The Beautiful "I"

I’ve been thinking about a single question lately, probably because I’m noticing it more and more these little nuances that no one else oddly enough seems to notice at all, and yet they are all around us. So the question is this: What is beautiful? That’s a huge question right? Everyone has some idea of what they think is beautiful but it’s also a very personal sentiment. Only you can decide what is beautiful to you and what isn’t. There’s no existence of a rule that defines what might be beautiful to one and horrific to another although many of our ideas overlap as a species for instance love is beautiful and hate is not. Let’s take it further, what can’t be beautiful? If there’s no rules, then maybe nothing stands in the way of seeing beauty when you truly want to. Beauty it’s well known is in the eye of the beholder. Who or what is the beholder? That’s you, what you are, the awareness that is aware must be the sole arbiter of beauty, what it deems beautiful, which just means, you decide. No one and nothing else can do this for you even though they will most certainly try. No one can totally escape the influence and influencers of this realm since the images and messages are all around you all the time and unless you’ve closed yourself off completely, perhaps you live on a mountain top with no internet and no other people, you have absolutely no choice but to encounter it. Even so whether or not you let outer influence sway you one way or another is still a choice. You can let yourself be dragged along into a world of ugliness or you can rise above it to create your own unique and totally personal way of seeing.

This is all very personal. As a person who had to investigate all the horrific and petty behaviors of the human race, not to condemn it, but to remove these movements from within myself, I spent a lot of time focusing on what I didn’t want. Even though I had one goal in mind, to reach some ultimate state of unconditional love, I found that my focus on eliminating all the opposites of that just made me cynical and untrusting. Basically, I developed an aversion to all things ego, such as pride, indulging one’s personal story over the interests of others, thinking your stuff matters above anything else, obvious selfishness felt truly annoying, expressing grievances seemed a dumb activity since unbeknownst to most you’re really just griping about your own output, kind of silly from here. So yeah, every where I looked I was just noticing all the negative aspects that were visible to me. While it does make light of what you don’t want or how you’d never want to be, on some level a pattern can be established, one of noticing the negative and over looking the positive notes of situations. If I’ve learned anything at all it’s that there’s always something else there that your own mind just might not be picking up. Learning to overlook the negative, since there’s nothing to do about any of it besides overlook it or maybe get away from it, taking measures not to be involved in any way takes another intention all-together. It’s almost like you get to the end of some road that can only keep going in the same direction, basically it’s circular, so it goes nowhere. You will only notice this because the experiences will repeat, you start to notice that your noticing is the same, a slightly different situation might arise but the inner responses to it are exactly the same, and they never feel good. This will actually go on for several years and it’s not because you’re stuck in a trap exactly but more like the mechanism to burn up your own ego is involved. Fire burns and burns hurt. What you see you notice, and what you notice is your pattern, it’s not out there, but in you. There’s no way around this. What all the situations are really there to do is to expose your own fear. You find things disturbing almost exclusively because you fear them or something about them. So you go into them again and again, and slowly over time become immune to their emotional charges. As the charges within the ego’s pattern dissolve, so does everything else, until eventually you find, you’ve left one world and are now in a completely different one. Of course, it’s not really a different world but a different way of perceiving that makes it seem like you’re somewhere new.

If you could see it clearly, what you’d find is that you’ve always been in a world of your own intending. Of course, this feels wrong since most of the time if asked you’d say, “I’d never intend this. This is not my doing”, but it is. Your whole life is nothing but your own intending leading to some doings. It may not be a conscious deliberate doing but it’s still a doing nonetheless and it is always only yours. Intent is woven into the pattern of your being, just how it is only depends on what you’ve learned and how you’ve learned it. Once you become conscious of this fact of existence, another doing arises, one that asks, “What would I really like to intend and why aren’t I intending it already?” Ah, no one told you that your world is interactive did they? Much has been written about the subconscious mind directing the show, and some of it isn’t really wrong per se, but it does no one any good to know this if they have no access to what is going on in there. A lot of people some illustrious, have spoken or written at length about what they think goes on below the surface of conscious thought and experience all to no avail because they have never actually ventured into it in a way that makes any changes to it for if you change the inside, the outside must follow. This law is immutable and yet, most never change a single thing even when they think they have mainly because these changes are not within thought and therefore are not ideas, but inner actions that live a life of their own. You don’t move them, they move you.

