“Say to yourself, ‘I have certain attitudes and ambitions. I also have friends and allies in these attitudes. But what would happen to me if they suddenly withdrew their support of me?’ Do this and you will understand one kind of fear – the fear of standing all alone. But you can stand all alone, which is the only stand having no fear. Stand in the light of your own lamp and see for yourself. Self-discovery is really a lot of fun.”

-Vernon Howard

Once upon a time there lived a woman called Maya in the land of Leela. In this society, children are given small colored rocks to carry around in a sack on their backs. It starts with a small rock which they come to believe represents them.

Over the years, the rocks accumulate and the weight of the sack can become quite uncomfortable.

Maya accumulated her colored rocks just like everyone else. She held her body in various ways and learned to walk with a slow and crooked gait. The pain spread.

People said well this is just the way life is.

Her doctor prescribed medications for pain and depression and that helped for a while. It helped her to get through the days, but the pain would always return.
photo credit: Alan Vernon.

She asked her friends for help. “Get a husband, that’s what you need. Have a normal life, get married, have kids, and work hard, and forget about the pain.”

She did and it only seemed to help for while.

“Go shopping.” “Get involved.” “Eat donuts.” “Have a drink!”

These solutions were only temporary.

A spiritual friend said, “It’s your karma. You have to work off your bad karma. I went to India and lived in an ashram and collected these beautiful rocks of spiritual concepts. Here have some.”

A philosopher said, “This too shall pass. Here have this rock of pithy sayings.”

A friend who was into new age stuff said, “You have to think positively. Ignore the pain. Just think happy thoughts. Think of a luscious green valley with beautiful butterflies and the sound of happy birds, and the universe will provide for you.”

Maya tried all of these various things. For a time, she could pretend away her unease with these solutions. But deep down she knew that collecting more rocks, no matter how beautiful and appealing they seemed, was not the answer. She realized that exchanging and shuffling around rocks of beliefs didn’t change anything.

Maya was a courageous woman and she decided to stop pretending.

What if I just remain present and watch? What if I just allow and feel and observe? Is there a way I can be honest with myself? What if I observe, without trying to figure it out? I will observe my thoughts and emotions and sensations in my body. I will not judge or ignore or recoil or pretend.

Soon, Maya realized that avoiding pain was avoiding healing. And soon, she realized that lightening her burden was as easy as chucking away the rocks on her back.

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“I might as well tell you right at the start of this talk that
you’re not living your own life and I want you to listen to the
talk tonight so that you can get a start on living from who you
really are. You’re living from who you are not now, whether you’re
aware of it or not. You don’t have any true strength inside of you,
anyone can do anything, and that is no way to live. And doesn’t
this make sense what I’m going to say next. Regardless of the
endless anxiety and the deep wounds and the scars, regardless of
how many you’ve collected, isn’t it about time you stopped? Isn’t
it about time that you see through the enemy called suffering?”

-Vernon Howard

The question is why is it that we humans are not comfortable with ourselves? Why do we feel uneasy and dissonant? Most of us feel this as unease and difficulty and discontent and depression. In the more extreme states, this manifests as cruelty and genocide and all that we consider evil and bad in our species.

When we are open we can see that the core of most spiritual and religious traditions and the mystics through the ages point to the truth that the basic problem is our deep identification with thoughts. By thoughts, I mean everything that is mind-created: thoughts, beliefs, emotions, embodied patterns, fears and so on.

Through certain practices, such as being present and being aware and letting go, we can see through this.

That’s easy enough to understand, especially for those who have suffered and are open.

The question then is why is it so hard to put into practice?

Geneen Roth’s book “Women Food Love” is wonderful because it points out that our relationship to food is an exact analogue of our relationship to life. We can understand awakening through understanding our relationship with food.

Eating is a tangible thing that many of us can relate to. Accumulating new beliefs and concepts is like going on a diet. When a person goes on diet, there is some initial excitement because it works. It works because the person is trying and is temporarily aware. There is the insistent energy of the newly-converted. “You have to try this new white-food only diet!”

