truly” humble. No one or no thing was ever “true” enough. Nothing was ever “real” enough. I know now this was simply the ego in action.

I took an Ethics class to try and discover what “truly” or “really” being good was, or if it was even possible. I was, of course, trying to intellectualize and analyze things that were in reality, quite “undissectible,” but the ego, being insatiable and stubborn, tried its best to once again figure things out. The inevitable result for me was more emotional pain and suffering and turning to alcohol to slow down the mind and temporarily numb, or neutralize, the negative emotions. This, of course, was like trying to use rubbing alcohol to put out a fire.

I couldn’t trust anyone because no one was ever being “honest” or “true.” The ego always had to make others as “this” or “that” and it was always something “below” me. Everyone and everything was either not enough of this or too much of that. They were never smart enough, nice enough, honest enough, cultured enough, aware enough, experienced enough, healthy enough, thin enough, and on and on. They were too nice, too cultured, too healthy, too overweight, too materialistic, too attached to meaningless ideas, too addicted, too dumb, too happy, too smart, too philosophical, and on and on.

All those negative thoughts that I had about other people and things were applied with twice the force towards my own life and my own concept of myself. I absolutely loathed myself. The ego was in a way hating itself. This is perfectly fine for the ego because it ensures its continuation of existence. As long as it can exist, it will exist in any form (positive or negative). The ego that thought it was better than everyone else, simultaneously somehow also thought it was worse than everyone else. The truth is, of course, that the ego doesn’t really care if it’s better or worse than anyone, as long as it is not “like” anyone else. As long as it’s special and unique, and ultimately separate. It wants to be great, and when I was fully identified with the ego, I was certain that I would do something great with my life. There’s nothing wrong with doing something truly great, but with the ego in control, it thinks that this greatness will separate itself from everyone else. The “great thing” will bring fame and fortune and other “great” things. A truly great thing brings about the opposite of separateness. It brings people together in a positive way.

After a year or so of college, I had decided to major in English instead of Philosophy. The ego, who I thought was me, was completely indulging itself in the products of other pain-bodies. I reveled in poems such as Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and was secretly thrilled (although not immediately) to find out that she had committed suicide. It was, of course, not my True Self that was thrilled to find out, but the ego and pain-body. Because she had killed herself, it gave a sort of validation to her work. “She was real,” the ego thought. If I found out that a poet, artist, or writer had committed suicide, I immediately became a fan of all his or her work. This was sickness and insanity. My True Self would never want to seek out such negativity. Why would I voluntarily surround myself with so much emotional pain, ugliness and death? Of course, I know now that it was not truly me who so obsessed with these intelligent, yet suffering artists, it was my pain-body. The ego, in its never ending quest for attention and to be special, perpetuated and kept alive the pain-body that was passed on to me through my parents and the environment that I was born into. This was very easy for the ego to do, because I, the real I, was completely unconscious to the fact that the ego even existed, not to mention the fact that it was in complete control of me.

So, over the next four years, I perpetuated such horrible and destructive mental-emotional pain and suffering on myself and others around me of which words can do no justice. I can’t even describe the utter insanity and self-destruction that I unconsciously created and thus dispersed into the world. I was so severely unconscious back then. It’s odd now that I look back. It’s almost as if a part of me knew that I needed to suffer much more so that I could see the Truths. I don’t think there was any other way. My anger and anxiety had me completely blind to what was really going on. I have no idea how I’m still alive, let alone not in prison or crippled. My True Self stayed hidden, buried beneath layers of pain and thoughts about who I thought I was. I erroneously thought that my mind and my thoughts were who I was. “How could it be otherwise?” I thought.

During my supposedly to be “enlightening” period of academic pursuits, I became an alcoholic, manic depressive, obsessive, compulsive, mind-obsessed, insane person. I was put in handcuffs about a dozen times for being a threat to myself and others. I was taken to psych wards and jails. I had almost constant suicidal thoughts and behavior. I would periodically cut and burn myself. I would intentionally overdose at least half a dozen times on whatever pills I could get my hands on, and there were always pills, so many pills. I can’t even remember the names of all the different types of medicine I was prescribed. I would take six or seven times the recommended dose of sleeping pills and wash them down with alcohol. I have, according to a couple doctors, some liver damage as a result of all this behavior. I just wanted to fall asleep and never wake up, or so I thought. I didn’t know where I wanted to be or what I should be doing, but I did know that the “here and now” was absolutely not it. I was diagnosed all sorts of different things such as bipolar disorder I – psychosis, severe chronic depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizo-affective disorder, and probably other things that I don’t even remember.

Those diagnoses only fueled the ego and its pain-ridden and negative “tortured intellectual” identity that it had created. By going to the hospital and having “trained professionals” tell me that I was “this,” I could add that label to my already suffering identity and enhance it with the “official proof” that I was indeed a “tortured intellectual.” I was secretly proud to be an alcoholic like Dylan Thomas or Jack Kerouac, or a mental patient like Sylvia Plath, Dorthy Parker, Virginia Wolfe, or Vincent Van Gogh. I kept ending up in hospitals because either my friends at the time called the police for fear of my safety or I would go to the emergency room severely depressed and suicidal. It was a cycle of self-abuse and mental torture that, in reality, the ego in me had no intention of ever ending.

After four very painful years at Ohio State, I thought that I would try something new and different. I thought a geographic change and a new field of study would be the answer to many of the “problems” that I was still experiencing. All I was doing, though, was changing external things, and was not changing anything internal, so in reality, I was not changing anything. My consciousness was still stuck in an old mind-set and I was still unaware of my True Self. I was still thinking that I was my ego. I realize now that I was acting out of fear, and more specifically anger and anxiety. I didn’t know it then, but acting out of fear is not really acting, but reacting. Acting out of truth, positivity, and love is the only way to act in alignment with the harmonies of the universe. I reacted, in an impulsive way, out of fear, and that of course only brought more suffering, more anger, anxiety, fear, and depression… more of the same. What I did, I see now, was not sane.

One night, in August of 2000, at around midnight, I hoped on my bike and decided to ride to my mother’s house. The only thing was that she lived fifty miles away! Several hours later, I arrived at her house. My sister was living with my mom at the time and she was surprised to see me walk through the door. “What are you doing here?” she gasped. “I’m going to move down here.” I replied. It was so crazy, but at the time I thought I knew what I was doing. I immediately fell asleep on a bed and when I woke up, I could barely move my legs they were so sore.

I started going to Ohio University. It was a more rural academic setting compared to Ohio State and I thought that would be good for me. I at first declared my major as Language Arts Education, but I soon realized that I had had enough of those self-loathing poets and writers. It was all too emotional for me. I felt that studying villanelles, plays, and philosophy was activating my emotions way too much and that the “answers” that I was getting were not “concrete” enough to be the Truth. I needed to do something that would keep my feet on the ground. After years of fruitless searching for Truth in literature and philosophy, I now thought that my ever elusive answers would be found in science. I had changed my major to Environmental Health.

Science would be my new path towards discovering the Truth. Through learning and exploring the depths of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics, I could find the evidence that I needed, the scientific proof of what is Real. I, of course, was unaware at the time, that all this was simply the ego believing it could figure things out. It audaciously believed that it could actually discover the Truth if it only worked hard enough at digging up the right worldly knowledge. I know now that the Truth is Real, and that certain bits of worldly knowledge could only hint at the Truth. It would not be until I started exploring spiritual wisdom that I would fully realize these Truths. Worldly wisdom alone can not find Truth.

At the time, though, this searching for the Truth was very serious business. It was constantly a life or death issue. The ego believed that it was absolutely necessary to find the Truth in order to be happy. I am aware now that the ego really never wanted to find the Truth and that is why it led me down all these never-ending paths. The ego never wanted me to be happy and content and at peace. It secretly knew that I, the True Self, would have no need for the ego if I was at peace and contentment. I wouldn’t need anything if I was truly content. I would have no desires if I was truly at peace.

I believe it was no coincidence that I ended up studying Environmental Health. In case you don’t know what it is, Environmental Health is the study of how elements in the environment affect human health. We would study water and air and soil and see how contaminants in them adversely affected health. Then, you could monitor and control things in the environment so as to reduce the toxicological effects on humans.

Well, one of the classes that I had to take was Epidemiology, which is basically the tracking and documenting of diseases and illnesses. In the beginning of the class, the teacher taught about Holistic (or Wholistic) Health. He said that total health was comprised of six different things, those being Physical, Mental, Emotional, Social, , and Spiritual Health. I understood most of what he said, but I had never thought about spiritual health as being a part of total health. Also, the idea of spiritual health did not seem like something that should be in a science class. It had been several years now since I had renounced my religion and my belief in God. I didn’t believe in anything Divine or Holy and I was sure that there was no such thing as negative energy fields. So, how could spiritual health have anything to do with my total health? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had basically no spiritual health at all, or more accurately, I was in poor spiritual health. Even though, I realized this at the time, I didn’t really do anything about it. I continued to drink and smoke and pollute my body with negative music, movies, internet, and video games. I was still very much unconscious of my True Self and was still living through the ego. I evidently hadn’t suffered enough. As long as I could get drunk, listen to music, and play video games, then I was happy. I see now how spiritually sick I was. I was not mentally ill. I never was. I was spiritually ill.

Even though the seeds of spirituality may have been sown, nothing had sprouted, and regardless, I was no where near ready to reap the benefits. A part of me still wanted to suffer. I would say, “I just want to be happy,” but the truth was that the ego that I was identified with wanted to continue to suffer mental anguish and emotional pain. I can admit now, that the ego in me was actually quite attracted to a life of pain and suffering. I now realize the insanity of this, but back then, I completely let myself become identified with the romanticized ideal of being this depressed and tortured intellectual hipster. I can only assume that it was because of my dense pain-body as to why I would want to identify with such a negative identity.

And so it continued on. I spent the next seven years constantly running and searching for Truth, but all I was really doing was suffering and inhaling pain like it was air. I was not living any kind of life. I was dying and it took all my energy just to survive. I was constantly confused. I had no idea of what was going on. I know now that a battle was raging on inside me between my True Self and the ego. Also, the pain-body was constantly active, devouring and accumulating negative energy. It was constantly adding layers upon layers of negative pain energy to itself. I had always sensed that something such as the pain-body existed, but I was never quite able to put my finger on it. I would say things like, “Why am I destroying my life?” and “Why am I so self-destructive?” I was nothing but a pure field of negative energy. I craved conflict, drama, resistance to everything that was. I desired pain; or rather the pain-body desired it. If someone who had awareness had tried to talk to me about the ego, and the pain-body, and energy fields, I would have laughed at them and called them a fool. “Show me scientific proof,” I would say. Then, I would stomp off, light a cigarette, and start drinking.

I, the true “I” was, of course, present during all this mental-emotional pain that I was going though, but it was not “realized” or “Awake.” Once I had awakened, the spiritual wisdom flowed in quite effortlessly. The spiritual wisdom would forever change my life, or more accurately, how I lived my life. My real life, Life itself, and my True Self, had never changed or gone away. They were always there, as they always will be, floating in perfection. Having awareness meant that I could finally see them and feel them again after they had been obscured for over twenty years.

But I was still unawake, unconscious. My body and my mind were under complete control of the ego and pain-body. Everyone was grotesque and scary, because all I saw in other people was the ego and not the True Self which is divine and holy and perfect. Fear, anxiety, and anger were the dominant emotions that I felt. Negativity was all I thought and acted out. I was trapped, or so I thought, in regrets and pains of the past and doomed to forever repeat the suffering. I always believed, wrongly, that if I could just get the right balance of medicine, virtues, and other things, that at some point in the future, I could be happy. I had all these requirements that needed to be fulfilled, and then, and only then, would I be satisfied and happy. Little did I know, or was aware of, that since I was completely being driven by the never-satisfied, always wanting more Ego and the drama-craving pain-body, I would never be happy for long and definitely never have everlasting peace.

As I mentioned before, I often tried to self-medicate with alcohol. In the beginning, it seemed to be the answer to all my problems. The alcohol would slow my mind down and it helped me relax. I could fall asleep at a decent hour and could get good nights of sleep. The alcohol would melt away the anger and anxiety, which were just forms of fear. Unfortunately, the alcohol would occasionally stir the pain-body and before I knew it, I would be cutting myself and stewing in pure negativity. Before long, I was a full-blown alcoholic and needed alcohol on a daily basis. I would get drunk and break windows and slash tires. Years of anger would come screaming out of me. I would constantly have alcohol-related incidents and would end up spending a few days in jail.

Anyone that has suffered with addiction knows that the pain it causes is nothing short of a real living hell. When I was getting counseling for alcoholism, I was made aware that addiction takes on many forms, but is ultimately the same thing. Whether it’s alcohol, nicotine, food, shopping, sex, or heroin, the structure of addiction is the same. I realize now that addiction is simply the ego searching for something external that will bring an end to its pain. The ego always thought it could solve my problems with something outside, something worldly such as alcohol, money, material things, or even worldly knowledge. The problem, of course, is that the pain was never permanently removed. The external “solution” was temporary and not a solution at all, but actually the complete opposite. The ego wanted it that way though, because if that external “solution” had actually worked, and was indeed a permanent solution, then I no longer would have had any need for the ego. If I actually had no more pain and suffering, then what would the ego have to strive for? Who would I be? I know now that I would be my True Self, the awareness behind it all.

So, my many years of pursuing worldly knowledge had not made me happy or peaceful at all. I had earned a couple of degrees in science, but they were doing me no good. The worldly knowledge that I had obtained was all very interesting and I’m sure it was quite useful to the right person, but it was quite worthless to me. I couldn’t apply any of it to anything meaningful as long as I was suffering mental and emotional pain. Constant anxiety and anger plagued my life. Depression and wild mood swings were around every corner. I couldn’t enjoy anything pleasurable or nice. I would burst into tears of emotional confusion if I saw a certain beautiful things. I began to severely withdraw from any emotional contact especially with other people and events. I could not go to places where large crowds were and I had a great deal of trouble emotionally connecting with people.

I can’t stress enough how miserable I was with constant suffering. Now, some people might think that the word “suffering” is too strong a word for what I was going through, but in reality, there is no other word for what it was. I’m very lucky to be alive and that no one else was hurt or killed during my years of unconscious behavior. I so easily could have slipped into death and would never have gotten to know the truths that I know now. I was not awake to my true nature, to my true self.

In the ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, it talks about the utter important task of knowing the True Self, which is called atman. Spiritual wisdom is knowing that the real you is atman, and not the ego or the pain-body or any other false-self. All of my suffering was caused by thinking “I” was the ego. I completely identified with the ego, which is a false-self. I thought I was the ego and the pain-body. I thought I was my mind and the thoughts my mind produced. I would get confused because it seemed like there were several “me’s” and I know now that even though it seemed like there were several “I’s”, there was only one atman, only one True Self. The pain that I experienced on a daily basis was largely due to the inner battle between the false-self ego and the True Self. The false-self, the ego, was winning that battle for over a decade. The more it dominated my True Self, the more I drowned further into the downward spiral of depression and emotional pain.

