WHY THESE ARTICLES AND BOOKS?
"It's one thing to study war,
it's another to live the warrior's life."
-Telamon of Arcadia 5th BC-
Ah autumn in New York! The leaves changing, people planning Thanksgiving and Christmas, summer memories lingering in…ok, I don't live in New York. I live in Canada, but it is autumn and my opening did create a nice mental picture didn't it? That is what this article is all about, mental images. In fact if we look closely, all we will ever see about the world and ourself is just that- a mental image. Everything, even the thing called "me" is nothing but a mental image, an imagined thought. The spiritual journey for all of us begins with the hope that all of our practices will get us somewhere. We are a bundle of hope. It might be for peace, freedom from pain, saving the world, being important and powerful- but it's there. The end of the spiritual journey comes when we see that there is no hope, and no hope of finding hope. That's the good news. Eventually when all of our seeking leads to failure after failure, we see that nothing in the dreamstate is going to help us find what we are is the abyss.
Probably one of the weirdest things about becoming and enlightened guy (or girl, or giraffe, or limestone block) is simply this- the realization that all we believed to be real: world, self, mind- are not real at all. There is only the appearance of things, not things themselves. They are just masks the truth wears, so to speak. Thus there is no importance to anyone or anything that happens. Yet upon awakening the enlightened character is still here, and here looks remarkable the same as it was before waking up. The dream doesn't dissolve, it just becomes clear. There is only one truth and one understanding, and everyone or anything who gets there will find the very same truth. How it is presented varies definitively. What I hope to do is show it is a journey of success and failures. And that we can not quit, too much is riding on our continuing "the fight." Ok, there is nothing really to fight, but is sure seems that way for a while.
Enlightenment is a big fancy word that confuses people. Most get into the enlightenment game having a false belief of what it is and attempting to obtain "that," sold by spiritual teachers for big money at workshops, satsangs or basking in their presence. I will only describe what I have found and then you can do what you want with it. If you want to hold onto your fairy tale world of what being awake means, stop reading now and go back to your little life and make yourself a better and happier person. If you choose to keep reading, don't bitch or complain some time later because your fairy tale bubble was burst. You have been warned. Awakening talk is following, and it ain't all peaches and cream.
Enlightenment sounds far greater and more important than it actually is. In fact being enlightened makes a person ordinary and insignificant. Anyone who says any enlightened person is special, including Buddha or Jesus, have missed the point. For example, Christianity and Buddhism are two of the worst paths to try and wake up because these religions have made these guys into supermen or gods. Assuming they actually existed, they were not supermen or gods, just awake. Imagine a group starting Howdieism right now! I guarantee you they would not see me as any kind of superman or god, but some smart-assed, sometimes confused person who looks and acts similar to the guy they remember before the change. I want to be clear that I don't want to say that I am enlightened or truth realized or anything else. Maybe I am or not, who cares? What did happen after the death was the complete understanding of what the ancient texts who spoke of Realization of True Nature really meant. So I want to share that "understanding."
The greatest myth perpetuated in spiritual circles is that the human being is enlightened, and thus somehow becomes special or super-human, god-like. The human being will get nothing from realization, other than know that what it is, is God. There is a sort of benefit, but it is not what you think. The human being is killed and the Absolute takes its place. Many may claim that they as a person are enlightened, but that is another form of disguised illusion. Being special is in the realm of the ego. For the seeker this creates confusion, for who is or is not enlightened? Thus the seeker must do the work themselves to separate truth from non-truth, and you are not going to take your bullshit beliefes with you.
All beliefs are false and are the building blocks of the ego (false self). There is Universal Truth, What Is, whether you want to believe it or not. This the same for everyone and everything, and is the only thing that really had any substance. One wants the truth, not to uphold a tradition or what someone else said. You have one job and one job only: believe nothing anyone tells you, and go check it out for yourself. Jesus and Buddha were just ordinary guys who got tired of all the bullshit. If they can do it, so can you.
"Who am I?
That is the great puzzle."
Alice in Wonderland
The warrior is one who will fight a battle within in order to awaken fully to truth. You are Horus, you are Arjuna, you are Jesus, you are Cinderella and until you realize these aren't stories of gods or fairy tales but about you, then those stories will have no use in your life. ONe you realize they are metaphoric roadmaps to Freedom, you can get on your horse and ride with them, not be shackled by them. However, we don't know what the truth really is, so a warrior goes looking for false, finds it, and kills it, never thinks about it again. Then keeps going. Whether the false is within or without makes no difference to the warrior. Truth, whatever it is, is all that matters. If you want the truth, the false must go no matter how nice the false is, or how attached you are to it, or how much you love it. False is false. The only way you are going to get to truth, is over false's dead body.