You might notice that mixed with the excitement is always an underlying fear that this will not last. There is the fear that just a little bit of change, a slight deviation, a life event, will be enough to derail this new-found discipline.

That is the question on my mind these days. What place does discipline have in the practice of awakening?

Self-discipline can be important. There have been many times that some self-discipline has seen me through. For example, when I first started meditating, I felt considerable agitation and discomfort. I worked through it. When we first start any awareness practice, such as observing thought, it can take some reminding and effort and self-discipline to see us through.

And yet, there many other times when self-discipline has worked against me. With self-discipline I can accomplish many things—I can live in the way which I think is best for me. I can develop certain habits, of exercise, sleep, diet, meditation and so on which I believe would be resonant.

When we stop to consider, it’s actually amusingly schizophrenic. Why in the world would we have trouble doing the things which we know are good for us?

It has to do with the fact that what we think is good for us is based on beliefs. It is based on beliefs and concepts derived from learned concepts of self, and what our parents and society and the media have told us, and the patterns which the need for control, approval and security has created in us.

We rush to newly-discovered beliefs—whether it’s the law of attraction or positive thinking or spirituality or a new definition of karma or self-improvement or some pithy saying about relationships we’ve just ingested—we rush to these beliefs and feel pretty sure that this is exactly what we need. But it never lasts, because nothing has really changed. It’s not that the beliefs are right or wrong. It’s just that operating from beliefs and concepts is a constrained way to live. It’s just more of the same old…

This moment, right here and now, is fresh and innocent. And yet, from habit, we bring the entire burden of our past and fears and beliefs and concepts and embodied patterns to bear down hard on the freshness of this moment.

And so, beliefs and self-discipline play a very familiar game of tug-of-war in our heads.

I don’t have an answer here which will satisfy the mind. In fact, the answer I have is decidedly unsatisfying to the mind.

Watch. Allow. Be present. Let go. Develop self-honesty. Let go of concepts and beliefs. With a smile!

Blah-ness. Dryness, emptiness, futility, disengagement. Painful to lift a finger. The opposite of love.

Here’s my description of what depression feels like.

By depression, I mean the mild to moderate clinical illness which has both physical and psychological symptoms and affects mood, thoughts, emotions and level of energy.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Does Awakening overcome depression?

I had episodes of anxiety for twenty years, worsening over time. With this method, anxiety was released in a matter of days. I can say with confidence that anxiety is a thing of the past for me. There are occasions when I  feel the beginnings of anxiety—a jittery sensation in the belly. When I was unconscious, I gave no attention to this physical sensation, and it built up over time into an energetic feedback loop of physical sensations and thought-stories. (All emotions are in fact a feedback loop of thought-stories and body sensations.)  But with instant recognition, I can easily release anxiety before it begins.

Depression is another matter. Anthony de Mello tells a parable of a Zen Master who said: Before enlightenment I was depressed. After enlightenment, I am depressed.

In my experience, depression does not go away as we awaken, but the experience of it is very different. The sense of futility and sadness and desolation goes away. But physical symptoms such as insomnia and low energy can come up. What is very different is my attitude towards these. These show up as simply another experience. There is no fear and no aversion and no attachment. So what remains are physical symptoms and they don’t gell up into that dark morass that we call depression.

Does depression bring about Awakening?

Yes, it does.

I see depression as the first Noble Truth of Buddhism. It is our reaction to the delusion of suffering. Suffering feels very real, but it is brought on by delusion, and this confusion manifests as depression.

Another way to say this is that depression is when we nudge ourselves to awaken.

Yet another way to say this is to say that depression is the way some of us react to the insanity of being identified with  our thoughts and beliefs, separated from who we really are.

Does Awakening bring about depression?

Yes, it’s possible.

Many people report symptoms such as the Dark Night of the Soul, detachment and apathy, while awakening.

Apathy and detachment can come about when we first start waking up from the delusion of the ego. A crisis can also come about when we realize that all our intentions, even our best spiritual intentions, are suffused with the ego.