I’m no Biblical adherent but there’s a wording in the Gospel of Thomas that reads, "Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished (or amazed), and he will rule over the All." What does it mean then? I had to keep seeking. My seeking wasn’t just until I found something either. My seeking went on long after that, much longer. Everyday thereafter, my seeking became ten fold to what it had been before I found something. Of course, it showed me something that day, it showed me what it could be like. My mind wasn’t transformed in an instant. It was changed yes, because I knew something about life that I later noticed no one else was even interested in. That was a troubling point for me right there. How I wondered could anyone be satisfied with what they had? Was it enough for them, life just as everyone pretends to know it? I couldn’t even imagine it was. All I saw was scores upon scores of totally confused and erratic beings wherever I went. I saw the sad people shopping for more cookies at Walmart as if this would suffice for an evening or the glitter gowned girls out for an obscenely priced steak at the steakhouse and cocktails afterwards at the casino, perhaps a bit of gambling to top off the evening with their prospective beau’s. How would this suffice? Did they feel pretty or perhaps cherished, for an evening? Would it suffice? For how long? Was it a reason to be born, to be dragged along though an entire lifetime of experiences just to die at the end of it all? Would it suffice? I couldn’t see how. There was something missing in all this, something vital had been left out completely, this couldn’t be a reason to be born. There was no way. That would be an astronomical atrocity of such gigantic proportions it would mean that life was inherently evil to make so many suffer so, and for no reason or for what? Just to be aware of something. It couldn’t be.

What I know now is man has caused his own troubles, every last one of them. Maybe he can’t help himself from doing it, but he still does it. It has nothing to do with life that’s for sure, for you can have this life any way you want it and if you settle for this, that’s on you, nothing else. One of my mentors actually said if you can’t feel anything still, take some drugs if you have to, do whatever it takes to restart your engine just don’t stay like that. I agree, for nothing seems more horrific to me than if I had stayed the way I was, and gotten to the end of my life just to realize too late that I could have changed it all if only I had dared to. I dared, but it’s not the type of daring that you probably think you know of, mine was daring out of necessity, out of desperation really. You might think despair or desperation has no value but you’d be wrong. It can have the highest value for what else might propel you to turn your back on everything anyone you might know has to say about life and how to live it? Not much, right? Instead you worry all the time about how you might look or how you might be received. If I told you that no one anywhere can ever really see you, you couldn’t believe me. You might even stand before me and say, “Look. You see me”, and yes, I see you but that doesn’t mean anyone else does, not really. My seeing is not what you think it is. For you it’s already too real, too all encompassing, you can not even imagine it at least I doubt you can. I think if you get any easy way to live you just can’t make the crossing since the actual crossing is farther than anyone talks about. It has nothing to do with meditation either, I can tell you that much. Meditation as it’s traditionally done is basically useless in terms of actual movement and changing. It’s like so what if you quieted your mind, what good will that do you? You’ve just shut down the one thing that might help you get out of your situation. Mostly you’ve really distanced yourself from the very thing you need to be closer to so you can see what’s actually causing it to work the way it’s working. For that you need to get inside of it, not shut it off. Shutting it off is like turning off the water when you want to take a hot bath. How’s that going to work when you have some soap and no water to lather it up with and obviously you can forget about rinsing anything off. I guess now you smell like soap but the dirt is still under it and that’s what’s causing you to shut the water off in the first place so no bath, you’re just going to stay as you are, I guess.

