This Was Never My Life

So I don’t know who is reading this blog, neither why. To be honest, I have absolutely no reason, no motivation for even writing it. All I really know is that I write now. After I had my one profound experience that I thought would change my life, about six months later, I popped up in the middle of the night and just started writing. Except for my rant writing against corporal punishment that I did almost ten years earlier, and a single attempt at what Jed McKenna calls “spiritual autolysis” I never wrote anything before. Now if I don’t write, I feel like I’m missing something.

So there’s that. No reason for writing, just sitting here because it wants to be done somehow. What I want to say in this post (I wasn’t thinking of this before, no, it just popped into my thought) is that the whole life I described living wasn’t my life. Whoever lived that life wasn’t me. Now that sounds absolutely insane and delusional, but it’s true. The woman who lived that life is not even here anymore. It’s not that who I was evolved into someone else then. It’s that she disappeared completely. This was not a process that I instigated, nor anything that I facilitated. Everything I went through didn’t come out of my own volition or some ideas I thought up, some force just had its way with whatever that person was who lived that life.

What I can tell you about how I am now is I have absolutely no idea how it is that I changed. I only know I would never think or act the way that person did. I’m actually astonished anyone might be so naive as to live the way I did especially when I was younger. It only makes sense to me now because of the patterns that I uncovered and how it carried over into my lived experience, mainly that I took on the reality of my parents, not their thought processes per se but the felt sensations of life itself as they were feeling it. That right there was the cause of all my troubles. I had a very deep sense that not only did I not belong to this world but that in time, life as I was living it might fall apart at any moment. My grandmother and my mother lived through that. Their lives as they had always known them did fall apart due to the war. Most people don’t get a pattern that is so disturbing which is how I had to get out of it completely. There was nothing to salvage from the pattern itself except an astonishing urge to escape it. This was another pattern I inherited from my grandmother. I can only imagine now what type of turmoil she had to face to make the decision to leave Ratibor and everyone she knew behind, indeed an entire community and network of relatives that she’d known all her life knowing full well she might never see them again. That takes a type of courage that we don’t even see anymore, most people don’t possess it at all. Add winter, freezing temperatures, on foot with only what you can carry and three small children to the mix and you get a real sense of what was being required of her. This other journey is no different. The road out can and does look exactly like that. It’s leaving everything you’ve known behind, in favor of the unknown, and you’re not choosing. That kind of decision isn’t made casually. It comes when what you know is no longer livable.

What I can tell you is people are in a fog. I know because I was in that fog and now I’m mostly out of it but there is something in every person alive who feels that something isn’t right, that life feels off, like there’s no real reason to live the way most humans do, and yet they don’t even see that there is a possibility of getting out of whatever mold they’ve been shoved into. In fact, most people are drawn to act it out, regardless of how painful it is to do so, they tend to choose this. Even if you told them there’s a way out they wouldn’t want it. Their fear is so great, that staying with what they already think they know about life is always preferable. And that’s most people alive right now. It’s not even a one in ten sort of scenario but a one in five hundred thousand type of proposition and it may not be that high. If for instance you think there’s a reason to help, there’s not. Everyone gets the pattern they get and when and if they are meant to see through the fog, they will. There is no helping. There is only helping yourself.

This writing is not me helping then. It’s just a record. I don’t even write it for you. I write it for my children, to read, long after I’m gone. They know I’m working on this and they don’t try to see it. They are as uninterested in how I am or what I do as anyone else I can come across. This is just the way it has to be. One thing I’ve learned for certain is what wants to happen will and what doesn’t won’t. There is no altering this from anyone’s personal perspective or actions. Our actions are never our own anyway. They are all pattern and the firing of thoughts, and sensations that move us how they will. So how can you even help yourself then? You can’t, not really. The desire to reach for something else, something past this fog either emerges and develops or it doesn’t. If you think it matters, it doesn’t.

If I ever get to thinking that maybe it does or there’s a way, I always remind myself of this: I will die and eventually everything about me will also die. It will vanish in time just like everything else that seemed to be but never was. You may think you are your life or in a life but you’re not. No one is in anything. To say there is the dream of life is to say there is only a dream. Obviously we have some sort of power over what we choose to do with it. To say you are just a pattern is not quite right but as long as you are in the fog then that’s all you are. There is no choice when you’re in the fog, say what you will, see what you see, believe what you will, it isn’t there and never was. You don’t get to choose then. That’s a hard line, but from here it’s the Truth.