Feelings of apathy and detachment and desolation are temporary, but they can last a while. I’ve felt apathy and its cousins to varying degrees over a period of two years. When we recognize we are not who we take ourselves to be, we reject many beliefs and ideas and perspectives we’ve long held. Sometimes this is a relief, and intelligence becomes free and easy. Sometimes, it’s confusing and disorienting.

We begin to lose hold of the familiar. Relationships, interests, careers, really just about everything that we use to navigate the world with can change.

We can come to the conclusion that nothing really is important. Why should I care?

The answer is why not? Why shouldn’t I care and engage with experiences?

We don’t have to disengage from the world. We can simply stop seeking completion in the world.

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How can the flux of ions and electrical currents in little specks of jelly the neurons in my brain generate the whole subjective world of sensations like red, warmth, cold or pain?”

-Dr. V. S. Ramachandran

photo credit: Patrick Hoesly

Here, I list some interesting research into consciousness.

The illusion of free will

Benjamin Libet and others have done some experiments which show free will may be an illusion. You are asked to wriggle your finger when you want to while a PET scan is done. The scan shows that you decided to move the finger at the same time that the finger moved. However, a type of EEG potential (called Readiness Potential) consistently shows that the brain gears up, getting ready to move the finger, almost a second before you actually decide to move the finger. So the brain autonomously decides to move the finger and then a second later makes you think that you have decided to move the finger.

Free will is a delusion. The best perhaps that we can do in this particular case is to consciously veto the decision to move the finger (in which case, someone joked, we don’t have free will, we have free won’t). But the decision to veto may be similarly autonomous.

Ok, so we don’t have free will, at least in this particular experiment—that’s bizarre enough, but why has natural selection gone to the trouble of creating a delusion of decision-making? Why is it important to natural selection that we believe that our decisions are not only free-willed but also instantly effect movement?

In another experiment, psychologist Dan Wegner, describes a party game in which a person sits in front of a mirror and someone behind him moves the subject’s arms around. If at the same time the subject hears a tape telling the person how to move his arms, he begins to feel that he is actually in command.

The brain, particularly the left-brain, is pretty skilled at this sort of spin-doctoring.

Autonomous function

A young woman barely survives a car crash, and is left in a “persistent vegetative state.” A team of British and Belgian scientists are astonished to find that despite her outward non-reaction, MRI scans which detect blood flow to active areas of her brain her brain show that her brain responds just as any healthy brain would. They say things to her and the language centers light up; they ask her to imagine moving through her house and the navigation areas of the brain light up. They ask her to imagine playing tennis, and motor control areas light up. It’s as if her brain is fully working, but she is not aware. Or is she?

Blindsight

Patients who have this has damage to certain areas of the brain, and although they can see, they a blind spot in their visual field. They can’t see objects in the blind spot, that is they don’t see it in their mind’s eye. But when asked to point to the object, they accurately point to it. If the object moves, they know it moved. But they can’t see it. This challenges the idea that we are or can be aware of everything that goes on. (Epiphenomenalism.)

Cotard’s syndrome

This is weird one. The patient claims to be dead. He can even smell rotting flesh and feel the crawling of maggots and worms. This may be an exaggerated form of Capgrass syndrome, where many areas of sensing and perception are cut off from the limbic (emotional) center.

Qualia

This is a label for magic. By what process does the flow of chemicals and ions in the brain produce the subjective experience of sensations like warmth and cold and love and green and good and bad and me and awareness? This is the “hard” problem in consciousness research.

Anosognosia: phantoms in the mind

A disorder where a person with a paralyzed limb believes it is still fully functioning.  A very intelligent and lucid patient, who was completely aware that she suffered a stroke, claimed that her non-functioning left arm continued to work. This may have to do with the differences of function between the right and left sides of the brain. It seems the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, will make stories when it is faced with confusing evidence, such as a paralyzed arm. The right side is more accepting.

The fallacy of beliefs, or, the Capgras’ delusion

A highly intelligent, perfectly normal young man is in an accident. He seems to recover completely, except for the one quirk that he is convinced that his mom and dad are impostors. They look and talk and behave exactly like his mom and his dad, but he is convinced they are not. One explanation is that the areas of the brain concerned with visual recognition are intact, but the connection to the limbic system, that is the part where emotions happen, is cut, so that patient’s brain recognizes people, but there is not emotional response, and so there is confusion, and brain’s explanation is that they must be impostors.

