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 concepts of 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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The tool I rely on the most is releasing. Because more often than not what is between me and Truth is some sort of resistance. Releasing certainly helps with letting go of the hard emotions, but if you try releasing, you will notice that it soon expands to letting go of beliefs and embodied patterns as well.

photo credit: RLHyde

Another favorite is observing thought. The cool thing about observing thought is that it expands to observing everything. With some practice, you are noticing the Voice—you know, the incessant Voice, and your thoughts, then the gaps in between, then emotions, beliefs, patterns. Some days, you look back, with a smile, and say, wow that was me just a little while ago.

I don’t meditate regularly. There are periods when I meditate a great deal and periods when meditation is just regular living.

At some point there is the recognition that these are just tools.

Lessons are learned. There is the lesson that awakening proceeds in a three-steps-forward-two-back sort of fashion. Whoever you are, you will experience a humiliating set-back, possibly several times. It’s a bummer.

There is the lesson of acceptance. True transformation comes about when I fully accept what I have become. When the lurching to be something different is let go of, there is clarity.

There is the hard lesson of allowing, with love and patience.

There is the lesson of gentle honesty. We are highly skilled at fooling ourselves, this sort of naked authenticity is not easy, but it develops.

There are times when there is an overwhelming feeling of emptiness. It can be vaguely disconcerting, and sometimes outright scary. If thought gets a hold of this feeling, it shows up as what is life all about? Is this all there is? What am I doing wrong?

This is a good time to inquire. Ask “who am I?” If thoughts happen, ask, “to whom does this thought occur?”

Don’t answer with a thought.

When the mind is busy or an emotion is overwhelming and any sort of practice seems too difficult, I fall back to reading and listening. Some of my favorite resources are here.

I don’t rely on any particular spiritual tradition or guru. Don’t deny, don’t follow. As Seng-ts’an said succinctly “Do not seek Truth; only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions, he meant beliefs and concepts, particularly spiritual ones. Letting go is far more effective than accumulating. Of course this isn’t easy. There is a strong movement in the ego to want to accumulate and cling to concepts. There is a strong movement to create a spiritual identity—what Leonard Jacobson calls a “spiritualized ego.” A woman who considers herself spiritually advanced said that she will go out of her way to make sure her karma is positive. Sure, you can live like that if you want, but it’s just replacing an idea of an unforgiving and judgmental God with an idea of an unforgiving and judgmental concept of karma. Chogyam Trunpa, a great Tibetan meditation teacher, wrote that we are often “deceiving ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.”

It does get easier and easier and easier. You do remember to be aware more and more. You do let go more and more easily. You remember more and more to be here now, to fully inhabit your body. The most essential question is “do I feel peaceful, joyful and complete” and more and more, you do see that the answer to this can be a resounding “Yes!”

What’s in your toolbox?

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Dear -,

Depression is the opposite of love.

Depression is rage turned inward.

Depression is all our hard emotions we had in the past for which we were not fully present, turned inward.

I understand how you feel. I understand the utter numbness. It’s hard to be comfortable in your own skin. Whatever you are doing, you want to be doing something else. If you are with people, you want to be alone. You don’t have any energy. You can fake it for a while, but the energy to pretend becomes harder and harder to gather up. There is insomnia or too much sleeping. The things that seem to motivate other people become meaningless. You have forgotten what pleasure is.

You wonder how is it that other people manage. Are they just pretending? How is it that they are not questioning life? How do they go about their lives, day after day after day?

You don’t like sunny days because they urge you to feel better, when you cannot. You do not like people who tell you to be happy or positive or “snap out of it” because they have no idea what it really feels like.

You wonder if people have noticed. What do people think of me?

I know these feeling intimately.

To people who are depressed, I suggest to use the full arsenal at hand. There is nothing wrong with using medication, though many people, particularly of our background, may feel that medication is an admission of weakness. I have taken anti-depressants in the past and I would take them again if I thought they would help me. Medicate, use therapy, meditate, exercise, avoid the things and people who make you feel down. Allow yourself to be depressed–if you want to be alone, sleep, or whatever, allow yourself to do or not do without judgment or guilt.