The answer to "who am I" is not found in lineage, a guru, meditation, satsang nights or kissing lotus felt. It is about the battle of cutting through all the bullshit to find out what's left. It is getting after your deep psychological and emotional stuff. It is not about re-ordering your mind, or making it more positive, but to shatter the mind. Blow it up and see what's left, and the only way you can do that is to get down and dirty. The process is about seeing your fear, and willingly walking into that fear not running away from it. In fact to sink into fear. Look at any fear long enough and hard enough and you will see it never existed and never will. Only thought and emotion, the structure of the false self, can keep it running. Walking into the fear is shining a light on it, shine a light on any darkness and it will dispel it as though it weren't there. Of course shine your light on anything in the dream state, and you will find it was never there.
You are either realized or you are not, with a mind that has varying level of awakeness in the dreamworld. Realizing your true nature is not about doing anything, it is about realizing. In fact the more you walk towards it, the farther you will get. The key part of the student's task is to reveal the illusion of reality and the mind. Most importantly to ask the question, "What is me?" could that be a lie too? The actual first glimpse of the Absolute Truth will be such great shock that it kills many, and makes insane much of the rest. To be prepared for that shock one must have a great reserve of energy, stored power to handle the onslaught of what oneness means. Thus job one for the student is to learn the process of energy and how to store more of it. And that requires some work. With the extra energy you can being to explore mind and reality in a very deep way, and not be "knocked" over by what you find because of the extra energy.
"I am teaching you these principles,
not with the hope you will memorize them,
but with the hope you will practice them."
-Carlos Castaneda-
Like everyone, when I started my life was a mess but I never realized how much of a mess it was. For a while my life became even more of a mess, but only by staying with the commitment can we finally go beyond the mess. To do so is hard work, not because it's hard, but because each and every being suffers from the force of their delusions, especially the main delusion of self\.I. The main attributes required are honesty, courage, and commitment. Honesty to look at the truth of the way we have been living, often for the first time, courage to not run from what we may find, and commitment to not stop until we know. The process is not fun. Most spiritual people do not have enough courage and honesty to examine their garbage.
Everyone inherently feels that the truth of themselves is so frightening they will simply choose a monotonous, boring life full of everything but their inner truth. They will look for any distraction to assure they will not have to be still long enough to hear the sound of the void. Western society itself has been designed with one purpose in mind, to provide a constant distraction to keep our internal dialogue active and the search for truth stopped. Religion is one of the world's great distracters. Most spiritual practice is just to give one the feeling they are moving forward and finding something, when in fact they are just standing still. They will search for a teaching that promises them something nice, that will make everyone happy. They fool themselves into thinking this must be the truth without looking to verify it. They just stop.
All of my teachers claimed that I had to realize that what I thought the world was, and who I thought I was, was a giant lie. It became part of my task to reveal the illusion of reality. You are not everything, that is a mistaken mystical thought. Rather everything is a projection "from" you, including "you."
"Most shamans believe they are already dead because they have been so close to death at least once in their life that they have little to fear."
Martin Prechtel
I myself followed a more shamanic method back in the late 90's, which was interspersed with Zen, Hermeticism and Egyptian practice. Along with the co-practice of dreaming, I undertook the personal practice of stalking the self. I began by simply recording my thoughts, for how could I know what I was thinking without a record of what's in there. It is sort of like scouting the opposition football team before the big game. The better you scout, the better prepared you are for its trick plays. I also instigated the practice of recapitulation (life review) where every single moment of our "story" gets dissected. It releases energetic bonds, drops influences of the past, lets us see our energy wasting habits and patterns, and most importantly pushes our awareness to the energy body to see hidden events that mind forgot or pushed aside.
Wtih the energy from that and Qi Gong, I began to examine the world around me and began to see it was not like i had believed it was. An outside force had come and given humans a parasitic mind that turned us into zombies or sheep with the sole purpose of feeding the parasite. So good was the manouver, most people could not even be suggested as to its possability. WhenI saw the movie the Matrix I realized, that this movie is showing symbolically exactly what is happening here. Somewhere along the way came the idea, "what would happen if I shattered my mind?" Blew up the parasite. What would be left, who would I be? So I followed the practices of not-doing to shake up every habit and routine, thus jumble my mind from its normal standard beliefs and ideas. Once you break an action you are no longer classifiable to mind, and mind gets scared. Eventually my mind "blew a fuse," and I began to see the reality that I had always been conditioned to believe was stable and real, was in fact not so stable and real. It reminded me more of a computer simulation, and that's when you begin to freak out. The not-doing was fun until the freak out stage. At that point mind returned with it's A-game, my biggest fears and hopes to pull my attention from where I was headed (void, abyss, no-self) and back on the dreamstate. This happened a number of times in the course of a few years, but "I" drifted further away each time, and mind had to work harder to get "me" back and under control. But the abyss is devoid of fear and devoid of hopes, as long as you have either- your missing the key to open the door.
