Zen And The Art Of Mass Transformation

Email update news

2008-10-05T08:36:00.000-07:00

Guys, Girls

A little post-closure post here - I'm writing this to inform all you peeps who've asked for automatic updates that I've transferred you across to my new blog.

I changed the blog from Wordpress back to Blogger so I could imbed better widgets in it, like the email subscription thing.

You can also now get Tolle audios directly from the blog if you want to.

www.1000daysofpresence.blogspot.com

It's also a nicer layout.

Wordpress is dumb.

Screw Wordpress.

You'll get a new email confirmation saying that you're now a member. If you don't want to be on the list for my new blog, you are clearly packing the intellectual arsenal of a brain-damaged infant, and I don't want you reading my shit. You can opt out in the confirmation email.

Obviously, as a regular subscriber to the blog you are a ten-foot-tall genius hero covered in golden armour, or a sylph-like genius with beauty and presence so powerful you can melt sand from fifty feet. Whichever you prefer.

www.1000daysofpresence.blogspot.com

Much love.

New Blog

2008-09-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's right, there's a new blog for you all to add to your RSS feeds.

It's entitled 1000 Days Of Presence. You'll see why when you read it at

www.1000daysofpresence.blogspot.com

Thank you everyone who's made this blog more interesting than average. I feel it's time to lay it to rest.

The new one is a diary of a project I'm embarking on. I'll be updating it as regularly as time permits. Anyone who tells a friend about the 1000 Days Of Presence project or posts about it on any blog or internet website officially gets a "cyberhug" from me. This is like cybersex, but less soggy.

If you like the new angle, pass it around. All of the people who've signed up for email updates for this blog I'll try to transfer you onto the next one. I am something of a techno-retard though, so this may take a while. As soon as I find an email signup widget (!?) that works on wordpress where my new blog is I'll stick it up and you can enter your details in there.

I'm going to try not moderating the comments on the new blog, although I'm aware there are some scary ass weirdoes out there who trawl the internet looking for things to swear at. We'll see how it goes.

Remember - the new blog is at

www.1000daysofpresence.blogspot.com

If you like what you see take the link, post it wherever you can. All support is greatly appreciated.

Much love, and thanks again to everyone who's submitted. Deep apologies for not getting back to everyone I've not gotten back to, I have read everything submitted.

Rock on, heroes. This is Dr Jekyll, signing off.

www.1000daysofpresence.blogspot.com

Word To My Homs

2008-09-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

Hello, gentlemen (and any ladies who might be reading this by accident).

Well, it's been a hectic few months. As any followers of this blog will no doubt be aware, I've not been posting nor responding for a long time. This is for the simple reason that you all smell of wee.

I've been chillin' in the name of, untangling myself from the crazed tomfoolery of the online underworld. I knew I had to get out, and 'just one more response' was keeping me glued to the computer. To coin a phrase, I dropped a portcullis on all things related to the world of seduction. People, places, things - I've just dropped off the radar completely.

All of you who've stayed with the blog, I salute you and give you a great big hug in a non-gay way. Apart from you, Mark. I'm secretly feeling your bottom.

I haven't decided whether or not this blog will undergo a full-scale revival yet - although I will post here and there. I don't want to become an anti-community protest blog - not because I don't think that's worthwhile, but because I'd rather not get sucked into playing another 'guru' role.

Equally, I have been reading my email every now and then, and if you've posted a comment that hasn't been published (there are 126 pending at this moment... eep!) then I will have read it.

As such, I am aware that there are a lot of guys dealing with some really fricked up shit as a result of community exposure. On an ongoing basis I would like to respond to these things as best I can because I really feel for you.

The last couple of posts on the blog, although fine holiday fun, were descending into (from my point of view) a kind of argumentative whak-a-rat. Someone would bring up a load of points, I'd address them, someone would respond to that with 20 more, I'd address them, someone would respond with 50 more, and so on and so forth.

I felt that leaving the blog where it was worked because I think there's enough info in the last 2 posts and response threads to give serious pause for thought. Call it my spanner in the works, if you will.

Now here's what's going to happen - feel free to post some responses. Bear in mind though that it's unlikely I'll be going all out on another serious back-and-forth, point-for-point debate about this, at least in the immediate future.

In other news, have returned to the work of Herr Tolle, have a new job and things are generally looking pretty rosy. Oh, and Lehman Brothers just went under. I told them that CDOs were a bad idea. Did they listen? Did they heck.

Speak soon, peeps.

C

Redefining Greatness

2008-05-31T04:05:00.000-07:00

So it's taken, what 5 days? 6?

That's how long it's taken to pull down the rep I've been building tirelessly for three years. Humbling.

All those of you who have chosen to remain with the blog, I salute you. I realise that there are many things pulling you away from here, and many voices undermining mine.

But you have stayed because you sensed something in what I'm saying. Something that may have hit you like a hammer - or maybe just something that's needling you at the edge of your consciousness and refuses to leave no matter how much you try to ignore it.

Good. What this means is that you are unwilling to simply and easily dismiss something that rings all too true, even if you really want to.

In that, you are already stronger than I was.

And before we go on, I want you to know a couple of things. Firstly, I am no hero. I know that a lot of people are saying and will continue to say that moreover, I am any number of very bad things.

Do not get sucked into caricatures of me in defiance to their venom. If you really respect me, you will not lionise me. I am no lion. I am a leech who wants to be a man again.

Now, I've spoken about a 'new way' and I know that many of you are waiting to hear what I have to say. Before I go on, a couple of things.

1 - This is going to challenge the living shit out of you.
2 - No, really, this is really going to challenge the living shit out of you.

Ok. Another thing I want to say is that I do care deeply about whether or not you get this. I want you to, and as such, all the doubts and questions that you are going to have, that's what the comment function on this blog is for. Shoot from the hip, gents. Don't hold back.

The interesting thing about the community is that the more 'advanced' it gets, the deeper it goes. We started out 10 years ago looking at how to open a conversation, and now we are looking to build our strength right deep down at the spiritual level.

A lot of the reasons for this are that if you have that kind of deep spiritual power, problems with women just evaporate as if they were never there. This is kind of strange and pretty interesting.

Another thing that many people have encountered is that once you get that kind of shit going on, you are suddenly tuned in to the very highest parts of your self. This is absolutely true and deeply revolutionary. It's also one of the main things (addictions notwithstanding) that held me in the seduction community for a long time after I'd achieved way beyond what I'd set out to achieve woman-wise when I got into it.

That is to say, it held my attention, strongly. You'll have heard it referred to in this blog and various community websites as 'nimbus'. And it is a very interesting phenomenon.

To describe it as being 'really on' is not accurate or honest. It is way beyond that. It's much more like a whole new dimension of power and insight which you gain access to. Which feels completely natural, like you at the deepest level. And it's not just your charisma that it supercharges, it blasts into everything. Intellect, sensitivity, vision, clarity, focus - everything.

Now, my question was 'can you trigger and sustain this in the context of seduction.' I spent a lot of time and energy doing my best to do just that, until I realised the simple and inconvenient truth that seduction is a context wherein the sustaining of genuine deep power is impossible.

So what then?

The interesting thing is that firstly, the feeling of this peak state goes way beyond that which you may gain from the adulation of others. In fact it has much less to do with how others see you, and much more to do with how you see them - how tuned in you are to their needs, and how effective you are at meeting them. In fact, it has much more to do with channeling love than with being loved.

Now love is a weak and feeble word, but it is not a weak or feeble thing. The crackling energy of this state gives you access to and turns you into a fountain of pure and genuine love that cuts through all negativity like a floodlight through shadow.

Now, the interesting thing is that when I was at my best, it was because I was going, every week, to a place where I would be exposed to exactly this phenomenon with great intensity.

Every week I would be filled with this thing, with this power.

It's interesting, because the first time I ever went to that place, I reacted very badly. I felt a deep defiance in parts of me I didn't even know I had. I felt a slithering inside my chest, like snakes under rock that had just been lifted. Which to be honest, didn't say very good things about my internals.

I'm going to give you a blast of that place I went to. It's free, you can download it instantly.

Now, before I tell you what that place is, there's something I want to talk about.

Infinity.

Infinity is something which many of us have started to take more seriously recently. The work of men like Eckhart Tolle has given us gateways, if you will, into an unseen realm.

If you don't know anything about this dude, google the fucker, and download his shit. It's good shit. He's a bit of a hippy, but of a very practical and grounded nature.

Now, the thing about the infinite in it's Buddhist conception is that the Buddha, and by extension his followers, see the infinite as a sea in which you dissolve.

They see you, as in you the ego structure, as a static conception in a world of shifting and ever-dynamic intertwined processes.

This is, I believe, pretty fucking astute.

As such, they believe that the way to achieve eternal peace is to dissolve into this infinity.

That's basically Buddhism. Everything else is a route to that - the meditation, the monasticism, the wearing orange, all that jazz.

Now don't get me wrong. I do not think this is stupid, nor inaccurate.

But I do believe it is incomplete.

The difference between the conception of the infinite held by Buddhists, and the conception of the infinite put forward by Christians (at least the ones who aren't too busy gay-bashing or shooting abortion doctors) is that the infinite has a personality.

That it, essentially, is a person. You can interact with it as you would interact with a person. It has a specific plan and agenda for you, as a person would. It has a very distinct character. It talks to you, and it listens to you when you talk back.

That's the first thing. When a Christian talks about 'God' they are referring to precisely the same phenomenon as Eckhart Tolle is when he speaks of 'Being'. When they refer to the 'Holy Spirit' they are talking about the same phenomenon as Eckhart Tolle is when he talks about presence.

The only difference is that they are not just experiencing it directly, but also talking to it directly, and listening to it directly.

Truth is, a great many Christians are shit at this. A great many Christians are much really Christian as Michael Bay is an actual bay.

Nonetheless, it is a very interesting avenue, is it not, to think that there might be something here that is not 'different' to Tolle's conception of the infinite, but is actually deeper and more sophisticated.

Before you turn away in disgust - realise this. I am not, nor will I ever be, a religious man. Religion is fucked - every bit as fucked as seduction. Neither of them is any kind of path to follow. Both will destroy you. I think everyone gets this about religion, and I think in time we'll realise it about seduction also. The big difference is that religion is not a ten-year old underground movement on the internet.

Still, they both have some things in common.

Both of them have their doctrines.

Both have their stock defence mechanisms.

Both have their idols, and both have their heretics. Like me.

Both have evangelists, both have acolytes, both have articles of faith.

Both have their pioneers, both have their standard rationalisations, both have their theologians, and both have the devils they fight.

In fact, I'll go further and say that what we are looking at here is basically the same phenomenon.

The main difference would be that in seduction you get laid quicker and the mid-life crisis hits you a great deal faster.

I've just read over that last sentence and got that feeling you get where you're trying to be funny and you accidentally say something so on point it's mental. A bit like in that film Idiocracy. Hehe.

Ok, here's the thing.

There is no future in either. They are both paths that promise much, and lead nowhere.

However.

There is still 'nimbus' to account for. And there is still the fact that what Christians are attempting, no matter how stupid or counterproductive their methods or their results may be, is something much deeper than dissolving into the sea.

It is forming a relationship, a living, full on, broadband connection, with the infinite.

Now THAT is a definition of nimbus if ever I heard one.

So here is your first challenge.

Greatness. True greatness. There is a guy who's name is Pete, who is a friend of mine. He is, literally, in community parlance, full nimbus.

He a pastor in a non-denominational church and his sermons are searching and penetrating examinations of what genuine greatness is, and how to forge - and maintain - this connection which I speak of.

Here is an mp3. Listen to it. It is fucking awesome. This dude's level of personal wisdom is beyond anything I have ever encountered in real life.

http://www.destinyedinburgh.com/Sermons/Redefining_greatness.aspx

All your comments will be answered.

Apart from the ones trying to goad me into slating Tyler. Stop asking me to do that. It's not going to happen. Not unless you give me a big bag of money.

And some crack.

Word.

Before I Forget...

2008-05-29T15:14:00.000-07:00

Yeah, my facebook account is my full name:

That's "Ciaran Healy" to the uninformed.

There are a few Ciaran Healys on facebook.

I'm the pretty one.

Add me.

Falling Feels Like Flying On The Way Down

2008-05-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

Ok guys, here's a response I was writing to someone and again, it got out of hand so I figured I'd post it here.

"Anonymous said...

Dude WHAT-THE-FUCK are you talking about? lol

Iam in the seduction community cause I want to get better with women. Some guys are good with women, some are not. If you want to get better with women you learn how to get better in a seduction community. If you don't want to be better with girls you don't join a seduction community."

It's not that simple. If you want to get better with girls, and you join the seduction community, not only will you probably not get better with girls (really - the overwhelming majority of guys who try this fail and are worse off with women afterward than when they started) if you do get better with girls then that newfound skill will not better your life.

It will damage you and those around you.

"WHAT IAM TRYING TO SAY IS THIS: Just chill bro'!!! What is all this complex nerd-talk about life good for? Keep it simple man... Let's bang some chicks!! RAWR!!!(H)"

This is not complex. This is chillingly simple. If you 'bang some chicks' you are not going to be better off for having done it. Period.

"...or not if it makes you more happy to sit in your room and read buddha and stuff."

Dude, I have no illusions that I am going to change your mind. None. I know you are set on this path, and I am sorry for you because you deserve better than where you are headed.

At the same time, 'sitting in your room reading buddha and stuff' is just as fucked as seduction if you're doing it because it 'feels good.'

What is good for you does not always feel good.

And frankly if 'what feels good' is the compass by which you are guiding your journey in life - fuck dude. Like, come on, man. Can you not see that this is dangerous? I mean, can you not see that living like this is emotionally unsustainable? And deeper than that - that the part of you that you are feeding by living this way in any area, let alone the all-consuming addiction of the seduction community, is something that will not serve you?

I mean, really, dude - and anyone reading this, listen. If what makes you happy in the short term is your compass needle, you are feeding that part of you that has no depth!

Do not be so blinded by your victories and the rhetoric of others that you believe that you can get away with this! Do not believe you are above the inescapable laws of human nature!

Hell does not give a fuck what you tell yourself! It just doesn't care! It laughs at you when you rebel against what you must know, somewhere in you, is the truth!

"Destructive??? Dark places??? Iam happier then I've ever been and I look around at the people around me who are doing drugs, complaining, mass drinking, consumerism, YOU KNOW ALL TAHT NICE STUFF???"

Do you not think that I had my periods of amazing happiness? Dude, like I have said, I was very good. I was better at this than most guys ever get. There are a lot of professionals with big followings who did not have the abilities I had. And I reveled in them. I felt like a million dollars. I'd never felt that good before or since.

And let me tell you man, that it's not the sex - although I had a shitload of that. That's like a fucking sideshow to the real action. The real action is the pride. The massive pride in who you are.

The pride that I overcame the impossible. The pride that I went from Zero to Hero. The pride that I lived untouched by the insecurities that had dogged me, and the pride that I was always the centre of attention.

That I could see the fucking matrix, man - that I could handle myself in with the hottest chicks like Neo handles himself in a bar-fight with a fat disabled drunk.

You see it changes. Firstly, there's the high of getting laid. That's a big high. It's even bigger when you consider all the shit you've gone through to get there.

Then when you really start to kick ass, there's the high of just being really slick. That's a big high.

Now here's the thing. You'll be pulling shit out of your ass that is awesome, and you'll love it. You'll be like "this is the coolest shit ever!"

And the girls will love it. And your friends will love it. And all the dudes on the internet will love it.

And there will be nothing about it that seems in any way wrong. Nothing. In fact, it will seem like the most natural and cool thing ever.

You will become a turbo-charged version of yourself, and it will rock so hard you will become an evangelical preacher, converting others to this way.

But here's the problem. And before I get into this let me again state that I have no illusions that this will change your mind. I do not think I would have stopped had I got as deep into this as you.

I guess what I want to do is to say to anyone reading this who is sitting on the brink - get the fuck away from the brink.

The problem is simple. The impossible becomes commonplace.

The impossible becomes commonplace.

What I'm saying is this. The human mind can normalise itself to anything. You will normalise yourself to this glory and when you do, you will encounter something.

This is something, incidentally, that I remember raising at a sit down dinner I had not so long ago with some of the best 'ladies men' alive.

Every single one of them nodded. So do not think that what I am about to describe to you is an isolated case, or specifically to do with me.

The problem you will encounter is NOT boredom.

It is NOT 'oh well, let's just do something else'.

You cannot condition yourself for months and years to relentlessly think and behave in a certain way without building up a massive inertia behind it.

The problem is very simply this - a creeping sense of the hollow.

This is not something that leaps upon you like a wolf. It just starts to seep into your life like poison.

Bit by bit, it gets more and more potent. It does this slowly, and you experience it as follows.

You're hitting on a lovely girl and suddenly you realise, maybe 30 minutes in to the conversation, that you are DEFINITELY going to be able to sleep with her.

You can see everything ahead, and you know exactly how to handle it. Short of an act of God, you know you're already fucking her, you're just moving toward a conclusion.

And when you get that realisation, the magic leaves the situation and it feels dull and mechanical.

And you do it anyway. And you fuck her, and you feel 'meh' about it.

Nothing dramatic, nothing massive, just 'yeah, hmm, ok then. Sex."

So you're chasing that rush you used to get and you go for hotter and hotter chicks.

And for a while you get that rush again. Then again, it goes. And you go for threesomes and strippers. And you get another rush.

Then the banality sets in. And it just feels like "ok, here's another mars bar, I'll eat the mars bar and get the sugar rush. Great. Now I need another mars bar."

And that sense of hollowness, all this time, is getting stronger and louder and harder to ignore.

Who the fuck am I?

What the fuck is going on?

Why do I feel so alone all the time?

And you shake it off and say "Don't be such a pussy. Stop bitching. There are a shitload of guys who would kill to get what you have. Buck your ideas up sonny Jim. Go to the club.

So you go to the club. And you pull.

And this time the hollowness doesn't wait for the sex to be over.

It doesn't wait for a week after you get laid, nor a day, nor a minute.

It's right there with you fucking you as you fuck her.

And suddenly you start thinking "who gives a fuck about this?"

But you can't stop.

And by this time the damage you're doing to yourself by each new girl you fuck is like throwing matches on a bonfire. You're already burning.

You're already way beyond fucked. You're just waiting for the least little thing to come tip those scales and drop you the fuck down.

And it will because the house you have built is a house of cards, and it CANNOT stand.

And when you fucking fall man, you fucking fall. And if any of you out there are thinking "what's all this existential nonsense, why doesn't he talk in specifics" let me say this.

It's not fucking nonsense when it's tearing you a new emotional asshole every single minute of every single day.

It's not fucking nonsense when your skills with women, those same skills you spent so much time honing are ripped away from you because no woman will even speak with a man who's so transparently worthless in his own eyes.

It's not fucking nonsense when all the guys who looked up to you are now looking at you like you never had any skill whatsoever and all your bleating claims of "I used to be good" are unconvincing even to you.

Look, I know that a lot of guys are in this and they seem so together. They're fucking the hottest chicks with total impunity and they feel like a million fucking dollars.

But that million fucking dollars is on loan, dude, and when that debt gets called in, you lose a lot more than you ever think you stood to lose in the first place.

I guess I just want to end with one thought. A lot of guys have responded to me saying "what about me, I feel great" or "What about X, he feels great".

Guys, falling feels like flying on the way down.

Falling feels like flying on the way down.

And the guy who wrote this letter to me is right to point at all the things that are fucked about the world.

"doing drugs, complaining, mass drinking, consumerism..."

You are right. These things are fucked. And they're fucked because they ALL - ALL OF THEM - are about building a life based on short-term hits of happiness, superiority and pride.

As seduction is.

AS SEDUCTION IS.

And just as you cannot divorce "doing drugs, complaining, mass drinking, and consumerism" from the short term high and the long term low that are associated with them, that are inextricably bond up in the very foundations of what these things are - ANY project of self-improvement based around seduction is irretrievably interwoven with the short term hit and the long-term low.

But the real killer is this. That long term low will hit you. And it will. There is no way out while you strive to be a better seducer of women.

None. Full stop.

Sorry.

A Short Public Service Announcement

2008-05-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

Hey there guys.

Ok, as some of you are aware, I've recently left RSD.

Before I go on to explain the reasons behind this, I think it's important to say that there has not been a 'falling out'. Sorry. No drama. Well, not of that kind, anyway.

Also, anyone looking at the RSD forum will notice that my archive has been deleted. This is because I personally requested it's deletion, and I would like to thank Tyler and the guys for doing that for me. They didn't have to and make the waves associated with it, but they did and I thank them for that.

To quote from the email I sent to Tyler asking for him to do this:

" A lot of the stuff I've advised guys to do and a lot of the ways I've
told guys to think are going to lead them into very dark places. It's
something I wasn't prepared to admit while I was still in RSD, but
it's abundantly clear to me now that I've been misusing my gifts as a
writer and a thinker to glorify myself at the expense of what's really
good for the people who trust me and listen to me. "

And that's the truth, guys.

Ok, the reason I left RSD is this. I am done with seduction. I really am. I don't think that there's a future there for me, and I don't think it's what I should be doing. Recently I've been feeling like the darkness inherent in that path is too much for me to take, to handle, or to survive.

There is nothing more seductive than the seduction community. It really, really got under my skin. It really, really went to my head. And the blunt truth is that the deeper I got into it, the more I realised that the vision of the 'happy seducer' that we all cherish and strive for is, I believe, a fiction.

Now, RSD is very open about this. Tyler has said on several occasions that it is in sorting out your life that you sort out your love life, and Jeffy has spoken live in many instances on the fact that seduction will not and cannot 'save' you.

Before I go on, I would like to state that I believe that RSD represents the very best of the community, not simply in their ability to build your confidence and success with women but also in terms of their integrity as men.

However, I do not believe that the mission to 'get good with women' is one which is emotionally sustainable nor ultimately healthy. It is good inasmuch as it provides a focal point for self-improvement, but I feel that there is a fundamental contradiction between detaching yourself from ego, self-worship and pride by embarking on a campaign of short-term superficial physical relationships with strangers.

This is a personal opinion which I have reached myself after extensive testing. I do not want it to be true. I wish that I could believe that there is redemption in charisma, in sex and in the glory of owning a club but the truth is that I have climbed to the top of that mountain and found nothing there but a cliff-face.

This is not a condemnation of any of the guys at RSD, who I still consider my friends. They are a superb group of men, deeply committed to helping everyone they come into contact with. I have accompanied them on several bootcamps and was consistently blown away by the compassion, genius and dedication of the instructor staff.

Also, I am especially happy that I was involved in the launch of Tyler's Blueprint, which is an amazing work - a true piece of modern philosophy from a true philosopher.

Nonetheless, I am glad that I have left the community, and I do not regret my decision to leave RSD. However, I still have a deep love and respect for the guys I worked with, and I will miss them all. With the potential exception of Jeffy. He's a dick. Kidding. Love you Jeff.

;p

So that's all I've got to say for now. It was one hell of a ride, guys.

Oh, and stay tuned to the blog. I will continue to update. And you're not going to want to miss this.

Ever Yours

Ciaran

Amazing Sermon

2008-05-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

This is a sermon from the Pastor of Destiny Church, Edinburgh. His name's Pete, and I'm humbled to say that he's a friend of mine.

Check it, it's incredible.

http://www.destinyedinburgh.com/Sermons/Good_friends_-_now_you_are_ready_for_life.aspx

Transmuting Fear Into Nimbus

2008-05-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Hey guys - response to a comment on one of my posts got out of hand so I decided to post it as a main blog post. I'm such a scamp.

Basically, the poster asked

"If you fear a woman, and fear rejection from a woman, then you have essentially allowed a woman to dictate what you need to fear or not."

I guess my point wasn't really about women, but the fact that fear entrenches itself in things. This isn't something you allow or don't allow - you can't stop it. Fear creeps in. And when it creeps in it builds fortresses for itself wherever it can. Fortresses of thought, of reason, of what you experience as insecurity.

One of the things it entrenches itself in, and the reasons for this are no doubt complex, is in trying to attract someone of the opposite sex.

I guess what I'd say is that it's not really a case of 'allowing' women to scare you, more admitting the fact that they already do.

If it were just a case of 'not allowing' the fear, guys would be having a lot more sex than they are. It's not a case of allowing or not allowing as I see it - the fact is that when you rock up to a honey you've never met, that calls out a lot of insecurities into the light of day. A lot of things you'd never even think you're subject to.

This gives you an opportunity to call out the deep structures of the 'ego,' and bring them from your subconscious into your conscious mind.

It doesn't need to be about girls either, nor is it necessarily gendered. The crucible can be any situation that is sufficiently intense. A high-octane sales role, for instance, would have similar effects.

The main problem with these high-octane situations is that the extreme levels of confidence and internal unity which they give you access to can lead to intense arrogance. The guy who hits on a lot of chicks and so calls out his insecurities, or the guy who takes a high-octane sales role treads a hard and brutal path, but it will get him powerful results.

The problem is that it is extremely easy to get lost in either the sex or the money respectively, and in doing so to lose touch with the highest part of yourself.

Perhaps this is inevitable, and if it is I would not be surprised. There is something inherently Faustian about both the 'seduction community' and the kind of high-pressure work environments I'm talking about.

At the same time, I cannot help thinking back to the power that I unleashed in myself. The purity of it, the clarity of thought it gave me.

I go back to what I posted earlier in the blog, in Zen/Nimbus Fusion.

The first time I enjoyed sustained access to the state of Nimbus I went in blind, just looking for the best way to pull chicks and accidentally stumbling across a higher state of consciousness, of radiant beauty and power, of total clarity of thought and expression.

The hubris was what pulled me down - and the truth is that this is not my own isolated case. The problem of hubris is intimately connected with the phenomenon of Nimbus, whether that Nimbus is triggered by 'pick up' or by your abilities as a rock-star, or by your ability as a salesman, or by your ability as a politician or whatever.

And yet, throughout history there have been those isolated cases of people who have ignited Nimbus and retained humility. Sort of got the Nimbus, but didn't lose their shit. Saints, for instance. And Gandhi. Moses. Christ. Buddha.

