A Dangerous Book
-Roger Stephens
Preface -- What's This Book About?
There is a story, probably apocryphal, in which a handful of French policemen were in hot pursuit
of a thief, who eluded them by ducking into a large building. They soon realized that there were
more exits from this building than there were policemen to cover them, and that without more
help, the thief could be expected to escape through an unguarded door. Next to this large
building there was a smaller one with only a few exits, so the police converged on this building
instead, confident that the thief would not be able to evade them ... after all, they had all the exits
covered. So they confidently assured the public that they had the situation well in hand.
This story is a parable about the official solutions to the problems we humans face today. In our
case, the thief might represent the solutions to our global, environmental, social, and personal
problems, the building the thief escaped into might be the unapprehended situation, and the
policemen the experts of all stripes who would fix our problems for us, and whose occasionally
clever but ultimately detrimental advice has had the effect of compounding the severity of the
problems they have not really addressed (the thief got away and did more mischief). This parable
is about why the state of the civilized world is moving swiftly to a new arrangement radically
different from what we are all used to.
Civilization is reaching a turning point. The technological successes of the past few dozen
centuries, culminating in this most stupendous twentieth century, have not only empowered
humans beyond their wisdom , but also severely changed forever, and in unknown and perhaps
unknowable ways, the very biosphere in which all life as we know it exists.
Doomsday scenarios are numbing, but viewed from a higher perspective, Life is very generous,
providing each and all of us the perfect laboratory for carrying out our human experiments.
Ironically, the very conditions which threaten the status of life on the planet are also those which
we living humans now require in order to learn what we each need to learn; otherwise, our life
situations would be other than they are.
The availability of information and alternative perspectives on life and the living of it has never
been greater in history. The electronics revolution is bringing more people within reach of more
information than ever before. With all these choices, and with more people promising us salvation
or heaven or Nirvana, who should we believe? Whose views of life are the most correct, and
therefore the most useful? Theologians? Business experts? Politicians?
The uncertainty arising from the popularity of all these alternatives reaches into the deepest
corners of our lives, leading more and more of us to begin to question the root assumptions of
our modern modes of life and the things we take for granted--continuous growth, annual crops
of new electro-mechanical toys, more powerful wonder drugs, more and more of everything.
All this comes at a cost far higher than the initial purchase price; it is a cost which has never been
factored into the selling price, but a cost which "the nature" of the world nevertheless assesses.
And mankind's bills are coming due with crushing insistence.
For generations, until the habit has thoroughly permeated the fabric of our culture, we have been
taught to expect more and more. Of course, we've usually gotten something other than we
bargained for, but that's quickly forgotten with every new wave of flowery promises. The
staggering costs of our consumptive lifestyles are coming due, and are expressed in the rapid
social and environmental change we find occurring all around us today. The foundations of
modern life (meaning the family, the community, and the state) are not nearly as stout as we have
been led to believe and expect. Drastic change, unforeseeable and uncontrollable by any human
agency, is touching every area of our lives, and when our pillars crumble, we begin searching for
something we sense that we should have looked for much earlier.
The growth of the self-discovery industry over the past several decades loudly proclaims the need
for more than just more. As usual, however, when a good idea gets organized, it ceases to be
alive, so these too have begun to grow into institutions and become pillars of their own sort,
begging us to rely on them, when in fact they themselves are operating by the same old rules:
growth as an indicator of worth, and as a source of ever-increasing income for those on the
inside. These new pillars are only props, and quickly crumble when stressed. The Earth quakes in
many ways when stresses get out of bounds.
This is a dangerous book because it calls into question some of the root assumptions which we
westerners have held for centuries, if not millennia, about the nature of human existence and our
place on the planet. Calling these assumptions into question isn't dangerous in and of itself, but
when a lot of people do so, the underpinnings of any artificially erected social arrangement are
seriously compromised. The truth about the Emperor's new clothes is no longer a secret.
The way society is organized today (presuming we can call overpopulation, political corruption,
economic instability, and religious intolerance "organized"), those who presently benefit the most
from the existing structures are those who are least likely to make the changes which need to be
made. The ideas in this book are dangerous to such interests, because the ideas contained herein
empower individuals to seek the truth for themselves.
Whenever a power base is threatened, particularly one which fails the test of moral legitimacy,
those in charge will take whatever steps necessary to minimize, or marginalize, that threat. Today,
those organizations and agencies who are best empowered to catalyze meaningful change are
also those least likely to initiate and support such change. Be they federal, state, or local
governmental bodies, corporate helmsmen, professionals, religious leaders, or (most debilitating
of all) educational systems, our leaders seem unable to present any fundamentally meaningful
solutions to the mounting problems facing society. The various overt and covert goals of
government, business, religion, and education are necessarily limited to the purview of those in
charge.
This book is dangerous because it declares, as openly and clearly as possible, that people--and
that means you, me, and everybody else--are not on this earth to wave a flag, or kill for God, or
flip burgers, or convert the riches of the planet into scribbles on a ledger. Just how far out of
touch with reality the public world is will become apparent in stages . . . the problems resulting
from our traditionally skewed world views are surging down upon the race in these times, and
only those who have sought more deeply than dogmas or intellectual arguments will find
themselves equipped to deal with life in the 21st century. I want to be one of those, and you are
reading this because you do too.
Humanity is entering a new era, a departure perhaps as profound as the first kindled fire or the
first turns of the first wheel . Right now, new revelations and developments are modifying all areas
and all levels of our earthly human experience, bringing changes that are far more profound and
sweeping than anyone can imagine or foresee.
Isn't it possible that the long-building woes presently inundating all spheres of human activity
might be related to some mistaken understanding of who we really are and why we are here? As
with the saber-tooth tiger attaining extinction because its strength became a liability, isn't it
possible that overpopulation, loss of individual sovereignty, physical and psychic pollution, and a
multitude of other maladies might be signaling a necessarily drastic course change for our
proverbial yet mightily foundering ships of state?
Societies all over the globe are being severely challenged by the consequences of their very
existence. It is becoming clear to a growing number of philosophically unattached people that
happiness, prosperity and meaning in life are the results of personal wisdom and action; they are
not delivered by institutions like the state, the church, the economy, or the schools, all of which
are based on untenable tenets, and administered by untenable tenants.
This book isn't intended to be a gentle pastel of how things ought to be, nor is it a diagram for
enlightened self-interest--a term which is curiously oxymoronic. What is needed is not a new
religion, or system, or technique, because we've already had to endure too many of those. What is
needed is a major re-thinking of our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet. It's
an inside job all the way.
The phrase "the world is a mirror" no longer strikes us as irresponsible or trite, as it might once
have. What we see in the world is what we think in our heads. It's a very simple concept, but it is
also a two edged sword, and faultily wielded, it is cutting us severely. Hence the blinding pain so
common in modern life.
Neither is this book a new set of instructions, a new roster of definitions, or a step-by-step
manual about building your own personal kingdom of heaven for fun and profit. It is more of a
mirror--not perfectly clear perhaps, but lucid enough that if you are really interested in finding
out who you are and what this world is all about, you will find within and between its words what
you need to see at the time. What you find will, of course, change as you change, and as the world
changes, but that's as it must be.
Because of all the transformations that are occurring in every conceivable corner of modern life,
new systems and new arrangements will have to emerge to deal with the consequences of these
changes. Increasingly, it will take conscious people in positions of responsibility to know what to
do in a situation which has never arisen before, it will take people who have freed themselves
from the misleading and often barbarous programming most of us have received since we were
infants. Clarity of action requires clarity of being. If we would do justice to the promise of the
future, then we have to learn about ourselves, who we might really be, and how to live in
harmony, both inwardly and outwardly. This book, to borrow from Zen imagery, is like a finger
pointing at the moon. It contains no ultimate answers . . . it only points in as many ways as
possible to the reality of being, the reality of your true being and mine, who we really are and
what we might really be here for.
The Earth and its family of life forms are entering a new age. Right now, right where you are, is
where to look for the next clue. Learning to be in the present, learning to be and hear and know is
what this book is about. For when a person learns this, then it doesn't matter so much how lost in
illusion the rest of the world is, for all the things that make life wonderful and inspiring now come
forth as if by magic. We were meant to live joyously and prosperously; anything which prevents
this is wrong. Or at least incorrect.
Chapter 1 -- Who Are You, and Why Are You Here?
Is a zebra a black animal with white stripes, or a white animal with black stripes? --Jerry Colonna
Well, here you are, a resident of planet Earth, a human being with a name and a history and a
social security number, a mysterious "something which is aware of itself," occupying a physical
body, dealing with an often confusing personality, learning how to navigate the choppy waters of
modern life, and wondering what it is all about.
As an adult, you are no longer allowed to bask in the pristine simplicity you knew in childhood.
Throughout your entire life, your body has changed in strange, wondrous, and often confusing
ways. Your awareness of the world, with all its quirks and wrinkles, has constantly grown and
changed, and you are moving, perhaps hesitantly, perhaps boldly, into some of Life's countless
corridors, finding things you like and things you don't like. You are wondering how you fit into
this strange place called the world, perhaps wondering how to re-arrange yourself so that things
feel better. You might be wondering what went wrong that your life is no longer as joyful as you
have heard that it should be.
And, as if your own personal changes aren't challenging enough, the world itself is changing
faster than it ever has before in history. Social institutions that haven't worked very well in the
past aren't working very well today either:
Schools, with precious few exceptions and after a centuries of professionally endorsed
improvement, have become little more than modified detention centers in which kids are ground
under the heel of conformity and don't learn much that's useful in the meantime. An endless
parade of school reform measures invariably results in a glitzier form of the same old panaceas
which haven't worked before. The people in charge, being themselves well-behaved and
conforming products of the system, can see no further.
Churches and religions have become businesses that promise heaven but never get around to
delivering the goods (heard of any saints or saviors coming out of the churches lately?) The
business of religion has grown into a sacred cow, and while the ministers and bishops drive
Cadillacs, the average believer is left to breathe and try to enjoy the exhaust of centuries of hot
air.
Governments at all levels are morally, if not legally, corrupt and bloated. They wave the flag of
democracies that aren't democratic while sinking the piers of consumerism ever deeper into the
hearts of their populations. A well-funded police state is taking shape behind increasingly shrill
calls for law and order, prisons are a Wall Street growth industry, and the news media, with
precious few exceptions, are as selective and narrow-minded as the people who control them.
Economic systems exist increasingly for the benefits of the share-holders. The actual costs of
doing business include bankrupted global resources and obliterated ecosystems, not to mention
human suffering on an unprecedented scale. The refusal on the part of politics and business alike
to even consider a steady-state economy belies the fundamental and as yet unrecognized
weakness of the system: unlimited growth is impossible in a finite arena, and fatal if vigorously
pursued.
The hidden, off-budget costs of what our leaders proudly call economic progress have escalated
beyond all reason, and beyond all comprehension as well. The energy required to maintain
wasteful and inefficient systems has become a built-in drain on the bodies, minds, and spirits of
people everywhere. The costly labor-saving machines that were created to serve us have grown
into monsters which are now threatening our very existence.
The new century will dawn on a world much different than the one we live in today. The "bigger is
better" mentality that has characterized and dominated human activity for the past several
millennia has overdrawn its accounts with the planet and is rapidly going bankrupt. Business and
government have become ends in themselves, more important in their own eyes than life itself.
The day-to-day welfare of the average person has been subjugated to the economic health of Wall
Street. Lawyers have a virtual strangle hold on all aspects of modern life, and the impersonal,
money-driven marketplace has succeeded in reducing human beings to the subhuman status of
percentiles, statistics, interest groups, constituencies, and market segments. The effects of this
systematic emasculation are degrading to real people, and this is a big reason why people are as
unhappy as they are today.
Whatever you may have been told, you are a valid human being, but the chances are excellent that
you are also bewildered as to how you fit into this sometimes frightening, sometimes wondrous,
but always changing world, and what you can do about it. You have left behind the toys of
childhood and are still figuring out how to use those of adulthood. No matter your age, you are
wondering what you are going to be doing for what remains of your earthly life (let alone
afterward), and hoping you are right.
The world is highly confused, and highly confusing, for normal people. Far more than a faster car,
a colder refrigerator, or a sneakier sneaker, people need the little things, the unmarketable and
untaxable things like love, family and community, and something meaningful to do with our lives.
For the vast majority of human time on the planet, our families and local communities were the
ultimate realities in our lives. For all but a handful of adventurous souls, there was only mystery
beyond the boundaries of our local territories. Family and community were the world. But in
recent years the family and the community, in lockstep pursuit of some fleeting materialistic
ideals, have surrendered their autonomy to an abstraction called society; the family and sense of
community have ultimately withered as a result. The public debate over family values conveniently
overlooks the fact that public, majoritarian, popularized values have actually replaced family
values, which ought rightly to be different for each family.
The fragmentation of the family institution, aided by a market-driven "stay ahead of the Jones's"
mentality, is what the so-called generation gap is all about: the most practical and usable
knowledge changes so rapidly these days that parents and grandparents become little more than
repositories of sometimes interesting but largely useless trivia. They used to be able to show the
way, but now they are just in the way.
Like you, every human being who ever lived has experienced life from the perspective of being at
the center of the local universe. For an entire lifetime, we are each the main character in the most
important drama on Earth: our own lives. But knowing this intellectually doesn't seem to help
when we are trying to make sense of what's going on around us, and it is especially difficult when
all the forces of society are marshaled against this feeling of being in the center. Society, the
church, and the state have replaced humans--family and the local community--as the official
centers of gravity. This conflict--between inside- and outside-centeredness--is perceived as
tension in our lives, so the baffling question of the real nature of one's very being usually gets
sluffed off as too troublesome to pursue. That is, until circumstances force us to address it.
Of all the people we know, the genuine ones, the ones who are really worth knowing and listening
to, are those who have experienced times of profound self-doubt and soul searching, those who
have had to dig within themselves when they couldn't get by on just talent or good looks. These
special people have experienced what is often called the dark night of the soul, which is how we
experience the final death throes of our crushed illusions.
It is always darkest just before the dawn, but the dawn always comes eventually. The dawning of
real (which is to say, divine) human consciousness comes from a yearning deep inside each one of
us that requires us to integrate, to unify, to become one with, to understand, to be who we really
are, and to discard the cumbersome baggage of what we aren't. Perhaps this yearning is prompted
by a personal tragedy, a sudden shift in career prospects, or any of countless other possibilities.
The important thing to note is that, for a rapidly growing segment of Earth's populations, this is a
time of great change, a great prompting for us to move in new directions.
We know by way of some inner reckoning that things should be, can be, and ought to be better.
We sense that there is something within that is trying to get out, something that will make a
difference. We can free our innate creative capacities only by finding out who we are, which is not
a simple as it sounds. It's not as hard as it sounds, either, yet to do so is vitally important today,
because world peace is impossible unless the people comprising that world are at peace.
It has never been, and never will be, that a peaceful world will make people peaceful. People will
never be peaceful unless they know who they are. Discovering who we are and why we are here,
even in settled times, can try the patience of the best of us, and yet today, we must all deal with
vast and sweeping changes which nobody can foretell.
