u/BandicootOk7017

There are all sorts of games available. The Game of Freedom is one in which the rules are simple. Simply be aware of whatever is happening. That's it.

This goes all the way down to the root to the most subtle aspects of experience. That's part of the fun and why it's called Freedom. There's less and less tension to hold on the more subtle awareness becomes.

Not everybody wants to play this game. Even those who think they do by way of any of the initiating traditions. Part of this game is also impersonal. In fact the more the game is played the more impersonal it becomes.

This isn't to say that I'm unhappy now. I actually don't know what I am. Aware. Alert. Clueless. Then this stuff spills out on a screen and sometimes folks agree. Mostly they don't.

Then we go back and forth for a bit before they have to walk the dog or go to a meeting and I have to pee. Maybe we reconvene later in the day, but more often than not the argument is forgotten.

Every now and then there's a quick spark of insight shared between parties. Like a literal flash of light you might see out the corner of your eye. This is forgotten just as fast.

So what are we doing? What we're doing. That's it. One thing after the next. There can be a claim involved like "I did that" or "I was happier when..." but this also goes and comes like everything else.

And there I was gonna post it but looked at the title again. What's the comparison? Whatever I'm looking at is a memory compared to now.

I say some really dumb stuff to people on the Internet. Stuff I wouldn't dare say to a stranger on the street, let alone coworkers, friends or family. Just making up stuff to get a fix.

Stuff like "This is a mirror."
No it isn't. It's a screen.

You can turn it off and maybe see a reflection but it's nowhere near the reflection of a mirror. Then I get stupider: "I AM a mirror!"

Now whatever anybody says to me doesn't apply. I'm above and beyond it and they're hurr-durr talking to themselves. Silly.

Hiding behind a screen name, snarky and snickering, in bed, probably in boxers.

God forbid I do something productive, like wash a dish or take a walk. No. I must win this battle of words to Enlighten a stranger.

Then they stop talking, responding, engaging, giving me attention. Now what?

It was at the end of their follow-up meeting because she went to the hospital recently. After going through a list of medications and other remedies for ailments he held out his hands to pray. He's a Christian doctor.

In his office are all kinds of Christian motifs, including a wire tree sculpture surrounded by the fruit of the Spirit according to Paul: love, joy, peace, and so on. He mentioned how his senior father had a couple falls recently but "He knows Jesus," said with a smile. Meaning that his father and the family aren't afraid of his death. He'll go to Heaven.

In the book though, Jesus says the Kingdom of Heaven is within. It's actually meaning inside and all around but to keep it simple; within. So where are these people going after death?

This is a tiny detail that's skipped every Sunday. Heaven is within. Jesus himself said if somebody tells you to look elsewhere they're wrong (if heaven is in the air, the birds are there before you).

The challenge with this kind of thinking is that it undermines the authority of the church. Ironically, Jesus undermined the authority of the established religious order in his day too. That's one of the main plot points. He wouldn't have been crucified if he didn't upset Jewish leaders.

So the whole thing is backwards as far as a religion goes. Most of Christianity is built on the words of Paul who wrote a bunch of letters. It's like he wrote some emails and whoever put the Bible together (a group of men) decided his letters should be considered holy. Paul himself had to wedge himself into the story. He needed permission from the original disciples to write and teach and build the church. All of that was based on his mystical experience of Jesus. He never actually met the man in flesh and blood.

The good news is that Mom's headache is gone. It could be because her blood pressure is stabilized now from the medicine, or the after effects of her emergency are wearing off, or she's no longer holding herself tense and giving herself a headache through worry.

Pretty sure the doctor knew this would happen and his prayer was merely for comfort. That's kind and compassionate. Maybe he is Christ-like afterall.

Isn't it strange how defensive we get over our beliefs? Strange at first and then silly. Even in private study we can notice the bars of belief rattle when the cage is shook.

It's like yesterday when people find out from a now deleted post that Jesus isn't his name. Whoever they wrote about. His original name is Aramaic for a Hebrew name. Even so the Aramaic name is shorthand for that original name which also happens to be very common.

The name "Jesus" comes from a Greek word which sounds like ee-ay-SOOS. Or more like the Spanish way of saying it. The English version actually passes through Latin from Greek. What a journey.

His original name means "Yahweh is salvation." Of course Yahweh is the Hebrew name for G-d which is the ineffable ground of being all the mystics brag about.