Who’s driving?

Most of us have an intuitive feeling that there is an executive “I” running the show in our minds. We have emotions and consciousness and awareness and thoughts, but we also feel that there is a “me” which is somehow more essential and it’s the “me” which is responsible for free-will and discipline and decisions.

Dr. Ramanchandran is prominent brain researcher and here’s what he says

“But what about the self? The last remaining great mystery in science, it’s something that everybody’s interested in – and especially if you’re from India, like me. Now obviously self and qualia are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have free-floating sensations or qualia with no-one to experience it and you can’t have a self completely devoid of sensory experiences, memories or emotions. For example as we saw in Cotard’s syndrome, sensations and perceptions lose all their significance and meaning – and this leads to a dissolution of self.

What exactly do people mean when they speak of the self? Its defining characteristics are fourfold. First of all, continuity. You’ve a sense of time, a sense of past, a sense of future. There seems to be a thread running through your personality, through your mind. Second, closely related is the idea of unity or coherence of self. In spite of the diversity of sensory experiences, memories, beliefs and thoughts, you experience yourself as one person, as a unity.

So there’s continuity, there’s unity. And then there’s the sense of embodiment or ownership – yourself as anchored to your body. And fourth is a sense of agency, what we call free will, your sense of being in charge of your own destiny. I moved my finger.

Now as we’ve seen in my lectures so far, these different aspects of self can be differentially disturbed in brain disease, which leads me to believe that the self really isn’t one thing, but many. Just like love or happiness, we have one word but it’s actually lumping together many different phenomena. For example, if I stimulate your right parietal cortex with an electrode (you’re conscious and awake) you will momentarily feel that you are floating near the ceiling watching your own body down below. You have an out-of-the-body experience. The embodiment of self is abandoned. One of the axiomatic foundations of your Self is temporarily abandoned. And this is true of each of those aspects of self I was talking about. They can be selectively affected in brain disease…”

Is the brain just a wet machine?

We’d like to believe that there is an executive “I” running the show, but is there really? We know that our minds can be pushed around by physical manipulation. Electrodes, surgery, chemicals like caffeine and alcohol and Prozac and LSD, and oxygen deprivation and brain tumors can profoundly affect us.

Synesthesia

Some people have a mixed sense. When they see numbers, they see a haze of specific colors around specific numbers, or they give a color to specific tastes, or they taste specific colors in specific ways. Is this the origin of language, where the mixing of sensations allowed us to associate sounds with shapes and colors? Does synesthesia explain methaphors and poetry and art? Dr. Ramachandran gives an example which shows that we are all synesthesics. Imagine a bulbous, undulating, soft, round thing. Next to it, imagine another thing which is of similar size but has sharp, jagged edges and moves jerkily. One is named Bobo, and the other Kiki. Which is which? Most people say Bobo is the soft, undulating thing.

Is awakening a shift to the right brain?

Listen to this captivating video of Jill Bolte Taylor, who is brain researcher, and describes a left-brain stroke. Does her experience sound like enlightenment?

Closing…

I have great hope for science. Science is clearly based on mind and intellect, and yet I believe it will fuse with awakening, which of course has nothing to with the mind or intellect.

Why?

Well, because both science and awakening are ultimately rational. Neither is based on faith or beliefs. Both ultimately rely on experience.

Science is full of assumptions, though it claims not to be, and the history of science is a history of falling assumptions. The most fundamental assumption in science is that we live in an objective universe in which space and time and matter are fundamental components of reality. This paradigm is cracking with research into consciousness and quantum mechanics. What if the fundamental component of reality is not matter or time or space? What if it is consciousness?

It’s very possible that our brains are not capable of understanding this. I had a very intelligent Doberman. As smart as he was, I know that if I had spent every hour he had teaching him calculus, he would have still blinked dumbly at derivatives and integrals. His brain was simply not configured for that kind of understanding. It’s possible that the human brain can never achieve an understanding of itself, or the universe.

