Sorry about the long quiet period.

I think in early February, Julia recommneded to me on email that I take a look at Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsch.

I am not sure why I actually did take a look, because this is not the kind of thing that would usually appeal to me. I would have dismissed it, from my own prejudices about the word God in the title.

But for some reason I did actually take a look and I’m very glad that I did.

I prefer to listen to the audio version rather than read the text. I was able to get audio and a book which contained the entire trilogy from my library. The audio version is on youtube (search for it) and it looks like there are plenty of used books available from Amazon, etc.

Right now I find the first book most resonant; however, the other two are also good and I feel they will probably resonate just as well when I have absorbed the first.

I’ve been wanting to write about it–but every time I listen to it, I find something new. And so I want continue to absorb before I say much about it.

I started this spiritual exploration about seven years ago now, after reading Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now, and exhausted from emotional distress. My approach has been to try to see the various spiritual ideas in my own experience, and this has served me well. But for quite some time, my exploration felt as if it was compelled and urgent and taumatic and confusing.

And now it is highly enjoyable and creative.

I think the turning ponit was the seeing two years ago that the basic problem is the problem of fear. The looking as suggested by John Sherman helped. And the Conversations with God wrapped it up nicely for me, confirming and enhancing my world view in a very practical way.

I doubt that I am done, and I am no longer trying to be. I am just very happy with who I am. The spiritual exploration now is joyous and creative!

There is a lot of material in Converstations with God, and I don’t think I can summarize it very well in a few sentences. Some of things I have really clicked with:

Trust your feelings. Your feelings are the language of the soul. Learn to discern feelings from emotion, which often thoughts. Follow your highest feeling.

Thought is productive and creative. Fear is a very attractive energy. Love is all there is.

That thought is productive and creative can easily be confirmed in actual experience. I don’t have the skills to use thought to create external experience. But I can use it to create my internal reality. Thought influences the context of mind and vice versa. One way to confirm this yourself is set up the parameters to see that your spiritual exploration is actually highly enjoyable and creative.

The CWG probably has the best discourse on relationships that I have seen. In thinking about relationships, we of course think about the very personal type of relationships, but everything is the relative world is a relationship. One thing only exists in relation to another.

The purpose of a relationship is the opportunity it provides to be who you are in relationship to the other person. It is not about our romantic ideas of sacrificing for, completing, loving, caring for, worrying about the other person (though all this may happen). It is about loving the opportunity to manifest yourself as the grandest version of you.

One common area of confusion is how to reconcile our esoteric spiritual exploration with the practical aspects of life. This is an area I have had trouble with, and my reaction to this generally had been to isolate myself in last few years. I have radically simplified life so that I had the mental space and the time to explore. The CWG has been very helpful to me in clearing this up.

The CWG confirms my view for me that the basic problem is fear. The reason we generally seem to be confused about how to live the extraordinary gift of life is that fear confuses us.

The common ideas about God–that God is to be feared, God judges, the ideas of eternal heaven and condmenation of hell and karma, that God punishes, that there is such thing as right or wrong–all come from fear.

Our confusion about existence comes from allowing ourselves to become what we are because of the experiences and words and beliefs of others.

Life is a constant, ever-expanding process of creation.

“Enlightenment is understanding that there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, and nobody you have to beexcept exactly who you are being right now.”

There is lot more and I do want to explore these ideas here. I will do so soon–when I think I have absorbed and had some experience with them.

For now I wanted to report that I am happy that this exploration for me is joyous and creative!

I’ve been writing here for about four years now.

Recently much has changed. I feel settled, easy. I believe there is really only one problem–and that is the delusion of fear. That recognition feels very big to me–with it, all the frantic energy of the last six or seven years that I spent in seeking an answer left me with a whoosh.

And so that something went wrong with site felt right. I cleaned up and simplified the site. I’ll continue to work on the site as time permits. I want to of course preserve what has already been said here and all the wonderful comments, and I want to convey the simplicity that the basic problem is a delusion brought about by fear, and the solution is to observe.

