You Are Your Own Guru

There’s no way around it.  The only way you can have experiences, the only way you can learn, the only way you can become wise, the only way you can get enlightened is by doing it your own self.  But how? 

We spend our whole lives trying to figure out the how.

It’s natural to want help with this.  It’s natural to want an easier way.

We go guru hunting to get help with the daunting task of figuring out how human life works and, sometimes, to hide under someone else’s umbrella for awhile.

We have a built-in hunger to figure life out and to find peace.  We’re hardwired that way.  Most of us look for ways to dull the hunger.  We fill our lives with enjoyments, busy-ness and time fillers.  Sometimes that works for a while, or even a whole lifetime.  But, sometimes, we get kicked off the rails and we’re back where we started, facing the old questions, “Who am I?”, “Where did I come from?”, “What is the good?”,  ”Where am I going?”, ”What should I do?”, “What is life about?”, “How can I be happy?”.  You know, the little nagging questions that can get in the way of sleeping.

Any guru worth her salt will just bring you back to the threshold of your own mind.  Any guru that doesn’t do that, one way or the other, isn’t really a guru at all but is a salesman.  You can learn from salesmen, but it’s expensive.  Then, you’re back on the road again.

Relax.  Every experience is good.  You are on a mission that will last your whole life.  Sooner or later, you will get to where you want to be.  If you pay attention, every step of the way will be good in its own special way.  Don’t be in a hurry.  You are exactly where you are supposed to be.  Savor it.

That’s the secret: pay attention.  Be here now.  Notice what’s around you.  Notice your thoughts.  Notice what you are feeling.  Notice what you are attracted to.  Notice what repels you.  Notice your behavior. Just notice, without having an opinion about it, as if you were watching someone else’s life.  You will notice habits and patterns.  You will start to realize who you are in this one instant of your life.  Then, you can have opinions about it and make other choices if you want to and see how that works out.

Life is designed to be self-teaching.  You can’t get ahead of yourself.  It’s all perfect.

You are work in progress, just like everything that lives in the Earth school.

Your only job is to be present.

WE ARE THE SCULPTORS OF OUR LIVES

I can take a wad of clay in my hands and squeeze and stretch it into some form that I like.  I can squish it all together and start again if I feel like.  I can do this as many times as I want.  Clay is malleable.  It’s easy.

The same is true of that string of experiences that we call our lives.  We shape those, too.  But, we use different tools.  Instead of the fingers and sharp sticks that we use to model clay, we use our thoughts.  We use the sharp tools of our Attention and our Intention.  We use our ideas and expectations.  Life is malleable, too, but it may not seem as easy to change as squeezing clay.

That’s because we stiffen the clay of our experiences with habit.  We constantly repeat patterns of thoughts in an endless loop, hour after hour, day after day.  This is easier than being present in each moment, having fresh experiences and having to make fresh choices, but, it’s a lot less fun.  It’s the difference between being alive and not being alive.  Not being alive is easier.  This gridwork of habit loops is what makes the clay of our lives seem so tough and resistant to change.  The clay is still soft but it’s stuck in a framework of habit patterns.

Who built this mess?  We did!  As a matter of fact, each one of us is pouring energy into maintaining our personal gridwork of habit patterns at this very instant and in every moment of every day.  It is our creation.  We pay the energy bill to keep it lighted.

We could change it, of course, if we wanted to, but that’s another story.

NOTE TO SELF: THE TOO-SIMPLE SECRET

Most of us miss the secret behind living a happy life because it is too simple to be noticed.

It is also hidden in a place that most of us would never think to look – inside ourselves.

The secret can be reduced to one word: being.

We call ourselves “human beings” but we are really human doings, constantly busy in mind and body.  Doing, doing, doing.

We fill our lives with noise.   We can’t hear the secret which is silent.

We think that reality is out there but it is really in here.

Enlightenment can happen in a flash.  But, usually, it doesn’t.  It comes in little pops, spread out over time.

There is nothing to be done.  You already are where you want to be.  All that you have to do is to realize that.  All you need to do is to let that seep in.  You just need to allow yourself to be.  Just now, as you are.

Get quiet, breathe. Let go.

ENOUGH

This ramble came out of a conversation with fellow sculptor and philosopher Mark Hargarten last May.  I felt moved to put my thoughts down.  Here they are.

The idea or sensation of “enough” is the axle of contentment.  It signals fullness, satiation, satisfaction or completion.  When I have had enough, I can relax and throttle back on striving.  I can bask in the richness of living.  I can effortlessly absorb the wonders of my world.  When I sense that I have enough of anything, I can shift my focus to the fine texture of experience.  I can pay attention to now.

