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When
you recognize the powerless that you experience because of conditioning,
beliefs or concepts, because of a belief in the "other,"
you realize that you don't have much of a life. You live
in fear, dread, hope, despair, the onslaught of emotions.
You feel out of control, and confused.
It is typical to try to alleviate these experiences. You look
to self-help books, religion, spiritual
paths, disciplines, teachers, philosophies, systems and structures.
You look outside.
Many systems teach that someone will come to save you at some point,
that there will be some divine intervention that will make everything
all right. When you begin to recognize the whole picture,
you realize that these beliefs, conditions and concepts are very negative. You can see how you have given
away your power, the control of your life to the outside; with
each step you take in that direction, you become more powerless.
You see that you are at the mercy of the system.
Part of the intellect says, "Oh, no, not me. I'm
liberated. I have a good career, a good relationship; I have
what life has to offer." But you also live in fear, because
deep down you are afraid that you will lose those things.
It is normal, because you see those things being lost by others
all around you.
So essentially humans need to be in the process of taking back
their life, which is to really know who you are. The past teachings
of religious systems, structures, disciplines, doctrines and philosophies
are not the answer. You can gain all the knowledge of the
scriptures, you can be versed in every attribute and possibility
of religions or spiritual paths, and still find yourself in a state
of fear and dread when you are alone. You find yourself struggling
to keep the intellect in its place, to hold back the conditions
that want to start running. The concepts flow freely in the
quiet.
These things have been happening for thousands of years; there
is nothing much that is new. I find it a bit strange that
humans have been on this planet for so long and still do not
realize what is actually happening. One sees through the lenses
of perception, looking outside, making up stories.
It is astounding how many humans will experience Life as it is, and still deny what is taking place. Pain, suffering,
disease, poverty, war - all of these are parts of the human drama.
No one escapes from them. There is no shame in that; that
is not the place of powerlessness. The place of powerlessness
is the addiction to escape. Trying to escape what-is is the
real powerlessness.
Yes, Life is hard. Life can be downright distasteful at times,
but it is Life. It is the consequence of the conditioning,
the concepts you hold.
You can make a pretty good assessment of your core beliefs by looking
at what is going on in your life. What is happening in your
life is indicative of the thoughts you entertain, what you feed
yourself.
You can be very concerned about your diet, what you are eating,
whether the food you eat is good for you. But hardly anyone
ever thinks about the mental diet: the thoughts and beliefs you
are taking in, without thinking, without analyzing, without looking
at them; the ideas that you assume are true because "They
said" they are true, or because "It is written."
It seems that most everybody is wanting to escape this world, unless
of course your life is running very well and you have enough
power, or own enough possessions to insulate yourself
from what is happening. But then you have forgotten that those
things own you; you are possessed by your possessions. You
may not realize that as long as things are running smoothly,
but the moment there is some threat on the horizon, you start seeing
where your real beliefs are. You become frightened.
You begin to live in this dread and fear of what might happen.
You are no fool; you know that the wealth, the possessions you have,
even a relationship or a career can vanish practically overnight.
If you don't believe that, then you haven't been watching the stock
market lately. People who trusted in the artificial power,
the status quo, the consensus reality, have lost what they had.
Where are the spiritual practices in this? Where is religion?
Unfortunately, they are also on the side of the system, the controller.
Something is happening. Something vital is happening and changing.
It is very subtle. The subtlety of what is happening goes
mostly unseen and unknown. Very few will go to that place
and look, because there is so much fear that surrounds it.
It is unpopular. It is easier to stay in the consensus, the
conditions and concepts, rather than to dig deeply into the Self
and understand what is beyond knowledge. It takes a lot of
courage to look in that place, to understand Life itself.
Usually when you do get the courage to look, you find yourself alone.
The world at large does not want to know any of this. The
world wants to believe that world leaders are doing the right thing,
that religions have your best interest at heart, that spiritual
disciplines and paths are trying to assist you in achieving a better
life, even though it will take place in the future. Spiritual
disciplines say, "Do this, practice that, and somewhere down
the way you will achieve something; in the meantime, just relish
the suffering because suffering wins you points. If you suffer
very well, you will be greatly rewarded. So endure the suffering."
Which is to say: "Endure the beliefs and concepts and
conditioning that we have laid on you for thousands of years.
