Happiness and Desire

Friday, May 20, 2016 K.Z. Freeman 1 Comments
There is a kind of tradition in many of the world's religions, especially in the East, for one to undergo a process of letting go of all material possessions. For a Westerner this might seem odd, as one can hardly imagine what can be gained in living like a hermit. But there is a very strong philosophical and psychological purpose behind this practice.

This is not something one does on a whim, and is preferable for one to undergo an examination of the emotional states while the process of letting go is happening. This can be very interesting and can lead one to the realize that all psychical attachment is an attachment to the mind, and that the first attachment and the "last" attachment were the mind's inability to let go. Yet what is the purpose of knowing this?

We all heard of the sayings and beliefs that material things do not bring happiness. Yet still most feel and know that, should they have a bunch of money, they could do the things they've always wanted to do. They could get the things they want. On one end, one feels that material things are not the true source of happiness, yet he or she is compelled to gather things and objects despite this knowing. They in fact do seem to bring a sort of contentment. But where does it come from? Is one content to have the object itself? Not exactly.

 The letting go of possessions serves a deeper meaning. With each thing you let go, you may come closer to realizing just what it is that makes you happy and content about possessing a thing in the first place.

 This can go on for a while. You may end up being left with nothing, and still the lesson will not become clear to you.

 Most who attempt this, the ultimate desire may be to reach a state of having no desire. A state where you wish to have no thing and are content with having no thing. Admittedly a state that his hard to reach for people who have been surrounded and submerged in a world of things and objects and the desire to have specific things and objects since first your realized that they exist. And yet the desire to reach this state is already desire. In a very real sense, one desires not to desire. But the practice of letting go can make you see something other that the very basic desire not to desire is already desire. In this letting go and giving away, you may realize that no thing will make you as happy as simply being here, now. Allow me to explain why this happens and what exactly this means.

 Even after letting go of all the material things and being left with nothing, one is still faced with the very basic problem because of which he began this practice. The desire to be able to let go is still there. There are no material things left to give, and yet the mind still grasps at itself and its own ideas and knowledge.
Being left with nothing, one may realize the initial desire was not to give things way, but for something to happen in the mind. A shift, a realization. So the fundamental issue of desire remains: you want something specific. What that is you may not have been aware of when you began this.

The superficial mind is ruled by whims, wishes and emotional fulfillment, which can manifest in the need to possess a thing or person. This can become an intense desire too; I want that, I want her, I want him. Usually we want things now.
But what happens when one gets the object of desire?
The person is content, for the most part anyway. 
The trick which was done by the mind, however, was to make you believe happiness is in the thing which you possess. And yet contentment does not come from possessing the thing, but from being free of the desire to have it. You no longer have the desire for the object or subject because you now hold it, and so for a while you are free of craving and in a sense free from the mind.

 The mind operates on a reward-based system. You want something, you get it, you are rewarded by feelings of contentment and a release of endorphins. And yet because the object and the subject are so intertwined, and you have just gotten the object, you do not realize the subject's contentment comes from emptiness, from absence of desire, and not from fulfillment of desire in the form of the thing or person. Instead it comes from a state of brief freedom.

 The most basic analogy is the consuming of drugs. You may think that it is the reward system of the ego and the release of dopamine which is in itself the reward that makes the user crave and seek out these substances. But the mind is much more subtle than this. In the moment where the drug is consumed, or even before this, in the ritual of preparation, the mind already knows the object of desire is gained, and you are free of the desire which binds you to a certain substance or the use or abuse of it. You are in the moment, free of desire now.

 You might, however, say that the object is happiness, for it can bring you joy not just when you get it, but later as well. But if one examines how long this "happiness" lasts, he or she is quickly confronted with the truth that contentment lasts for as long as there is the absence of desire. It lasted for as long as there was not any other desire to take its place. When the desire is gone and you are free from the mind's grasping, able to be in the moment, you are content.

This is not the euphoric state one feels in a dopamine rush, which is often confused with being happy, but a happiness one feels from contentment that stems from inner peace and stillness.

 But this is still not the lesson letting go seeks to teach. What it does is very simple: Do not renounce the things of this world as if they are bad and controlling. Do not renounce your own desires for things and people, but realize that, just like the subject, the object and the desire for it, are impermanent. That they exist as a play which you are acting upon for a brief and very limited time, a play which you have been programmed to take as seriously as possible.

Today it would be rather silly for a material being to completely renounce the things of material, as one is also material. This kind of renouncement thus becomes almost a renouncement of the Self. And yet knowing this, the process of letting go, and the examination of the Self while letting go, can be very fruitful. 