K

But I had only recognized the problem; not solved it. A few months later I stumbled upon John Sherman’s site. I resonated with what he said about fear. So he had some credibility with me, and what he said about the looking is the same thing Nisargadatta and Ramana say, except I think John Sherman is simpler and clearer.

I did the looking. I wondered, as I think many people do, if I was doing it right. But I can assure that if you are doing this looking you are doing it right. It is self-correcting. About three months later, the urge to look went away. And the recovery began.

The recovery was difficult at first. I was coming into a difficult period after a really good year, so it was very disappointing. I felt as if I was falling back into some of my older issues of anxiety, depression, insomnia, weight fluctuations, apathy, confusion, isolation, self-recrimination, over-anlayzing–all of these worried me that I was slipping, not moving forward. For a while, I had the idea in my head that someday I will be “done.” Then I realized it was this very expectation that was causing mental conflict, and I tried to drop any expectation I might have had about what should happen. I went through periods of doubt. I considered exploring other paths–maybe getting into Advaita.

And strangely, a feeling of shame came up. It’s hard to describe–it’s a context that I have done something wrong, I don’t belong here, I feel like a stranger. My theory is that this feeling comes about from the feeling of separation caused by the fear of life. Separated, I felt like I’ll be found out that I am not who I am. My guess is this feeling must be very common–most of us suppress it or learn to live with it.

But recently, something has shifted. I feel more settled. More at home. I am more satisfied with life, less resistant, and I have the understanding that this has nothing to do with the content of life or mental states. Happiness and unhappiness come and go, according to what happens in life and according to our particular mental states. These come and go, and have no effect on being alive, just being–satisfied, human.

So now I recommend to people to understand that the basic problem is the fear of life. The solution is the do the looking, as John Sherman suggests.

And during the recovery, use whatever tools you want to handle it. I like the release technique I talk about here, so that’s what I recommend. It has been very useful to me. But whatever it is that you prefer is good. Meditation, yoga are good. Observing thoughts is good. Allowing, letting it be, letting it go, acceptance–all good.

And so, after six years of seeking, I’ve circled back to see that it was always about just being a natural human being.

If you’re interested in this, here are the simple instructions on how to look from John Sherman’s site:

 Now move the focus of your attention inward to what it feels like to be you.

What you are looking for is the feel of what you would call me. You are looking for exactly what you refer to when you say the word ‘me.’ You are looking for the me-ness of you.

Here’s a way to see what I am speaking about. Many people have found this helpful. Try to evoke a moment in your childhood. It can be anything, really. See if you can remember what it felt like to be you then.

That’s exactly what it feels like to be you right now, isn’t it? Look and see. It’s the same sense of me. Exactly the same me-ness.

Try to put your attention on that subtle feeling of me for just a tenth of a second.

It may be helpful to know that as you do the looking you might recognize that you have looked before. The feel of you is the same now as it was five minutes ago, five years ago, or when you are a small child. You might be able evoke a memory of when you had looked at you.

It may be helpful to know that doubts will come up. You might wonder if you’re doing it right or if it’s really working. Don’t worry, the technique is self-correcting. And confirmation of it seems to come in retrospect; you might not recognize for a while that the effects of the fear are falling away.

It’s a simple and direct technique. With focus and intensity, you look for the you in your thoughts, and see that the you in thoughts does not refer to anything.

I went through it two years ago and in a few days recognized the absence of what I had presumed to be the center of experience. Experience does not happen to me; experience just happens.

But nothing really changed after the seeing. So I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a valid technique but doesn’t go anywhere.

Recently, a friend pointed out this site: http://liberationunleashed.com. They are all about just this one seeing–the seeing that the self that most of us think we are does not exist.

If you go through this looking, keep your expectations clear. This is not about liberation or enlightenment or any such thing. What you will see is the truth that the you you think you are in thoughts does not exist.

If you look inside for you, you will immediately find the sense of you. It’s just you, the personal you. This is the sense of you, the sense of I am, the sense of being, the sense of existence, what it feels like to you, the experience of you. This of course does exist. But the you in thoughts which you think is the center of your experience does not exist.