Joshua. That's the transliteration from Hebrew which the shorthand Aramaic ends up being something like Josh. Not as a nickname though. Just Josh.

Ironically, calling him Josh makes him even more human. The story has a grounded mystical tone rather than a detached mythical one. Josh as a name is approachable whereas the name Jesus carries a whole swath of conditioning which is exactly what Awakening dissolves.

All that to say if you keep going you may end up hating Jesus too. Not literally. You end up seeing through the conditioning. That's all.

Bold words for a man who grew up in the church and wanted to be a pastor at one point. The heck happened to twist up his narrative so much to reject The Risen Lord? Life happened.

Do you know the dude's name is actually Joshua? I mean whoever they wrote about. Whoever had such a strong influence on folks to be talked about for at least thirty some odd years before they put the story to paper. That guy. Josh.

Jesus is a bastardization of that man. He's an amalgam of hopes and dreams and rules to achieve them. Imagine him according to the pulpit decree and there you have it: a ticket to Heaven, whatever that is.

> The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

My sister has a library full of systematic theology books. My family then, for the most part, is still steeped in the tradition. I'm the oddball naturally. The little queer whose strangeness stretches across the board. Unconditionally myself which, ironically, is often a problem. Not enough to cause any actual disasters mind you. Only enough to be a distasteful contrast to an ideal.

The way I see it, any theology that has to be packaged into a system is worthless. That's all theology then. Garbage. Every philosophy which lends itself to a particular way to be is also garbage. There's this science book I'm looking through by Richard Feynman and he says something about science which is funny: we're standing at an ever expanding frontier of ignorance. Something like that.

They don't know and are highly susceptible to discovery. The folks who know are always the problem then. A few million years of ago some soup coallesced to produce whatever gizmo is involved in writing and reading these words. Somewhere in there a notion comes to not only know what's up but to control it in some way. Weird.

Maybe that's what Josh was getting at. Nobody is in charge of this heap of stardust. Or it's in charge of itself and, on occasion, does something to support personal interest. A prayer from hunger leads to an unopened Twinkie by the roadside.

Get hungry enough and what Josh talked about shows up. Maybe even gets you to laugh...at yourself.

Years ago when the spiritual awakening theme began to dominate my life I threw everything away. I packed what could be carried and put total trust in the Universe. So eventually I found myself in San Francisco, marching up and down city streets, hungry, tired and depressed.

Sitting down in front of a closed up shop I crossed my legs and closed my eyes. Not meditation necessarily. At my wit's end more like it. Some other street sleeper passing by remarks with bitter resignation echoing my own, "I hope that brings you money." There wasn't enough energy to fight the thought or bypass it with idealized hope. I simply closed my eyes.

Moments later somebody nudged them open again with a small box tapped against my chest. Two fresh slices of pizza inside. Lukewarm, but delicious and deeply satisfying. Memorable too a decade later.

Since then I've discovered that no matter how much I worry Life gives. It gives so much that worries fade. They aren't pushed away mind you. They're noticed. That's it.

Years ago when the spiritual awakening theme began to dominate my life I threw everything away. I packed what could be carried and put total trust in the Universe. So eventually I found myself in San Francisco, marching up and down city streets, hungry, tired and depressed.

Sitting down in front of a closed up shop I crossed my legs and closed my eyes. Not meditation necessarily. At my wit's end more like it. Some other street sleeper passing by remarks with bitter resignation echoing my own, "I hope that brings you money." There wasn't enough energy to fight the thought or bypass it with idealized hope. I simply closed my eyes.

Moments later somebody nudged them open again with a small box tapped against my chest. Two fresh slices of pizza inside. Lukewarm, but delicious and deeply satisfying. Memorable too a decade later.

Since then I've discovered that no matter how much I worry Life gives. It gives so much that worries fade. They aren't pushed away mind you. They're noticed. That's it.

This is purely gut burning popcorn drama. Scroll away.

Like many of my posts this one begins both as a reflection of experience and from silence. Something happens, I sit with it, some sauce bubbles up like these words. So what happened?

Yet another argument on Reddit with yet another character steeped in their own confusion trying to pass it off as wisdom. Another character once called it wisdumb. I'm kinder, most days.

The phrase in question which I found equally amusing and sad is "Egocentric Beliefs."

I says to the gentleman "that's a concept." They ask "do you even know what that means?" I say "it's irrelevant. It's a concept. Relative to Awakening that's the relevant part." (That last line is my favorite part of the play.)