 Impermanence may teach you the ultimate truth of your own death. It is a grim lesson, perhaps, and most of us know it, but do not feel it. It can propel you to be here, now, and to see your own suffering not as true suffering, but a nuance of existence. Being here, being you, is, after all, the only thing you will ever truly possess. Everything else, and the thought that you possess anything else, will be an illusion.

Image by Jie He





Similar posts:


Original Nature


Materialism and Abstractionism


The Self as a Temporal Illusion


Oceanic Experience


Happiness and Desire


Ego Loss and Higher Self


Is God Real


Psychosphere


The Illusion of Duality


Self-Realization

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Buddha Nature

Wednesday, May 18, 2016 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

Buddha Nature

If it could be attained by reading, thinking, introspection, analyzing, arguing, dreaming or wise words, then why don't you have it already, since you have been immersed in these activities since birth?

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Original Nature

Friday, May 06, 2016 K.Z. Freeman 0 Comments

Jie He
What is our original nature?

A simple question, but one that tends to show up sooner or later in a person life. Why would anyone want to know this? What benefit could it serve?

Since this question often relates to meditation, and to know what is our original nature conceptually, we must explain some of the levels of being we go through in our daily life, and what exactly meditation will do to the psyche.

Meditation is a way of training conscious attention in turning inward and into the Self. This tends to be a very subtle process. Until it is not. Doing this, you venture deeper the more you practice, as the Self is the one place where no-one else can actively go, although others can point in different directions for you to go.

What you will discover at some point, is that you as a form that is consistent and true, does not exist. Instead of consistent and rigid, you will find the Self as fluid, a pattern. One pattern is strong; another pattern is weak. The more you perform a certain pattern, the more that pattern will become the idea of you, the Identity. The I entity.

 When you go through the first layers, you will notice the superficial identity is largely based on others. 
Because Self cannot exist without the contrast of Other, it is natural for you to identify and build this Identity based on the reactions of others (mother, father, friends, relatives, people you don't know...). The strongest building block of social pattern (ego) is the perceived reaction - meaning the reaction you expect or wish to have from others. As a result, actions which involve and rely upon the feedback of Others have the most power to build superficial Identity.

The more these patterns become clear to you, the more you will wish to be mindful of them. 
There will be an inevitable wish for change, or alteration. Being mindful of pattern works the same way as looking into a mirror. One is bound to find imperfections and things to alter. 
This is the sphere where most of “you are not your body” comes from. It happens due to an inevitable sense of duality which arises when looks inward and a subconscious idea first emerges. You are watching these patterns, which means there must be a watcher, an I behind the patterns that is not the patterns. Then you go further and say this I is not the body either, but eternal and the same in all beings.

This is both true and false, as with being Mindful you will notice both of these and the level of truth of either depends largely on perception.

However, Mindfulness today has become a very "Westernized" concept. 
Today Mindfulness is acceptance through denial. That is, seeing oneself as doing specific things and having certain feelings, then accepting those feelings, but not allowing these momentary emotions to change your overall inner state or have an effect on it. At first this is impossible. The reason why is very simple. The Entity which does not wish to have a certain inner state already had it when he or she experienced it and decided he or she doesn’t want it. In a sense there is often no acceptance, only a pushing aside.
Accepting an inner state means feeling it completely. 
You can only perform an inner alchemy and freeing the emotion by accepting your emotion as it arises, as you can only transmute something you give attention to. By pushing attention aside, all you have done is looked the other way. Pointed the mirror elsewhere. Yet the state remains just as it is, right here.

As you do this and meditate, you begin to unravel feelings and emotions which seem to stir out of nowhere. 
They will continue to arise as long as you try and push them aside, instead of observing them and accepting them as being a part of your being - a part of your form and current state right now. 

 Through acceptance you again start to notice other patterns in which you realize that these feelings are not the I that is watching. In this layer of pattern, you will learn firsthand about the nature of duality. A great doubt might stir in you, which for a while will dominate the psyche in a very direct sense. 
Since you will be actively splitting the mind into the watcher and the watched, for a a while not realizing they are the same process, you will notice a question showing up in your head: what then is me? 
This question is natural, as are the feelings associated with it. They are your chance to notice how you have created this - along with every other pattern - yourself; the pattern of there being two, of the one who is asking the question, and that which is being asked. That the two are not one and the same thing will seem normal in this state. That is, This body, and Not this body. Yet despite it seeming real, it is an illusion created by the Self by a certain kind of thinking and feeling. The realization of this will allow you to progress further, since before you truly realize this, you will always be pulled in two different directions of conceptual thinking created by superficial patterns. 
As a fun side-bump, the dissonance created fuels any resentment or anger entwined in the patterns you already have in your mind, and so all these emotions will increase in potency. And yet through this you will probably feel that you are actually "angry or irritated for no reason".

