Choose Again

throwing a bucket of paint through the air

I find lately that if I have anything to say, it's so ridiculously difficult to put into words that I seem to lose the desire to say anything at all! I wanted to say "redonkulously" because redonkulous seems to capture the essence a bit more accurately.

If I could say one thing to everyone out there reading, it is this: There is nothing wrong with you. There actually cannot be anything wrong with you.

A friend told me the other day that her daughter took a self-defense course in which the teacher said that one great way to disarm an attacker is to say something completely unexpected. So instead of screaming, "No! Please don't hurt me!" or "Help!", you scream ARE YOU HERE TO WATER THE PLANTS!?

The incongruity breaks the spell, or might, and gives you a moment to break away. What is being broken is the mindless story the attacker is telling himself about what is happening and what he wants to happen. He is mesmerized by the dream of his own story, and the illogical thought sequence makes him stop momentarily and say, wait, what? It introduces a moment of enforced mindfulness in which he realizes that you are not participating in his dream-reality. This is disorienting momentarily, and then of course, enraging. So you really have to slip away during the brief disorientation phase.

To a human being, the one truly incongruous thing you can say is "Everything is exactly as it should be!" This is because in the human dream, nothing is as it should be.

Yet when we succumb to the sense that nothing is as it should be it's just a failure of attention. It is what happens when we begin to be carried away by the thoughts in our minds as though they were true statements about reality. Below the layer of noisy thought—below, above, between it—is the silence in which they occur. Direct your attention to that silence.

Without the thought that something is wrong, nothing is wrong. When you bestow your attention upon a thought that causes suffering, and you ride along with it, you intensify its existence. We are lazy about where we place our attention and our attention is extremely powerful.

It takes no effort at all to continue to suffer. Suffering is the lowest common denominator. It does take some effort to move your attention away from the loudest, most prevalent sensory experience to that in which it is occurring. This is how you break the spell.

the wrapper

One thing that's kind of hard to get your mind around if you aren't having the experience of it on a regular basis and really, who does, is the idea that we all share a self. This isn't something that the thinking mind can understand. But it can misunderstand it mightily and I thought I'd try to correct some of the misunderstandings, or at least point them out. Come at it through the back door, so to speak.

The idea of the individual self is looked upon with disdain in spiritual circles. One is not supposed to have an individual self and perhaps people try to understand that the individual self doesn't exist and try to pretend that they themselves don't exist... I don't know. There seems to be a lot of variety of interpretation around this point.

But the truth is that the "I Am," MY I am, and YOUR I am, are the same. We have the same experience of I Am. Not the same in detail or coloration or nuance perhaps, but at the root, yes, the exact same experience. This is a shared self. As has been said, there is only One of us here.

And yet the glory of this experience of oneness is that YOU are not diminished by the understanding. You are partaking of the shared self completely, and yet the self you identify with as a human—the wrapper—the body—with all its wacky intimate tendencies and habits—that you, although temporary and illusory, also exists as a perceivable self. Only THAT self is not real.

It's not real, and yet it's there, like the you in a dream. It's there, and yet what is saying "I am" is not that. Not the wrapper. Not the body. What is saying I am is the same as everyone else's self.

Rather than being kind of a bummer, or a feeling of loss, this understanding of oneness is accompanied by an increased, rather than decreased, feeling of existence. You exist in a larger gestalt, rather than the tiny isolated one of the body-you. Believing that the individual body-you is all you are is painful.

On the other hand, experiencing the big You, the shared You, is a riotously joyous experience. It's a feeling that your entire nature, everything you are made of, is good news. It's not a somber spiritual experience that only a few can have. It's your true nature and mine. Everyone's. The same.

Yet the little "yous"—the human wrappers with all their funny differences—are not bad. There's nothing bad there. It's like a virtual self—like an experiment—and there's great beauty in it. It's very poignant. It's a wrapper around a tiny bit of what you actually are. It's like we are pretending that we are only our big toes.

And as this motley collection of big toes we have the opportunity to love each other. Quelle surprise! It's a wonderful thing. Of course, if we remembered Who we truly are, we'd love each other automatically. But the forgetting gives it an interesting twist. The forgetting adds suffering into the mix. A very interesting and awful twist.

of mountains, pencils, calculators and party games

Let's say you were born a few hundred years ago in a large, fertile valley surrounded by extremely tall mountains that were so difficult to climb and so inhospitable that no one had ever successfully escaped the valley, except by death.

Not in your lifetime, but perhaps in the lifetime of your great grandmother, or just existing in the sagas that were told at night during evening work, were tales of people who had seen the exotic world on the other side of the mountains. No one living had ever been there, or known anyone who had, so really it was just an ongoing story in your collective minds, which were shaped completely by the only things you could say for sure existed: mountains, sky, valley.

This is very much our situation in these bodies, as humans, in this dream of life. And our vocabulary—that which shapes our thoughts—is a function of our situation. We do not have vocabulary for anything else. Everything about our thought processes is limited by the fact of their birth in the dream. Our thought processes only work for the valley. They are a closed system. Our thinking is dream thinking.

Last night I had a dream in which I was trying to tally up an extremely large order I'd received from a good customer. Knowing that she'd gone way overboard in her ordering, I was trying to figure out how much she was paying per piece, thinking that somehow the more she ordered, the less she was paying. We have no volume discounts, so there was no real reason to do this, but in the dream I thought there was.

Because I was not lucid and my thinking was dream-thinking, I was trying to do this by using a dream calculator and by writing things down with a dream pencil on a dream piece of paper. If you are at all aware of the ground rules of human dreams, you'll know that one thing you cannot do in a dream is accurately use a calculator or write anything down, because everything you write down and everything you read on the calculator screen keeps changing. In the human dream-world rules, it states that nothing written in letters or numbers remains the same the second or third time you look at it.

However, because I was not lucid, and because my mind was a function of the dream world, I was unsuccessfully engrossed in this exercise for what seemed like a very long time until finally my attention shifted to something else within the dream. Most important in my failure-to-notice was not the fact that the calculator and pencil did not work. My most important failure of attention was that I had created a problem that did not exist and was attempting to solve it.

This is the nature of the spiritual search. We use the mind we have. The mind we have, by its very nature, creates a problem that does not exist. Then we try to solve it. The tools we have at our disposal are our dream minds. They simply do not work. But the most important thing to realize is not that they do not work, but that the problem is not real.

Yet we keep on trying to figure it all out using the same pencil and the same calculator. The more we employ the technologies of the dream, the further into it we go, until we begin to live lives totally obsessed with the details of the dream, combing through them like rag pickers, trying to find something that sparks a feeling of recognition.

We need to stand up straight and have some self-respect and question the premise of the problem. The ego loves to send us on wild goose chases. The ego is the dream mind. It wants to keep you entangled in problems that don't exist, and keep you turning towards it for solutions until your life is over and you have spent the whole thing within the dream.

And yet, this in itself is also not a problem. The only problem is suffering. When you were a kid and you played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, you weren't really worried about the fact that you were wearing a blindfold. You knew that eventually the blindfold would be removed, and that the donkey's tail was not a real goal.