I would say to myself in despair, “I’m driving myself crazy!” and “Why am I destroying my life?” I never realized the significance of these statements until I read “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. Those statements, while uttered out of hopelessness, actually held important parts of the Truth which I had long been searching for. These books made me remember ancient wisdom that was somehow lost through generations of unconsciousness. This wisdom, for the most part, was not passed down to me (although I would hear bits of it), but even if it had been, I would have ignored it. I couldn’t see or hear anything unless it would bring me pain and suffering. I was unconscious and it was not going to be easy to wake up.

A few days after Thanksgiving in 2007, the insanity and pain had reached a breaking point. I was driving to an AA meeting and something (most likely the pain-body) possessed me to plow my car into a telephone pole while going about 60 mph. The whole telephone pole broke in half. The airbags deployed and I survived. My chest hurt and I had difficulty breathing. My right foot felt like it was broke. An ambulance showed up and then a fireman asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine. Then, they asked me what happened. I told them I tried to kill myself. I don’t know if this was true or not. Since I still had my seatbelt on when I crashed, I don’t think this was a full-blown true suicide attempt. I was just feeling so miserable that I guess I needed to make my external universe the same as my internal state. I don’t think that I (completely under the control of the ego) wanted to really die. The ego just wanted me to stay in a constant state of emotional pain and suffering. If I was to die, the ego would die as well, and the ego definitely did not want to die. It could guarantee its own survival by keeping me stuck in a desperate life situation of despair. That way it could always be looking for ways to sedate the pain.

So, they took me to the emergency room and then the psych ward. I didn’t want to go, but they said I didn’t really have a choice. This was the ninth time that I had been to the psych ward of a hospital in just ten years. I knew exactly what to say to get out as fast as possible. I knew I wasn’t going to find the help or answers that I needed from them. Not long after I left the hospital, my life situation was worse than it had ever been before. With some help from my mom and her husband, I avoided being homeless just a week before Christmas. I was living in a trailer and working as a cashier. I walked to work by cutting through an empty lot. There was a foot of snow and the sky was always dark and cold. I had $70,000 in student loan debt and had two science degrees. I was only getting around 20 hours a week and I couldn’t afford my heating bill. I had several other bills that I simply could not pay. Within a few months, I would file for bankruptcy.

I simply could not accept my reality. I could not believe that after more than a decade of school and struggling with “mental illness” and addiction, I had nothing to show for all my hard work. I started drinking again. I completely refused to accept my current reality. I would ask the same questions over and over. “Why did I go to college?” “Why is life so unfair?” “Why was I ever born?”

One day, after a night of drinking and ending up in some strange house, I called my mom and yelled at her. I told her that she really never wanted me and that I was not supposed to have ever been born. It made sense to think that I should not have ever existed. All the pain and suffering were because I was not supposed to be here on Earth. My life was not part of the plan. It also explained all the suicidal feelings and self-destructive behavior. I was not supposed to be here. I should have been aborted.

After I sobered up a bit, I realized how hurtful I had been to my mom. The insanity of that night, of not knowing where I was, or how I got there, really woke me up. This wasn’t the first time that something like this had happened, but all of sudden I decided that this would be the last time, and sure enough I haven’t touched alcohol since. I didn’t really know it then, but it was the beginning of something that would forever change my life for the better.

A couple weeks later, I decided that I would have no more suffering. No more pain. No more drama. No more resistance to what is. No more negativity.

Something was changing in me. Things would get scary and I would lose all sense of who I thought I was. I would have bouts of terrifying emotions that I had never had before. I would experience feelings and states of consciousness that I had never felt before. There would be times when other people thought I was on drugs or on little sleep. I had no idea how long this would last. I also, had no idea of where I was going. The unknown is quite scary.

I just keep reading and writing about Buddhism, existentialism, and other philosophies. The project now is finding an end to suffering, at least my own suffering.

Here I Am

2011-09-23T20:34:00.000-04:00

Here I am. I have options and they all have consequences. I have to get up at 5:00 AM, like always, and sit in a little box. I’ll sit there for eight hours, with a half hour lunch, until the shift change. There’s a regulation somewhere in some book that says there needs to be a human present. I’ll probably talk to around five people the whole day. Every one of them, most likely, will be told “no” in some form.

“No, we don’t take cash.” “No, we don’t serve non-members.” “No, we don’t have cigarettes.” Rarely, do I get to say any affirmative.

I do have a radio at least and even though I’m not supposed to read while on duty, I sneak books in with my cargo pants. Also, I write a lot.

So, because of some safety regulation, I get paid to read, write, drink coffee, and listen to the radio. There’s a bathroom here as well. I may have to put on a new roll of receipt tape, but that’s rare. I live alone. I have a job. Okay life, you may begin.

This may be the worst thing for me… or the best. It’ll of course be a combination of the two. I’m going to be alone with my thoughts. There will be no social distractions. My consciousness will be isolated from others. I will be able to focus on things such as my current situation, human nature (or lack thereof), and the only real question I have. That is, “How am I going to survive this?” Is it even worth it? After I pay my rent, bills, and my massive monthly student loan debt, I have little left over. It’s going to take a long time until I can buy a car. There are no better jobs within walking distance. I must endure. I have no other options. Well, there is one. I could say that that is not an option, but I’d be lying to myself, even though it’s not really possible to lie to yourself. I must acknowledge all my options and all the possible consequences of those options. I cannot, well I should not, complain about my current situation. I have chosen it. I think I have made some bad choices.

Who knows where this predicament will take me? Physically, no where, but mentally and emotionally it will surely be interesting.

For some reason, the first thing I want to write about is my past. How I got to the point where I am now. I want to know, so that I don’t let it happen again. Bad choices breed bad choices. Maybe I should just say, “Choices were made.” People are either more skillful or less skillful at this life thing.

Dissatisfaction and Discontentment

2010-11-14T15:17:00.007-05:00

Mental resistance to what is = suffering. The present NOW is where the flow of life occurs. By surrendering to, accepting, and not labeling or judging the present moment, your mental resistance is reduced, and thus your suffering is reduced. Resistance to what IS is directly related to your level of suffering. Dukkha teaches us that life will always have problems and suffering. Dukkha can be translated as unsatisfactoriness. The Buddha saw that the conditioned egoic mind is almost always in a state of dissatisfaction (resistance) with the present moment. Things never quite seem good enough. Happiness and contentment always seem to lie in the future or just around the corner, or the egoic mind feels that happiness can never happen because of things that happened in the past. The conditioned mind is basically obsessed with the past and the future, which means it is obsessed with imaginary and unreal places.

The mind creates more dukkha through desiring, craving, lusting for the present moment to be something other than what it is. Desiring means one has discontent in some form with the present. There is a sense of lack of something. This is very common in western minds and it is also a great illusion. The egoic mind falsely believes that if it gets this or that, then it will be satisfied. However, desire is a bottomless pit. If one is a slave to the egoic mind, he or she will never feel satisfied and content. In a way, knowing that the egoic mind will never be fully satisfied, one should give up constant craving (tanha) for this or that to bring them contentment/satisfaction. They should accept their present situation. This doesn't mean to just stay stuck in the mud. One should first accept their present situation wholly without labeling or judging it. They should just see it for what it really is. This puts the mind into a more positive state of consciousness, and it is accepted wisdom that positive change can only come from a mind in a positive state.

The Buddha's description of a "rich" person is simply one who is content with what he or she has. Other egoic minds, especially the marketing industry, fueled by greedy corporations whose business model is based on infinite growth, inadvertently try to make us feel that we could not possibly be happy or content now. The American capitalist system is a system that is not in sync with nature and a sustainable ecology. Nearly our whole economy is dependent on oil, which is finite, and yet our business models demand infinite growth. This cannot and will not be sustainable. However, we get bombarded with thousands and thousands of advertisements telling us that we could not possibly be happy and content now, at least not until we buy this gadget or lifestyle. People who are in the business of selling us things, ideas, lifestyles, etc. need people to feel dissatisfied, discontent, and unhappy with their present life. Western corporate culture has for many years conditioning, socializing, and programming our fertile minds with ways of thinking that create discontent and dissatisfaction.

We are products of our socialization. Our current minds are the by-products of years of programming by power hungry and greedy corporations (those who feel that success = financial and material abundance). We have been programmed to feel that happiness/contentment/peace can only be bought and that it always lies in the future once we get this or that. We have been deluded into thinking that we cannot be happy now. Advertising, TV, movies, schools, churches, parents, etc. have conditioned our minds to feel that we must obtain certain external things/lifestyles/images to feel good about ourselves. We have become beasts craving a future satisfaction that never really comes because our conditioned minds are always looking to the future of "more" and "better." Discontentment becomes a constant background feeling. Some people feel empty and depressed. While others are constantly seeking adventure and excitement to fill a never-ending void.

To be free of the conditioned mind, one must be very present, in the NOW, and surrendering to what IS without labeling or judging it. Cease the thinking through focusing on deep breaths. Feel the present power of now, the only place where life, reality, and God exist.

Physics and Spirituality

2010-10-27T13:15:00.002-04:00

It’s scary and new, this world of knowing who you are, because, in reality, who you are is truly unknowable. It is infinite, timeless, and formless. How can this not be true? When you go to a funeral, you do not see the body and go, “Hey, it’s Bob.” No, you think, “There is Bob’s body.” “Bob” is not “here” anymore. Was he ever really here? Did he really go anywhere? You know that body lying there is not who that person is or was.

Just the body is dead, and that isn’t even totally correct. The organic material that makes up the body is made up of molecules. These are made up of elements (mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen). There exist over 10 million compounds made up of different arrangements of just these four elements. The elements are made of particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Neutrons and protons are in turn, made of quarks. There are many other subatomic particles such as muons, pions, electron neutrinos, and muon neutrinos. So, everything is made of atoms. Water in a puddle, pizza crust, money, stars, comets, eyeballs, air, the scents of a flower and gasoline, the sun, the moon, and your toilet are all the same at the atomic level. That is they are made of differing arrangements of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And the most amazing thing about atoms is that they are nearly all empty space. The radius of an average electron orbit is about a hundred thousand times larger than the radius of the nucleus. If the earth, for example, was an electron, and the sun was a nucleus, then the earth would have to be ten times farther away from the sun than Pluto is in order for our solar system to be like an atom. So, there is much more empty space in an atom than in our solar system. But don’t get the idea that atoms are like solar systems.

So, anyway, the energy that “flowed” through every atom that made up Bob did not die. Energy does not die. It is transferred. According to the principle of conservation of energy: Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but can only be converted, or transferred, from one form to another. So of all the different types of energy that existed within Bob, none of them disappeared.

There are many types of energy. Mechanical, gravitational potential, kinetic, electrical, heat, and chemical are just some of the many types of energy. What kinds of energy exist within the brain and the mind? Is there thought energy? Something that Einstein discovered was that enormous amounts of energy can be found in very tiny masses. His famous equation shows how the energy of an object at rest equals the mass of that object multiplied by the squared speed of light in a vacuum. Using Einstein’s equation, a 0.046 kg golf ball at rest has enough rest energy (if it could be transferred somehow to electrical energy) to power a 75 watt light bulb for 1.7 million years. So, if we could discover something of mass that makes up thoughts and moods, then we could verify the enormous energy within the mind.

Also, all objects radiate energy, specifically as electromagnetic waves, which are electric fields and magnetic fields traveling together. What’s interesting about electromagnetic waves is that they don’t need a medium (such water or air) to travel through. Sound waves, for instance, can’t travel through outer space, which is a vacuum, but electromagnetic waves can. Electromagnetic waves carry energy…energy no different than the energy that the body transfers from food, or energy that is transferred when water or steam moves turbines and “makes” electricity. Every cell in your body, and in your mind, which is just a part of your brain, radiates electromagnetic energy.

So, what are moods? This is of particular interest to me because I suffer from frequent “mood swings.” Most of my life has been plagued with oscillating feelings of extreme joy, sadness, boredom, unease, anxiety, exhilaration, excitement, darkness, gloom, doom, fear, anger, compassion, and on and on. I have a hypothesis that moods are made of atoms, or at least some sort of particles, and so they are affected by and must follow the rules of physics. I think that moods may absorb and emit electromagnetic waves. When I feel miserable, what is going on at the atomic level? There has to be physics involved with moods, right? That’s what I want to study and find out.

Misanthropic Rambling after being influenced by Nietzsche

2010-09-07T02:55:00.000-04:00

It goes on and on and on. Has anything really changed? There will always be “problems” that humans complain about. They will war and fight and argue. I only see things getting worse as the world population keeps growing. Resources are only going to become more limited. Perhaps are only hope is massive deadly wars and pandemic disease outbreaks to lower the population.

Humans may be able to understand the importance of sustainability, but they are not able to practice it on the whole. Humans may understand the concepts of peace and satisfaction, but it is not in their nature to genuinely practice it. It is in our nature to become angry, jealous, nervous, scared, arrogant, and self-righteous, to name just a few of the multitude of complex emotions that humans possess.

Being human means being irrational and emotional. Even the most logical of humans of course have their flaws in logic at times. What the status quo (at least the one where I live) considers a “good” human is never a person full of rationality. It is someone who is considered a good Christian, someone considered caring, loving, and unselfish. Of course, the public doesn’t usually analyze the possible deeper motivations of the “good” person. Every human has needs and some are better at others at achieving those needs. Usually people are nice or “good” becomes it makes themselves feel good. They love the attention and admiration they get. They selfishly crave compliments such as, “You are so generous.” I’m not criticizing them, I’m just saying that they are human, and they are simply exhibiting human natures. It is being who we are to desire fame, fortune, love, or peace.

I’ve tried to resist being human to no avail. Trying to not be human is trying to be anti-nature. Of course, humans are notorious for being anti-nature. So much of religious morality is anti-nature. The invention of virtue and morals suppresses humans’ natural animistic instincts. Of course, when a human becomes very emotional, he or she basically forgets about virtues and morals and laws and becomes what he or she truly is, which is an animal. Human nature is to survive, just like any other animal. Humans though, well the more greedy humans who want to control and stay in power, have invented and reinforced ideas of civilization and government. Of course most humans like these ideas for the most part because they too want order and relative peace.

However, human civilization and bureaucracy is only a mask of our true nature. Underneath the seemingly ordered way of things lies this force of visceral and raw animal nature.

