The Failure of Later

No one who thinks reality as it is learned is true can really have any sort of life. I just don’t see how. I know how I was and I know now that wasn’t life, no, more like a continuous nightmare. Even when faced with a dire choice, let’s say life just threw you a curve ball and it’s wake up or die, most people will choose death. The mind is really a monster in some ways. I suppose you can’t really blame them since the mind really only lets you see what it wants you to see, so you are in the dark, basically at the mercy of forces you don’t command or even know are there. Well, how are you going to commandeer something you don’t think exists? If you haven’t heard of it, that pretty much constitutes that it doesn’t exist at least not for you. No one explores what they can’t see, no first you need some exposure, something has to say, “Hey, look over here. I’m trying to show you something real.”

The craziest part is even if there is some exposure, let’s say someone like me is here saying something like, “There’s another way, other options”, yeah, even if there’s some true exposure, if the mind doesn’t let you see it in a way that takes any sort of hold over you, what can you do? You’ll just be lost in the morass of thoughts, sensations, and the learned direction of one’s attention. It’s almost like instead of being interested, most minds are opposed to anything that challenges the given reality. That’s weird to me because I wasn’t like that. I was constantly seeking and exploring other options as if my life depended upon it probably because it did. My learned reality was shit. There was nothing in it that was ever going to do me any favors, I knew that much. It was only much later on that I started to see things differently, much differently.

Oh well, what can you do? I don’t see that there’s anything to do about it because really, who cares and what for? The one who seemed to care so much about what others were saying or doing seems to have vanished. I do my writing but I don’t think I’m here to be some helper. You learn early on that in a realm like this it’s actually help yourself or nothing. No one can give anyone some insight if their mind has closed up all the roads that lead out. Personally, I don’t think the average person even wants out. As long as they believe there’s something called a future which will change things for them that’s enough. Humans sell hope in the future like it’s some commodity these days. Invest in yourself now, reap the rewards later. Most never realize the rewards will never come, so they’re still waiting. The mind has a billion ways to spin the fantasy that later on, when you’re done working, life will finally work out or give you what you want. I mean really the whole world functions according to this one belief. It uses it to mobilize the masses of people to keep going, keep toiling, just work and pay bills until you drop dead, maybe your reward is in heaven. If your reward or relief doesn’t come, the social structure in place insists there’s nothing wrong with the system but with you, you failed is the ethos of humanity. Of course, all this work and toiling is sold as a type of virtuous path, the few at the top are able to manipulate the many this way but even if you’re at the top it’s still not that good. I see the result of this top living, and they are often obnoxiously drunk, and gambling at the casino. They don’t need the money. They can lose more than I make in a month as if it’s toilet paper, but I don’t see happiness in their eyes any more than I see it in the ones that work for or under them. They are as befuddled mentally and emotionally as the next one. This should be obvious but maybe it’s not. The people look to those above them to chart the way and they find themselves even deeper in the stinky marshes. Year by year it gets more outrageous and debilitating for them. The age of the expert or the one who knows best is maybe finally over. Maybe people finally start to see that the ones with the answers don’t actually have any. That would be amazing although for some disturbing. To see that your whole life revolved around a bunch of false ideas is never fun because you have to look at all the time you wasted, and maybe the insanity of what it had you doing isn’t far from the surface either, you wasted your life, threw it away like garbage would be the final revelation.

I wonder now what I can really do with my mind. Is it just a thought and emotion machine or does it actually have capacities that I never knew about? That’s the real question at the heart of all this searching and awakening business. The craziest thing to me now is how it’s all been framed into making this one special and that one not. Asleep and awake are certainly states of mind, but if it makes you superior or elevated in some way over all the other ones, you’re still asleep. The need to feel or be superior is always driven by the fact that you don’t know what you are or how you work since we’re not in competition. There is no competing going on the way everyone thinks there is. This whole racket is just a petty game that sinks you deeper into the pit of insecurity, since you won’t always be winning. Age will make sure of that, you can win for a time but sooner or later you’re not winning, you’re just drifting towards death and that’s about it. Even so, that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything, no you should be having dreams but not just any dream, a dream that is for you. I think every single person born has a dream that is for them, it’s not random, and it’s only special in the sense that no one else can have this dream but you. You’re the sole entity who can have your particular dream of life. If that’s special, okay, but it doesn’t make the other dreams less special, it just makes it yours.

