Umberto Eco

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
-- Umberto Eco

Goldsmith

God must become an activity in our consciousness.
-- Joel S. Goldsmith

Married to...

Buttercup Festival.

Body, Gogh

"What is the use of a beautiful body, animals have it too... perhaps even more than men... but... the soul, as it lives in the people, that's what animals never have. Is not life given us to become richer in spirit?" - Vincent van Gogh


---
I'm watching "Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh", a film with some of Gogh's letters read by John Hurt. It's excellent.

Vincent is seen as the archetypical "tortured artist", with some justification. But I think it is much more important that his art came from Love of Life, and like he said himself, from Serenity. He never felt sorry for himself, he took the hardships of life as simply the price one paid to reach Higher. And he saw the Light, Love, and Joy behind it all, and that is what he painted.

Art and awakening

I just had a realization: art, like humor, can facilitate awakening. Well, I knew that, but what I realized is that like humor, but unlike most other methods, it can make awakening into a process which has more pleasure than pain.

Resting as awareness

Opinions

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Fear and smallness

I have come to realize that all my trouble with living has come from fear and smallness within me. -- Angela L. Wozniak

Ego dissolving

Hokey sh*t, here's another huge thing from the same book:

The ego having been fully dissolved is not the same as awakening.

Many wake up, permanently or not, before the ego is dissolved, and the awakening accelerates the process explosively. But the ego may still be there, in fact it can even be a very strong ego, and fight the dissolving process tooth and nail.

This fits my experience so much, and it seems to be one of the few things missing from The Disappearance Of The Universe. In that book the end of the ego seems to be totally identified with Awakening, and it does not make sense to me, because so many people who are clearly awakened also clearly have ego.

What Adya says may explain what happened to me: it might be that I had not just a brief awakening in 1986, but a permanent one (I'm not at all sure, though), but it was obscured by a fantastically strong ego, which has been painfully being dismantled every since, accompanied not the least by crippling fear. It can still be difficult at times, but I'm pretty sure I'm close to the end of fear. I hope very close! :-)

Glimpsing Reality

Once again, Adyashanti has said something I needed to hear (in the book End Of Your World). This one also confirms long-time suspicions of mine.
He talked about how some people have mini-awakenings which are not permanent. They can be longer or shorter. And how it might even be so short as just "a snap of the fingers".
But that even that... Reality is so powerful that just such a glimpse can powerfully change somebody's life.
And start the ego falling apart for real.

Which is exactly what happened to me in 1986. I had a micro-second glimpse of something, and then fear kicked back so hard that it took me two decades to dig back to where I could start getting an overview of what had happened.
One of the effects, apart from the beginning of mystical experiences and the ego dismantling, was that I got in touch with a powerful Inspiration for my art.

I'd figured it out, but it's good to hear that it's a known phenomenon, this brief glimpse of Reality (Source).

Descartes on doubt

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
-- Rene Descartes

I strongly agree, though I would add that once won't do it by a long shot.
And also that "all things" mean all things, not just those which are supposed to be in doubt by humans.

Happiness from without?

From a surprising source comes an article about fool's gold.

Adyashanti

Adyashanti is one of those who sometimes says valuable things I've not heard anywhere else. He has a Utoob channel.

---
Here is a "bootleg" video where he talks about The Secret and manifesting things. Will it make you happy?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Passenger

One of my old fave songs is The Passenger by Iggy Pop.
I'm gaining appreciation of the lyrics now, it seems to me they are about both "being in the world but not of it", or detachment from the dream, and about going with the flow instead of letting the ego try to control the world.

I am the passenger
And I ride and I ride
I ride through the citys backside
I see the stars come out of the sky
Yeah, theyre bright in a hollow sky
You know it looks so good tonight
I am the passenger
I stay under glass
I look through my window so bright
I see the stars come out tonight
I see the bright and hollow sky
Over the citys a rip in the sky
And everything looks good tonight
Singin la la la la la-la-la la
La la la la la-la-la la
La la la la la-la-la la la-la
Get into the car
Well be the passenger
Well ride through the city tonight
See the citys ripped insides
Well see the bright and hollow sky
Well see the stars that shine so bright
The sky was made for us tonight
Oh the passenger
How how he rides
Oh the passenger
He rides and he rides
He looks through his window
What does he see?
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He see the stars come out tonight
He sees the citys ripped backsides
He sees the winding ocean drive
And everything was made for you and me
All of it was made for you and me
cause it just belongs to you and me
So lets take a ride and see whats mine
Singing...
Oh, the passenger
He rides and he rides
He sees things from under glass
He looks through his windows eye
He sees the things he knows are his
He sees the bright and hollow sky
He sees the city asleep at night
He sees the stars are out tonight
And all of it is yours and mine
And all of it is yours and mine
Oh, lets ride and ride and ride and ride...