Every time I see an advertisement, or some pitch, by a human, I know there is little sincerity behind it. The salesperson really just wants money, and only wants the money so they can eat and have shelter and clothing. I yearn for the days before systems of economics where people’s work was directly related to survival. Now, people have to work at some silly job invented by some capitalist just to get money. Well you don’t get money; you get a paycheck, and they have to get all involved with banks, thus more greedy people who absolutely love money. Their whole life is about making money.

If humans could just work to survive by hunting, fishing, and building a shelter then I think people would be so depressed all the time. Your work is directly related to the natural human animal nature to survive. Nowadays, our work is mostly to just make some other person lots of money. The whole system has been designed by capitalists and those in power to just keep the capitalists rich and the keep those in power in power.

Of course, I was raised in a different time and place and I don’t know hardly know anything about surviving outside of civilization. Hell, I hardly know anything about surviving within civilization. I’m trapped living a life with little meaning and purpose. I feel this is one of modern civilization’s causes of despair. People’s livelihoods are not directly related to our natural instincts to survive. Basically, life is too easy and humans feel constantly dissatisfied with their lives. I guess that is why humans do things such as exercise and sports and hiking outside. It reconnects them with their natural instincts. Humans get bored and just create drama and fights because it is too difficult to suppress our human drives, even though civilization (religion and government mostly) tries to control and repress our natural instincts.

Humans cannot be completely trusted. They are animals that pretend they are not animals. They try to separate themselves from nature as much as possible it seems. Their minds are overly sensitive about all kinds of things. They get easily frightened, angered, or anxious. They feel shame and sorrow. They get hurt and hurt others.

I don’t think I’m being cynical about humanity. I’m just being realistic. Humans can only be trusted as much as any other animal. Well, actually I think you can trust animals much more. You can trust them to be a certain way much more than humans. Humans have this self-awareness that causes them to question their own desires and motives. It causes humans to suppress their own drives and wants. Humans, basically, are a mess. Animals, on the other hand, just do what they want for the most part. Sure many species have a form of social structure similar to humans, but they don’t seem to have the self-aware issues that humans do. Just look at the insanity of what a “civilized” person has to go through to just get food or have sex. It’s ridiculous. Hunting and gathering is natural. Working at some gas station to get food is not.
Humans seem as if they are from some other planet where the natural order of things is completely different than here on Earth. The humans’ quest for order and peace has now caused massive anxiety and depression because it has further distanced humanity from nature. Although one could say that humans are from nature and therefore anything we do should be considered natural. You can always argue anything.

Love Is Natural Presence

2009-05-27T15:29:00.010-04:00

A good way to know if your true intention is love is to see how you react to giving love. If you are truly "giving love," then you will not be upset if the other person does not appreciate the "love" you give. If you give a gift of love and become angry because the person you love does not like it, then your true intention was to control or manipulate the other person for selfish reasons. You were trying to MAKE them love you. There is no negativity (and thus no resistance...thus really no mind) in real love. This is why some people say that they felt like they were in a whirlwind or lost in love. The mind practically shuts down and the natural biological state takes over. This is natural presence. You are in alignment and union with Life, The Universe, Now, Reality, God, etc. This is the love, peace, and happiness of God that many people speak of. It is the greatest power in the universe.

Namaste

Stuck In The Mud

2009-05-27T14:55:00.005-04:00

Okay, so you suddenly find yourself stuck in the mud. Your tires are spinning, you're burning gas, and you're not going anywhere. At this point, most people usually have some form of negativity arise. The pure and divine consciousness (that is who/what they truly are) gets clouded with all sorts of emotions such as anger, anxiety, insecurity, fear, jealousy, etc. The mind thinks, "This should NOT be happening!"

A mind in a negative state breeds more negativity. Negative thoughts turn into negative behavior which causes negative effects. This is known as the universal law of attraction. This also relates to the universal law of cause and effect. These laws apply to physical entities, as well as non-physical entities such as emotions. Anger attracts/causes anger. Love attracts/causes love. So, a positive mindset is necessary first to have positive results arise. Action out of a negative mindset clouded with negative emotions will only breed negative results.

To clear the mind, you must become present. You must stop resisting what is no matter how much your mind may want to label it or complain about it. Resistance to the present moment is resistance to life. All negativity is caused by some level of resistance to the present moment.

"But I'm still stuck in the mud!!" you say. Well, the first thing to do is FACE REALITY. DEAL WITH IT. Don't turn away, or hide, or distract yourself from the present reality. Focus wholly on the present situation. Being present clears the mind by sweeping away imaginary future thoughts (anxiety, fear) and dead past thoughts (resentment, anger). The main point of meditation and yoga is to become present. This stills the mind and puts it into a much more positive state.

Now, once the mind is truly in a positive state, only positive action will arise.

Steps to Positive Action:
Surrender to the Present Moment. See reality without complaints/labels. Drop the negativity, which is simply resistance to the present moment and the mind's addiction to past and future thinking. Do this perhaps through meditation or mindfulness. This puts the mind into a more positive non-resistant state. Now, the action (planning, working, etc) you perform to get yourself out of the mud will be positive and much more effective (because it is in alignment with Life/Now/Reality) instead of creating more negativity.

Please do your part by not polluting the collective consciousness with more negativity. Get your mind into a positive loving state and thus contribute positivity and love to the collective consciousness. For the sake of the environment and civilization, this is duly needed.

The Purpose of a Zen Garden

2009-05-20T12:19:00.000-04:00

Do not focus on the fruits of your labor. A good farmer does not focus on the end product. A good farmer focuses on the task at hand. A good yield of crops will not come if the farmer does not focus on proper tilling and planting of seeds. When it time to irrigate, that is what must be focused on and nothing else.

So, the purpose of a Zen garden is to become present and to not focus on the end product, but to focus on good raking and placement of stones. In the present, you focus on what you want the end garden to look like, but when you are actually working on the garden, you must get those thoughts out of your head. If you are working on a line, then that line is the only thing in the universe.

A Zen garden can be a metaphor for anything we do in life. Anything we do, we should be focused on that work. If we are painting, we must focus on painting. If we are walking, we should focus and feel the Earth at our feet. If we are in a conversation with another soul, we should focus and really listen to what that soul has to say.

Wherever you go, BE THERE totally. For many years, I had little discipline of the mind, as most people do. The mind just went back and forth to the past and future, seemingly on its own accord. I was rarely present. I was rarely an active participant to the unfolding of the universe.

Consciously practicing mindful living has changed all that.

Mindful Living

2009-05-20T11:50:00.002-04:00

Today I mowed my grass, and later I will do the dishes. These activities are wonderful opportunities to FOCUS on and be very mindful of. My mind wanted to stray from the act of mowing the grass. This is where self-discipline comes in. My mind wanted to think about the unchangeable past and the imaginary future. It wanted to worry about money, a career, relationships. It wanted to do anything but focus on just mowing the grass.

I've been practicing mindful living now for over a year, and I've gotten much better at being able to come into the now and focus on whatever the task at hand is. So, when I started my mower, I really felt (experienced) the power of the engine and the vibrations given off. I intently focused on just the act of mowing. I became very present. I had no anxiety or fears. My mind was calmed by simply focusing on the senses experiencing present moment awareness.

When I started mowing I really focused on making beautiful straight lines. I went slow and steady and didn't turn the act of mowing my grass into something to just get through. I enjoyed the presence. I felt tapped into the NOW, which I feel is synonymous with words such as LIFE, REALITY, the UNIVERSE, and GOD. Manicuring the lawn really reminded me of my little zen garden I have that I use to become present and still the mind.

Being truly present with the whole body and mind is not just some hokey metaphysical new age BS. It is unbelievably practical. It is a way to live with little to no negativity (anxiety, fear, anger, guilt, shame, resentment, etc.).

ALL NEGATIVITY, IN ALL ITS FORMS, IS SIMPLY VARYING DEGREES OF RESISTANCE TO THE PRESENT MOMENT.

Being In Alignment with the Present is Being in Alignment With Life

2009-05-19T21:36:00.000-04:00

The energy that is presently in the form of your current mindset (or consciousness) has always existed since its inception from the Source and always will exist until it returns to the Source. Where did this energy come from? The Source of the energy, that is the totality of the universe which is the One Consciousness, is one of the greatest mysteries.

All the energy in the universe, as a whole, makes up a Oneness or a single Truth. This Truth is the same as Life and Reality in the present moment, the only "moment" that exists. The mind however has the capability to spend a lot of time out of alignment with the present.

The main purpose of meditation is to become present. Being present stills the mind because it is out of the unpredictable future and the unchangeable past. So, get in the habit of asking, "When is my mind?"

Having your mind and body in alignment with the present moment cultivates oneness with the harmony of the universe. To really tap into the joy of living, one must have his or her mind and body in alignment with the present moment, and therefore the universe.

One way to come into present-moment awareness is to FOCUS on the air that is around you. Deeply breathe in, visualizing and feeling your lungs expanding. Feel the air filling up your lungs. Hold the inhaled air as you "feel" the oxygen transferring into your bloodstream via pulmonary alveoli. Do a controlled slow exhale. Feel the carbon dioxide-rich air being released from your lungs into the space around you.

Meditation and coming into the now puts the mind into a more positive state of consciousness. This positivity attracts positivity. Action out of negative mindsets breeds negative effects.

In the beginning, it may seem hard and a waste of time, but the more someone comes into the now via meditation, the more peace he or she cultivates. Over time, one realizes the uselessness of negativity and is able to drop it as soon as one becomes aware of it.

Surrender to the Present Moment

2009-05-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

Whatever life gives us, we must be willing to surrender to the reality of the present moment. I'm not saying we should just quit or give up trying to better our lives. We should never give up on our dreams.

The present moment is simply what is. To resist and fight the reality of the present moment is to be at war with life. I see the present moment as being synonymous with life, reality, and thus God.

The present moment should not be judged or labeled. It is what it is. We must come to an acceptance of the present situation and stop resisting what is. This puts our minds into a more positive mindset, and thus much more positive actions spring forth. All negativity, from slight annoyance to extreme despair, arises from differing levels of resistance to the what is...life itself. Resistance is directly related to negativity. The more resistance to a certain situation, the more negativity, and thus suffering.

If you are in a situation that seems unbearable, work to a state of surrender to what is. This is not the same as giving in or turning yourself into a doormat. No, this means that you are simply seeing the present situation in a realistic way. Seeing reality for what it truly is, without conditioned labels or judgments, is the most positive way to deal with a situation.

Just remember: What you resist persists. If you turn life into an enemy, then life will say, "Okay Let's have a war!!" Remember that we ARE life. Life is not something external, out there. Life IS us. Everything we do is life. The mind however likes to turn life into a thing we possess. It also likes to turn life into something that we must fear or be angry about.

Life is us, and we are life. Be one with the present moment, and don't let the mind try to label reality as anything other than what is.

Can We "Discover" a Unified Theory of Physics?

2009-05-01T11:26:00.000-04:00

The universe is continually unfolding and being "created," and all of us are an integral part of this unfolding. No one is exempt. No one has an objective view of the universe, life, reality. By existing, everyone interacts continually with the universe.

We are a part of the "master plan" and therefore if we are supposed to find a unified theory of physics, (aka a Theory of Everything) combining Newtonian physics and quantum physics (and other theories), then "finding" it is simply part of the plan.

Having an objective view of the universe would be like the eyeball being able to see itself...or Mona Lisa being able to look at herself and see the creepy landscape behind her.

Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved. By living, existing, we continually are creating the universe. Would the universe even exist without a witnessing consciousness? Many theoretical physicists and philosophers believe this. It's interesting to think that the universe did not create consciousness, but rather consciousness creates the universe.

Philosophical Agnosticism and Spiritual Beliefs

2009-03-27T20:26:00.000-04:00

First of all, I have nothing but compassion for all of humanity, but....

Oh, how quickly my faith in the intelligence and rationality of humanity can so swiftly melt away! Does anyone even care about the logic of their own thought processes? I understand that small talk about the weather and sports does not have to adhere to the highest levels of logical reasoning, but when it comes to religion, spirituality, and philosophical views, I would hope that a person would want to have put some thought into their stance. I erroneously thought that most people would want to question their own beliefs for validity and reason. Oh, how could I have been so naïve?

Agnosticism, I'm quickly finding out, is not as understood as I previously thought. I honestly believed that most people knew what the word “agnostic” meant. Philosophically, (and I’m talking about the Alfred Jules Ayer’s definition of philosophy here, which means no metaphysics, and sticking to only what can be observed and tested in a logical, scientific method) how could I not be agnostic? This does not mean that spiritually I do not have my own ideas, views, and beliefs about what the words “god” and “God” mean. I’m agnostic, not atheistic. An atheist to me is no different, on the level of reasoning, than a fervent dogmatic believer in the existence of God (however he or she defines it/him/her). I don’t pretend to possess any capability of knowing what’s going on outside or “beyond” the senses. This does not mean that I don’t have ontological beliefs about what is going on. Spiritually, or non-physically if you will, I have my ideas.

It is funny (perhaps “absurd” is the better word) how the human mind, well knowing (with as solid logic as language will allow) that it CANNOT KNOW the answers to metaphysical questions, still continues to pound its “head” against the stone wall. This of course is a reference to Dostoevsky’s “Underground Man” who, like many “thinking men,” as opposed to “the man of action,” continues to bang their heads against the stone wall. The “stone wall” represents “the laws of nature, of course, the conclusions of natural science, mathematics.” While the “man of action” (called this because he’s see purpose, Truth, a reason to do) sees the wall and accepts it as Truth and fact, the “thinking man” sees no primary cause for action. Anyway, I’m getting off point.

Basically, the vast majority of people do not question or analyze on the level of even a novice philosopher or logician. I know that words themselves are mostly inadequate to express the Truths our human minds seek. What is it that keeps people from diving deeper down the rabbit hole of their own thoughts and beliefs? Is it simply mental laziness, low IQ, worldly distractions causing defocus of thought, basic biological drives of sex and hunger, or just the strong desire to see things “concretely,” that leads people to just not explore their own beliefs to at least a somewhat logical intensity? Of course, at the root, it is fear. Who doesn’t have fear? I completely understand fear and how it forces us to throw out logic. We are practically hard-wired to have irrational beliefs about reality in order to make us “feel” better.

I’m not attacking faith or beliefs. We all have beliefs and we constantly make assumptions. We assume so much on a daily basis that it would be impossible to function in society without assumptions and beliefs. Faith is wonderful to me. Personally, I wish I could have more faith. Faith is a letting go of “what may lie ahead.” Belief is the opposite of Faith, in a way. Belief is a holding onto of an idea. Faith is simply a calm peaceful hope. Belief is what people go to war over. Knowing is….well, it depends on what level we’re talking about. One could argue that the only thing we do know is that we can think… that we have consciousness. Cogito ergo sum. The whole world may just be something like The Matrix, or a dream, or a hallucination. Everyone and everything you see (including this blog you’re reading) could just all be the product of your mind. But at least you could say that you at least know that you have or are this consciousness.