My experience had been that it was not huge seeing. Nothing much changed.

So do this if you want to, but have the clear expectation that what you’re doing is seeing through the delusion of self in thoughts.

You’ll see that the way it’s done is that you work one-on-one with someone who will guide you. If you’re not comfortable in that setting, I’ll be happy to work with you. Drop me a line: http://www.beyond-karma.com/about/.

I like happiness as much as the next guy. But it’s not happiness that sends one in search of truth. It’s rabid and feverish, clawing madness to stop being a lie, regardless of price, come heaven or hell. This isn’t about higher consciousness or self-discovery or heaven on earth. This is about blood-caked swords and Buddha’s rotting head and self-immolation, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something they don’t have. -Jed Mckenna

If you’ve been with me on this for a while you know what we do here is to try to wake up the truth of life.

And so you probably also know what I mean when I say it’s hard.

This thing I do is compelled. It would be insane to do this out of choice. It drives me crazy. There is a back and forth nature to this which is very frustrating. There is a tendency to isolate myself. Maybe you know what I mean when I say that my external life can become messy, and there isn’t much motivation to do much about that. Everyday is an adventure. There are times of high confidence and clarity. There are times of low energy and low motivation and doubt and confusion. How this thing I do reconciles with the everyday and conventional demands of life is not an easy thing to figure out.

Some of the most popular articles on this site are related to the Dark Night of the Soul. The phrase is misleading in that it suggests it’s one night we’re talking about.

So why does this happen? Why is it hard?

A recent revelation is that the reason I experience this degree of difficulty is because of a mental conflict. The mental conflict of not getting what I want.

Here’s an illustrative example.

I quit smoking with the help of Allen Carr (Easyway method). Well, to be clearer, I’ve quit smoking many times before that time and each of those previous times was a five day long nightmare. I don’t have to describe that to smokers and ex-smokers; they know. But when I quit with Allen Carr’s method, there was no pain. It was in fact, absurdly, an enjoyable experience.

Why? What was going on?

The lesson in that was a lesson about the mental conflict of desire. Briefly, part of me wanted to smoke and part of me did not, and this conflict makes the small event of nicotine withdrawal symptoms into a horrible nightmare. Truly, the withdrawal symptoms from nicotine, are nothing, and I know smokers and ex-smokers will protest up and down about that, but when you look, they are negligible. Allen Carr is much better at explaining this than I am–don’t take this as a lesson on how to quit.

Having learned that lesson from quitting smoking, I saw the truth of it in many of my addictions and bad habits and even desires. But I don’t have clarity in those areas, so I’m not qualified to talk about that, but I do think the same thing is going on in the recovery.

I think the recovery (waking up, becoming a natural human being, whatever you want to call it) is hard because of expectation. I have some nebulous expectations of what it feels like to be free and natural. The reality of it doesn’t match up what I think I want. The difference is the mental conflict. The mental conflict leads to not-nice feelings.

It’s not even that I have any big expectations. It’s not like I want to be a guru or I have visions of being swarmed by spiritual babes. Well, maybe a little of the second.

The expectations are more subtle. They have to do with it life would feel like when there is no resistance. When decisions are easy, what to do next is easy, what to say and how to be and how act and what to think–when all that is easy. And in my experience that does happen. But it’s nothing like the mental projection from an expectation. This difference between expectation and reality manifests as a difficult recovery.

Something like that–my words are not clear yet, but I want to explore this a little further. What happens if I drop all my expectations? What happens if I notice the subtle expectations which I had not noticed before and drop them as well?

The spiritualized ego

Another thing I wanted to address has to do with some conflict that came about in the comments in the last article–accusations about spiritual advancement and spiritualized egos and so on. I want to address it but I don’t think I have the skills to clearly explain that way I see it.