Now this is saying two things. Egocentric Beliefs is a concept but so is the idea of a concept. This is the marvelous wonder of Awakening. No concept is true. Sort of. It's better to say every word is late.

Something else my scene partner* said which is actually worth considering is: Awakening leads to direct experience.

This is equally amusing and insightful. Amusing because of how ordinary this so-called Awakening becomes and then insightful because when all concepts are seen through you're left with experience without the narrative about experience. A narrative can still come. I went to the store to get some ice cream is a narrative but there's no dependence on it.

Whether or not there's a story about Life becomes less relevant than the fact of Life itself.

Ego is simply the sense of oneself. That's it. We blow the word out of proportion, stuffing it with all kinds of expectations and threats for the sake of whatever "spiritual" model we're clinging to for the moment. The model is a bundle of concepts to avoid the inevitable:

I don't know.

Nobody does. Every single word is late to the party. There's actually no such thing as direct experience either then, but it's valuable as a pointer: All the way up to seeing directly what's available without buying into a story about what's available. Look around and see. That's it.

This (whatever is available when you look around) is non-dependent on ideas. The chair remains as it is whether we call it chair or cheese. Now the part that always gets confusing is this: the language is still This Which Remains Without Words™.

The act of calling the object a chair is insparable from the witnessing of the object. We have to slow down to see this. Actually it's less slowing down and more paying attention in increasingly subtle ways. It doesn't matter how many ways we flip the description around, unless you actually pay attention to experience when narration starts, you'll skip right over the fact that there's zero separation between the witnessing of experience and experience itself. This includes the experience of thought.

This is the "final realization" of Awakening. Nondual Awareness is a fancy term.

There's no room for a separate thing called Ego then. It's some passing sense. That's it. Like all sensation it's inseparable from the Awareness of it.

___

*In improv you get multiple scene partners to play with, riffing off the cuff about a given topic.

What a waste of a title to be honest. It's so on the nose it's sickening. Ugh. But here it is, as it is, and that's the whole point to it: The Art.

Oh look, we've elevated it a bit so now it's not just The Art of Mindfulness but also The Art. Ugh.

This could have easily been called The Art of Post-Insight Integration or TAOPII. How's your Tao Pie today? On and on with this nonsense if we wanted which is also the point.

Attention.

The Art asks a couple simple questions but they really begin with one: Am I paying attention?

You can run around in circles through the maze of recursive Nonduality to ask Who am I? But that only leads back to the starting position of attention. Or, nowhere.

So here we begin to look. Am I paying attention? Then another question may come. What am I paying attention to? Another. What is the quality of attention? And that's where the questions go back to the beginning.

Another recursive loop as long as it's exclusively an intellectual pursuit to define the ineffable, inseparable momentum of attention. Oh here we go! More words about Nothing Nowhere.

Simply look and see. That's all there is to it, and there are layers to it too, apparently. Maybe read it again if you missed it.

Not that anybody cares. It's part of my path (?) to write stuff out and occasionally share it with the class. Sometimes that comes off with a heavier hand. Sometimes it's celebrated. Often enough it's hated.

Regardless what I wanted (and weirdly resisted) was praise and admiration. It's probably some holdover from whatever carried through from childhood to always push for the spotlight. Even getting it at times I was jealous of folks who got more of it.

Then after looking closer at the sense of jealousy itself it...melted? A different perspective showed itself. Service.

Regardless of who gets praise the point of the work is to offer a way out of suffering and into clarity. That's it. Better the work be praised (for a moment).

So the whole posture towards Angelo DiLullo has changed. If somebody offered his book or resources at the beginning so much could have been avoided. I have zero regrets. Wouldn't change a thing, but also recognize how much easier discovery would have been if there was grounded, thorough guidance like what Angelo offers.

My thing involved stitching together some sort of patchwork of practice and insight from many different (and often contradictory) sources. Hilarious in retrospect, which is a mantra, but wholly unnecessary nowadays. It's like how cognitive science is catching up to and refining the perspectives from traditional ideologies.

There's less to sift through and a more immediate encounter with direct experience. That's what Angelo's work offers, which many of you probably already knew.

Anyway, that's my confession for today.

You've no doubt seen The Gospel of John Wick. It's only four chapters if you haven't. Spoilers to follow.

The High Table is Supreme. Nobody is above the table. To challenge the table is to challenge the very notion of one's continued existence.