Science breaks the understanding of consciousness into the “easy” problem and the “hard” problem. The easy problem is the correlation between the brain and mental functions. How does the brain process stimulus from the senses, and how does it remember, and how does it signal movement and so on. In a sense, the “easy” problem looks at the brain as a wet machine. It’s called the “easy” problem because scientists believe that with enough funding and time and research, the “easy” problem will be solved.

The “hard” problem is how the brain produces consciousness or self-awareness. How does the brain experience the sheer greenness of the color green? How is it that movement of electric energy inside the brain gives rise to the subjective experience of self-awareness?

Some big names in Consciousness research: Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, David Chalmers, Susan Blakemore,  Steven Pinker, Francis Crick, Peter Russell.

For a person of unsoddened mind, unassaulted awareness, abandoning merit and evil, wakeful,
There is no danger or fear
-Translated by Thanissaro Bhukkhu

Awareness and Release are really the same thing. As awareness grows, we become more and more aware of our patterns and conditioning, and this helps us let go. And as we let go, we become lighter and more aware.

photo credit: J. Tegnerud

Releasing is something we all understand, but it’s not something that is always easy to put in practice. Intellectually, we know that we can allow, watch, be patient, with love, and this can help us let go and heal. That sounds pretty good, but resistance is by definition resistant, and not always easy to discern and let go of.

And yet, the answer is always the same: allow, watch, be patient, do all of this with love, and let go.

And again. And again.

A key to releasing, I believe, is understanding that emotions are made up of thoughts and body sensations. When we experience an emotion, we usually allow our minds to run away with the stories, but if we can stop and allow and look, we see that an emotion is really a bunch of body sensations, to which we have linked certain thoughts.

This is my favorite releasing technique: How to release big and small emotions.

Here is another technique which is a little more meditative:

Get comfortable.

Close your eyes.

Connect with the present. Become aware of your breath.  Become aware of the in and out cycles, the contraction and expansion, the taking and giving, of breathing.

Listen. Listen to the sounds and see that there is no time delay between hearing and sensing. Don’t label, don’t interpret. Just listen.

Allow everything to be as is. Don’t try to achieve a special state. Let go of the meditator. Let go of that special person inside you who judges whether you are doing this right or wrong. Allow, without effort, everything just as is.

Witness with dis-attachment. Allow whatever is happening, and watch. Observe thoughts, dispassionately. Thoughts will pull. Thoughts will seem compelling. The mind will wander. When you realize it has wandered, observe, with a smile, and bring it back to the present.

Breathe into every thought and feeling and memory and emotion which comes up. Remain aware of the cycles of breathing. Allow and embrace all that comes up, embrace it with breath, envelop every feeling and emotion with your breath. Embrace the numbness and sadness and anger and frustration and confusion. Don’t reach for any particular thing.

The ego will want to run. Fear may come up. Embrace this too. What does it feel like, this lurching, this strong wish to run? Embrace it fully, allow it. Breathe into, experience it. Allow it fully, with patience and love.

Breathe into anything that comes up and stay with it until a natural, softening release happens.

Allow yourself sufficient time for this meditation. It can take five minutes; it can take an hour.

Like all the techniques which I talk about, with practice, this technique becomes an everyday tool that you can use easily even when you are not meditating.

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Open up your senses. Meet perception half-way. Listen to the sounds around you right now. See if you can meet them half-way, so that there is no delay between sensing and hearing. There is no delay when there is no interpretation.

photo credit: alicepopkorn

This experience of innate, effortless awareness is the crux of all spirituality. If we miss this core, spirituality then becomes nothing more than the chase of concepts and hierarchies.

Listen to music at this level of consciousness. See the vibrancy of colors at this level. Feel the aliveness in the inner body in this awareness.

We all run to self-help, but self-help is the advancement of the ego, and there is nothing wrong with this if we realize this. We run to books and blogs and seminars and the latest spiritual secret, and there is nothing wrong, but the crux of the living is still very, very simple. It is Awareness.

We seek peace outside ourselves, in achievements and vacations and beliefs and concepts and God and prayer, and there is nothing wrong with this, but the crux of the matter is still very, very simple.