Point is, there's something here, and I don't know if it's just madness to look at it, and I don't know if you can purposefully ignite it without destroying yourself in the process.

Maybe you can't. Maybe it's arrogance even to try. Sometimes I'm reminded of all those Greek legends of the heroes who tried to climb Olympus. Perseus - ended up dead. Prometheus ended up in eternal torment.

These are not idle cautionary tales, these are deep truths about the way of things.

But if a pure Nimbus divorced from any sense of personal accomplishment or sense of self - if such a thing could be mapped, could be discovered, then such a thing could be industrialized.

This is madness, I know it, but if you had felt the giddy brilliance, the total power and clarity of a human mind in a state of complete unleashed flow, you would know as I do that the prize here is no less than a fire that could burn this world to the ground... or save it.

Eckhart Tolle holds a lot of the keys to achieving a state of genuine humility. His work is invaluable, but I feel that while it is potent beyond measure, there are intractable things in this world, deep darknesses that only Nimbus can penetrate.

The difference I think is between stepping back from the world and punching right through the centre.

But before this can be done, that ego, that vast fiction of you (and me) must be undone.

And the quickest way to do that is to enter the crucible - and listen to Tolle as a debrief.

The reason that's such a potent combo by the way is that going out hitting on chicks will rile your ego up like a crazy thing. When you listen to Tolle later (either when you get home if you haven't pulled or the next day if you have) he's not talking in the abstract. His insights will hit the structure of your ego like wrecking balls, because the structure of your ego is exposed.

This will allow you (I hope) to make rapid progress toward a clean kind of Nimbus (and by that I mean a humble Nimbus) that is unbelievably powerful but that will not lead you to the "Icarus-like" destruction that's so common in the 'community' - and in life.

You see, what we're dealing with here is the eternal question of whether or not a man can achieve vast sums of power without fucking himself up doing it.

I think it's possible - but maybe that's because I just refuse to give up hope that it is. If it's not, and life is really no more than the Augustinian story of "Shut up and keep your head down, or God will shoot it off" then, shucks, I just don't want to be part of that world.

Getting a bit sentimental now - but my point remains. Find where the fear is entrenched. Meet it, then hold yourself in that place, do what you can, express yourself as best you can, and when it hurts, use Eckhart Tolle to transform that pain into insight that will drive you further and further into a state of selfless purity and genuine power.

That's of course if you're doing it with pickup. I think that there might be several other ways to make this happen, several different ways to find a crucible that burns at your ego and exposes it for you to transmute into Nimbus.

I mentioned sales jobs, but really anything that places your personality on the line in a major way with no defences would do the trick. Anything that requires continual courage and tests your humanity.

Either that or you could stay at home and watch Power Rangers.

I prefer the green one.

The Howling

2008-05-05T09:57:00.001-07:00

The howling will take you.

It is the justice of the cliff face, as unforgiving as cruel gravity and as jagged as a granite crag.

The howling waits. It is you at your most vicious, and it is easily provoked.

You see, your insecurity is not a weak or toothless creature. It is the sum total of all your silenced rage, of all the times you bit your tongue and muttered darkly. It is that part of you where the venom goes, where the knives are, where that vicious part of you lurks that would butcher a child just to see a mother cry.

It is the howling, and there is one thing that it cannot stomach.

And the crazy thing is that it is difficult to see the trigger, for once the howling descends upon you, you are torn limb from emotional limb. It will reduce everything in it's path to ash - and why?

Because it is the unleashed power of your unrequited hatred.

Now imagine if you unleash that hatred at someone else. Imagine how it would feel to unleash your hatred on someone - someone you know well.

You could tear them to shreds physically - or you could really hurt them. You could attack those wounds most deep and raw, those deep wounds that will collapse their personality like a house of cards into self-hate and despair.

But how much can you ever really know a person?

The truth is that there are secret wounds that lie buried behind the eyes of every single one of us, wounds so deep and dark that we would never speak of them to others.

What if you knew those wounds?

How fast could you reduce a man to suicidal despair if you knew those secret wounds that would grant you the ability to shatter him with a word?

Seconds.

The answer is seconds.

But you see, there is only one person in the whole world who knows those secret wounds in you, and that, my friend, is you.

And that is why you are the most deadly and savage threat you can or will ever face.

And the thing is, you do not need to go into fully fledged hatred for yourself in order for you to unleash the howling upon yourself.

All you need to do is lose your self-respect for just one second.

And in that second, you are already screaming because the howling will rise in you with the speed and intensity of the shriek of the feedback from a burning Stratocaster.

All it takes is for you to lose your self-respect for one moment, and you're already on your knees begging for the pain to stop.

My point is simple.

The howling cannot be controlled. It cannot even be slowed. All you can do is take the damage, then in it's wake pick up the pieces of what was once your personality and piece them together in some way that seems to work.

The howling is why so many live on their knees - because they compromise on how they allow themselves to be treated in life, and so they are torn to shreds in the holocaust of self-hate that leaves nothing but wreckage in it's wake.

You have to maintain your self-respect.

Always.

It is non-negotiable.

It is, as they say in Latin, a 'sine qua non'.

If you don't have it, the howling will take from you all that you do have and leave your vaunted dreams a mass of livid shards rattling between your ears awaiting your faltering attempts to rebuild some kind of personality.

And what is self-respect?

Self-respect is the knowledge that there is nothing in this world, no money, no woman, no man, no messiah, no message, no ideology, no hope, no plan, no crusade, no mission, no quest, no caveat, no quandary, no thing in all of the universe that is worth polluting the integrity of your genuine self for.

Now be warned lest you hide away behind a tantrum. This is not a cop-out for avoiding the shit you need to face to achieve your true potential. That shit is huge, and must be faced.

Remember - you can lie to yourself all you want to. The howling doesn't care about your lies. It is the part of you that sees how weak you are. It is the scourge, the terrible scourge that you wield upon yourself with chilling and callous rage, rendering your excuses and rationalizations as nothing.

There will be disrespect, and darkness and tests and pain to be taken. But have the courage to face it head on, and do not let it slide inside you like a snake.

The truth is that your 'self' such as it is, is infinite and beautiful like the microscopic complexity of a butterfly's wing or a strand of DNA. It is as powerful and unstoppable as a glacier or a tsunami. It is as deep and as creative as the universe itself because in truth, it is the universe itself.

There is nothing on this earth, nothing that can be named no matter how magnificent or majestic, no matter how phenomenal or unique, no matter how precious or wonderful - nothing that is worth compromising the sanctity of that radiant purity.

The funny thing is this - you can't fake this. If something truly owns you, that same thing will destroy you.

Nothing can stop it. You cannot dodge this one. It is the way of things.

If you're not prepared to walk away from something you love, that thing you love will gut you like a fish, because no matter how wonderful it is, it will overstep the boundary you never set, and when it does, the howling will come.

And once it comes, you're naught but ash, and that thing you love will look at you with the contempt you so richly deserve. And then it, or he or she or they will leave you broken.

You may recognise the pattern from those failed relationships with the women or the men you loved too much. I advance that it is a pattern that holds through all your life, through all the things you love.

So how to stop the howling from destroying you, while still holding fast to the things that you love?

It is simple, but pay attention, because simple and easy are very different things.

Everything pushes. Everything.

I remember being in love twice in my life and on both occasions, she pushed at the boundaries. On both occasions I had set none, and on both occasions I failed the test. Because I let myself be belittled, I lost self-respect for myself, just for an instant. And in that instant, the howling came and crippled me, and although a woman can love a man with a crippled body, no woman can love a crippled soul, whining and abject, begging for the least scraps of affection to rain meaning upon the desert I had reduced myself to.

These were not evil women. They were excellent women, the two best that I have yet encountered.

They did not 'compromise my self-respect' by pushing me beyond those boundaries. I did, by setting none.

And what is a boundary?

Is it the moment you open a can of anger? Is it the moment where you unleash the howling upon them? Or storm off in a tantrum? Or even shout "No! NO MORE!"

Is it?

No.

No.

Never.

It is, simply, the moment where you call the bluff.

Where you let her or him or them know they a limit exists in you, and that the limit has been reached, and beyond that limit, there is reality, and the justice of the cliff face. That they stand at the brink and there is nowhere left for them to push you.

That is it. No more, no less.

And how do you call that bluff?

That's simple.

You just look. You just look deep into the eyes in a moment that has no anger and no resentment and chills to the marrow. That gaze that drains all the joking and all the fun from the situation and makes it clear that there is no room left for friendship. That this is the moment where they throw down, walk away or silence themselves and show respect.

Essentially, you hold their gaze and bring forth, into your eyes, the coldest and most chilling part of you. That part of you where all light dies. That part of you they need only glimpse for the briefest of moments to know that they should bite their tongue and watch their step around you from now on in.

You do not unleash the howling.

You leash the howling.

Then you bring the howling in a moment of total clarity where your eyes lock. It needs last but the briefest of moments. It is pure unspoken communication, and all the more powerful for it, because it cannot be faked.

And then, as soon as you see the glee and cockiness die in their eyes, you slide the howling back into the shadows and bring back the sunshine.

The howling is not a toy. It is the darkest part of you, the part of humanity you read about in the news when you read of a massacre.

But in order to live as a human should, you must maintain self-respect, because respect is the only armour the howling cannot penetrate. Without your self-respect, you are not just lost. You are damned. Damned and burning.

The howling is your greatest enemy, but while you retain your self-respect it is the one guardian that no-one will challenge.

Oh, and one other thing.

The sooner you nip shit in the bud, the smaller the bluffs you'll have to call and the easier things will be. If you let things grow out of control, the bluff you will have to call can, and may well end the relationship, or whatever it is that has taken your heart.

And when it ends, it may well take your heart with it.

But as far as I see it, that's the price you pay for the cowardice you showed in letting it get to that point. And when we are talking about the inescapable natural justice that runs through the affairs of men, my life has taught me that you are best paying in pain up front.

Hiding from what you know you have to do is cowardice, and cowardice is something you will not accept in yourself. As soon as you see cowardice in yourself, you will lose your self-respect, and your armour with it. And we all know what is waiting for you then.

I have two questions for you.

My first is this - how much bullshit are you prepared to swallow to achieve the thing you want the most, be it a relationship or a mission or a role or anything in all the world?

My second is this - how will you ever respect yourself enough to sustain your strength through the shit you'll need to face if you are the kind of person who swallows bullshit?

Your self-respect is the only armour you can have or will ever have against the most brutal and sadistic enemy you'll ever face - an enemy who can reduce you to a quivering chunk of ruined and bleeding flesh in moments.

But then, of course, you know who I'm talking about.

You are who I'm talking about.

Icebergs And Battlefields

2008-05-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

So here's my theory.

It's all about icebergs and battlefields. I think you're going to like it.

The thing is this, I don't think it's stillness. I think it's love.

And not love in the Hollywood sense. Not love in the brotherly sense, nor in the charitable sense. I'm talking about the deep stuff, the deep love. The swirling substrate of reality itself.

God is love, the man said. And the one who lives in love, lives in God, allegedly. And God lives in him, I have heard.

Very well.

It's all love. There is no stillness, but only flowing love. Deep love, mind you, not some pansy ass bullshit.

That Nimbus that we speak of, it is not authority, nor is it presence, nor is it anything other than the pure love of humanity, the love of God, that flows through us - or that we obscure.

Whatever love flows through (deep love, mind you) is reified and filled with meaning and purpose. Anything filled with love becomes powerful and compelling, beautiful and - to us who are locked in the frozen wastes of hell - an end in and of itself.

Hence many things, not least the preoccupation with sex which fills the mind of many a man. It is not the sex he seeks so much as the glory, the meaning and the fulfillment that comes from that moment where a beautiful woman surrenders beneath his touch.

But you see it is the hunger for love that drives us to cast this world in a lens of division, to demonise men and manners, climates, councils, governments - and ourselves not least - because in demonising we give ourselves something more precious than we can each of us imagine.

We give ourselves the opportunity prove our goodness, our love and our meaning (for each of these is the same) by instigating carnage upon those whom we have arbitrarily decided to hate.

I was once so naive as to believe that the simple understanding of this process could set us free from hell.

Of course, the truth is that the darkness, the division, the fiction and the hate (for each of these is likewise the same) has been driven by you and I deep into ourselves. Deep down. Down beyond forgetting into a place where we cannot even remember the lies we have convinced ourselves are real.

What now?

Do we plunge through Zen, and meditation and prayer to shine a light into those dark places?

Of course we do, if we want to live.

But as my life continues I am increasingly of the mind that this is not enough.

There needs be some more proactive approach.

And the more I see, the more I am convinced of the fact that peace can be waged, just as war can be.

Where is your crucible? That is the point of all this, you see. That in this strange pursuit of women, we have discovered something that runs much deeper. That the light of consciousness can only dissolve those parts of you that are visible above the surface. Those deep, dark feelings that cut you inside will remain hidden in shadows forever.

Unless...

Unless....

Unless you call them out. Unless you place yourself into positions that drag your insecurities screaming and biting and tearing and shrieking into the light of day where they can die, and be born again as light - as you must be.

Find it. Find your crucible.

And why?

Because we are each one of us falling through infinity, and if we do not learn to fly, then we will fall forever.

The darkness in each of us is like an iceberg, and we cannot dissolve it by dissolving only the parts that we can see.

And mediation in stillness allows those deep pains, those deep wounds and those deep divisions in us to creep into the shadows. The Zen of the mountaintop, or the garden, or the lotus will dissolve those parts of you which are still jagged and painful on a mountaintop, or in a garden, or when contemplating a lotus.

And what you will achieve is peace and presence.

But what if you step into the fire, into the battlefield? The Zen of the battlefield can and will dissolve those parts of you which are fearful on a battlefield. Right deep down, down to the core.

And what you will achieve... has yet to be seen.

But you will understand, in time.

Another Gem From The Nation

2008-04-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

This time by a goodly fellow named Cyrus.

"When you realize that the moment is “the only thing that ever exists,” you’re like “nice… you can shut up now, hippy.” But thinking of it in this way totally changed my perspective: the moment is the only thing that you can ever CONTROL. When you want to be awesome, and you want to live fully, and experience everything to the greatest extent, and you want to be who you want to be… the only way you can do this is by BEING IN THE MOMENT COMPLETELY, ALL THE TIME. If you only do this socially and not by yourself, you’ll feel like a lie. You have to live in this way. That’s how you get in touch with your higher self."

Do You Really Want Pity?

2008-04-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

To our deepest core, our cells will reward us for driving ourselves beyond the limits of all endurance.

Do you really want pity?

When you whine - do you really want pity?

THINK.

That whining voice, that complaining voice that reminds you of all your circumstances and all the things that hold you back - WOULD YOU REALLY WANT THAT VOICE ANSWERED?

Even if life responded in full to that voice, what would it give you?

It would comfort you. Comfort you, and pity you.

Do you really want pity?

Honestly, do you?

What's the best thing that whining could get you? Comfort and pity!

Do you want either!?

Can you not think of anything greater than comfort, or anything better than pity?

Comfort? Pity?

What is that whining voice asking for other than your mother to pick you up and hug you because you grazed your knee!

Are you a child!?

Pity?

Comfort?

Glory and AWE!

Fuck your comfort! I want GLORY!

Fuck your pity! I want your AWE!

You will stand in awe of me one day, looking at me shocked and just saying "how in the living fuck have you done what you've done?"

As children we hungered for pity and comfort.

As adults we still do.

We need to remind ourself that pity and comfort are of no use to us.

I do not want comfort. I want glory.

And I will never, ever need pity, no matter how much damage I have taken, no matter how wronged I have been or am being, no matter how much shit I've gone through or am going through or face in my future.

No pity, not from you. Not from anyone.

I have no use for your pity. And I have no use for your approval.

Glory. Awe.

Everything else is irrelevant.

PAIN Is The Way

2008-04-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

This is a post pulled from RSD Nation by a guy called Sanik. Thought I'd share.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A NATURAL??

FIRST: The Paradox of the paradox, WITHIN the paradox.

At first it doesnt seem to make sense, whats the chasm between a doofus and pimp, between a guy whos stifled and cant speak his mind and a guy who just can let loose and flow with the moment.

Its been said, Hes stuck in his head.He just doesnt know what to sayHe doesnt have an idea of who he is.Doesnt know his boundariesHe lacks the center.

What shapes and molds a boy into a man? I think thats a more important question rather then the nerd into the natural.

ITS PAIN.

PAIN, THE SCARS OF EXPERIENCE. The tissue becomes stronger, you become stronger. you evolve.

PAIN.

Pain is the chisel and the hammer on the stone of the self. PAIN if what defines strength. A man is the measure of how much pain he endures and pushes past.

THUS I EVOLVE.

All growth is preceded by and accomplished by great deals of what? say it with me... PAIN, SUFFERING, FRUSTRATION, RESISTANCE, OBSTACLES.

What does a man do, as all the forces of the world push against him, what does a man do when all that stands in his way is pain. He accepts its challenge, he accepts its ravaging impact.

Pain is the great teacher, its a teacher that I have resisted for a long time, in the pursuit of instant gratification and pleasure. In my case its taken a lot of looping my thoughts over the same thing again and again.

its taken me hanging out in different sub cultures, getting into spirituality and meditation but even the so called spiritualists a great deal of them are avoiding pain.

The difference between a natural and someone who is always frustrated is because they are not approaching life as what it is, A GREAT DEAL OF PAIN, OBSTACLES TO BE OVERCOME and CHALLENGE.

So they accept the lesser pain, and build upon that the rationalizations and the judgements to prove themselves right.

But like a mentor told me the best way to approach life is HEAD ON and by approaching life head on and moving with its flow DESPITE the obstacles you become in alignment with the world. And as soon as you become alignment with the world you become in alignment with yourself and vice versa

For what is the world with you the experiencer? Does the world exist independent of you and your mind? does it have any realness besides the reality of the filters of your perceptions, your beliefs and labels, your ways of holding up your world. Think carefully about this and you will know it to be so that you are the creator of your reality PERIOD.

The centeredness and the trust of knowing yourself is the best the you could strive for and achieve, that of course on side with all worldly goals and accomplishments but it is the center, the core of yourself, the truth that you come to by only going deeper into yourself that you find your true nature.

Its the pushing through of pain, blasting through each concentric ring until you get to the center of the self, which is the place where the moment happens, the place where you observe and are detached YET completely involved in the motions of the world.

As that comes upon your, your going to realize.. as the mind is lazy, as the body is lazy so your going to get to start doing athletics because that would be in alignment with your goals of becoming a better man...

Take me for example, im back in Kung Fu now 5 days a week, as a hobby I have taken up FREE RUNNING, have you ever seen those guys that jump from roof to roof and scale fences, its the art of conquering obstacles in your enviornment, its a very philisophical sport!

Im getting stronger, more awake, feeling more centered, I dont chase woman now, woman appear out of thin air!! they want to be with you, not because of the clever things you say or whatever bullshit you think but because of your INHERENT STRENGTH OF MASCULINITY.

The power that comes to you of onlly BEING A MAN and what happens you BE A MAN. YOU BECOME [I]THE MAN[/I]

So in its utterlly naked simplicity what I have learned and come to as this

You have to BECOME THE CHANGE, TO HAVE MADE THE CHANGE, TO BE THAT CHANGE.

Their is no other way but the gateway of pain and how it will sculpt you and your mind, how your attitudes will change, do you think I learned about pick up from PURE PLEASURE.
NO IT FUCKING SUCKED SO HARD. The frustration at times was unbelievable yet at the same time completely achievable.

The key is knowing that its up to you and because its up to you, you have to know that you can do it, that you can face the pain head on and face it again and again except pain never goes away, it only becomes stronger but in the face of pain you push against it even though pain will ultimatly destroy you, its nature will consume you because PAIN is just the hand of death but through pain your will recognize the truth of your life. The truth of the beauty of yourself and of your gift of being a man in this world

Im beginning to think that we can accomplish anything!! CARPE DIEM!!!!

The Crucible

2008-04-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

This is chaos, and fire, and hell.

This is where you find it, where you find the darkness that's been lurking beneath the surface for all your life.

This is the crucible where all lies die.

For you can lie to yourself when you're sitting in front of your computer. You can lie to yourself when you're on your Xbox 360 destroying fictional aliens with a fictional gun. You can believe that you're the man, that you're the hero. And it is a happy fiction.

But out there, out in the field, you have nothing to hide behind. You have you, the club, and the truth.

One of the things that really fires me up and drives me to get this shit handled is the truth that I am nowhere near as powerful as I tell myself I am.

That for everything I've done, and for everything I'm doing, there is something about a beautiful woman that strips me down to that place we each of us know so well. That place that some call insecurity, and some call fear.

How lucky are we to have a war! To have a battleground and an arena that each of us, as men can stand inside and fight!

How blessed are we to find that place a hundred times a day - that two feet of space in front of beauty, that moment that destroys us.

That is where we each belong. In that moment, there is truth. We face it with the moral simplicity of a soldier, and we are blessed for that.

And the glory is not in the prize, although the prize is beyond compare.

The glory is in that moment where we walk unshielded into that crucible and hold inside it until it feels as if our hearts would break.

The glory is in that moment of defiance, and not defiance of injustice, and not defiance of loneliness - but in defiance of despair.

In defiance of despair we shine like the sun.

When we step up and into that crucible, into the place where all lies die we find out, perhaps for the first time, who we really, really are.

And we are shocked by that weakness.

And we are moved by it.

And we are driven by it.

And there is the glory, that one moment where you stand alone before all your fears, and all your fears rain down upon you, and you hold and throw whatever you've got against it. And whatever you've got fails.

And you break.

And you hate yourself.

And somewhere, as you fall, some part of you reaches out and grabs a hold of something...

And you stand again. And you walk back, once more into the crucible because that is where you forge a self that is stronger than steel, harder than diamond and smoother than silk.

If you want to know how strong you are, the following words will give you a taste. They were spoken by the leader of a bankrupt nation with defeated armies, a nation that had watched it's allies crumble like ashes before the greatest military power that had ever arisen on the earth.

"We shall go on to the end.

We shall fight in France.

We shall fight on the seas and oceans.

We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air.

We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall fight in the hills.

We shall never surrender."

Make no mistake about it, this will tear your heart in a thousand ways. You will meet women you would die for, and women you would kill for. You will see glory that you never dreamed of, and see whole vistas of humiliation that you never knew could even exist.

And if you hold fast through all the chaos, and do not compromise who you are, no matter what the temptation to cheat in this way or that... IF YOU HOLD YOUR INTEGRITY....

Then you will walk on this earth like a juggernaut of incorruptible power.

And you will blaze like a beacon of holy light.

A beacon that fuses true goodness with true power.

Take yourself with you on this journey.

Take those parts of you that say "I will not sleep with a girl who's not 100% into me."

Take those parts of you that say "I will not stoop to stealing a woman off another man, because I do not need to stoop - and I will never need to stoop again."

Take those parts of you that say "I will never compromise on what I know is right."

Do not lose that part of you that still believes in the greatness and the goodness of man - and of yourself.

Do not cheat yourself on this. Be the man you know you are - have the principles you already have...

But place those principles... and yourself... into the crucible. Burn.

Burn.

Forge.

And blaze.

And if you have the strength within you, if you can find it somewhere inside, then you - yes, YOU - can be the light that shines in the darkness.

You can BE the proof that man does not need to compromise in order to succeed.

A man is nothing if left unforged.

I Will Not Break Today

2008-03-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

No more horror. No more pain.

That is the cry of this planet. The earth itself sings out for an end to the nightmares, and a gateway to the better place that each of us secretly know is inches from us.

We have two options.

We can wait for a saviour, and risk the fact that he will not come before our time is spent.

Or we can be the saviour, and risk the fact that we may not be strong enough to face the horror and survive.

The one way risks ignominy. The second risks hell.

And that is where the only dignity lies.

Not in spires or cathedrals.

Not in hope, and not in safety.

Only in fire are we sure that we are not compromising the highest part of us.

Only when we stare despair full in the face do we fulfill our better natures.

It is going to take a pure, consistent and extreme expression of all the things that are highest and best in humanity to pull us up and out of the shit we're in.

So then let us be pure. Let us be consistent, and let us be extreme.

That fear that claws at you. It likes to hide in context.

I am fear of failure, it says.

I am fear of rejection, or fear of loss.

No.

It is not fear of failure.

It is not fear of rejection.

It is not fear of loss.

It is just fear.

Plain.

Simple.

Fear.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Ha! You think you have phobias?

You think you are afraid of commitment or connection?

Bullshit.

Fear is a discrete phenomenon.

It is a thing in and of itself.

It manifests.

It manifests as any number of things.

But in the end, it is only fear.

The chaos, the horror, the loss and the waste that climbs up inside you whenever it can.

Fuck fear.

Fuck it till it's dead.

Tear that shit down. Place yourself in it's bastions, in those places where it hold you most.

Place yourself there, and fight.

Fight like a psychopath.

Fight like a king.

Fight like a warrior poet until you've banished it forever.

The places it hold you are the places you meet it.

Meet it.

Destroy it.

Destroy it with courage, destroy it with flame, destroy it with that one inch of you that refuses ever to give up because 'fuck you' is why.

Because if you want me, God, you can come down and get me.

Because if you want to break me, here I am.

Because there is something in me, always, that stands on the brink of surrender and always says NO.

No.

Not today.

I will not break today.

I will beat you, no matter what the cost, no matter what the terror, or the humiliation or the shame.

I will take you to pieces because I am stronger than you for one simple reason.

I choose to be.

I choose to be stronger than you.

And although I may not have the strength of thousands, I have the strength of one.

And that strength extends exactly one inch beyond yours, fear.

I will always beat you.

Because I will always throw myself at you, and I will endure for one more second than you can.

I will say yes just one more time than you can say no.

And in that simplicity, I am free.

In that moment, you cannot touch me.

You're already dead.

You just don't know it yet.

But worry not, my friend.

You'll find out soon enough.

Awesome Article On Meditation, Humanity And Life

2008-03-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1

Meditation: Why Bother?