So, I feel that human beings who are not God should philosophically call themselves agnostic. Of course, my definition of God sees everyone as God as a whole and also as one within and beyond forever here and now. This is my belief. I’m mostly Buddhist with hints of Hinduism. Jesus had some really good ideas as well. It’s just a belief that helps me deal with the fear that we all have about the unknown. Philosophically, with logic and reason though, I’m agnostic. I hope I’ve made this clear. Lolz. Now, go have some fun!!!!

Life is not as serious as our minds tend to make it!

Anatta - The Concept of "No-Self"

2009-03-22T17:40:00.000-04:00

There was a short story titled “Where Am I?” written by Daniel Dennett. He is a philosopher, primarily of the mind and science. He wrote a massive book with the bold title “Consciousness Explained.” I had to read his short story “Where Am I?” when I was a freshman at Ohio State taking Philosophy 101. My professor, Diana Raffman, was also a big contributor to the whole mind-body problem. Little did I know at the time, that the story would be one of the biggest supporters (at least for me) of the Buddhist concept of Anatta.

Anatta is a Pali word which roughly translates as “no-self.” (Contrast the concept of atman in Hinduism)

In the story (which was around 1979), a man has his brain surgically removed and put into a vat. The brain is hooked up to a computer which then sends the electrical signals via radio waves to tiny receivers that have been put into his hollow head. All the receivers are properly attached to the correct nerve endings. So, his brain is in a vat still functioning just fine. All of the signals are being sent from the brain through the computer to the radio receivers. After the surgery, the man wakes up and has the odd situation of being able to look at his brain in the vat.

Needless to say, he has a moment of wondering where he is. He realizes that “there” is his brain, and “here” is his body, but “HE” is somewhere else. It “feels” like he is simply his point-of-view (his eyes basically), but he quickly realizes that this is not certain. The story goes on to get into all kinds of more complex situations involving another body and a computer “brain” that is a replica of his brain.

Some beginner metaphysical philosophy questions that came to my mind after reading the story were:

1. Is the mind the home of consciousness or is consciousness “outside” of the mind, thus being able to be AWARE of the mind and all its thoughts?
2. Is the mind simply “inside” the brain, and science has yet to discover where it is?
3. Is consciousness and the mind the same or different?
4. Is the physical body (including the brain) and the mind together create consciousness?
5. Are “we” simply a sum of the parts (brain/mind/body/consciousness) or are we just a part of a ONE consciousness, and we each have our own subjective “view” of this ONE WHOLE consciousness? In this sense, the “individual” subjective consciousness is one and the same as the ONE consciousness.

Yikes!! This gets pretty wild! What I really feel is that The Buddha realized that our true nature is definitely not this separate, autonomous, entity/unit/thing. When we think of “me,” we think of our self as this separate and alone “thing” wondering the earth without any real connection to anyone or anything else.

The Buddha knew something that Western Physicists didn’t “figure out” until much later. Anyone who has studied Physics and Chemistry knows that everything is connected and that everything is energy in some form. All reality is interconnected by atomic structures coming “in” and “out” of differing vibrational frequencies. Quantum Physics is verifying some of these ideas that The Buddha had hit on 2600 years ago.

If two people hold hands, and I was the size of an electron, I would pass right though both hands and not know the difference where one person started and the other began. At the size of an electron, the hands would look like, well nothing. So, you see, the idea of a separate self is an illusion. We feel alone and separate only because of our perspective.

So, nothing is ever really personal. For example, an action (in the physical sense) occurs. Let say a person calls you an idiot because you accidentally parked in a handicap spot while you ran into the store. You may think, “Oh geez, I made a mistake!” or “That person was very rude!” You will take what the person said to be a personal attack on your competence. You may feel dumb or embarrassed. You may get angry or defensive. All of these reactions are occurring because you are taking an action (someone yelling at you) personally.

First of all, the “handicap spot” is an illusion, a creation of a society. Sure, there is a relative practical reason for the existence of the spot, it is, never the less, an “idea” created by a society to serve a purpose related to morality and fairness. Ethics is metaphysical, no matter how practical it is for keeping a sense of order.

So, the person reacting to your violation of ethics is reacting to a human created idea. This idea came into “being” as the result of….well, many (and the word “many” is not really adequate) previous “actions” going all the way back to the beginning…whatever that is.

An aside:
Also, if someone breaks a law, such as running a stop sign or parking in a handicap spot (when he or she is not legally handicapped), was the law broken? Ok, sorry, I’m getting off point. I might as well ask, “If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound?” This is just more metaphysics and of course quantum physics.

Also, how can anything be personal? Every action is the result of EVERYTHING before it. How can an action (which is usually a combination of many actions) be a direct personal attack on me? The guy, or rather the ego created by his conditioned mind that sees itself as separate and autonomous, that calls me an idiot is simply the product of EVERYTHING before.

If someone takes offense, it is the ego that is really taking offense. If you want to know what the spiritual ego is read “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. If someone yells at me, first of all I acknowledge that there really is no “me.”

No one can know (with the mind) who he or she is. The ideas of “he” “she” “me” are concepts that our minds use to give the world a sense of order. The truth of who we are is beyond the mind. If you can be comfortable with the fact that you cannot know with any real logic of certainty who you are, then that is about as close as you’re going to get.

Study epistemology. No one can even agree on what the word “know” means. I like to believe that I am Consciousness and that consciousness is One and One is All. But I can’t prove this with rational thought or logical reasoning. It’s just a metaphysical belief.

Attachment to Desires - The Buddha's First Noble Truth

2009-03-22T15:46:00.000-04:00

Many people, when first taught the Buddha’s First Noble Truth, are simply told that desire is the cause of suffering. They then go off thinking that they must not desire anything in order to not suffer. This is silly.

Simply being a human means that we will have desires. We have biological drives for sex and food and water. We have all kinds of desires. We WANT things. Being human, possessing a human mind, we rarely are content with the present moment. We always feel that things are “not quite right” right now. We must get this or do that in order for things to all be in order. We say, “When I get that, then I will be happy!” or “When I finish this project, then I can relax!” This is a core illusion that The Buddha realized. This is dukkha. The conditioned human mind is in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction. It is always desiring. Desires come and go. We cannot be free of desire. Millions of years ago, humans (like dogs or any other animal) had to constantly being seeking food and shelter. This is the same mind we have today. We must always be seeking. We might not even know what we want, but we must always be looking for something. The present moment, we think, is clearly not good enough. We must find more or different.

The proper way of teaching the First Noble Truth is to say that ATTACHMENT to desire is the cause of suffering. We all want things in life, but our intensity of dukkha is directly related to the amount of our attachment to, or dependence on, getting what we desire.

Here is what the Dalai Lama has to say about attachments and desire.

“The attachments bring trap. Whether it is to a person, to substances or whatever, it is a trap. Monks are detached. One of the practices in all major religions is detachment. Don’t have too much attachment, and you’ll be contented. You have it in Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, all major religions. You should be contented. Wealth, money, friend, family, contentment is best. It’s the key to peace of mind. Some of my friends are billionaires, but their minds is on more, more money. Contentment means some kind of personal check, but it doesn’t mean we no longer have desire. But attachment and desire should be separate. Without desire, then life is meaningless. Desire for good, for more service to others, desire for more benefit to others. That makes your life more meaningful. Without desire, then you’re a robot. No further progress. Genuine desire, with reasons, with logic, that’s proper desire.” (From “Why we monks don’t miss sex - Dalai Lama” By FEMI ADESINA, The Sun News Online, December 13, 2008 http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=71,7514,0,0,1,0 )

The Buddha’s four big categories of attachment that really cause a lot of dukkha are:

Remember: As living breathing humans, we naturally have desires for all of these, but we should discipline ourselves to not be so completely attached to them. This, of course, is done through meditation, and realizing our thoughts, emotions, and feelings are like temporary clouds passing through the sky. They sky, of course, is our awareness, or consciousness, of the mind and its thoughts. We separate our consciousness from our mind. We are not every little thought and whim that passes through our minds.

1. Attachment to the desire for sensual pleasures – We have desires for food, sex, alcohol, drugs, love, attention, media, shopping, new things, thrills, fun and excitement, etc. If are happiness is absolutely dependent on getting one or more of these things, then we will create more dukkha. We must rise above our conditioned minds. We must not be a slave to our conditioned habits. We will simply continue to just create more dukkha over and over again.

2. Attachment to Opinions and Views – We have strong desires to be “right” and to “know the answer.” We want our opinions and views to be the Truth, and the facts. Our egos want our opinions and views to make us seem “better” and others “less.” This is being close-minded and self-righteous. We are not opening up and seeing things from any other perspective. Rigid attachment to our own views and opinions can cause us enormous amounts of dukkha. We must be willing to let go of our own ideas.

3. Attachment to desire for rites and rituals – If we are so attached to “how things ought to be done,” this will cause us more dukkha. We are clearly forgetting anicca. This is also being closed-minded. If we think life MUST be lived this way, we will soon see more dukkha.

4. Attachment to the idea of a separate and permanent self – This is clearly forgetting about anicca and anatta. We create so much dukkha for ourselves when we fall into the illusion that we have a “self.” We think bad things are happening to “me.” We take things personally. We forget about how we are all connected by energy. Anatta is probably the most difficult concept for Westerners to grasp. I had a hard time coming to terms with it. We are taught to try and separate from the pack, to be the best, to be a winner. Ego is encouraged. There is conditioned into us a deep sense of self. “You” are either a success or a failure.

If you can’t grasp anatta, keep meditating on it. Keep reading about consciousness. Read a short story called “Where Am I?” by Daniel Dennett. Who are you? Your mind? Your body? Your brain? Is there a single autonomous entity that you can clearly point to and say, “This is ME!”?

Zen Mind - Original Mind

2009-03-19T12:34:00.000-04:00

What is the mind? Zen Buddhists see two minds: the original, unconditioned mind and the conditioned mind. Most everyday people operate with the conditioned mind and are completely identified with their thoughts and emotions. Most people feel that their very temporal thoughts (which lead to emotions which then lead to behavior) are correct views of reality. A part of The Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path is correct view, or right view. It is very important, in order to live a skillful life (which is a life of cultivating less suffering, less dukkha), to see reality in the correct way. The correct way is seeing reality with as much of the original mind as possible. This can take years of practice, but can lead to a life with very little suffering.

The zen mind...the original, unconditioned mind is like a bowl. The physical structurue of the bowl is all the real original mind is. When we are born we have a fairly empty mind (we have genetics and instincts and reflexes). As we grow older, our "bowls" get filled with all kinds of stuff. We get conditioned with judgments, labels, and perspectives from our society, culture, family, schools, religions, movies, tv, radio, all media, and on and on. Our perceptions of reality and what IS has become now defined and hardened by our subjective conditioning. Our ideas of what is "evil" and "good" are taught to us. Our ideas of what is successful and a failure are taught to us. Of course, there are real feelings of what we call good (love, happiness, joy, peace) and bad (pain, sadness, anxiety, fear, anger), and most of what is conditioned into us is based on generations before us that have tried to live in a more skillful manner and avoid feelings of "bad" and cultivate more feelings of "good." However, much of this generational conditioning causes us to feel that we are the mind. WE ARE NOT OUR MINDS!!!

Our egos really like to feel that our minds are powerful and always right. They are powerful, but if they are not disciplined in the proper way, they will take us over and run our lives, often creating more dukkha than necessary. When we are in the depths of anger or anxiety (which are really just forms of fear at their roots), we must be able to step outside of our minds. This is not easy in the beginning, especially is we have always been told we have great minds, or we have a good head on our shoulders. I feel that this is why so many intelligent people also seem to suffer more than less intelligent people. By intelligent, I simply am talking about IQ and the capacity to solve complex outside the box verbal, spatial, and social "problems."

Unfortunately, though, many of our thoughts, ideas, and emotions are simply reactions and assumptions about reality, and are not actual views/representations of reality. Our conditioned minds love to make problems out of everything. In reality, there are no problems, just situations that exist in the now, and must either be dealt with in the present, or put aside to be dealt with later. In Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" he emphasizes that problems are illusions of the mind. For a problem to exist, and for our minds to sit around and label things as "problems" and "bad" and "messed up," there needs to be a heavy sense of past and future. Every so-called problem is only considered "bad" relative to something else. Often it is imaginary or a distorted memory of a past reality. Of course, reality only exists in the present moment, which is all there ever really is. The past does not exist except for only in our minds/memory. The future is completely imaginary. Eckhart Tolle points out that in a real emergency, our minds do not have time to sit around call it a "problem." We become very focused in the now and we deal with the emergency. This is why people do such things as extreme sports like sky-diving and mountain climbing and race car driving. It forces them into the now, and there is a stillness of the conditioned mind that is often obsessed with past and future.

Meditation is all about coming into the now, stilling the mind, getting back to the original unconditioned mind. When we are having believed thoughts about reality, the first thing we must do is to break the incessant chain of thoughts and say to ourselves, "I'm having believed thoughts right now." Whatever we are stressing about or are angry about, we need to start saying things to ourselves about how we are simply having thoughts and ideas about reality. This separates ourselves from our conditioned minds, which are full of illusions and distortions about what's really going on. A book that I really like about putting Zen meditation to work in the practical modern world is called "Being Zen" by Ezra Bayda. This book shows you had to step out of the conditioned mind, come into the present moment, and then be able to more forward in life in a more skillful manner, thus creating less dukkha for yourself and others around you. There will never be no dukkha. That is the First Noble Truth. Check out the story about the 84th problem.

After we can set our minds aside, we can then see more clearly that our thoughts are almost always not facts. Our emotions are not facts either. When my mind seems to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, I pretend to hold my mind in my hands. Then, I "look" at it, and sort of just laugh at all of its wild and distorted thoughts just swarming around. Then I act like I'm placing my mind aside on a table or the bed. This immediately separates me from my mind, and I feel some peace. Also, I will focus on the present senses. I will feel my breath going in and out of me. I will focus on the textures of maybe my clothes or an object that is near me. I will focus on present sounds like birds or a train going by or traffic. Anything that is happening NOW I will focus on. This stills the mind because it removes the heaviness of past and future.

It takes practice, but eventually it becomes easier to dis-identify from the mind. After some time (and it can take years for some people), it will become more than second nature. It will become your nature to dwell in the original mind.

Peace Love and Happiness

The 84th Problem

2009-03-18T05:16:00.001-04:00

I absolutely love this story about The Buddha meeting a troubled farmer. I'm going to tell it in my own voice.

There was this old farmer who was just having all sorts of problems. His crops weren't growing as expected and his livestock were starving. After he'd sell what meager amount he had to sell, there was hardly any food and goods left over for his family to live on. His kids despised him and his wife was threatening to leave him. Also, he had tons of debt for all kinds of things and collection agents were constantly threatening to take away the little that he did have. His back was in really bad shape and every time he walked, his left knee throbbed in pain. Things just seemed hopeless to him.