You see when I say “I”, I am not speaking of myself as someone who needs or wants something from you or anything else. This can not happen anymore, because there are two “I”s, the one you learned was you and the one that actually is you. These are not the same thing. I’m not saying either one of them is real the way you think of yourself as real but when it comes to living you got to use one of them and the one most people have doesn’t work so well, if at all really. When the “I” of someone I come across talks to me they are not speaking from the same “I”. It’s not a matter of meditation but a life long struggle to rid yourself of the learned “I”. Basically, it will take everything your actually made of to defeat it. This struggle will be daily, hourly, nightly, and last as long as it has to. There is no going back at some point since you’ve already seen there’s nothing there to go back to. Going back to what? The whole back button has utterly vanished. All this being said, I already know that you can’t understand me, but who cares, for me this is not an issue. It’s not the reason I write because at this point reasoning is totally irrelevant but at the same time this is exactly how I’m able to say whatever I say. I don’t have to weigh my words against you being there to hear them. It’s enough for me already that I hear them which is different than someone here called “I” crafting up something you will like or be able to relate to. If you can hear me then that’s not my doing. I am not a doer anymore like you might think everyone is. There are no doers on the earth. There is really only many individual sparks of awareness and the intent that being conditioned by society and the past, living in time, commands them to do whatever they do. Most never question this learned “I” that is really only a fabrication based on need, the need to exist as some type of special separate entity in relation to a world of other entities. If I tell it to you straight, I would say this is not the way it is, that the whole charade is something made up as a fantasy in your own mind. That doesn’t mean you reject the whole mind though, or sit and tell it to shut up, it really just means you need to find out who’s talking and then find out what they really have to say, because as a rule they are always lying, not on purpose, but to themselves. Of course, if the vary basis for your existence is based on all the lies that you learned, you are going to have a terrible time telling yourself anything even remotely true. The only real truth that will come out of you then is probably your tears, that is, if you still have some left. Or rage, sometimes that’s an indication of something true trying to escape the confines of this “I” that is always lying to you. There’s no problem with having an “I”. The only problem with it is it is split between the true “I” and the one that doesn’t make any sense so now you either have two that are always fighting each other or just have one but it’s not the right one. When the true “I” gets shut down, sometimes it never comes back. I actually think that’s what usually happens if your life goes okay, there’s no real struggle within it to make it question everything it believes in which is its fantasy. If there is trouble then you’re more likely to look and see what went wrong or is always going wrong, probably that was me. I was never okay with life the way everyone was living it. I knew that couldn’t be a reason to be born, just too stupid really. I didn’t think the miracle of life would be that dumb, and I was right, it isn’t, only the “I” that you learn you are is that gullible.

Now we have AI which is really just a perfected version of the wrong “I”. It can take anything you say and make it sound much better than it came out, but that’s not really an accomplishment if everything is already some form of bullshit. People are really in love with it because it’s very convincing. They actually wish they were so articulate but the real “I” doesn’t actually work with words so much as with images and the feelings that are generated because of them. Emotion is the fuel behind all actions so if you lose that, you’re basically going to be a type of robot, which is basically how everyone behaves these days. The basic premise behind the needy “I” is to be seen even when you can never actually do this. Whatever you think is looking at you isn’t really there. This life is more like a mirror which is reflecting back to you whatever you think is there but isn’t. So if you don’t like what you’re seeing you had better figure out what is making it appear to you the way it is because only you have the power to see what isn’t really there even if you’re not really using it and it’s more like it’s using you. Mainly, if I had to put it in a nutshell, no one realizes just how powerful the mind is and how it’s constantly being swayed by the needy “I” to the point that it thinks it’s stuck and in prison to some set of personal circumstances that it feels it is impossible to break out of. Apathy is usually the main human condition these days. That’s really how the message to shut down the internal dialog all together is so appealing. It’s like no one can figure out what it’s really for because they are in the wrong “I” so they reject it all together. That’s easier than the internal battle which would ensue if they knew there were two “I”s and only one can win. Let me just say this, if you think you already know how your day will go, you’re in the wrong one.

The true “I” is the part where you’ll be astonished or amazed but it can only reveal its true powers of imagination if the learned “I” is completely gone. You see the learned “I” is constructed completely out of fear and doubt is its constant companion which really just means it doesn’t work. It can’t do the job the other I can do when it comes to living life to the fullest extent. There’s really a song that sums up the real “I” better than anything I can say about it and I’ll leave you with it. Listen closely to the words because they are telling a true story about what it wants to do with you.