Meditation is not easy. It takes time and it takes energy. It also takes grit, determination and discipline. It requires a host of personal qualities which we normally regard as unpleasant and which we like to avoid whenever possible. We can sum it all up in the American word 'gumption'. Meditation takes 'gumption'. It is certainly a great deal easier just to kick back and watch television. So why bother? Why waste all that time and energy when you could be out enjoying yourself? Why bother? Simple. Because you are human. And just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it. All of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue, you sit up, take stock, and realize your actual situation in life.

There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending your whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You manage to make ends meed somehow and look OK from the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything caving in on you, you keep those to yourself. You are a mess. And you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under all that you just know there has got be some other way to live, some better way to look at the world, some way to touch life more fully. You click into it by chance now and then. You get a good job. You fall in love. You win the game. and for a while, things are different. Life takes on a richness and clarity that makes all the bad times and humdrum fade away. The whole texture of your experience changes and you say to yourself, "OK, now I've made it; now I will be happy". But then that fades, too, like smoke in the wind. You are left with just a memory. That and a vague awareness that something is wrong.

But there is really another whole realm of depth and sensitivity available in life, somehow, you are just not seeing it. You wind up feeling cut off. You feel insulated from the sweetness of experience by some sort of sensory cotton. You are not really touching life. You are not making it again. And then even that vague awareness fades away, and you are back to the same old reality. The world looks like the usual foul place, which is boring at best. It is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights.

So what is wrong with you? Are you a freak? No. You are just human. And you suffer from the same malady that infects every human being. It is a monster in side all of us, and it has many arms: Chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness. Many, many arms. None of us is entirely free from it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head saying, "Not good enough yet. Got to have more. Got to make it better. Got to be better." It is a monster, a monster that manifests everywhere in subtle forms.

Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand. Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth from people that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm, or team spirit. Booing, cat-calls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are the people trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering, discontent and stress.

Life seems to be a perpetual struggle, some enormous effort against staggering odds. And what is our solution to all this dissatisfaction? We get stuck in the ' If only' syndrome. If only I had more money, then I would be happy. If only I can find somebody who really loves me, if only I can lose 20 pounds, if only I had a color TV, Jacuzzi, and curly hair, and on and on forever. So where does all this junk come from and more important, what can we do about it? It comes from the conditions of our own minds. It is deep, subtle and pervasive set of mental habits, a Gordian knot which we have built up bit by bit and we can unravel just the same way, one piece at a time. We can tune up our awareness, dredge up each separate piece and bring it out into the light. We can make the unconscious conscious, slowly, one piece at a time.

The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in you head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments ever the same.

There is not a thing wrong with this. It is the nature of the universe. But human culture has taught u some odd responses to this endless flowing. We categorize experiences. We try to stick each perception, every mental change in this endless flow into one of three mental pigeon holes. It is good, or it is bad, or it is neutral. Then, according to which box we stick it in, we perceive with a set of fixed habitual mental responses. If a particular perception has been labeled 'good', then we try to freeze time right there. We grab onto that particular thought, we fondle it, we hold it, we try to keep it from escaping. When that does not work, we go all-out in an effort to repeat the experience which caused that thought. Let us call this mental habit 'grasping'.

Over on the other side of the mind lies the box labeled 'bad'. When we perceive something 'bad', we try to push it away. We try to deny it, reject it, get rid of it any way we can. We fight against our own experience. We run from pieces of ourselves. Let us call this mental habit 'rejecting'. Between these two reactions lies the neutral box. Here we place the experiences which are neither good nor bad. They are tepid, neutral, uninteresting and boring. We pack experience away in the neutral box so that we can ignore it and thus return jour attention to where the action is, namely our endless round of desire and aversion. This category of experience gets robbed of its fair share of our attention. Let us call this mental habit 'ignoring'. The direct result of all this lunacy is a perpetual treadmill race to nowhere, endlessly pounding after pleasure, endlessly fleeing from pain, endlessly ignoring 90 percent of our experience. Than wondering why life tastes so flat. In the final analysis, it's a system that does not work.

No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail. No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you. And in between those times, life is so boring you could scream. Our minds are full of opinions and criticisms. We have built walls all around ourselves and we are trapped with the prison of our own lies and dislikes. We suffer.

Suffering is big word in Buddhist thought. It is a key term and it should be thoroughly understood. The Pali word is 'dukkha', and it does not just mean the agony of the body. It means the deep, subtle sense of unsatisfactoriness which is a part of every mental treadmill. The essence of life is suffering, said the Buddha. At first glance this seems exceedingly morbid and pessimistic. It even seems untrue. After all, there are plenty of times when we are happy. Aren't there? No, there are not. It just seems that way. Take any moment when you feel really fulfilled and examine it closely. Down under the joy, you will find that subtle, all-pervasive undercurrent of tension, that no matter how great the moment is, it is going to end. No matter how much you just gained, you are either going to lose some of it or spend the rest of your days guarding what you have got and scheming how to get more. And in the end, you are going to die. In the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory.

Sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it? Luckily it's not; not at all. It only sounds bleak when you view it from the level of ordinary mental perspective, the very level at which the treadmill mechanism operates. Down under that level lies another whole perspective, a completely different way to look at the universe. It is a level of functioning where the mind does not try to freeze time, where we do not grasp onto our experience as it flows by, where we do not try to block things out and ignore them. It is a level of experience beyond good and bad, beyond pleasure and pain. It is a lovely way to perceive the world, and it is a learnable skill. It is not easy, but is learnable.

Happiness and peace. Those are really the prime issues in human existence. That is what all of us are seeking. This often is a bit hard to see because we cover up those basic goals with layers of surface objectives. We want food, we want money, we want sex, possessions and respect. We even say to ourselves that the idea of 'happiness' is too abstract: "Look, I am practical. Just give me enough money and I will buy all the happiness I need". Unfortunately, this is an attitude that does not work. Examine each of these goals and you will find they are superficial. You want food. Why? Because I am hungry. So you are hungry, so what? Well if I eat, I won't be hungry and then I'll feel good. Ah ha! Feel good! Now there is a real item. What we really seek is not the surface goals. They are just means to an end. What we are really after is the feeling of relief that comes when the drive is satisfied. Relief, relaxation and an end to the tension. Peace, happiness, no more yearning.

So what is this happiness? For most of us, the perfect happiness would mean getting everything we wanted, being in control of everything, playing Caesar, making the whole world dance a jig according to our every whim. Once again, it does not work that way. Take a look at the people in history who have actually held this ultimate power. These were not happy people. Most assuredly they were not men at peace with themselves. Why? Because they were driven to control the world totally and absolutely and they could not. They wanted to control all men and there remained men who refused to be controlled. They could not control the stars. They still got sick. They still had to die.

You can't ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option. You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of this endless cycle of desire and aversion. You can learn to not want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them. This does not mean that you lie down on the road and invite everybody to walk all over you . It means that you continue to live a very normal-looking life, but live from a whole new viewpoint. You do the things that a person must do, but you are free from that obsessive, compulsive drivenness of your own desires. You want something, but you don't need to chase after it. You fear something, but you don't need to stand there quaking in your boots. This sort of mental culture is very difficult. It takes years. But trying to control everything is impossible, and the difficult is preferable to the impossible.

Wait a minute, though. Peace and happiness! Isn't that what civilization is all about? We build skyscrapers and freeways. We have paid vacations, TV sets. We provide free hospitals and sick leaves, Social Security and welfare benefits. All of that is aimed at providing some measure of peace and happiness. Yet the rate of mental illness climbs steadily, and the crime rates rise faster. The streets are crawling with delinquents and unstable individuals. Stick you arms outside the safety of your own door and somebody is very likely to steal your watch! Something is not working. A happy man does not feel driven to kill. We like to think that our society is exploiting every area of human knowledge in order to achieve peace and happiness.

We are just beginning to realize that we have overdeveloped the material aspect of existence at the expense of the deeper emotional and spiritual aspect, and we are paying the price for that error. It is one thing to talk about degeneration of moral and spiritual fiber in America today, and another thing to do something about it. The place to start is within ourselves. Look carefully inside, truly and objectively, and each of us will see moments when "I am the punk" and "I am the crazy". We will learn to see those moments, see them clearly, cleanly and without condemnation, and we will be on our way up and out of being so.

You can't make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes flow naturally. You don't have to force or struggle or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. You just change. It is automatic. But arriving at the initial insight is quite a task. You've got to see who you are and how you are, without illusion, judgement or resistance of any kind. You've got to see your own place in society and your function as a social being. You've got to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual living with other individuals. And you've got to see all of that clearly and as a unit, a single gestalt of interrelationship. It sounds complex, but it often occurs in a single instant. Mental culture through meditation is without rival in helping you achieve this sort of understanding and serene happiness.

The Dhammapada is an ancient Buddhist text which anticipated Freud by thousands of years. It says: "What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now. The consequences of an evil mind will follow you like the cart follows the ox that pulls it. The consequences of a purified mind will follow you like you own shadow. No one can do more for you than your own purified mind-- no parent, no relative, no friend, no one. A well-disciplined mind brings happiness".

Meditation is intended to purify the mind. It cleanses the thought process of what can be called psychic irritants, things like greed, hatred and jealousy, things that keep you snarled up in emotional bondage. It brings the mind to a state of tranquility and awareness, a state of concentration and insight.

In our society, we are great believers in education. We believe that knowledge makes a cultured person civilized. Civilization, however, polishes the person superficially. Subject our noble and sophisticated gentleman to stresses of war or economic collapse, and see what happens. It is one thing to obey the law because you know the penalties and fear the consequences. It is something else entirely to obey the law because you have cleansed yourself from the greed that would make you steal and the hatred that would make you kill. Throw a stone into a stream. The running water would smooth the surface, but the inner part remains unchanged. Take that same stone and place it in the intense fires of a forge, and the whole stone changes inside and outside. It all melts. Civilization changes man on the outside. Meditation softens him within, through and through.

Meditation is called the Great Teacher. It is the cleansing crucible fire that works slowly through understanding. The greater your understanding, the more flexible and tolerant you can be. The greater your understanding, the more compassionate you can be. You become like a perfect parent or an ideal teacher. You are ready to forgive and forget. You feel love towards others because you understand them. And you understand others because you have understood yourself. You have looked deeply inside and seen self illusion and your own human failings. You have seen your own humanity and learned to forgive and to love. When you have learned compassion for yourself, compassion for others is automatic. An accomplished meditator has achieved a profound understanding of life, and he inevitably relates to the world with a deep and uncritical love.

Meditation is a lot like cultivating a new land. To make a field out of a forest, fist you have to clear the trees and pull out the stumps. Then you till the soil and you fertilize it. Then you sow your seed and you harvest your crops. To cultivate your mind, first you have to clear out the various irritants that are in the way, pull them right out by the root so that they won't grow back. Then you fertilize. You pump energy and discipline in the mental soil. Then you sow the seed and you harvest your crops of faith, morality , mindfulness and wisdom.

Faith and morality, by the way, have a special meaning in this context. Buddhism does not advocate faith in the sense of believing something because it is written in a book or attributed to a prophet or taught to you by some authority figure. The meaning here is closer to confidence. It is knowing that something is true because you have seen it work, because you have observed that very thing within yourself. In the same way, morality is not a ritualistic obedience to some exterior, imposed code of behavior.

The purpose of meditation is personal transformation. The you that goes in one side of the meditation experience is not the same you that comes out the other side. It changes your character by a process of sensitization, by making you deeply aware of your own thoughts, word, and deeds. Your arrogance evaporated and your antagonism dries up. Your mind becomes still and calm. And your life smoothes out. Thus meditation properly performed prepares you to meet the ups and down of existence. It reduces your tension, your fear, and your worry. Restlessness recedes and passion moderates. Things begin to fall into place and your life becomes a glide instead of a struggle. All of this happens through understanding.

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion. So is this reason enough to bother? Scarcely. These are just promises on paper. There is only one way you will ever know if meditation is worth the effort. Learn to do it right, and do it. See for yourself.

Chapter 2

What Meditation Isn't

Meditation is a word. You have heard this word before, or you would never have picked up this book. The thinking process operates by association, and all sorts of ideas are associated with the word 'meditation'. Some of them are probably accurate and others are hogwash. Some of them pertain more properly to other systems of meditation and have nothing to do with Vipassana practice. Before we proceed, it behooves us to blast some of the residue out of our own neuronal circuits so that new information can pass unimpeded. Let us start with some of the most obvious stuff.

We are not going to teach you to contemplate your navel or to chant secret syllables. You are not conquering demons or harnessing invisible energies. There are no colored belts given for your performance and you don't have to shave your head or wear a turban. You don't even have to give away all your belongings and move to a monastery. In fact, unless your life is immoral and chaotic, you can probably get started right away and make some sort of progress. Sounds fairly encouraging, wouldn't you say?

There are many, many books on the subject of meditation. Most of them are written from the point of view which lies squarely within one particular religious or philosophical tradition, and many of the authors have not bothered to point this out. They make statements about meditation which sound like general laws, but are actually highly specific procedures exclusive to that particular system of practice. The result is something of a muddle. Worse yet is the panoply of complex theories and interpretations available, all of them at odds with one another. The result is a real mess and an enormous jumble of conflicting opinions accompanied by a mass of extraneous data. This book is specific. We are dealing exclusively with the Vipassana system of meditation. We are going to teach you to watch the functioning of your own mind in a calm and detached manner so you can gain insight into your own behavior. The goal is awareness, an awareness so intense, concentrated and finely tuned that you will be able to pierce the inner workings of reality itself.

There are a number of common misconceptions about meditation. We see them crop up again and again from new students, the same questions over and over. It is best to deal with these things at once, because they are the sort of preconceptions which can block your progress right from the outset. We are going to take these misconceptions one at a time and explode them.

Misconception #1

Meditation is just a relaxation technique

The bugaboo here is the word 'just'. Relaxation is a key component of meditation, but Vipassana-style meditation aims at a much loftier goal. Nevertheless, the statement is essentially true for many other systems of meditation. All meditation procedures stress concentration of the mind, bringing the mind to rest on one item or one area of thought. Do it strongly and thoroughly enough, and you achieve a deep and blissful relaxation which is called Jhana. It is a state of such supreme tranquility that it amounts to rapture. It is a form of pleasure which lies above and beyond anything that can be experienced in the normal state of consciousness. Most systems stop right there. That is the goal, and when you attain that, you simply repeat the experience for the rest of your life. Not so with Vipassana meditation. Vipassana seeks another goal--awareness. Concentration and relaxation are considered necessary concomitants to awareness. They are required precursors, handy tools, and beneficial byproducts. But they are not the goal. The goal is insight. Vipassana meditation is a profound religious practice aimed at nothing less that the purification and transformation of your everyday life. We will deal more thoroughly with the differences between concentration and insight in Chapter 14.

Misconception #2

Meditation means going into a trance

Here again the statement could be applied accurately to certain systems of meditation, but not to Vipassana. Insight meditation is not a form of hypnosis. You are not trying to black out your mind so as to become unconscious. You are not trying to turn yourself into an emotionless vegetable. If anything, the reverse is true. You will become more and more attuned to your own emotional changes. You will learn to know yourself with ever- greater clarity and precision. In learning this technique, certain states do occur which may appear trance-like to the observer. But they are really quite the opposite. In hypnotic trance, the subject is susceptible to control by another party, whereas in deep concentration the meditator remains very much under his own control. The similarity is superficial, and in any case the occurrence of these phenomena is not the point of Vipassana. As we have said, the deep concentration of Jhana is a tool or stepping stone on the route of heightened awareness. Vipassana by definition is the cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. If you find that you are becoming unconscious in meditation, then you aren't meditating, according to the definition of the word as used in the Vipassana system. It is that simple.

Misconception #3

Meditation is a mysterious practice which cannot be understood

Here again, this is almost true, but not quite. Meditation deals with levels of consciousness which lie deeper than symbolic thought. Therefore, some of the data about meditation just won't fit into words. That does not mean, however, that it cannot be understood. There are deeper ways to understand things than words. You understand how to walk. You probably can't describe the exact order in which your nerve fibers and your muscles contract during that process. But you can do it. Meditation needs to be understood that same way, by doing it. It is not something that you can learn in abstract terms. It is to be experienced. Meditation is not some mindless formula which gives automatic and predictable results. You can never really predict exactly what will come up in any particular session. It is an investigation and experiment and an adventure every time. In fact, this is so true that when you do reach a feeling of predictability and sameness in your practice, you use that as an indicator. It means that you have gotten off the track somewhere and you are headed for stagnation. Learning to look at each second as if it were the first and only second in the universe is most essential in Vipassana meditation.

Misconception #4

The purpose of meditation is to become a psychic superman

No, the purpose of meditation is to develop awareness. Learning to read minds is not the point. Levitation is not the goal. The goal is liberation. There is a link between psychic phenomena and meditation, but the relationship is somewhat complex. During early stages of the meditator's career, such phenomena may or may not arise. Some people may experience some intuitive understanding or memories from past lives; others do not. In any case, these are not regarded as well-developed and reliable psychic abilities. Nor should they be given undue importance. Such phenomena are in fact fairly dangerous to new meditators in that they are too seductive. They can be an ego trap which can lure you right off the track. Your best advice is not to place any emphasis on these phenomena. If they come up, that's fine. If they don't, that's fine, too. It's unlikely that they will. There is a point in the meditator's career where he may practice special exercises to develop psychic powers. But this occurs way down the line. After he has gained a very deep stage of Jhana, the meditator will be far enough advanced to work with such powers without the danger of their running out of control or taking over his life. He will then develop them strictly for the purpose of service to others. This state of affairs only occurs after decades of practice. Don't worry about it. Just concentrate on developing more and more awareness. If voices and visions pop up, just notice them and let them go. Don't get involved.

Misconception #5

Meditation is dangerous and a prudent person should avoid it

Everything is dangerous. Walk across the street and you may get hit by a bus. Take a shower and you could break your neck. Meditate and you will probably dredge up various nasty-matters from your past. The suppressed material that has been buried there for quite some time can be scary. It is also highly profitable. No activity is entirely without risk, but that does not mean that we should wrap ourselves in some protective cocoon. That is not living. That is premature death. The way to deal with danger is to know approximately how much of it there is, where it is likely to be found and how to deal with it when it arises. That is the purpose of this manual. Vipassana is development of awareness. That in itself is not dangerous, but just the opposite. Increased awareness is the safeguard against danger. Properly done, meditation is a very gently and gradual process. Take it slow and easy, and development of your practice will occur very naturally. Nothing should be forced. Later, when you are under the close scrutiny and protective wisdom of a competent teacher, you can accelerate your rate of growth by taking a period of intensive meditation. In the beginning, though, easy does it. Work gently and everything will be fine.

Misconception #6

Meditation is for saints and holy men, not for regular people

You find this attitude very prevalent in Asia, where monks and holy men are accorded an enormous amount of ritualized reverence. This is somewhat akin to the American attitude of idealizing movie stars and baseball heroes. Such people are stereotyped, made larger than life, and saddled with all sort of characteristics that few human beings can ever live up to. Even in the West, we share some of this attitude about meditation. We expect the meditator to be some extraordinarily pious figure in whose mouth butter would never dare to melt. A little personal contact with such people will quickly dispel this illusion. They usually prove to be people of enormous energy and gusto, people who live their lives with amazing vigor. It is true, of course, that most holy men meditate, but they don't meditate because they are holy men. That is backward. They are holy men because they meditate. Meditation is how they got there. And they started meditating before they became holy. This is an important point. A sizable number of students seems to feel that a person should be completely moral before he begins meditation. It is an unworkable strategy. Morality requires a certain degree of mental control. It's a prerequisite. You can't follow any set of moral precepts without at least a little self-control, and if your mind is perpetually spinning like a fruit cylinder in a one- armed bandit, self-control is highly unlikely. So mental culture has to come first.

There are three integral factors in Buddhist meditation --- morality, concentration and wisdom. Those three factors grow together as your practice deepens. Each one influences the other, so you cultivate the three of them together, not one at a time. When you have the wisdom to truly understand a situation, compassion towards all the parties involved is automatic, and compassion means that you automatically restrain yourself from any thought, word or deed that might harm yourself or others. Thus your behavior is automatically moral. It is only when you don't understand things deeply that you create problems. If you fail to see the consequences of your own action, you will blunder. The fellow who waits to become totally moral before he begins to meditate is waiting for a 'but' that will never come. The ancient sages say that he is like a man waiting for the ocean to become calm so that he can go take a bath. To understand this relationship more fully, let us propose that there are levels of morality. The lowest level is adherence to a set of rules and regulations laid down by somebody else. It could be your favorite prophet. It could be the state, the head man of your tribe or your father. No matter who generates the rules, all you've got to do at this level is know the rules and follow them. A robot can do that. Even a trained chimpanzee could do it if the rules were simple enough and he was smacked with a stick every time he broke one. This level requires no meditation at all. All you need are the rules and somebody to swing the stick.

The next level of morality consists of obeying the same rules even in the absence of somebody who will smack you. You obey because you have internalized the rules. You smack yourself every time you break one. This level requires a bit of mind control. If your thought pattern is chaotic, your behavior will be chaotic, too. Mental culture reduces mental chaos.

There is a third level or morality, but it might be better termed ethics. This level is a whole quantum layer up the scale, a real paradigm shift in orientation. At the level of ethics, one does not follow hard and fast rules dictated by authority. One chooses his own behavior according to the needs of the situation. This level requires real intelligence and an ability to juggle all the factors in every situation and arrive at a unique, creative and appropriate response each time. Furthermore, the individual making these decisions needs to have dug himself out of his own limited personal viewpoint. He has to see the entire situation from an objective point of view, giving equal weight to his own needs and those of others. In other words, he has to be free from greed, hatred, envy and all the other selfish junk that ordinarily keeps us from seeing the other guy's side of the issue. Only then can he choose that precise set of actions which will be truly optimal for that situation. This level of morality absolutely demands meditation, unless you were born a saint. There is no other way to acquire the skill. Furthermore, the sorting process required at this level is exhausting. If you tried to juggle all those factors in every situation with your conscious mind, you'd wear yourself out. The intellect just can't keep that many balls in the air at once. It is an overload. Luckily, a deeper level of consciousness can do this sort of processing with ease. Meditation can accomplish the sorting process for you. It is an eerie feeling.

One day you've got a problem--say to handle Uncle Herman's latest divorce. It looks absolutely unsolvable, and enormous muddle of 'maybes' that would give Solomon himself the willies. The next day you are washing the dishes, thinking about something else entirely, and suddenly the solution is there. It just pops out of the deep mind and you say, 'Ah ha!' and the whole thing is solved. This sort of intuition can only occur when you disengage the logic circuits from the problem and give the deep mind the opportunity to cook up the solution. The conscious mind just gets in the way. Meditation teaches you how to disentangle yourself from the thought process. It is the mental art of stepping out of your own way, and that's a pretty useful skill in everyday life. Meditation is certainly not some irrelevant practice strictly for ascetics and hermits. It is a practical skill that focuses on everyday events and has immediate application in everybody's life. Meditation is not other- worldly.

Unfortunately, this very fact constitutes the drawback for certain students. They enter the practice expecting instantaneous cosmic revelation, complete with angelic choirs. What they usually get is a more efficient way to take out the trash and better ways to deal with Uncle Herman. They are needlessly disappointed. The trash solution comes first. The voices of archangels take a bit longer.

Misconception #7

Meditation is running away from reality

Incorrect. Meditation is running into reality. It does not insulate you from the pain of life. It allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and you go beyond suffering. Vipassana is a practice done with the specific intention of facing reality, to fully experience life just as it is and to cope with exactly what you find. It allows you to blow aside the illusions and to free yourself from all those polite little lies you tell yourself all the time. What is there is there. You are who you are, and lying to yourself about your own weaknesses and motivations only binds you tighter to the wheel of illusion. Vipassana meditation is not an attempt to forget yourself or to cover up your troubles. It is learning to look at yourself exactly as you are. See what is there, accept it fully. Only then can you change it.

Misconception #8

Meditation is a great way to get high

Well, yes and no. Meditation does produce lovely blissful feelings sometimes. But they are not the purpose, and they don't always occur. Furthermore, if you do meditation with that purpose in mind, they are less likely to occur than if you just meditate for the actual purpose of meditation, which is increased awareness. Bliss results from relaxation, and relaxation results from release of tension. Seeking bliss from meditation introduces tension into the process, which blows the whole chain of events. It is a Catch-22. You can only have bliss if you don't chase it. Besides, if euphoria and good feelings are what you are after, there are easier ways to get them. They are available in taverns and from shady characters on the street corners all across the nation. Euphoria is not the purpose of meditation. It will often arise, but it to be regarded as a by- product. Still, it is a very pleasant side-effect, and it becomes more and more frequent the longer you meditate. You won't hear any disagreement about this from advanced practitioners.

Misconception #9

Meditation is selfish

It certainly looks that way. There sits the meditator parked on his little cushion. Is he out giving blood? No. Is he busy working with disaster victims? No. But let us examine his motivation. Why is he doing this? His intention is to purge his own mind of anger, prejudice and ill-will. He is actively engaged in the process of getting rid of greed, tension and insensitivity. Those are the very items which obstruct his compassion for others. Until they are gone, any good works that he does are likely to be just an extension of his own ego and of no real help in the long run. Harm in the name of help is one of the oldest games. The grand inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition spouts the loftiest of motives. The Salem witchcraft trials were conducted for the public good. Examine the personal lives of advanced meditators and you will often find them engaged in humanitarian service. You will seldom find them as crusading missionaries who are willing to sacrifice certain individuals for the sake of some pious idea. The fact is we are more selfish than we know. The ego has a way of turning the loftiest activities into trash if it is allowed free range. Through meditation we become aware of ourselves exactly as we are, by waking up to the numerous subtle ways that we manifest our own selfishness. Then we truly begin to be genuinely selfless. Cleansing yourself of selfishness is not a selfish activity.

Misconception #10

When you meditate, you sit around thinking lofty thoughts

Wrong again. There are certain systems of contemplation in which this sort of thing is done. But that is not Vipassana. Vipassana is the practice of awareness. Awareness of whatever is there, be it supreme truth or crummy trash. What is there is there. Of course, lofty aesthetic thoughts may arise during your practice. They are certainly not to be avoided. Neither are they to be sought. They are just pleasant side-effects. Vipassana is a simple practice. It consists of experiencing your own life events directly, without preference and without mental images pasted to them. Vipassana is seeing your life unfold from moment to moment without biases. What comes up comes up. It is very simple.