I have a friend who dreams she has cancer. When it first showed up, there was nothing there but the thought that she should have some test to see if she had it. The test was positive and what proceeded to be dreamt from there followed all the medical rules that cancer now follows but what if she hadn’t had that thought to begin with? What if she never went for the test? What if there’s no test to say how anything actually is? What if all our rules are just fantasies or emanations that we just hook our attention to, and now we’re riding along in a dream that makes us believe we are sick with cancer? What if our minds adhere to beliefs, in this case the belief in sickness and when they do, the dream of this belief must follow? What if that’s all it is? I would say the hardest beliefs to cut out of your system are those that present some physical reality. It’s easier to cut the belief that maybe you’re not lovable, then it is to cut the belief that your teeth are falling out. My own teeth have actually stopped decaying for some reason. Whatever pain I had in some of my teeth is virtually gone. I think it all started when I got braces as a kid and they told me my teeth were bad. When I was a teenager I stopped complying with this headgear contraption and took some wire cutters to the braces themselves until they were forced to remove them against what they called their better judgement. I had teeth problems thereafter. It was implanted somewhere in my mind and played out the way it was planted to according to the idea that teeth were precarious and vulnerable. They were a problem to solve. As long as anything stays a problem to solve guess what? It just keeps surfacing as one to give you something to do that day. While you’re fast asleep in the dream, your attention will go anywhere and focus on anything it learned was true or that left some type of indelible mark on your awareness. The time with my braces was marked as a bid for freedom. My parents were overpowering and demanded that I comply with their wishes and I wasn’t having it. Needless to say much heartache would follow on both sides of the equation. Anger and animosity ran rampant between all parties. Understanding or sympathetic responses were basically non existent in my upbringing. This of course isn’t a unique situation. We see it all around us. The world at large mimics this pattern endlessly. I wonder what pattern my friend is responding to then, perhaps some need to be noticed? When you’re sick with cancer all of a sudden everyone stops and pays attention. Her parents finally visited and are providing support. Maybe they didn’t really do that before, I don’t know since I don’t know her history so well but it’s not that unique either. I know she’s developed this deep faith in some God that tells her no matter what happens, it’s the will of God. I don’t think cancer is the will of God though, that would be absurd to me. This whole passive stance that everything is just the will of God robs people of any power they do have. What they really think is there’s some divine message attached to it all, but if there is what is it? I’m God and I’m happy you’re suffering? This is my plan. If it’s any kind of plan I would say it’s a plan to reject this whole idea. What kind of God creates suffering for any reason? Shit, that’s not my kind of pal. I’d go without God if that’s what it was all about. I wouldn’t make friends with a person who acted this way, so why do it with some idea up in the sky?

I would call this whole cancer fiasco the collapse point. It’s basically your time to shit or get off the pot. You are out of fucking options to lie to yourself about what your life might do or be. Shit is now real as fuck. Death is staring you in the face wherever you look. It’s really a time to see that whatever you are doing doesn’t actually work, in fact, it sucks balls. Maybe you see now that your own mind has dreamt up this nightmare and you get to work sorting it out, the true from the false. Of course, what you’ll find is it’s all false but if it is, shouldn’t you have some say in how it all pans out? You’re not a leaf being blown down the street in response to every random wind that comes upon it. A person has capacities and just what these capacities really are must be thoroughly investigated. I know firsthand that our capacities have just been shut down or off by our life, they may be dormant but that doesn’t mean they’re gone. If capacities are part and parcel of what you are then they are still there within you just waiting to be reactivated. Personally, I think what’s really happened is our minds are too afraid to dream anymore. We had a lot of dreams at some point in our lives and because of how we are trained to live from birth, nothing really came true the way we thought it would. Then we just went into some mode where we set ourselves up to avoid having to take any more chances on anything. Most people have learned to play small, not because that’s how they want to be but because it’s a safer way to go. You don’t get knocked down as much if you live a small safe life. I think I fell for that trap just because I had children. I had some need to protect them from all the ignorance. Of course, when you’re surrounded by insanity because let’s just say it, this world is insane, there’s no way around that one when anything anyone can say is basically an illusion they just believe is true. This is a huge situation to get used to. It was bad enough before technology but now it’s a million times worse with everyone being able to say what they think is true just because they saw it. What no one realizes is seeing depends on what you believe is true, not because it’s actually true but because your mind interprets it as if it is.