The sense of “enough” is a product of self-knowledge.  Through experience, I can get a clear idea of how much of anything it takes to make me happy, whether it is air, food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, security, fellowship, money, power, knowledge, novelty, adventure or automobiles.  Each of us has a satisfaction profile that is as unique as our fingerprints.  We come wired that way.

No satisfaction profile is better than any other.  It is our individual recipe for contentment.  It can be a road map to guide us through our life choices.  If we have an idea of where we’re going, we have a better chance of getting there.

We all come here to life on Earth to bring a fresh flavor to the mix.  No one else can bring our flavor for us.  When we grow into the unique kind of creature that we were born to be, we have done a big part of our job, our special flavor is being delivered.

That feeling of “enough” is a green light that tells us that we are on the right path.  It tells us that we should keep doing what we are doing or to keep not doing what we are not doing.  It tells us that we should be paying attention to the subtler parts of our adventure.  It tells us to proceed.

While we humans never stop desiring, nor should we, it is possible to reach that easy place where the exhilarating rush of desires, like the gentle rocking of a boat, adds zest to living without swamping it.  It is possible to find our balance and to glory in it.

This whole ramble is about externals, the stuff of ego. I see that inner peace is never far away. I just need to get quiet, breathe and be here now.

GREAT NEWS

In the morning, when you leave the land of dreams, you open your eyes to a view of the room that you fell asleep in.  The light may have changed but every detail of the room and its contents, and its inhabitants, including you and your body, is exactly as you expect it to be.  None of this is worth a second thought, or any thought at all, for that matter.  It is time to get on with the new day.  And so, you do.

As far as you can tell, the world that you live in exists independently of you.  It was there long before you were born and it will continue, unchanged, after you are gone.  You can pay attention to it or not.  It doesn’t matter to anyone but you.  Reality goes on.  It has nothing to do with you.  It is completely impersonal and it’s the same for everybody.  That is why we call it “objective reality”.

We need to learn to cope with it if we are to have any hope of surviving, let alone thriving.

We are subject to reality. You could say that we are consumers of it.  Our relationship to reality is a one-way street.  While we are subject to reality, reality is not subject to us.  That’s just the way it is.  We think that any other way to think about it is delusional.

For a long time, going back five to seven thousand years, some deep thinkers began to realize that the world that we know is not the ultimate realty.  They began to sense a subtler reality beneath the world of appearances.  They talked about and wrote about it but their claims fell mainly on deaf ears.  From time to time, great teachers were born who claimed to see a deeper reality and even performed “miracles” based upon their knowledge of it.  Some of these teachings were cocooned in layers of non-comprehension and became the source of religions.  Religions, being matters of “faith” or “belief” tend to be cataloged with superstition in the modern mind.  Only a small minority of humans have taken these teachings seriously as reality.  The rest of us stay on the surface of appearances and struggle to cope.

Starting in the early part of the last century, our view of reality began to be challenged by new discoveries in Physics.  Delving into the nature of atoms, physicists discovered that the solid reality that we perceived consisted mainly of empty space.  They visualized the atom as a miniature solar system with subatomic particles orbiting the nucleus of the atom like planets orbiting the sun.  As they looked closer, they discovered that the particles they were studying were most likely bundles of energy, whatever that is.  And, these bundles of energy sometimes acted like particles and sometimes acted like waves, depending on whether they were being observed.

As far as we humans could tell, based on our deepest study, the world that we live in exists solely in our perceptions.  The reality inside it is completely different and not directly knowable by us.  Now, the Hindu idea that the world that we perceive is “maya”, the Sanskrit word for illusion, began to seem less far-fetched.

Another train of inquiry in science has been in brain research.  The accepted idea has been that humans developed consciousness as our brains evolved and that our minds are a function of our brains.  This fit the view that humans are animals that have developed consciousness and are the only creatures that are conscious of being conscious.

New tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines have allowed researchers to closely observe the electrical activity of the brain in real time.  In this way, we have been able to learn what areas of the brain become active when we have particular thoughts or experiences.  We have become much more knowledgeable about how the brain works.  Still, intimate study of brain activity has not yielded any idea about where thoughts originate in the first place. 

The study of perception has not yielded any idea of how the stimulation of our sensors of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell can possibly deliver the experience of the magnificent, fine grained, sensually rich, totally immersive world that we live in.  The mystery of how we can convert nerve impulses from our contact with the sea of patterned energy, that Physics has found to be all that is, has not been solved.  In fact, the question has not been posed in the minds of most scientists.

While it is undeniable that we are conscious and that we are conscious that we are conscious, science has not provided any explanation of the source of our consciousness.  The assumption that consciousness somehow emerged from higher brain functioning in the newest part of the human brain, the cerebral cortex, is common.  No tenable argument to support this belief has been put forward.