The more you do this, the deeper layers you will have to deal with. Deeper fears and deeper anxieties, but also deeper layers of bliss, as fear and anxiety cannot exist without its equally strong counterparts.

Through this, the process of going backwards in your experience of the Self will continue. Deeper layers of pattern and stronger emotional responses as the patterns are triggered by you poking at them. There cannot be a mind-pattern without an emotional component and a corresponding mental state, so experiences of strong emotion are normal. 

 This eventually brings one before something our minds know and have drawn deeply symbolic representations of.

It is not a coincidence that the symbol for the flower of life is called a flower, and that it symbolizes complete unity. It is also not a coincidence that the symbol for the final crown chakra is an unfurling lotus, and that opening it requires one to let go of all attachment. But the most important letting go is not of material possessions, but mental ones. Especially of letting go of being attached to what we consider the positive emotion.

But what exactly does this mean and how does it relate to our Original nature?

Freud called this symbolism the want to return to the womb. In its true meaning it is not sexual. What awaits there and what the symbolic meaning of “return to the womb” means, is not something psychology discusses much, since the oceanic state is not what humans normally experience in everyday life.

It is that our Original nature is not that we are not our bodies, nor is it that we are a spirit. But that both of these concepts do not have any meaning besides in the mind. 

 Both the concept of Spiritual and Physical are the same thing though different perception and different labels. 
Both words are man-made words, and both divide man’s original nature, which in neither body nor spirit, but simply is. 
The physical form is spirit, and spirit is the physical form. The body is alone the body, and spirit is alone the spirit, the experience of either still perception. 
You shift your point of view, and you are just a body. 
You shift your point of view, and you are a spirit. 
Both lines of thinking divide what is fundamentally one and the same thing given a different name and concept only after the experience of Oneness has already been experienced. So everything else was possibility, and remains possibility.
Because of this, everyone can have this experience, and everyone can be subject to this understanding, as the feeling of Oceanic arose before anything else ever did. 
Before someone told you what an arm is, or before you knew you liked Sally, there was the feeling of Oneness.

In our original nature, there was no concept of Me and Other, no concept of Spirit and Mind, or Spirit and Body, or Body and Mind, all were the other. All implied the other. All had the possibility of being either. 

 What you in fact did in your original nature was float weightlessly, not aware of Self, yet having an experience of Self through having the experience of Other, yet not being aware of Other. You were not aware of the Self in the sense which you are now, and your Original nature was the experience of Self as the Other, and Other as the Self.

 Spirituality can be another word for a way of Seeing into the Suchness of things, which does not necessarily mean seeing things as they are. It is why true seeing can only be known through experience.

 You inevitably realize, when you are truly honest with yourself and what you are, is that Spirituality is a game just like any other. 
Just like consciousness plays at being a bird, a human, a tree or a rock, so too we play at being this, being that, instead of feeling that we are all of these things.

 Why spirituality is the highest and potentially the most dangerous game, is the same reason every game is serious and potentially dangerous. Because it convinces you that it is not a game. By doing this, the game is successful in playing itself and continues to change its own rules until it again convinces itself (you) of its seriousness.

 The way to figure out something is a game for sure is easy. The moment it manged to convince you that it's not a game, you can be damn sure that it is. Or to give a more graphic example. You know it is a game for sure when it convinces you to hold behind your own back a stick which dangles a carrot before your head, unaware that you are holding the stick yourself.

 In this manner your original nature is always right there, although it is difficult to be it, as over it we all have layers of experience which are more immediate and have our notice. They are the dangling carrot fooling our presence that the carrot is all there is.

 So how can I be this original nature now?

It is in practice. It was never anywhere else. If it could be attained any other way, by reading this text, thinking, introspection, analyzing or wise words, then why don't you have it already, since you have been immersed in these activities since birth?

Similar posts:

 Materialism and Abstractionism

The Self as a Temporal Illusion

Oceanic Experience

Happiness and Desire

Ego Loss and Higher Self

Is God Real

Psychosphere

The Illusion of Duality


Self-Realization

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