Don't look for proof of anything. Don't hold these systems
up to the clear light of awareness and see what they are really
saying."
The Bible, the Upanishads, the Gita are all collections of philosophy. Philosophy
is an individual's rendering of what is taking place and why.
The conditioning says that these things are absolutes, that they
are what God has to say to his/her children; these things will help
you achieve a goal, a place in heaven, or nirvana, or a better life
next time.
Trash, trash, trash! Yes, I am trashing the whole bit, because I
see what has been happening. These things have made you complacent,
subservient, and powerless. You have given your life away
to the outside.
There are many beautiful scriptures, but what if the author or editor
of the scriptures misinterpreted what was heard? What if the
person who supposedly said those words didn't mean it quite that
way? The masses base their entire life on these hearsays,
not on having a direct experience. You may think you
have a direct experience, but you have a direct experience of your
conditioning, your concepts. What you think is what you become.
It is not your fault. This is not to blame anybody for anything.
But it really is time to wake up. It is time for you to recognize
the real power of this existence.
Someone recently sent me a poem that says the Absolute is just dreaming
all of existence. The Hindu says this is Maya, illusion.
Christianity says "This is your proving ground, the place where
you prove your love for God by suffering, by being obedient."
The Buddhist says, "Get out of your mind; it is all mind anyway.
Once you get out of your mind, you will be free." Vedanta
says, "Not this, not that."
All of these systems and structures are indicating that "This
is not it." It is subtle. To say "It is all
the oneness," is nice. It is true. But who cares?
So it is all the oneness, so it is the Absolute; that is not the
point.
Some physicists now say the ground of all existence is little squiggly
strings. So what? You don't care about the squiggly
strings that make you. You care about the life that you are
living. You care about your existence.
Any system or structure that advocates that you forget about your
existence and just wait for some better life, some better time,
some other place, is really anti-Life. It is advocating the
destruction of this planet. And so far I haven't found anybody
that is saying otherwise.
No matter what you think or believe or what you conceive of, you
really must begin to listen to what you are saying. You must
begin taking responsibility for your words. No matter what
kind of authority you have, no matter what you know or think you
know, no matter what the lineage, none of that matters one bit!
LIFE matters, and you are Life, therefore you matter.
I am not concerned
with teachings. I am not concerned with religions, spiritual
disciplines, "other." I am concerned with Life,
and only Life.
I coined the term "The Consciousness" to help provide
a bridge for people from the ego-creation of God, the "other,"
to the all-inclusive Is-ness that is Life, that is you.
It doesn't matter that you are the oneness. It matters that
you are a unique expression of the oneness. We emphasize
the oneness and unity, not realizing that it is the unique expression,
you, that is the important component. YOU. Your Life,
your expressing, your ability to live, which have been hampered
by conditioning, hypnosis, beliefs, and concepts which get
plenty of press. There is plenty of validation out there for
the "other." But when you wake up from the conditioned,
illusionary, separative beliefs and concepts, you awaken into the
unique expression of The Consciousness that you are, and that is
what is important.
So it is really time for you to take back your Life, even though
you may not know you have given it away. If what others
say deters you from being who you are, you need to take back
your life. If you have altered yourself, going against your
unique beingness, Is-ness, in order to fit in to society or system,
you need to take back your Life. If you are in a relationship
that isn't working, and you keep not being you, trying to make it
work, you need to take back your Life. If you have beliefs
and concepts and religion that are making you subservient, controlled,
expectant of something later on, you need to take back
your Life. If you are following various teachers, systems,
philosophies, beliefs, spiritual paths that are not pointing you
to the Self that you are, you need to take back your Life.
If you live in fear of the past, of what-was, you need to take back
your Life. If you can't move on, you need to take back your
Life.
Yes, it is scary. First, you didn't know that you had given
away your Life. You had an expectation that the system was
the way to get your Life. It is very subtle.
Life is not a stagnant, conditioned arena. Life is alive and
flowing and changing. Get used to it. If you really
want to live, you will be changing. If you really want to
be the unique expression of The Consciousness, you will have to
drop everything that says you are not. Surrender, let go,
leave it behind, forget about it.
I know it is difficult. When you start seeing how conditioned
you are, how much hypnosis is running your Life, it is a fearful
experience. But there is a way out. The way out is to
take back your Life. Stop letting others tell you who you
are. Stop permitting others to dictate how you are supposed
to be. I say this with some caution. There have been
many who have been so conditioned to violence that they may hear
this and say, "OK, I'm going to kill a bunch of people.