Misconception #11

A couple of weeks of meditation and all my problems will go away

Sorry, meditation is not a quick cure-all. You will start seeing changes right away, but really profound effects are years down the line. That is just the way the universe is constructed. Nothing worthwhile is achieved overnight. Meditation is tough in some respects. It requires a long discipline and sometimes a painful process of practice. At each sitting you gain some results, but those results are often very subtle. They occur deep within the mind, only to manifest much later. and if you are sitting there constantly looking for some huge instantaneous changes, you will miss the subtle shifts altogether. You will get discouraged, give up and swear that no such changes will ever occur. Patience is the key. Patience. If you learn nothing else from meditation, you will learn patience. And that is the most valuable lesson available.

Chapter 3

What Meditation Is

Meditation is a word, and words are used in different ways by different speakers. This may seem like a trivial point, but it is not. It is quite important to distinguish exactly what a particular speaker means by the words he uses. Every culture on earth, for example, has produced some sort of mental practice which might be termed meditation. It all depends on how loose a definition you give to that word. Everybody does it, from Africans to Eskimos. The techniques are enormously varied, and we will make no attempt to survey them. There are other books for that. For the purpose of this volume, we will restrict our discussion to those practices best known to Western audiences and most likely associated with the term meditation.

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition we find two overlapping practices called prayer and contemplation. Prayer is a direct address to some spiritual entity. Contemplation in a prolonged period of conscious thought about some specific topic, usually a religious ideal or scriptural passage. From the standpoint of mental culture, both of these activities are exercises in concentration. The normal deluge of conscious thought is restricted, and the mind is brought to one conscious area of operation. The results are those you find in any concentrative practice: deep calm, a physiological slowing of the metabolism and a sense of peace and well-being.

Out of the Hindu tradition comes Yogic meditation, which is also purely concentrative. The traditional basic exercises consist of focusing the mind on a single object a stone, a candle flame, a syllable or whatever, and not allowing it to wander. Having acquired the basic skill, the Yogi proceeds to expand his practice by taking on more complex objects of meditation chants, colorful religious images, energy channels in the body and so forth. Still, no matter how complex the object of meditation, the meditation itself remains purely an exercise in concentration.

Within the Buddhist tradition, concentration is also highly valued. But a new element is added and more highly stressed. That element is awareness. All Buddhist meditation aims at the development of awareness, using concentration as a tool. The Buddhist tradition is very wide, however, and there are several diverse routes to this goal. Zen meditation uses two separate tacks. The first is the direct plunge into awareness by sheer force of will. You sit down and you just sit, meaning that you toss out of your mind everything except pure awareness of sitting. This sounds very simple. It is not. A brief trial will demonstrate just how difficult it really is. The second Zen approach used in the Rinzai school is that of tricking the mind out of conscious thought and into pure awareness. This is done by giving the student an unsolvable riddle which he must solve anyway, and by placing him in a horrendous training situation. Since he cannot flee from the pain of the situation, he must flee into a pure experience of the moment. There is nowhere else to go. Zen is tough. It is effective for many people, but it is really tough.

Another stratagem, Tantric Buddhism, is nearly the reverse. Conscious thought, at least the way we usually do it, is the manifestation of ego, the you that you usually think that you are. Conscious thought is tightly connected with self-concept. The self-concept or ego is nothing more than a set of reactions and mental images which are artificially pasted to the flowing process of pure awareness. Tantra seeks to obtain pure awareness by destroying this ego image. This is accomplished by a process of visualization. The student is given a particular religious image to meditate upon, for example, one of the deities from the Tantric pantheon. He does this in so thorough a fashion that he becomes that entity. He takes off his own identity and puts on another. This takes a while, as you might imagine, but it works. During the process, he is able to watch the way that the ego is constructed and put in place. He comes to recognize the arbitrary nature of all egos, including his own, and he escapes from bondage to the ego. He is left in a state where he may have an ego if he so chooses, either his own or whichever other he might wish, or he can do without one. Result: pure awareness. Tantra is not exactly a game of patty cake either.

Vipassana is the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices. The method comes directly from the Sitipatthana Sutta, a discourse attributed to Buddha himself. Vipassana is a direct and gradual cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. It proceeds piece by piece over a period of years. The student's attention is carefully directed to an intense examination of certain aspects of his own existence. The meditator is trained to notice more and more of his own flowing life experience. Vipassana is a gentle technique. But it also is very , very thorough. It is an ancient and codified system of sensitivity training, a set of exercises dedicated to becoming more and more receptive to your own life experience. It is attentive listening, total seeing and careful testing. We learn to smell acutely, to touch fully and really pay attention to what we feel. We learn to listen to our own thoughts without being caught up in them.

The object of Vipassana practice is to learn to pay attention. We think we are doing this already, but that is an illusion. It comes from the fact that we are paying so little attention to the ongoing surge of our own life experiences that we might just as well be asleep. We are simply not paying enough attention to notice that we are not paying attention. It is another Catch-22.

Through the process of mindfulness, we slowly become aware of what we really are down below the ego image. We wake up to what life really is. It is not just a parade of ups and downs, lollipops and smacks on the wrist. That is an illusion. Life has a much deeper texture than that if we bother to look, and if we look in the right way.

Vipassana is a form of mental training that will teach you to experience the world in an entirely new way. You will learn for the first time what is truly happening to you, around you and within you. It is a process of self discovery, a participatory investigation in which you observe your own experiences while participating in them, and as they occur. The practice must be approached with this attitude.

"Never mind what I have been taught. Forget about theories and prejudgments and stereotypes. I want to understand the true nature of life. I want to know what this experience of being alive really is. I want to apprehend the true and deepest qualities of life, and I don't want to just accept somebody else's explanation. I want to see it for myself." If you pursue your meditation practice with this attitude, you will succeed. You'll find yourself observing things objectively, exactly as they are--flowing and changing from moment to moment. Life then takes on an unbelievable richness which cannot be described. It has to be experienced.

The Pali term for Insight meditation is Vipassana Bhavana. Bhavana comes from the root 'Bhu', which means to grow or to become. There fore Bhavana means to cultivate, and the word is always used in reference to the mind. Bhavana means mental cultivation. 'Vipassana' is derived from two roots. 'Passana' means seeing or perceiving. 'Vi' is a prefix with the complex set of connotations. The basic meaning is 'in a special way.' But there also is the connotation of both 'into' and 'through'. The whole meaning of the word is looking into something with clarity and precision, seeing each component as distinct and separate, and piercing all the way through so as to perceive the most fundamental reality of that thing. This process leads to insight into the basic reality of whatever is being inspected. Put it all together and 'Vipassana Bhavana' means the cultivation of the mind, aimed at seeing in a special way that leads to insight and to full understanding.

In Vipassana mediation we cultivate this special way of seeing life. We train ourselves to see reality exactly as it is, and we call this special mode of perception 'mindfulness.' This process of mindfulness is really quite different from what we usually do. We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for the reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all of our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted. In Vipassana meditation we train ourselves to ignore the constant impulses to be more comfortable, and we dive into the reality instead. The ironic thing is that real peace comes only when you stop chasing it. Another Catch-22.

When you relax your driving desire for comfort, real fulfillment arises. When you drop your hectic pursuit of gratification, the real beauty of life comes out. When you seek to know the reality without illusion, complete with all its pain and danger, that is when real freedom and security are yours. This is not some doctrine we are trying to drill into you. This is an observable reality, a thing you can and should see for yourself.

Buddhism is 2500 years old, and any thought system of that vintage has time to develop layers and layers of doctrine and ritual. Nevertheless, the fundamental attitude of Buddhism is intensely empirical and anti-authoritarian. Gotama the Buddha was a highly unorthodox individual and real anti-traditionalist. He did not offer his teaching as a set of dogmas, but rather as a set of propositions for each individual to investigate for himself. His invitation to one and all was 'Come and See'. One of the things he said to his followers was "Place no head above your own". By this he meant, don't accept somebody else's word. See for yourself.

We want you to apply this attitude to every word you read in this manual. We are not making statements that you would accept merely because we are authorities in the field. Blind faith has nothing to do with this. These are experiential realities. Learn to adjust your mode of perception according to instructions given in the book, and you will see for yourself. That and only that provides ground for your faith. Insight meditation is essentially a practice of investigative personal discovery.

Having said this, we will present here a very short synopsis of some of the key points of Buddhist philosophy. We make not attempt to be thorough, since that has been quite nicely done in many other books. This material is essential to understanding Vipassana, therefore, some mention must be made.

From the Buddhist point of view, we human beings live in a very peculiar fashion. We view impermanent things as permanent, though everything is changing all around us. The process of change is constant and eternal. As you read these words, your body is aging. But you pay no attention to that. The book in you hand is decaying. The print is fading and the pages are becoming brittle. The walls around you are aging. The molecules within those walls are vibrating at an enormous rate, and everything is shifting, going to pieces and dissolving slowly. You pay no attention to that, either. Then one day you look around you. Your body is wrinkled and squeaky and you hurt. The book is a yellowed, useless lump; the building is caving in. So you pine for lost youth and you cry when the possessions are gone. Where does this pain come from? It comes from your own inattention. You failed to look closely at life. You failed to observe the constantly shifting flow of the world as it went by. You set up a collection of mental constructions, 'me', 'the book', 'the building', and you assume that they would endure forever. They never do. But you can tune into the constantly ongoing change. You can learn to perceive your life as an ever- flowing movement, a thing of great beauty like a dance or symphony. You can learn to take joy in the perpetual passing away of all phenomena. You can learn to live with the flow of existence rather than running perpetually against the grain. You can learn this. It is just a matter of time and training.

Our human perceptual habits are remarkably stupid in some ways. We tune out 99% of all the sensory stimuli we actually receive, and we solidify the remainder into discrete mental objects. Then we react to those mental objects in programmed habitual ways. An example: There you are, sitting alone in the stillness of a peaceful night. A dog barks in the distance. The perception itself is indescribably beautiful if you bother to examine it. Up out of that sea of silence come surging waves of sonic vibration. You start to hear the lovely complex patterns, and they are turned into scintillating electronic stimulations within the nervous system. The process is beautiful and fulfilling in itself. We humans tend to ignore it totally. Instead, we solidify that perception into a mental object. We paste a mental picture on it and we launch into a series of emotional and conceptual reactions to it. "There is that dog again. He is always barking at night. What a nuisance. Every night he is a real bother. Somebody should do something. Maybe I should call a cop. No, a dog catcher. So, I'll call the pound. No, maybe I'll just write a real nasty letter to the guy who owns that dog. No, too much trouble. I'll just get an ear plug." They are just perceptual and mental habits. You learn to respond this way as a child by copying the perceptual habits of those around you. These perceptual responses are not inherent in the structure of the nervous system. The circuits are there. But this is not the only way that our mental machinery can be used. That which has been learned can be unlearned. The first step is to realize what you are doing, as you are doing it, and stand back and quietly watch.

From the Buddhist perspective, we humans have a backward view of life. We look at what is actually the cause of suffering and we see it as happiness. The cause of suffering is that desire- aversion syndrome which we spoke of earlier. Up pops a perception. It could be anything--a beautiful girl, a handsome guy, speed boat, thug with a gun, truck bearing down on you, anything. Whatever it is, the very next thing we do is to react to the stimulus with a feeling about it.

Take worry. We worry a lot. Worry itself is the problem. Worry is a process. It has steps. Anxiety is not just a state of existence but a procedure. What you've got to do is to look at the very beginning of that procedure, those initial stages before the process has built up a head of steam. The very first link of the worry chain is the grasping/rejecting reaction. As soon as some phenomenon pops into the mind, we try mentally to grab onto it or push it away. That sets the worry response in motion. Luckily, there is a handy little tool called Vipassana meditation which you can use to short-circuit the whole mechanism.

Vipassana meditation teaches us how to scrutinize our own perceptual process with great precision. We learn to watch the arising of thought and perception with a feeling of serene detachment. We learn to view our own reactions to stimuli with calm and clarity. We begin to see ourselves reacting without getting caught up in the reactions themselves. The obsessive nature of thought slowly dies. We can still get married. We can still step out of the path of the truck. But we don't need to go through hell over either one.

This escape from the obsessive nature of thought produces a whole new view of reality. It is a complete paradigm shift, a total change in the perceptual mechanism. It brings with it the feeling of peace and rightness, a new zest for living and a sense of completeness to every activity. Because of these advantages, Buddhism views this way of looking at things as a correct view of life and Buddhist texts call it seeing things as they really are.

Vipassana meditation is a set of training procedures which open us gradually to this new view of reality as it truly is. Along with this new reality goes a new view of the most central aspect of reality: 'me'. A close inspection reveals that we have done the same thing to 'me' that we have done to all other perceptions. We have taken a flowing vortex of thought, feeling and sensation and we have solidified that into a mental construct. Then we have stuck a label onto it, 'me'. And forever after, we threat it as if it were a static and enduring entity. We view it as a thing separate from all other things. We pinch ourselves off from the rest of that process of eternal change which is the universe. And than we grieve over how lonely we feel. We ignore our inherent connectedness to all other beings and we decide that 'I' have to get more for 'me'; then we marvel at how greedy and insensitive human beings are. And on it goes. Every evil deed, every example of heartlessness in the world stems directly from this false sense of 'me' as distinct from all else that is out there.

Explode the illusion of that one concept and your whole universe changes. Don't expect to do this overnight, though. You spent your whole life building up that concept, reinforcing it with every thought, word, and deed over all those years. It is not going to evaporate instantly. But it will pass if you give it enough time and enough attention. Vipassana meditation is a process by which it is dissolved. Little by little, you chip away at it just by watching it.

The 'I' concept is a process. It is a thing we are doing. In Vipassana we learn to see that we are doing it, when we are doing it and how we are doing it. Then it moves and fades away, like a cloud passing through the clear sky. We are left in a state where we can do it or not do it, whichever seems appropriate to the situation. The compulsiveness is gone. We have a choice.

These are all major insights, of course. Each one is a deep- reaching understanding of one of the fundamental issues of human existence. They do not occur quickly, nor without considerable effort. But the payoff is big. They lead to a total transformation of your life. Every second of your existence thereafter is changed. The meditator who pushes all the way down this track achieves perfect mental health, a pure love for all that lives and complete cessation of suffering. That is not small goal. But you don't have to go all the way to reap benefits. They start right away and they pile up over the years. It is a cumulative function. The more you sit, the more you learn about the real nature of your won existence. The more hours you spend in meditation, the greater your ability to calmly observe every impulse and intention, every thought and emotion just as it arises in the mind. Your progress to liberation is measured in cushion-man hours. And you can stop any time you've had enough. There is no stick over your head except your own desire to see the true quality of life, to enhance your own existence and that of others.

Vipassana meditation is inherently experiential. It is not theoretical. In the practice of mediation you become sensitive to the actual experience of living, to how things feel. You do not sit around developing subtle and aesthetic thoughts about living. You live. Vipassana meditation more than anything else is learning to live.

Chapter 4

Attitude

Within the last century, Western science and physics have made a startling discovery. We are part of the world we view. The very process of our observation changes the things we observe. As an example, an electron is an extremely tiny item. It cannot be viewed without instrumentation, and that apparatus dictates what the observer will see. If you look at an electron in one way, it appears to be a particle, a hard little ball that bounces around in nice straight paths. When you view it another way, an electron appears to be a wave form, with nothing solid about it. It glows and wiggles all over the place. An electron is an event more than a thing. And the observer participates in that event by the very process of his or her observation. There is no way to avoid this interaction.

Eastern science has recognized this basic principle for a very long time. The mind is a set of events, and the observer participates in those events every time he or she looks inward. Meditation is participatory observation. What you are looking at responds to the process of looking. What you are looking at is you, and what you see depends on how you look. Thus the process of meditation is extremely delicate, and the result depends absolutely on the state of mind of the meditator. The following attitudes are essential to success in practice. Most of them have been presented before. But we bring them together again here as a series of rules for application. 1. Don't expect anything. Just sit back and see what happens. Treat the whole thing as an experiment. Take an active interest in the test itself. But don't get distracted by your expectations about results. For that matter, don't be anxious for any result whatsoever. Let the meditation move along at its own speed and in its own direction. Let the meditation teach you what it wants you to learn. Meditative awareness seeks to see reality exactly as it is. Whether that corresponds to our expectations or not, it requires a temporary suspension of all our preconceptions and ideas. We must store away our images, opinions and interpretations someplace out of the way for the duration. Otherwise we will stumble over them.

2. Don't strain: Don't force anything or make grand exaggerated efforts. Meditation is not aggressive. There is no violent striving. Just let your effort be relaxed and steady.

3. Don't rush: There is no hurry, so take you time. Settle yourself on a cushion and sit as though you have a whole day. Anything really valuable takes time to develop. Patience, patience, patience.

4. Don't cling to anything and don't reject anything: Let come what comes and accommodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens. Don't fight with what you experience, just observe it all mindfully.

5. Let go: Learn to flow with all the changes that come up. Loosen up and relax.

6. Accept everything that arises: Accept your feelings, even the ones you wish you did not have. Accept your experiences, even the ones you hate. Don't condemn yourself for having human flaws and failings. Learn to see all the phenomena in the mind as being perfectly natural and understandable. Try to exercise a disinterested acceptance at all times and with respect to everything you experience.

7. Be gentle with yourself: Be kind to yourself. You may not be perfect, but you are all you've got to work with. The process of becoming who you will be begins first with the total acceptance of who you are.

8. Investigate yourself: Question everything. Take nothing for granted. Don't believe anything because it sounds wise and pious and some holy men said it. See for yourself. That does not mean that you should be cynical, impudent or irreverent. It means you should be empirical. Subject all statements to the actual test of your experience and let the results be your guide to truth. Insight meditation evolves out of an inner longing to wake up to what is real and to gain liberating insight to the true structure of existence. The entire practice hinges upon this desire to be awake to the truth. Without it, the practice is superficial.

9. View all problems as challenges: Look upon negatives that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don't run from them, condemn yourself or bear your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in and investigate.

10. Don't ponder: You don't need to figure everything out. Discursive thinking won't free you from the trap. In mediation, the mind is purified naturally by mindfulness, by wordless bare attention. Habitual deliberation is not necessary to eliminate those things that are keeping you in bondage. All that is necessary is a clear, non-conceptual perception of what they are and how they work. That alone is sufficient to dissolve them. Concepts and reasoning just get in the way. Don't think. See.

11. Don't dwell upon contrasts: Differences do exist between people, but dwelling upon then is a dangerous process. Unless carefully handled, it leads directly to egotism. Ordinary human thinking is full of greed, jealousy and pride. A man seeing another man on the street may immediately think, "He is better looking than I am." The instant result is envy or shame. A girl seeing another girl may think, "I am prettier than she is." The instant result is pride. This sort of comparison is a mental habit, and it leads directly to ill feeling of one sort or another: greed, envy, pride, jealousy, hatred. It is an unskillful mental state, but we do it all the time. We compare our looks with others, our success, our accomplishments, our wealth, possessions, or I.Q. and all these lead to the same place--estrangement, barriers between people, and ill feeling.

The meditator's job is to cancel this unskillful habit by examining it thoroughly, and then replacing it with another. Rather than noticing the differences between self and others, the meditator trains himself to notice similarities. He centers his attention on those factors that are universal to all life, things that will move him closer to others. Thus his comparison, if any, leads to feelings of kinship rather than feelings of estrangement.

Breathing is a universal process. All vertebrates breathe in essentially the same manner. All living things exchange gasses with their environment in some way or other. This is one of the reasons that breathing is chosen as the focus of meditation. the meditator is advised to explore the process of his own breathing as a vehicle for realizing his own inherent connectedness with the rest of life. This does not mean that we shut our eyes to all the differences around us. Differences exist. It means simply that we de-emphasize contrasts and emphasize the universal factors. The recommended procedure is as follows:

When the meditator perceives any sensory object, he is not to dwell upon it in the ordinary egotistical way. He should rather examine the very process of perception itself. He should watch the feelings that arise and the mental activities that follow. He should note the changes that occur in his own consciousness as a result. In watching all these phenomena, the meditator must be aware of the universality of what he is seeing. That initial perception will spark pleasant, unpleasant or neutral feelings. That is a universal phenomenon. It occurs in the mind of others just as it does in his, and he should see that clearly. Following these feelings various reactions may arise. He may feel greed, lust, or jealousy. He may feel fear, worry, restlessness or boredom. These reactions are universal. He simple notes them and then generalizes. He should realize that these reactions are normal human responses and can arise in anybody.

The practice of this style of comparison may feel forced and artificial at first, but it is no less natural than what we ordinarily do. It is merely unfamiliar. With practice, this habit pattern replaces our normal habit of egoistic comparing and feels far more natural in the long run. We become very understanding people as a result. we no longer get upset by the failings of others. We progress toward harmony with all life.

Chapter 5

The Practice

Although there are many subjects of meditation, we strongly recommend you start with focusing your total undivided attention on your breathing to gain some degree of shallow concentration. Remember that you are not practicing a deep absorption or pure concentration technique. You are practicing mindfulness for which you need only a certain degree of shallow concentration. You want to cultivate mindfulness culminating in insight and wisdom to realize the truth as it is. You want to know the working of your body-mind complex exactly as it is. You want to get rid of all psychological annoyance to make your life really peaceful and happy.

The mind cannot be purified without seeing things as they really are. "Seeing things as they really are" is such a heavily loaded and ambiguous phrase. Many beginning meditators wonder what we mean, for anyone who has clear eye sight can see objects as they are.

When we use this phrase in reference to insight gained from our meditation, what we mean is not seeing things superficially with our regular eyes, but seeing things with wisdom as they are in themselves. Seeing with wisdom means seeing things within the framework of our body/mind complex without prejudices or biases springing from our greed, hatred and delusion. Ordinarily when we watch the working of our mind/body complex, we tend to hide or ignore things which are not pleasant to us and to hold onto things which are pleasant. This is because our minds are generally influenced by our desires, resentment and delusion. Our ego, self or opinions get in our way and color our judgment.

When we mindfully watch our bodily sensations, we should not confuse them with mental formations, for bodily sensations can arise without anything to do with the mind. For instance, we sit comfortably. After a while, there can arise some uncomfortable feeling on our back or in our legs. Our mind immediately experiences that discomfort and forms numerous thoughts around the feeling. At that point, without trying to confuse the feeling with the mental formations, we should isolate the feeling as feeling and watch it mindfully. Feeling is one of the seven universal mental factors. The other six are contact, perception, mental formations, concentration, life force, and awareness.

At another time, we may have a certain emotion such as, resentment, fear, or lust. Then we should watch the emotion exactly as it is without trying to confuse it with anything else. When we bundle our form, feeling, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness up into one and try to watch all of them as feeling, we get confused, as we will not be able to see the source of feeling. If we simply dwell upon the feeling alone, ignoring other mental factors, our realization of truth becomes very difficult. We want to gain the insight into the experience of impermanence to over come our resentment; our deeper knowledge of unhappiness overcomes our greed which causes our unhappiness; our realization of selflessness overcomes ignorance arising from the notion of self. We should see the mind and body separately first. Having comprehended them separately, we should see their essential interconnectedness. As our insight becomes sharp, we become more and more aware of the fact that all the aggregates are cooperating to work together. None can exist without the other. We can see the real meaning of the famous metaphor of the blind man who has a healthy body to walk and the disabled person who has very good eyes to see. Neither of them alone can do much for himself. But when the disabled person climbs on the shoulders of the blind man, together they can travel and achieve their goals easily. Similarly, the body alone can do nothing for itself. It is like a log unable to move or do anything by itself except to become a subject of impermanence, decay and death. The mind itself can do nothing without the support of the body. When we mindfully watch both body and mind, we can see how many wonderful things they do together.

As long as we are sitting in one place we may gain some degree of mindfulness. Going to a retreat and spending several days or several months watching our feelings, perceptions, countless thoughts and various states of consciousness may make us eventually calm and peaceful. Normally we do not have that much time to spend in one place meditating all the time. Therefore, we should find a way to apply our mindfulness to our daily life in order for us to be able to handle daily unforeseeable eventualities. What we face every day is unpredictable. Things happen due to multiple causes and conditions, as we are living in a conditional and impermanent world. Mindfulness is our emergency kit, readily available at our service at any time. When we face a situation where we feel indignation, if we mindfully investigate our own mind, we will discover bitter truths in ourselves. That is we are selfish; we are egocentric; we are attached to our ego; we hold on to our opinions; we think we are right and everybody else is wrong; we are prejudices; we are biased; and at the bottom of all of this, we do not really love ourselves. This discovery, though bitter, is a most rewarding experience. And in the long run, this discovery delivers us from deeply rooted psychological and spiritual suffering.

Mindfulness practice is the practice of one hundred percent honesty with ourselves. When we watch our own mind and body, we notice certain things that are unpleasant to realize. As we do not like them, we try to reject them. What are the things we do not like? We do not like to detach ourselves from loved ones or to live with unloved ones. We include not only people, places and material things into our likes and dislikes, but opinions, ideas, beliefs and decisions as well. We do not like what naturally happens to us. We do not like, for instance, growing old, becoming sick, becoming weak or showing our age, for we have a great desire to preserve our appearance. We do not like someone pointing out our faults, for we take great pride in ourselves. We do not like someone to be wiser than we are, for we are deluded about ourselves. These are but a few examples of our personal experience of greed, hatred and ignorance.

When greed, hatred and ignorance reveal themselves in our daily lives, we use our mindfulness to track them down and comprehend their roots. The root of each of these mental states in within ourselves. If we do not, for instance, have the root of hatred, nobody can make us angry, for it is the root of our anger that reacts to somebody's actions or words or behavior. If we are mindful, we will diligently use our wisdom to look into our own mind. If we do not have hatred in us we will not be concerned when someone points out our shortcomings. Rather, we will be thankful to the person who draws our attention to our faults. We have to be extremely wise and mindful to thank the person who explicates our faults so we will be able to tread the upward path toward improving ourselves. We all have blind spots. The other person is our mirror for us to see our faults with wisdom. We should consider the person who shows our shortcomings as one who excavates a hidden treasure in us that we were unaware of. It is by knowing the existence of our deficiencies that we can improve ourselves. Improving ourselves is the unswerving path to the perfection which is our goal in life. Only by overcoming weaknesses can we cultivate noble qualities hidden deep down in our subconscious mind. Before we try to surmount our defects, we should what they are.