He had heard of a great teacher named Siddhartha Gautama who had became The Buddha (enlightened one). He decided that he must go see this man and get some advice on what he should do.

So, the farmer went to go see The Buddha. In desperation, he told him about all his problems. He told The Buddha how he felt hopeless and how he was worried that he was going to die alone, poor, and miserable.

The Buddha smiled a little bit and said, "Ah, you have 83 problems! I'm sorry, but I can't help you at all with your 83 problems!"

The farmer was shocked. "I thought you were some great and wise person!" he said to The Buddha.

The Buddha told the farmer that, although he could not help him with his 83 problems, he could help him with his 84th problem.

The farmer did not understand what The Buddha was talking about. The Buddha explained to the farmer that his 84th problem was really the only "problem" he had.

"What is my 84th problem?" asked the farmer with very curious eyes.

"The 84th problem is that you don't want to have any problems at all!" laughed The Buddha. "There have always been "problems" and there will always be "problems." Everyone always has so many "problems! My teachings cannot eliminate all your so-called problems, but my teachings can help you with your 84th problem. You can be like the lotus flower, still and peaceful, rising out of a dirty muddy pond."

Happiness Is The Way

2008-11-05T00:42:00.000-05:00

I wrote this after reading a section of one of my favorite books by Thai Buddhist Monk Ajahn Chah called "Everything Arises, Everything Falls Away"   Also, of course, it's influenced by "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle

There's is no way to happiness and peace. Peace and happiness is the way. This means be happy and at peace now. Hoping for peace and happiness in the future is not the way. That is suffering.

Can you be happy and at peace now? Do you think there is something or someone you need in order to be happy and at peace? What would it be? If you get it, will you then be happy?   Jesus said you don't need anything to have the peace of God and the Buddha said that desire is the cause of all suffering. The Bible says, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Why do you think if you get this or that it will bring you happiness and peace?

Hope is the mind stuck in the future. Some people are addicted to hope. They love to hope, and so they are never happy or at peace now. Right now is never good enough. The greatest evil (Satan if you wish) is also the greatest illusion. Jesus and the Buddha discovered this illusion and tried to tell people. The illusion is that salvation and heaven are in the future. We think when we get this or that, then we will be happy. We may even realize this is not true, but we still think it. We feel anxiety about the future, always worrying about the future.

What about right now? Is anything wrong right now? At this very moment, what is wrong? Is someone trying to kill you right now? Right now, is there something to worry about? Only when we start thinking about the past and future, do we create imaginary problems. Problems really only exist in the past or future. Right now, is there a problem? Problems need time to exist. When we sit around and think about things, problems pop up. When we were a little kid playing, we had no problems because time did not exist. We were so focused on playing, we were so in the now, that time disappeared, and we had such peace and joy.

You are in heaven right now. Now, everything is exactly as it should be, because it could not be any other way. Is that not perfect? Is that not heaven?

Are you angry at me? Do you think I'm lying to you? Do you still believe that something in the future will make you happy and bring you peace? That's the illusion that keeps you suffering. Salvation is only possible in the only thing that is truly eternal, which is the present moment. It is always now. The ego hates the now because it has no control. The ego can control the mind-made past and future stories.

I think I'm going to get married and have kids. I think I'm going to go back to Paris and Le Mont St. Michel.

The Wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut

2008-10-17T15:52:00.000-04:00

In November 1998, I saw Kurt Vonnegut speak at the Hillel Jewish Center near Ohio State University. At the end of his speaking, he took a couple questions. A man stood up and asked, "Mr. Vonnegut. In all your years of writing and lecturing, what do you think the most important thing you've ever learned is?"

Vonnegut and the the crowd was very silent for what seemed like an eternity. Then, he said, very seriously, "We are all here just farting around, and don't let anyone tell you any different."

This is probably the coolest thing I've ever experienced in my life.

After ten years, I understand so much more what he was saying. I believe we all have our own personal and subjective views of the world/reality. There is no way to know what our meaning or purpose is. There is no known absolute, ultimate authority which shows us what our meaning or purpose is. No one knows exactly what we're supposed to do with this existence. We must not cower in the face of this.

Vonnegut was a humanist. The meaning of life is determined by individuals and groups and humanists agree that the meaning of life is too end suffering as much as possible for yourself and others. That's it. It's very simple.

We are all just farting around. So, every single human being chooses his or her own meaning. So no one is wrong. No matter what you do, it is no more or less meaningful than any other person. I have only compassion for those who fall into the delusion that they are more or less important than anyone else. I don't care what you believe. Your belief is no more or less meaningful than anyone else's belief. If you believe that the wonderful teacher Jesus Christ was truly the son of God, then wonderful. If you believe that aliens really run the world, then wonderful. If you believe that God does not exist, then wonderful. I personally believe that we do not have the capacity to know what is really going on. I believe that the meaning of life is to be peaceful and happy, and make others peaceful and happy. Wonderful.

Now, when your belief interferes with my belief, what happens? Well, I believe we are all just farting around. So, I let you believe your belief, and I'm not going to argue who's right, because obviously I believe we can't know who's right. Usually, that's the end of it. But if you try to keep me and other people from being happy and peaceful, then we may have a situation. Turn on the news and you see people fighting over views, opinions, and beliefs that they are completely attached to as if they knew it was the ultimate absolute Truth. Then we have wars, genocide, and terrible suffering.

Well, I just wish people would think about things a little more. That's another one of my purposes in life. I would like to add that although in the big picture, no one is more important than anyone else, but I do have my own peeps who are subjectively more important to me. Perhaps I've totally contradicted myself, but it's not like I'm writing for the UN.

Past and Future Are Not Real

2008-10-16T21:42:00.000-04:00

I'm not saying things didn't happen, or that things won't happen. I'm just saying that everything that does happen only happens in the present moment, the now, which is the only real "time" anything happens. When people talk about the past or the future, they of course, talk about it in the now. So, their present consciousness determines the story and vice versa. Unfortunately, the latter is more common. The unaware, or unconscious, person (which is most common) has a mind that is usually in the past or the future. The so-called past and future are simply stories. Our subjective interpretation of what happened or what is going to happen is NOT the absolute reality.

     Think about a football game. Thousands of people supposedly see the same game, but if you asked one of the players what happened, he's going to tell a totally different story than another player, a ref, the waterboy, or some drunk in the stands. They all "saw" the same event though, right? The usual "bad" past story that someone tells is just one subjective perspective. Obviously, "bad" things happen, but how we choose to "remember" and "predict" completely determines our level of suffering.

   I think about some my own "bad" events. To me, I could say they were absolutely horrible suffering, but that's just my perspective, and I guarantee you I was severely "unconscious" during the event. My perspective was most likely very distorted and being filtered through unawareness. Then, after the fact of the event, I continued to tell this horrible story to myself. In actuality, though, what was so horrible about it? In itself, if you got rid of socialized judgments and labels, what is so bad about it? The more and more you investigate, you'll realize that your mind is really just addicted to the negative story. The negative story about the past event (told in the now) then affects my consciousness in the present, which then affects my future.

   The key then is to dis-identify with the mind and its obsession with the unreal past and future. The only way who do this is by coming into the now. What I do is very basic meditation. I block out everything else and focus on natural rhythms. Natural rhythms are always in the now. I focus on my breathing, heartbeat, and lungs. I tell myself, "This moment right now is all that exists." I feel the air around me go in and fill my lungs. My lungs expand. I feel my heartbeat. Then, I slowly breathe out, feeling the air move out into the space around me. "This is all that is real," I say to myself. My mind is virtually absent. If I hear something like a car or a bird, I acknowledge it as occurring in the eternal now. I keep my focus on the now.

It is absolutely amazing. The peace that I cultivate while doing this is a hundred times better than any medicine or drugs/alcohol. It's a real peace and happiness. But it takes practice. I've been practicing keeping my mind in the now for almost eight months now, and it's definitely not always easy. But I'm getter better all the time. It's all about practice, and the good thing is that the more and more I practice, the more peace I cultivate. It's like a farmer. The more and more he practices growing corn, the better and better he gets. Of course, it's not always perfect. But that's anicca. Do you know anicca? It's a truth of existence that I have to remind myself of often. The Bible also talks of it. Anicca is impermance. All things are temporary. This, too, shall pass. Ajahn Chah said that if a wise person or text does not speak of anicca, it is not wise. Whenever I fall into a dark and scary pit, I just remind myself of anicca. I say to myself over and over. It's temporary. It's not certain. Then, before I know it, I feel much better.

Existential Freedom

2008-10-15T02:30:00.000-04:00

Hegel – individual state of mind derived from historical circumstances Individual – bad Civilization, society - good
Freud – childhood events
Skinner – conditioning

Regardless of how you got where you are now, you should still be able to realize your freedom and your choices. Where is the evidence that you cannot reasonably do anything you want? If you were abused during your childhood, and you say to yourself that you cannot have what you really want because of this, I say show me the shackles! Show me this tether to your past that prevents you from going to your dreams. You say the fear of rejection, abandonment, and loss prevents you from achieving your goals. You read all this psychology that says you are disordered and a victim of dysfunctional circumstances. You read about all these symptoms and you think they are describing you like some magical psychic. They are such vague and ambiguous descriptions that millions of people could think they are being described. I think that is a core distinction between some “mentally ill” and some “non-mentally ill.” The so-called mentally ill (not the truly mentally ill) choose to self-apply different labels of mental illness. That is what is ill of them. The treatment they need is to realize they are not mentally ill, but have chosen to identify with a victim role. They may even choose to think that they were a victim before, and are only comfortable with being a victim now. So, they delusionally think they are mentally ill because it keeps them in this uncomfortable comfort-ness. Their illness is masochism. They think they must suffer to be themselves. They see illusory handcuffs to their own past, and pick and choose traumatic events to support their masochism. For some, suicide is the proof required to uphold and solidify the victim role. If you really wanted to be a continually suffering victim, you definitely would not end you life.

Just Socialized Perception?

2008-10-14T00:38:00.000-04:00

Is psychology a science? Is philosophy a science? Anything can be a science if the scientific method is followed, but once you start hypothesizing about things that transcend our senses, you have left science. Some psychology and philosophy is science, but I think most of it is not. Science can only claim to know what it “sees” from observations of experiments and tests. That is the limit of science. Psychology and Philosophy discuss all sorts of things that cannot be “seen.” I put question marks around the word “see” because not everything that can be seen is some physical objects that can be experienced with our senses. Anger may not be able to be seen physically, but it can be described and felt.

Well, what about when someone says he feels God and describes God? How is God any different than Anger or Love? Could it be reasoned the God is no different “structurally” than an emotion? Can’t science observe someone feeling God as someone feels love?

Perhaps they are all just results of socialized perception. They (emotions and “god”) are possibly just illusions created by humans as a part of their evolutionary survival qualities. I know I’m misusing some biology words here, but my view should be somewhat understood. Do any other species have emotions? I’m not talking about feelings, but emotions. Feelings of fear and anger are survival tools, but anger as an emotion is useless. We may say a snake is angry, but that is just a human idea applied to a non-human entity. If only we could know what the snake was feeling.

Distractions From Reality

2008-10-13T17:33:00.000-04:00

People surround themselves with distractions. We all do it, some more than others. This job I have has very few distractions, and because of that reason, I have come to understand why we drown ourselves in all kinds of things completely unnecessary to sustain life. I do not want to call these distractions meaningless, even though there is no real way to know or not. They are subjectively meaningful to those who wish to self-righteously declare meaning to them, but you and I know that that is not “the” meaning. The meaning we cannot know. It may seem wise to say the meaning of these distractions is just that, distraction. One could say the distraction’s purpose is for relaxation or stress-relief. These are still self-applied meanings. In all practical sense, the distractions have meaning, in that they are simply things to do. They fill time.

But I am not concerned with what is practical and relative. Sure, it is practical to use words like “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong.” They help us get through the day and live in a society with rules relative to certain situations. Being practical is not what I’m concerned with. Why? Because I don’t want to live a life blind to reality. I don’t want to voluntarily put my head in the sand. I don’t want to be unaware and unconscious of the reality that we can’t know the ultimate meanings of anything we do. I don’t want to be deluded, but alas, I know that my perceptions are all socialized perceptions. What can I do to escape these conditioned views? But I digress.

The distractions are everything we do to try and hide the fact that we cannot know if any of this has any point. As you will see, nearly everything we do is to divert our focus from the only thing we can know, which is that we cannot know. We don’t want to even think about our absurdity in this world. Here we are in the now. Each new now is a whole new reality. Each new now is immediately born and dies. Each now is unique. It has never been now and it will never be now again. We have popped into this current now. We walk and talk and think. What do we do?

Well, we have to do something, don’t we? I feel hungry. I need to eat. No, you can’t take that! You have to buy it! Get out of here! This is private property! There is not one square inch that is not owned by either a person, group of persons, or the government. Everywhere I go I’m trespassing.

Can’t I just take that apple off the tree? No, you have to get a job. To get a job you have to prove you are who you say you are. I have to call myself something? You need all these cards that supposedly prove you exist. You need an address to prove where you are. Then, you can get a job…maybe. You have to do some job that may or may not seem to have some purpose. You’ll have to do this for a few weeks, then you’ll be given a piece of paper. That’s called a paycheck. Now, you have to take that piece of paper to a bank. You’re going to have to prove who you are and where you are all over again. After some time, you can get some other pieces of paper in exchange for the first piece of paper. This paper is called money. You can use this money to get the apple. Oh, can I take the apple now? No, you can’t have this apple! There are health regulations, don’t you know? You must go to a store and give them some money and then you can own an apple. Then, you can do whatever you want with the apple as long as it’s not obscene or violent.
One could say this is relatively and possibly absolutely absurd. Well, it’s how society gets along. It keeps order, or at least the illusion of order. It’s how billions of humans somewhat share the planet.

There are so many distractions to just get food and shelter to stay alive long enough to reproduce. Then, there’s the absurdity of that. What’s the big point of carrying on the species? Is there some prize we’re working for? Whether your existence is meaningless or not, you are here, or at least you think you are here, as Descartes would say. You feel hungry and horny. You have this drive to survive, but you don’t, and can’t, know why. This is the absurdity. We cannot know why we do these things, so the very things we do to survive become the distractions. We lose ourselves in these distractions and we feel they are very important, and relatively they may be. None of the distractions are really important though. We make them important.

We cannot (we think) accept the reality that we can’t really know with certainty if there is any ultimate purpose to our daily actions.