A very important tool in understanding and releasing depression is learning to let go.
photo credit: Ariesfairy

Letting go is a simple practice, it’s very natural, but often there is resistance to it. The resistance shows up as “I need to understand more” or “it’s too simple to work” or “I don’t know what it is that I’m supposed to let go of.”

Some people have obvious emotions that go with depression, such as anger or loneliness or sadness or anxiety. I had anxiety. The mechanism of anxiety is so very obvious and demanding, that it can’t be ignored so in a sense it’s easier to get a hold of to release.

In depression, often emotions are numbed, so it’s a little harder to get hold of an emotion to let it go.

Letting go, ironically is all about allowing.

What do you think when you hear “allowing” and “letting go”?

If you look at the concepts of “letting go” and “allowing” you will find that you already have a bunch of judgments about them. They may seem weak, passive, lazy, giving-up-control, wishy-washy kind of concepts. You are used to hard work and control. Your judgments about these concepts have to do with the deep fear that if you slow down, or stop pushing hard, or simply expect life to be easy, the whole house of cards will collapse.

Allowing, with patience and love, is however the most essential part of living and growing.

For two years, I went through a period of very low-energy and self-isolation. I wasn’t unhappy, but nothing seemed to be happening in life. I would have rather been alone than with people. I would rather have been doing nothing than doing something.

My lesson at that time was to be allow, be patient, with love. To watch, with awareness.

It isn’t always easy to remain in stillness and allow and watch because all our conditioning screams at us to do something. Do something, get up, change yourself, be better. Even in depression when it isn’t easy to get up and do something,  the feeling that you should nevertheless persists.

When you are able to allow yourself and people and events and life and situations to be as they already are—without judging or wishing for change, you begin to understand the immense power of allowing and letting go.

You may not understand what it is that you have to let go of—most of us don’t—but you can still practice allowing and letting go.

Start with this: http://www.beyond-karma.com/how-to/how-to-release-big-and-small-emotions-release/

Use it for the smallest emotions. Use it for the sense of dread you may feel for having to go to work, or to be with people when you don’t want to, or when you are somewhere where you don’t want to be. Try it for that funny feeling you may have at night before you go sleep when you wonder what is this all about. Is this all there is? Try it for that feeling that comes up which asks, what is it that I am missing in life? What is it about me that is broken? Try it for these little, vague feelings of uneasiness.

When your mind objects and says it doesn’t understand or needs to know more or it doesn’t know what it is that it should let go of, look at the judgments your mind has about letting go. Let go of that resistance.

I will publish an article about a breathing-release technique soon which you can also try, and you may also want to look at this allowing meditation: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Adyashantis-Meditation-Allowing-Everything-to-Be-As-It-Is

With love,

Kaushik

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I am not an economist and I have little interest in statistics. This is an instinctive view.

The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change will collapse first.

ECKHART TOLLE, A New Earth

A compassionate perspective–For ten thousand years, since the advent of agriculture, and possibly even before that, mankind has developed an ego, individually and collectively. An ego is the image of who we are in thought, and the beliefs we create around the image. Humanity’s collective ego has propelled a continuing program of control, through religion and culture and spirituality and technology and ecology and economy and social institutions.
photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Humanity’s rigid structures are burgeoning at the seams, and perhaps the most troublesome are economic trends.

Economic Trends: In short, the heaping piles of IOUs far exceed the monetary base in most sovereign nations. The economic options for nations are to increase taxation and reduce spending, or  print money or borrow money. This means high volatility over the next few years. Economies will rapidly shrink, with intermittent temporary reflationary surges.

Institutionalized dukkha–Buddhism’s first noble truth says dukkha, dissatisfaction, is inherent in the individual and collective human mind. Economically, this manifests as the feeling of lack—the lack of money and the lack of things. And so we always want more. Consumers have to consume more, corporations must grow in size and profits, institutions must grow in power and reach, economies must scale, debt must always grow, the GDP must always grow. The goal is always to get more.