If in wherever it is that you are there isn’t any room for self-questioning, it’s probably a trap. I’ve trapped myself several times. In the first year after reading The Power of Now, I was all about presence. For two years after that, I was about observance and self-honesty. That wasn’t bad actually, until I realized self-honesty is just another mental process, easily subsumed by the ego. The break came after that, when I realized that the central problem was fear, in the sense that the Buddha calls dukkha. Not the particular emotion of fear, but an entire context of mind.

And with that I gave up the mad search.

It’s not that the searching stops. It’s just no longer about anything which is not reachable in direct experience. It’s not about transcendence or enlightenment or a mystical union with the universe. It’s not about spirituality or spiritual practices or spiritual advancement. It’s not about loaded words like God and awareness and presence. It’s not even about meditation–meditate if you want to, it has some great benefits, but waking up is not one of them. It’s not about concepts which are not within my direct experience. It’s no longer about other people’s words.

And so my conjecture is that the search up to about a year and half ago, was not necessary. It wasn’t without value, but maybe I can save some people some time.

How?

It’s very helpful to think of this in terms of fear. Not the emotion of fear. The context of fear–what the Buddha called dukkha.

Thinking about it in these terms does not require us to stretch our beliefs to anything which is not already in our direct experience. We know fear. We know the context of fear–we’ve lived it practically everyday since birth.

And in terms of the solution, we know what it means to “look at you.” We know what “you” means. It means you, the sense of existence, what it feels like to be you. We know what look means–it means attention.

The only part of this which might be outside of direct experience is why the looking cures the affliction of fear. This we have to prove or disprove to ourselves.

My experience of the looking was that first, I understood it right away. I had already seen the fear thing a few months before I went to John Sherman’s site, so I think he already had credibility with me. The looking he suggests is something I had already tried with Nisargadatta and Ramana, but John Sherman was exceptionally clear and simple, and I finally understood what was meant. I looked, whenever I remembered to, for about three months. I looked once and the urge came up to do so again and again. I felt some agitation for a couple of weeks. That went away. After about three months, the urge to look went away.

And then the intervening months were not fun. There were intertwined periods of high confidence and high doubt, of feeling very connected with life and feeling very confused. That recently cleared away, and the understanding that a lot of these not-nice feelings are due to the difference between expectation and actuality is very helpful.

That’s about where I am. I can’t say I am completely free of resistance and fear. But I can say that the looking does something, and you can explore it and prove it or disprove it for yourself.

What we want is to feel human, to feel the extra-ordinary satisfaction of being human, to feel the peace which surpasses understanding. We want this because we know it’s possible. The thing, the only thing, that’s in the way is the context of fear, Buddha’s dukkha.

So far as I can see, in the understanding of this, nothing is required which is outside of direct experience. For me, that is excellent news.

Of course, in pointing this out, the question comes up, how do I know where I am now is not a trap?

I don’t. I’m open to that. If there isn’t any room for self-questioning, it’s a trap.

To be a natural human being, free of the insanity the ego and conditioned-pain and destructive patterns and self-limiting thoughts, and free from the energy of seeking and wishing to be different–in short, to be free of fear and its effects.

How is it that I am not free right now?

In the last year particularly there has been a release, a shift. I feel more at home, easier, lighter, less resistant, more honest with myself and others. I feel healthier, I sleep much better, I eat better, I don’t experience episodic depression and anxiety in the way I used to. I relate more openly with people. Some emotions have gone away or I no longer take them as personally as I did before; emotions such as regret, remorse, uncaused sadness.

Perhaps the only complaint I have, in practical terms, is that my life is a little dull. I haven’t made the effort to re-engage.

Life is very good.

But.

There is still some resistance. There are still some mental conflicts.

There are specific fears which come up…insecurity of the future, the need for approval and validation, and others.

Sometimes my reactions are unconscious—in those times I have the feeling that whatever I am thinking or doing or feeling or saying is not natural but motivated by reactive patterns. Recently, an egoic emotion of anger came up because I did not get what I wanted from someone—and this is something I thought I had released a long time ago. It surprised me.