To be happy, each of us has to be doing what we came here to do. How are we to know what that
is? Can we take and aptitude test that will tell us who we are? Is there anybody whom we can go to
and get this kind of wisdom? Many otherwise sensible people still believe so.
You probably have many life questions for which you haven't found adequate answers, answers
based not on some external authority which at some point must be taken on faith, but on your
own innate and super-human feel for what is right and proper for your life. Somewhere deep
inside you know that unless you are at peace with yourself, you will never find peace and
fulfillment in the world.
That's why I have written this book, for I too have searched for most of my life for the truth about
who I am and why I am here. I have been what the world would call modestly successful in several
widely varying occupations, but none of them was "IT", none of them was what I am really here to
do, so none of them brought me the happiness I sought.
So I scoured the dusty archives of philosophy and religion for something that boiled down to more
than just narrow-minded dogma and blind faith. I have asked tough questions whenever I could. I
have taken chances; I have sat on mountain tops and shivered, in deserts and watched
rattlesnakes crawl across my legs. I have turned my back on the world of money and popularity. I
have thrown my fate to the winds looking for wisdom, and for those special answers that resonate
with something deep inside me. This book exists to help me share some of what I have
discovered.
While I did find a few vague clues about the real essence of life in the more traditional places like
religion and philosophy, I found the most in unexpected and unofficial regions, like the occasional
lyrics to a popular song, casual words or glances from a stranger, a cold, babbling stream at
dawn, the laughter of a child, the stench of a road-kill possum rotting in the sun, a passage in
some little known book. That's why this book is sprinkled with quotes . . . they are windows which
can open to new panoramas for those who are tired of the same old wallpaper.
What I discovered in my own way is what all the masters and seers throughout history have been
saying all along, but which has been effectively buried beneath the dogma of every organized
religion. Reality is here, and if from time to time someone breaks through the illusions and gets a
good look at it, then comes back at tells his friends about it, chances are pretty good that when
you filter out all of the cultural flavorings (figures of speech, idioms, local slang, etc.), that having
seen the same reality, each such seer would be describing pretty much the same reality. Beneath
the rhetoric, what they have all been saying is this:
What you are looking for is who you already are.
Now, I know that sounds simple, but when you investigate, and I mean really dig within and ask
yourself "Who am I?," and when you don't settle for the usual labels that you've been conditioned
to regurgitate on cue, then you will begin to perceive the limitless depths available through the
portal of that simple statement.
You will discover that happiness, purpose, and meaning in life are never the results of the right
beliefs or techniques, they do not depend on social connections, money, reputation, education,
circumstances of birth, or any of the other surface things we humans are taught to worship. If you
persist, you will discover that you've always had what you needed, and that your only problem has
been that you were taught, and convinced, that you needed something you didn't already have.
This book, therefore, is a modest restatement of the same truths which have been known by the
wise since the dawn of human existence, potent and vital perspectives which have somehow
survived the spiritually withering process called civilization.
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
--Lao Tzu
Synonyms: enlightened, Self-realized, saved, reborn, awakened, anointed, ascended. These are
simply different labels for the natural, the intended, and the nowadays thoroughly misunderstood
status of human beings on the planet we call Earth. These are just different ways of referring to
the goal which is always at hand, the main message of all the masters, the inalienable birthright of
all human beings. These are what we came here to be, and these are what most of us have traded
away in pursuit of God, country, and a larger share of that big apple pie in the sky.
More synonyms: Heaven, Nirvana, Moksha, the Elysian Fields, the Happy Hunting Grounds, the real
world. These are different labels for what a realized being realizes. It's the same world, but how
you see it depends on how you see you; and how you see you depends on who you think you are.
This simple question--Who am I?--is really the most profound question a person can ask. It may
sound too simplistic, too obvious to lead to any real insight into the practical problems of life, but
unless you can answer it, unless you even begin to ask it, then the glowing promise which lighted
your infancy goes dim, and life soon degenerates into a badly written and poorly played soap
opera, a futile struggle for survival against overwhelming odds.
Consisting of only three simple words, just six letters, "Who Am I?" is in fact a huge question, the
ultimate inquiry. Unlike most of the bland, factual questions we are used to, this one cannot be
answered in any number of words. Yet once it occurs to you what it really means, this question
will lead you to the discovery of why you are here and what this life is really all about.
It is impossible for anyone to learn that which he thinks he already knows. --Plutarch
This is about YOU. It is not about your name, your education or reputation or job prospects, your
social or cultural background, your blood line, your personal history, or anything else so
superficial. It is about that mysterious sense of consciousness that resides at and as the very
center of who you take yourself to be.
Yet the best that can be expected of all the words in this or any other book is that they might have
the effect of holding a mirror up to that consciousness within you in order that you might catch a
glimpse of the profound mystery which you really are.
Chapter 2 -- Some Words About Words
The truth which can be spoken is not the true truth.
--Lao Tzu
Beware of language, because it is often a great cheat.
--Peter Mere Latham
Words cannot express what words cannot express.
--Anon
Like other books, this one makes use of what we call language. Language is a system of
conventional symbols which, when arranged in a consistent manner, tend to convey meaning
beyond themselves. Language is cultural; the meanings of words depend on the prevailing social
values, and knowing what words mean can often be helpful.
But the major problem with this or any language is that our ponderous reliance on it makes it
deceptively easy to forget that the world doesn't exist according to the rules of sentence structure,
the manner in which we are forced, by convention, to discuss it. When this is forgotten, then
language becomes an invisible, and therefore all the more powerful modifier of how we perceive
the world around us. It is as though we have been wearing colored glasses over our eyes for
longer than we can remember, glasses that allow us to see only certain colors. Eventually it
becomes a matter of common sense that only those colors exist in the world, which, when we take
them off again, is obviously untrue. Any language, taken at face value, will ultimately give us a
false, or at best misleading understanding of everything we describe in that language, including
who we are.
To cite a simple but potentially shocking example, consider the sentence "The lightning flashed".
Its meaning is clear, if not thunderously electrifying.
If one looks no further, then it will be presumed that lightning is a thing which does the verb
flashing. According to the rules of sentence structure, "The lightning flashed" is quite proper and
correct . . . it contains a noun and a verb. That's why we can understand the sentence, if not its
referent.
What is hidden, what is made invisible by the convention of our linguistic structure, is that
lightning isn't a thing which sort of hangs around in a cumulo-nimbus trench coat and
occasionally does the verb flashing. In the case of real lightning, there is no such separation of its
reality into the categories of noun and verb, because flashing isn't something that lightning just
does: it's what lightning is.
Additionally, a dependence on language usually lulls us into the presumption that, having once
given something a name, a superficial label, we actually know and understand what it is. We all
know the label "lightning"; we all use it casually. Yet even scientists whose careers are spent
studying lightning are not so bold as to claim to know what it is-- that's why they are studying it.
But in the spirit of over-simplification which has characterized the last few thousand years of law,
religion, politics, and media, we humans and the world around us have been reduced to discrete
adjective-laden nouns which spend our lives doing verbs adverbially, if not ad nauseously. When
everyone around us unquestioningly does something all the time, we eventually cease to have
questions about it, we accept it, it becomes a norm. Over-simplification is appealing to the
spiritually drowsy because labels are far easier to grasp than the realities to which they pretend.
After a while, we just assume that the labels are true.
This is conventional thinking, wherein people convene (come together) and agree to call this "this"
and that "that". When somebody asks you who you are, for example, don't you usually answer with
your main label? Most people aren't really interested in anything but your labels, and they might
even get seriously irritated at you if you present anything but the right one. But that's just your
name, a tag which someone stuck onto you before you knew what had happened. Your name isn't
who you are. Who are you?
In the same way, you are not your body, which changes from moment to moment with every
breath and twitch of muscle. Neither are you your mind, your ego, your personality, because those
too change with every experience you have. Who are the YOU who has been there unchanged all
along? Who is your life happening to? Unless you can discover this, then you will have no choice
but to live in the painfully ineffective and maddeningly insubstantial illusion of who you think you
are.
In the reality of your being, you are not a noun or a verb; you are as far beyond a label or some
grammatical form as a bolt of lightning is beyond the little words used to indicate it. So is God,
Truth, Life, or whatever you may choose to call IT.
But this is a book, and to be intelligible it must make use of the available language, whatever its
inherent limitations. So, if we would transcend those limitations, then you must listen within
yourself for that silent but--but once you learn to recognize its feel--unmistakable ring of
recognition when you hear something that in your bones you know to be so. It may even give you
something of a charge, like lightning, but without the revolting side effects.
Chapter 3 -- So, who are you, anyway?
To know that you do not know is best. To pretend to know when you do not is a disease.
--Lao Tzu
To know anything well involves a profound sense of ignorance.
--John Ruskin
It is simply the belief that we know who we are that keeps us from discovering who we really are.
We have all spent our formative years developing and refining our egos. Egos are the
personalized roles we learn to play, the convenient identifiers of who we are supposed to be.
Like a job description, these life description labels are tiny enough to be grasped by our
understanding, and once we get a handle on "who I guess I am", it crystallizes into what is called
an ego, a responsible and duty-bound member, first of the family and later of the society. Our
loyal performance of these roles is thereafter required, and over the centuries we have elaborated
all sorts of social, religious, and legal structures to hold ourselves and each other to their dutiful
execution.
The label called you is knowable (it has fingerprints, a certain physical appearance, certain
personality traits, and so on), but what the label is affixed to remains a mystery. Understanding
the label while ignoring the reality may give us a momentary sense of security that we know what
it is, but the realization that we "don't really know" is what begins the search called self-inquiry.
Since we take our own egos so seriously, we take everyone else's seriously as well. We have
become convinced that these egos are real and are who and what we really are. We learn to take
things personally: we get angry whenever our egos are questioned or misunderstood, and we get
disappointed when other egos turn out to be something other than what our egos thought they
were. Based on a false understanding of the players, the dynamics of human interaction quickly
become bewildering and frustrating, giving rise to whole generations of psychologists, counselors,
and advisors to provide our egos with excuses for why things are not right in our lives.
The problem, of course, is that we have forgotten who we are; we only know who we think we are,
something that turns out to be very insubstantial. When who we think we are fails, we are
naturally at a loss as to where to turn or what to do about it. If the disrupting event is a biggie,
then we might even lose it and have to go spend time with the nice man at the funny farm.
To see this point more clearly, to see how bewildering these multiple images of ourselves and of
each other can become, and to get a perspective on the extent to which we all engage in this
game of unintended interpersonal deception, let's pretend that you and I are talking face to face
to each other. It will seem to a third person that two people are having a conversation.
If we look a little more closely however, we soon discover that, even though there are only two
bodies present, there are a great many of us involved. The dynamics of this phenomenon are
active in every personal relationship you have.
First, there is who we will call You #1. This is who you really are, the you who you have been since
before you became who you think you are, the eternal and unchanging consciousness which
knows that it exists, the innermost witness to your life.
This part of you is the ultimate mystery in the cosmos. It is the doorway to Truth. Religions have
called this mystery by such diverse names as the Atman (the presence of the infinite Brahma in
individual form), the Holy Spirit, the Buddha nature, and countless others, but these terms are
really just metaphors which all refer to the mystery which exists at the very center of all your ideas
about yourself.
To the extent that we haven't yet recognized it, to the extent that we still believe in something
outside of ourselves, a god or something, then the inward search is still just an inverted outward
search. You #1 is the innermost witness of all this.
By contrast, You #2 is who you think you are. This is the you with whom you are most familiar. It
is your idea of who you are, including your body, your mind, your personality, everything that
makes you a temporally continuous member of the human species.
But You #2 is actually a highly subjective selection of everything that everybody has ever told you
about yourself: you have retained what you believed and agreed with, and discarded what you
didn't. This personalized mental/emotional construct, this character-in-the-play-of-your-life, is
called the ego (Latin for I am). It is the feeling of selfhood, the identification of You #1
(consciousness) with a name, a body, a personality, and a personal history.
In a way, our lives are like a necklace strung of our personal experiences, and the continuity that
we feel in our lives, the so-called stream of consciousness (I am the same one who last night went
to sleep) runs like a thread through the beads of those experiences.
However, in the glitter of the beads, this unifying thread is largely overlooked. The beads may be
luxurious or tragic, stunningly brilliant of as dull as ditch water, but it's that mysterious stream of
consciousness that holds everything together, including your personal perspective of it. The
beads, which taken together are known as You #2, come and go, but the string running through
them is essential and eternal; this is who you really are: You #1.
So, when our parents told us that we were angels or idiots, the minister that we were as dumb and
helpless as sheep, the neighbor kids that we were dweebs, our big sister that we were a pain in
the butt, and so on, we were learning who we are, and how we rank in society. We were learning
You #2.
When we were small children and weren't yet interested in learning how to work the earthly ropes,
we didn't know who we were, and what's more we didn't much care . . . we just were. Experiences
were neither good nor bad: they just were, and Life always replaced one with the next.
But soon enough, as a necessary (for the aims of society's managers) part of the process of
socializing us into the family and community, we were taught to accept as gospel the information
and opinions which came from our "olders and betters". To a tiny infant, that effectively means
everyone else on the planet. We were told by everybody and every condition around us who we
were expected to be, and it was our sacred duty to make sure we measured up. A major irony in
this is that probably none of these people had even the slightest idea who they really were, yet we
were brow-beaten into believing in their assessments of who we were and what the world is.
Now, as adults, having learned well our early lessons in political correctness, we dutifully put on
different and appropriate faces for different people. None of us presents quite the same persona
to our parents as we do to our friends, or to our bosses or teachers or siblings. In fact, if we look
closely and honestly, we will see that we have a slightly different face, a slightly different act for
everybody we know, because we have had different experiences with each of them.
If our acting is self-consistent, then things run more or less smoothly; but if inconsistencies
should creep in, our relationships become cumbersome and unwieldy. As a result of trying to
cater to each different personality we know, each of us effectively becomes a whole congregation
of egos (ministers usually have altared egos). You #2 is really You #2A, 2B, 2C, and so on. There
are many, and which one is really you?
Finally, there is You #3, which is who I think you are. While you have an inside view of you, I have
an outside, and therefore much different view of you, a view that is heavily influenced by the
contents of my mind, my world views, etc.
Have you noticed that people never see us the way we see us? And we can be sure that we never
see them the way they see themselves. So in effect, everyone sees everyone else differently. There
is a different You #3 for everyone you know. And no two are alike. Ultimately, there are as many
You #3's as there are people on the planet, and as many for each of them, and every single one is
different.
As we sit there and talk, I eventually develop my own personal You #3, the way(s) I see you, the
attributes I note and ignore. It is a view of you which changes slightly with every word and gesture
I receive from you, or even just think I receive from you, a view of you which you will never
understand for the simple reason that you would have to see my world through my eyes to
understand it. You cannot see my world while living in yours, and vice versa.
Of course, there are many of me as well: Me #1, who I really am, Me #2A, 2B, etc., who I think I
am, and your personal Me #3, who you think I am.
So while we sit there and interact with each other, who I think I am (Me #2) talks to who I think
you are (You #3), both of which are just ideas in my head. And who you think you are (You #2)
talks to who you think I am (Me #3), both of which are just ideas in your head. Two separate pairs
of illusions are carrying on two mutually exclusive conversations between themselves, passing
vague words and indistinct body language back and forth, all of which mean different things to
both of us. Is it any wonder that we so often fail to understand each other and end up frustrated
and fighting?
