Exploding the myth
“Days like this, like your day today.
maybe the rain on the window trying to
get through to you. What do you see today?
what is it? where are you?
the best days are sometimes the first,
sometimes the middle and even sometimes the last”
― Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
Which myth?
The one that says if you follow a well-worn path you can be anything you want.
Of course, not everyone is disposed to fall in line but they rarely garner the limelight.
I realise that these words are shrouded in generalisations galore but the simple truth is that our supposed sanity and well-being is based on comfort, must-havery, being all we can be and growth, personal or otherwise, and nothing much else.
But it’s a slog.
…Just as we think we’re cresting the wave of success et al. we crash and burn into, if not an ennui-infused state, something resembling the torpor of knowing we’ve got to do it all over again. (It used to be the case that retirement, usually in our early 60s, would let us off the meathook of perpetual motion but with the cost of living being what it is, it’s more likely the case that we’ll all be working until we drop. Ye gads!!)
What we don’t do, or not in my bailiwick of ancestral waifs and strays, is to ask or invite the question:
Who or what is it that seems so committed to the whirling dervish of activity to ensure our ultimate success?
Does it matter?
Probably not, but when we’re fixated on developing the ‘me’ or ‘I (am)’, you’d think we’d want to understand why (for example) everything in our known experience, our actual experience, is formless — i.e. it is, apparently, in a constant state of flux — and yet we have this rock solid sense that there is us/me/I and everything else (duality).
My point?
If everything else is apparently moving, shifting, energetic and alive, then what makes us feel there is a separate self?
Put it another way, when in previous posts I have suggested that this is all there is, what does that say or suggest to you?
Just this moment?
Right now.
New, and new and new.
And no, I’m not talking about that slightly odd notion that we can live in the mythic Now. Instead, I’m suggesting that there is no one who has ever done anything.
You might ask yourself who or what maintains your breathing, seeing, touching, smelling and aliveness more generally. Or to be more granular, you don’t will your seeing (assuming you’re not blind) anymore than you have a stern word with your heart or lungs because they’ve decided not to be more determined or committed to the cause of ‘me’.
I realise that in sharing these words and what I’ve said in my previous posts you might be left wondering: what is he trying to achieve?
The truth is: nothing.
In fact, there is nothing in what I’m (now) sharing for the separate self. Even if it were to consider who is driving the bus, it might come to realise that if it took this message to heart (a bit of an oxymoron) that it would have to die. I know that sounds extreme but to apprehend, to no one, that there is no such thing as free will and choice, cause and effect or personal development, then it’s very likely to shout expletives at the screen along the lines of…"what a load of BS”.
And that’s fine.
As I’ve said already, there is nothing on offer here, no sales pitch and I’m just as likely to lose all my current subscribers as to reach a few hundred more.
Then again…you might come to realise that all those tips, techniques, 7-step programmes and books, for all the apparent good they’ve done you, never provide lasting, soul-comforting peace and that might be because there is something else in play; namely:
the unknown appearing as the known
nothing appearing as everything
emptiness appearing as fullness.
Blessings and much love,
Julian
PS. These posts are work in progress (I may delete some of them or amend them) if only because what I am trying to share is beyond words, and that makes the apparent task at hand very difficult.