I feel there’s a common discrepancy in spirituality, and one which I myself was “guilty” of for a long time, of mistaking beliefs and thoughts for truth. By that I mean, mistaking thoughts about love, God, the whole thing, for the real deal. All I can say is that you’ll KNOW when you feel it, there won’t be any doubt, because the very thought that doubts is below or less-than (so to speak) love, or what I’m talking about. And it isn’t anything like what you think it’s like, it can’t be, it’s beyond that.

In my experience though, and this is sort of a warning, you may come to a very, very scary place if this is what you really think you want. Maybe some people get it no problem, but I know the emptiness of experience that comes with knowing truth scared the bejeesus out of me (and still does sometimes!). I’m not talking about an abstraction here, it’s emptiness on a very deep level, as intimate as you can get.

What it basically boils down to is that we grow up and become firmly rooted as an identity whose fundamental basis is “getting things.” The very root of identity is a kind of “collecting,” it’s a hoarding of memories and thoughts and feelings, and we’re convinced on a bodily level that that’s what we are. But, of course, that’s not at all what reality is about, not at all! And if you look around you’ll wonder how you ever missed it. It’s very in-your-face!

There is fundamentally nothing to get here, you will get nothing from life. No one ever has in the history of existence, and each life is basically like a sandcastle that gets built up only to be knocked back down into sand again by the ocean. That’s very obvious if we’re honest with ourselves, and YET… notice that almost everything humans do is based on this false assumption that there’s something to get?

Ever notice how you never really get anything out of your “spiritual experiences” except a story to tell yourself and others? It may even be accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction or security, a certain hidden pride. But I’m not just knocking spirituality, the same goes for every experience, bar-none. Reality is literally what you make of it!

Sorry! It can be a real shocker, I know.

But if this really hits home, and this is the light at the end of the tunnel so-to-speak, an incredible love and wisdom shines through. It frees up an incredible amount of energy that’s been wasted on the impossible task of extracting something out of nothing (ha!), and suddenly, miraculously, the incredibly perfect joy of everything is plain to see. Like, last night I stared at the cracks in the ceiling for forever, just in sheer awe. There’s nothing to get here and no one to get anything, and there’s also nothing to die, only experiences and the possibility that those experiences may become more free.

This is what the Buddha was talking about when he said salvation, it’s not the salvation of someone from something, it’s the salvation of reality from having to be either of those things. In a sense, it’s the only true mercy, and even then, not even “salvation” is serious, because even Buddha died like everyone else. Awareness loses itself in the dream and awakens and loses itself in the dream and awakens over and over and over forever, it doesn’t care, so it’s up to you if you want to realize this or not, no one’s going to make you!

It can be a helpful exercise to imagine if, in the next moment, you were to die and everything you know now came to an end, like waking up from a dream. For me, the more I do this, the freer and lighter things become, more playful. For, as Alan Watts was fond of saying, life is NOT serious!

“Angels fly because they take themselves LIGHTLY.”

Take care and be well,

Alex B.

This is what months of suffering, falling on and off of the “spiritual path,” has shown me:

There is no separate self, there’s only experience (sensations of sight, sound, and touch labeled “outside” and sensations of thought and feeling labeled “inside”) indivisible from awareness. There is no “ghost” haunting this body, it’s all intimately one. There is no self and other, that’s only an afterthought, there’s just awareness looking in at itself through the sense organs of the world’s many creatures.

What we think of as ourselves, individually, is really only a strongly believed series of sensations built on memories that we’ve learned to accept since childhood. Every idea we have of ourselves is someone else’s idea. This feeling of separation gives us the sense that we are outsiders in a huge, scary universe that we have to fight off and beat into submission (just so that we can survive for a little while until we ultimately die).

However, the truth is we are not separate, we never were. There is no death because, if you’ve followed me up until now, what is there to die? Nothing! There is only the continuum we call now, which is timeless, without past or future. And what we really are is whatever we’re doing NOW. If you are washing dishes, then you are the process of dishes being washed (minus the words of course!). We are not nouns but verbs!

This takes time to filter down to the gut level of experience. (For me too, this is an ongoing deepening “process.”) Notice every time you’re trying to protect “yourself,” and remember that there isn’t a separate self that you need to protect. Every time you reinforce that there’s no separate self, the conviction of innate perfection, of indestructibility becomes stronger. (This isn’t a belief, non-separation is already the truth of all experience, you’re just revealing it to yourself.)

I’m not going to lie, it’s terrifying sometimes, but it’s freedom, the only freedom. Stand naked as experience and be completely vulnerable to the last atom of your being, moment by moment, and notice when you’re choosing one state of being, one experience, over another. Pure awareness has no preference, it is fundamentally without opinion or judgement, it IS love/acceptance. And remember also that there’s no one who will come to stop you from keeping your suffering alive. In that sense, it’s totally up to you.

This should give you an idea of where this is going, it’s the total unraveling of everything untrue. This is total freedom.

Keep it real,

Alex B.

Just got off of a conference call with Bentinho. He really, truly is a gem, that kind of clarity I’ve only found in old, long-dead Zen masters, and hearing it coming from someone alive on the other end of a phone is so much more affecting. The truth is so, so simple that it’s easy to make it complicated and suffer about, basically, imagination! Bentinho puts it in such simple terms and really helps you see that complication is the only problem there is, because the truth is the simplest thing, literally right in front of your nose (and your nose too!).