We have identified ourselves so completely with these various Me #2's that we have confined and
limited our experience of the vastness of Life to those small, isolated enclaves. We have cut
ourselves off from more than 99.999% of our being by accepting the tightly defined roles we are
playing as the actual limit of who we really are. And when we are playing so many different (and
often contradictory) roles with so many different people, it is very easy to become lost.
In a way, we humans are like waves in the ocean of life. Each wave starts small and grows to some
extent as it crosses the ocean, picking up shape and definition, and also picking up whatever
flotsam and jetsam it may encounter. Waves learn to believe that they are real and independent,
so it's better to be big, because then you can be influential and throw your weight around, you will
amount to something, you can make a real splash in life, and be looked up to by lesser waves.
Sometimes waves travel unimpeded for thousands of miles, sometimes they hit a shallow reef and
are momentarily tripped, but eventually they all impact and die on a beach somewhere (their
reflected echoes are called ghost waves). In the course of their odysseys, these waves have learned
to think of themselves as unquestionably and quite obviously separate and independent, as things
in and of themselves. Some of them believe that there is some great god called the Ocean out
there somewhere which it is their duty to seek and serve. They are firmly convicted in their beliefs
about death. In truth, of course, no wave is ever apart from the Ocean it exists in and which is
ultimately responsible for its very existence. Their anguish is the result of their having totally
accepted the illusion that a wave can and should and does exist as an independent thing.
This is what Jesus probably meant when he said "I am the vine and you are the branches" (it is not
recorded that he also said "I am the ocean and you are the waves", but he might have). The "I"
from which he was speaking is the same "I" that each of us experiences as pure consciousness,
our awareness, the central-most feature of our existence, our US #1. Impersonal and beyond the
comprehension of the petty ego, that "I" is the vine, it is Life Itself in all its forms, and our egos,
our self-imposed definitions and limitations, these are the branches which think of themselves as
independent agents. If we are centered in the branch, then we will miss the fact that a branch is
just a branch.
A branch that thinks it's independent is a cutting, and in the extreme, a dead one. The branch will
not thrive if severed from the vine, and though we may continue to exist for a while, we can never
thrive severed from the truth of our being. If you cut yourself off from food and water because you
believe you are separate from these, you get dead.
Likewise, if you cut yourself off from the larger part of your real Self by believing that you are just
a name, an ego, a separate and fragile personality struggling against injustice and weakness, then
you will wither. Why would anybody choose to harm another human being, whatever the excuse,
unless they were a dis-eased branch that thinks it's a whole vine?
There is only one whole vine, and it's called "the universe and everything in it". When you hurt
another person, when you callously step on a flower or kick a dog or shout at a child, you are
ultimately hurting yourself, because we're all connected, the separations between us are strictly a
matter of convention. This is a truth which society and its managers don't want to learn, which is
one of the reasons why so many social institutions are falling apart.
The ego is a servant which has been elevated to the rank of master, a part claiming to be the
whole, which is why the ego will always lead us astray, whatever its announced motives. The ego
is a function, a direct consequence, of the presumption that we are separate beings. Since it is
simply not true that we are separate, anything based on that presumption will necessarily be
wrong, and will necessarily lead to imbalance. That doesn't mean that the ego ought to be
scorned, improved, repaired, or discarded, although there are many people who firmly believe
this, too. Because of the general stress levels in society today, and because these stresses, by
their very nature, will easily upset a normally sane person's equilibrium, there is ample room in
the system for a lot of professionals and charlatans making a lot of money by claiming to have
access to a cure, regimen, vitamin, or talisman which will totally perfect your ego. These remedies
don't work because they are all founded on a false presumption: the belief that the ego is real.
The purpose of self-discovery is not to discard the ego or to somehow perfect it; the purpose is to
recognize the ego for whatever it is, but to do so from an awakened perspective which is behind
or beyond the ego. Who is having the dream called you?
That perspective is called being: the experience of consciousness, pure and simple. This was the
place from which Jesus, Buddha, and all the rest were speaking when they shared their parables
and metaphors. Since you are conscious, you are already connected, so there is nothing further to
be done to real-ize (make real) that connection. Once you see it, then you understand how you
can still play your ego like a role, forming and reforming it as needed.
But you will no longer take that role too seriously, you will no longer be impeded by the old habits
and personal fears in which that role may have believed in the past. It is your right, and your
responsibility, to reshape your role into whatever feels right, so long as you allow others the same
freedom.
Chapter 4 -- Don't Take It Personally
Here's another group of related words which have something to teach us. We are considered, by
ourselves and everyone else, to be persons; we take things personally, we have personalities.
These words all come from the Latin word persona, which was originally the mask that was held
up to an actor's face while playing a dramatic role (from per, meaning "through", and sona,
meaning "sound" . . . it was the mask through which the sound came). It you go to a copy of a
play, you will find listed in the front the Dramatis Personae, the persons, or personalities, taking
part in the drama.
We use many other theatrical idioms when referring to our lives and activities: we act out certain
roles, life is but a stage on which we must play our parts, we must develop our character, enjoy
our time in the lime light, get our act together, and not make too much of a scene before the final
curtain comes down. The metaphor of theatre, when not taken too literally, points directly into the
experiences of living our lives. We are taught by the world of our early years to doubt our own
natural, inherent character and reshape it so it might more closely reflect the role assignments we
get from other people, and then we wonder why we are having so much trouble playing them.
Incidentally, most people don't even play the roles they have: they work them, all the way to
death.
As children we were taught, by adults and institutions everywhere, that as we were, we were not
good enough for life, for society ... we must first be improved, educated, taught, instructed, and
molded in such a way as to become docile, well-behaved citizens, reliable consumers, and net
assets to the economy. Few of us can recall the early day when this process began; it's all we've
ever known. There is something innately wrong with us that needs to be fixed. Religions
sometimes call this condition original sin, meaning that we are damned for the simple reason that
we exist. To me that kind of treatment hardly seems likely from a loving God.
But as a result of having been muffled, muzzled, and stifled, we have become like actors who have
forgotten that we are playing in a play. We have, perhaps quite willingly but probably unwittingly,
agreed to forget that we are just playing roles. This quite naturally leads us to consider our roles
as being ultimately real, as who we really are.
Because these roles are not who we really are, we are not very comfortable with them--they are
like shoes that no longer fit us comfortably, but we don't dare break a cosmic taboo and take
them off. As a last resort (and this usually happens at a relatively young age), we resign ourselves
to what everybody else is doing: we learn by example to take everything personally.
The good actor, when he recalls that he's just playing a part, won't just quit the play; he will
continue to play his part, but he will do so with an inner confidence and a barely detectable
detachment which will make his contribution notable, whatever his role. He will never lose sight of
the fact that the whole drama is a performance, that he is not really about to be killed, maimed, or
slandered.
And the actor can play the role all the more effectively only if he maintains the awareness that at
root it's a pretense, just a play. Taking the role too seriously and trying to hard to conform to the
standards of so-called normalcy lead to confusion, frustration, unhappiness, and usually a dreary
botching of the play.
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and become absurd,
and thus normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the
last 50 years.
--R. D. Laing
Consider Shakespeare's Hamlet, with Lawrence Olivier playing the lead. If we were to interrupt the
play in the last act and ask Hamlet how he is doing, he would tell us in a nervously heroic voice
that he just got cut on the arm with a poisoned sword, he has about a dozen lines left, and he is
about to die on that "X" over there. At this point in the play, death is imminent for him, and every
other detail in the plot clearly supports his impending demise.
But if we were to ask Sir Lawrence how he is doing, he would have a totally different response; it
would have nothing at all to do with the drama and pretense on the stage and, within the context
of the play, his comments would probably sound ludicrous. He might say that he had done better
Hamlets, that the crowd tonight was limp, or that after the curtain comes down, everyone--good
guys and bad guys alike--would get out of their costumes and go out for a late dinner. This
response certainly doesn't resonate with the plot or the characters in the play, and yet which view
is the more realistic, the more truthful, the more ultimately real of the two?
We have all been brainwashed into believing that our roles are real, that who we really are is a
fragile, mortal personality encased in a porous, vulnerable bag of skin, plopped down in the midst
of this enormous and impersonal universe to do the best we can against overwhelming odds. We
are taught to become egocentric (as though that illusory ego were the real center of who we are),
trying to match that fragile individuality against the whole rest of the cosmos, while at the same
time subjugating that ego to the "higher" interests of the society we happen to live in. It sets up a
contradiction which frighteningly few people ever see through.
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
--Winston Churchill
But it is this perception of relative helplessness that allows all the experts--the ministers, lawyers,
doctors, and politicians--to keep us down and maintain their social and economic dominance.
Since they are lost in the same dream of isolated consciousness that we are lost in, their
livelihoods and self-images depend directly on their ability to keep themselves, and us, ignorant
of who we really are. It just wouldn't do, for instance, for the churches to admit that we needn't
consult them, that God (or Truth, or whatever you choose to call IT) is eternally and immediately
accessible to everyone.
That's why saviors are never popular with church authorities until they have been killed--saviors
can't be manipulated while they are still alive, but when they are gone, their words can be molded
to just about any ambitious pursuit.
We have been coerced into allowing others to define for us who we are and what roles we ought to
be playing. We have turned our backs on the reality of why each of us is here as who we are here
as. We have learned to suppress our own inner directions and listen instead to experts whose
business depends on our continued ignorance and reliance on them. We have let them tell us who
we are when they don't know who they really are. Then again, as long as we can be fooled,
perhaps we deserve to be.
You got some great dreams, baby, but in order to dream you gotta be asleep. When you gonna
wake up?
--Bob Dylan
The critical time in life for each of us comes when we begin to honestly ask ourselves, "Who the
heck am I, anyway?" If we have identified ourselves with some passing attribute like youthful
beauty or political advantage, then there will inevitably come a time when that special attribute
will have faded again, for nothing which exists in time and space--the ground rules of this earthly
drama--is permanent.
As a result of our attachment to a temporary condition, to an ill-defined and psychologically
dependent role, we will eventually have what is called an identity crisis, which is the often sudden,
but sometimes only creeping shock of realizing that "I am not who I thought I was!" This can be a
highly magical moment if you are intent on understanding who you really are, and a highly
disquieting one if not.
What about You #1 and Me #1? Therein lies the mystery, and it is a mystery which can never be
squeezed between the pages of a book. Who you really are is cosmic, eternal, and boundless,
which is the nature of consciousness. You are the Actor.
The best that any words can do is to point in the general direction of truth. This is the intent of
the Zen story about a disciple who came to the master and asked, "Master, what is the moon?"
Instead of providing a factual, verbal, informational answer, the master simply pointed his finger
at the moon, as if to say, "There it is . . . my words are not the moon . . . if you want to know what
the moon is, look and see."
There, all around you and within you, is Life. Look and see what it is, look and see that beneath
and beyond that small package of human fears and desires called you-the-person there lurks the
splendor and magnificence of the cosmos itself, by whatever name you prefer to call IT. Each of
these human lives that we so fearfully protect are simply another novel variation of the game of
finding one's Self over and over in countless disguises.
Remember: we're all in this alone.
--Lily Tomlin
Chapter 5 -- The One Thing Everybody Knows
Right now you are reading these words. Maybe in your mind's eye you even watch yourself taking
them in. Who is it who is reading? If you say, "It is me," then I must ask, "Who (is it who) knows
that it is you?" That knower is consciousness, the baffling awareness of awareness which we have
labeled as You #1 or Me #1.
To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.
--Aristotle
I think, therefore, I am.
--Rene Descartes
When asked in a coffee house if he would like another cup, Descartes replied, "I think not,"
whereupon he disappeared.
--Anon.
The one thing that everybody knows without a doubt is "I exist." But who am I? What is this I which
I perceive to exist?
Try this one: With my index finger, I can touch lots of things--the keys on my computer, my nose,
and so on. I can do this only because these things are not the tip of my finger. The one thing I
cannot touch with the tip of my finger is the tip of my finger.
In the same way, I can touch, look at, or perceive many things with my consciousness: I can
objectify my surroundings, my fingertip, my thoughts, even who I think I am (my ego). I can do all
this because these things are not my consciousness. I cannot, however, objectify that same
consciousness which is aware of these things. It is, as Alan Watts once remarked, like trying to
bite your own teeth or sniff your own nose.
We can't be aware of consciousness in the same way we are aware of the objects of consciousness,
just like we can't be aware of our fingertips in the same way as we are aware of the things we
touch with our fingertips. Consciousness can never be made the object of its own inquiry because
it is beyond the polarity of objectivity and subjectivity.
That is the clue. You #1 is that which is aware of all the rest, including who you think you are. You
#1 is like a microphone which picks up all the sounds in a concert but is unaffected by and makes
no judgments about any of them. You don't hear the microphone, even though you couldn't hear
anything without it. Consciousness is the infamous still small voice, the one that doesn't use
words.
Unlike You #2, You #1 cannot die because it was never born. It is eternity masquerading as a
human being, it is the kingdom within, it is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness
thereof.
Now, the implications of these ideas probably hurtle headlong into the face of most everything
you have ever been told about who you are and what this world is all about. Religions and
philosophies, where most of us got the low-down on life, insist that we think of them as
ultimates, as literal revelation, but their own self-importance blinds them to the possibility that
their so-called truths might have been intended to be metaphors.
Your first impulse in pondering these ideas might be to dismiss them as heretical hogwash. They
aren't, and that's one reason I have included quotes by other thoughtful, if not profound thinkers
and seers. But if you are really concerned about your life, about experiencing a happiness which is
not dependent on the stock market or the government or the whims of some other person, then
enough of what you read here will stick. The important thing is: Don't believe a word you read
here! Find out for yourself what is true, for if it is true, then Life (call It God, Reality, Atman,
Brahma, whatever) will ultimately find countless other ways of getting the word to you.
The next message you need is always right where you are.
--Ram Dass
Chapter 6 -- What's So Great About Consciousness?
Compared to the glorious attributes of the human mind, its capacity for imagining and creating
magnificent and sublime thoughts, the silent microphone of consciousness seems almost bland,
hardly worthy of mention. It has no age, no sex, no color, mood, or morality; it has no attributes
whatsoever. One reason we overlook it is because it isn't exciting, its nature is beyond the bounds
of conceptual thinking.
Since consciousness has no attributes in the same way our bodies or intellects have attributes, it
is neutral, unattractive, it doesn't attract our attention. As far as the concert is concerned, the
microphone which picks it up is perfectly transparent. The projector which projects the movie
onto the screen is likewise most effective when it remains in the background.
And yet this mysterious something called consciousness is the whole secret of wisdom and
sagacity, this is the pearl of great price, this is what life really is. Where better to hide the truth
from an eager, clever, and intelligent seeker than right out in the open? Each one of us knows one
thing for sure, and that is "I am". That's the basis on which everything else is built, and if this
basis remains unconscious, well, look around at the misery and suffering in the world, and you
will see what rampant unconsciousness can accomplish.