In the quietest of times, I can feel a subtle hum of anxiety in my body.

Overall, I cannot report that I am completely satisfied with life.

How will I know when I am free?

When life is lived in satisfaction and the need to ask this question disappears.

I do not expect that all the things which I consider negative or confusing or binding will go away—maybe they will. I expect more that there will be no resistance to whatever is happening.

What am I doing about this?

At this point, not much at all. I recognized a little over a year ago that the original problem is fear—this was big.

Fear damages all of our mental structures (ego, pain-body, beliefs, and so on). Life is experienced in the mind. All sensations and perceptions and experiences are in or of or through the mind, and when mental structures are compromised by fear, nothing can be certain, not even our frantic efforts to fix ourselves.

With that recognition I was able to let go of a five year spiritual search.

This release brought about a shift, a great delight, acceptance, understanding, and a renewed wish to re-engage in life. A great deal of resistance fell away.

Now, things have settled a bit. I don’t know what the next step is but experience has taught me to be patient. It will be clear soon enough.

So what’s my spiritual practice?

My spiritual practice is neither.

When I remember to, I bring attention to the sense of I AM, or very simply, the ordinary sense of me (as suggested by Nisargadutt and Ramana, and very cleanly clarified byJohnSherman). This is effortless now. I see that what it feels like to be me is constant and has always been the same. I see that the sense of me is really awareness, presence, stillness.

I try to be aware whenever I remember. I try to fall back out of conditioned thoughts and emotions to a quieter place inside, and allow and observe.

I use the release technique whenever I feel harsh emotions.

I am patient.

This website

I started this website to share my journey. Honesty and authenticity developed over time. In the beginning years I had a great wish to help others—but that energy has dissipated with the realization that though the basic problem of fear is universal, everyone’s insanity and recovery is highly individual.

Now, I write what I want…I want to be honest and authentic and relevant. Much has changed—I know I should re-organize the website and the books…oh well.

I’m not done. But I do feel significantly lighter, more natural, easier.

It happened as I recognized that the basic problem with me, and all human beings, is fear.

The Buddha said that people suffer. We suffer, not because there is suffering, but because of the damage caused by fear in the mind. Every human being, I think, at some point and at some level, knows that he or she is not seated in naturalness. It’s interesting that most people do not face this problem head-on. There even seems to be prevailing sentiment that even though I am not seated in naturalness, everyone else has figured it out.

Why some of us are able to see and admit the insanity within, and some of us ignore what is so very obvious when seen, is a bit of a mystery to me. How did I go for 45 years not seeing that there is nothing wrong with life but there is something wrong with my orientation to life? Suffering gives us this insight.

The Buddha’s second noble truth says that there is a way out of this suffering. This is of course where the whole misleading world of religion and spirituality begins. This is where it starts with the myriad, confusing, dogmatic, often money-making, always divisive, ways to be spiritual. God, awareness, presence, meditation, particular teachings, particular beliefs, particular practices, hierarchies and advancement and so on–none of them has worked in the long history of humanity. But this is what we do.

I go back to only that which I am certain of. Which is very little.

I know that the basic problem is that we perceive reality through damaged mental structures. Some people may call these mental structures the ego and the mind, but I haven’t found it useful to analyze this too deeply.

I think that the damage is caused by an original fear.

I know in the presence of damaged faculties nothing we know or believe or practice can have any certainty to it. The experience of life happens in the mind, that is all our perceptions and sensations and actions and beliefs and thoughts and emotions come from the mind, and when the mind structures are damaged, nothing can have any certainty.

The solution to this is go back to the source. To go back as deeply as we can within ourselves, so that there is a touching between the damage and the source.

I had believed that to go back to the source requires spiritual work. I thought I had to ferret through all that is false to find truth. I was completely wrong about that.

The source is right here, right now, right on the surface. It doesn’t require meditation. It doesn’t require spiritual knowledge. It doesn’t require a particular practice or particular understanding. Even to call it source is a bit too much.

It’s just looking at the sense of who I am, the sense of I AM, the very ordinary every-day sense of what it feels to be me.