I know I thought there were actual wars going on because I believed in wars. Where did I get this idea? My mother. My mother talked about war with me, she referenced the Nazi’s ever since I was old enough to think and say something in response to it. She used to call my step father one as well in response to some coldness she thought he was portraying. She’d often accuse his father of being one. She’d yell, “Your father was probably a Nazi. I think he was because that’s how you act.” If it’s not ironic as hell that she didn’t even know she was made up of twenty five percent Jewish DNA, I don’t know what is. I’m not saying there were no Nazi’s either. I’m not saying that no one experienced or experiences war, I’m a hundred percent sure they do. I don’t see any point in denying that human beings have been dreaming up atrocities since they got here and when you’re in the throws of dreaming, all experiences are as real as anything else. That’s how you’re going to be troubled. You’re going to see that all these things that humans do are all a misguided attempt to become whole through some means that will only tear them apart even further. Whether war or cancer, is it all just dreams? If it is, shouldn’t there be some way to circumvent the horrific in favor of another way? Why do we continue to create shit no one likes? Are there entities who like war, who like destruction and the exploding of random bodies under the bombs they set off? Do some find horror exciting? Why do we have horror movies? I dislike them so I don’t watch them. My kids used to watch them because they liked to notice the way they were filmed. They could see the fake scenes as comical or absurd. Fake or not, I don’t like to view such things. I have some fear that the pictures will bubble around in my head and morph themselves into my experience. That’s really how I watch my thinking. I try not to resist anything but I don’t just blindly accept it either. Whatever I see or hear about now, I let it roll off of me like rain might fall on some flower petals and drop to the ground below. I see how some of the water stays and only evaporates after the sun hits it. That’s a natural process, but that’s not the standard procedure, instead when the storms come humans don’t just stand there, they react and respond, basically confirming the nightmare storms tenfold, then they wonder how they are stuck in some cycle where they come again and again. It never dawns on anyone that life is just their imagination.

If life is only imagination, subject to what we direct our energy and attention on or to, the implications are just too horrific to even contemplate. “Why like this?”, comes to mind. It’s inconceivable that humans are solely responsible for what life has become and that it might have gone any other old way. I think that’s how we insist that some things are impossibly set, the mountain must remain a mountain, because if it didn’t, who or what might we say caused all this? We want to believe so badly that there’s some meaning to not just our own lives but to all this. The only way we can do this is if we can make sense of it somehow even if or when it becomes utterly obvious that it doesn’t. The only place sense gets inserted is after you’ve bypassed all your learned knowledge because before that point there’s nothing that does. After that point, there’s still nothing and yet everything, but who can explain the everything? You will never be able to explain something by using the false utterly senseless words to do it.

My life is as silly as the next one. It’s not a serious affair but it is a loving one, not in the sense that I love everything I see since there’s no need for that. Anyone who loves what life has become like for the masses doesn’t know life. They want to exclaim that all is love but that’s not my message. My message is only you can decide what’s love and what isn’t. This isn’t a top down rules based universe where anyone nor anything decides anything for you. This is more of a you are your universe and anyone who denies this just hasn’t gone far enough. We should all have absolute dominion over our own lives and the fact that we don’t only relies on what we believe in. We don’t have to accept sickness or poverty or whatever ails us. We just have to do the work that uncovers what lies hidden to our immediate awareness. We have to rid ourselves of the past and anything we learned there that doesn’t serve us. Always to be reborn into what you actually are means dying to what you think you are right now. That’s not a quieting your mind type of activity, it’s an opening up your mind to see what lies within it, how it got there, and what it’s going to take to remove it permanently. Yes, you have to stop fighting too. If all your energy is going into your armor, your defensive architecture that keeps you you and everything else exactly what you think it is, you can’t do this. Only allowing what does arrive to be as it is can free up the energy you will need to make this journey. I’d say start with your life failed. There’s nothing more to do about this, let it fall apart even further, throw chunks of yourself in an existential bonfire and sit and watch it burn, you think it will be chaos and hell but it won’t be. Most of you are in hell right now. You have no idea what the sunlight even feels like because you’ve never actually been in it.

Maybe ask yourself this: If you died tonight, could you say you lived the way you wanted to? If not, you missed out. You didn’t get what you came for. There is no God that demands we suffer, only we can do this to ourselves. We make ourselves sick and then blame it on some universal virus that’s just going around when that’s not true at all. Nothing is going around anywhere. You’re actually in a world all your own, and never suspected it. You believed in the world they sold you, the one everyone you knew told you was there, but in Truth, it never existed. I know that’s a lot to take in but there is good news, you don’t have to stay in it. You’re only as free as you allow yourself to be.