If we are sick, we must find out the cause of our sickness. Only then can we get treatment. If we pretend that we do not have sickness even though we are suffering, we will never get treatment. Similarly, if we think that we don't have these faults, we will never clear our spiritual path. If we are blind to our own flaws, we need someone to point them out to us. When they point out our faults, we should be grateful to them like the Venerable Sariputta, who said: "Even if a seven-year-old novice monk points out my mistakes, I will accept them with utmost respect for him." Ven. Sariputta was an Arahant who was one hundred percent mindful and had no fault in him. But since he did not have any pride, he was able to maintain this position. Although we are not Arahants, we should determine to emulate his example, for our goal in life also is to attain what he attained.

Of course the person pointing out our mistakes himself may not be totally free from defects, but he can see our problems as we can see his faults, which he does not notice until we point them out to him.

Both pointing out shortcomings and responding to them should be done mindfully. If someone becomes unmindful in indicating faults and uses unkind and harsh language, he might do more harm than good to himself as well as to the person whose shortcomings he points out. One who speaks with resentment cannot be mindful and is unable to express himself clearly. One who feels hurt while listening to harsh language may lose his mindfulness and not hear what the other person is really saying. We should speak mindfully and listen mindfully to be benefitted by talking and listening. When we listen and talk mindfully, our minds are free from greed, selfishness, hatred and delusion.

Our Goal

As meditators, we all must have a goal, for if we do not have a goal, we will simply be groping in the dark blindly following somebody's instructions on meditation. There must certainly be a goal for whatever we do consciously and willingly. It is not the Vipassana meditator's goal to become enlightened before other people or to have more power or to make more profit than others, for mindfulness meditators are not in competition with each other.

Our goal is to reach the perfection of all the noble and wholesome qualities latent in our subconscious mind. This goal has five elements to it: Purification of mind, overcoming sorrow and lamentation, overcoming pain and grief, treading the right path leading to attainment of eternal peace, and attaining happiness by following that path. Keeping this fivefold goal in mind, we can advance with hope and confidence to reach the goal.

Practice

Once you sit, do not change the position again until the end of the time you determined at the beginning. Suppose you change your original position because it is uncomfortable, and assume another position. What happens after a while is that the new position becomes uncomfortable. Then you want another and after a while, it too becomes uncomfortable. So you may go on shifting, moving, changing one position to another the whole time you are on your mediation cushion and you may not gain a deep and meaningful level of concentration. Therefore, do not change your original position, no matter how painful it is.

To avoid changing your position, determine at the beginning of meditation how long you are going to meditate. If you have never meditated before, sit motionless not longer than twenty minutes. As you repeat your practice, you can increase your sitting time. The length of sitting depends on how much time you have for sitting meditation practice and how long you can sit without excruciating pain.

We should not have a time schedule to attain the goal, for our attainment depends on how we progress in our practice based on our understanding and development of our spiritual faculties. We must work diligently and mindfully towards the goal without setting any particular time schedule to reach it. When we are ready, we get there. All we have to do is to prepare ourselves for that attainment.

After sitting motionless, close your eyes. Our mind is analogous to a cup of muddy water. The longer you keep a cup of muddy water still, the more mud settles down and the water will be seen clearly. Similarly, if you keep quiet without moving you body, focusing your entire undivided attention on the subject of your meditation, your mind settles down and begins to experience the bliss of meditation.

To prepare for this attainment, we should keep our mind in the present moment. The present moment is changing so fast that the casual observer does not seem to notice its existence at all. Every moment is a moment of events and no moment passes by without noticing events taking place in that moment. Therefore, the moment we try to pay bare attention to is the present moment. Our mind goes through a series of events like a series of pictures passing through a projector. Some of these pictures are coming from our past experiences and others are our imaginations of things that we plan to do in the future.

The mind can never be focused without a mental object. Therefore we must give our mind an object which is readily available every present moment. What is present every moment is our breath. The mind does not have to make a great effort to find the breath, for every moment the breath is flowing in and out through our nostrils. As our practice of insight meditation is taking place every waking moment, our mind finds it very easy to focus itself on the breath, for it is more conspicuous and constant than any other object.

After sitting in the manner explained earlier and having shared your loving-kindness with everybody, take three deep breaths. After taking three deep breaths, breathe normally, letting your breath flow in and out freely, effortlessly and begin focusing your attention on the rims of your nostrils. Simply notice the feeling of breath going in and out. When one inhalation is complete and before exhaling begins, there is a brief pause. Notice it and notice the beginning of exhaling. When the exhalation is complete, there is another brief pause before inhaling begins. Notice this brief pause, too. This means that there are two brief pauses of breath--one at the end of inhaling, and the other at the end of exhaling. The two pauses occur in such a brief moment you may not be aware of their occurrence. But when you are mindful, you can notice them.

Do not verbalize or conceptualize anything. Simply notice the in-coming and out-going breath without saying, "I breathe in", or "I breathe out." When you focus your attention on the breath ignore any thought, memory, sound, smell, taste, etc., and focus your attention exclusively on the breath, nothing else.

At the beginning, both the inhalations and exhalations are short because the body and mind are not calm and relaxed. Notice the feeling of that short inhaling and short exhaling as they occur without saying "short inhaling" or "short exhaling". As you remain noticing the felling of short inhaling and short exhaling, your body and mind become relatively calm. Then your breath becomes long. Notice the feeling of that long breath as it is without saying "Long breath". Then notice the entire breathing process from the beginning to the end. Subsequently the breath becomes subtle, and the mind and body become calmer than before. Notice this calm and peaceful feeling of your breathing.

What To Do When the Mind Wanders Away?

In spite of your concerted effort to keep the mind on your breathing, the mind may wander away. It may go to past experiences and suddenly you may find yourself remembering places you've visited, people you met, friends not seen for a long time, a book you read long ago, the taste of food you ate yesterday, and so on. As soon as you notice that you mind is no longer on your breath, mindfully bring it back to it and anchor it there. However, in a few moments you may be caught up again thinking how to pay your bills, to make a telephone call to you friend, write a letter to someone, do your laundry, buy your groceries, go to a party, plan your next vacation, and so forth. As soon as you notice that your mind is not on your subject, bring it back mindfully. Following are some suggestions to help you gain the concentration necessary for the practice of mindfulness.

1. Counting

In a situation like this, counting may help. The purpose of counting is simply to focus the mind on the breath. Once you mind is focused on the breath, give up counting. This is a device for gaining concentration. There are numerous ways of counting. Any counting should be done mentally. Do not make any sound when you count. Following are some of the ways of counting.

a) While breathing in count "one, one, one, one..." until the lungs are full of fresh air. While breathing out count "two, two, two, two..." until the lungs are empty of fresh air. Then while breathing in again count "three, three, three, three..." until the lungs are full again and while breathing out count again "four, four, four, four..." until the lungs are empty of fresh air. Count up to ten and repeat as many times as necessary to keep the mind focused on the breath.
b) The second method of counting is counting rapidly up to ten. While counting "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten" breathe in and again while counting "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten" breathe out. This means in one inhaling you should count up to ten and in one exhaling you should count up to ten. Repeat this way of counting as many times as necessary to focus the mind on the breath.
c) The third method of counting is to counting secession up to ten. At this time count "one, two, three, four, five" (only up to five) while inhaling and then count "one, two, three, four, five, six" (up to six) while exhaling. Again count "one, two, three, four fire, six seven" (only up to seven) while inhaling. Then count "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight" while exhaling. Count up to nine while inhaling and count up to ten while exhaling. Repeat this way of counting as many times as necessary to focus the mind on the breath.
d) The fourth method is to take a long breath. When the lungs are full, mentally count "one" and breath out completely until the lungs are empty of fresh air. Then count mentally "two". Take a long breath again and count "three" and breath completely out as before. When the lungs are empty of fresh air, count mentally "four". Count your breath in this manner up to ten. Then count backward from ten to one. Count again from one to ten and then ten to one.
e) The fifth method is to join inhaling and exhaling. When the lungs are empty of fresh air, count mentally "one". This time you should count both inhalation and exhalation as one. Again inhale, exhale, and mentally count "two". This way of counting should be done only up to five and repeated from five to one. Repeat this method until you breathing becomes refined and quiet.

Remember that you are not supposed to continue your counting all the time. As soon as your mind is locked at the nostrils-tip where the inhaling breath and exhaling breath touch and begin to feel that you breathing is so refined and quiet that you cannot notice inhalation and exhalation separately, you should give up counting. Counting is used only to train the mind to concentrate on one point.

2. Connecting

After inhaling do not wait to notice the brief pause before exhaling but connect the inhaling and exhaling, so you can notice both inhaling and exhaling as one continuous breath.

3. Fixing

After joining inhaling and exhaling, fix your mind on the point where you feel you inhaling and exhaling breath touching. Inhale and exhale as on single breath moving in and out touching or rubbing the rims of your nostrils.

4. Focus you mind like a carpenter

A carpenter draws a straight line on a board and that he wants to cut. Then he cuts the board with his handsaw along the straight line he drew. He does not look at the teeth of his saw as they move in and out of the board. Rather he focuses his entire attention on the line he drew so he can cut the board straight. Similarly keep your mind straight on the point where you feel the breath at the rims of your nostrils.

5. Make you mind like a gate-keeper

A gate-keeper does not take into account any detail of the people entering a house. All he does is notice people entering the house and leaving the house through the gate. Similarly, when you concentrate you should not take into account any detail of your experiences. Simply notice the feeling of your inhaling and exhaling breath as it goes in and out right at the rims of your nostrils.

As you continue your practice you mind and body becomes so light that you may feel as if you are floating in the air or on water. You may even feel that your body is springing up into the sky. When the grossness of your in-and-out breathing has ceased, subtle in-and-out breathing arises. This very subtle breath is your objective focus of the mind. This is the sign of concentration. This first appearance of a sign-object will be replaced by more and more subtle sign-object. This subtlety of the sign can be compared to the sound of a bell. When a bell is struck with a big iron rod, you hear a gross sound at first. As the sound faces away, the sound becomes very subtle. Similarly the in-and-out breath appears at first as a gross sign. As you keep paying bare attention to it, this sign becomes very subtle. But the consciousness remains totally focused on the rims of the nostrils. Other meditation objects become clearer and clearer, as the sign develops. But the breath becomes subtler and subtler as the sign develops. Because of this subtlety, you may not notice the presence of your breath. Don't get disappointed thinking that you lost your breath or that nothing is happening to your meditation practice. Don't worry. Be mindful and determined to bring your feeling of breath back to the rims of your nostrils. This is the time you should practice more vigorously, balancing your energy, faith, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom.

Farmer's simile

Suppose there is a farmer who uses buffaloes for plowing his rice field. As he is tired in the middle of the day, he unfastens his buffaloes and takes a rest under the cool shade of a tree. When he wakes up, he does not find his animals. He does not worry, but simply walks to the water place where all the animals gather for drinking in the hot mid-day and he finds his buffaloes there. Without any problem he brings them back and ties them to the yoke again and starts plowing his field.

Similarly as you continue this exercise, your breath becomes so subtle and refined that you might not be able to notice the feeling of breath at all. When this happens, do not worry. It has not disappeared. It is still where it was before-right at the nostril-tips. Take a few quick breaths and you will notice the feeling of breathing again. Continue to pay bare attention to the feeling of the touch of breath at the rims of your nostrils.

As you keep your mind focused on the rims of your nostrils, you will be able to notice the sign of the development of meditation. You will feel the pleasant sensation of sign. Different meditators feel this differently. It will be like a star, or a peg made of heartwood, or a long string, or a wreath of flowers, or a puff of smoke, or a cob-web, or a film of cloud, or a lotus flower, or the disc of the moon or the disc of the sun.

Earlier in your practice you had inhaling and exhaling as objects of meditation. Now you have the sign as the third object of meditation. When you focus your mind on this third object, your mind reaches a stage of concentration sufficient for your practice of insight meditation. This sign is strongly present at the rims of the nostrils. Master it and gain full control of it so that whenever you want, it should be available. Unite the mind with this sign which is available in the present moment and let the mind flow with every succeeding moment. As you pay bare attention to it, you will see the sign itself is changing every moment. Keep your mind with the changing moments. Also notice that your mind can be concentrated only on the present moment. This unity of the mind with the present moment is called momentary concentration. As moments are incessantly passing away one after another, the mind keeps pace with them. Changing with them, appearing and disappearing with them without clinging to any of them. If we try to stop the mind at one moment, we end up in frustration because the mind cannot be held fast. It must keep up with what is happening in the new moment. As the present moment can be found any moment, every waking moment can be made a concentrated moment.

To unite the mind with the present moment, we must find something happening in that moment. However, you cannot focus your mind on every changing moment without a certain degree of concentration to keep pace with the moment. Once you gain this degree of concentration, you can use it for focusing your attention on anything you experience--the rising and falling of your abdomen, the rising and falling of the chest area, the rising and falling of any feeling, or the rising and falling of your breath or thoughts and so on.

To make any progress in insight meditation you need this kind of momentary concentration. That is all you need for the insight meditation practice because everything in your experience lives only for one moment. When you focus this concentrated state of mind on the changes taking place in your mind and body, you will notice that your breath is the physical part and the feeling of breath, consciousness of the feeling and the consciousness of the sign are the mental parts. As you notice them you can notice that they are changing all the time. You may have various types of sensations, other than the feeling of breathing, taking place in your body. Watch them all over your body. Don't try to create any feeling which is not naturally present in any part of your body. When thought arises notice it, too. All you should notice in all these occurrences is the impermanent, unsatisfactory and selfless nature of all your experiences whether mental or physical.

As your mindfulness develops, your resentment for the change, your dislike for the unpleasant experiences, your greet for the pleasant experiences and the notion of self hood will be replaced by the deeper insight of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness. This knowledge of reality in your experience helps you to foster a more calm, peaceful and mature attitude towards your life. You will see what you thought in the past to be permanent is changing with such an inconceivable rapidity that even your mind cannot keep up with these changes. Somehow you will be able to notice many of the changes. You will see the subtlety of impermanence and the subtlety of selflessness. This insight will show you the way to peace, happiness and give you the wisdom to handle your daily problems in life.

When the mind is united with the breath flowing all the time, we will naturally be able to focus the mind on the present moment. We can notice the feeling arising from contact of breath with the rim of our nostrils. As the earth element of the air that we breathe in and out touches the earth element of our nostrils, the mind feels the flow of air in and out. The warm feeling arises at the nostrils or any other part of the body from the contact of the heat element generated by the breathing process. The feeling of impermanence of breath arises when the earth element of flowing breath touches the nostrils. Although the water element is present in the breath, the mind cannot feel it.

Also we feel the expansion and contraction of our lungs, abdomen and low abdomen, as the fresh air is pumped in and out of the lungs. The expansion and contraction of the abdomen, lower abdomen and chest are parts of the universal rhythm. Everything in the universe has the same rhythm of expansion and contraction just like our breath and body. All of them are rising and falling. However, our primary concern is the rising and falling phenomena of the breath and minute parts of our minds and bodies.

Along with the inhaling breath, we experience a small degree of calmness. This little degree of tension-free calmness turns into tension if we don't breathe out in a few moments. As we breathe out this tension is released. After breathing out, we experience discomfort if we wait too long before having fresh brought in again. This means that every time our lings are full we must breathe out and every time our lungs are empty we must breathe in. As we breathe in, we experience a small degree of calmness, and as we breathe out, we experience a small degree of calmness. We desire calmness and relief of tension and do not like the tension and feeling resulting from the lack of breath. We wish that the calmness would stay longer and the tension disappear more quickly that it normally does. But neither will the tension go away as fast as we wish not the calmness stay as long as we wish. And again we get agitated or irritated, for we desire the calmness to return and stay longer and the tension to go away quickly and not to return again. Here we see how even a small degree of desire for permanency in an impermanent situation causes pain or unhappiness. Since there is no self-entity to control this situation, we will become more disappointed.

However, if we watch our breathing without desiring calmness and without resenting tension arising from the breathing in and out, but experience only the impermanence, the unsatisfactoriness and selflessness of our breath, our mind becomes peaceful and calm.

Also, the mind does not stay all the time with the feeling of breath. It goes to sounds, memories, emotions, perceptions, consciousness and mental formations as well. When we experience these states, we should forget about the feeling of breath and immediately focus our attention on these states--one at a time, not all of them at one time. As they fade away, we let our mind return to the breath which is the home base the mind can return to from quick or long journey to various states of mind and body. We must remember that all these mental journeys are made within the mind itself.

Every time the mind returns to the breath, it comes back with a deeper insight into impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness. The mind becomes more insightful from the impartial and unbiased watching of these occurrences. The mind gains insight into the fact that this body, these feelings, various states of consciousness and numerous mental formations are to be used only for the purpose of gaining deeper insight into the reality of this mind/body complex.

Chapter 6

What To Do With Your Body

The practice of meditation has been going on for several thousand years. That is quite a bit of time for experimentation, and the procedure has been very, very thoroughly refined. Buddhist practice has always recognized that the mind and body are tightly linked and that each influences the other. Thus there are certain recommended physical practices which will greatly assist you to master your skill. And these practices should be followed. Keep in mind, however, that these postures are practice aids. Don't confuse the two. Meditation does not mean sitting in the lotus position. It is a mental skill. It can be practiced anywhere you wish. But these postures will help you learn this skill and they speed your progress and development. So use them.

General Rules

The purpose of the various postures is threefold. First, they provide a stable feeling in the body. This allows you to remove your attention from such issues as balance and muscular fatigue, so that you can then center your concentration upon the formal object of meditation. Second, they promote physical immobility which is then reflected by an immobility of mind. This creates a deeply settled and tranquil concentration. Third, they give you the ability to sit for a long period of time without yielding to the meditator's three main enemies--pain, muscular tension and falling asleep. The most essential thing is to sit with your back straight. The spine should be erect with the spinal vertebrae held like a stack of coins, one on top of the other. Your head should be held in line with the rest of the spine. All of this is done in a relaxed manner. No Stiffness. You are not a wooden soldier, and there is no drill sergeant. There should be no muscular tension involved in keeping the back straight. Sit light and easy. The spine should be like a firm young tree growing out of soft ground. The rest of the body just hangs from it in a loose, relaxed manner. This is going to require a bit of experimentation on your part. We generally sit in tight, guarded postures when we are walking or talking and in sprawling postures when we are relaxing. Neither of those will do. But they are cultural habits and they can be re-learned.

Your objective is to achieve a posture in which you can sit for the entire session without moving at all. In the beginning, you will probably feel a bit odd to sit with the straight back. But you will get used to it. It takes practice, and an erect posture is very important. This is what is known in physiology as a position of arousal, and with it goes mental alertness. If you slouch, you are inviting drowsiness. What you sit on is equally important. You are going to need a chair or a cushion, depending on the posture you choose, and the firmness of the seat must be chosen with some care. Too soft a seat can put you right to sleep. Too hard can promote pain.

Clothing

The clothes you wear for meditation should be loose and soft. If they restrict blood flow or put pressure on nerves, the result will be pain and/or that tingling numbness which we normally refer to as our 'legs going to sleep'. If you are wearing a belt, loosen it. Don't wear tight pants or pants made of thick material. Long skirts are a good choice for women. Loose pants made of thin or elastic material are fine for anybody. Soft, flowing robes are the traditional garb in Asia and they come in an enormous variety of styles such as sarongs and kimonos. Take your shoes off and if your stockings are thick and binding, take them off, too.

Traditional Postures

When you are sitting on the floor in the traditional Asian manner, you need a cushion to elevate your spine. Choose one that is relatively firm and at least three inches thick when compressed. Sit close to the front edge of the cushion and let your crossed legs rest on the floor in front of you. If the floor is carpeted, that may be enough to protect your shins and ankles from pressure. If it is not, you will probably need some sort of padding for your legs. A folded blanket will do nicely. Don't sit all the way back on the cushion. This position causes its front edge to press into the underside of your thigh, causing nerves to pinch. The result will be leg pain.

There are a number of ways you can fold your legs. We will list four in ascending order of preference.

1. American indian style. Your right foot is tucked under the left knee and left foot is tucked under your right knee.
2. Burmese style. Both of your legs lie flat on the floor from knee to foot. They are parallel with each other and one in front of the other.
3. Half lotus. Both knees touch the floor. One leg and foot lie flat along the calf of the other leg.
4. Full lotus. Both knees touch the floor, and your legs are crossed at the calf. Your left foot rests on the right thigh, and your right foot rests on the left thigh. Both soles turn upward.

In these postures, your hands are cupped one on the other, and they rest on your lap with the palms turned upward. The hands lie just below the navel with the bend of each wrist pressed against the thigh. This arm position provides firm bracing for the upper body. Don't tighten your neck muscles. Relax your arms. Your diaphragm is held relaxed, expanded to maximum fullness. Don't let tension build up in the stomach area. Your chin is up. Your eyes can be open or closed. If you keep them open, fix them on the tip of your nose or in the middle distance straight in front. You are not looking at anything. You are just putting your eyes in some arbitrary direction where there is nothing in particular to see, so that you can forget about vision. Don't strain. Don't stiffen and don't be rigid. Relax; let the body be natural and supple. Let it hang from the erect spine like a rag doll.

Half and full lotus positions are the traditional meditation postures in asia. And the full lotus is considered the best. It is the most solid by far. Once you are locked into this position, you can be completely immovable for a very long period. Since it requires a considerable flexibility in the legs, not everybody can do it. Besides, the main criterion by which you choose a posture for yourself is not what others say about it. It is your own comfort. Choose a position which allows you to sit the longest without pain, without moving. Experiment with different postures. The tendons will loosen with practice. And then you can work gradually towards the full lotus.

Using A Chair

Sitting on the floor may not be feasible for you because of pain or some other reason. No problem. You can always use a chair instead. Pick one that has a level seat, a straight back and no arms. It is best to sit in such a way that your back does not lean against the back of the chair. The front of the seat should not dig into the underside of your thighs. Place your legs side by side,feet flat on the floor. As with the traditional postures, place both hands on your lap, cupped one upon the other. Don't tighten your neck or shoulder muscles, and relax your arms. Your eyes can be open or closed.

In all the above postures, remember your objectives. You want to achieve a state of complete physical stillness, yet you don't want to fall asleep. Recall the analogy of the muddy water. You want to promote a totally settled state of the body which will engender a corresponding mental settling. There must also be a state of physical alertness which can induce the kind of mental clarity you seek. So experiment. Your body is a tool for creating desired mental states. Use it judiciously.

Henepola Gunaratana

Zen Nimbus Fusion

2008-03-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

My game sucks.

This has been something of an annoyance to me for a little while now. Last I knew, I kicked ass. Now I don't.

I couldn't pinpoint why. I mean, there's the obvious - that after coming out of a long relationship I'm all rusty. That's fair enough. But the strange thing is not that I'm 'bad' in some vague way... the strange thing is that my game is now exactly the opposite of what it used to be.

I used to be all about the insta-pickup. Just an instant sexual vibe leading quickly to sex. It was like submission fighting - everything geared toward the one result.

Now, it's weird. I radiate this chilled energy that puts women at ease, but it doesn't get them all jittery and wet like it used to. If I try using any of the overt sexual comments that I used to find so powerful, they come out weak. I can hear it in my voice, it's just not genuine. It's like I can remember the verbal and physical forms of what I used to do, but the core's just not there now.

As such, there's a strange discordance (one might say incongruence) between my words and my internal state.

This is the one thing I guess I didn't expect, because I've been pouring so much effort into reaching an internal state of massive stability and calm. Back in the days of yore, I never had that - the power I used to have came from what I recognise now to be a pretty dirty kind of psychological place.

Nonetheless, that power worked. It had a hugely compelling quality to it which my game now lacks.

I reached a level with Zen the other day. It was a kind of intellectual breakthrough of sorts. Zen is a funny fucker, as I understand it, it's not really about reaching a kind of mediative calm so much as it is about holding thoughts inside your head which your mind cannot process, thus short-circuiting it - two mutually incompatible concepts tear it apart, and catapult you into a state of presence.

Once you've got a hold of the short-circuiting mechanism, you can effectively bypass meditation entirely, and crack great big chunks out of your ego-structure on an ad-hoc basis. The damage you inflict upon the ego structure seems to be pretty deep too - it's not like it just 'grows back' as it often does with meditation - instead, you can feel a marked and persistent release in emotional pressure that doesn't go away.

It's pretty cool.

But here's the thing.

My game's still pretty flaky, especially compared with what it was. Chicks keep wanting to girlfriend up, and not get down with the nasty. Grr.

You see, I'd made the mistake of equating 'presence' with 'Nimbus'. Presence is that quality that Tolle has in spades. Presence is the sensation of calm power that flows from a quieted mind.

Nimbus is an entirely distinct kind of thing. You do not need to be enlightened to Nimbus. I mean, shit. Hitler had Nimbus. And he was a dick.

So I'm starting to think... what the fuck is it that attracts women if it's not presence? And how does presence link to Nimbus?

What is presence? What is it? How does it impact game?

And why am I not sparking hard attraction like I used to?

Well, here's the thing. I was thinking about what I had going on in Vegas (where my Nimbus was ablaze, leading to rapid debauchery) and what I had going on back in the day (when my Nimbus was ablaze, leading to rapid debauchery).

I was also thinking about what it is that's missing now.

I think that what I'm doing is confusing presence with Nimbus.

So if presence is the power of the quieted mind, what's Nimbus?

Here's what I think.

The power of Nimbus is what happens when you feel as if you are fully living your purpose on earth. Nimbus is the confidence that comes from 100% living in line with a deep goal that inspires and consumes you, placing all your internal assets at your disposal. It is as if you are walking in line with reality itself, and a host of effects extend from that which mark it out as a unique and discrete phenomenon.