Enter John. No telling what happened by the end of it (is he really...dead?). But all throughout what's evident is that John is willing to throw all of it away in an irrepressible desire for vengence.

John was pressured into his natural self. Consequences. That's the whole structure of the Gospel.

These consequences don't come as a result of some outside force. They come in one's response to such a force. Awakening is such a force. Something runs into the house and starts turning on all the lights!

In John's case it was the perpetual momentum of his personal myth. Everybody knew who he was, and was either scared of the fact or compelled to challenge him for proof. It wasn't simply that The High Table was after some discordant servant. The whole political structure was against John, personally.

Same with this force of nature called Awakening. The person doesn't survive.

Point is at the end of the situation you're back to the table, so to speak, with an irrepressible motive. To serve and be of service.

The bee does it. The apple tree does it. The mountain does it. The wind which stretches over the mountain top does it. Everybody is involved. There's no escape.

Well, there is one, but even in that...

This is kind of a silly question. Embedded is the understanding that nothing is actually expressed since that means division. There's at least the potential for expression on one hand and then whatever gets expressed on the other.

The potential to wake up is there. Then suddenly there's a disturbance in the force of slumber and a whole world of consequence dawns. Maybe it's having to go to the bathroom. Maybe it's figuring out how to turn off the alarm again. Either way one thing leads to the next.

Then somewhere around lunch I catch my breath and notice the day has been unfolding fine without the interruption of owning it.

There's no room for a claim in this. Even if a claim comes to say "I did that" it doesn't have to be owned. Even if some sense to own it comes it doesn't need a story.

It's some other passing sense about a passing experience.

Over and over like this from the moment I wake up to going to sleep again. Speaking of which, I lay quietly becoming completely available to the process and a miracle happens:

All I know about myself disappears.

My whole world dissolves without expectation. Maybe another world springs into view in its absence or between waking moments. I call that world and many more like it a dream.

Without it pure empty potential for anything to be. No guarantee in it though.

So be quiet. Let it do itself and see what happens.

There's a note in the description that says Awakening is an ever-unfolding process. It isn't. Life is an ever-unfolding process, maybe, but not in any way separate from the whole universe as a process, which it isn't.

Things happen. Not even that ole philosophical jargonism that "things appear to happen." Nope. Things happen. The wind blows, a tree moves, a bird chirps, a car beeps, the baby sneezes, I blink. That's the whole picture.

One thing happens after the next from the moment the body stretches awake in the morning to cuddling up under a blanket at night. From the most subtle to obvious and extreme, this is the way it is.

All the questions about self and not-self and everything in-between are moot. They have zero effect on one thing happening after the next. In fact questions, doubting, seeking, wanting are more things which simply happen.

There's no promise outside of ordinary consequence. Not as a principle of cause and effect, as that would be a promise. Maybe we can say "Life is strange," but even that isn't a guarantee. Toast isn't...that strange.

There are all these stories of how it should be and where it's going and every one of them is...a story. Nothing more. There's really no telling what will happen or when.

A dessert is said to be rich when all the flavors are decadent and intense. Those caramel apple mini cakes from Costco fit that category. Cut those layers of cream cheese icing and sugar-soaked apples with a small cup of coffee and you're in heaven and/or a diabetic shock. Life as it is is equally intense and layered.

The questions about purpose, goals, direction, and all the mixup from organized thought go away when there's simple, consistent observation of what's already available.

That's a moutful of Wordsalad to say: Look.

"Who's looking?"
"What am I looking for?"
"How long?"

All silly questions. Look around and see for yourself. No idea how to peel your eyes away from this screen. Only you can do that.

But when we look at what's already available without buying into opinions about what it is or where it's going then something incredible can dawn. Nothing mysterious mind you. Nothing immediately extraordinary. Simple. So simple it's ignored.

Look at all the sensory information available by simply sitting. David Chalmers goes into this a bit at the beginning of his book The Conscious Mind:

> But any color can be awe-provoking if we attend to it, and reflect upon its nature. Why should it feel like that? Why should it feel like anything at all? How could I possibly convey the nature of this color experience to someone who has not had such an experience?

This kind of appreciation can extend to any of the senses. None of it earned. Given.

No beliefs either. No doctrines. No models for behavior. No expectations. No rewards. Nothing. And yet, incredibly rich.

If you have to go to the bathroom there's no debate about it. Well at least not until you're 40 or so. But even then you have a sense of a possibility so you go to the bathroom, get into position, and wait.