The ultimate tragedy is that everything that is life is devalued into a means of maximizing material value. “Everything” includes the earth and her natural resources, the biosphere, human life (labor, wars), beings (cruelty to fellow animals), society (continually adapting to the economy), religion as means of control, and even spirituality which is often commandeered for achievement and validation.

A Short History of Money –  There have been various means of exchange: barter, gold and other precious metals, credits, IOUs, seashells, and representational money. Representational money is the system we have now. Money represents bank credit. It has no inherent value; it is valuable only by consensus. This is called fiat currency.

Debt-driven economy: In old Europe, as villages prospered, they gave their gold to the local goldsmith for safekeeping. People often came to him to borrow gold and paid back with interest, which he shared with depositors to incent more deposits.  The goldsmith soon discovered that he can loan money by simply giving out promissory notes, instead of the actual gold. These promissory notes became a means of exchange. Then he got even a bolder idea and decided to loan out more money in promissory notes than he actually held in gold. And it worked! It would continue to work until everyone demanded all their deposits back at the same time—this is called a run on the bank. It might have made sense to outlaw the practice of loaning money that didn’t exist, but at the time of European expansion, it was so profitable that it was instead regulated and legalized.

The Federal Reserve in US, for example, is a private, for-profit bank, not a government institution, which loans out money that doesn’t exist.

Money is debt. Money is not created by the market. Money is created when a bank makes a loan. If all loans were called in at the same time, there would be just enough money in circulation to pay back the loans, but not enough to pay the interest, and so the money supply must always grow to cover the debt and interest, and the debt must always grow to increase the money supply. Money is always chasing itself.

Money is money by fiat. Money was backed by gold for a long time. In 1972, the US removed the gold backing. Now, in the US money is a fiat currency; that is, it is money by decree. There is nothing backing up money except the social consensus that it has value.

American hegemony in decline:

• The US has a national debt of 12 trillion dollars, and unfunded liabilities of 106 Trillion, against a GDP of 18 Trillion. (Each US citizen owes $40,000 and is liable in the future for $360,000). Every year, The US collects 2 Trillion in taxes, and spends 3.5 Trillion. The yearly deficit of 1.5 Trillion is borrowed through US Treasuries and bonds.
• The US GDP consisted of 70% consumer spending, much of it financed from home equity loans and expansion of easy credit card debt. With market value of real estate down, credit very tight, and high unemployment, it is unlikely that that consumer spending will balloon to these levels again.
• In an absurd trade spiral, the US voraciously consumes goods from China, and borrows the money for the consumption also mainly from China. Essentially six Asians work hard to keep one American fat, and loan him money so he can pay them.
• The US is holding back unemployment (U-6 number) at 17% (it was 25% during the Great Depression)
• Almost all states and local governments are bankrupt or underfunded.
• The problems in the residential real-estate market will be exacerbated by increasing foreclosures and problems in commercial real estate market.
• Even with the massive injection of money stimulus and 0% loans, there are increasing signs of deflation and decreasing confidence.

International economies on the decline: Japan will continue her austerity and devaluation of currency. Sovereign debt will overwhelm Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Dubai, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. The UK will institute severe austerity measures. The Eurozone will likely collapse. China is waking up a deluge from an housing bubble burst. There are warning signs of bubbles in Canada and Australia. India will face inflation and continued corruption.

Early 2010, wagging the dog: So, if  these insurmountable problems are real, why has the stock market rebounded, the dollar held, and gold and oil remained reasonable and even rallied? What happened?

What happened is a massive injection of money, the largest humanity has ever seen, from the government and the Federal Reserve, through holding the interest rate at 0%, quantitative easing, bail-outs, and stimulus spending. This is of course not sustainable.

The US economy will collapse in 2010 – 2015. This will cause an unraveling of the internal social fabric, and will have international consequences as the balance of power shifts.