I remember in biology they said the purpose of a species is to reproduce in order to carry on the species. As said above, it this not absurd? Why is the earth moving (if indeed it is moving) around in ellipses amongst the universe? Why not? Okay, well that is absurd. There is no known reason for why the earth is doing what it is doing. You could explain the physics, but that not telling me why. It’d be no different than showing me why a ball rolls down a hill. You’re not telling me the ultimate “why.”

Do I want there to be an ultimate reason for things? Do I want some explanation for why we are here and why the earth does what it does? You bet I do…probably more than most people in the world. Why else do people get into philosophy? They want to know the meaning of life and all its wacky ways. If I actually knew there was some higher order to things, and that my life had some inherent purpose (and I knew what that purpose was), then I would know what I’m supposed to do. I wouldn’t be burdened with this immense freedom and responsibility to create some sort of relative meaning of my life.

I can’t find that absolute master plan, though, and thus there is this absurdity that we have no choice but to deal with. It is always there. Is it better to try the futile act of ignoring it or hiding from it? I don’t see how deluding yourself is the best way to go about it.

Listen to me. I’m using words like “better” and “best.” What am I implying? Do I think there is some standard of how to live in absurdity? (Remember the world in itself is not absurd, nor is mankind. It is in there co-existence that absurdity arises.) Who is there to say how I should act? Yikes, where have I gone with this thought process? Have I stumbled into nihilism?

Desire, Greed, Self-Destruction, Necessity

2008-10-03T18:41:00.000-04:00

Could we argue that human beings as a species are fundamentally self-destructive? Self-destructive because never satisfied – Is it our nature?
We’d have to define “self-destruction.” I could say it is when a species creates, or alters, an environment that is toxic to itself. The environment cannot sustain the life that created, or altered it.

Humans know, or at least highly assume, that they are going to die. “To be satisfied” means having a “sense” of satisfaction, which of course is only temporary.

Being a living creature that requires food and sex to survive and reproduce, humans must desire. To crave food and sex is to be alive (post-adolescence). To want is to not be content. Now, if we could call these food and sex drives simply “aspects of living” and not desires then perhaps we could separate what is sufficient versus greed.

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First, to know what is necessary for life can then show us what is unnecessary. A modern conditioned human who has been socialized by family, institutions (school, church, etc.), advertising industry, movies, video games, TV shows, news agencies, etc. is very likely to desire more than the necessities of life.
Therefore, a socialized conditioned human desires more than the indispensable necessities required to sustain life. Show me a species that desires more than the necessities. I’m sure there are some. Perhaps the squirrel may just be preparing for a winter of unknown length and severity. The squirrel is not being greedy or desiring beyond necessity. If there happens to be “unused” nuts, that is simply a byproduct of the squirrel attempting to ensure its survival through the winter.
Is it possible far a modernly socialized human to desire only the necessities?

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If aware that you are playing a role, you’re not the role anymore. You never can be the role, but if aware you don’t self-deceive anymore.

This inability (conscious effort) to self-deceive has caused me to become quite alienated (mentally, socially, psychologically) and thus physically isolated from other people.

Constant (possibly uncontrollable) introspection and analyzing, often with bad logic, naturally makes things worse.
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If it is a fact, or a truth, that __________________________....
What could possibly be put in the blank?

What is intelligence? Those called intelligent should be able to solve problems, but we have already determined that there are no problems. Problems and solutions do not exist. What does the word “intelligent’ imply? It’s meaningless, the word “intelligent.” We can’t logically verify what intelligence is.
What is the use of language if it is interpreted subjectively?
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Beginning of a science fiction novel
I have these distracting moments of being human that derail me from my purpose of obtaining knowledge for the home bank. I feel “lonely” or “scared” and I lose track of why I’m here. This body seems to be too sensitive to the inputs. Maybe I’m just not using it right. This “mind” thing is the most bizarre though. It is fundamentally no different that the other sense objects. The ears hear, the eyes see, the nose smells, the tongue tastes, the skin feels, and the mind thinks. I can’t shut off any of them. Even in sleep mode, they’re still on. There are so many simultaneous inputs. I don’t have any problems sorting them out, but I don’t know how humans do it.

The emotions and moods are fascinating. They seem to serve no real purpose. I saw a man throw a fit and who knows what it was about? What purpose did the fit serve? It changed nothing.

Bullshit
Bullshit does not equal nonsense. Some nonsense is bullshit, and some bullshit is nonsense. Not all bullshit is nonsense, and in fact, most bullshit is perfectly sensical, and that’s what usually makes it so fascinating. I use Ayer’s principle of verifiability to determine if a statement, proposition, or hypothesis is nonsense or not. If it is not nonsense, it can then possibly be determined if it is true or false.

Dukkha, Greed, and Society

2008-10-01T18:39:00.002-04:00

Some quick definitions:
Capitalism: an economic system in which the production and distribution of goods depend on invested private capital and profit making; dominance of private owners of capital and profit making

Socialism: an economic theory of social organization which advocates that the community as whole should own and control the means of production, distribution, and exchange.

Communism: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person is paid and works according to his or her needs and abilities.
Greed: an excessive desire

Dukkha: A Pali word that translates as suffering, unsatisfactoriness. Being in a state of insatiability, dissatisfaction, stress, discomfort, unease, and impatience because one desires people, things, and situations to be different than how they are. We experience dukkha all the time to differing degrees. Dukkha is things like wanting a candy bar, wanting to be free of debt, and wanting a better job, but it also aversions. Aversions are just desires inverted. If you hate something, you want that thing to be something that it is not. You may desire for it to not even exist.

The above definition of “greed” is vague. There is no clear meaning to the word “excessive.” What is too much? What is too great? Depending on what part of the world you are in, “greed” can have very different meanings. In my part of the world, middle class America, I feel that greed is an integral part of everyday life. We don’t think of it as greed, but see it as normal desire. What Americans call “poverty” is nothing compared to how millions of others live around the world. Our greed is hardwired into our minds, passed down from generations. If greed is excessive desire, then Americans are some of the greediest people on the planet. Our desires are so beyond basic that we cannot be called anything but greedy. This reason, and perhaps this reason alone, is why Americans are also some of the most unhappy and dissatisfied people on the planet.

Humans are fundamentally greedy and never satisfied. These two things are not the same, of course, but they are definitely linked. There are virtually non-greedy humans, yet they still suffer from dissatisfaction (dukkha). They want, desire, crave reality (what is; people, situations, governments, economies, systems, things) to be something other than what it is. Me, wanting others to see this dukkha, is dukkha. The cause is dukkha and the cessation of that cause is dukkha. When I think, “Why can’t these people see the ridiculousness of the suffering they cause themselves by the bottomless pit of desire,” this is dukkha. I desire (and cause myself more dukkha) that others let go and abandon their selfish and greedy desires. They cause so much suffering for themselves and others solely because of their own desires that, unbeknownst to them, will never be quelled. They want more money, and when they get it, what do they then want? More money, of course! They want a nicer home, and when they get it, they want a nicer home. They want more respect at work, and when they get it, they want more respect. They want love, and when they get it, it’s not enough or it’s not right. They always dissatisfied. Capitalism is founded on the assumption that greed is innate to human nature. Humans all have differing degrees of greediness at various times.

Are any other species greedy? Greed is excessive desire, and is this not the same thing as wanting and/or having more than one needs. If greed is excessive desire, then what is a basic desire? All that a human needs to survive in order to reproduce and carry on the species (who knows why!?) is some potable water, food, and protection from dangerous elements (weather, deadly animals, and other humans). An infant also needs care, and “love” is inherent in this care.

So, why were humans not satisfied with just these basic necessities? Well, we had these little buggers called ideas and imagination. We thought of more “efficient” ways of acquiring more food and better protection. But at some point did we not have enough? One man had more, and the other man thought he should have more too. Competition and envy arose within man. The one man had more because of factors such as skills, intelligence, and luck. But why can’t a human just be content with acquiring his or her basic needs for survival? Why do we get jealous, greedy, and bored? Why do we get dissatisfied with getting enough? Someone may have enough, but then sees someone else who has more. Envy then arises and he too feels this compulsion to get more at almost any cost. He’s willing to sacrifice his own peace and happiness to get more. He’s willing to put himself though enormous amounts of stress, anger, and anxiety to get more.

A wise person who has true peace is well aware of dukkha. They are well aware of the bottomless pit of desire and the suffering this craving for more and for change causes. The bulk of humans think (although they may not admit it) “I’m not satisfied with Enough!”

So, is it “human nature” to always want more and to always want change and the new? To not be satisfied? If so, then humans are doomed to self-destruction. Sustainability does not work with people always wanting more. The Buddha’s first Noble Truth is that life is dukkha. Even if you are satisfied with just having your basic needs met, you still experience physical pain, sickness, aging, and death. You will desire to not be sick and not be in pain. That’s the obvious dukkha, but the constant state of dissatisfaction is more subtle. It sneaks in all the time. You have to be very aware to catch it. You will realize that you always want something. Things are always “just not quite right.”

It seems as if human dissatisfaction, and resulting greed, will be our downfall. Dukkha causes dukkha, and even the process of the cessation of dukkha yields dukkha. Whole systems of governments and economies are founded on the fact that people need things, but unbridled capitalism (and systems like it) causes unnecessarily enormous amounts of suffering. Why? Simply because they encourage dissatisfaction and greed. Are they just giving people what they want? Does capitalism “work” because it mirrors most closely to “human nature?” Capitalism really only benefits the capitalists and not everyone can be a capitalist, even though the capitalists say that anyone can be a capitalist. For various reasons, many people want to be workers, not capitalists. The workers should not be “punished” for not having an inclination to be entrepreneurs. I’m not saying Communism is better, although true communism or socialism would be closer to an ideal. Unfortunately, all it takes is one greedy person (and of course we all have dissatisfaction, and thus greed) and socialism fails. Capitalism “works” because it allows, and even encourages, greed and infinite desire for profit, for more. This, of course, leads to infinite dissatisfaction.

So, are we actually doomed to self-destruction via greed? Because we are not all going to agree on a single way of living, I’d say that we most likely are doomed. Even if we were all Christians or Buddhists, there would still be envy and greed. People would still want more and better. They’d think, “I’m a better Christian,” or “I have more peace than you,” or “I want the peace that she has.” Only a truly enlightened one would be free of dukkha, but is this possible in the human form with the human mind? Even if a handful of humans were actually “enlightened,” it wouldn’t be enough (Ah, see how subtle dukkha is!) to save humanity from self-destruction.

This may seem depressing, but in reality, it just is how it is, or at least how I think it is. Americans, for sure, are doomed to self-destruction. We consume at a rate that is completely obscene and grotesque. If everyone on the planet consumed the way the 300 million Americans do, there would be hardly anything left. The amount of trees and fossil fuels that we use is severely disproportionate to that of most other countries. Most likely America will combine itself with other countries such as China, Russia, Europe, and the Middle East into one globalized economy. We shall see if that is better or worse.

Problems and Solutions Are Illusions

2008-09-30T22:27:00.000-04:00

Has the hundreds or thousands of years (depending on what field you are talking about) of academia and human thinking and analyzing in fields such as psychology, economics, philosophy, biology, anthropology, and physics produced any universal solutions? By “universal solution,” I mean a solution that everyone agrees on and is indeed a solution.

In many fields like psychology, sociology, economics, and philosophy, the individuals within these fields try to come up with solutions to problems such as poverty, war, emotional suffering, suicide, and the such. For hundreds or thousands of years, many intelligent people have come up with all kinds of wonderful theories of how it is, how it should be, and how to get from how it is to how it should be. Have any of those theories and practicing of those theories done any real good? Have we come any closer to peace and harmony among mankind? Do we still have people suffering from horrible emotional and physical pain? Are people still living in abject poverty? Do insane wars still ravage on around the globe? Do greedy, cruel people and groups still spread injustice and hatred everywhere they can just so they can have more money so they can buy another house? What good has any of it done? Sure, we’ve filled billions of pages of books with all sorts of interesting ideas and theories, but what have they accomplished?

But am I just doing the same thing? Aren’t I just sitting here writing about how I think it is and how I think it should be? I’m doing it with an awareness of it though. I’m looking for a “solution” by acknowledging that we cannot have any real solutions. The solution is to stop wasting our energy on problems that have no solutions and therefore they are not really problems. Desiring a solution simply creates more problems which create more solutions and problems and this goes on forever. Just how Alan Watts showed how desiring to be free of anxiety yields more anxiety, wanting to be free of problems yields more problems. Wanting to have no fear causes more fear. Fighting something strengthens it. Resisting an emotion causes it to persist. Trying to absolutely not be a self-defeating perfectionist is trying to be a perfectionist, and that is self-defeating. The cure is in the disease and the disease is in the cure. It’s getting angry at your anger or nervous about your anxiety.

So, is there a point in trying to solve our problems? Well, we always deal with, and can only deal with, the here and now. We never deal directly with the future. We can plan all we want, but that’s all it is: a plan. It’s not reality. Reality is right here, right now. The so-called problems of poverty and war did not just materialize out of nothing. They are not these independent isolated entities floating in space. History and Time are continually rolling out, interconnected with infinite factors. There are no problems or situations. To call something a problem or a situation is to bracket off something that cannot be bracketed off. Therefore, there are no real problems or even situations. We just have a series of nows that we continually act in. Historians can discuss and study the Vietnam conflict as if it were a football game with a clear beginning and end, but we all know that is erroneous. There was no beginning or end. Honestly, I don’t think there is a beginning or end to anything.

Ontology

2008-09-26T18:33:00.000-04:00

You see, I have never liked the idea of life being a game or a play, and we are merely players. That to me is volitional submission to delusion. It is bad faith as Sartre calls it. Life is not a “game” or a “play” and I don’t want to even pretend that it is. Life is life. It is what it is. Reality is not anything other than reality. It is indifferent. It does not care, nor does it have the capability to care, whether you feel any degree of happiness or sadness. It does care if you live or die. Reality is more easily experienced it seems when a human is first of all isolated from other humans, and secondly he or she has no contact with human-made things. A human who is lost in the wilderness can more closely experience reality, but of course, he or she still has the human mind with all its judgments and convictions. They would have to have their thinking fully in the here and now. They could not be thinking about the past or the future. Being in a state of survival helps humans experience reality. Now, some would say to me that reality is whatever they experience, but I disagree. Reality exists prior to human interaction. So, in order to actually see reality, we need to somehow take out the distortions that humans apply to the perceptions of reality. Reality is filtered via our perceptions. We cannot “see” reality, and we definitely cannot “think” reality, but I believe that we should at least try to do our best to get rid of the obvious illusions and try to understand and see reality as accurately as possible without the common human misperceptions.