The “hard problem of consciousness” is only a hard problem if one accepts the assumptions of a science based on the presumption that reality is physical in nature and that all truths can only be based on physical principles.  This is a curious position when one considers the finding of physics that the physical world that we perceive does not represent the underlying facts of existence.  In other words, the solid world that we experience does not exist as a physical fact.  It exists and is real only in our individual perceptions and is entirely subjective.

If we were to turn our assumptions about physicality and consciousness on their heads, we could easily solve the hard problem of consciousness and gain a fresh view of cosmology, evolution and history.  If we assume that consciousness is the beginning, bedrock and source of all that is and that the big bang and all that is issuing from it is an idea in eternal consciousness, the world makes a lot more sense.  In other words, the physical universe and all that it contains is a manifestation of thought.  Matter is frozen consciousness like a splash of water instantly turned to ice in midair.

If the universe is not merely an accidental or random explosion of dumb matter but, rather, the exuberant flowering of intention, what does that make us?  Instead of an accidental fluke of nature, a self-conscious animal on an obscure planet in an incomprehensibly huge cosmos, who are we?

Could it be that we are conscious beings in a conscious universe?  Could it be that we are made of the same stuff that that the universe is made of, which is consciousness?  Could it be that our minds are local facets of the universal mind?  Could it be that we share in the attributes of the conscious, creative, expanding universe?  These conjectures need to be tested in our own experience.

If the universe is a thought in the process of manifesting itself and if we humans have the ability to generate thoughts, do we also have the power to manifest the things that we imagine?  There are mountains of evidence that we do have that power to manifest “physical” realities and that we have always had that.  We are doing it now but, mostly, we are unaware of it.  Instead, we accept our world at face value and deny having any role in creating it. We are content to be consumers of reality rather than creators of it.

The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe.  It is programmed by the system of beliefs that we have acquired throughout life.  Then, based upon constant streams of sensory inputs from our bodies, it filters the massive amounts of data it receives and creates an interpretation that we consciously perceive.  We call this interpretation “reality” or “the world” or “my life” or “now”.  Notice that our brain creates what we are perceiving as reality.  It creates our individual universe.  In that sense, with the help of our brains and, based on our thoughts, we are making it all up.  Each moment of each day of each life is a work of creative genius.

The programming of our brain begins in the womb and continues throughout life.  Up until about age six we are totally receptive to any influences in our environment that give us information about what life is like and how we should react to our experiences.  These influences are mainly other people and we learn to mirror their ideas and behaviors uncritically.  We do not begin to develop enough sense of self to begin to filter those inputs until that time so the contents of our subconscious mind are mainly the product of other people’s ideas.  The subconscious mind works like a tape player.  When a particular kind of experience is encountered, the relevant tape is played back.  That tape is the program that the brain uses to mold sensory inputs into the reality that we experience.  While it is possible to replace these programs that reside in the subconscious mind, it requires persistence.  We do it often throughout life as we learn, grow and develop new habits.  We can change our programming consciously if we choose to and are willing to devote the necessary effort to the process.

We could call these brain programs our beliefs.  Our beliefs determine what our world is like.  If we carry the belief that we at the mercy of chance events or of other people then our life experience bears this out.  If we carry the belief that we determine the quality of our own life and that we are not subject to the intrusion of chance events or of other people, then we won’t be.  This is important because it highlights an essential principle:  No sovereign, divine being can impinge upon the life of any other sovereign, divine being without agreement between the two.  Nothing can come into your life unless you invite it in through your beliefs.  This is the basis of your security on the planet.

The essential self that we really are is always present, running in the background.  It is the “me” that is reading this.  It is the witness to my every thought, feeling or action.  It is the source of every new idea.  It is the source of loving thoughts, empathy and compassion.  It is the thread that holds my life together.

You have a body but you are not your body, as much as you may identify with it and think that it is you. Your body is the physical vehicle of your essential self.  You are the consciousness behind your body.  You are the driver.  Your body is the car.

Your physical self, the body/mind that you have incarnated into, your vehicle, includes an operating system.  That operating system is the software that we call “psychology”. Psychology controls behavior.  A major segment of our operating system is a very useful program that we have come to call “ego”.  It is the ego’s job to protect and preserve our physical body and to provide for its wellbeing.  The ego is the seat of the idea that we are our body and nothing else.

In the course of doing its job, this body self, false self or ego that we all have is the source of fears and all of the cascade of negative feelings and ideas that come from fear.  Anger, envy, jealousy and hatred are its spawn.  When we are feeling any of these, we are in the grip of ego and the bogus idea that it is the real me and that I should base my behavior on its promptings.

