Where are you going?

Where are you going?

Everything comes to you. Try and stop what comes to you. Try and escape what comes to you. You can pretend that it’s not here. You can pretend that you had something to do with things showing up the way they do with such precision, with its particular colors and flavors and moods. But it won’t make it true.

Then why not stay here and enjoy what comes.

“I don’t like what’s showing up right now. I wish I felt different. How do I make myself feel good all the time so that I never have to experience anything unpleasant?”

These thoughts are entertained under the assumption that you had something to do with these feelings, perceptions, and thoughts showing up the way they did. If only you thought different things, than these unpleasantries wouldn’t show up, right? 

WRONG! 

They showed up. That’s all. The rain shows up. The clear blue sky shows up. We don’t question them showing up whenever they wish, then why do we insist that our moods, feelings, and thoughts are conjured up by us? 

“What do I do then when unpleasantries show up?”

 The same thing you’d do when the rain shows up. You watch it out the window. You use an umbrella when appropriate. You don’t mind it any business and continue sipping on your chai latte. Basically, you move on with your life while these feelings move on with theirs. They only linger when you try to solve their existence. 

Just as you wouldn’t try and solve the rain’s existence,  don’t try and solve the existence of your internal weather.

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Observe and Notice

“It takes only alertness to see habits of thinking and how these contract us. When we see that almost all of our existence is mechanical repetition we automatically step out of the pattern and into observing… Observing itself has its own taste and needs no addition.”

– Jean Klein, Who Am I?



This quote goes hand-in-hand with Nisargadatta's I AM THAT. Observe the "I" before everything else: before thoughts, before actions, before the person does or says anything. There's always that moment before anything happens. Unfortunately, in most people that moment seems so fast and fleeting, they hardly notice it. But it's there. And it's also there during thoughts, conversations, and actions. The observing is there before, after, and during the personal dramas. If it wasn't being observed, how would you know anything is happening at all?


Notice "I exist" before everything else.


Notice how repetitive thoughts are. They're like a broken record, the sole purpose of which is to tell you who you think you are. Thoughts don't tell you who you really are, they just repeat everything you've learned over the years—the things others have told you and things that you've heard—in order to establish an identity. But notice how thoughts only derive their information from the past and the projections of the future. They're never in real-time. The only thoughts you experience in real-time are the ones about what happened or what could happen.


But even as thoughts happen, there is something that is noticing them. That's the gold mine right there. Borrowing Peter Brown's favorite phrase: it's not nothing. It is full. "It has its own taste and needs no additions." The desire to add something to ourselves—more information, more things, more people, more money, etc—is a thought-driven/identity-driven phenomenon. And as already discussed, thoughts are nothing more than repetitive garbage collection of the past and the non-existent future. Notice the fact of that.


Before anything else, I AM. Feel it. Know it. Stay with it.

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The Lie of Content

Liberation: No preferences, not giving a shit, free of the tyranny and the lie of “content.” – Peter Brown, "I Think That's What He Said" (http://www.theopendoorway.org)

I find that without the content or my story of the situation, things are just happening. There is no attachment to what's happening nor to the results. As my teacher, Peter Brown, puts it, "I am the field of experience." 

Many layers have been shed already and now I can see the layers that lie beneath, the more painful, buried ones. However, I am seeing that these seemingly unconquerable sensations are still just that—sensations. They are happening within this field that I am and the only reason they feel like contractions and not expansions is due to my holding them to be something. I am supplying some kind of meaning to them—"ouch, it hurts; this shouldn't be." If I believe that they shouldn't be, then I'm going to try and get rid of them, mask them or run away from them. What if I just STOP. 

I stop for a moment and don't fight the sensations nor go to the content/story to try and explain why I feel the way I feel. 

I feel sore around the heart center, but there is no suffering. It's just a sensation. At first, scary and unmanageable, but in a mere moment becomes a neutral sensation. And I am once again the field of experience. 

I'm seeing that the situation appears, the same way my thoughts about it appear—as an experience in my field and not who I am. Upon a closer look, I see that there's no causality between the situation and my thoughts about it. All content is a lie. The content is only real as itself—as content—and nothing more. 

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