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

----
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.

No moment

"... the lesson of the moment is that moments cannot be seized. There is no now, there is only the intersection of past and future, both of which poses the curious charm of not existing."
- Jed McKenna


That is so brilliant. It's clear to us that the past does not exist, and the future neither. And it's also clear that the "now" is a dimensionless line where the two are touching. So what does that make the whole universe?

Discipline or flow?

A famous success guru said: "Do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. There are 999 other success principles that I have found in my reading and experience, but without self-discipline, none of them work."

What a life. Sentenced to spend your whole life doing things you don't want to do, all in the name of "success". I'm sure it has made a lot of rich, bitter old men.

Like Jed McKenna talks about, and like I've experienced in my own life, if you start "going with the flow" and let the higher mind guide you instead of forcing your egoic desires on life, you will more and more get into a sort of life where you never do anything you don't feel like.

Think about it: if you're in touch with the Universe's wishes, and you're going in the right direction, what needs doing will also be something you're interested in and you feel like doing, n'est-ce pas?

Doing that more and more will also help undoing the ego (because only the ego struggles against the Flow), so it's not a painless process, but it will get you more and more into a true effortless existence.

Becoming an un-fish

"There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realising its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being."
- Wei Wu Wei

This author seems really interesting, and I've just ordered one of his books. I went for All Else Is Bondage: Non-Volitional Living, because going with the flow is something which really hits home with me right at this moment.

A Hard Crust

"You are nothing but consciousness, everything that tells you more than that is like a built-up crust of hard-packed emotional energy that has formed around you like a shell. All true growth and development is first and foremost a process of chopping away this crust."
- Spiritual Warfare page 100

Yes, yes, f***ing hell.
And the reason it takes so much work and time is because it is so incredibly hard-packed and many-layered.
It continues:

"Ego sends us searching in the direction of learning, of becoming more and adding on to ourselves, but everything we claim to seek lies in the opposite direction; of unlearning, of letting go, of reducing."

No breaks

Once I worked for a boss who was testing a new kind of personality analysis test for recruiting. One of the questions was: "do you ever exert yourself to the utmost?" I commented to him: "heck, I always do that."
He laughed and said "come on..." and I can understand that, because outwardly I'm sure I seem like a nicely relaxed person. But it's really true, only in the ultimate sense: spiritually.

I don't know any other gear but top gear, and I don't know any other destination but All The Way.

Creating something real

I've made a discovery:

Trying to create something real is an awakening-process.

They tell us, and I believe them, that nothing is real besides God/Oneness/Source. So I'm sure you can't really create something real. But that's besides the point. The point is the trying.

I do it by art, but I'm sure it'll work with anything, like trying to create a "real family" or trying to build a "real boat", both of them as opposed to the fake ones you get handed from others.

I don't know how it works. Maybe it's simply that when you keep reaching for something real, you get something real, in the end.

Inspiration

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self- consciousness. -- Aaron Copland

Julie's words

More from Jed's second book (said by Julie)

"There's not a singly thing that matters about the dream except that you're in a dream. Wake up!"

"I understand fear now, I know what it is, how total it is. You can look at yourself and not see it because you don't see anything that's not it. I know that I wasn't afraid, I was fear."

I think if one really understands those two statements, they are tremendously important.

Update: Another interesting thing she said is that all human feelings stem from and are variations of fear. It's like a human is a prism which takes the incoming white light of fear and creates a rainbow of seemingly varied feelings from it.

On fear

"Depression is fear with hope removed."

"Denial of fear is the motivation underlying all activities in which humans engage."

Both by Jed McKenna

His books are really outstanding. Apart from DU, the most uncompromisingly non-dualistic ones I've read. And like DU, exceptional in being clear despite this. Other non-dualistic books I've tried to read have been nebulous at best.

No big or small

I had a sudden insight at one point which confirms the unreality of the world:

There is no big or small.

If you consider an object as divorced from all other objects, can you judge it's size? No you can't. Size is meaningless without other objects to judge it against.

If a concept demands relativity and relations to make sense, can it possibly be real? Of course not.

And, to me at least, this makes the whole universe meaningless and therefore non-existent, because sizes and relations is everything in this world.

Exhilaration

McKenna talks briefly about a phenomenon of the person who is "breaking free", who is on his way to awakening: elation. An occasional wild, intense, boundless elation. "King of the world, Ma!"

I'm happy to hear it, because I've felt it sometimes for many years, and I've even mentioned it to a couple of spiritual consultants, only I called it exhilaration. It's what has made the hardship of a collapsing ego bearable. The vivid, inner exhilaration I feel by my contact with Source.

New documentary

I've added a second documentary to YouTube:
The Story of a Course In Miracles.

It is tricky and long to chop up 65 minutes' worth of documentary, encode them correctly, and upload them, but the first one had such great reception I wanted to put up this one too.

These seven parts are the first half-part, I hope to do the second half soon.

Update: all 16 parts there now. 

Buy the DVD at ACIM.org!

This Contracted Life

I just had a delightful conversation with A Course In Miracles luminary Judith Skutch Whitson. She told me a story which I found very inspiring. She had been communicating to her sister who had died in an accident. And her sister seemed to be in an "everywhere" space and seemed very peaceful and relaxed about the whole thing. Her sister used the term "diffused" about the state, and she said to Judith that she ought to be aware of the great number of souls who are clamoring to get into the contracted state of life on Earth, to take advantage of the intense Forgiveness Lessons this gives.

Life as a human is tough, and many of us curse it sometimes. But there is much evidence that it was not created by accident: it really is a greatly accelerated course for spiritual progress.