Another train dream

(I don't know why I often dream about traveling around in complex train systems.)

I dreamed that I was on a train in the local train system in/around Copenhagen, with a couple old friends.
An area we were going to was nicknamed "Tivoli", according to the train station map. I did not know why, but I found out. (Tivoli is a venerable Copenhagen amusement park.)
Once out there, it happened that the train went into a tunnel, and then went downwards. Like 45 degrees downwards!
While hanging on for dear life, I asked my friends what the hell is this, and they said "have you never been in this area before?", and I said "apparently not by train!"

It went down like a roller coaster, except it went on and on and on and on, with gut-wrenching speed.
I thought, "how and when did Danish Rail have the time and money to build this??!"

It was absolutely, spectacularly terrifying. After I woke up, I had remnants of that fear for over an hour. (Yet it was not all that unpleasant, oddly.)

Then later it leveled out, and soon we came to a station. I ogled a beautiful woman getting off, and then we got off ourselves. I said that I knew the guy in the video store in this town, and we could do some kind of business with him.

When we went out of the station, the stars were out and the birds were singing. Even though the train had never turned upwards again, we were outdoors.

I thought about it a lot after waking, and I'm guessing I can learn that you can be afraid for no reason at all. And that even if it feels like you sometimes go down, there really are no levels.

About everything

Funny, it seems to me that there are two ways to enlightenment:

1) Rejecting everything in the world.

2) Embracing everything in the world.

Would seem like opposites, but I think not.
I think the key is in the word everything.
You can't have any exceptions, because then you won't arrive at unity.

The first one is really looking at the whole illusion and rejecting it.
The second one is really looking past the illusion, and embracing what's behind it.

Addictions and pretty women

I've written about addictions before. I think it's a very important aspect of life to understand if one wants to rise above the traps.

An addiction occurs as a distraction from pain. Which at its deepest level always the pain of the imagined separation from Source (god). That pain is very great, which is why addictions are so powerful.

Addictions are not only drugs, they can be anything. Work, exercise, "love", sex, sports, prestige, wealth, anything that can take attention.

I've managed to stay clear of the most destructive ones, like drugs. But I still have some: coffee, sugar. Thinking. Entertainment. Pretty women. It's especially in the last one that I really notice the power of addiction. The attraction, the pull, of a beautiful woman is so astoundingly powerful it beggars belief.

It's a bit of a special case though. It is my belief that while sex in itself is pretty much just a drug, the abstract part of the Beauty of Woman is one of those things which connect us with god. Which is why it can be so powerful and so painful. It actually helps undo the Ego. I once had the perception that this design was deliberately created to help counter the introversive effect of sex, and offer a way out.

Hicks and Tomlin

“Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is just energy condensed to a slow vabration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.”
- Bill Hicks


The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
- Lily Tomlin

... the problem with being in the human race is that even if you win, you're still a human.
- Jed McKenna
(Admittedly that was implied by Tomlin, a little bit.)

Indeed. I've never understood people who looooove being human. Come on, it fucking sucks on all levels. The best you can hope for is good sex and a million dollars? Good grief.

Disillusionments

"The process of awakening is a series of disillusionments, and each one hurts."
- Jed McKenna

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Tim points to this article about McKenna, thanks.

By the way, I'm currently reading the ebook bonus chapters of Jed's book, and they are surprisingly interesting. They're not really superfluous I think.

It's a pity that Jed's publishing company is so egoic that it does not have a good deal for somebody who already paid for the paper books and just want to get the bonus chapters, instead you have to pay the full price for the ebooks. (And $17 is too much for an ebook anyway.) They are also so suspiciuos that they use "Adobe Digital Editions" instead of PDF files, so you can't copy text, you can't get the computer to read the text aloud for you, etc etc. I don't think it's in the spirit of Jed's go-with-the-flow attitude.

Articles by Jed McKenna

Articles by Jed McKenna.
(Just dismiss the browser warning, it's meaningless.)
"We don’t want truth, we want a particular truth; one that doesn't threaten ego, one that doesn’t exist. We insist on a truth that makes sense given what we know, not knowing that we don't know anything."

Awakening/lucid

I just realized that what people call "awakening" can't be that.
Since you're still in the dream, it's the equivalent of lucid dreaming. But you're still dreaming/sleeping.
Awakening is leaving the Dream entirely. No more dream at all.
I'm sure there's at least as big a difference between the two as there is between dreaming and lucid dreaming.