Trying to make it better

Is trying to make it better the core problem? Is covering it up with encouraging words or pills the best way? What is the alternative? What about keeping death as a close companion and letting him decide what is worth trying to make better. I think he would say, "live your life, I'm coming when you least expect it"

Here's what death does

Death makes you look at yourself and go, "What the fuck am I doing?"  Death looks at your problems and makes you realize you never even knew what that word means. Death makes words dissolve and leaves you with experience. Death is the only way to glimpse what love is. Death takes a color sitting on the floor and makes it dance. Death makes you realize that memory is worthless and the future will never find you. Death makes every song the most beautiful, every taste the sweetest, every vision sparkle, and every breeze feel the coolest. Death looks at your complaints with disbelief.  Death shows you that you have never before used your senses.

Death makes you understand for the first time what life is.

Death is speaking, but we don't listen

Why do we live as if we are not about to die? Do we pretend in every moment that there isn't a chance that death is not a breath away? Death is in fact the great unknown. But we know it follows us, stalks us, but yet it as if we have completely decided to ignore it and live these mundane, nothing lives. Instead of turning around and facing the fact that, yes indeed, we will die, we walk hand in hand with fear. We listen to fear, breathe fear, and do fear's bidding in each moment that death is not recognized as a real and true presence. The irony here is that we are treating fear with the utmost respect and authority where it deserves none and has none. Fear is the illusion, death is the reality. There is no meaning to life other than death. And what is death constantly trying to say to us, but yet we ignore it? Death says to us constantly and insistently, "Live."

"Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people." ~ Khalil Gibran

Selfishness

Let's talk about selfishness. It is the most ridiculous notion that could be created. To accuse someone of being selfish means that you are saying to that person that they did not act in a manner which considered your feelings or that seemed motivated towards their own interests. What does that even mean? Isn't the act of telling someone that they have behaved selfishly confirming your own selfishness? Now, let's say that I acted in a way that seemed to the other person as being unselfish. I really considered their feelings and maybe even put my own desires aside for such a purpose. If I did so what exactly are my desires then? It would seem that my desires were to act unselfishly to benefit the other person, but am I not seeking to benefit the other person for my own purposes? Was that not my own selfish intention that is being over-looked? There is no difference whatsoever between acting selfishly and acting unselfishly. Charity workers, gift givers, Mother Theresa. They behave exactly as they wish to behave. To define selfishness is pure absurdity disguised as "proper moral behavior"  The inner-workings of fear…One of fear's favorite pastimes is putting lipstick on a pig.  Wipe off the makeup and get real.

Destruction

"The day man experienced the consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to the other forms of life, at that moment he began sowing the seeds of his own destruction."  ~ U.G. Krishnamurti

Love??

O.K. gang. It's morning and time for work. Wakie Wakie. Do you really think your parents loved you? Shit, I think I hit the wrong button here..... How could they? Did they even know what love was? Did they love themselves? You have beliefs that you adopted from them and want to keep them because you trusted your parents. I cannot think of a less compelling reason than trusting your parents as a basis for taking on their beliefs. Am I attacking parents?... of course. They don't have a clue about love, no idea whatsoever. Did a parent ever define what it even is? If you really get down and dirty, how can a dream character truly love a dream character? A little comfort and a hug feel good, but 'love'? They had/have no idea. They were driven by their own demons and taught what love is by their parents who had even less of an idea. Need, desires, sex, companionship, security, yes, they are much more likely the motivators but not love. Just look at how many lies they told you. Would you lie to a person that you truly loved? What kind of love would that be? They were doing the very best they could with what they had, that's all that was going on. Do I love you? What would I do, pretend there is a separate you and then devote myself to that illusion? Not worth the effort and a complete delusion. There is no me/you division to begin with.

Thought

I have skirted the edges of the conundrum of thinking and have made cursory statements about it on this blog, but I am ready now to take it on full force. The tricky thing about thinking is that it is the tool that brought me as far as I have come. Thinking was the force that shoved my nose in my own shit and made me realize the pervasive nature of fear and how I have allowed it to dictate my life. Thinking showed me all of the lies that I was unwilling to face until I got honest and really thought about things. Thinking is what showed me how I was wrapped up in the illusion of other people's perception and made me realize that I really don't care about what other people think and how it's really none of my business anyway.

But now that I have come to the point where I now realize that thinking is also a large cloud that fogs up the mind. Thinking takes you only so far. It's like the saying about using a ladder to climb to heaven. The ladder was crucial for making the journey, but what is the benefit of carrying that ladder around after you have climbed it? The same goes for thought. Thought is a tool that is valuable beyond measure, but it is also a tool that is wielded by the ego and used to continue the illusory perception of identity and separation.

It took me awhile to see this, although there have been signs pointing me in this direction all along. But it takes clear seeing. Kind of like advice. Does anyone really ever take anybody else's advice? It takes you having to see things for yourself before it sinks in and makes a difference. At least that is how it has always worked for me. People could tell me things until they were blue in the face, but until I saw it for myself, it never made much difference. The same goes for this blog. It doesn't make any sense to someone unless they have experienced it, so the reading of it by another really isn't of much value. But it is helpful in the fact that it shows you that something else exists. I would have never done any of this had I not realized there might be something else out there.

So things have gone relatively slowly for me (hence the lack of postings) and it took me a bit to understand what was happening. But what has been happening is the dawning of the fact that I need to let thought go. It serves little purpose and only causes me to cut things up and label things as good or bad or boring, etc. etc. What I am done with is the whole business of judging anything. I am weary of it and need it gone. Thought isn't going to do anything for me at this point and it's time to sweep it away. It's a tough realization considering that I have always considered myself a thinker and have reaped the benefits of thought for quite awhile. But now here I am, a place where experience and happening and recognizing my own lack of free will. Thought is now a tool that presents the illusion of free will and that can only cause frustration.

For many people and certainly for me at times, thought is hell. It is the borderland that separates us from our own nature. It walls out life and cuts up experience into pieces that are then held up and judged by a force that has no real power to judge. The act of judging anything has always the same purpose: to keep separate. To claim that there is a "me" and there is an "out there" out there, which is the only source of pain and suffering that exists.

So how is thought going to go? It probably won't quietly step out of the picture. It will linger off and on, but through the desire to release it, it will go. What will replace it is what has always been there. The energy of life that guides everything. Thinking about it doesn't stop it or reverse that force anyway, so why bother?