We march to the loud drumbeats of the latest secrets of happiness. We run to positive thinking, but positive thinking doesn’t release negativity—it just covers it up if we try hard enough, for a while. We run to the likes of the law of attraction but it cannot be terribly useful to us when we are full of embodied patterns of sadness and fear.

We beat up quite a bit of foam and lather in seeking our true purpose, but when we realize our inner purpose is, and always has been, to awaken, we can happily give up the angst of seeking out our great purpose. Then, there is great purpose in everything that we do, and everyone who we meet.

We run away from pain, but pain can can only be released when we allow it, even welcome it, and watch it, with awareness.

Awareness does not require you to believe, or to have faith, or to be strong, or diligent, or to be spiritual.

Let’s try it.

Relax completely. Let go of thoughts and emotions. Let go of beliefs. Notice your breath. Notice the sounds around you. Notice the taste in your mouth. Notice where you skin touches your clothes. Notice the inside aliveness. Relax deeply, release tension, be aware of tightness in your body and let go. Be aware of the air going in your lungs. When thoughts arise, allow them, watch them, and bring attention gently back to your senses.

With short moments of self-observation, we become conscious of thoughts and emotions and fears and patterns and beliefs and egos. We become conscious of what Einstein called the “optical illusion of consciousness.” We become conscious of our delusion.

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“May I ask just one question?” put in one of the others. “In what manner should one live one’s daily life?”
As though one were living for that single day, for that single hour.
“How?”
If you had only one hour to live, what would you do?
“I really don’t know,” he replied anxiously.
Would you not arrange what is necessary outwardly, your affairs, your will, and so on? Would you not call your family and friends together and ask their forgiveness for the harm that you might have done to them, and forgive them for whatever harm they might have done to you? Would you not die completely to the things of the mind, to desires and to the world? And if it can be done for an hour, then it can also be done for the days and years that may remain.
“Is such a thing really possible, sir?”
Try it and you will find out.

-J. Krishnamurti

I don’t have much experience with death. There have been only five people who I’ve known personally who have died—four family members and one friend. And during the time of passage, I think we all have similar wistful thoughts. We will miss the person who died. And we think: we must celebrate the moments of our lives, and we must be grateful for what we have, grateful for life itself. We must stop wasting time.

But then we soon forget.

In the Mahabharata, a 50,000-verse ancient Sanskrit epic poem which culminates in the Bhagavad Gita, there is a scene where one of the heroes, Bhima, is presented a riddle by a rakshasha. If he’s right he can pass, if he’s wrong he loses his head. The riddle is “what is the greatest mystery of all time?”

The answer: The greatest mystery is that Man is mortal and yet lives as if he is immortal.

photo credit: ZeePack

Death is mystery. The trouble is that we can’t leave it as a mystery. We come up with all sorts of theories of existence and death. We believe.

The fear of death is the fear of the end of experience, at least this is how my mind feels it. The end of experience is frightening, because the mind is acquisitive and it is fearful of not having enough time to acquire enough pleasure, things, power, status, time, approval and so on. The mind wants enough time to complete its incomplete-able story. The fear of death is also projected onto others; it is my fear of how I will feel when a loved one dies. So, it’s really the fear of my own feelings.

In western countries, we fear death perhaps more because it is something we hide. In India, death is treated very differently. My grandmother passed away four years ago. There were rituals and and the body was prepared in the house, openly, with children running around and family and guests visiting. There was mourning of course, but mostly there was the consensus that this was a happy time, as she was finally free of an ailing body. Indians mourn and fear death like most human beings, but the energy is different because death is never hidden. During the ride to the crematorium in a hearse-like bus, people in that part of India stop whatever they’re doing and momentarily touch their fingers to their hearts, saying good-bye. It’s a nice tradition. The pyre is outside and anyone, including children of all ages, can view the open-flame cremation.

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

-Mark Twain

Anthony de Mello reminds us, it’s more useful to worry about life before death rather than after.

I don’t know about death.