Why do I think it is so important to study ontology? Well, the easy answer is that it comes very natural to me. For some reason, I almost cannot stop thinking about it. I would go so far as to say that I do in fact obsess over it at times, but this doesn’t really answer why I want to study ontology, or why I think it is important. I think that I really got interested in it because of my own suffering. The mood swings, the emotional pain, the suicidal feelings; I want to understand these. I want to know if they are necessary. I want to know if they are even real. If they are only illusions, then how can I maintain the awareness to avoid feeling and experiencing the suffering of the emotional pain? I know that pain exists so that we avoid certain situations so that we can go on living in order to reproduce. Who knows why? Reality though is right here now and we are always “in it.” Pain is one thing, but suffering anger, anxiety, and depression though is something else. They seem to be unique to humans. They seem to be unnecessary, unlike pain.

Also, I’ve personally experienced similar realities in dramatically different perspectives. That makes me realize that reality itself is not what I perceive it to be. That you see is an enormous help to me in dealing with my sometimes drastic mood swings.

So, the main reason I want to study ontology is that I feel that it may hold a solution for people like myself suffering from illusory emotional problems.

Seeing Reality as an Existentialist

2008-09-26T02:21:00.000-04:00

I have moments of seeing reality and the freedom in that reality. I don’t feel trapped anymore and I realize I can do anything and go anywhere. The things and people that often scare me are finally “seen” for what they really are. They have no real power over me or anyone else for that matter. I realize that the fear that I experience is an illusion. Now, fear in its primal state is real, but most “fear” we experience is, in a way, delusional thinking. Fear is a useful tool to keep you alive, but that should be all it is for. I have absolutely no reason to fear for my life, as does hardly anyone else, and yet many of us have constant fears (often expressed as anger or anxiety).

I heard an explanation for this irrational fear that seems to make sense. Ten thousands years ago, two hunters were walking through the jungle. Suddenly, they hear a rustling in a large bush nearby. One man runs away thinking it is a tiger, but the other one just thinks it is the wind. This time it was just the wind. You see, we are the descendants of the man who ran away in fear. Almost all the time it is just the wind, but occasionally it was a tiger. The man who always got scared and ran away went on to live and reproduce. The man who had little fear eventually was eaten by a tiger.

I’d guess about 99.9% of my life I don’t have to fear for my life, but I very often react to the wind as if it is a tiger. This, of course, is not seeing reality. Modern society is very convenient and very rarely do we have to fear being killed, yet you still see people, myself definitely included, full of fear manifested as anger and anxiety. The mind and body, it seems, are “wired” to react as if a huge tiger is about to attack them and rip them to shreds, but in actuality, they just don’t have enough money for rent. Even more common are people being angry and anxious about trivial things like long lines at the grocery or traffic. Of course, these are not the real reasons for their fear. These are just triggers. Someone angry at the end of a long line at the grocery is not really angry at the fact that he must wait fifteen minutes to buy eggs. He chooses to perceive the situation as just another obstacle in a long series of obstacles that he calls his life. He thinks he’s going to be late for something more important. Well, if it’s so important, why is wasting his time at the grocery? So, the real reason he’s angry lies in his perception. He’s choosing to see the current situation as this authority telling him, “No!” He may choose to think life is unfair because this or that happened in his youth jeopardizing his potential. He may choose to think life is unfair because of the way he was raised. The point is he is not seeing the reality of his situation. Reality is not what we think or judge it as. Reality does not have labels. It just is what it is. The reality is that he is standing in a line of other people in a grocery store. That is all. There is nothing good or bad about the reality. It only “becomes bad” when he chooses to judge the situation relative to something else. He compares the present situation to past experiences and also ideas of future experiences. He labels the current situation as “just more bullshit piled on my bullshit life.” Of course, he’s going to be angry (or anxious if he doesn’t want to appear angry) if he compares his present situation to some fantastic made-up future or some great past experience, and of course he only can label those future and past experiences relative to something else. Being angry is a horrible (a label that can only exist relative to something else) mind-clouding experience, but it is also an illusion. It is being delusional. Why? Because you are perceiving some situation and labeling what is (Reality) as this or that. It’s like yelling at a tree or a rock and calling them dumb and hating them (I have been so angry before that I’ve done this!). I’ve been so angry that I hate anything or anyone I see. I’m being delusional. The rock or the person is just what it is. If the person is verbally abusing me, calling me all kinds of names, what is it that makes this bad? I choose to interpret or perceive (based on past learning experiences) the person and the words as hurtful, rude, bad. But are they absolutely? Of course not!

Then why do we still get frustrated and angry if we know that the current reality we’re in is just what it is? If we know, and have the awareness, that reality is just reality and not good or bad, then why do we still, at times, feel fear (anger and anxiety)? Perhaps because we want things to be good, and in order for things to be perceived as good, we must also see things as bad. We must compare this situation with that situation. We set ourselves up to feel bad. When we say, “This is good,” what are we saying? We saying this thing, situation, person has qualities that make it better than some other thing, situation, or person. The “good” is relative, not absolute.

Okay, when I call a situation bad, and I then get angry, I’m just being delusional. Okay, so I’m delusional. It doesn’t change the fact that I feel miserable, alone, and angry. Even if I have the awareness of the delusional thinking, I still feel like shit, hate the world, don’t see the point in anything, and think about suicide. So, what is going on here? Am I just not being a “good enough” existentialist or am I not being mindful enough? (The last sentence is either/either, not either/or.) Is existentialism and Buddhist mindful living not recognizing human nature? Is my anger simply the result of my not living up to my impossibly high standards? Am I just mentally ill, whatever the hell that means?
I know that I cannot be something such as “good” or “mentally ill” since those ideas have no absolute meanings. I just don’t want to feel pain. I don’t want to feel those angry, frustrated, uncomfortable, lonely, confused, hungry, cold, scared, and anxious. Everything I do is, or should be, an attempt in some form to quell this desire to not experience suffering and pain.

We cannot know if we are good or bad, right or wrong (for there is no absolute authority), but we can know how we feel, at least in our own consciousness. Could we then say that a “good” action is one that truly leads us away from suffering? Buddhists see actions not as good or bad, but rather as skillful or unskillful. A skillful action is a step away from dukkha (suffering, never being satisfied), but an unskillful action would just create more dukkha.
But we can’t always know if our actions are skillful or not. We may think we are being “good” or “skillful,” but how do we really know? We simply can’t know. Besides, it’s not like our actions are these independent factors that have a clear cause and effect. It’s not like action A directly causes action B in some isolated vacuum. I went to college and get a couple of science degrees thinking that was “good” and “right,” but now I get severely angry at times because I owe $70,000 for degrees I’m not even using. I’ve stepped into dukkha thinking I was avoiding it. I thought I was being skillful, but it seems at times that I was actually being unskillful. Basically you can’t, or shouldn’t, desire anything, but you never really get exactly what you desire. The idea of what you desire is not real, and can never exist in world-reality, but only mind-reality.

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A lot of people say guns are bad, but it is obviously not the gun itself. A loaded gun sitting on a table is being-in-itself. It is not bad or good or any other label. Could we just say that non-humans (anything that is not a human consciousness) cannot be “bad,” but humans can?
The man can be bad (making a choice which severely encroaches on others’ freedom) but not the gun. I don’t know. Who is the absolute authority labeling the man? There is none.

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The reason I thought I needed medicine was because despite the awareness of reality without judgments and preconceived ideas and labels, I still had racing thoughts and sever bouts of depression, anger, and anxiety.

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Have I intentionally isolated myself by studying subjects that hardly anyone else in my current community has any interest in or did I just become alienated by studying what really interests me? I’m doing what I choose to do and I must accept the consequences (without judgment) of isolation from others. If I choose to study ontology then I will find it hard to find others who also study ontology. This is not necessarily true though. If I choose an environment where hardly anyone studies ontology, then I will not have anyone to share my interests with, but if I become a philosophy student at a university, then I will not feel so isolated.

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Regardless of the psychological explanations for why philosophers are the way they generally are, their arguments are still valid. The fact that they can ask these questions is enough to justify their work.

Life, Existence, God

2008-09-22T17:17:00.000-04:00

I would not be surprised at all if this life (whatever it is, if it is even possible to be seen as an entity) is severely not what we think it is. We can’t think about it. We are wrong anytime we think we know anything at all about what “life” is. We cannot know why we are here (or anything else, for that matter), how we got here, when we got here, where we are going, and who we even are. We cannot know these things with any certainty. So, since we cannot use our own minds to understand anything, can we then conclude that life is (from the only point of view available to us, our mind) absurd. Absurd because there is no real logical way to know, or answer, the above questions of who, how, where, when, and why we are. The scientific method is useless. There is no way to test our observations. It is absurd because we cannot logically know of some absolute authority that could assign our actions (and the universe) with some meaning, purpose, or master plan. We are the mouse in the maze, but no matter how hard we try, we cannot know what we are in, why we are in it, how we got in it, who or what put us in it, and where exactly “it” is, and thus where we are. We are Mona Lisa. She cannot know that she is “in” a painting. She cannot see the painting. All she can see are these “things,” but she cannot see the whole picture, because obviously she is in it. She is a part of it. She would have to remove herself from the painting to see it, but then of course, it would not be the original painting, and of course, she cannot remove herself.

This is the state of the human mind. It cannot look at the universe and see it. It would have to remove itself to see it, but then it would not be seeing what it wants to see.

So, that is why our existence (which can only be “seen” with the mind) is absurd. Every thing’s meaning, every thought, idea, object is relative to something else ad infinitum. Gottfried Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason states that “for anything that exists, there must be some reason why it exists, and why it exists as it does.” The following is from the book, “Sartre For Beginners” by Donald Palmer.

“For Leibniz, this principle was the criterion of rationality. Anybody who denies this principle simply declares himself to be irrational. So, take an example like the fact that my keys are on the table. Why are they there? Because I placed them there. Why? Because I plan to enter my locked office after writing this chapter. Why? In order to pick-up my briefcase and go home. Why? In order to… Again, every moment of being is explained by referring to some other moment of being on which the former is dependent.

And how far does this chain of explanation reach? For Leibniz, there are only two possibilities: Either every chain of contingent being finally terminates in some NECESSARY being (a being which could not NOT exist – that is, a God), and that being anchors and is responsible for the meaning of all being…or every chain of contingent being is infinite – in which case every state of being is explained by another state of being, which in turn is explained by yet another state of being and so ad infinitum. In this case, according to Leibniz, there is never any real explanation of anything, only infinite deferral of meaning…and in that case, everything is utterly absurd.

Because the human mind cannot accept utter absurdity, Leibniz asserts that there must be a God who bestows meaning on the whole of the history of being. Without such meaning, life would be too horrible to bear.

Can the human mind deal with the idea of an absurd universe? Sartre believes that only the cowardly mind cannot do so, and he believes that such a mind posits God to relieve the anxiety provoked by the thought of a meaningless universe. But this belief is posited in “bad faith,” according to Sartre.”

Leibniz was right except that he thought that God cured this absolute absurdity. I don’t know how a philosopher could logically deduce the existence of God, but I digress. I’m not assuming that there is no entity such as God. There is simply no logical process of thought which could prove the existence or non-existence of God, whatever God may or may not be. Science ends at the Big Bang. It cannot go before the Big Bang. One may feel and think of God as much as one wants, but that does not cause or explain God’s existence. Whether God exists or not is irrelevant to life simply because we cannot know whether God is there or not. Life is absurd as a result of our inability to know if God exists to render meaning unto our lives. Although, even if we could know that God exists, what good would that do? We still have to live this life, with all its ups and downs. If God does exist, it seems to be like Nature: indifferent. Nature (which we can at least know exists via our senses), like God (which we cannot know via our senses), is indifferent to whether you live or die, or are happy or sad. Reality, or Nature, just is. It doesn’t “feel” or “care.” One’s life is just a part of a system, although we can’t really see that system, since we are a part of it, and so we cannot know if there indeed exists a system at all.

Could I not just say that we cannot know if life is absurd or not? Well, sure I could say that, but this is exactly what absurd means. We can’t know if there is a “master plan” or not, whether our existence has some divine bedrock at the end of the relative deferred meanings.
So, our existence and our life situations are literally absurd. Life is absolutely absurd. I would agree with an atheistic or agnostic Leibniz. So, how now do I act? What do I do with this knowing I cannot know?

(Aside: Let me clear something up. Logically, it is possible to know if God exists, but not as of right now. Perhaps tomorrow, someone or something comes to earth through a huge hole in the sky and reveals the master plan and immediately all humans know, as a matter of fact, that God exists. As of right now, there exists no possible way of knowing (via logic or scientific method) the existence of God, master plan, divine presence, holiness, or any kind of transcendental reality.)
Why do I do the things I do? I wake up and live. I do things so I can just go on living another day. I eat, drink, sleep, so I can keep doing it until I die. In between, I do all sorts of things like cleaning the toilet, reading books about reading books, and saving money to travel to Darussalam. It’s all really quite arbitrary. You can get into all sorts of arbitrary things during this existence, but they have no absolute meaning. I just wish that I could be in a better mood for most of this existence. This is why I want to get back on lithium.

Anyway, I have this feeling that every human, regardless of intelligence or education, knows that we cannot absolutely know whether life has meaning or not. Everyone acts in response to this realization. Most bury this realization and go along living their lives in “bad faith.” Mostly, this is done with religion, or at least a belief in some Higher Power, God, Master Plan. Others turn to sense pleasures such as alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, food, entertainment media, and other distractions. Some dive (not consciously) into normalcy and conformity. Some dive into extremism and anti-social activities. Some get PhDs in philosophy or environmental health.

It seems we have to do something. We get hungry and nothing else matters but finding some food. So, does it matter that life is absurd? Regardless of whether life has meaning or not, we still have to get up and do things. We still feel pain, joy, depression, love, and anger. Every philosopher that ever lived still had to worry about food and shelter. When I ask if it matters if life is absurd, I don’t mean absolutely or ultimately, but relative to this life we must live (assuming we have decided to keep living.)

I think it does matter because now I know that there is no ultimate prize I’m working for. My job that I get up to go to everyday is not some “duty to the divine” as the Bhagavad-Gita says. We can’t know if there is heaven or hell, reincarnation, karma, nirvana, soul, atman, enlightenment, angels…all that metaphysical stuff.

So, there is no higher purpose to anything I do. There is no reason for my job other than to make money in order to buy food. This is not a bad thing unless, of course, you suffer from crazy mood swings, racing thoughts, depression, and emotional hypersensitivity.

Some Ego Talk

2008-09-14T19:38:00.000-04:00

When I write, the ego comes and goes. At times, it is writing, being creative and intelligent, being competitive. But at times, it annihilates itself. I think that’s funny. It has been several months since I became aware of the ego and I see it as this funny little thing now. At first, I was very scared of it, and at times it does puff up its chest and scream. It can appear to be intimidating, but after I read a little and come into the now by breathing and feeling things around me, the ego turns into what it really is, just a silly little parlor illusion. It’s just a bunch of conditioned thoughts that are nothing of reality. The word, “conditioned,” has connotations, but I think it is the right word. B.F. Skinner used it his way, but I use it my way. I don’t see why I should change. Buddhists also use the word “conditioned” when describing the mind.

