If you’re perceptive you will notice something about the life you’ve been conditioned into.
It feels kind of… clunky, choppy, almost intermediate. It’s as if you’re playing a first-person shooter with slow internet — everything’s glitchy, your aim’s off, and you’re not having fun.
You have the feeling that something ain’t quite right. Life doesn’t feel direct.
Like in the first-person shooter example, the issue is one of connection. But unlike in the first-person shooter example, fixing this issue isn’t about fixing the connectivity.
Actually, it’s not a matter of fixing anything.
The problem is not that you aren’t connected but that you believe you’re separate.
There is nothing disconnected in need of reconnection. This is because there never was any connection in the first place. Connection implies two separate things being connected through an intermediary.
There are no two or more separate things. There are no things at all.
You believe you are here and life (or the world or other people) is over there, separate from you. And this belief leads to all kinds of craziness.
The signs are all over the place.
When we feel separate we feel incomplete, unworthy, lacking. We put others on a pedestal. We believe others know or have something we don’t, so we happily relinquish our sovereignty. We’re afraid of the big bad world out there. We fight for a place under the sun. We lack trust.
Look up.
Who do you see above you?
A scientist? A teacher? A guru? A friend? An enemy? Your parents?
This is the Buddha that is beckoning to be killed, figuratively speaking.
When we believe we are separate individual selves, we’re constantly trying to find the answers outside of ourselves. We’re always looking for someone who knows more, is wiser and more successful, can help and guide us, can make sense of our life for us.
What you’re doing is appointing middlemen — intermediaries between you and life.
If it’s not a person, then it’s a teaching, philosophy, ideology. And if it’s not that, then it’s “your own” thoughts.
Middlemen come into play when we’re afraid of abandoning ourselves into the bosom of life. Then we labor to keep an artificial segregation alive.
We do that because of fear.
The mind craves something to hold onto — a concept that will provide stability and assurance. The mind hopes to find solid ground. Sooner or later every concept is seen as insufficient for the task. Concepts in general lack in actuality and substance.
How could they ever help make sense of a life that is non-conceptual?
It might be scary, initially, to see there’s nothing to hold onto, no one even to do the holding onto.
This is the only (imagined) barrier between you and life.
The barrier is exactly that: me and my life.
Are you willing to give “me” and “my” up, leaving only life standing, alone and unmolested?
Could you imagine your hand releasing its death grip on the steering wheel (and let your pal Jesus take it)?
If you believe you are in control of your life and letting go of control means letting your life spin out of control, then this might feel like you’re going 250 km/h (believe me, Americans, it’s fast) on the Autobahn and taking your hands off the wheel.
You’ll feel as if you’re releasing control you could have.
If you know ‘you’ have no control and have already relaxed the compulsive drive to be in control, then it might feel like being on a rollercoaster and lifting your arms — you’re relaxing into it a little more.
Surrender and letting go isn’t a weekend seminar. What you’re letting go of is the last thing the you, you believe you are, wants to or can let go of. It’s like telling a fist to relax and become an open palm — the fist doesn’t want that because that would be its end. And besides, the fist can’t do it because it’s not the fist that opens up; it’s the hand.
Speaking of hands, your grubby hands are an issue — more middlemen. They believe they can hold on to things, such as steering wheels.
But all they grasp for is wisp.
The good thing is that those hands are nothing but wisp themselves. And if it’s all the same wisp, then there is nothing but wisp, and we can forget about middlemen because they too are this wisp.
Just this endlessly twirling wisp wisping with itself.
Luka
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I don’t see anyone above me.