Here’s a good rule of thumb that I’m learning: 99% of spirituality confuses more than it makes clear. The truth is this: there is no separation between observed and observer, never was, never will be. Spiritual search, and suffering, happens when you assume that there is separation that has to be gotten rid of. As Bentinho said in the talk, unity literally looks like whatever you’re experiencing right now, that’s it! It’s only your expectation (a thought appearing in unity) that it has to look like something else that tricks you! The state the Buddha was in is no different than your own! Enlightenment is NOT AN EXPERIENCE!

My god people, we are so free, so unimaginably free that it brings tears to my eyes. We’re here, loving, beautiful beings that we are, but somewhere we just learned to be dissatisfied, to be afraid. We’re not really afraid of dying, or of anything, but we’ve become convinced that we are. You slip into non-existence every night with no qualm, yet here you are, conscious of these words! HOW?! Nothing, no experience, no concept, no belief can touch you, you’re always right here.

Love,

Alex B.

There’s an incredibly wise being that we (in this case, ‘we’ being a bunch of words and sensations of course!) call our body, when’s the last time you actually felt your body? When’s the last time you actually felt what it’s like to have space around your fingertips, to feel the floor against the soles of your feet? I’m only just beginning to notice how much of a stranglehold what I’ve taken to be myself (again, words and sensations, a “funny feeling” as Alan Watts so perfectly puts it) has over this unknown, deeply mysterious thing that we so flippantly dismiss as “only a body.”

I think everyone, deep down somewhere, secretly knows that the body is the doorway to the universe itself, but that’s a little too scary to think about! Just notice, next time you think of it, that what you feel as your body is really a vibration, and, if you have the guts, follow that vibration and stay with it.

You are perfect, now, already. Find every means by which you doubt your natural perfection and investigate!

Do you know the sensation of avoidance? That is your perfection sending you an invitation to look deeper! If you are avoiding something, a projected future or past, a sensation, a story about yourself, then you are very lucky! This means you get to discover how perfect you are first hand.

Follow avoidance to its root and try to find that thing, the projection, sensation, or story, and examine it, experience it fully! I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised at what blossoms out of your simple inner courage.

You are love, and nothing but love can survive your gaze. :-)

Alex B.

yellow-springs-deactivated20121 asked: My friend, you are right! Do not ever doubt the realization you have obtained, because you are absolutely right in it.

Thank you! Doubt is a funny thing, it seems now to me that it’s the only thing that separates the “seeker” from the “realized,” so to speak. :-)

How many of your stories about this (life, the universe, you, etc) can you drop? Start with the surface ones and work your way down until you get to the most fundamental ones. Try it, like an experiment, just to see! What does life look like without them? How is experiencing different?

Okay, so sit down somewhere quiet, where you’re not going to be disturbed. You can do this anywhere, but why not make things as easy on yourself as possible? Focus on the fact of your experiencing: focus on the act of your hearing, not the sounds themselves; focus on the act of your seeing, not the objects you see. How much effort does it take to hear sounds? How much effort does it take to see things?

Now, start letting go of your stories. Start with something simple, drawing on your present experience. Just pick a story based on your most recent memories, hopefully one with some emotion attached, like, “So-and-so doesn’t like me,” or something along those lines. For example, maybe you were in a minor car accident recently, and your present experience is really colored by that memory, lots of latent anxiety, worry, etc.

What does life look like if you drop that story? Look around as if you were unable even to conceive of the accident or any of its imagined consequences (afterall, none of that is really present anyway).

Now move deeper. Drop the story about how you got to the position where you’re currently sitting, drop the story about your location (in a room, in a house, in a specific country, on planet earth). Drop your ideas about your future, your dreams, your desires, all of it.

Now drop the story that you have an identity (even if that identity is no one, drop it). Drop the story that you are a human being, that you have a mind or a body. And drop every story about every memory that comes up, see them as empty images, simple energy vibrating in experience.

As emotions come up, drop your stories about them. If you feel something and want to label it “anger,” drop your story that that’s what it is. Can you experience that energy without the name? If so, then is it really anger? Maybe, just maybe, all the emotions that you used to avoid will begin to be recognized for the mysterious, unknown vibrations that they are. Is it the feelings themselves you avoid, or is it your stories?

Every story that comes up, drop it right away. Drop it all as if you were unable to even conceive of it!

This can be scary at first, but realize that the scariness is only a story too. :-)

Where it leaves you, words cannot say, but I highly recommend you give it a try.

Alex B.

I’ve come to a realization about death (and birth, and life, which is beyond both!), but it’s too blissful to speak much of right now. Perhaps I’ll post more on it later, but in the meantime here’s a quote from Alan Watts:

“Not to see the unity of self and other is the fear of life, and not to see the unity of being and nonbeing is the fear of death.”

…

We are all intimately familiar with non-being. How could we know being except in contrast with it? What, for example, is the difference between death and deep sleep? What about pre-birth? Who’s to say we did not live before? Is it false just because we don’t remember it?

Are you your memories? If that is so, then if your memory is not as good as it used to be, what is it that knows the difference?

You, the you that knows you exist, stop existing each night. Hell, sometimes you take a nap too and you stop existing just for fun in the middle of the day! Why are you worried about death???? It’s the most intimate, restful thing in the world.

Excuse me while I enjoy the endless delights of existence. :-P

Alex B.

Separator by Radiohead

Try and stop experiencing, just try. :-)

You are as much the Buddha as Siddhartha Gautama was, here with the same effortless grace, in your own perfect way. Want to see? Just try to not be here, as you are now, experiencing everything in your perfect, open, loving space. You are the Almighty, unshakable, open to all things, yet unaffected. What can trouble you?

You are holding the entire universe in your palm.

Don’t let it go to your head! :-P

Alex B.