Here's a few descriptions:

...................................................
Jlaix:

UBER fast calibration on the fly, PITCH PERFECT

Chode Vaporization

Utter fearlessness

Conversational genius, full improv IF DESIRED

Impervious to fire, bullshit, sickness, pain

Laser vision crowd reading

100% empathy and emotional maneuverability

Massive influence, unspoken dominance (it is what it is)

Non verbals completely dialed

Increase in Physical Energy

Profound understanding of any social situation/ hierarchies etc

Vortex-like presence draws in (black nimbus if reaction goes too far)

You DO NOT CARE

.................................................
Dada:

-Ultra feeling of freedom

-Ultra feeling of joy

-Everything seem in slow motion

-Sens of peace

-fast thinking/slow mouvements

-Feeling like god (I'm god)/top of the world.

................................................
Ciaran:

Serenity in the midst of chaos

The feeling of BEING the eye of the storm

The convergence of circumstance and probability leaning strikingly in your favour

Ability to almost instantly solve the most intractable conversational, logistical, social and sexual roadblocks.

Superhuman levels of emotional endurance and recovery time

Total clarity and full access to all higher brain functions (insight, genius, wit)

A kind of 'celebrity aura' which makes all your approaches stick like fucking superglue

A total and intuitive grasp of channels of physical communication (aka kino) leading to rapid and nigh-unstoppable escalation

Sex.

.....................................
Tamer

- effortless motion and purposefull motion in achieving all things he desires. Aristotelian in social matters "form follows funcion."

- A social chess master who knows all scenarios six moves into the future and has the correct counter to each of these scenarios.

- Listens to women and is able to create deep emotional connections with any woman he choses

- His attitude and level of cool is so contagious to all people around him that even cockblocks and alpha males are helping him and are on his side.

- knows how to dance salsa and merengue and fancies latin clubs ;)

...................................................
FoodBuddha:

Physical:

The pupils of the eyes dilate, reflecting more light than normal.

Eyes never seek reactions.

The blood vessels dilate, bringing more blood and heat to just beneath the surface, causing a sheen on the skin... different than sweat. A better "pallor."

Body motions have no urgency to them; they are relaxed, strong, purposeful. Value-scanning, head-wagging, nervous types of behaviors are gone.

Voice deepens slightly, and verbal cadence comes under direct control.

Chest expands, shoulders relax back, spine straightens, head is up.

Breathing is normal, heart rate is normal, not elevated or pounding.

Muscles feel energized.

Pain is nonexistent. Any previous pains are gone.

These add up to being the physical display of "All who surround me are in my sphere." It is instantly recognizable.
.........................................................

Nimbus is like the full expression of masculine polarity.

Nimbus is intimately linked to purpose. That's what I had before that was so compelling... I was living completely in line with what I saw (and what I still see) as my purpose on earth.

But there was a problem, and I think it's the problem (I hope on a lesser scale) that Hitler ran into.

Dark Nimbus.

You see, Nimbus is fucking potent. When you Nimbus, you are unleashing forces of unimaginable power into your life, and into the world in which you live.

Remember - Nimbus is nothing more or less than the unification of your being that comes from living a fully conscious life with 100% intent toward a goal that inspires you to the depths of your being.

Consciously living your dream.

If your purpose on earth is coming from a place of darkness, a place of need and hunger, a place of anger or loneliness or shame - then your Nimbus will be tainted.

I speak from bitter experience. The Christmas before last I experienced a pretty extreme state-crash. The reason I went for Zen as hard as I did is probably a simple reaction against not wanting to fall off the wagon again.

But here's the thing. I went for Zen like a crazy bastard, as I am wont to do.

In releasing attachment from everything, I relinquished that sense of purpose that I had. When you're living in line with your highest dreams, your body and mind flood with a power that has a quality to it so compelling that women (and anyone else) are simply blown away.

However - if your Nimbus is based on lies (and it will be if the purpose you're living out is coming from a place of internal pain) then your Nimbus has no foundation in reality.

This does NOT mean it is weak. A Dark Nimbus can be extremely potent. History is littered with examples of such.

However, when you have a Dark Nimbus, one of two things will happen.

1 - The disconnect between your Nimbus and reality will cause your Nimbus to crumble, resulting in an "Icarus Effect" - you fall very hard because you were soaring so high. It will manifest itself as extremely acute existential angst, as you are forced to watch your awesome life melt away in front of you like snow in the Sahara.

However, this is actually the better of the two results of the Dark Nimbus. The second is extremely nasty, and it's this:

2 - The disconnect between your Nimbus and reality will cause you to retreat into a fantasy world of your own creation to preserve the Nimbus itself. This does preserve the Nimbus temporarily, and the compelling power of the Nimbus will draw people into your reality even when it is transparently failing (there are many, many examples of this - Hitler's probably one we can all relate to... Godwin's Law-Tastic). The problem here is, obviously, that at some point you're going to need to pay the piper, and when you do, the cost will be extreme. Either that or you die in delusion like a coward like that mustachioed Austrian fuck. One or the other.

You see, Nimbus is the effect that surrounds you when you feel like you're living 100% in your purpose and you are surrounded by destiny.

Obviously, there is a devil's deal here. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.

But here's where I'm starting to think that Zen comes in.

You see, purpose is not the exclusive domain of the ego.

That's right. It's not something I can see completely clearly right now, but basically, if you can 'purify' your purpose with Zen, if you can strip away all the self-seeking from it, you can (I hope) build a Nimbus with foundations that run extremely deep, and are woven into the very fabric of your being itself.

In theory, if one did this, one could build a Nimbus that was effectively immortal and needed no external input to sustain it - other than you living out the highest purpose of your life.

Maybe I'm just trying to justify all the effort I put into Zen. I don't know.

It does seem to me though that there MUST be a way to connect the dots on this - a way to build a Nimbus that is not contingent on outside circumstance, and will not consume you or crush you.

I think there is a way to FUSE Zen and Nimbus, to fuse presence and purpose, triggering something much greater than both, a synergistic fusion of wisdom and power.

Which is, as you can probably guess, my goal for the immediate future.

Let battle commence...

Five Chunks Of Mind-Shattering Wisdom

2008-03-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

It is absolutely fascinating just how deep non-existence goes. It's crazy, even non-existence doesn't exist... and that's the final hurdle.

Ok, tell you what - there's two pieces of writing which really delve into this.

One is the Sutra On The High Seat Of The Treasure Of The Law (Otherwise known as the Platform Sutra)

http://www.angelfire.com/realm/bodhi...orm-sutra.html

I have repeatedly had my brain blown out of the back of my skull with that one. It's very detailed, and hits the thing from a lot of different angles.

Then I read the Diamond Sutra - which is shorter, and more focused.

It will take your mind and beat it like a ginger stepchild.

http://www.diamond-sutra.com/diamond...ext/page1.html

Truly, these things are two of the most powerful pieces of writing I've encountered.

You might also want to check out the Bhagavad Gita, the most holy text of the Hindu faith:

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/gita1.asp

It's fucking mental, and contains an incredibly sophisticated and profound philosophy of the infinite.

You might also want to check out the Tao Te Ching, which is the central text of Taoism. An exceptional, and very beautiful piece of writing which is utterly destructive of mind-structures and thought-forms.

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~p.../taote-v3.html

I really liked this one. It really undermines the conceptual level of thought.

I'd also throw out a mention to the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of the original sayings of Jesus. Don't worry, it's not religious. In fact, it's been deemed a heretical document by the Catholic Church. It's like the "James Dean" of the Gospels.

http://www.webcom.com/gnosis/naghamm/gosthom.html

Joking aside it's an extremely interesting piece of writing which has some very challenging and jarring statements. A lot less 'moral' than normal Christian literature, and to my mind, all the more potent for it.

Ok - all these things are tools. Like the work of Tolle - it's not about filling your head up with all this stuff. It's about using this stuff to empty your head.

With all these pieces of writing what I'll do is read it until something strikes me as either totally nonsensical or completely profound. These are the two signs that an epiphany is lying just beneath the surface of your mind waiting to arise.

What I then try to do is dwell in that state of profound understanding or jarring rejection and just be there completely. Very often after a few minutes (or maybe a few days) of what I suppose you could refer to as 'contemplation', I'll get that 'breakthrough' and see shit from a whole new angle.

It's all very exciting if you ask me.

Transcendence

2008-03-08T07:19:00.000-08:00

Enlightenment is simple.

It's all to do with stepping out of a fictional world of your own creation, and engaging with reality as is.

The way to do that is simple, and it has two stages.

The first stage is to reject the illusion you're working under.

The second is to reject rejecting the illusion.

Whenever you attempt to reject 'the ego', you set up another ego that mirrors it.

This is because you are rejecting your ego from within your ego. You can do nothing else.

What then happens is that a 'Zen ego' creates itself around the concept of 'no ego'.

So you reject that too.

Then boom, you're in it.

Full enlightenment is simply where you realise that any attempt to escape the ego sets up another ego which must itself be discarded.

So, you reject feeling like you need to pull to have value.

Then you reject not feeling like you need to pull to have value.

You reject trying to save the world, then you reject not trying to save the world.

You reject trying to be a better person, then you reject not trying to be a better person.

You reject trying to help people, then you reject not trying to help people.

You reject being afraid, then you reject not being afraid.

You reject trying to be free, then you reject not trying to be free.

You reject looking for someone to save you, then you reject not looking for someone to save you.

You reject trying to fill the gaping hole inside you, then you reject not trying to fill the hole inside you.

You reject being filled with fear by the hot chick you're talking to, then you reject not being filled with fear by the hot chick you're talking to.

The act of rejection from within the ego sets up another ego around the psychological event of rejection.

The act of rejecting that shadow ego instigates a crisis in your ego, because it is being torn apart by two mutually incompatible rejections.

It then collapses under the pressure, catapulting you into a full connection with reality.

Your ego is an extensive structure which has roots that run very deep.

As such, you will notice that it rises up in different forms over and over.

Each time it arises, you reject whatever form has arisen, and you then reject 'not that'.

This tears chunks out of the ego structure, and will quickly leave you with a far calmer and more 'enlightened' sense of yourself, and your 'beingness', if you wish to call it that.

Over quite a short period of time, you will be able to inflict massive, structural damage on the fictional self which has imprisoned you for your entire life.

The benefits of enlightenment are as follows:

1 - A striking reduction in negative emotion, including fear, anger, hatred and all forms of emotional pain.

2 - A sense of the beauty of things, especially the natural world.

3 - The ability to develop rapid and genuine connections with people of all genders, ages and classes.

4 - A quiet, playful calm that is infectious.

5 - Superior physical reflexes.

6 - Reliable and consistent access to the state of Nimbus.

7 - A detached clarity of thought which enables you to engage with problems as they arise with precision and effectiveness.

8 - A 'bulletproof' effect which renders the nastiest and most brutal attacks on you powerless to harm your sense of who you are.

9 - A greatly increased learning faculty, allowing you to pick up skills and produce work of high quality with little or no mental effort.

10 - A kind of internal sixth sense which allows you to recalibrate your words on the fly, sensing conversational danger and avoiding it as you would avoid a pothole in a road on a clear summer day.

In short, I would heartily recommend it.

Fine holiday fun.

The Second Step

2008-03-03T10:25:00.000-08:00

It is one thing to see the problems that mire you, and quite another to escape them.

You see, the first thing I do when I see a new problem, a new issue, a new trap, is panic.

I only just noticed this - but it is the truth. I panic. Then I fight.

It's how I've lived a great deal of my life, and the more I see it in myself, the more I realise that I am not alone.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step, or so they say.

What's the second?

Well, the truth is that in panic, there is at least motion. Panic can get you out of a situation, although it's far from reliable.

When you act out of panic, you set yourself up for a war. You are fighting, and when you fight, enemies rally against you. You emanate a nervous energy that causes people to raise their guards against you, and sometimes it might seem that even reality itself is resisting you.

Now, you can do this and win. I myself have achieved several things in my life through struggle and fire, and achieved them well.

But there is always a price to pay for doing things this way. When your energy is coming from a place of defiant rejection of what is, there is a build-up of darkness inside you. Poison, both internal and external is created.

You make your omelette, but you break a shitload of eggs doing it. It takes longer. It pushes you to the brink of destruction and despair, over and over.

And that brink is where the real battle is fought. For the longest time I believed that it was there that all victories were won - because at the end of despair there is always a choice to keep fighting or to give up.

As long as you just keep fighting, you will eventually achieve.

That's basically been my philosophy on life for a long time now.

I'm 27 and I have almost a full head of gray hair.

And yes - I have achieved a level of endurance that I think is pretty singular... but that's not a good thing. I often fall back into a fighting mode - often without noticing - and trigger more battles, more stress, more poison.

I guess that life has taught me - that I have taught me - that struggle is the arena in which success is won.

I no longer think that's true.

I think that there's something else, a higher way of achieving. A way of achieving that does not drain and injure. A way of success that leaves one stronger for the journey, and not haggard and torn, slugging your way to glory like Rocky in the 15th round.

It all comes down to the second step.

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

The second step is to chill.

To accept the situation, to accept that you do have the problem. To accept that there is no immediate solution.

Tolle speaks of a man stuck in mud. I'm that dude. And that dude fights and struggles, lashes out for any ground, hates the mud, blames the mud, blames himself, rages and laments.

His struggles suck him deeper, deep down. Right down to the bottom.

And it is here that he will either give up, or fight on though all reality and sanity is screaming at him to stop.

And as long as he simply refuses to die, as long as he never stops fighting, he will get out.

But who will he be when he gets out?

What kind of a man will he be?

What kind of darkness will he carry with him from the swamp?

I am amazed that I still stand and move and breathe when I think of the huge reservoirs of toxicity I have exposed myself to throughout my life. But again, there is a truth about fighting which spiritual teachers rarely speak of, and it is this:

Fighting works.

It hurts so bad, it hurts more than anything else in the world, and it opens you up to such stunning levels of emotional pain that you would be amazed the human mind could experience agony to such a degree.

But it works... in a way.

Whatever CONTINGENT problem you have, you can resolve through struggle.

And that is why it is such a popular method. There is a simplicity to it. You fight, you endure, and if you endure for long enough, and fight hard enough, you will probably win.

But here's the real reason why fighting is futile...

The CONTINGENT problem is NEVER the real problem.

Ever.

You're bad with girls? That's not the REAL problem. The real problem is that you're unhappy with YOU.

And if you get good with girls by FIGHTING, you will end up an emotional wreck who can pick up chicks like a rock star.

Or, like me, you'll go through a phase of being awesome with girls, but you'll have built up a backlash of negativity in your mind, a backlash that's just waiting for the right moment to swing into your self-esteem like a wrecking ball and tear you down to less than you've ever been.

The problem with "saving the world" is that there are a million ways in which your ego WILL kick off. There's no way to do this in an "enlightened" way which completely circumvents the negativity you're going to encounter.

You see, you will panic. You will. Sorry.

And when you do, the quality of action that you put out there is going to be chaotic, destructive, antagonistic and basically shit.

So what do you do?

Well, Tolle finishes the story of the guy in the mud like so. What if the guy, instead of fighting his situation, just accepts he's in the mud. He's not REACTING to it in a knee-jerk emotional way, he just accepts the situation.

Then he looks around, and looks for a solution. Maybe he sees a branch that he couldn't see before because he was thrashing around, and pulls himself out. Maybe he just moves with confidence, care and purpose, and extricates himself from the mire by himself.

Whatever he does, the quality of action rising out of that situation is very different from the panicked thrashings of before. There is a smoothness, a calmness - a silent power backing every motion.

Same with any action.

For the longest time I saw the 'matrix' of social conditioning as the mud. I thrashed around in it, I railed against it. I wanted to save the world, but that desire was suffused (and perhaps even born) in desperation.

That desperate energy flowed through me, and through everything I did. I was fighting, and the world fought me. I threw a punch, the world threw 50.

So...

Accept it. Accept the mud we're mired in. Accept the matrix, accept the madness. Accept that it exists, and that it holds us fast both in the world outside and the world inside.

Admit there's a problem - accept it - look at it - be cool - don't lose your shit - then act with measured and calm movement.

That's the formula.

Acceptance brings us in line with our true power. Instead of acting through what the Hindus refer to as Karma (desperate, personal, egoic and contingent fighting), we act through the grander conception of Karma - we bring the full, smooth force of the universe to bear through our actions.

The way to act through universal karma and not personal karma is to accept the mud.

And we can do all sorts of kick-ass shit.

Just remember - when you're trying anything great, it's not the rejections you need to watch out for... it's YOUR rejection of the rejections.

Whenever you're fighting, remember... surrender. Accept. Then act with smooth and balanced power.

Oh, and one other thing...

Keep your eyes on the prize, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Eyes on the prize.

Nimbus, Desolation And Resonance

2008-02-21T02:55:00.001-08:00

I've always hated hippies. Smelly, unwashed bastards that they are, stumbling around in drug-addled stupors, wasting everybody's time with bullshit about vibrations, vibes and other v-related things.

But the more I come into a true understanding of who I am in my essence, the more I can see what those doped up dumbasses are trying to say.

There is a certain quality to the essence of humanity that makes it similar to noise. Perhaps it is that reality is a wavefront, collapsing from quantum probability into past certainty through the crest of the now.

Whatever it is, pain resonates. It resonates like any object does. The interesting thing about the wounds that we suffer is that all future wounds seem to be, more or less, different aspects of that same primal wound playing itself out in context.

Eckhart Tolle calls this the 'pain body' - and when I first read his stuff I thought that was the weakest part of what he was saying. Looking back, I can now see that the reason I didn't believe I had a 'pain-body' (still think the term is cheesy as hell) is that I'd buried that fucker so deeply that not even I knew of it's existence.

98% of the time I'd be fine, happy as larry. But when it hit - boom. It took me off the edge of the world. Full blown post-traumatic stress disorder, and unipolar depression so savage that I once had a rape victim shake her head at me and tell me how lucky she felt that she didn't have to go through what I'd been through.

I guess the deeper you push it, the more pressure you build. The more it festers, and the more ingrained it becomes.

Nimbus. Nimbus is the answer. Whatever the question is, the answer is Nimbus.

Nimbus is like getting a broadband connection to the power of God. It's like you just become fully unlocked, and all your higher faculties are supercharged and placed at your total disposal.

I Nimbus'd in Vegas.

And when the pain body (quote unquote) struck, I suddenly had the clarity to recognize it's essence, or what a hippie might refer to as it's 'vibration' or 'frequency'.

It was desolation. That's it, that's my 'pain body'. Desolation.

Some others I know have painbodies which have a different frequency - be it an appalled rejection of things, or guilt, or shame. Mine is desolation.

I don't know if I'd ever have had the power to see that if I hadn't been all Nimbus'd up.

No, that's a lie.

I know for a fact that I never would have realized that if I'd not been Nimbus'd up.

And now I've seen it - now what?

I know that it is not a dark and brooding presence in my mind anymore. It is a resonance from my past - a resonance which echoes, perhaps, but no more than that.

And no, I will not be able to break it's back in a day, nor even perhaps in a decade. But I will break it, you mark my words. And I now have a weapon of choice.

Nimbus.

Nimbus is something above and beyond normal 'skill' or 'insight'. It is like what happens to Super Mario when he eats a mushroom. Full power, on a totally different scale to anything you've seen before. It suffuses you like a flood of golden, holy light.

You become a transcendent uber-being, and the most intractable problems both outside you... and inside you... become simple and resolvable.

I experienced it a few times back in the day - but I never focused on it. I never had a name for it. Now I do.

If there is an answer to the problems that we face with women, in life or in anything, that answer can be seized with the ravening power of the Nimbus.

And so it begins...

2008-02-20T17:32:00.000-08:00

So I'm off in Portland, in Oregon. It's the birthplace of grunge, I hear.

Ok...

I haven't posted on this blog in a little while because I've been

a) Busy
b) Thinking
and
c) Having fun.

I guess the big news is that I'm now single. I broke up with a lovely young lady, and although it wasn't ideal, I feel it was for the best.

The other big news?

I went to Paris Hilton's birthday (no, really).

I experienced the full power of the nimbus.

Oh, and I may have found the answer.

Yes, the actual answer. To the question that drives us, Neo. You know the question, as I did.

How can I save the world?

Well friends, you'll find out soon enough. Stay posted.

Strange Days

2008-02-08T02:07:00.000-08:00

So... Oprah's pushing the shit out of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth.

Awesome.

And also a little weird.

Mixed feelings about this one.

It's weird - the first time I read the Power Of Now I knew that Tolle had finished the book I'd been trying to write for ten years.

I mean, with A New Earth getting the Oprah treatment, we're seeing the beginnings of something really big. It's going to take off hard. Tolle is going to trigger a spiritual awakening on a global scale.

It's funny isn't it? I've always struggled to write down things he just comes the fuck out with - but he's done it. You think I'd be happy for the man - and honestly, I am. I've got more respect for him than for any thinker living or dead.

At the same time, there is a part of me that writhes in indignation at being pipped to the post... which is ludicrous because I never had even the smallest degree of the insight that dude's toting.

Pipped to the post.

How revealing is that?

I mean, dear me, that's not healthy, is it? What does that say about my motivations in this 'grand endeavour'. Ego-tastic, that's what they are.

I don't know. It's funny, sometimes the ego overplays it's hand. It is, after all, one arrogant bastard.

But when I caught myself whining about Tolle to myself, I realized

1) the fucking absurdity of my bitching

2) the shitty foundations on which my 'noble desires' lie

and

3) that I am still surfing the deep seas of unconsciousness.

I think it's 3 that I should look at closely. It's weird - I noticed something recently that I don't think I'd admitted to in a while.

I'm scared pretty much all the time.

I mean, not to whine about it. There's nothing to be afraid of, I mean, jeez - my life couldn't be going better... and yet...

It's like a noise, that you just tune out after a while. You know, like if there's construction work outside your window or something, and after a while your brain just tunes it out. It's like that, but 50 times more subtle.

I can feel it like a gnawing in the centre of my chest. I think a lot of the shit that I do has a quality to it of 'overcompensation'. Like I feel I need to be the absolute best at stuff because... maybe because I'm so scared of being the worst.

It's a strange one. It's important though. It's like I've brushed away a lot of the surface debris of the 'ego'... or whatever you want to call it.

But now I'm starting to see the deeper levels of the thing.

I don't know.

The thing is, this fear I feel - I know it's there, but it's so deeply buried that I can hardly bring my awareness to it. As such I can't just 'Tolle' it away. Not at once, anyway.

I guess it's just a case of keeping the awareness coming. I guess it's just a case of keeping the faith, so to speak. A case of continuing to hone my presence, my ability to be in 'the now' as our esteemed German colleague might say.

I'm not sure.

Strange days.

Excellent Zen Articles

2008-02-04T16:13:00.000-08:00

Both of these are articles which detail a way to rapidly increase your internal clarity and power.

http://uarelove1.tripod.com/AWA_INSTRUCTIONS1.htm

http://www.albigen.com/uarelove/awa_clarification.aspx

I heartily recommend both.

Ciaran

Crack-Cocaine To The Ego

2008-02-04T14:19:00.000-08:00

So we're all on this grand mission to save the world. We're all prepared to lay down our shit to do it. We're prepared to do what it takes.

We're prepared to walk through fire. We're prepared to take the pain. We're prepared to get industrial about ourselves - about connecting to our true nature, and to the true power of our very humanity.

We're prepared to let go of every attachment and every piece of who we are, to throw ourselves into the teeth of this thing - and jack our species out of the fictional world it has created for itself... a world that is fast destroying everything.

And that's great, and I applaud it.

BUT...

There is a danger here.

The danger is this. Your 'identity' will build itself out of whatever materials it has. It forms the most powerful and compelling story that it can from the raw materials it has in front of it.

The problem with actually and seriously confronting the task of 'saving the world' is that the idea of 'being the saviour of the world' is like crack-cocaine to the ego.

Except far, far more addictive, and far, far more destructive.

We are each of us severed creatures. We have been severed from the reality of who we are, and exist as phantoms. We are all of us phantoms, ghosts. We inhabit reality, but we are not of it because we are fictional and it is not.

As such, we crave reality. We hunger for it and cry for it. We would kill to feel real. We would die to feel real.

The hunger to feel real transcends all physical, animal and "natural" drives, and it unique to the human animal.

That is because self-deception is unique to the human animal and we are, all of us, ghosts formed by self-deception.

That is our identity, what Eckhart Tolle refers to as the 'ego', and what you know in popular culture as your personality.

Self-help is masturbation. This is about self-destruction.

The big, blaring danger with trying to save the world is that your mind rapidly constructs an artificial 'picture of you' with you in centre stage playing the role of saviour.

And as long as you're playing that role, you're still locked in self-delusion. You're just locked in self-delusion's most potent and visceral trap: thinking you are, basically, the second coming.

I hope you can see how this is the logical route of insanity. Following this line of reasoning - as I did - results inevitably (and I'm not fucking around with that word) into a spiral of grandiose visions which push your mind beyond it's limits and drive you insane.

And once you're insane, once you've lost your shit... you're useless. When you're insane you can't save shit.

So be warned. This is the crucial pitfall - indulging the whirling helter-skelter of messianic thoughts that course through your mind.

You're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

So what if this is you? What if you've indulged it, and now you're locked in this vortex of epiphany?

Firstly, slow yourself down.

Slow down your breathing.

Slow down your mind.

Just slow....

Slow it down....

Good. Slow. Good.

Now look, the problem you're facing is one that I struggled with for years.

Frankly, I would go as far as to say if you're struggling with this problem that's actually a massively good thing. Why? Because it means that although you're coasting on the edge of a cliff, you do at least appreciate the full scale and intensity of the possibilities that lie in front of all of us.

Any one of us could save this world. And it's not hard, and it's not going to require huge amounts of physical suffering. You could actually do it while having a blast and making a huge pile of cash.

But again, once you see that such a thing is extremely possible, you start to think "hey, cool - I could do that. I'd be the king of the world!"

And then you're fucked.

Pride, they say, is the Cardinal Sin.

Now, I don't see 'sin' as a moral concept. I don't think Christianity, or Buddhism, or Islam, or Judaism or Sikhism or Hinduism - I don't think that these are 'moral' religions.