The most profound insights about life rarely permit themselves to be lassooed by words and
reduced to bare and coarse facts as we call them. The more exacting our words, the further from
the Truth we stray, which is why poetry is generally more precise about human experience than is
prose, and why music can be said to be even more exact. We'll stick to words here, though, and in
the realm of words, the analogy, the parable, the story of what something is "like" is likely our
best bet.
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
--Samuel Butler
Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other great teachers told stories and parables because they knew
not only that facts and tedious details would be lost on the people they hung out with, but also
that what they were describing--a relationship, a process--could not be reduced to mere facts
and figures. So they told parables.
The word parable comes from the Greek word parabole, which literally means comparison. In
mathematics, a parabola is a plotted line representing the range of solutions to a given formula;
every point on the parabola satisfies the formula. But since a formula represents a relationship
between unfixed variables, no single solution, no particular set of values, is considered to be final
and ultimate.
Likewise, a parable is a wisdom story which can be solved at any point along its curve, and while
all interpretations are relatively correct, none are final, ultimate, or conclusive. The great teachers
used parables because they knew that their disciples were all coming from different places in their
understanding and experience, that they could relate to a story much more comfortably than to a
theory, and that they would learn the parable's highest lessons by learning to listen to their own
being.
Theories based on precise facts are easy to botch. If you forget part of a theory, or get just one of
the facts or numbers wrong, then the final results will be meaningless, if not misleading, and you
may not even know it. But you can paraphrase a story and it will still retain its meaning. Each
person who hears a parable will come away with something appropriate to their level of
understanding, a meaning which resonates with their experience, even though it might be slightly
different for everyone.
Here's a parable, an analogy, which comes from India, from the Upanishads, and is thousands of
years old. It presents a parabolic answer to the root question of all religion and philosophy (Who
am I and what is this?), and does so in a way which everyone can relate to.
In the beginning of the world (and though it probably had no ultimate "beginning" as we think of
them, you have to start somewhere), there was only Brahma. Being all there was, and therefore
totally known to himself, Brahma soon realized that this totality of awareness would eventually
become extremely boring . . . after all, when you know everything there is to know, then there's
no surprise, nothing to keep you interested. It's like reading the same book for the seventy-eight
millionth time. Anyway, since he was omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and
omnipresent (all-everywhere), Brahma decided to create a diversion for himself, a way of
introducing the elements of surprise, intrigue and drama into his experience. He thought, "What
would it be like to forget who I really am?"
So, he invented the game of cosmic hide-and-seek. According to the rules of this game, Brahma
would pretend to break pieces of himself off from the whole so that to all appearances they would
seem separate. That's the "hide" part. Then, as the apparently separate
consciousness at the center of each of those apparently separate pieces, and through their
apparently separate and unique perspectives, he would "seek" to rediscover who he really was,
which was, of course, everything.
Imagine seeing yourself from an infinite number of different perspectives, each one initially
ignorant of its relationship to all the rest. Imagine going to sleep and dreaming a different lifetime
each night, each lasting for more or less years, each complete with the full range and variety of
emotional life and death details. Imagine having the same dream but playing a different role in it
each night, seeing it through different eyes each time.
Well, guess who those apparently separate pieces are? Since there is only one I Am in the universe,
one consciousness, it's all a game of hide-and-seek, and each one of us is in the same state: I'm
IT AND You're IT!
Chapter 7 -- What Are Children?
We were all children once, we have all had the experience of entering into humanhood from some
other orientation, and of then learning about ourselves from those around us. The word "child" is,
of course, simply a label, a phonic sound, a literal tag, a categorical concept. The tag is easy to
understand, but the reality is quite another matter.
In truth, children are mysteries; their bodies apparently come from or through the body of their
mother with a token contribution from a father, but their spirits, their consciousness, the mystery
of their being, where do these come from? Do they emerge full blown, or do they develop
gradually over time, or some mysterious mixture of both? If a child is a novel and original seed
planted by the divine into the earthly soil, then what is the meaning and purpose of that seed?
What fruit will it ultimately bear? A mystery!
Each child is like a plant which has never before existed, a plant with its own set of likes and
dislikes, its own unique mix of talents and abilities, some pronounced, others latent. The best way
to raise a child is to pay attention to it, to see what it is here for, and to assist it in being that.
Unfortunately, our societies have for centuries believed that children are innately inferior, and that
adults, by virtue of chronological seniority, can and should pull rank on children whenever it
seems fitting or convenient to do so.
'Til society is very differently constituted, parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed because
they will be obeyed, and will constantly endeavor to settle that power on a divine right which will
not bear the investigation of reason.
--Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
This is not a manual on how to raise children, but sometimes if we can see how we got into a
certain mess, we have a better chance of getting ourselves out of it again. Our parents all meant
well when they raised us as they did, regardless of what they thought they were doing, but their
methods were primarily centered, either pro or con, on how their parents raised them, and on how
the society at large viewed children. Our parents misled us to the extent that they tried to change
us into something that we weren't.
Now, we must live our own lives and try to sort truth from fiction about who we really are. By
examining from a different perspective some of the things that all of us have been through, we
can discover a deeper appreciation and understanding of just what it means to be a human being.
This is what world and local events are increasingly pressuring us to do.
Each of us is the cosmos reborn as each of us. We don't come into being, we come out of it. Even
the idea of some connection between us and the cosmos is too distant. In those early months
before we got talked out of ourselves and learned who everyone else thought we ought to be, we
were still cosmic beings, we hadn't yet developed a personality, an ego.
This is one reason why we can remember events from our fourth, third, perhaps even second
years of life, but not much further back than that. Before we had learned how to construct and
identify with our egos, our points of reference were cosmic, not personal. We had not yet learned
of any socially defined boundaries. This cosmic orientation is the one we experience in sleep, but
we don't remember the time as spent consciously because we are tightly bound to our human
egos, which exist only while we are awake. A little child hasn't yet drawn the lines of demarcation
which will later tell him that the rug he is crawling around on is separate from him. To a little
child, everything is everything--there is just IT.
Since we developed our egos, however, our memories have become personal, like our present
self-images. We think of ourselves as persons having personalities, so this is the context within
which we view our experience. We have personal memories dating from the time when we first
became persons. By contrast, our cosmically oriented memories are timeless and eternal, however
buried, and once you learn to recall them, they are a whole lot more reliable.
But even though we now consider ourselves to be persons, we still retain a dim, almost visceral
memory of what life was like before it was chopped into pieces for us. The tension between this
memory, and our now truncated perceptions of reality, is what we interpret as discontent. We
remember what things ought to be like--living in peace and harmony with the world and with
each other--but when we look around our worlds, we see very little of this.
Our parents themselves were a product of this error of identity, so it is not surprising that they
raised us accordingly. It has become a vicious circle which must be broken somewhere if there is
to be any real peace in the world or in our personal lives. That's why the direction of your life must
be up to you; it cannot be left to your parents, or worse, to some impersonal organization.
We can't form our children on our own concepts; we must take them and love them as God gives
them to us.
--Johann von Goethe
This requires real trust and awareness--trust that Life knows what it is doing, that each person is
who they're supposed to be, and the awareness to see that, with our minds, we can only guess at
what is best for ourselves or those around us. Parents want their children to be happy, and yet
parents are rarely happy themselves. You must be allowed to be who you are, and you must
likewise allow those around you to be who they are.
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether
it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
--Carl Jung
We see in the world around us what we are; or, more precisely, we think we see what we think we
are. If we have no sense of the mysterious within us, then we won't notice it in other people.
Neither will we notice weakness, or faults, or anything else that we ourselves do not already have
traces of within us. When you have reached into your own depths to the point of realizing how
mysterious and magical you really are, then you will gratefully and thankfully extend the same
sense of awe and wonder to everyone else around you, whether or not they are aware of it. You
will have recognized that who you really are is, at its very root, also who they really are. Life is not
a competition, though competition is very popular among egos.
Furthermore, before they become brainwashed by the conflicting value judgments of their society,
children are naturally sensitive to the vibrations, the "feel" of others in their surroundings. Just as
you can't fool an animal by acting out something that you are not, you can't fool a little child.
Children are not impressed with politics or rational argument, they don't feel the need to project
an ego into the world around them, so they are still clear enough to see what is. This is, no doubt,
the reason behind those stories you sometimes hear of children being temporarily adopted by
some wild animal which, had they been adulterated like the rest of us, would have killed them.
Children are relatively clean and clear mirrors in which we can see ourselves.
Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children.
--Richard Henry Dana
Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.
--J. D. Salinger
There is a lot of interest being paid today to the "inner child", as though this perspective was a
recent discovery. Of course, most of the excitement is marketing hype, but beneath it, people are
coming to recognize that perhaps we were never intended to become adults, particularly if being
an adult is to be miserable and frustrated.
Healing the inner child really means bringing the frustrated adult back to his or her realities,
because the child within each of us is eternal, even though the bodily costume may grow old and
wrinkled. Healing the inner child means giving up the illusion that we are separate, that our egos
are real, or that life is intended to be deadly serious. It isn't.
Healing the inner child means learning to live in the moment, not being continually obsessed by
the past and the future, learning to give your whole being to whatever is happening in the Now, in
whatever Now happens to be. Since they aren't born with the attachments that they will later
make, children enjoy a happiness which is pure and natural, it is not conditional on such outer
things as purposes and goals.
In the little world where children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing
so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.
--Charles Dickens
Healing the inner child means being honest rather than political about your feelings. When a child
is angry, he doesn't suppress it just because it might not be politically correct not to: he screams!.
It is an honest scream, which is why he can scream at the top of his lungs all day if he wants to,
and never get hoarse. How many of us can say that? But once he is done with his tantrum, it is
almost as though nothing had happened, he is once again playing happily.
Healing the inner child means being able to let go of the past to accept a new present, for the
present is always new and novel. The squeals of delight and surprise which accompany the play of
children spring from their unadulterated joy at not just seeing, but experiencing from the depths
of their being, the wonder and mystery of creation without making the fatal attempt to try to
figure it out. They haven't been around long enough to see through habituated eyes. Whatever is
simply is. Even outwardly familiar activities are always new and exciting ("Tell it again, Daddy!"),
and children delight in them because that's the way they still see the world.
Everything's incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every
object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths. Nothing's in the least
like what it seems--or rather, itrselves do not already have traces of within us. When you have
reached into your own depths to the point of realizing how mysterious and magical you really are,
then you will gratefully and thankfully extend the same sense of awe and wonder to everyone else
around you, whether or not they are aware of it. You will have recognized that who you really are
is, at its very root, also who they really are. Life is not a competition, though competition is very
popular among egos.
Furthermore, before they become brainwashed by the conflicting value judgments of their society,
children are naturally sensitive to the vibrations, the "feel" of others in their surroundings. Just as
you can't fool an animal by acting out something that you are not, you can't fool a little child.
Children are not impressed with politics or rational argument, they don't feel the need to project
an ego into the world around them, so they are still clear enough to see what is. This is, no doubt,
the reason behind those stories you sometimes hear of children being temporarily adopted by
some wild animal which, had they been adulterated like the rest of us, would have killed them.
Children are relatively clean and clear mirrors in which we can see ourselves.
Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children.
--Richard Henry Dana
Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all of my best friends are children.
--J. D. Salinger
There is a lot of interest being paid today to the "inner child", as though this perspective was a
recent discovery. Of course, most of the excitement is marketing hype, but beneath it, people are
coming to recognize that perhaps we were never intended to become adults, particularly if being
an adult is to be miserable and frustrated.
Healing the inner child reallyh will make it a tent. Instruction comes from the outside, it is cerebral
and specialized, its goals are conditional. The process is not organic, however, and is therefore an
artifice; it is artificial.
There is a meaningful place in the world for instruction, but instruction is not education.
Education comes from the Latin verb educere, which means "to draw out from". Education, at least
as a category of learning, is "inside outward"; it is not a process of installing something from the
outside, but a process of drawing out that which is already there, to build the clothes to fit the
child instead of down-sizing the child to fit standardized clothes. The purpose of education ought
to be to show how to build one's own clothes.
Each child is born with an internal agenda for its life, sort of a pre-programmed schedule of
experiments to be run. This agenda is not ordered or organized in any linear fashion, but it is
there just as surely as our DNA is there to guide the maintenance and health of our physical
bodies. The very mix of talents, abilities, and inclinations in each child, if we could but see it
rightly, is a clear indication of the life purposes with which that soul incarnated.
When a great athlete or scholar or musician emerges, everyone can readily recall clear harbingers
of that greatness which were there from the start. Each and every child is a unique, once-in-
forever expression (a pressing out) of the infinite, each is an essential ingredient. If that
ingredient is to benefit the whole, then it has to be allowed its expression. When we taint those
ingredients as soon as they arrive (by sending them through the meat-grinder of public schools
and dogmatic religions), can there be any doubt about the results? Look at any newspaper.
The fact that our so-called educational systems are failing is ample evidence that the way we have
been doing schools, and childhood itself, is wrong. In traditional school systems, the child is
effectively the least important element in the arrangement. The child must conform to the system,
instead of the system accommodating the needs of the child.
Our institutional obsessions with power, prestige, and static stability, and the structures society
has fabricated to ensure their continuation, have made real people secondary to abstract systems
and ideals. Looking through a wide-angle lens, this is precisely why modern world cultures are in
so much trouble.
Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat.
--Martin H. Fischer
Fortunately, the educational system in this country is no longer entirely monolithic, for thoughtful
and perceptive people are coming to understand that children can lead happy and successful lives
without being subjected at a young and tender age to years of institutionalized boredom and
regimentation, that education, in the true sense of the word, needn't be expensive or
homogenized, and that universal education works only when it is voluntary.
Only a few children will learn when they have to; all will learn when they want to. More and more
parents are home-schooling their children, and even a few widely scattered public schools, at the
local level, are working to right a system which has become so top-heavy that it is now upside
down. Our children are the future of the planet; there is no human resource more precious to the
happiness, let alone the continued existence, of the human race. Power, prestige, and fame fall
pitifully short of meaning when compared to the happiness of our grandchildren.
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be such arguing, much writing, many
opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making. --John Milton
There is no best school system, just like there is no single correct shoe size. People are gradually
being forced by conditions to realize this. Many different approaches are emerging, some better
than others, but the theme seems to be greater local autonomy for parents and communities, and
greater freedom and choice for children.
Education . . . is hanging around until you've caught on.
--John Ruskin
The children entering the world today must be allowed to be who they really are in order to
properly change the systems which have created the turmoil we see around us. We will not save
the world by turning out more of the kinds of people who messed it up in the first place; we can
improve the world only by letting succeeding generations move freely enough to live their lives by
their own lights.
If we can realize and recall how we began our experience in this time and place, then we might
have the clarity to understand what the system did to knock us off course, because only then will
we know how to get back on our tracks again.
Chapter 9 -- How We Got Lost
There is a Hindu story of the child in the womb who sang, "Let me remember who I am." And his
first cry after birth was, "Oh, I have forgotten."
--Anon.
The Judeo-Christian story of the garden of Eden is really a parable. It isn't about some historical
event that was supposed to have happened in a certain country on a certain date, though it still
seems important to some religious sects to take it literally. It is a story about you and me when we
first entered this physical dimension and put on these physical/emotional/intellectual disguises.