All the straining and effort to accomplish some grand event which is happening naturally (especially with fiber or water) is the suffering. Same with getting Lit.

Folks make being Lit into some grand event that happens eventually, hopefully, if you seek and strain hard enough. The desire for Enlightenment is the only thing standing in the way of Enlightenment.

Look outside. No really, peel your eyes away from this screen for half a second and glance outside. Even better if you're already close to touching grass. If it's daytime, the Sun is lighting up everything. If it's nighttime, the Moon or a nearby streetlight or ...your own natural ability to look.

Even if you're blind you have a sense of the world as experience. What I'm aware of is never separate from the Awareness of it, even if what I'm aware of is total darkness. The ...Light of Awareness is already lighting up all you've ever known.

So you're already Lit.

What do you want to do then? Not some abstract thing like Buy-A-Yacht-Lol. Right this moment what do you feel like doing?

That right there is your chop wood, carry water.

I started writing here because my account wasn't old enough to post on r/Awakened. Started writing there because of several peak experiences which fit the story of Spiritual Awakening.

Nonduality is something I came across along the way then. Maybe it had something to do with Mooji and Advaita. Maybe the old scripts I read like any of gitas or sutras. Then some opinions about it became familiar enough to adopt and sell.

Awareness? The heck is that. I mean we all know based on what we've been told but in actual experience there's no such thing. At best it's a quality of experience to notice stuff from the most subtle sensation to any peak experience. All seen equally despite whatever gradient of intensity. But Awareness as a thing to be?

No idea how to do that. But we have pointers. Notice this. Question that. Dismiss this. And of course "I am That." All nonsense at the end of the day because it's all conceptual.

Some folks tell me "Yes! The Truth is ineffable!" Well...what the heck is Truth? Same as Awareness.

This isn't to say that Awareness is the Truth or vice versa. They're words. Concepts. They're only relevant to whatever conceptual framework we're playing with for a day.

Then that old habit called Sleep comes. We drool a bit while faithfully forgetting whatever concepts we played with for a little while. This includes the concept of being a body that laid down to rest.

Now this isn't to encourage the concept of "You are not the body." That's only the opposite of being the body which is still is inside a framework.

I sum up this definition by saying it's deconditioning. Once there's detachment from concepts and all the storytelling then there's no longer a dependence on them. It's that simple.

This doesn't mean I walk into the grocery store confused about the word "Pasta" on the aisle sign. It means I'm not depending on the word for anything other than the practical use of it. Namely, to get a bag of pasta.

All the peak experiences which come along with deconditioning are the source of confusion. We want to wrap these up into a neat little story of Spiritual Awakening with the grand finale chapter of becoming some ideal. It never happens.

Actually what does happen is the body wakes up in the morning and every little thing thereafter is a consequence. One thing leads to the next until the body is finished for the day and lays back down. Maybe there's a few scenes stitched together from a memory (a dream). Maybe not. Then the body wakes up again.

Over and over like this for as long as anybody can remember. Trump does it. Putin does it. The Pope does it. Keanu Reeves. All our saints, aints and everything in between is subject to the same cycle. Wake up, walk around, eat, pop a squat, lay down.

Every major concept like God, Spirit, and even Reality is secondary and equally a consequence of waking up one day and going to sleep later that night. Birth and death.

We chop up the spinning of the planet around the Sun into minutes, hours, days, years and lifetimes. Not once has it stopped spinning. Somebody simply decided at one point "Hey let's start here..." and everybody agreed with them.

No idea what a Thursday is without a calendar.

This sorta question isn't meant to be answered on a screen. In fact it's probably better to go outside and consider it. Otherwise you run the risk of depending on somebody's opinion.

Some folks become experts in other people's opinions. The other day in fact somebody gave me a list of opinions, a whole stack of shoulds and should-nots and then said, "That's all according to..." their favorite philosopher.

What's immediately evident doesn't require any belief. It doesn't need any philosophy. No rite, ritual or routine. All of that stuff is obviously sustained by "What's Evident," but as it is, the sustainer of experience is independent of the madness.

This does no good reading it on a screen though. You'll breeze through these words and scroll on to some other dopamine kick, like a kitten or something. It's what we do.

You're encouraged though to take a quick glance at the situation without depending on somebody's opinion about what it is.

This also isn't a way to live. Folks get confused by this. A quick glance to see and that's it. Carry on.