That's who I am." Not!
There are certain attributes of Life that are important to
realize. One of the major attributes of Life is cooperation.
Life is a cooperative enterprise; it would not be where it is if
it hadn't been cooperative. There is an absolute inter-dependency
on the whole of Life cooperating. Religions, spiritual disciplines,
beliefs and concepts are non-cooperative. They are the adversary
of existence because they say "This is not it."
There is a sense of rightness to Life. There is no corresponding
sense of wrongness. This sense of rightness stands by itself;
it is not a polarity or duality. There is a way to be in this
world where you remain in step with Life, taking each step as it
is there, being realized in each moment as the Self, as the unique
expression of The Consciousness, free of hypnosis, free of conditioning,
free of beliefs, living on purpose, because you have taken back
your Life.
It is really about the brain. Most people think it is about
some spiritual soul or entity or something like that. Life
is about the brain, developing the brain to be more, to live in
connection and harmony and balance as-it-is, not as you want it
to be or expect it to be, but as it is. When you really look
at Life-as-it-is, the unique-expression-that-you-are will come up
with novel solutions in being, if it is not hampered by beliefs
and concepts.
It is easy to believe that you are not conditioned. It is
easy to believe that you don't have any beliefs. "Other
people have beliefs; what I hold is the truth." But every
one of you has come from conditioning. You are born in conditions.
You are conditioned from day one, and the conditioners around you
are very often not aware that they are conditioners.
The world is conditional. Life is unconditional. How
could that be? How could the world be conditional, and Life
unconditional? Well, Life is an opportunist. Life takes
advantage of every situation: it puts to use everything, even the
conditioning. But there is a movement in Life that awakens
humanity from the hypnosis, the conditioning. So Life
offers ample opportunity to awaken to existence, to Life, to The
Consciousness.
You can get to the place where it really doesn't matter what people
believe about anything, it really doesn't matter what people are
teaching or saying or doing. You recognize that there are
but two conditions in this world: there are those who
live as the Self, and there are those who escape the Self.
That is all there is. So if you are not living as This,
if you are not being This, allowing This, embracing This, you are
the "other" and you are escaping This.
The world has provided you with many beautiful escapes. They
call it "enlightenment," or nirvana, or heaven, or drugs.
People don't like it when I put all of those in the same category,
but they are the same.
To live without exceptions, to live in honesty, to face the Self
that you are, this unique expression of The
Consciousness that you are, is to squeeze through this little
tiny aperture through which nothing else can fit. Beliefs
and concepts are too big to go through it. The essence of
the Self is very tiny, the "thumb-sized being" as the
Hindus say, but it is the most powerful aspect in the universe.
It is all that you need. All you need is presence, and being
with what-is, and you start seeing, you start recognizing how your
thoughts have created your realities, how your beliefs control your
life.
Those who don't have any beliefs, those who don't partake
of any spiritual systems, disciplines, structures or way-of-being
are happier. They are living with what-is.
We live on this
planet, and because we do, we have a responsibility to every form
of life on this planet. We have a responsibility to find the
connections in Life. We have the responsibility. That
is not a bad word: "responsibility" simply means "responding
with ability." When you recognize your True Nature, you
also have the ability to respond to Life.
I know you may think this is oversimplified. It is not.
This may be confusing to you because it is against your programming;
it conflicts with your beliefs. But if you can be still and
allow, you will find you begin to resonate with it. You will
find that you have given away your life; you have done so with good
intentions, but nevertheless, you have given away your life.
It is time to take back your Life.
This has happened in very subtle ways. Fear, doubt, resistance,
attachment--these are all energy hooks that keep you disempowered.
I have read about awakenings of various individuals. In that
process of gaining so-called "enlightenment," one awakens
from the "illusion," the Maya of the world, and somehow
recognizes the Absolute. It is believed that at that point
the mind shuts down, the false begins to disappear, one escapes
the past because the past is illusion; it didn't happen. One
transcends the world, and may recognize the lie of the world.
One is quite relieved that one really is the Absolute just dreaming
all this mess. It's really nice: you are just dreaming this
mess. People aren't really dying, or starving to death, or
killing each other, or destroying the planet. People really
aren't. Nice, isn't it? No responsibility--which is
no ability to respond to Life. Don't you see how disabling
that is?