I don't think that the advice of the foundational figures of these religions had anything to do with morality at all. I think that they're about power. I think that they're about forging a hardcore, broadband link to the source of all power itself - a source that is, incidentally, also the source of all goodness itself.

I call this source reality. It has had other names.

Look, pride is not bad in some vague 'moral' sense.

Pride is bad because it will completely destroy you, extremely quickly, given half a chance.

Anything it touches, it destroys.

It is like ebola.

Be aware of this.

And what do I mean by Pride? Simple. When you draw that sense of worth, value, importance (and reality) from some conceptual structure.

And saving the world is a conceptual structure with an incredibly powerful emotional charge.

A charge of frantic nervous energy.

Can you feel it? 'Saving the world' - it sounds like a myth, a legend... a fairy-tale.

You get to be the fairy tale hero. You get to be the shining knight, the legend. You see the dreams of glory, the nobel prize, the applause, the adulation.

Getting sucked into that will not just distract you. It will fill you with a frantic kind of arrogance which will repulse the very people you need to attract.

And something that's even more insidious than the feeling of coolness you get while daydreaming, is the feeling that your life has purpose.

It's a strange one - you might be surprised that I'm talking about it as a trap.

But it is a trap.

It's the biggest trap going.

When you walk through life and you draw meaning from the idea that you're on this grand quest to save the world, you can put up with all sorts of shit, knowing that it's all in the service of something so great that everything it touches becomes meaningful and cool.

This is so subtle, and so potent. It's one of the greatest weapons in the Devil's arsenal, and you need to constantly watch yourself for it, constantly expose it for what it is beneath the veil of delusion it uses to hide from you.

Can you see it? Can you feel it?

If you can, worry. If you can't, worry.

You see, we get closer to our power when we discard things.

One big example of that would be when you discard judgment between good and evil, and discover that extremely rapidly you connect to a deeper experience of true goodness that rises naturally from within you, and is many, many times more powerful than anything you've ever experienced before.

Conversely, you'll know people who are stuck fast in conceptual ways of thinking about good and evil, and somehow manage to be total dicks.

I know from my past that all the times I was certain I was 'right' were in retrospect the times when I was the most destructive of others... and of my own life and happiness.

It's almost like you could draw a graph - that how 'right' you feel you are is directly proportional to how much of a dick you're actually being.

Funny.

For years I looked at 'saving the world' in a 'heroic' way. I felt heroic when I thought about it, and that buoyed me up during the hard times, which were extreme and nasty as fuck.

But those bad times only happened BECAUSE I looked at 'saving the world' in a 'heroic' way.

I took it personally. I drew my sense of self from my 'mission'.

And all the shit that befell me wasn't even the worst of it.

The worst of it was that I was totally paralyzed when it came to actually thinking clearly about exactly how to do that.

So nothing got saved, not even me.

The ego is a crafty motherfucker - and it's much cleverer than you are. By miles.

This is perhaps the biggest single obstacle to doing anything to actually save the world - getting lost in the myth of the thing. Getting lost in fiction. Getting lost in thought. Getting lost in pride. Getting lost in your head.

Remember - it is only once we have discarded everything that we are free to do anything.

You must discard the fiction of being the saviour. You must discard the fantasy of being Neo, or being Morpheus, or being any motherfucker - even you.

It is being itself which you must cultivate if you are going to genuinely contribute to this planet's redemption.

So be aware. And of course, be.

But don't just 'be'. BE. BE to the motherfucking HILT motherfuckers. Damage your fictions. Obliterate your moral judgments and connect to the reality of what you really are.

Destroy your personality. Destroy your desire to be 'the saviour'. Destroy it each and every day for the rest of your life.

Only then do you actually stand a chance of changing the world.

But then of course, on the bright side, once you do it you'll find that changing the world is nowhere near as difficult or as complex as you think.

Soundbytes And Suicide Bombers

2008-02-01T11:31:00.000-08:00

So what's the process?

Well, it's very simple.

Almost ten years ago I began looking for a way to change the world.

Now, I realize that's a strange thing for a young kid of 17 to attempt, but if you give me a moment I'll try to explain why it was that I did that.

And maybe I could explain it a little better to myself, because I'll be honest with you, it's kinda hazy.

It all started with a book by a guy called C.S. Lewis, who you might now from such seminal children's classics as "The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe," and "Voyage Of The Dawn Treader."

This was called The Great Divorce. It was read to my English class by our teacher Sandy MacKinnon. He later went on himself to write a book about sailing across Europe in a tiny little dinghy. Cool guy. Bit of a hippie. Probably gay.

Anyways, this book was just awesome. I remember hearing stories from it and just sitting there electrified. I was electrified because up until that point I guess I'd always assumed, with the arrogance of youth, that I knew myself.

Once I read the Great Divorce I realised two things...

Firstly, I knew shit about myself. There were layers of self-delusion and rationalization.

Secondly, I realized that there was something to 'get.'

It hung there, tantalizing, defying explanation but somehow totally simple. Just a truth so potent that it lay under all things as the foundational truth of the human condition.

Hey, maybe I was wrong, but one day as I was walking home from school, a thought struck me.

It was one of 'those' moments that you sometimes get. Perhaps it happens to everyone and they forget it, perhaps I was just really lucky... or really unlucky.

It's really simple, to be honest. You see, in The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis presents a conception of the darker side of human nature that I thought was totally brilliance.

Basically, he's saying this:

Happiness, heaven, love and joy are not emotional states. They are symptoms of a deeper state that rises once naturally inside you when you can drop the bullshit self-delusion in which we all are trapped.

This blew my mind. I mean, think about it.

All the good things in the world just rise the fuck up naturally once you can drop the emotional bullshit you mire yourself in on a daily basis.

And that bullshit is not random.

That's the other thing that blew my mind.

The 'ego' shit, the arrogance, the self-pity, self-loathing and obsessive behaviours, feelings and thought patterns that lock us in unhappiness are all simple iterations of exactly the same thing.

What I'm saying is this: that unhappiness itself is a distinct thing. It is a specific phenomenon obeying specific rules, and it arises for one specific reason.

That negativity itself is not some 'mysterious force,' but that it can be seen and understood - and even negated entirely.

Why can it be negated?

Very simple. Because negativity is not as it appears.

Remember the first rule of philosophy: There is no division in reality. Whenever you see a division, that means that you know... you KNOW.... that the division you see exists only in your mind.

So let's pull something relevant and negative out of our asses and dissect this fucker to see how it works, shall we?

Racism seems as good a negative concept as any.

So racism then. Let's just go for the good old white-on-black racism we all know and love.

Just for one moment step back from the emotive power of the word, and look at it. Can you feel it? Racism.

Racism.

It's jagged and sharp. It's provocative and visceral. Racism.

You can feel the bile rise inside you, can't you? The anger, anger at the injustice of racism.

But here's the thing.

If you can step back from racism's emotional spikiness just far enough though, you can see something else.

That racism is, essentially, a series of conceptual descriptions of reality that are almost comically ridiculous.

I mean, just for one moment put aside any feelings of hatred or anger, of disapproval and fury, and simply look at the ideas inside racism like they are simple descriptions of the world - which is what they purport to be.

As soon as you get some distance and perspective away from the emotional reaction to racism, you very quickly realise that it's fucking retarded.

Not 'bad' or 'evil' - just transparently incorrect.

And that shift is extremely interesting because all of a sudden, you can see what lies at the core of racism. And it's not some grand twisting devil monster.

It's simple 'incorrectness'.

The ultimate problem with racism is not that it's damaging or injust. The fundamental problem with racism is that, before any emotions get invested in taking sides for it or against it... it's just incorrect.

It simply is a very basic error of fact about the way that the world operates.

You see, to say that "black people have as much humanity as white people" is NOT to state a moral case. There's nothing 'moral' about that statement, any more than it is moral to state that I'm sitting on my bed as I type these words.

It isn't 'good' or 'bad'... it simply is the case.

So why do racists kick off so badly? Why are they so 'in-your-face' and determined to go out of their way to attack and undermine black people?

Why do they reorder the world in racist terms?

Why would a racist see evidence of racism wherever they went?

Well it's actually really simple.

You see, racism is obviously untrue, so no matter how much a racist may claim to be 'speaking the real truth, not what the bleeding heart liberals push down our throats' (or whatever), the only conclusion you can draw is that whatever the reason is for their racism, it has nothing to do with black people.

And that's very interesting.

There's a hidden motivation here which the racists themselves are not aware of.

Just think for one second how fucking trippy that is.

That the real motivation for racism is not race. Race provides a context for something much deeper and much more primal to play itself out.

And what is that?

Well it seems to be the fact that when you see the world in divided terms, you see it as comprised of two opposing poles.

Good.

And Evil.

The problem is, no human being can ever hold fast to any conceptual framework of 'goodness' for long, and so we are continually transgressing our OWN standards for what makes a person good, and what makes a person evil.

This is the root of self-loathing.

We construct an internal world of value judgements that are rigid and static because they are creations of the logical process.

This = good.

That = bad.

What we then do is look at the world using that matrix of judgments as a filter.

Anything that falls into 'good' we support and rally behind because doing so proves to us that we are 'good'.

Anything that falls into 'bad' we attack and deride because doing so proves to us we are 'good'.

You see?

So let's take it to a slightly deeper level, and say that all this demonstrates some stuff about humanity itself, about who we are.

We seem to be able to divide and categorize the world we see around us.

We also seem to be able to drop that categorization process and just experience it unfiltered by rational thought.

But these don't seem to simply be two things that we 'can do'.

They seem to be entire universes which we can inhabit.

The first, the world of division, is a world of moral polarities. In that world good and evil exist. Both have their definitions and limits, and these definitions all thrum with a powerful emotional charge. There is a kind of claustrophobia to this world, because it has no exit.

Even those locked inside it know, at some level, that all the victories of this world are meaningless. Money, power, adulation - everyone, even those of us locked very deeply in self-delusion somehow recognise and feel that these things, for all their mesmerizing power, have no truth to them, no substance.

In the world of division you see only the surface of things, and because of this you can be easily manipulated by glamour and flash.

So much of the commercial structure of our age, like the entertainment and consumer industries is based upon triggering compelling emotional reactions in this universe of division.

We hate the bad guy and cheer on the hero.

We want Jack to get the terrorists.

Men shoot aliens/zombies/whatever in a video game, then ogle fast cars they'll never be able to afford while scanning their paychecks for a sense of personal value. They support sports teams and invest those arbitrary teams with moral weight, shutting their minds to the vast artificiality of it because pay-per-view culture gives them a glimpse of a world with two teams, a world of polar simplicity which makes sense.

And all the time men are filling their minds with fantasies of the perfect woman who will come and save them from their meaningless lives.

Women immerse themselves in celebrity gossip, into a universe of tabloid adulation and condemnation of women, relationships and the female form. This at once totally demeaning and completely mesmerizing, and complements nicely the thousand neuroses of appearance that women develop and cling to like driftwood in the open sea.

And all the time women are filling their minds with fantasies of the perfect man who will come and save them from their meaningless lives.

And of course every now and then you get an entire subculture dedicated to nothing more or less than the total rejection of this fictional world.

Goths, chavs, punks, metalheads, hippies...

All of these are simply rejections of that fictional structure.

The problem is simply that the emotional rejection to that structure is itself a structure which traps the humanity of these people in boxes they can't even see.

So this is what I mean when I say that a divided world seems claustrophobic. There's a sense of grand irony, for instance, that surrounds Goths. This is because by and large, Goths are intelligent enough and introspective enough to realize how ridiculous it is to create a new 'conformity' out of 'non-conformity,' which is exactly what they've done.

But this is what everyone does. We react emotionally against something that is, at heart, nothing more than a fiction. And in doing so we create new fictional universes that trap us.

So let's return to racism for a second, because if there's something that is more absurd and counterproductive than racism, it's the emotional reactions AGAINST racism that we all feel.

That's right.

Hatred of racism is still hatred.

And all hatred is a lie.

None of it is true.

It's all based on fundamental misunderstandings of the nature of reality.

All hatred is ultimately based, very simply, on errors of fact.

They have to be, because all hatred is based on division, and there is no division in reality.

So - hating a racist is as absurd as hating a child for thinking that 2 + 2 = 5.

At the end of the day, the core tenets of a racist world-view are that black people are worth less than white people. Or that they are intrinsically more violent, or more ignorant, or whatever.

But at the end of the day, if you genuinely believe that black people are NOT worth less, that they are NOT more violent, that they are NOT more ignorant, and if you believe these things in the same way as you believe that the earth spins round the sun, or that the leaves rustle when the wind blows, you MUST therefore realize that all racism is nothing more than simple errors of fact.

HOWEVER.

None of us do. I find my hackles rise when I encounter genuine racism, and that leads me to think that racism, to me, means a lot more than just two groups of people kicking off on each other for no real reason.

It seems to me that if I'm getting that emotional reaction rising then maybe I'm USING my hatred of racism to prove to myself that I'm a good person.

And that's why the issue's so fucking volatile.

No-one's thinking with their minds. They're thinking with their identities in this morally-charged powder keg of 'right' and 'wrong,' 'good' and 'evil.'

And all of a sudden, boom. Everyone's kicking off.

My point is this: this is not a process that you are aware of.

Once you become aware of the dynamics of this process, you realize that it's controlling you in ways you didn't realize.

Once you realize that deep parts of your mind, deep moral insecurities about who you are, control the way you live your life even to the point of pushing you to extreme and rash actions.

Once you see this process inside you, you realize that it keeps these divisions alive, the divisions between black and white, man and woman, rich and poor... whatever.

But you also see that it is the exact same process that triggers ALL CONCEPTUAL THOUGHT.

That's right, all of it.

All of your compulsive and self-destructive behaviours... ALL OF THEM... are morally charged.

All your compulsive and self-destructive thoughts... ALL OF THEM... exist for one reason and one reason only: to prove to you that you are a good person.

Of course they are.

What else could they be?

The engine that drives the creation of the ego itself is the desire to be 'good' and not 'bad'.

All of the conceptual world exists because of this fundamental division.

But then of course, you know what I'm going to say next, don't you?

Yes.

There is no division in reality.

And once you realize that, you also realize that the fundamental core of what it means to live a successful life as a human is not the division between 'good' and 'evil, or the division between 'right' and 'wrong'.

It is, quite simply, the division between real and unreal.

There is no division in reality.

The only division that can therefore exist is the division between reality and the false.

Can you see?

So it seems that we are all locked in this 'moral universe' of good and evil.

But beneath this world, the world of soundbytes and suicide bombers, political parties and national boundaries, of the people you like and the people you don't like, beneath your taste in clothes or music, there is a deeper world.

And this deeper world has it's own justice which is a completely separate phenomenon from what we see as 'human justice' in the same way that a shadow of your hand is a separate phenomenon from your hand itself.

And why?

Because a shadow has no reality. It simply appears to.

This deeper world is the world of the real.

You will experience it as a psychological state which arises rapidly and unbidden once you begin to cultivate the moments of inner stillness that allow you to silence the noise in your mind.

It's a blast.

If I could describe this state of being, a state of being that is instantly accessible to you, as you read this, right now, I would simply need to point to the phenomenon of 'The Zone'.

Have you ever been in 'The Zone?'

Yes?

That's what it feels like.

So you can essentially live your whole life in the zone, responding instantly and effectively to stimuli.

Truth be told though, that's probably just something for the Zen Masters.

Good thing is, you don't need to live your life 'in the zone' in order to tap this energy.

And why?

Because 'the zone' is not a single state you reach like you'd flip a light switch on.

It is a muscle that you can pump.

You can develop your direct connection to 'the zone' itself. You don't need to be on a surfboard or diving out of an aircraft. You don't need to be a kick-ass sportsman, or a great artist.

You just need to be human.

And the interesting thing is, once you begin to realize the incredible depth of power that flows rapidly out of that 'Zone', you may well become a sportsman or artist, or jump out of an aircraft or learn to surf.

And why?

Because it rocks to do these things, and once you've got your connection with 'The Zone' dialled, your abilities just fucking explode.

The world of direct experience of reality, is replete with a deep sense of calm power that has no opposite and cannot be corrupted. It is incredibly potent, and intoxicating to such an extent that the real challenge of this world is not to simply 'bliss-out' and just sit on a mountaintop in ecstacy for the rest of your life.

Which is a nice choice to make, if like me you've spent most of your life feeling shitty, depressed, lost and alone.

Just bliss out on a mountaintop, or cultivate the power of 'The Zone' itself.

I'd rather do the second than the first... but I'd rather do the first than spend my whole life failing to escape self-hate.

And 'failing to escape self-hate' is, in a nutshell, the essence of what it means to live in a world of moral division.

But look - here's the thing.

For so many long years, philosophers have sought the truth then brought it back so that it could be discussed and debated.

But in discussing it and debating it we have lost it.

The truth is that the truth philosophers have sought is not a 'system of philosophy' that describes the way the world works.

The truth is not an answer.

The truth just is.

And because of that, the only link we have with the truth itself is through the fact that we just are.

So, if we can simply cultivate that single link - the link we share to our reality - then truth is the state of mind we occupy.

The meaning of life is not an answer, it just is the meaning of life. It's a state that you occupy, and although words can point to it, they can never capture it's essence any more than words could capture the essence of 'redness.'

And once you've left behind the search for the answer, the answer becomes obvious.

Develop the connection with the reality of your genuine self by undermining the foundations of the world of 'moral opposites' that has you trapped.

And how do you undermine that world?

It's so easy, you'll kick yourself.

You just look.

That's all.

You see, you have a power that all your insecurities do not have.

You are real.

They are not.

So just your awareness itself has more than enough power to disintegrate the deepest and most fundamental hatreds and arrogances that slink beneath the surface of your conscious mind like vampires.

Just shine the sun on those motherfuckers, you'll incinerate them.

That's it, it's really that simple.

Remember - if you fight them you lose.

So just look.

Just look at the things that create emotional reactions in you.

And thank God every time you have an emotional reaction - because that's some deep-seated division inside you that's just revealed it's position. And once it's revealed, you just look at it.

Then you hold the gaze.

Just hold it.

Don't get sucked in to it.

Don't attack the division.

Don't justify the division.

Just look at it.

And hold.

Hold.

And then you'll discover that it just fades. It loses it's harshness... and from that moment on it will never have the same power to hurt you.

And as soon as you do this, even once, you've opened up a whole new level of consciousness that's connected to the source of all human power.

And that, my friend, is the tip of the spear.

Cultivate Power

2008-01-28T13:09:00.000-08:00

I am shortly to depart the snowy mountains of Colorado.

It is a beautiful place, with scenery so epic that no painting or picture could ever be more than a shadow of the majesty of nature.

And nature is an interesting thing, is it not? As I was snowboarding down Buttermilk Mountain I stopped, casting my eyes across the silent grandeur of the mountains ahead.

I looked at my glove, and closer at the minute flakes of powdery snow that covered it, and it got me thinking.

No two snowflakes are alike, they say.

And no two mountains are the same.

But in a way, snowflakes and mountains are identical.

You see, the quality of difference is a quality everything shares. Everything is exactly different, exactly unique.

Infinitely different.

There is a quality of infinity to all things that never disappears, no matter how close we look, nor how far away we stand.

That shifting infinity though - it is not a uniform thing. The underlying infinity of reality itself forms and reforms always, and never loses cohesion.

And just as one form may disappear - a snowflake, a mountain or a man, that quality of infinity which is present in all things... which is the true nature of all things... remains just as a wave can collapse without destroying the ocean.

What is this awareness that I feel? What is it?

Because I'll tell you what it feels like - it feels as if I'm tapping into that shifting infinity, and that the shifting infinity is the ocean upon which the 'waves' exist.

Could it be that the human brain is not a processor, but in truth a kind of transmitter that hooks up our animal forms directly to the shifting infinity of the quantum universe itself?

It seems to me that the true challenge of the modern human condition lies in managing to escape the linear processing which the human brain is poor at, and instead use our brains as they 'want' to be used... as organic pattern-recognition quantum computing devices.

This process does not require any thought or any effort, and it massively accelerates the power of you as an individual in every circumstance you can imagine yourself in.

Professional, personal, social, sexual... whatever.

To begin to undermine the 'analytical compulsion' which is the bane of all living humans is to instantly awaken a level of personal power which is quite simply indescribably potent.

This power will allow you to charm, to command. To understand, to realize. To experience life at a pitch and intensity that you'd never believe possible, and to generate lighting reflexes for seeing, and seizing, opportunities that will make your life into something approaching a Hollywood movie script.

What's interesting to me is that most people who find this truth simply 'Zen-out' on a mountain top, or smoke pot and say Om.

Fuck that.

What I propose is that anyone who wishes to live a life of glory throws themselves into honing their Zen as they would hone a sword to a razor edge.

Let us kick something off, and deploy enlightenment like a nuclear assault on the very foundations of fear, hate and arrogance.

Just remember, people.

It begins at home.

Get yourself in order. Begin your training.

Cultivate power.

Cultivate the power of reality itself.

Six Billion Lies Competing For Attention

2008-01-27T10:34:00.001-08:00

Ok, here's the plan.

I write a book. It doesn't need to be Da Vinci. It just needs to be slicker than average, and to get a case across.

The book will argue the following case.

There are two fundamental levels to what we experience.

There's the fictional level, the level of concepts and thoughts, the level of value judgments and black and white distinctions.

There is also another level of reality, which is basically just reality.

Now, we are born into the first world, the fictional world. It is imbedded in our psyche as it was embedded in the psyche of our parents and all our ancestors stretching back to the dawn of self-delusion.

The crazy thing is, we know it's fictional. Or at least, since the middle of the 20th century we've known it.

The alienation of youth - something we assume is universal and normal, is actually neither. It's a very specific historical phenomenon that began around the end of the 1950's and has continued until the present day.

Why?

Because before television and radio and mass communication the cultures into which we were born were the only ones we knew. The viewpoints of our parents were the only ones we had.

The psychological cohesion of the fictional worlds into which we were born were absolute.

But not now.

From the 1950's onward we've been increasingly bombarded with information which has made each of us aware of a wider world around us, of people who do not think as we think, or believe as we believe.

And no matter how strong the fictional world we are born into appears to be, even one atom of doubt can do it terrible damage... for after all, it is simply not real.

You see, the fictional world is rigid. It is one of rigid value systems and rigid structures. Perhaps the truth is that in a world where wealth, power and information shift so quickly, all rigid structures will always fall.

Always.

Good.

Let them fall.

Because here we are now at the tail end of the postmodern age, at the twilight of subjectivity.

This fictional world has fallen in on itself, and fiction now consumes fiction... and it is universally accepted by all who enjoy even a whisper of wisdom that money is not the answer, and that product is not the answer, and that status is not the answer.

A crisis point is being reached.

And it is this.

In order to compete with the consumer products of yesteryear, the next generation of consumer products must have all new bells and whistles on them.

There is a kind of zero-sum game going on in this Capitalist world in which we live.

Luxuries are competing against each other for our attention and our money.

And in doing so, they are becoming more outlandish, more potent, more extreme.

This process is accelerating all the time in rate and scale. It has no upward limit. It is, essentially, a feedback loop.

BUT.

All feedback loops, left unchecked, shatter their boundaries. If you leave a mic next to an amp and allow that screech of feedback to increase indefinitely, something is going to blow.

Some fuse is going to pop, somewhere, and the whole system will cease to function.

The feedback loop of consumerism is screeching at such a powerful and overwhelming volume that it is awakening mass numbers of human beings from their unthinking slumber.

Nowhere, at any time in the past, have there been so many people snapping out of the mindset of the 'herd' and looking around them. Looking around and seeing nothing.

Nothing.

Emptiness.

Pointlessness.

The howling terror that comes with the realisation that we are all slaves to a machine of our own design.

The grinding crunch of the realisation that there is no conspiracy. There is no Big Brother, no hidden governments pulling the strings.

There are no strings.

There's just six billion different lies competing for attention.

I am always buoyed up when I hear of the massive numbers of people suffering from clinical depression.

It makes me smile.

Why?

Because I know from bitter experience that the phenomenon that medics refer to as clinical depression is very often the awakening of a true understanding that the world in which we live and die is a fiction with no meaning.

Jarring, isn't it?

Heh.

Well that's because from the point of view of the fictional worlds into which we are born, their collapse means the collapse of all personal meaning and significance.

No, I'm still talking way too abstract.

From the point of view of the fictional world of meaning that you have woven into the fabric of your psyche itself, the fact that you can't get rid of the doubt that you feel about the very life you live is fatal to your ability to operate in the world.

The death of the lies that you rely on to navigate your way through the chaos of existence renders you crippled.

The destruction of that fiction which is the very ground beneath your feet and the realisation of it's totally delusional nature is shattering, crippling and extremely painful.

Now let me be clear.

I'm not trying to argue away your beliefs.

What I'm saying is this.

Your beliefs are doomed.

They cannot survive. They simply do not have the strength to hold together under the relentless pressure of the world in which we live without you totally retreating into your own mind and blocking your ears to all evidence to the contrary.

And sure, some people will do that. And it is so tempting to look at those who retreat further into delusion and say "humanity is weak, and thus is doomed." And many say such things.

But I do not.

For I am not looking at those who retreat deeper into slumber.

I am looking at those who are emerging, tentatively and painfully, into the light of day.

You see, there is an inescapable natural justice to the affairs of men that is totally implacable, and has nothing to do with morality.

It cannot be cheated, and will instigate a terrible, and rapid vengeance if you try.

But it also rewards massively. The rewards are huge and immediate, and grow exponentially with time.

I'll talk more of this later, but for now, simply think on this.

Fiction has no power. Not in and of itself. A man may invest himself in a fiction by a process of self-delusion, arrogance and fear, but the only power that fiction has is the power that man gives it.

Why?

Because that man is real.

He invests a fiction with his reality, and can, if he believes it strongly enough and others are weak enough, reorder the world in his image.

But...

It is still a fiction, and as such, it is still rigid and artificial - and thus it is still doomed.

It will fall. All things that stand, fall.

But what if a man, instead of building a new fiction from the ruins of his old world view, instead dedicted himself to cultivating that connection with reality itself?