When we were babies, Life was a paradise. Our real needs were small and easily met, our
nakedness didn't matter a whit because we hadn't yet learned how to feel guilt or shame, and we
were never worried about making the wrong impression. Our experience was a continual banquet
of surprise and discovery. We were fresh and unsullied arrivals, still unified with wherever it is that
we came from. We saw Life as a whole-- undifferentiated and all of a piece with us.
Not having learned to break the world up into nouns and verbs, right and wrong, us and them,
everything was for us quite naturally and peacefully part of everything else. We were fully
integrated with the cosmos, we hadn't yet discovered the game of fractionating everything in
order to control it, so existence was one.
God made integers; all else is the work of man.
--Leopold Kronecker
But we can't stay in the cradle forever, so according to the rules of the earthly game, according to
this parable, the time would have to come when we got symbolically kicked out of the garden.
This happened to us when we began to understand our local language and, by extension, to
understand and accept as our own the world views of those around us (initially, parents, siblings,
and in-laws . . . soon enough, hundreds of total strangers, many of them outlaws). We learned
how to reach out into the world and select very specific and tightly defined aspects of it, then
mentally categorize them. We learned how define reality as that which can be reduced to mental
and linguistic terms and symbols, and we learned how to ignore everything that couldn't be so
reduced. Finally, we learned how to manipulate the symbols to get the things we had been taught
were important.
You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Small children are powerful in an unconscious (that is to say, in a self-un-important) way. Their
power radiates from them as joy, innocence, spontaneity, and a magic which is powerful enough
to bring monarchs to their knees. Imagine the President picking up a two year-old. Who do you
suppose will play by whose rules?
It won't be the child who says, "Oh, this is the President! I'd better behave." It will be the President
who says "Goo-goo gaga". There is a tacit recognition on the part of both the President and the
child as to who is really the more powerful, and the less powerful has no choice but to acquiesce.
The reason this power exists in a small child is because that child is still honestly what it is, it
hasn't yet learned to try to be something or someone else, it is still consciously one with the entire
cosmos, or, if you wish, with God, for "of such is the kingdom . . . ". Children are god-like in that,
like God, children are not impressed with persons.
A small child is like a pure solution which is strong because of its innate and undiluted purity.
Each child is different, each has not only a different DNA complement, but in much the same way
a different agenda for its life.
Each one of us came into this world outfitted with a unique assortment of physical, mental,
emotional, and psychic equipment. Despite the ideals which are constantly held up to us as
standards for our personal development, there is no better or worse equipment for successful
human being . . . a short-handled trowel might pale beside a steam shovel in physical power and
mass, but the steam shovel cannot do the work of a trowel.
Each of us has a singular combination of talents and abilities, a completely novel balance of
attributes and inclinations, because each of us came into this earthly theatre to play a completely
novel and unique role in life, to contribute our special ingredients to the human banquet. We came
here to learn the things that our equipment alone can help us learn, to see the truth of who we
really are from an entirely new perspective, to boldly do what no one has done before. Each of us
was born to be what we already are.
What happens in the course of growing up, however--and this has happened to all of us to one
degree or another--is that the pure child becomes polluted. That formerly untainted, unique and
powerful solution called a child is corrupted by the addition of things that don't belong there,
things intended to make that child behave in a more standard and predictable, and therefore
controllable way, things like attitudes, prejudices, judgments, biases, fears, guilts, and so on.
Well, here's an interesting observation: When children are no longer children, they are called
adults. The term adult is a shortened form, sort of a catch phrase, for "adulterated child". The
state of adulterated childhood--called adulthood--is routinely glorified to impress the children;
chronological majority is elevated to make it envied, striven for, cherished, and protected at all
costs. This tells children that there is something inferior about being who they are, but there's
nothing they can do about it but wait for the day when they can begin their pay-backs. They are
told, "When you grow up, then you can be adulterated like we are." Missouri loves company.
Every one of us is a completely novel, never-before-tried version of those pure solutions. Each of
us was born perfect, perhaps not by society's standards, but certainly by Life's. Each one of us is
different, and those differences are mighty strong evidence that we came here to be different
people and do different things.
Society gives endless rewards to people who "play the game", but society has never been
particularly fond or tolerant of diversity. On the surface, society righteously proclaims that all
people are presumed to be created equal, as though all people can and should be reduced to
some lowest common denominator, a statistical norm, a complete list of acceptable attributes.
Beneath the surface, however, this allows society to treat us, and for each of us to treat each other
and to some extent ourselves, as things. In this view, children are categorically viewed as
imperfect . . . immature raw material which, only if properly molded and shaped by morality and
social forces, might one day qualify as acceptable. Hence, we dutifully followed everybody else's
lead and got lost.
Here's another indication of the problem, another one of those sly twists in the language. We have
the same word for the place where we send small plants and the place where we send small
people. It's called a nursery and, according to the derivation of the word, is ideally a place where
nursing, in the mammary sense of the word, takes place. Nursing, cuddling, cooing, caressing,
and those other loving and gentle human interactions are vitally important in the early months
and years of human life. The fact that many kids today don't get them may just be related to some
of the social problems we find around us.
In the interests of efficiency and economy, each plant in a nursery is reared under the same
strictly controlled conditions: the same size pots, and the same amounts of water and light and
food, as though all plants ought by nature to prosper and flourish under precisely the same
conditions.
If any plant should show a desire to grow in unacceptable (i.e., non-standard) ways, that plant is
quickly nipped in the bud (by the authorities, of course, and on the excuse of something which is
generally dressed up as "the greater social good"). If such a plant should remain strong in its
insistence to be what it is, then it is eventually tossed out onto the rubbish heap to fend for itself.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
--Henry David Thoreau
Most adults suffer a dull, indistinct unhappiness which is so habitual that it has become
inseparable from their daily lives, however they may smile to mask it. They have been talked out
of themselves. From the earliest age they have been brainwashed into the belief that as they were
born, and as who they were born, they aren't good enough, that they must continually prove their
worth, that their bodies are fallible and liable to disease, that their passions are unnaturally sinful
and must be harnessed and suppressed, that their duty is to serve the aims of the majority. Down
deep, they are convinced that they aren't good enough.
Their consciousness started out cosmic, attuned to the oneness of all existence, but has since
been pared down to a strictly utilitarian fraction of its totality. That naturally universal attunement
has been filtered and reduced to a trickle, which is then called normal or ordinary consciousness.
With ordinary consciousness you can't even begin to know what's happening.
--Saul Bellow
After decades of propaganda and worldly and/or other worldly teachings, the vast majority of
adults have resigned themselves to trying endlessly to be what they are not, and the frustration
they quite naturally feel is expressed as fear, hatred, intolerance, greed, and all of the other social
maladies we see around us. Look at almost anyone when they don't know they are being watched,
when they are not performing . . . what sort of a face are they wearing, what does their expression
convey about their prevailing thoughts? Their faces cannot help but mirror how they feel about
themselves. Even professional actors cannot maintain a false persona indefinitely, and habitual
worry lines are telling.
Most adults are ill-at-ease (another way of saying dis-eased) because they know something is
wrong in their lives. They faintly remember their own person gardens of Eden, but the rewards of
social conformance haven't even come close to replicating it, and more of a non-solution is never
enough. Their mental habits and belief systems won't allow them to face up to what has happened
to them, and to what they are doing by perpetuating institutions that don't really work. Though
they often mean well, they continue playing the charade seriously and often fearfully because they
don't know what else to do.
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always
and forever explaining things to them.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Young people have always retained a stronger memory of what things should be like, which may
be why modern life always seems to include some degree of unrest in its younger citizens. And
today especially, young people seem to have a stronger grip on the edenic memory than
generations past. Yet because of the subordinate role assigned to children and minors in general,
their wisdom is universally dismissed as uninformed, childish, and impractical.
Who is more foolish: the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid of the light?
--Maurice Freehill
We have all had our feet set for us into the steel-reinforced concrete of conformity, but we are
also fortunate that it hasn't had time to set completely. We can always change, but it becomes
more and more difficult the longer we wait.
The beauty of our human situation is that what we are looking for doesn't have to be brought into
being from the outside; it is already full and complete, and we have no further to look for it than
our own beingness.
We are not here to be clones of Michael Jordan or Madonna orish under precisely the same
conditions.
If any plant should show a desire to grow in unacceptable (i.e., non-standard) ways, that plant is
quickly nipped in the bud (by the authorities, of course, and on the excuse of something which is
generally dressed up as "the greater social good"). If such a plant should remain strong in its
insistence to be what it is, then it is eventually tossed out onto the rubbish heap to fend for itself.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
--Henry David Thoreau
Most adults suffer a dull, indistinct unhappiness which is so habitual that it has become
inseparable from their daily lives, however they may smile to mask it. They have been talked out
of themselves. From the earliest age they have been brainwashed into the belief that as they were
born, and as who they were born, they aren't good enough, that they must continually prove their
worth, that their bodies are fallible and liable to disease, that their passions are unnaturally sinful
and must be harnessed and suppressed, that their duty is to serve the aims of the majority. Down
deep, they are convinced that they aren't good enough.
Their consciousness started out cosmic, attuned to the oneness of all existence, but has since
been pared down to a strictly utilitarian fraction of its totality. That naturally universal attunement
has been filtered and reduced to a trickle, which is then called normal or ordinary consciousness.
With ordinary consciousness you can't even begin to know what's happening.
--Saul Bellow
After decades of propaganda and worldly and/or other worldly teachings, the vast majority of
adults have resigned themselves to trying endlessly to be what they are not, and the frustration
they quite naturally feel is expressed as fear, hatred, intolerance, greed, and all of the other social
maladies we see around us. Look at almost anyone when they don't know they are being watched,
when they are not performing . . . what sort of a face are they wearing, what does their expression
convey about their prevailing thoughts? Their faces cannot help but mirror how they feel about
themselves. Even professional actors cannot maintain a false persona indefinitely, and habitual
worry lines are telling.
Most adults are ill-at-ease (another way of saying dis-eased) because they know something is
wrong in their lives. They faintly remember their own person gardens of Eden, but the rewards of
social conformance haven't even come close to replicating it, and more of a non-solution is never
enough. Their mental habits and belief systems won't allow them to face up to what has happened
to them, and to what they are doing by perpetuating institutions that don't really work. Though
they often mean well, they continue playing the charade seriously and often fearfully because they
don't know what else to do.
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always
and forever explaining things to them.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Young people have always retained a stronger memory of what things should be like, which may
be why modern life always seems to include some degree of unrest in its younger citizens. And
today especially, young people seem to have a stronger grip on the edenic memory than
generations past. Yet because of the subordinate role assigned to children and minors in general,
their wisdom is universally dismissed as uninformed, childish, and impractical.
Who is more foolish: the child afraid of the dark, or the man afraid of the light?
--Maurice Freehill
We have all had our feet set for us into the steel-reinforced concrete of conformity, but we are
also fortunate that it hasn't had time to set completely. We can always change, but it becomes
more and more difficult the longer we wait.
The beauty of our human situation is that whanet and serious overpopulation, include societies
which consist of people who have been systematically prevented from being who they really are,
people who have forgotten what they are here on this earth to be.
Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Non-conformity is not simply doing the opposite of what everyone else does; that's called being
contrary and is just as conformal as conformity. Non-conformity has rather to do with being what
you are, whether or not it accords with what others are doing. Sometimes you will do like others
do . . . that's okay when it's appropriate; sometimes you will do what others don't do. That's okay
too. If you are going to be true to yourself, then conformity is the last thing you want to be
concerned about. Conformity means doing something the same way every time, without having to
think, doing it automatically, and doing it exactly the same as everyone else is doing it.
Fashion is the rush to conform more quickly than everyone else.
--Alan Watts
Being what you already are is deceptively confusing, because it is both the hardest thing in the
world to do and the easiest . . . hard because of the common sense you have accumulated thus far
in your life, and easy because it's already the case.
How easy is it for a rose to become a daisy? How hard is it for a rose to be a rose?
Earlier I mentioned our natural DNA complement (yes, DNA is complementary). DNA is short for
deoxyribonucleic acid, which is the basic chemical form of the body's operating manual on how to
be a body, how to make hair and skin and bones, how to digest food, how to record and recall
memories, basically, how to be biophysically who you are. You can't live without this acid.
In the same way as we were born with DNA, each of us was born with what we call purpose, with a
vital agenda, with something of a reference guide about what we are here to be and do. It, like our
DNA complement, isn't something that we can develop or acquire . . . we are born with it. There is
no exercise you can do to acquire what you already have. Science hasn't found it because it
doesn't exist in terms of science.
To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived--to dig
deep into the actual and get something out of that--this doubtless is the right way to live.
--Henry James
You #1 are actual. Who you really are is already the case; nothing is necessary to bring it into
being. All that is necessary is for you to remove your attention from the illusion of who you have
been told you are.
In a way, our lives in the world are like a movie projected on a screen. There is adventure, intrigue,
personal challenges, conflict, fires and storms, high drama, birth and death. When you are
entwined in the plot of a movie, you forget for the moment that it isn't real. You believe in the
pretense of the movie so strongly that you will laugh or cry, your body will become tense, your
heart will pound, but all the while you are sitting comfortably in a darkened room watching light
images which are substantially unreal dancing across a white screen.
This is how we have become: watcher/participants in a movie over which we have been told that
we have little directorial control. We want to be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction,
but the only choices the directors give us are the scenes projected onto the screen. When we are
given a choice between one scene and another, it's isn't much of a choice. It is hard to remember
that everything on the screen is part of the illusion; it is temporary, one moment it is there, the
next moment it is gone . . . one moment we are happy, the next we are sad.
If it is really our intent to find reality, then we must at least temporarily remove ourselves from the
pretense of the movie . . . we need to learn to tell the difference between the witness who is
watching the movie and the roles we are playing, the difference between the flashing, evanescent
light images projected onto the screen, and the screen itself.
Our consciousness is like light, and the contents of our minds--our thoughts-- are like the film
we run through the projector of our imaginations. We project into the world who we think we are
and what we have been taught the world is. But these projections, like the movie, are artificial,
merely illusory. When you want to see reality instead of the illusion, when you want to see the
screen instead of the movie, you turn off the projector.
What is artificial needs artificial support, but what is real needs no such support. When you turn
off the projector, only what is real will remain. The screen has always been there, you are not
creating it by turning off the projector; you are simply removing energy from the illusion. This is
what meditation and prayer are really all about, though these, too, have been convoluted in the
interests of philosophy and religion.
And this is why the path of self-discovery is so threatening to the establishment. When it is
discovered that peace is not the result of the existence or actions of any government, police force,
or religion, that health is not the result of any medicine, that happiness is not the result of any
personal power or possessions, then people who are fed up with congenital civilized frustration
will turn back to reality, and the artificial distractions of life, for which we all pay dearly, will
wither. This is part of what is happening in the world today.
The trick is to be who you decided to be when you decided to be who you are.
--Me
Chapter 11 -- Making Sense of Reality
Most of what we think we know about the world comes through our senses, those mysterious
windows between what's inside and what's outside our bodies. Whether we assume that there are
at our disposal the five traditional senses (touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight) or the expanded
modern lists which include such as the senses of time and of motion, we can all agree that our
worldly experience would be fractional without the input provided through these various windows.