What has been sought after as enlightenment has been disablement.
It has truly disabled people to be in this world without being of
it.
You are the world. You are Life. You are happening.
You may be conditioned in certain ways, but that is all right too.
You are the world; you are happening.
My awakening was quite different. I awoke to (and the only
words I heard were) "It is all alright." The awakening
didn't banish anything, didn't throw anything out. It just
said, "It is alright." That meant that my life as
it was, as it is, is alright. That was my illumination.
It was a beginning step, because I saw that I would have to LIVE
"alright." I would have to be alright. I would
have to teach all right. Most importantly, I would have to
exemplify all right, because I realized that no one is going to
want to believe this. Everyone has gone to the moon looking
for something else, while I am here saying "Here it is, right
here."
I've noticed in the accounts of awakening that "This isn't
it; this is just illusion; get over it." I awoke to "This
IS it. Live with it." How? By taking responsibility
for Life, recognizing the years of conditioning, beliefs and
concepts under which I had labored, the striving I'd done, the mistakes
that I had made. Because it is all right I knew, and still
know, that the highest good is always taking place.
When you are able to be present with what-is, you really transcend
the boundaries of time and space; you are inclusive. You bring
everything into the arena, and you begin to catch a glimpse of a
bigger picture. I am not concerned for my immediate life.
I am concerned for 10,000 years. What effect am I going to
have for 10,000 years?
Maybe it is OK to just turn my back when there are teachings that
are derogatory toward Is-ness and Life and Being, that are limiting,
that are destructive, that are distorting, that are discouraging,
that are preaching "This isn't it; there is something else
that is better."
"This" becomes "better" as you involve yourself
wholeheartedly and completely in it moment by moment. That
is true liberation, because there is nothing to be liberated from.
It doesn't matter if your life is in shambles; you didn't realize
that you had given your life away to beliefs and concepts and systems.
"Everybody is doing it, so it must be right."
There is something weird about humans: If something is ancient,
it is revered; if it is new, it is rejected.
Life builds upon itself. The brain creates neural
pathways building upon experiences. When one is really
direct in these experiences, there is a realization that occurs.
Life is This, being with what-is. And later on you may even
start liking what-is, being comfortable with what-is. You
may even get to the point where you like yourself. You may
realize, "Oh, I'm not such a bad person after all; I just bought
the systems, the beliefs, the concepts, and so I thought I was bad."
But really, there is a heart of gold, there is a purity that was
always present. It was just so buried in all the muck that
you couldn't find it; it couldn't be seen.
Being present with what-is, is taking your life back. Yes,
there is stuff that happened to you and to others. But when
you look at that stuff you recognize that it happened in a state
of ignorance, deception, lies and illusions.
Life has happened, your life has happened, because it could.
You can live powerlessly, giving your life away, or you can start
taking your Life back. If you start taking your Life back,
then you find that when you hear the news media predicting doom,
you say, "Wait a minute? Who says?" Don't be afraid
to disagree.
If you look and you see where all these conditions, beliefs and
concepts are going to wind up, you will be the first one on your
block to disagree. Human existence is getting deeper and deeper
into a pit. It is ignoring those little warning bells, those
little "what ifs?", those "Wait a minute? Who says?"
So wake up, and take back your Life. Be in the process of
taking back your Life. Let the proof of Life be in the living
of Life, the direct
experience of Life, because when you do that, you recognize
the conditioning, the beliefs and the concepts that have altered
your experience. You start clearing things out. You
throw out the old stuff to make room for the new. It is happening
in the brain.
The brain is not limited to that mass in the head. The whole
body is a part of the brain, and it is in constant connection
with the rest. Communication is happening, moment by moment.
But if you are busy talking to yourself, limiting yourself, reprimanding
yourself, judging yourself, you miss what is actually happening.
There is great inspiration and hope. There is light.
There is awareness. There are greater possibilities when you
get unstuck, when you take back your Life.
In taking back your Life you begin to know that you are. You
recognize that unique expression of The Consciousness that you are,
and you find places of balance and harmony. You find places
of cooperation, where you can truly be Life, living on purpose,
living in connection and awareness, beyond systems or structures,
beliefs or concepts, you live Life as Life, as The Consciousness,
moment by moment. top
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