Deflationary Depression is the likely scenario. The injection of government money should have caused inflation, even hyper-inflation, because that is what happens when the volume of money increases without corresponding increase in goods and services. However, there is no velocity to the money–that is money is not moving around. This is a sign of deflation. Prices will drop and stagnation will continue or get worse.

Other risks include: peak oil, deficit, debt, unfunded liabilities, commercial real estate risk, credit card debt risk, the US government’s decreasing ability to borrow money, underfunded State and local governments, an economy highly dependent on consumption, the inevitable end of government stimulus, the structure of the debt-driven economy itself, and rapid alterations in the social and class fabrics.

The US gets in a major war every decade—because it can. Eisenhower was prescient in his warning about the military-industrial complex. This decade will be no different. Likely areas of new wars might be the expansion of the Afghanistan war to Pakistan, war with North Korea, or war with Iran.

Fear. There will be trouble in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel and other restive countries. Terrorism will rise. The Mumbai terrorist attacks were relatively inexpensive and “easy”—executed by a very small, radicalized, brainwashed teams of young desperate men with no special training and no special goals except to incite fear.

Humanitarian crisis: There will be desperation in the poorest and most troubled areas, such as Pakistan and the Middle East.

Backlash in the US: The trend to go big in the US will reverse. Everything about the US is too big: our bodies, houses, cars, consumption, materialism, debt, military, government, wars—this will begin to reverse in a trend to go small and local.

Survivalism will go mainstream.

We can expect political leaders to do exactly the wrong things. This is not a cynical statement about politicians. People want quick recovery and so political solutions will always be quick-fixes of spending or control. International sentiment swings between conservatism and progressiveness, but neither can address the basic failure. Pain will be addressed by stimulus spending, and any new initiative will be burdened by special-interest compromise. When the effect of any stimulus dissipates, what remains is still the same faulty economy, laden with even more debt.

Deflationists and inflationists, democrats and republicans, regulators and free market economists, socialists and capitalists will debate endlessly. People will point the finger at the unabashed greed of Wall Street and Wall Street will blame the voracious consumption of the public, and everyone will blame the government.

Governments will barely be able to contain themselves in the rush to print money. Distressed local governments may experiment with new and absurd ways to garner taxes, perhaps by levies on such things as owning pets, and pleasure items, such as alcohol and sex and nicotine, and discretionary items such as gasoline. There may be movements to bring underground economies to the legal surface so it can be taxed—areas such as barter, prostitution, gambling, and marijuana.

The temptation to expand the two wars the US is already fighting, or to use her bankrupt but still lethal military within her own boundaries will be too great. Wars prime the economy.

An opportunity for awakening: I am not minimizing the suffering that can ensue from an economic collapse, There will be desperation, uncertainty and suffering, but from these can rise the opportunity for individual elegance and spiritual awakening.

I fully resemble that story—a few years ago I was at a Vipassana meditation retreat, a ten-day, silent, simple-food, meditate-five-hours-a-day kind of thing. On the very first morning, in the very first meditation session, after less than three minutes, I wanted to bolt.

I didn’t have a car or I would have.

That was my first hint that something was off.

Why do we have so much trouble just being, just resting, sitting and closing our eyes? The only thing easier than that is to sleep. And yet most of us are not able to completely face ourselves.

photo credit: Vincepal

If you look at your life, you will find many instances of running away from yourself.

Here’s a clear example: we think about food all the time, except when we actually eat. When we eat, we don’t eat food, we eat our past and sorrows and anger and fear and what we should have said or done.

Depression and anxiety come from running away. They come from turning emotions inward, rather than releasing or expressing them.

I had a difficult marriage for a long time, and then a difficult divorce. On the surface life was fine. I come from an Indian heritage, and if you know Indians, there’s a certain approach to life. I had a good education, check. I had a wife. Check. Two kids, check. Good money, a 401k account. Check. And so on.