Along with the looking, the release technique I talk about here is still with me. It’s very natural now, innate. I don’t consciously think about letting go. It happens.

The giving up of the spiritual quest is a huge relief.

And life simply lives. For some of us on a spiritual journey frequently confusing questions come up, about how we can reconcile our regular life with our current spiritual understanding. I don’t have a clearer understanding–it’s more that the questions are disappearing.

It’s kind of strange that a five year harried spiritual quest has come down to something so simple.

This is what I feel now. It’s a pretty good place to be.

You might wonder why I’m writing about healthy weight management on a website which is about being a natural, free, human being. Well, there are a number of relevant lessons in this.

A few years ago I got tired of dieting. I realized that all diets work in the same way. First, they work. I lose weight. Then, they don’t work. And I gain back weight with a vengeance, generally gaining back even more than I had lost.

I went through many yo-yo swings before I got tired of it. I read Charles Eisenstein’s The Yoga of Eating and some stuff from Geneen Roth, and what they said made intuitive sense to me.

So about a year ago, I tried the following:

Eat when I’m hungry
Eat absolutely whatever I feel like eating
Stop eating when I’m satisfied
Eat with full awareness

This meant discarding all the conventional wisdom about eating.

I eat when I’m hungry. If I’m hungry late at night, or in the middle of the night, I eat. If I’m not hungry for breakfast I don’t eat breakfast.

I eat absolutely whatever I want to eat. If I feel like eating potato chips or ice cream or a donut, that’s what I eat.

I tried this for a year, and what happened was, well, nothing. In fact I think I gained more weight.

About the time that I felt the relief, I also began to understand why this was not working.

So I made a small change. I changed “awareness” to pleasure. Instead of eating with awareness, I eat with pleasure.

And it works. Effortlessly. Without any sense of deprivation.

This experience I think is an apt analogy to what happens when we go on a spiritual search for enlightenment.

I gained weight for emotional reasons. I gained weight because I was eating through fear and conditioning and mental rules.

This is what happens generally in life. We have a sense of alienation from the very beginning, and so we learn to experience life through fear and conditioning and confusion and mental rules.

At some point we decide we don’t like being fat. So we go on quest to fix the problem. Which is what dieting is.

At some point in life we don’t like being confused or depressed or feeling uncomfortable in our own skins. So we go on spiritual quest to fix our lives. We seek wisdom and practices and enlightenment.

Dieting is very much like the spiritual quest. They are both just another form of control, another of form of resistance.

It turns out the answer is not to try to fix our lives. If the goal is to live freely and naturally and sanely, the answer is not to try to fix anything or seek anything. That takes us further away from the truth. The answer is to recognize that the only problem there is is that we have always thought, from the beginning of our lives, that there is a problem. Everything else is a logical effect of this original problem.

Similarly, the answer is not to go on a diet to lose weight. The answer is to recognize that because of fear we learn to eat emotionally. When we eat freely and naturally and body knows exactly what to do.

Another lesson here is to understand how powerfully distracting abstraction is. I was trying to eat naturally with “awareness.” Awareness is an abstract word, it took me further away from the real thing. “Pleasure” is something I understand innately, I don’t have to learn pleasure, I don’t have get into any specific mind state to experience pleasure, I completely and immediately understand what pleasure is.

These words which we use, like awareness, oneness, non-duality, acceptance, consciousness, karma, true self, false self, Self, self, and all the paradoxes and clever sayings and wisdom and Sanskrit words which spiritual enthusiasts seem to be so fond of–well, they take us further away from the actual thing.

The actual thing, the sense of you, is utterly ordinary, and right here on the surface. You don’t have to dig down deep for it, you don’t have to look for it, you don’t have to distinguish it from abstractions like false self and true self and awareness and consciousness. It’s just you. Take a look.

I think back in May I had a shift. I didn’t quite understand what had happened, and I still don’t have clear words to describe it. I saw that life is perfect, it has always been perfect, mysterious, wondrous, quirky. The only problem with life is that I had thought there was a problem with life. And this bit of off-centeredness has been with me since I was a baby.