Even to say you are thinking when you’re in the fog isn’t quite right. There is no thinking in the fog either, just whatever thoughts are firing up are being thought up. It’s not much different when you’re not in the fog, thinking still happens the same way but the thoughts are more informed when you know what you’re looking at and what you’re actually dealing with on a moment to moment basis. Believing in stories basically ends, so if you think there’s a president, guess what? There’s not. There’s only some fool who being in a fog dreams he is one and a lot of naive people supporting his dream by believing there’s some reality to it. It’s the same with wars and all the other nonsense. Obviously if everyone believes there is something like this they all act like it’s happening and the dream of life is happy to accommodate them. You can only see what you believe you will. That’s a hard line too. Once you're out of the fog, you'll see something else, and life won't be how it was before. It doesn't look the same and it doesn't work the same. Mainly, what is clear is that you are always looking and living through the imagination of your own contents of mind and there's no telling what's in there. You only uncover it by degrees as your new understanding of what life is, destroys all your illusions.

Changing your mind about what you believe is not some pastime event. I can tell you those strands I saw run deep, they make up every minute fractal crevice of every reality you ever thought you lived through. Your every emotion, thought, idea, and experience is recorded in it, not as some event you lived through but as what and who you came to believe you are. The tension that holds you together has but one name, and that name is fear. There are a million different types of fear that fuel the same engine. If you wanted to break free you would have to do battle with each and every one of them. It’s just you and them. No one is with you which is how no one can help.

I don’t think you want to do this. I don’t even think you can want to do this. If you got a bad pattern then okay maybe you do, but you can’t decide this. This would be like deciding to walk into a bonfire someone made and just standing in the middle of it while you shriveled up like a piece of wood. When they say that you have to die to be reborn, they aren’t making that up. Also you could actually die, this happens more than you’d think. You don’t hear about it because the person who died trying probably didn’t leave any clues behind. I can tell you the body doesn’t really go for it especially in the beginning. You have to release the tension slowly or things start going haywire and you can only know what to do with that if you get a signal that guides you. Trust me, there are probably many more failures than successes. I once wrote that it is like trying to escape from a maximum security prison without any arms or legs and no one to help you and I stand by that. There’s a lot of soft literature about awakening for one reason only, so you won’t really do it. It’s nice to think you are awake without actually being awake and they have all written a book about it.

Also it isn’t about one experience. There is no way to just see something and then pop right out of it. There will be a battle and it will last at least ten years or longer depending on what your mind is like when you start. I would say it might be slightly easier if you are so situated that you can be or stay alone most of the time but that’s not the situation I was in. Also even this has its drawbacks because you won’t be in contact with the friction you need to uncover what lies hidden in you. Then it doesn’t complete. It can also be partial. Completion is very rare, and it only really occurs after many years, probably upwards of twenty or even thirty, true completion reveals itself in a way that is forever immutable when you’re close to your actual death. I’ll just say this: there is a lot to be rid of.

If you think about it like this, let’s say you start, seriously start when you are forty. That’s forty years of crap that’s been stored in your system, sure a lot of them tie together and sometimes you can kill two with one stone but if you calculated all the moments of those forty years, and how they cemented in, you get a feel for what you’re up against. Patterns embed. Some start doing this in your first year of life, so you can imagine how hard it would be to pull it up and out of your system sometimes while you’re still living within them. By then it’s not only spread but its infected many other living aspects. Now try doing this all the while not knowing what you’re actually doing. On top of this, you’ve somehow got to live your life among the rest of the foggy inhabitants so no help there. All they can do is try to pull you back in to where they are. Everyone has a story for you to believe in. Every interaction, every single conversation is a pull back into what you’re trying to rid yourself of. Now add all the false teachers, everyone who wants to teach you what awareness is because they think they know and they look authentic. How hard will it be? I would say on this path, you trust no one unless their life shows you straight up they know what they’re talking about. I had such a friend for the first five years but then he died. I can tell you that set me back because I relied on him so much to reflect back to me just what I was and not what I wasn’t. I have not met anyone else who could do this. You have to be near the end to do it.

All I do is write. I don’t say this is for you, more like if it’s not, good, find out what is. There is no right way if you ask me. Just life doing what it does. After this, who knows what I will say here because it won't be me. I can't even say what does it. No one can. That's just a little heads up of how mysterious it can all be. I will never know for sure, I just know it works better this way. Life can be good, so good, now instead of getting out it you wish and hope it lasts forever. You don't care how, just that it does.