What we are inclined to forget, however, is that the tools available to us for our investigations into
life are also the limits of what we can perceive. Our eyes, for instance, avail us of a visual
awareness of form and spatial relationship, but our eyes do not show us everything that is there,
they are sensitive to only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. When we humans look at
a patch of blue sky, we see simply blue. A bee can look at the same patch of sky and, because of
the structure of its polarizing and compound eyes, can tell precisely in which direction the sun is.
Obviously, the same sky is there for both us and the bee, so it must be that the bee sees a
different world and can make distinctions that we can't, although t
We see with our eyes only a tiny sliver of the spectrum. We hear with our ears only a tiny fraction
of the vibrations there to be sensed. Our senses of taste, touch, and smell are likewise narrowly
focused. We cannot be sensually aware of anything we don't have the facility to be aware of; you
can't taste a turkey dinner on an AM radio.
Can a bird somehow see wind currents? Can a fish somehow feel an impending earthquake? There
is growing evidence that they can, which ought to indicate to us that there is infinitely more to life
than we humans have the sense to perceive. And because we don't have in our human arsenal any
analog equivalents, we cannot conceive in what manner that fish becomes aware of the coming
earthquake, or how birds can land lightly in the midst of swirling and, to us, invisible winds. The
scientifically acceptable windows show us only a fraction of what's there, yet we have been
convinced that that's all there is, and that our assumptions based on that fraction are correct. But
they aren't.
And yet, we and our hallowed institutions have the audacity to claim that we understand life well
enough to direct it. Again, check out the news. It is widely acknowledged, by open-minded
parents at least, that young children can often see things which we adults cannot see (or have
forgotten how to see): imaginary playmates, auras, and other physical or spiritual essences for
which we adults have no concepts. Just because we grown-ups can't see them is no evidence that
they aren't there.
But we have fallen for the illusion that, if something can't be put into words or some other
symbolic representation like mathematics, then it isn't real. We have accepted as reality the severe
limitations of language and sensation, and have incorporated them into our mentative processes,
so whatever comes through our senses is either immediately and automatically translated into
terms we are comfortable with, or it is discarded as being unreal, imaginary.
We call this making sense of the world, putting our sensory input about the world through the
filters of our beliefs and attitudes, and arranging the mental pieces we have chopped it into in
such a way that we can feel like we understand them. Rather than really making sense of the
world, however, it is perhaps more accurate to say that reducing the infinite world to our finite
abilities to make sense out of sensory input is like trying to intelligently analyze a football game
using a thermometer. Hence, poetry, which alludes to images which are not specifically
expressible, is generally dismissed as being non-factual, as hyperbolic, and therefore something
less than the meat-and-potatoes reality of facts.
Do all humans see the world the same way? Even though we all have eyes, do we see the same
things? What are we hearing when we hear? What do we feel when we feel? Can't say. But the sky
in Mona Lisa was no more or less real to Da Vinci than the sky in van Gough's Starry Night was to
Vincent.
Science tells us that what we call matter is mostly space. If the average atom were enlarged to the
size of the solar system, with the electrons out near the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, that atom
would be far emptier than the solar system. If all the space in and between the atoms of your body
were removed, so that the nuclei and electrons were packed up against each other, you would be
a barely visible speck that still weighed what you weigh. What we call matter is mostly space, and
what little matter there is may not matter quite the way we think.
And yet, when we come to a wall, our senses tell us it is solid. Despite there being so much space
in matter, we can't walk through it. This isn't because of the matter which is there, but because of
the electrical fields surrounding the atoms and molecules both in the wall and in our bodies.. Our
senses don't tell us this, because they can't; all they can say is "thou shalt go no further in this
direction".
In short, senses neither lie nor tell the truth; they simply pass to our awareness a very narrow
selection of the available information. Making sense of the world, that is, making the world into
sensual information, is to make nonsense of the world, because our senses are partial, selective,
and therefore exclusive, while the real world is complete and inclusive. Even though our senses
have been trained to tell us otherwise, the truth is not a matter of common sense. Great
discoveries are usually made by people who have sought beyond the bounds of what is popular or
comfortable, and this means questioning everything.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
--Albert Einstein
Chapter 12 -- Mind over Matter?
We are consciousness, but we live in a world which happens to express itself in terms of
something we call matter. This matter undergoes change under the influence of what we call
energy. What is matter, what is energy, and what is this far stranger thing called consciousness
which seems to be neither matter nor energy, but is nevertheless aware of both?
The apparent distinction between matter and energy on the one hand, and what is loosely called
spirit on the other, has puzzled thinkers throughout the ages. Matter is roughly considered to be
anything that can be perceived through either the senses ore their technological extensions
(microscopes, telescopes, computer imaging, etc.). Spirit, about which science has nothing to say,
is everything else. Philosophies and religions, those institutions which have placed themselves in
charge of spiritual matters, have become hopelessly complex in their efforts to explain life, not
because Life is hopelessly complex, because it isn't, but because philosophies and religions have
begun from a false premise. The false premise is: The universe is assumed to be a collection of
mutually discrete and independent things, and therefore not a unity.
Since the unsensed is more mysterious than the sensed, we have traditionally assigned the
superior position to spirit, a practice which has been supported by both science and religion,
though not in the same ways. In science, intellect (a quasi-measurable function of consciousness)
is seen to be superior to inert matter, and it is assumed that intellect's purpose is to control
matter. In religion, the functioning of inert matter is seen to be the result of the intervention of
spirit, with the same intent to control.
The schism between the physical and the spiritual is what gives strength to the idea that one can,
or ought to be able to, control one's body with one's mind, although there is just as strong a case
to be made that for the likelihood that one's body (its chemistry, shape, and neurological
capacities, etc.) can also control one's mind (perceptions, attitudes, etc.). There is a growing body
of evidence which indicates that body chemistry may be more significant to human happiness
than was ever before imagined, by the experts anyway, because mystics and psychedelic explorers
have known it for thousands of years.
The final reasoned assault on this artificial separation of matter and spirit began in 1905 when
Einstein turned the rather staid and confident scientific community on its staid and confident ear
when he published his Special Theory of Relativity. This theory put forward the astounding idea
that matter and energy were equivalents, that each was an alternative form of the other. His
formula for this equivalence is the most famous formula in the world . . . E = mc2, which means
that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.
We know that mass (matter) can be converted to a wall, our senses tell us it is solid. Despite there
being so much space in matter, we can't walk through it. This isn't because of the matter which is
there, but because of the electrical fields surrounding the atoms and molecules both in the wall
and in our bodies.. Our senses don't tell us this, because they can't; all they can say is "thou shalt
go no further in this direction".
In short, senses neither lie nor tell the truth; they simply pass to our awareness a very narrow
selection of the available information. Making sense of the world, that is, making the world into
sensual information, is to make nonsense of the world, because our senses are partial, selective,
and therefore exclusive, while the real world is complete and inclusive. Even though our senses
have been trained to tell us otherwise, the truth is not a matter of common sense. Great
discoveries are usually made by people who have sought beyond the bounds of what is popular or
comfortable, and this means questioning everything.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
--Albert Einstein
Chapter 13 -- What is Resonance?
Do you remember the tv commercial in which Ella Fitzgerald broke the wine glass with her voice
(maybe it was the tape)? Have you ever turned up the volume on your stereo and heard the
windows clatter? Have you ever ridden in an old car and when you reached a certain speed, the
fender or something would begin to rattle?
All of these phenomena are the result of what is called resonance, from a Latin word meaning,
literally, "to sound again". In fact, it is resonance in the electronic circuits of the receiver which
allows you to "tune in" to a radio or tv station.
Resonance isn't strictly a physical or electrical phenomenon. When we hang out with favorite
people and we are all getting into a certain rhythm of conversation, or music, or whatever, there is
a resonance, a like-feeling-ness enfolding all of us. This is why musical concerts and ethnic
religious gatherings can be so energizing . . . all those people in the same groove . . . the
resonance goes far beyond just the physical. Angry mobs work the same way.
When a certain critical mass of people is assembled who are in the same groove, the energy so
generated and focused is infectious, even to those who are not physically involved. This is a fact
which has not been missed by the shapers of public opinion: fear, hatred, and animosity can be
skillfully focused in support of cures` which are materially far more damaging than the alleged
illnesses (e.g., the arms race, the drug wars, religious fundamentalism).
Each of us is like a radio transmitter which is on twenty-found hours a day. This transmitter
broadcasts what we are thinking, how we feel, our moods and emotions, all of the moment-to-
moment contents of our consciousness. Many psychic abilities amount to little more than the
ability to pick up on these vibrations in much the same way that a radio can pick up the electrical
noise generated by an approaching car. The phenomenon of entrainment is when many people
"lock into" the same ideas or activities. The flavor of humanity at any given moment is the sum
total of the transmissions of each person alive.
Every thought you have affects your body and the way it works; it also affects the world around
you. That's because your mind and your body are part of You #2, while You #1 is the
consciousness which is both aware of all the rest and the fundamental reality of all the rest. When
you spend time in the space of You #2, doing thinking, pondering, worrying, fearing, plotting, and
carrying on all of the internal conversations that we do, you are automatically including not only
your own body and your environment, but also the world at large in the discussion, you are
actually broadcasting yourself to the world at every moment of your existence.
Almost nobody today will argue that stress has no effect on physiology. And when you
unconsciously buy into the feelings of fear or uncertainty which presently entertain large
segments of the earthly population, then you will be swept right along with the masses. Your body
will respond to fear and anxiety with outpourings of chemicals which,
if there is no immediate action to spend them on, will ultimately turn around and bite you instead
of your imagined attackers. Worrying is like sitting in your car in your garage with the engine
running, thinking about being chased down the road by the bad guys. You will gun your engine as
though it were really happening, but all you are really accomplishing is burning gas, filling the air
with smoke, and wearing out your engine, all to no purpose.
In the 1970's, Normal Cousins made headlines by audaciously announcing that he had healed
himself of cancer by watching old comedies, by laughing a lot. The medical profession, their
power and expertise threatened by these revelations, nervously discounted the results, but
thousands of people around the world found the same things to be true: by changing the contents
of their conscious awareness, by changing their belief systems and common sense world views,
they also changed the level of health of their bodies.
This is the principle of resonance in action. To make a little clearer how it works, let us consider
the lowly tuning fork. A tuning fork is usually a brightly polished little two-pronged piece of metal
roughly shaped like a pickle fork, which, when struck, emits a pure and exact musical tone. They
are used for tuning musical instruments, but not usually fish . . . did you every try to tuna fish?
Suppose we had a tuning fork in the key of "A". If we were to strike that fork, making it hum, and
then set it next to another "A" tuning fork, the second fork will begin to vibrate as well. We don't
even have to strike it; it will pick up the vibrations of the first fork through the air, and will do so
because the natural resonant frequency of both forks is the same. A "B" tuning fork would just sit
there quietly and refuse to hum along.
If we were to strike an "A" tuning fork, then set it down in an array of many different tuning forks,
only those whose natural resonance corresponds will begin to vibrate; the rest will remain
unmoved.
This is just an analogy, but it is indicative of how Normal Cousins was able to heal his cancer, and
how every thought you think has an effect on you and your world. Here's the connection:
First, the energy you use to strike the tuning fork is analogous to the degree of consciousness you
bring to your thoughts, the amount of energy and attention you pour into them. Most people are
only partly conscious, and therefore poorly focused, which is why their impact on the world is
minimal. They spend most of their time dreaming, sending out conflicting thoughts which never
accomplish much because the messages are so jumbled that they end up being self-canceling.
Whereas we all know people who seem to be super-charged; the energy they bring to their affairs
is palpable, you can almost feel it when they walk into a room. These people resonate strongly.
The more conscious you are, the more energetically you are ringing your fork.
Second, the tone of your personal tuning fork is the nature, mood, and quality of the thoughts you
carry around in your head. Your world view, how you see yourself, the quality and tone of the
constantly running internal conversations we all have with ourselves, all of the attitudes, biases,
prejudices, and presumptions you carry around with you about life, the universe, and everything.
Self-doubt and self-confidence are tones, as are self-respect, fear, anxiety, happiness, joy, and all
other human emotions. These are the instructions you are broadcasting to Life, and they are also
the limitations of what Life can show you of its infinitude.
Finally, the array of tuning forks is the world around you. The world around you is in fact a
potentia, and unlimited repository of untried possibilities. The opportunities for success and
failure, for happiness and misery are all right there, but they don't manifest until someone comes
along and calls them forth, just like a seed won't sprout until it is watered.
When you are vibrating with self-doubt, then your experience in the world will show you the
reflections of those thoughts, thereby reinforcing your belief that your self-doubt is justified.
Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.
--William Shakespeare
When a carpenter walks into a room, what he sees is the woodwork. That's not to say that
woodwork is all that's there, but his mind-set will show him what he is used to looking for; he will
see in the world what his thoughts are. Likewise, an interior decorator will notice the decor and
largely ignore the woodwork. Whose vision, whose version of the world is the most accurate? Are
any such versions all-inclusive and therefore valid?
The principle of resonance is what motivational seminars are really all about . . . changing the
tones in your head so that you can have more preferable experiences, whether the goal is selling
watches or watching cellars, whether it is seeing more being, or being more seeing.
The world as it is is neither good nor bad: it simply is. Its goodness or badness, what it is,
depends on who's looking at it. This is why the mass communication of the past several decades
has been so profitable for governments, merchants, and other people with an agenda, "Create a
need and fill it" is the cornerstone of modern market economies. For most of this century, mass
communication has been used to create fear in people, then offering the most profitable antidote:
Communism led to larger and more powerful killing machines. Satan led to more (900) numbers
at the bottom of the tv screen. Cancer led to a multi-billion dollar health care industry. Crime led
to overcrowded jails and an inhumanely brutal justice system.
Speak in the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only portal available to any of us to escape this vicious circle is consciousness, finding that
place within which is who and what we really are, and learning how to tell the difference between
our thoughts and who it is that's thinking them. It means taking back the responsibility for our
being from those who have usurped it. It means standing up and being who we are, refusing any
longer to try to be someone we are not. It means reclaiming our natural birthrights of freedom of
thought, action, and expression.
Chapter 14 -- How To Be Who You Are
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different
drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
--Henry David Thoreau
As you grow older, keep your discontent alive with the vitality of joy and great affection. Then the
flame of discontent will have an extraordinary significance because it will build, create, and bring
new things into being.
--J. Krishnamurti
Young people, particularly in modern times, have always been at least mildly discontented with
what they found when they left the cloistered security of the cradle. Something deep within shouts
that injustice is never right, that freedom and liberty are man's natural and normal condition, and
that anything which prevents this liberty is morally wrong.
This was the great message of the Sixties in this country. It was a frontal assault on the
institutionalized injustices like racial segregation, suppression of free speech, and the official
promotion of a lifestyle which allowed no room for alternatives. In the Sixties, there was still
enough energy in the status quo to suppress the revolution which began back then. There is no
longer enough such energy, so society is changing faster than ever before, despite the best efforts
of anyone to control its directions.
