"Stop cowering in the corners of life, hiding behind your ego armor and constricting your heart with your narrow minded clinging."
-The White Mouse
"We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved."
-Sogyal Rinpoche
"Sometimes even when the cell door is flung open, the prisoner chooses not to escape."
-Sogyal Rinpoche
In this vast cult of delusion followed fervently by most individuals of our global village we never imagine that all of our chasing after things, ideas, and experiences is leading us away from becoming free. We think of ourselves so wise and skeptical as we seek out those phenomena that we have been trained to think will make us happy and "real," forever accepted by ourselves and others as successful. But nothing lasts forever. We all know this, not intellectually, but instinctually, and that is why we become both expert adepts at our own denial and expert enablers of others' denial. We may think or say that we shouldn't think about the inherent impermanence of everything including ourselves, because that is morbid and it may bring us more fear. But in our denial of this, we merely express our great gnawing fear of the reality. We rush about in our impressive busy laziness, filling our lives with projects, schemes, plans, people, ideas, religions, experiences, rituals, chores, and anything we could find that could help us remain distracted. We hope that by this distraction that we can escape and finally reach some place in our lives where we will finally have everything we want and finally have pushed out everything about life that we don't want. And in this deception, we add more bricks to the walls that keep us limited, narrow minded, and enslaved. Just because the prison guard is our own delusion, does not mean we are any less enslaved than if the guard was someone else. The mental and emotional chains are always the hardest to break because we have been so skillfully trained to not see such things as having any reality.
But getting to know and befriending the impermanence of everything is the key that unlocks the cell of our lives. Every time we see a sunrise or we adore a lover or when we find ourselves not being able to stop laughing, we get a glimpse of this freedom. The question is how do we overcome the inculcation, the teachings, and the distractions of the cult of delusion so that we can learn to realize our freedom....Not on some abstract philosophical level. Not on some imagined higher spiritual or astral plane, but in the here and now, the present moment, within our very lives as we are living them now, standing on the ground. As long as we are asleep at the wheel of our lives and follow distractions without ever looking within at our motivations or intentions or even what or who we really are as opposed to what or who we are used to telling ourselves, we can't see it. So we devise all sorts of speculations and theories that we accept since they sound so hard core or true or realistic. But if we are not even adept at getting off from the treadmill of distractions and the pulling puppet-strings of manipulated desires (as exists in our current economy), how can we stand there and assert anything about the reality of anything else?
And herein is why looking within is the most potent powder keg flashes of mindfucking. Many people often think that looking within means avoiding the world and focusing on one's own mind and spirit...a sort of abandonment of reality. But they misunderstand. Looking within in those sorts of ways are an avoidance of reality or an attempt to escape responsibility. But there is another more profound looking within, which is not self-focused. It looks within because it is beyond mere cataloging mental perceptions, thoughts and feelings. It looks within to find out exactly what is doing the perceiving, thinking, and feeling. Where the hell are all these things coming from? They are coming from the same sort of processes that give rise to everything else in the universe that exists. There is no difference, though we often like to think so. This sort of looking within confronts and understands impermanence, no matter how frightening. This sort of looking within combined with looking without gives rise to more and more glimpses of what it is like to live with awareness as the center of your being. This gives rise to more and more choices and options in places you never even imagined. This sort of insight can lead you to the realization of where you really stand in relation to other beings and phenomena. Without that relation, you would not exist. And since everything changes and there is ultimately no stable and solid enduring self for you to retreat into and try to hide from the world, you can begin to develop a way of life that is free.
Freedom is one of our deepest instincts, though we are mostly trained by cultures and religions to run away from that freedom...We are trained almost to the point where we feel our instinct is to run from freedom. But the only thing happening here is that our fear has been manipulated either by others or by ourselves. (You didn't think that it was possible for beings to be so tyrannical that they manipulate themselves, did you? Think about it for a while and you will see they are all around you.) Did you ever stop to think about what could happen if you learned to see past the neurotic "convictions" of your own limitations? Our society says that we are free and celebrates our supposed individual liberty yet treats us and trains us to be obsessed only with power, sex, wealth, and everything else it wants us to buy into and sell while it distracts us from contact with the flavor of life and death. It teaches us to try to refine our desire-getting skills while pulling the wool over our eyes about the nature of those desires. And so we find ourselves thinking "if only I had this/that" sort of thoughts. Or we find ourselves trying so hard to grasp at the mercurial mirage of security and endless comfort. Sometimes we even find spiritual-sounding excuses to maintain this stupidity. We say that our endless jumping or running around looking for the next and latest or better thing to satisfy ourselves is the practice of non-attachment, but that is because we are denying the slavery we have fallen into.
We think we need not reflect too much on our lives, since we either believe we are eternal beings who deserve to live forever, or we think that there is no meaning to existence and therefore nothing matters. But these two twin poles are simply the symptoms of a creeping fundamentalism that underpins our choices in maintaining our outlooks. Neither of them are correct. Neither of them get to the heart of the matter. And both of them contribute to our anxiety and the existential angst we often deny is there, just under the surface goading us into making all the stupid and endlessly repeated mistakes we have ever made. Is there a way out? I wouldn't have written this if there was not.
To start with, paradoxically, one must come to the conclusion that there is no escape from your life. You must learn to deal with the whole show, in all of its pretty and ugly aspects, with all of the things you like, dislike, or feel nothing for. All of this is your life, and without any of them, you would not be who you are. Starting from the idea of "no escape" or "no exit," you can then learn to get to know yourself, your life, and this thing called reality that many people often talk about in pseudo-wise fashions. Sure you know about your feelings, thoughts, body sensations, thrills, boredom, spirituality, identity scripts and assemblage points. But what underpins them all? You may exist because you think, but what is that mind that thinks? Who is this person that feels? How did you get to be the sort of person who claims to be yearning for freedom yet finds that such a difficulty that you many times feel it to be impossible? Don't answer the questions. They are not Socratic questions. They are simply calls for reflection, because intellectualizing about this sort of thing only leads to more distraction. Your possibility of freedom is already an inherent part of being alive. You simply need to learn how to embody it.
I leave you with a Buddhist reflection called "the four faults" to think about for the next time you find yourselves swimming in a sea of delusion and have started losing the ability to distinguish between what may be reality and what is the bullshit that is collecting in your perception. Why does complete liberation seem like such an outlandish and impossible idea? Because it is too close to be recognized. It is too profound for us to fathom. It is too easy for us to believe. And it is too wonderful for us to accommodate, especially in our cynical and world weary mindsets in this post-modern era where we are taught that fundamentalist skepticism is the pinnacle of intelligence.
Stay tuned for more rants.
-Irreverend Hugh, KSC
January 6th, 2006 / Chaos 6th, 3172
"What if when you try to kill the Buddha, She kicks your ass instead and leaves you there shredded and bleeding, yet laughing?"
Rant 154
Rants Vol. 2 Index