The toughest part of this period was interaction with the rest of the world. Who could I tell? Who would believe me? "Hey Howdie what did you do on the weekend?" "Oh I sat on the ground for 36 hours and stared at a tree until it disappeared then re-appeared as a medieval castle, or that politcian he's not really a human being, he's from another dimension and his job is to keep humans as food." So it became a real challenge of how to act around people during this stage, and I am sure a few of the readers are going through this in their own way now. At one point I was actually crazy, nuts. I hid it from everyone, but inside I was whacked. Nothing stable remained. The only person I told was a Korean Zen master I had worked with. A student of his responded with an email, "He thinks you're going crazy, but he also thinks it's funny. He suggested just taking a break from practice and chill out for a while." The crazy period subsided, and a more clear state took its place. But that crazy period is part of it, the trick is learn not to run from it, but not let it swallow you up. Those you see pushing shopping carts and talking to themselves had a glimpse, a real glimpse of the absolute- but had no help to avoid the trap it can cause. The same Zen master later sent me a note that read, "Unless you go crazy, you will never find God."
Then comes death.I had many small deaths over the last 15 years, and no death is fun. I will talk about some of them in these articles. Then after all the years of practice, effort and sacrifice- a great event happened that could not be tied to any practice at all. I fell into a deadly canyon near a raging waterfall. There was no way out, and "I" accepted sure death. There was simple acceptance of dying and of a wanting to have good seats to see it. Then something strange happened, I got out. Even now I have no idea how I fell in, or got out. But the "me" that fell in was not the "me" who came out. That was a few years ago and I still have no idea who this "me" is, and I've quit trying to look! It was a dramatic event to realize that "we" the little human being is never in control of anything, never choosing anything. Only mind makes us think we are. Once that is gone we will see the lie of free will, along with other lies like separateness or something is wrong. We will see we are just video characters, robots, playing in a dream world where all is predetermined and perfect.
From the standpoint of the Absolute Reality I found, there was nothing I had ever had to do, just be an idiot and fall into the canyon. Yet in time I also saw how the years of practice and smaller deaths (and crazy periods) along the way contributed to this event. The committed practice will not take you TO a glimpse, and yet it will. Paradoxical! All the ego deaths and pain form had to suffer along the way, were ways of loosening up the holds of ego to break it down enough so that it would be ready when given the right circumstances (certain physical death) that it would let go and I could die without any grasping. I was happy in fact to be dying, not fighting for any more time, simply observing the amazing process of death. But as Richard Rose asks, "Who dies, what dies?" I'm careful now not to say what will or will not take someone to an "ah-ha" moment, Real paradoxical.
"For I and no one else will be the witness and the watcher."
-Virgin and the World-
-Early AD Hermetic Text-
Everyone has the mistaken belief that awakening experiences, glimpses of the Absolute are nice and pleasant (beauty, love, light, whatever). Mystical experiences, exploring the dream, are often nice and pleasant. Going beyond the dream is about death, the death of everything that you believe is real (which of course is everything). And that is not fun for the ego, but downright terrifying. One should not come back from a glimpse full of love and compassion- but they should be spooked and freaked out. But the next stage after a glimpse demands commitment too, if just not to stop and run away from the whole goofy mess. But it won't happen for you Until like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, you are ready to put everything on one spin of the roulette wheel. And you can't hold onto anything as out of play: not your wife, your kids, your career, your opinions, beliefs or hopes. As long as you have something to lose you will never find the truth. Only when you release and give in to death without grasping to anything, will that drop enough of your armour to get a look at it. Of course while ego must be "killed," you find later it don't kill it. You find it never existed! Thus you spent all your time trying to kill something that was never there. And most that will make you laugh- all the crazy, spooky, creeped out periods get overshadowed with this humour of it all. But the way through it is through the concept of death, that is why the ancient texts and temples had the symbology of death everywhere. It is why many today believe the Egyptians were a death crazy cult. They were, but the death they wanted was the death of the self.
But then something amazing happens. After "you" die, "you" are still here. Ego died, even this great spiritual observer died, but something continued. Then you recognize that the deepest truth is that our truth is their truth. All there ever was, was this one.
Then again, what is there really to lose?