Society can be thought of as the average of its parts, just as a cheering section at a football game
will take on the predominant color of the cards being held up by the people sitting there. When
fear and mistrust dominate a society, when people feel themselves to be at the mercy of forces
beyond their control, beyond even their comprehension, when victimization is proudly worn as a
badge of identity, then the participants in that society are guaranteed to be miserable, and none
of the official programs for improvement will work.
Top-down solutions for society's problems don't work because society is an abstraction, an
illusion, a statistical generalization. None of us has ever met society, none of us has ever shaken
its hand, or looked into its eyes, because it doesn't have any. Society is not a fact: it is a
perception, a convention. Society is a way of averaging the complexities and individual differences
present in the people who comprise that society, like the color of the cheering section. When
people are reduced to statistics, they become static and mean.
There is no division, no separation, between the society and ourselves; we are the world and the
world is us, and to bring about a radical revolution in society--which is absolutely essential--
there must first be a radical revolution in ourselves.
--J. Krishnamurti
With the demotion of the importance of family and the loss of tolerance for diversity, modern
society has grown to depend almost exclusively on punishment to control social behavior. The
myriad of rules, regulations, and sanctions in modern life are like large sheets of properly colored
cellophane stretched over the crowd, and you can be arrested for breaking out and tearing that
social fabric.
We are highly suspect if we try to break out because our social roles have been defined for us, and
when we start being someone different, we are likely to hear complaints that we are not being
ourselves. If we persist, we will be labeled as "threats to the social order", because that's easier
than accepting the fact of human diversity. The only way to change the color of society is for us
individual people to change our own cards. You already are who you are supposed to be. Be that.
First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.
--Thomas a'Kempis
Even to resent those in our past who led us astray from our real being, to resent anything,
introduces another impurity into our properly pure solutions, it rings an undesirable tuning fork
out there in the world. Peace, without which real success is unattainable, is impossible until we
begin the personal process of separating all of society's controlling influences out of our systems,
until we begin to find out who and what we really are.
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.
--Christopher Morley
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
--Robert Louis Stevenson
My life changed forever the day I realized that I was not responsible for the way ll have an
extraordinary significance because it will build, create, and bring new things into being.
--J. Krishnamurti
Young people, particularly in modern times, have always been at least mildly discontented with
what they found when they left the cloistered security of the cradle. Something deep within shouts
that injustice is never right, that freedom and liberty are man's natural and normal condition, and
that anything which prevents this liberty is morally wrong.
This was the great message of the Sixties in this country. It was a frontal assault on the
institutionalized injustices like racial segregation, suppression of free speech, and the official
promotion of a lifestyle which allowed no room for alternatives. In the Sixties, there was still
enough energy in the status quo to suppress the revolution which began back then. There is no
longer enough such energy, so society is changing faster than ever before, despite the best efforts
of anyone to control its directions.
Society can be thought of as the average of its parts, just as a cheering section at a football game
will take on the predominant color of the cards being held up by the people sitting there. When
fear and mistrust dominate a society, when people feel themselves to be at the mercy of forces
beyond their control, beyond even their comprehension, when victimization is proudly worn as a
badge of identity, then the participants in that society are guaranteed to be miserable, and none
of the official programs for improvement will work.
Top-down solutions for society's problems don't work because society is an abstraction, an
illusion, a statistical generalization. None of us has ever met society, none of us has ever shaken
its hand, or looked into its eyes, because it doesn't have any. Society is not a fact: it is a
perception, a convention. Society is a way of averaging the complexities and individual differences
present in the people who comprise that society, like
the color of the cheering section. When people are reduced to statistics, they become static and
mean.
There is no division, no separation, between the society and ourselves; we are the world and the
world is us, and to bring about a radical revolution in society--which is absolutely essential--
there must first be a radical revolution in ourselves.
--J. Krishnamurti
With the demotion of the importance of family and the loss of tolerance for diversity, modern
society has grown to depend almost exclusively on punishment to control social behavior. The
myriad of rules, regulations, and sanctions in modern life are like large sheets of properly colored
cellophane stretched over the crowd, and you can be arrested for breaking out and tearing that
social fabric.
We are highly suspect if we try to break out because our social roles have been defined for us, and
when we start being someone different, we are likely to hear complaints that we are not being
ourselves. If we persist, we will be labeled as "threats to the social order", because that's easier
than accepting the fact of human diversity. The only way to change the color of society is for us
individual people to change our own cards. You already are who you are supposed to be. Be that.
First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.
--Thomas a'Kempis
Even to resent those in our past who led us astray from our real being, to resent anything,
introduces another impurity into our properly pure solutions, it rings an undesirable tuning fork
out there in the world. Peace, without which real success is unattainable, is impossible until we
begin the personal process of separating all of society's controlling influences out of our systems,
until we begin to find out who and what we really are being.
There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.
--Christopher Morley
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
--Robert Louis Stevenson
My life changed forever the day I realized that I was not responsible for the way ll have an
extraordinary significance because it will build, create, and bring new things into being.
--J. Krishnamurti
Young people, particularly in modern times, have always been at least mildly discontented with
what they found when they left the cloistered security of theg those seekers back to their reality,
back out of the illusions which have become so deadening to their vitality.
The third stage, after the master has moved on to wherever masters move on to, is the death of
that religion, when it becomes organized. The master, while he was alive, was never organized . . .
he had no system, no dogma, no limits on the depth and breadth of what he chose to say of how
he chose to say it. His life was a revolution, unplanned, and spontaneous. Like Life itself, he could
honestly be no other way.
While the master is alive, even the people constantly in his company are never quite sure where he
is coming from. But once he has left, the followers must reconstruct what they understood his
teaching to have been. These often conflicting records will, of course, be limited and modified by
the limited understandings of the chroniclers. The result: instead of a living, vital truth, there will
be a raft built of beliefs which must be believed in because they are no longer self-evident like
they were when the master was still alive.
Religion, in becoming organized, becomes dead. The vitality and spontaneity which marked it
while the master was alive have gone out of it. The message of the master was not an
organization, not a dogma set in concrete, but a vital, flowing, ever-self-renewing river of life,
and quite apparently often self-contradictory, because Life calls for opposites now and then. The
great masters all realized this is how it must be, which is why none of them ever sought to form a
new religion. They understood that real truth could never be catalogued or systematized, that it
was as big and all-inclusive as Life itself, and the only way for people to see it was to find it
within.
Organized religions are like dams which seek to capture the flowing river of truth and
understanding which the master embodied, then dispense it with indulgent caution to the faithful.
But that flow is cut off, dammed, (or damned) as soon as a creed is created, and the fresh, vital
flow of life is turned into a stagnant and silt-choked, but well-controlled swamp.
Organized religions are not interested in producing self-realized people, or in helping people find
the truth according to their own strengths; they are primarily interested in their own perpetuation,
and their efforts are largely directed along the lines of proselytizing and fund-raising. In doing
religion, they have become busynesses. If the purpose of religion is to get us into the kingdom,
religions are like revolving doors, and the priests get very angry at people who go through on the
first spin.
If religion is the opiate of the masses, then the Hindus have the inside dope.
--Alan Watts
Nevertheless, religions exist, and you have probably had some exposure to one or another. But at
this stage of your life, you are asking questions, and many of these questions involve the
relevance and believability of religious creeds, the chaffing seams and constricting bulk of
religious habits.
Old religion factions are volcanoes burnt out.
--Voltaire
Chapter 16 -- Which is the Right Religion?
Just as the world "as it is" is neither democratic nor socialist, neither good nor bad, positive nor
negative, so it is neither religious nor scientific. It is simply as it is. Religion, like science, is just
another way of trying to figure out what the world is, just a different set of filters through which
we sift our experience to try to explain things which, according to all the other filters we use, are
difficult to explain.
In truth, Life is the ultimate in simplicity--it doesn't get complex until we try to explain it.
Consider a plant . . . how smart is it in terms of knowledge? It knows nothing of vitamins and
minerals and cellular structure and regeneration the way a botanist understands them, yet the
plant grows wonderfully, usually better than botanists.
That religion is best which makes us vulnerable and open to Life, like we were when we were little
children, and doesn't close us into a tightly defined box composed of creeds and dogmas, or a
box of knowledge and superstition. That religion is best which allows us to be who we are, who
we came here to be.
Music is the only religion that delivers the goods.
--Frank Zappa
All religions are both right and wrong. They are right in that all have ultimately sprung from the
consciousness of someone who successfully parted the veils of worldly illusion and saw through
to the truth which supports this world; they saw through the movie and perceived the screen on
which that movie is being projected. Despite the glittering pomp and somber circumstance which
organized religion has draped over these living, vital insights, they are still there . . . well-hidden,
but still there.
Frank Zappa's comment alludes to the fact that at its heart, religion's true function is not some
future-oriented emotional gush: choirs, golden staircases, offering plates, hero worship, (800)
numbers, or lavish, consoling promises, but is instead a present, real-time celebration of what
already is, what always is: the timeless eternity of isness. Any religion can be helpful now and
then, but none are ultimate, for the infinite and infinitely dimensioned cosmos itself is the only
Ultimate.
This, however, is generally forgotten by the organized religion which seeks to throw a dogmatic
lariat around the cosmos while piously ignoring the fact that the vast remainder of reality has
been left out of the corral.
History bears the same relation to truth as religion does to reality, i.e., none to speak of.
--Robert Heinlein
Religions are like the spokes of a wheel, and the purpose is to get to the center, where there is
peace and stability. Any spoke you want to choose will lead in two directions: inward, toward the
center, or outward toward the periphery. Religions vie amongst each other for paying customers,
each claiming to be the "one true spoke."
Spokes are easy to distinguish out near the rim, where they are separate and seemingly
independent, which is why most religions are concerned primarily with making sure everyone
knows how they differ from other religions, and pointing their judgmental fingers at all the
infidels who believe otherwise. It's the good-guy bad-guy game performed religiously.
Out on the circumference, activity is furious, so it looks like something meaningful is happening
there . . . all the fancy robes and golden candlesticks and crowds of faithful followers swooning in
each others arms. Sometimes one particular spoke is up, in its heyday, and its spiritual pride will
not go unadvertised. Sometimes it is down in which case the crowds flock elsewhere.
Each spoke points in two directions: toward the center, and also directly away from that same
center. You can move in either direction, but the religious authorities would prefer, if not insist,
that you go outward. The more outward you go, the more frantically you will have to cling to that
spoke to keep from being thrown off. In time, you become a fervent believer . . . your social
standing may demand it, not to mention the fate of your soul (whatever that might be), and if you
behave you will remain in the good graces of the church. You need them (or at least you learn to
believe so) and they definitely need you.
But as they merge toward the hub, the spokes begin to lose their individuality, they all begin to
look similar, which is considered bad for business. The closer you get to the center, the more
similarity emerges between the same spokes which appeared so different out on the
circumference. You begin to see how they have certain things in common, and their similarities
really outweigh their differences.
At the very center, of course, where there is no furious activity, where things are smooth and
balanced, there are no spokes at all. By this time you have left all religion behind you; you have
graduated from what the Hindus call the Wheel of Samsara, the wheel that takes you from birth to
death to birth to death to . . .
The truly religious man does not embrace a religion, and he who embraces one has no religion.
--Kahlil Gibran
You are perfectly free to go in either direction on these spokes. You can go outward to the
circumference, in which case you will be taken for a ride, sometimes way up and sometimes way
down as you bounce through life. Or you can go inward toward the center, where the ride is
smooth because it is in balance. If the center is where you want to be, then you will eventually
have to leave all the spokes behind. Religion's official spokesmen don't want you to know this, or
they will lose you as a paying customer.
So, ultimately all religions are also wrong, because God, or whatever you choose to call the
ultimate ground of being, is the center, not only the center of this metaphorical wheel, but also
the very center of you, and as such is immediately available to all of us.
If Deity, by whatever label, is really omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, then there is
nothing else in existence which is not also It. How can there be? Otherwise the Deity would not be
omnipotent, etc.
The analogy of the wheel applies to us individuals as well. When you have lost sight of your
center, the place where you were when you assumed a human body, then you have moved out to
the periphery where life is shaky and dizzying.
Even though you have been taught for a lifetime to mistrust yourself, that as you are you are not
good enough to embody the divine, you will never find your center beyond your own
circumference, because it's not out there . . . it is within.
Truth is immediate. The word immediate means not mediated, or without mediator; it means that
there is nothing standing between you and it. That includes dogmas, priests, rituals, practices,
time, space, and anything else you can imagine. Truth is what one realizes by living with the same
quality of spontaneity that was lived by Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and all the rest. Like theirs, our
lives must not be cages in the confining prisons of dogma and conformity. The only thing that
keeps heaven from our experience is the assumption that it is to be found somewhere or
somewhen else.
One does not realize the spontaneous life by depending on the repetition of thoughts or
affirmations; one realizes it by seeing that no such devices are necessary.
--Alan Watts
The American Indian sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, since to him all
days are God's.
--Charles A. Eastman
So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, When just the art of being
kind Is all this sad world needs.
--Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Religions and churches serve best when they serve as filling stations. When you are out of gas,
you go to a filling station, you tank up, and then you move on with your life. Certainly there is a
modicum of community surrounding a church congregation--people showing love to each other
and so on--but the real test comes when someone wants to leave and move on with their lives.
What usually happens is that since churches and religions have become legal and institutional
entities, with mortgages and payrolls, building programs and a full menu of available services, the
officers are more interested in collecting life-long paying customers. Religions have become big
business, and in so doing, they have become more like retirement communities, where you are
expected, often under threat of eternal damnation, to remain docile, to blindly follow the pastor,
and to unflinchingly remain in the fold. Sheep thrills.
When one blind man follows another blind man, they both fall into the ditch.
--Kahlil Gibran
I once wrote a short story about a community which lived on the banks of a great wide river. The
prevailing religion held that across the river lay the promised land, but the river was so
treacherous that very few ever dared to cross it, and fewer still succeeded. The local hero was
presumed to have been the only one to successfully complete the trip, thereby earning him the
title of savior.
One day a young commoner decided to find out for himself what the promised land was really
like, so despite the risks, not to mention the threats of eternal damnation, he set out across the
river. He was gone for a long time, nearly eighteen years, and those remaining behind thought
him a fool for not conforming like the rest and believing the words of the true religion everyone
else believed in. Stories abounded about how he had surely drowned, was eaten by sharks or
captured by pirates, all because he doubted the divine revelations of the priests.
Eventually the young man returned. He hadn't been eaten by sharks, or captured by pirates; in
fact, none of the dire predictions of the priests bore a shred of truth. But what he did report about
his journey, the truths he discovered, did infuriate the priests. He said that the other side of the
river was just like this side (the kingdom on heaven is at hand), and that anybody who cared
enough could see for themselves if they were willing to take swimming lessons. This outraged the
priests of the home religion, who were making a killing selling soul insurance and life preservers,
so they had the man arrested and then executed. Later, of course, he was martyred, and brand
new religions sprang up around the various recollections of his teaching.
We now find the world full of religions which promise to deliver us to the next world in return for
our moral and financial support in this one. These religions, built around vague, fragmented, and
reconstructed recollections of the masters' teachings are like big, fancy cruise liners, complete
with all sorts of creature comforts to keep their paying customers occupied.