The Prisoner: Why is she so miserable?

2008-09-09T15:13:00.000-04:00

When a life situation is considered by the ego to be “bad” or “not good,” it is easier for some, if not most, to realize, or see, that they are not their situations. If someone is a prisoner, she can see her situation as unpleasant, but what is this view based on? Why does she see her situation as bad? If she had just popped into existence and found herself in prison with an unconditioned mind free of past experiences and judgments, would she still see or feel her current situation as unpleasant or bad? Does the degree of unpleasantness directly relate to past experience? If, for example, she had lived in a mansion, had plenty of comfort, and had never been exposed to hardship, would she then experience a higher degree of unpleasantness than someone who has had a hard life? Perhaps.

The conditioned mind sees things as good and bad, happy and sad, and everything in between. It sees dualities. It is trapped in a world governed by the law of opposites. In order to know happiness, it must know sadness. In reality, they are not dependent on each other. Happiness is just happiness and sadness is just sadness. The prisoner is, in reality, simply existing. She is in a place at a time. Why is this bad? Why does she feel so horrible? Why is the world seen as such a cruel and unforgiving place? “It is bad” is a thought. A prisoner thinks this only if they know of (based on past experiences) some other place and time that is “better” than the one they are experiencing at the present moment. What she thinks of though is not truly real. It is a place and time that is imagined, idealized. It doesn’t exist. She desires to be somewhere that does not exist, but that imaginary place and time is “better” than where she is now. She, of course, will never get there, even if she gets out of prison, and starts a new life, she will never get to that place and time that she so desires to be. She will forever be unsatisfied with her life. Nothing will ever live up to her dream.

The prisoner who sees her situation as bad had adopted an identity that is seen as bad by herself and her idea of society. She sees society as this entity that has a consciousness. It judges people and what they do. Everyone has his or her own perceptions about the attitude of the society in which he or she lives. It depends on what level of pessimist or optimist you are. She sees herself as a “bad person” being punished in a bad place. So, it is deemed a bad situation. See sees herself (“herself” is the ego) as the same as the situation, as the labels (self-created in her mind). She is (ie. she believes, she deceives herself) a prisoner, a bad person in a cruel, ugly, and cold place. She has reduced herself to a single word, when in reality, she (self) cannot be described truthfully or even thought of. Her self (which is not accurate to say since she does not possess her own self) is. Perhaps consciousness is who she is (I don’t really want to get into what her True Self is exactly, but I do assume that she does indeed have something that is a Self and that it simply is existing. It is.

The point is she exists first as a Being. She is being. She is existing. So, if she can realize that right now she is simply where she is. She is at a specific place and time. She is here and now. If she can do that, it is a great success. Why? Because she is beginning to free herself from the ego. All those thoughts in her head that she must be miserable have been conditioned into her. Thoughts like, “Prison is bad. Everyone who goes to prison is bad. I must be and have to be miserable here.” Why? Who is this absolute authority which says that a prison must be a certain way? Of course there is no absolute authority that says this. There may be committees and boards which say a prison should be this way or that way and that the prison should accomplish this end, but that is definitely not an absolute authority. Most authorities are just people who sit around a table, discuss issues, and write things down. Then they somehow convince (usually with threats of violence and hardship) others to believe that they are indeed an authority.

Anyway, she has a choice, and for most people, it is not an easy one. She has a choice of what identity she chooses to identify with. Obviously, she cannot change her genetics, but everything else is not predetermined. She has the freedom to think and behave anyway she wants. This concept is difficult to accept and for most people it is impossible to actually do. It would be best for her to have the awareness that the identity she identifies with is not who she is. It is only a role she is playing, a mask to the outside world, to the others. This is not good or bad or depressing or silly. It is only reality. Whether you like it or not, you do not equal all the forms that you surround yourself with. By forms I mean all the entities that you say are yours. A job, residence, car, clothes, toys, gadgets, boats, family, race, religion, economic position, social position, health, academic level, intellectual capacity: These are all forms, the are all phenomenon (as Buddhists say).

Unawareness of the ego means that you and the ego are one and the same. You live in “bad faith,” in a state of self-deception, as Sartre says.

You see people at all levels living in bad faith. There is the hard-working man who only feels successful, who feels powerful because he is his job, residence, neighborhood, car, family, and many friends. His possessions ARE who he is. He is happy, confident, proud, and even a little bit satisfied perhaps. Then, you have the hard-working poor man. He has very little. He lives paycheck to paycheck and never has any money left over to save. He lives in an unattractive (his ego says) and unsafe neighborhood, and is often frustrated. He has no friends. He (the ego) feels weak and unimportant because he is his residence, his job, neighborhood, family. He is deceiving himself and reducing his self to an insignificant and powerless man, alone, fearful, perceiving the world as cruel and terrifying. The men have their own views of society and there own mind-made perceptions of society. Those “societies” strengthen, for better or worse, the men’s egos.

The prisoner can be whatever she wants to be. There are of course physical limitations of reality. But just because she is in prison, it doesn’t mean that all is lost and all is bad. She can read, go to school, and improve herself in many ways. She can have relationships. She can learn to play an instrument. All of this is not easy at first. She must make changes. She might need psychotherapy, medicine, support groups. She needs to read, and write and explore herself. Slowly, her thinking can change, and as a result her behavior and emotions will change. No, this is not impossible. People do it all the time. They decide that they don’t want the identity that they have right now and they take steps to change it. It changes anyway, whether they like it or not, but to have control over what identity you identify with is true freedom.

To have the realization that you can truly be what you want is very empowering. The hard part is sticking to it. Practicing everyday. Never giving up, even when it seems that all hope has been lost. There will be many “tests” of your determination. There will be many temptations, as they say. There will be many times when running away feels like the best or only option. It is not. You must stand there and face reality no matter how absurd, insane, painful, sad, wild, and deadly it may seem.
Can you do that? Can I?

The Infinite Depth of Here and Now

2008-08-02T23:46:00.000-04:00

What is a second? Who determined what how long a second is, or how long a meter is? Who determined how heavy a kilogram is? A second used to be calculated from how long it takes the earth to rotate one time. 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. That makes 86,400 seconds in a day. So, when someone built a clock, he or she made it so that a second was just the right length of time so that there would be 86,400 seconds from when the sun rose to when it rose again. Now, that definition was, of course, not very accurate because we all know that one day is not exactly 24 hours. So, now, the second is defined by how long it takes for 9,192,631,770 electromagnetic wave cycles from cesium-133 atoms to occur. A second this accurate is found in atomic clocks. They are called atomic clocks because cesium-133 is a radioactive isotope. One atomic clock is so accurate that it will only be off by about a second even after 20 million years. But the truth is that a true second does not really exist.

When a second begins and when it ends is never going to end. This may seem odd, but it is true. It is like the problem of someone trying to get from end of the room to the wall on the opposite side. If a man is 6 feet from a wall, and goes exactly half way, he is then 3 feet away. He goes another half way and he is 1.5 feet away. Another half way, and he is 0.75 feet away. This, as you see, goes on forever. It goes on infinitely and the man will never reach the wall. The real distance of a foot will never be known. We erroneously begin the situation with saying that he is 6 feet away, when truthfully we do not know how far away he really is.

Also, there is the problem of a perfect circle. A perfect circle does not exist. A circle is, by definition, a series of rays. A ray is a distance between two points. A distance between two points is a line. So, a circle is a series of lines. No matter how small you make those lines making up the circle, they are still lines. A curve is just a series of small lines. You can infinitely cut the lines down, but as long as there are two points, then there is a line. So, that which seems invisible is not really invisible.

What is a meter? I'll finish this later.

Physics, Metaphysics, Moods

2008-06-17T17:33:00.000-04:00

It’s scary and new, this world of knowing who you are, because, in reality, who you are is truly unknowable. It is infinite, timeless, and formless. How can this not be true? When you go to a funeral, you do not see the body and go, “Hey, it’s Bob.” No, you think, “There is Bob’s body.” “Bob” is not “here” anymore. Was he ever really here? Did he really go anywhere? You know that body lying there is not who that person is or was.

Just the body is dead, and that isn’t even totally correct. The organic material that makes up the body is made up of molecules. These are made up of elements (mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen). There exist over 10 million compounds made up of different arrangements of just these four elements. The elements are made of particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Neutrons and protons are in turn, made of quarks. There are many other subatomic particles such as muons, pions, electron neutrinos, and muon neutrinos. So, everything is made of atoms. Water in a puddle, pizza crust, money, stars, comets, eyeballs, air, the scents of a flower and gasoline, the sun, the moon, and your toilet are all the same at the atomic level. That is they are made of differing arrangements of protons, neutrons, and electrons. And the most amazing thing about atoms is that they are nearly all empty space. The radius of an average electron orbit is about a hundred thousand times larger than the radius of the nucleus.

If the earth, for example, was an electron, and the sun was a nucleus, then the earth would have to be ten times farther away from the sun than Pluto is in order for our solar system to be like an atom. So, there is much more empty space in an atom than in our solar system. But don’t get the idea that atoms are like solar systems.

So, anyway, the energy that “flowed” through every atom that made up Bob did not die. Energy does not die. It is transferred. According to the principle of conservation of energy: Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but can only be converted, or transferred, from one form to another. So of all the different types of energy that existed within Bob, none of them disappeared.

There are many types of energy. Mechanical, gravitational potential, kinetic, electrical, heat, and chemical are just some of the many types of energy. What kinds of energy exist within the brain and the mind? Is there thought energy? Something that Einstein discovered was that enormous amounts of energy can be found in very tiny masses. His famous equation shows how the energy of an object at rest equals the mass of that object multiplied by the squared speed of light in a vacuum. Using Einstein’s equation, a 0.046 kg golf ball at rest has enough rest energy (if it could be transferred somehow to electrical energy) to power a 75 watt light bulb for 1.7 million years. So, if we could discover something of mass that makes up thoughts and moods, then we could verify the enormous energy within the mind.

Also, all objects radiate energy, specifically as electromagnetic waves, which are electric fields and magnetic fields traveling together. What’s interesting about electromagnetic waves is that they don’t need a medium (such water or air) to travel through. Sound waves, for instance, can’t travel through outer space, which is a vacuum, but electromagnetic waves can. Electromagnetic waves carry energy…energy no different than the energy that the body transfers from food, or energy that is transferred when water or steam moves turbines and “makes” electricity. Every cell in your body, and in your mind, which is just a part of your brain, radiates electromagnetic energy.

So, what are moods? This is of particular interest to me because I suffer from frequent “mood swings.” Most of my life has been plagued with oscillating feelings of extreme joy, sadness, boredom, unease, anxiety, exhilaration, excitement, darkness, gloom, doom, fear, anger, compassion, and on and on. I have a hypothesis that moods are made of atoms, or at least some sort of particles, and so they are affected by and must follow the rules of physics. I think that moods may absorb and emit electromagnetic waves. When I feel miserable, what is going on at the atomic level? There has to be physics involved with moods, right? That’s what I want to study and find out.

The Past is Dead

2008-06-12T17:13:00.000-04:00

So many are obsessed with history, obsessed with situations that happened long ago. It is not good to live in the past. It is fine and good common sense to learn from past mistakes and therefore turn mistakes into learning experiences. It would be unwise to forget mistakes in your past, but do not dwell on them, do not attach yourself to them. Learn from them and then let them go. You don’t need them anymore once you have learned your lesson.
The past does not exist, so how can something that does not exist control you and cause you to suffer? Only if your mind believes that your past can control you. Only if you give life to your past and you believe your past has the power to continue to control you. If you unconsciously identify with an ego-created, mind-made, false-self of the past, you give life to an illusion; an unreal, non-existent, phantom and then emotions pour in concerning this phantom. You feel sorry for this phantom of the past, or it makes you angry or nervous or fearful.
You then become a living breathing pain-body (or rather the pain-body becomes you) and you fear losing your identity if you lose your pain. All this pain and suffering can be bypassed and avoided if you simply do not identify with past, especially with mind-made fictional past selves. They are not real.

Reality Doesn’t Care What You Want

2008-06-01T21:57:00.001-04:00

Me three months ago (Of course when I first wrote it, it was Me Now): You say you want peace and happiness, but you cannot have peace and happiness. Having peace means having nothing else. Happiness is not peace. If you are happy now, then that is what it is, but it is not peace. Peace is really not possible for a human (by traditional definitions), but if a human can transcend what it has defined itself as, then perhaps peace is possible. Real peace is nothingness. Of course, nothingness is just a word, and tries to make “nothingness” into some thing. Peace is only in nothingness, but nothingness is not a place, as many people see heaven.
Most people do not really want peace. They want relationships, stressful jobs, fun times, parties, conflict, drama, tragedy, comedy, highs, lows, middles, happiness, and sadness.

Me (Now): Yes, but doesn’t one get bored with peace? Doesn’t one get dreadfully sick of never having any fun? What about excitement and sex and yummy pizza? Do you get to enjoy these things?

Me three months ago: Yes, you can voluntarily throw yourself into the mix. Just maintain awareness. Also, you must accept all the non-peace you will then have to experience. Cause and effect. With absolute peace, there is no cause and effect.

Me (Now): So, basically, being alive is “not peace.” I have to act. Even not acting is a form of action. By body is always moving. My heart is always pumping blood throughout my body. My lungs are moving in and out. By your extreme definition of peace, I can only be at peace when I’m dead.

Me three months ago: Yes, that is why I said that peace is only in nothingness. Not Sartre’s “nothingness”, but the Buddha’s “nothingness.”

Me (Now): Well, what is that? This nothingness.

Me three months ago: You can’t think about it and I can’t tell you with words. The best explanation that I’ve heard is that your life is like the flame of a candle. It flickers and burns and is constantly and seemingly randomly moving this way and that. Nothingness, which is nirvana (not heaven) is the flame extinguished. Where did the flame go? It didn’t go anywhere. It simply doesn’t exist. It is nothing. The essence of the extinguished flame is nothingness.

Me (Now): Okay, so this peace that you say that most people don’t really want. To live in this world, I have to not be at peace, but can I have moments of peace, or at least get close to moments of peace?

Me three months ago: Yes, follow the eight fold path as best as you can and try to empty to your mind. Focus only on your breath going in and out. Consciously try to be aware of your breath, but don’t try to control it. Just feel it. Realize that right now is the only thing that is real and try to only feel that now-ness. Align yourself with the energies of the cosmos by aligning your mind with the energies of now.

Me (Now): Okay, so I’ll do that when I want to have some peace, but for right now, I have to get ready for work at the gas station. Oh, that unwavering Reality. You simply are. You always are there and there is nothing I can do about it.