The depression and anxiety attacks were a form of running away, or keeping myself from running away.

After the divorce, I had custody of the girls, one after the other, and that was good. It gave me focus. We had always been very close, the three of us. The girls are intelligent and mature. As the girls grew up and became independent, I began to realize how much of my life had been focused around them. In there absence, there was a feeling of emptiness for a long time.

In the five or six years following the divorce, I had an ego-maniacal sort of energy. I made good money, traveled, and went through a succession of women. I had married young and so the experience with women was new and exhilarating and validating. And a great distraction from having to face myself.

At the tail end of that mania, I had a relationship which I sort of think of as the fulcrum of change. That was a volatile relationship, because of me, because I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t faced myself yet. I remember an incident where she threw away my hand-written journals. And I remember not being too mad about it, because I deserved it. That’s how clumsy I was at that time with life and people.

The end of that relationship was painful, and the misery of that pain was what opened me up to awakening.

And after that there was the energy of the newly awakening—I traveled, I wrote, I explored, I stayed still. External life didn’t get easier—in fact it got more difficult, as I could not find a job, and got financially wiped out in this recession. I went through a time of very low-energy and isolation and insomnia and weight-gain. I would say it was depression, except it didn’t have the unhappiness and the black feeling of futility that often goes with depression.

Still, this was okay, because I saw it as yet another opportunity to awaken.

We run away in many different ways. We run away because of fear. Some people throw themselves in work, some in routine, some need a great deal of attention. Some drink. Some need drama. Some cling to particular beliefs. Some hate. Many of us struggle with food and weight and self-image. Many of us even run away by chasing spirituality.

Keep running—you will not stop because someone tells you to. You may not even stop when you realize you’re running.

But you can start seeing clearly slowly. It’s less effort than not seeing clearly. Be aware, observe. Allow. Love yourself. Fully inhabit your body, here and now. Watch. Witness.

And stuff will come up, and you won’t like it. That’s why releasing can be helpful.

And you’ll have to develop a gentle honesty with yourself. That kind of happens on its own, if you let it. Just know that we’re pretty good at fooling ourselves. Be patient, be gentle, and allow.

And if you do this, and face up to yourself, you may come upon a time when you realize that it’s all been about resistance, about running away, about running away because you are afraid. And then you may stop and look.

That’s a good time to ask: who am I?

There is no conclusion to that question. It’s about seeing you are not your mind, not your thoughts, not your emotions, not your beliefs. All this stuff that happens to “me” happens to an entity which doesn’t exist. It’s a phantom which exists only in thought and memory.

This is why most of us go through life without facing up to this question.

And this is why we suffer.

But at some point life gets painful or boring or absurd enough, and we open up and consider who we really are.

Awakening begins. Awakening for most of us is a journey. It is a journey of letting go of resistance.

What is your particular resistance right now? Are you angry? Are you pissed off because you’ve been practicing the law of attraction and the muscled metrosexual with the Ferrari still hasn’t shown up, the rude bastard? Or are you pissed off because the spiritual identity you have been building up for years is now beginning to crack? Are you feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, anxious, despondent? Is there inertia, low-energy, lassitude? Is life running in the same old cycles? Is it three steps forward, two back? Do you have doubts about this awakening thing you’re doing or not doing? Did you just realize you’ve been fooling yourself?

My resistance at first was intellectual. There are deep patterns of conditioning which can manifest as depression and anxiety and fear. There are addictions. After the initial awakening insight, there have been periods of peace and confidence and high-energy, and periods of great inertia and insomnia and doubts and frustration. Deeper and deeper patterns come to the surface, and are released.

These days I know that the least amount of suffering, the smallest feeling that something isn’t right, the barest nudge that my life is not working, is an indication of resistance in me.

That’s how it goes.

What can you do?

It isn’t what you do. It is what you stop doing.

You stop resisting. You stop resisting resistance. You learn to let go. You find that place within you which can allow. You love. You be patient. You watch, with dis-attachment. You allow.

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