There are plenty of embarkation wharves on this shore, since the channels have been dredged out
to make it possible for these huge ships to come in close. But on the other shore there are no
such wharves; instead, there are natural barriers like reefs, shallows, sand bars, and tricky
currents . . . all manner of impediments to these expensive, ponderous, and unwieldy vessels.
Consequently, because of the investment and earning power they represent to their owners, these
huge ships spend most of their time steaming around in deep water, covering the same stretches
of the river over and over again (their navigators are often lawyers, merchandisers, and investment
counselors), telling their passengers how lucky they are to be on this ship, and keeping them
occupied enough to prevent their noticing that the ship never arrives anywhere.
The crews, of course, are well-schooled in deflecting any troublesome or disturbing questions
that might be raised by passengers who happen to notice that their long-awaited deliverance is
always being rescheduled to some vague time next year. They will assure restless passengers that
the waters are shark-infested, that drowning is a certainty if one should choose to jump ship, that
one might be captured by satanic pirates, anything to keep the numbers up.
If you look closely at the words of the masters (not necessarily at the words of those who came
afterward and whose understanding of the message would have been clouded at best), then you
see that they all talked of finding the truth within, not without. Some of these boats might get you
a little closer to the other shore, but if you really want to arrive, you will have to do the last leg on
your own.
Buddha, Jesus, and the rest didn't come to throw us a life-preserver, but to teach us how to swim
so we wouldn't any longer have to depend on artificial flotation devices which always spring leaks
at the wrong time. How can you have a leak in your ability to swim?
Those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will
not even stop to learn.
--Galen
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aims.
--George Santayana
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
--Denis Diderot
Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business.
--St. Jerome
Chapter 17-- What About the Devil?
It is well known in dramatic circles that the hero in a play will be no more convincingly heroic than
the villain is convincingly demonic. The two roles contrast off each other, and without this
contrast, the audience will leave.
Early in its history, when its adherents were still a criminal element hiding out in caves,
Christianity found it advantageous to bolster the reputation of its hero, known as Jesus to the
Romans, Jeshua to the Jews, and Issa to the Persians. It was high time for him to become a world-
class messiah, and he needed a convincing opposite, an evil empire to do battle with. So,
Christianity created Satan, borrowing on the ancient image of Pan to give him cloven hooves and a
ruddy complexion, not to mention making him insatiably horny, and therefore eternally sinful.
Ever since, Pan, the ancient god of animal wisdom and communion with nature, has been cast in
the worst possible light.
It is interesting to note that the devil's name was originally Lucifer, which actually means "the
bringer of light", and indicates the positive role he played before Christianity singled him out for
infamy.
Lucifer's original job description was to present to mankind those challenges and trials which
would result in the growth of human consciousness, learning more about the world . . . the
opportunity to fall down enough that eventually you learn how to walk without crutches and other
artificial supports.
You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, if you
are in pain, if you experience losses, if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain
and learn to accept it, not as a curse or punishment, but as a gift to you with a very, very specific
purpose.
--Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Growth never takes place without some sort of challenge, and it was Lucifer's job to bring light
through experience. Needless to say, his contribution to human evolution has been severely
perverted in order that Jesus could be a hero.
Fear of the devil is one way of doubting God.
--Kahlil Gibran
Nowadays, the strength of the belief in Satan is astounding among fundamentalist religions; such
religions' adherents seem to fear the devil more than they love God. In fact, they seem to spend
far more time and energy vilifying and running away from Satan than they do in loving their
neighbors. This serves the exact opposite intent of the masters after whom these religions have
named themselves.
Many religions people are deeply suspicious. They seem--for purely religions purposes, of
course--to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.
--Rudyard Kipling
If God ( or whatever) is really omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, then how can there be a
conflicting power? How can there exist anything which is "not God" or "not Life"? There can't be, of
course, and once we realize this, then it becomes necessary to radically adjust our thinking about
the devil, in whatever disguise we may personally dress it.
There is, of course, no such thing as a devil, but this reality remains hidden for those who believe
in one. And their belief gives their fear-driven perceptions the strength of conviction. Like colored
glasses, if your thoughts are red, if your colored glasses have red glass in them, then you will see
red everywhere. That's no proof that the world is red. If an honest, true perception of reality is
what you want, then sooner or later it will occur to you that colored glasses, regardless of their
colors or claims, will have to be removed so that you can see reality directly, immediately. If you
believe in a devil, then you will see devil-stuff everywhere, but that's no more proof than that red
glasses make the world look red. This is one of the many negative legacies of organized religions:
to remain in power, they have taught fear instead of love, judgment instead of forgiveness,
separateness instead of unity. They have converted themselves from vehicles into destinations,
and all the while ignoring everything that Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, or whomever, said to the
contrary.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
--Jonathan Swift
The present resurgence of fundamentalism everywhere in the world seems to indicate that a lot of
people are scared stiff; it is not just coincidental that fundamentalism promotes fear as one of its
basic operating principles. Intolerance, of anyone who happens to think differently about life, is
rampant. Compare the atrocities being committed today in the names of religion or philosophy
(the Middle East, Bosnia, China) with the driving spirit behind such abominations as the Crusades,
the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazi Holocaust, the McCarthy era, the Cold War, the drug war, to
name but a few). Control spawns xenophobia.
The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.
--Sir William Osler
The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedom, where they could not only
enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoying his.
--Charles Farrar Browne
Chapter 18 -- Real Religion is Ultimately Personal
Behind all creeds the spirit is One.
--Andrew Lang
Recall the difference between who we really are and who we think we are. Who we really are was
never born and will never die. Who we think we are is like the actor who is playing the roles of you
and me. That actor doesn't come into being just when the curtain rises, and does not cease to be
when the curtain comes back down, even though his character does. So it is with us. Who we really
are is real, eternal, not limited to or confined by the time schedule of the play, and therefore
eternally one with the ultimate reality some call God.
Real religion is personal because its intent is to relate and to contrast that part of us which is
temporary (the role, the personality, You #2) with that part of us which is eternal (the actor, You
#1). We have been talked out of our innate interconnectedness with Life, with Truth, and religion
is what we call the process of rediscovering that link. The true Self (Atman, Brahma, the Father,
who you really are) needs nothing to link it to what it already is.
Then again, since it deals primarily with the illusory part of us, religion itself can be said to be
ultimately illusory; it will have to be different for each of us, because each of us has lost sight of
the Self in a different way. The masters all discovered this, but they also realized that their
followers didn't yet get the message, so they made suggestions in order to bring those followers
back to their reality. Their advice to their disciples was not of the one size fits all variety, but was
individually tailored to the needs and challenges of each disciple. Jesus' teaching was not given to
an editorial panel, but to ordinary people who wanted to experience what he was experiencing;
each needed different prompts.
All of us are different; what makes sense to me might not make sense to you. Naturally, our paths
are different, so the promptings (and that's what they must be . . . not orders, but suggestions) we
need as to how to follow that path will likewise be different.
But when they became organized, when the original master has passed from the scene and taken
his divine insights with him, the religion that formed in his wake lost the ability to innovate, to
treat each of us as a special case. The priests who came after the master didn't have enough soul
to fill his sandals, so their only option was a creed, a static set of beliefs which had to be accepted
without question, resulting in an intellectual and emotional bullying of the sort to which no master
would stoop. The masters said, "Heal!", but the priests said "Heel!. That's dogma.
Accepting things on faith was something I had trouble with as a child. I was brought up a
Lutheran; I got over it eventually, but until I did I could never rectify two conflicting tenets that
were ground into me at a young and impressionable age. The first was that God was omniscient,
omnipotent, and omnipresent . . . okay, I could accept that.
But the second was that I, as a human being, was sinful, and therefore somehow other. In logical
discourse, this is called a non sequitur . . . given that the first statement is true, the second
doesn't follow.
If you start out with a ball of clay, and you make different things out of that clay--a cup, a
figurine, a doorstop--these objects all have different appearances and functions, but they are still
all made of that same clay. Similarly, if you begin with God and make a universe out of it (recall
that, by definition, there was nothing else to work with) then what can that universe, and
everything in it, possibly be composed of?
After I shook the dust of organized religion from my sandals, I learned that the link between big
'ol God and little 'ol me was no more and no less than consciousness. And each of us, at and as
the very center of us, have this same feeling of I Am, for the not-so-obvious reason that each one
of us is really God (Brahma) pretending to be each one of us. There is only one I Am, there is only
one God, one Brahma, one Tao, one beingness. When I find Me #1, and you find You #1, we both
see the same world, because we both are the same world. But we have so cleverly and
convincingly hidden ourselves from ourselves that we really believe that we are separate entities.
That's the hide part of hide-and-seek. Humanity has become hide-bound.
Chapter 20 -- What is Meditation?
Up until this century, the west looked upon prayer as the only valid route to happiness, the only
officially sanctioned access to God, impossible if not downright blasphemous without the priests.
This was fine as long as you had no problem with the prevailing dogma, because any deviation
was called heresy, and heretics usually got dead quickly. But due to the cross-cultural exchanges
which have taken place over the past hundred years or so, the concept of meditation has been
introduced into the otherwise largely Judeo-Christian western world.
While religions hard-liners are always reluctant to admit that there can be anything good about a
non Judeo-Christian idea, the more open-minded have discovered that, far from being a
detraction, meditation is a sorely-needed antidote to the frantic life styles we have developed here
in the west, and which has been exported to societies all over the globe.
Many, many years ago, when our lives were relatively simple and straight forward, the practice of
meditation would have seemed almost unnecessary, because people were still natural. Their lives
were naturally integrated with the world around them, and the ego, which now serves to isolate us
from the world, was not so crystallized that people were selfish and fearful of life.
Today, life in the mainstream has become frantic in its busyness, its headlong rush right past the
present into the future. Because of centuries of incessant indoctrination via both the so-called
work ethic and religious pressure (the devil finds work for idle hands), being at peace is perceived
as almost unpatriotic. We have wrapped our egos so tightly around us to protect us that we have
cut ourselves off from the eternal peace which is now just a religious or moral vision, a future
attainment, no longer a present reality.
We have forgotten our place in the world. With the full aid and encouragement of material greed
and a well-learned fear of death, we have for thousands of years viewed the world as our
possession, with us at the top of the heap. Armed with this presumption, it becomes an article of
faith that the world and all its creatures are here solely for the purposes of human exploitation
and the lining of human pockets.
This attitude has led directly to the degradation of the environment, the depletion of natural
resources, the fouling of the air, water, and land, the bureaucratic atrocities which are called
governments, and untold misery for billions of people.
And more to the point, as we approach the end of the century, the traditionally positive outlook
for young people has turned unpalatably sour. Perhaps this is why, in a recent national survey of
thousands of junior high and high school kids, it was discovered that more than 20% have either
contemplated or actually attempted suicide. All of the traditional promises for the future,
including job security, a home in the suburbs, an honest government, and the prospect of living a
life of conspicuous consumption, have turned out to be false. TV has sold us an erroneous sense
of reality, and there seems to be nothing we can do about it.
Meditation, as both a practice and a way of life, has emerged in recent times to offer a workable, if
not vital alternative to people who are fed up with living frantic, anxious lives, and who have
found no solace in the worn out mantras of organized religion. Meditation is a way to get
reconnected with who you really are and what you are really here to do and be. Meditation is like
catching a glimpse of the backstage props to remind you that the play is really a play, that the so-
called worldly realities are also part of the play, and that you are really the actor, not the role. For
only then will you be able to play your role, to dance it instead of working it to death.
Some insist that in order to meditate you must sit a certain way, think certain thoughts, or hum or
chant exotic mantras with your eyes closed, to mention just a few of the more popular
instructions. It is generally presumed in all these methods that the mind
must be perfected, cleansed of all its dross, purified.
There is a story about a disciple who let it be known that he was meditating to polish his mind to
absolute clarity, to remove every last trace of human weakness. When the master learned of it, he
sought out this particular disciple, who was sitting piously in a place of prominence. The master
sat down next to him and asked what he was doing.
"I am polishing my mind to clarity."
The master thought for a moment, then picked up a brick and began rubbing it on the rock where
the disciple was seated. Unable to resist his curiosity, the disciple asked the master what he was
doing.
"I am polishing this brick to make it a mirror."
"You can't do that," said the disciple. "No amount of polishing will make that brick into a mirror."
Tossing the brick away, the master said, "And no amount of polishing will bring clarity to your
mind."
There are said to be many methods of meditation, but really there is only one. Just as real prayer
is not a one-way flow of requests and complaints, so meditation is not to be thought of as the
admission fee for some celestial joy ride. The purpose of meditation, regardless of the technique
involved, is to slow down the mind, to bring it from the high rpm's encouraged by our fast paces
back to idle speed. Having learned to separate the mind from the body (at least in our thinking),
and having concluded that it is the mind which is somehow responsible for our being, our minds
are in nearly constant activity, thinking about one thing or another, worrying or planning or
recalling or projecting. After all, time is money, right? And when you waster time (money), you are
committing a grave, if not treasonous sin.
This continuous mental activity becomes obvious if you should ever decide to sit down and hold
your attention on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. One thought naturally leads to
another. You begin by thinking about, say, a flower, and before long you find you have been
thinking about flower arrangements, pesticides, bouquets, mother's day, and insects, and soon
the original thought flower has wilted to nothingness.
The purpose of meditation isn't to still this continual activity, because it is the mind's special
talent to provide associations. The purpose is to learn the difference between all those thoughts
and the consciousness which is experiencing them. Meditation is a space in which you can hold to
one idea so completely that it is exhausted and transcended without the mind immediately
jumping to a new subject. Only then is it possible to become properly aware of that mysterious
facility called consciousness which is having these thoughts, only then is your real center reached
where, unlike the periphery of spinning thoughts, there is peace.
This example may help illustrate the difference between consciousness and its contents, called
thoughts. Picture yourself standing on the curb watching taxi cabs driving past you. Each taxi is a
thought group, a sort of theme park on wheels. Each is a joy ride of serially associated thoughts.
One taxi advertises thoughts about work, another about love, another about paying the bills, or
getting your act together, or whatever. There is even one about meditating. Some advertise more
boldly than others, saying, "This is important to think about" or "You are being wasteful or
inefficient or irresponsible unless you get into this cab."" Habitual thoughts are just taxies that
you habitually like to ride around in.
Whenever you indulge your attention in any line of thinking, it is like getting into one of those taxi
cabs. Their purpose is to take you for a ride, and that's precisely what they do. You are whisked
away into a joy (or horror) ride, and soon you have completely forgotten that you are not
experiencing reality. The entertainment consoles in these taxies, programmed with our prevailing
world views, hopes, fears, and self-images, are state of the art . . . virtual reality, perhaps, but not
really reality. Virtual reality is still not real.
Reality . . . what a concept!
--Robin Williams
Of course, reality is not just an idea or a concept . . . it is too huge for any idea to contain.
Someone said that if the human mind were simple enough to be understood, the human mind
would be too dumb to understand itself. If we can't understand out own brains, what can we say
about the universe, let alone that which gave rise to it? To claim to be able to do so would be like
some character in a book claiming to understand the motivations of the person who wrote the
book. Not likely.