I do know about life. I do know that it is possible to be easy with life, where life and living are one, where in our true nature, we are easy and peaceful. All we have to do is to stop identifying—stop identifying with beliefs and ego and mind and identities. I talk about Awareness and Release, but there many other simple portals, available to everyone.  I like the openings which are available to all of us in the daily aspects of our lives. I like the ones that don’t make any pretense of requiring us to jump through spiritual hoops and hierarchies. Eckhart Tolle talks about Presence and Acceptance, Geneen Roth talks about conscious eating, Candice O’Denver talks about simple awareness, Adyshanti talks of simple meditation, and there are many others (External Resources). It does not take religion or spirituality and you don’t have to be special or blessed or strong. Come as you are. That’s perfect.

There’s only one way to crack through the cement wall that you have surrounded yourself with. I’m going to give it to you now and I want you to remember it and try to connect it and practice it. There’s only one way to break out of your building false securities, which is to suffer knowingly, intentionally, without looking for an answer. Now there it is. You can save yourself years of work if you take that home, write it in your own words and examine it.

-Vernon Howard

Crack through the delusions. Enjoy life. You will have plenty of time to be dead.

He loved me as a son when I was growing up. He had many challenges in his life, including health and financial problems, but he handled them with dignity and courage, and I will remember him as someone who was always very loving, jovial and generous.

A few years ago he had told me he was at peace, despite his health issues. He was happy that his children had grown up to be very capable and compassionate.

In his last few days, his family and many of his close extended family were able to see him.

His instructions were not to grieve, but to celebrate his life.

Kantikaka understood what it meant to be loving, generous and joyful. Often, when loved ones pass away, they remind us to celebrate what we already have, here and now. But as time passes, with the hustle and bustle of life, we can soon forget.

I will not forget.

To free the mind from all conditioning, you must see the totality of it without thought. This is not a conundrum; experiment with it and you will see. Do you ever see anything without thought? Have you ever listened, looked, without bringing in this whole process of reaction? You will say that it is impossible to see without thought; you will say no mind can be unconditioned. When you say that, you have already blocked yourself by thought, for the fact is you do not know. –Krishnamurti

The Sufis talk about the awakening journey as a journey in three stages: the journey from God, the journey to God, and the journey in God.

In the journey from God, you believe what you are is a bunch of beliefs. You are your accomplishments and your labels and your fears and your conditioning. You believe in changing your circumstances and in improving the image of you. You want a fat bank account and a thin body and approval and validation. You believe in struggle and effort. You believe this is what it means to be human.

The only outcome is uneasiness, and it manifests in different ways in different people, as anxiety, fear, unhappiness, depression, addictions and so on.

photo credit: Dom H UK

Geneen Roth writes about this in “Women Food and God” and she says that the eating version of this is that you spend your life dieting, controlling, and exercising in and exhausting up-and-down cycle which ends in disappointment each time. And each time it works, and then doesn’t work, you go for more of the same.

In the spiritual version of this, you believe in an unforgiving and judgmental God. You may even have escaped the conceptual constraints of traditional religion, and then you believe in unforgiving and judgmental concepts. You search for spirituality and new-age stuff which fits into your version of fear and desire.

The lesson here is the insight that you are not your thoughts.

The next journey is the Journey to God. You have had the insight that you are not your thoughts and you take on practices.

In the food version, you stop all the crazy dieting. You understand that your over-eating or under-eating is not about discipline but rather about a deeper understanding of yourself. You understand that understanding is not figuring out, but looking at it in a whole, peaceful, allowing sort of way.

In the spiritual version, you create beliefs and beautiful concepts such as compassion and acceptance and forgiveness and karma and maya. You say the universe is benevolent. You believe, but you don’t know for sure. Your compassion does not include everyone, it does not reach out to perpetrators and requires validation and approval. You may have found yourself the ultimate spiritual guide, or the ultimate spiritual tradition. Your high monks and true spirituality trumps all the others.

The Journey in God, in all the versions, is the end of seeking. It is the end of lurching towards something different. Life is not a test. You don’t have to live by beliefs or morals or commandments or concepts of karma.

You are not a mistake. You are already whole. You only discover this when you allow, with love and patience.

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