With this recognition I understood. I understood why everything I have learned and known and believed and rejected and felt and said and thought–everything–is uncertain. I understood why spirituality, in the broadest possible sense, does not work, and hasn’t worked for five thousand years. I understood why this has nothing to do with any kind of practice. I understood why this has nothing to do with any kind of becoming.

This was a pretty big for me. The realization itself is not big. It’s not a secret; it’s all over the spiritual landscape; many have said this before. What was striking was the exclusivity of this, that this, and nothing else but this, is the only problem.

And with this little realization, I released the last five years of searching, isolation, anxiety, depression, insomnia…

The best way I have of describing this right now is that resistance is going away. I’m letting it be, giving it some patience and time.

And I’m utterly delighted with myself! My mind is so taken with itself right now that all it wants to do is play these thread of delighted thoughts over and over again. I let it play, hehe.

And I’m also angry. I’m angry at the entire world of spirituality and spiritualized personalities which stand between humanity and freedom. I realize the anger is misplaced; I’m really just angry at myself for spending five unpleasant years on a search which in the end turned out to be so simple.

I’m angry and delighted, and I also know that I can’t trust any conclusion I come to right now. So what you’re reading here comes with a warning label.

I’ve been an aspirant for five years, starting with a reading of Eckhart Tolle. I’m thankful to Tolle because he showed me that that there is another possibility. But I recognized that he couldn’t really help much further than that.

My goal was modest. I just wanted a happy life, here on earth, the same life I had, but free and easy, because I knew now that was possible. I didn’t want to be spiritual or mystical or knowledgeable.

And I recognized the irony of taking on this venture. I wanted to be free and easy, but what I was getting into was anything but free and easy.

I read a lot of stuff.

I got only two practical techniques out of the whole five-year unpleasant endeavor. Two techniques, one is observing (thought), and other is releasing, and really both of these are techniques of observance.

I also came to believe that it takes honesty and willingness. Honesty and willingness are important if you are, like I was, trying to find truth in the spiritual morass. But even honesty and willingness are just mental processes, and not necessary for the seeing.

As I dove into this mess, I got worse not better.

I didn’t choose to figure this out.  I didn’t choose to spend five years simplifying my life and isolating myself and abandoning conventional goals and trying various experiments, trying and failing. I didn’t choose. I was driven to it.

The worst time was probably late last year. I was depressed and in denial. I made myself sick. Literally. Last year I had really bad news at the doctor’s. High cholesterol, onset of diabetes, high weight, high blood pressure, and so on.

I think we get worse with a spiritual quest because we nudge ourselves to keep going. The nudging is often very unpleasant.

What I had learned kept me going. I had some relative peace, some psychological comfort.

This was good. But this was not freedom.

And on a morning walk one day it hit me: the only problem there is is the belief that there is a problem. The feeling that there is something wrong is the only thing that has ever been wrong.

The relief is enormous. I had not realized what a heavy burden the search had been in the last five years.

I just had a physical a couple of months after this realization and there is no sign of any problems. No anxiety, no depression, no insomnia, not even diabetes!

I have enough humility now to know that the clarity and lightness I am feeling may or may not be permanent. But I think the basic insight is permanent. Life is perfect, life is love; the only thing which is wrong is this feeling that something is wrong, and this feeling becomes the foundation of everything we experience.

It’s my pet hypothesis that once this realization happens–the realization that the only thing there ever was wrong was this sense of unrightness that we carry with us–when that realization hits, it’s inevitable that the fear and the sense that there is something wrong will go away and the healing will begin. It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do–the solution is very recognition of the basic problem. I’m not sure about this; it’s only an hypothesis, and it’s one I can’t really test.

I’m also convinced that the looking which John Sherman suggests does away with this fear and closes the wound in which we feel that something is wrong.

In any event, this relief of giving up the quest is a wonderful thing, and I’m really enjoying it!