Wise humans have been parsing the deep truths of human life for a very long time.  We live in an exciting age where the brilliant tool of science is beginning to validate the insights of our most advanced thinkers.  Statements that were couched in spiritual terms and formerly thought to be fanciful, poetic evocations of wishful “truths” are beginning to be seen as accurate descriptions of the deep nature of reality.  While these statements have always been accurate and accessible to initiates through arcane disciplines, they have not been comprehensible to rationalist/materialistic thinkers until recently.  Science, the quintessential rationalist/materialist mode of inquiry, is providing the bridge for our comprehension of this wisdom.  The reason for plumbing the depths of this deep knowledge is that it indicates to us the principles of consciousness upon which a successful, fulfilling life can be built.  We can understand what works and why it works and have the option of creating the life of our choice.  In doing that, as seemingly isolated individuals, we each contribute to the positive evolution of consciousness and to the expansion of the universe.  This is an automatic byproduct of our selfish urge for a life of greater fulfillment.  What is good for one is good for all.

I have been drawing a very simple cartoon of what I have come to believe is the truth of human life. I have spent my time on the planet collecting the bits of evidence that have allowed me to reach these conclusions.  Everything that I say here is subject to revision based on further learning.  This theory is a work in progress as I am and we all are.  This is what I believe to be true today.

I will summarize the good news:

          You are an eternal being, a self-aware off-shoot of all-that-is.

          You have chosen to incarnate on planet Earth and to be part of nature.

          You create your experience of living with your thoughts.

          Your thoughts and desires contribute to the evolution of consciousness.

This is my advice to you:

Find the stillness that lies within you every day and spend some time there.

Notice what you like in your life and say, thank you.  You will get more things like it.

Take your attention away from things you don’t like.  You will get fewer things like them.

Choose the best feeling thoughts that you can find and think them as often as possible.

Notice your emotions.  Good feelings tell you that your current thought is good for you.  Bad feelings tell you that your current thought is bad for you.  Then, let them go.

Be kind and loving to yourself.  You will tend to be kind and loving to everyone else.

Dream up the best life for yourself that you can imagine in as much detail as you can manage.  Especially, feel what it will feel like to live that life.  Decide to have it and put energy into getting it every day.  Then, let it go and trust that it is on its way.

Share what you learn with other people.  The more you give, the more you get.

Remember that your life is your life.  You are making it all up.  It is your unique work of art and it doesn’t have to fit into anyone else’s unless you say it does.

There is only one of us here, in spite of appearances.  What is good for one is good for all. 

What is bad for one is bad for all.

The greatest gift that you can give is to be your own, authentic self.  That’s what you are here for.

Have fun.

AWARENESS / NOISE

Awareness is the flashlight beam of attention.  Some people are penlights held close to a surface.  Their world is small and bright.  Other people are large flashlights whose beam covers a bigger area.  Some are spotlights who light up huge fields.  In each case, the area that is lighted is the world that particular individual lives in.

The size of our flashlight depends on what we pay attention to.  If I am a penlight that is curious to see more, I can pull back from the surface and light up a bigger spot.  I can keep backing up to see more, more and more.  My curiosity will cause my beam to grow and, without noticing it, I will become a bigger flashlight living in a bigger world.

This is all about what I pay attention to and how much attention I pay to it.  If my attention is diluted or clouded, I can’t see as well and my world gets smaller.  I am living in a fog.

Our media provide the fog by overstimulating and misdirecting our attention.  Our media provide the noise that blocks the signal of our clarity.  This noise can overwhelm the signal.  We can become confused.  We can become lost.

Fortunately, we have remedies to this confusion. 

We need to get quiet.  Inwardly, we can bring our attention the here and now with meditation and mindfulness.  Outwardly, we can turn off the TV and radio and put down our cell phones.

The noise has an on/off switch.  Use it.

CHANGE THE SUBJECT

Thoughts are like birds that fly through the sky of our attention.  Some may sit on a wire and hang around for a while if you pay attention to them.  Otherwise, they simply fly by.  One thought follows another. 

What you pay attention to is the key.  You have control over what you do, or don’t, pay attention to.

Some thoughts are sticky and hard to let go of.  They have aroused an emotional response in you.  In other words, you can feel them.  If you have gotten stuck to a bad-feeling thought by paying attention to it, it can be hard to shake.  You do have a choice, though.  You can change the subject.

Choose a good feeling thought.  Since you can’t really think more than one thought at a time, the new, better feeling thought, will push the bad-feeling thought aside.  You can replace your thoughts as often as you wish.  Change the subject until you find a really good-feeling thought and stick with it.  This is just as arbitrary and artificial as it sounds, but it works.

Good feeling thoughts are the ones that are consistent with your highest good in some way.  That’s why they feel good.  Concentrating on them will bring positive experiences into your life.  This is automatic.  You don’t have to think about it.