Water Does Not Care What Is In It.

"Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil."

-- Marcus Aurelius

Fred Davis recently said "THIS has to be enough". He is of course referring to What Is.

There is only what is, as I have said before, because there is no such thing as what is not. We can only have what we have. We can only experience what we experience. So where does that leave us?

Right here. Right now.

This has to be enough. There is nothing else. As long as you have desires for something that does not exist, for something other than that which is, then you will create your own suffering.

That is what ego does; one could almost say its job is to do that.

The ego was a survival mechanism. I suspect its original design was all to do with creating circumstances in which the organism could survive, even if that meant banding together with other organisms. The problems arise when it begins to believe that it really exists.

It's like when you go to watch a movie. 

You know you're just watching a movie. You know you paid your entrance fee. You know you are sitting there with drinks and snacks and perhaps in the company of friends, but in order to enjoy the experience you deliberately forget all that. You become so involved in the story playing out on the screen before you that you forget that it is not you. You forget that it is a story. You become fully immersed in the story and, usually, quite enjoy it.

Life is the same. 

The character, the ego, the little me – whatever you want to call it – is just a story. 'What you really are' is here to experience that story. There is nothing wrong with not waking up and realising that it is a story, because that would be what is happening and there is never anything wrong with what is happening. The whole universe is perfect just the way it is. That which you truly are understands this. The ego does not.

Awakening, Enlightenment, Unity with God – whatever you want to call it – is simply what you are when you realise that it is just a story.

There is no you. There never was a you. There never will be a you. There is only this, right here, right now.

Egos spend the majority of their time living in a world that does not exist, a world of their own imagining. If only I had more money. If only I had a better job. If only I wasn't so fat. Feel free to add your own to the list. It is all just a list of things that do not exist created by ego, because it does not think that This is enough.

Enlightenment is not a state of permanent bliss, because enlightenment is not a state.

It is very nice to sit around and feel total bliss, but total bliss is just an arising in what you truly are. To what you truly are there is no difference between Hitler and Schindler.

There is no good or bad, they are just points on the same sliding scale of okayness.

Opinions, beliefs, positions, values and stories are all the realm of the ego. They are all arisings. You, whatever you are, observe all those things and therefore are not those things.

Your true nature accepts everything just as it is. 

I do not know what it is, I just know that it is perfect.

Poking a Stick Into the Mud

She is detached from all things; that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself, she is perfectly fulfilled.

– – Lao Tzu

Today my ego decided to argue with reality. Seriously.

The ego mind, which can never grasp Liberation, decided to argue about non-duality.

In most discussions about enlightenment, non-duality is the core of the realisation. There is no separation. Individuation exists only in language. It should therefore be easy to persuade an ego that it is wrong.

It isn't.

The ego has a memory of the enlightenment experience. In the ego's memory of the enlightenment experience, the ego was sitting on a chair in a medical centre not thinking, just looking around. In this memory the ego is obviously thinking as it is inventing what it was doing by piecing together glimpses of what was stored in memory at the time.

In every memory, the ego sees itself as being the central actor. Therefore, as far as the ego is concerned, there was always a duality. The ego was looking. The ego was noticing that it wasn't thinking. The ego is feeling pleased with itself because it became enlightened at that moment.

Only, it didn't.

Egos cannot be enlightened since they are a fictitious construct, a character, something that does not exist until after the events in which it believes it took part are over. In order for ego to exist, language and thoughts have to happen first. It is easy to prove to yourself, your real self, that language and thoughts do not occur until after the moment has passed.

For example, you are looking around and you see a cat. That is it, seeing has happened and microseconds later a thought arises and labels the thing you saw as a cat. Another thought may then arise about what kind of cat it was and memory will be consulted, colours will be assigned, comparisons will be made. All of this is happening after the seeing took place and did not exist at the time of the seeing, when Awakeness Is.

The ego has no input into the Now. The ego inserts itself later, when it uses thoughts and language and memory to create a story. To the ego, there will always be a duality.

Enlightenment involves complete non-attachment, including non-attachment to language and labelling. Without labels there is no other, there is just What Is.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

– – Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching: An Illustrated Journey translated by Stephen Mitchell