What if he left behind all fiction, and worked ceaselessly to break himself from the 'matrix'?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human authority?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human wisdom?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human beauty?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human honour?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human strength?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human clarity?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human genius?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all human success?

What power could a man have if he was connected always to the source of all humanity?

You see, there are two worlds which you experience every single day.

The first world is the world that your school, university or job tells you is real. The world that television tells you is real. The world that advertising tells you is real.

The world of consumerism, of insecurity, of arrogance and hate, of 'moral crusades' and 'moral judgments' that further divide a divided planet.

The world of what you should and shouldn't do. How you should and shouldn't feel. Who you should and shouldn't be.

And then, on the flip side, you have this moment, right now. This second you're living in which flows like the crest of a wave, which never began and never ends.

And those of us who have chosen to leave behind all fiction strive daily to cultivate that connection with the wavefront of the only moment you'll ever know - this one.

There are many ways to cultivate that - I myself have been reading up on Zen, and I'll continue to do so, and to look for and explore anything else that looks promising.

I think of it like learning to surf.

But the point is this - there is an inescapable natural justice to the affairs of men.

And that means that we do not need to win any arguments to save the world.

We do not need to fight in order to win.

All we need to do... and this is very simple... is to work that one muscle. That one thing - connection with reality itself.

Because once we have developed this to a significant degree, I have the feeling that we will be able to transcend the problems that, right now, seem intractable.

So, what I'm going to do is put together a book which gives concrete ways of getting... and supercharging... that link with reality.

It will be very simple to sell because the raw power of such an approach makes most self-help look childishly weak. This shit can revolutionize your life in a matter of days, if properly applied... and properly delivered.

As such, I'll make a shitload of cash and be able to afford that new diamond-studded loofah I've been looking at.

And, as an incidental side effect, we'll kick off a process that can save the world.

Apsen Baby!

2008-01-23T18:18:00.000-08:00

So here I am in Aspen. Aspen times, baby!

Woo!

It's epic, just awesome scenery. I've just eaten some pizza, and we're about to go out somewhere and eat.

I have three watches.

One of them simply states "Now".

One of them sports a Union Jack and displays the time in Britain.

One of them has a Superman logo and displays what a certain German fellow would refer to as 'Clock Time'.

They all have chunky leather straps and they're on one arm.

It looks like a huge leather bracer.

Goth-tastic.

In other news, I need to buy some new jeans, as the crotch has worn out in these ones. I'm not wearing pants right now, and there's about 5 feet of snow outside.

Chilly.

Aspen! Woo! Aspen!

And that's all I got right now gents.

The Power Of Christ Compels You

2008-01-22T22:36:00.000-08:00

That's what I said.

You see, I've got a great deal of respect for those crazy ass Zen Masters who sit on a mountain top and are totally at one with the world.

I think it's awesome - and not only that, I think that these men are like relay racers. They cultivate the flame of awareness, carry the torch, so to speak.

You see, every single religion started with some dude who was hooked the fuck up.

Let's take the one example that's going to piss everyone off - Jesus.

Heheheh.

I love flaunting my Christianity. There's something so cringeworthy about the 'J' word. There's not much you can do to freak out your work colleagues when you work in RSD, but the Christian thing? Love it. They just get really awkward.

Apart from Tim, of course. But don't you worry. I'll get him somehow.

I want to pick the JC example because it's such an extreme case.

Now, most people think of Jesus as this sanctimonious, holier than thou twat who preached at people to meet these impossible moral standards, then died.

And from one point of view, they're right.

That point of view is the point of view of orthodox Christian theology.

It's fascinating.

If you look at the life of Jesus as represented in the Gospels, you find something very interesting.

His story goes like this.

He starves himself in the desert.

He sees Satan.

Satan tempts him, and he resists.

He comes out of the desert healing people left, right and centre.

He becomes something of a celebrity.

Then he goes to Jerusalem, and begins to talk about where he's coming from.

Then he goes to the temple, and kicks the fuck off.

Then he's arrested.

Then he's killed.

Then he comes back, imbues his followers with superhero powers and flies off like Neo.

And that's it.

It's interesting, because about 50 years ago in Nag Hammadi, a scroll was found from first century Palestine detailing the 'sayings' of Jesus. It had no narrative, just a collection of his sayings, a lot of them unknown.

It was declared a heretical text by the various Christian Churches, and sidelines. You can read it online at this link:

The interesting thing is it contains sayings like this:

"Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all."

And it says things like this:

"When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

Hmm.

Slightly different vibe, huh? Slightly more intense, and insightful. Less easily categorized as 'moral preaching'.

It's funny - the thing about 'moral preaching' is that the only people who ever listen to it are hypocrites.

And the funny thing about 'morality' in general is that it's basically nothing more or less than the machinery of judgment and condemnation.

The irony is that even in the accepted Gospels, Jesus says that we should not judge, nor should we condemn.

He doesn't qualify this.

He just says it.

Don't judge. Ever.

Don't condemn. Ever.

This essentially undermines the principle of justice on which all human morality is based.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

This Jesus guy was not a moral man.

He was, if anything, anti-morality.

And quite openly so.

Here, check this out, again from the Gospel of Thomas:

"I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I'm guarding it until it blazes."

Interesting.

What's he talking about here?

I think he's talking about the ability to tap into the core essence of one's very humanity, the link we each share with the infinite consciousness that is our birthright as humans.

What did the big JC do? Here's what I think.

He clicked to something massive. Some power, the power of Zen, or Allah, or infinity, or God, or whatever label you want to stick on to it - he united with it.

And once he'd united with it, he knew that he had to communicate it with the world, because if he could trigger a process that would lead to the whole world hooking into this power as he had, the world would move beyond morality as he did - and there would be no more conflict either inside people's minds, or outside in the world.

Here's another interesting one:

"If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits."

Hmmmm.

Interesting.

Let's read that again, shall we?

"If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits."

So what you're saying here is that the machinery of morality will chain you down and fuck you up, isn't it? That's what you're saying, isn't it, Jesus?

I thought so.

He also said this, which I think is cool:

"Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye."

Sounds like a dude to me.

I also like this one:

"Congratulations to the person who has toiled and found life."

And how about this little humdinger?

"Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters... will not be worthy of me."

What the fuck?

Hate?

From the mouth of the vaunted 'lamb of God?'

Interesting.

What's he talking about here? You hate them?

Really?

I think he's talking about total destruction of any attachment to other people or things - even your close family.

In fact, I think it's pretty obvious that's what he means.

It's a little bit like Buddhism - only much more hardcore.

And that's what's emerging, isn't it? He's like Buddha, only far more extreme. Much more hardcore. No soft edges on this motherfucker. Just straight up "this is what you do."

And why would you do all this shit, huh?

Why would you do all this crazy ass shit?

Well, from the mouth of the man himself it's so that you can enter the 'Kingdom of God'.

Kingdom.

God.

Interesting words those.

It's almost as if everyone just assumes that this means the afterlife.

It's even more interesting that everyone (myself as a kid included) assumes this when Jesus explicitly states on multiple occasions that the opposite is true.

Here's an example, but all four Gospels are littered with stuff like this:

"His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?"

"It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it.""

Kingdom.

God.

Ok, so what's a Kingdom?

Well, a lot of theologians start talking about kingship, lordship, all that jazz.

But no-one seems to be getting even more basic than that.

What's a Kingdom?

A country. A place. A state. A nation.

It's a domain.

And God.

Well, a lot of theologians start talking about first causes, about creators, about a whole shitload of stuff.

For me, it's becoming increasingly apparent that what the truly Holy men and women referred to as 'God' is exactly the same phenomenon - exactly the same - as that infinite stillness that Zen connects you to.

As that moment of awe when you see something that your rational mind can't process.

As the sublime which poets write of.

The infinite reality of which we all are part.

So 'Kingdom of God' could very easily translate as 'Domain of Infinite Reality'.

In fact, I'll go further and say that it's pretty fucking obvious that this is what that sandal wearing hippy was talking about - and not some autocratic intergalactic bastard with a grudge against apple-eaters and a twitchy smiting hand.

So here's the thing.

I don't think Jesus was dispensing moral advice.

I think he was describing reality as he saw it, and I think he was doing that for a reason.

And the reason is this:

Power.

Unbelievable, and uncorruptible power.

You see, as I cultivate the authenticity I have - as I continue on my quest to shatter the conceptual apparatus of my identity and ego, I discover that I am a great deal more powerful than I have ever been.

I recently discovered that when I was out pulling chicks using pure honesty, I was so good that even world class pickup artists who know and trust me are highly sceptical that the things I did ever happened.

I think this is hilarious. I had no idea I was that good.

But here's the thing - all of my 'methods' cannot be used for ill.

All the things I teach simply do not register in the minds of people who are selfish. They think I'm lying, that I achieve what I achieve by trickery.

It simply does not fit into their world view that authenticity - that honesty itself - has a visceral power that simply cannot be rivalled by any other human agency.

You see, the power of authenticity is incorruptible power. It is the power to walk up to any woman in any situation, and fuck her within minutes if that is your will.

Yes, you heard me. Minutes.

It's the power to hold your cool under pressure that would shatter a normal man's mind, and make decisions of such insight and brilliance that others are blown backward by the near supernatural levels of genius you display.

It's the power to float above all negativity - to transcend struggles that would destroy even great men by widening your perspective and seeing solutions of such dizzying potency that others will stop in their tracks and follow you into hell if you ask them to.

It's the power to surf the crest of chaos itself.

It's all the power there is, or ever could be.

And it's right there, right here, right inside us all the time - as long as we can rise above the universe of 'judgment,' 'condemnation,' and 'morals,' and dwell in the domain of infinite reality.

And in that place, there are many different powers I think, awaiting our discovery. The descriptions of 'psychics' and 'mystics,' 'mediums' and 'spiritualists' all share commonalities which are so pronounced that only arrogance, judgmentalism and the desire to disdain with which our reality is riven obscures this obvious truth.

But of course - once you've categorized a power, you've imbedded it in the world of conceptual thought and cut if off from the original source of it's power... the domain of infinite reality.

And once it's cut off from the source, it loses it's wholeness. Or, to use another word for wholeness - it loses it's integrity.

And then, when you chase after it, you are chasing a phantom - and it destroys you.

This, I believe, is true even when talking about the most crazy-ass levels of power. That's why psychics and mediums are such weird motherfuckers. They're chasing power.

And chasing power is a fucking stupid thing to do.

Because you don't need to chase what you already are.

Here's why I'm a Christian. Because of all the holy men who've ever walked the earth, Christ alone believed in global redemption.

I love Zen. I love it. I find it so much more potent than anything else I've ever encountered for stripping the self-delusion from you and riveting you to reality.

But the goal of Zen is Zen.

The purpose of Zen is Zen.

And the point of Zen is Zen.

I call it recreational enlightenment. You punch into the domain of infinite reality, then just 'Zen out' for fifty years.

Maybe you take on a student. Maybe you don't.

It's all very Zen.

And frankly, it's not for me.

I'm the least Zen guy I know.

I'm so not Zen, that I want to take Zen and wield it like a sword to destroy the internal and external conflicts which wrack this globe and threaten our species.

I always find it amusing when people tell me that this can't be done. I find it funny because that kind of talk just riles me up more and makes me more set on doing it.

Doing what, you say?

Aye - well I'll tell ye.

If a man could connect totally with reality itself, here and now, he would have the full powers of the communications revolution and the information age at his disposal.

If a man could crack the code on waking people up to full connection with that domain, the domain of infinite reality, he could package that idea, and sell it.

And in selling it, he could create a business - a self-help business in the existing industry using proven techniques to drive this information into the popular consciousness like a fucking piledriver.

This isn't about 'discovering the meaning of life'. It's about unleashing the meaning of life.

And that is how a man could become a millionaire, and save the world doing it.

Now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout.

Blueprint Times Abound

2008-01-21T02:25:00.000-08:00

Sweet mother of Christ, people.

You have no idea what my job involves.

The Blueprint Decoded seminar is probably the most sought after piece of machinery in the seduction community's history.

It's had a four year build up. FOUR YEARS.

That's not some marketing team with a graphics design team setting up a flashy ass waste of everybody's time so they can cash in on fame.

It's a different order of thing.

And that's what you have to realise about the Blueprint. It's a different order of thing.

It's a different kind of program, a different kind of seminar.

This is simultaneously the Magnum Opus of a man who's reputation has held steady in the face of some of the most extreme and damning criticism ever leveled at anyone, and a heartfelt plea to all men to rediscover their very humanity.

It is a blistering attack on falsehood that cuts to the very core mechanism of self-deception - and shatters it like glass on an anvil.

It is so transcendentally beyond anything that you've ever seen or heard before that to call it a 'seduction product' is, to my mind, almost funny.

But the truth is....

Damn. It will make you a star.

It will make you a superstar.

It will turn your head inside out, and when it's done, your life will be unrecognisably awesome.

It's like the pickup equivalent of Bruce Lee's Tao of Jeet Kune Do... except Lee never finished his masterpiece. Tyler did.

A scorching piece of work that hits harder and harder each time you watch it, wrenching you out of the matrix of conceptual bullshit and rooting you into reality like a pillar of steel driven 500 miles into the floor.

Such an incredible display of honesty, authenticity and humanity that it leaves all criticism of the man splintered like matchwood in a tornado.

We're all going to be famous.

That is to say... Tyler is going to be famous enough for everyone.

It might not happen immediately, but it will happen.

You'll see.

Epic.

The Tip Of The Spear

2008-01-20T05:29:00.001-08:00

And so it is, just like you said it would be.

Life goes easy on me.

Most of the time.

Awesome weekend - one of the best I've had. Hit a realization I've been working toward for some time now.

The tip of the spear.

It's so simple.

I'm too tired to tell you, and I need to think this one through.

1% of infinity is infinity.

If you can sort yourself out 1%, you can sort yourself out.

The tip of the spear.

Sleep now.

Channel The Flow...

2008-01-19T03:22:00.000-08:00

We're like fun junkies. We'll do anything if it's fun. We'll sit all day hammering plastic buttons to shoot fictional creatures with fictional guns because it's fun. We'll inject chemicals into our veins because it's fun. We'll waste our whole lives because watching TV is more fun right now than working toward the glorious fun times we could have in the future.

We'll protect our identities like we protect our crack habits. A man will walk through fire, will punch a man in the face, will kill and will die before he compromises on his identity as a man.

This is all good, because this is all leverage.

You see, marketers have known these things for decades. And always they have used this knowledge to get rich. And I'm not judging them, really I'm not. The capitalist system is not the 'Great Satan' of our age.

But fun is like a groove into which humanity will flow.

And identity is like a wall that blocks that flow.

But remember children, Ciaran's first rule of philosophy.

There is no division in reality.

Which means that there is no contradiction between these two things.

None.

If identity is like a wall that blocks flow, you can use it to channel people.

And if fun is like a groove, you can channel them wherever you want them to go.

So what if you channeled people into success? What if you channeled people into their own strength, and in doing so, unleashed the latent power of their humanity itself?

What if you used the energy of the riot to cut through it?

What if you used the structure of the matrix to shatter it?

The thing is, I'm just some dude, and so are you. Neither one of us has the strength to save the world.

But the world has the strength.

And because of fun and identity, you can channel the strength of the world.

And in doing so, you could, theoretically speaking, get it to save itself.

The Eye Doesn't See Itself...

2008-01-17T20:21:00.001-08:00

Hanging out with Tim makes me realise how much negativity I carry around with me.

That's not a bad thing.

I have a friend back home who thinks he's always really positive. His philosophy on life is that you should always find the positive, block out the negative and live to the fullest.

Sounds like a good philosophy, and it would be were it not for the fact that he's not a very happy guy a lot of the time. He just thinks he is.

That might sound like a terribly arrogant thing to say, and perhaps it is, but if you met him you'd know what I mean. He's the kind of guy with a raging temper, who's sense of moral condemnation is always poised on a hair trigger.

It's almost like he blanks out the negative even in himself, making him think he's happy when he spends 90% of his time complaining, criticizing or attacking something he hates.

He gets under my skin, as I'm sure you can see from this post.

The eye doesn't see itself, you see?

He can't see himself. Not really. And so who he thinks he is he sees through the same filters as the ones he uses to see the world. It's crazy, sometimes I think he's profoundly unhappy... but he has no idea. He thinks he's on top of the world.

The traps we build for ourselves, eh?

Why do I bring up my friend?

Well I'll tell you. Because he is my friend. I love that guy. Love him to death. He's an awesome dude, but he's awesome for none of the reasons he thinks he is.

The eye doesn't see itself.

I realise that I have carried a weight of negativity with me. I know this, and I guess at some level I've known it for a while.

But I only see myself through that negative filter because the negativity we carry with us is imbedded our very faculty of perception itself.

And this includes our self-perceptions.

So how could we know? How could I know that basically everything out of my mouth has some kind of critical aspect to it? Some form of bitchiness, of negativity?

I couldn't.

The eye doesn't see itself.

But then of course, there is a power that transcends this truth. The power of empathy.

And empathy, to me at least, means more than the sharing of feelings. It means the sharing of perspectives, and perspectives are everything.

The whole universe, seen from one certain perspective, is inches away from salvation and needs only a nudge.

How do I know this?

Because all perspectives exist.

And it seems that the process of self-actualization, sorting yourself out, becoming whole again, healing... call it what you will... is not in fact the process of changing your perpective for a better one.

It seems instead to be the process of fusing perspectives.

You see, all the identities that people agonise over, hate, love, desire, defend - they are all no more (and no less) than perpectives.

People often believe that changing their lives means abandoning their true essence - but this is not the case.

It is the broadening of your perception to allow you to occupy both perspectives simultaneously - and realise that in truth, there is only ever one perspective.

Reality.

So... this thing with Tim. When I hang out with him I realise, not with self-loathing, but with genuine surprise, how pervasive my negativity is.

It's fascinating, because yesterday I simply had no idea and now I do.

Cool.

You see, even though the eye does not see itself, the eye does not have to.

There are many perspectives walking around the world, and some of them are extremely close to the source of perspective itself, reality itself. Some people (not nearly enough, but they exist) look at the world and they don't have a filter of judgement.

They just see.

And when they look at you, they see you so clearly that you see yourself.

Which, God willing, is all you really need.

The Cleanest Motherfucker In The Room

2008-01-16T23:47:00.000-08:00

Huh. Fascinating.

Just had dinner with Tim. We had sushi in LA, darling. I feel so sophisticated.

I love LA. I've no idea what it is but the vibe of this place just climbs inside you. I went into Starbucks the other day and ordered a Tall Skinny Hazelnut Latte. It's started already.

I'm becoming a twat.

But Tim, yeah, crazy. Had big chats. He explained to me the core concepts of his upcoming superconference. I was humbled. Honestly.

I knew there was something different about him the first time I saw that fucker in Transformations. He just didn't seem to have any kind of conflict inside him, nothing.

Now I know why.

It's too late to go into detail, and besides, I need to think this one over, but what he's basically done is to devise a method of self-improvement that has no conflict in it whatsoever.

He's purged 'struggle' from the mix.

The thing is, we're all products of the process. Whatever process we put ourselves through forges us in it's own image. For old-school community-heads that often means a skull full of bad wiring, because there was so much negativity and bitterness back in the day.

Many people transform themselves through struggle, and succeed.

They fight to become good with women, and they get good with women.

But those who have fought to succeed have conflict woven into the very fabric of their new personalities... the personalities they fought so hard to forge.

And that's not to diss them - after all, they succeeded. I was one of them. No-one could have accused me of failing to get good with women.

But it was always there, seething below the surface, that conflict. Even now I can feel it.

Not with Tim. Tim's self esteem is cleaner than a pure mountain spring. It has a clarity to it, a shining purity that marks him out and the cleanest motherfucker in the room, regardless of what room he's in, or how long it's been since he showered.

It's weird, a part of me was worried I'd miss the 'magic'. That he wouldn't be able to explain what he'd done, or he wouldn't really be aware of it.

I needn't have worried. He knows his shit inside out, and he's slick... really slick at explaining it.

This is such a massive piece of the pie I'll devote a whole post to it in more detail when I'm not on the verge of unconsciousness.

Still, I feel very blessed to know this dude. If the lightning he has can be bottled, and I think it can... who knows what glory the future holds?

Interesting....

Sniffles, Tim, Transformations And What It Means To Discard Shit

2008-01-16T16:44:00.000-08:00

Fnnnng.

I have a cold.

It's that or a flu or something. I'm in Los Angeles right now (woo!) but I'm stuck in a tiny little office (boo!) with no windows under florescent lighting for 9ish hours a day.

It's all good though, because I'm working on the marketing for what may be the most powerful self-help product ever released.

The Blueprint.

It's undeniably potent. This is the third time I've seen it now (twice live then this run through) and each time I see it I get hit at a deeper level.

I do love working for RSD.

But I have a cold.

This is not so bad, but I do need to pull my shit together. This weekend I'll be going on bootcamp with a guy who is, quite simply one of the most exciting teachers of which I am aware.

I speak of RSD's legendary Tim. He made his name from innumerate glowing reviews and articles, and then smashed it out of the ballpark with his now legendary 2 hour speech in the Transformations program.

But why do I bring this up on a blog about saving the world?

Well, I'll tell you.

Humanity, and reality itself, have a kind of 'fractal' quality to them.

That is to say that things do not change in their fundamental nature as they change in scale.

Personal transformation is something that once upon a time only existed in the marketing materials of NLP-inspired self-help seminars.

But now it's real.

I've done it. Everyone at RSD has done it. Moved from a place of darkness to a place of clarity and authenticity.

And there is no-one I've ever seen who's as clear and as authentic as our little Tim.

The man is like a shining beacon of holy light. That's why his Transformations speech was so potent - because the truth of it shone from him like the sun.

Amazing, I mean, just amazing.

It struck me so hard because I tend toward the darker side of things. It's probably why I get on with Jeffy so well - there's this part of me that's still wounded. Still twisted and jagged.

I buried it deep which seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm trying to resolve my internal issues in an industrial way it's a little annoying.

Pressure over time, Ciaran. Pressure over time.

Nonetheless, when I saw Tim I just felt awed by just how fucking clean the man's self-esteem is.

I mean, it's the cleanest I've ever seen. By miles. There just doesn't seem to be any of that darkness, that haughty edge, that impatience and emotional brutality that sometimes slips out of me from somewhere deep down.

So yesterday I met him for the first time, and I have to say I wasn't disappointed. He really is like that in real life, and on top of that (or perhaps because of that) he's just a great guy to talk to.

He said two things which really struck me. He said firstly how grateful he was for every moment of his life.

And the second thing he said was this. When he teaches a guy, he sees the cool dude beneath the layers of self-hate. He sees that, and just moves toward that vision. Everything that isn't in that vision gets discarded.

That word stuck in my head. Discarded.

Hmm.

Because I've always been of the opinion that the negative should be fought and destroyed... but of course with retrospect this has never helped me. I just backwards-rationalised that it did.

What really made me good with girls were the things that I discarded. I discarded the tactics. I discarded trying to impress. I discarded having a set outcome for an encounter... and all of a sudden my encounters with women kept ending in sex.

Discarding something negative is the only way to fly. If you fight it, you've already lost because it's won the only battle that matters... convincing you that it's real.

If you discard it, you just discard that fucker and go about your day.

Intriguing.

So last night I started to discard.

I would recommend it, as it seems to be working wonders.

There Is No Division In Reality

2008-01-15T12:38:00.000-08:00

So I'm reading the last post I put up. It's strange, there's definitely something not right in the way I'm thinking about this.

It's too shrill. Too 'questy'.

The problem with a quest is that all too often we do them so that we can be 'that guy'. You know, the romantic/tragic/epic hero.

And there's nothing wrong with romance, or tragedy or the epic... it's just that these are the things that can sneak in the back door of the mind and before you know it you're off compass, and your ego is fighting a losing battle against demons of it's own making.

The difficulty with saving the world is not, I'm starting to realise, that saving the world is really all that hard.

The world wants to sort itself out. The 'world', as we call it, is really nothing more than a massive group of people, and people are pretty straightforward creatures really.

They have huge reserves of compassion and decency, courage, love, hope and power.

The world can save itself. It's not like it doesn't have the manpower.

The problem, as I see it, lies in the fact that saving the world is a pretty trippy thing to try and do. It can fuck with your head very, very fast.

You can start to feel like you're on some kind of evangelical crusade, start to objectify the world into the things that help you and the the things that hold you back and all of a sudden you're just some arrogant prick with delusions of grandeur.

I know because I checked.

But there is a truth that goes beyond all this. And it is this truth:

There is no division in reality.

It's very simple. Reality isn't broken down into bite sized chunks we can analyze and interact with. We break it down into those chunks ourselves.

And we live in a world of chunks of things. And sometimes those chunks come into conflict.

Like the idea of saving the world and the idea that the human ego is a ravenous animal which will consume and destroy anyone attempting such a task.

It seems pretty intractable. Like the one thing could never reconcile itself with the other.

But it's not true. Why?

Because there is no division in reality.

And so even though I cannot see past this divide, not yet, I understand that this divide exists only as the crest of an electrochemical waveform in the lump of meat between my ears.

There is a way to transcend this division, and in doing so, save our species from itself.

Somehow.

And so it is....

2008-01-15T03:19:00.000-08:00

Howdy people.

I've started this blog to explore some of my ideas about the world, life, and other such random inventions of the mind.

My interest is simple. I'm interested in finding out if there is a way to effect a mass transformation in the minds of the human race.

The kind of transformation I'd like to effect is pretty simple, and I'm sure you can guess.

Less conflict, more chilling.

Less hate, more hope.

Less horror and more humanity.

The only three things I guess this transformation must be is

a) Large scale,

b) Self-sustaining,

and

c) Permanent.

Now, you may say I'm a dreamer. And if you'd have caught me a while back, you'd have been right.

Right now though, I feel there's something there. Something more than moralism or drum-banging.

Something tangible that can be done. Something real.

It has many facets to it, and although there is a simplicity underlying the thing, I cannot see it all yet.

It has internal aspects to do with identifying and destroying the arrogances and insecurities within myself.

It has external aspects which involve breaking that transformation down into simple, mass-friendly chunks, then driving that into the market as a commercial enterprise.

But I sense that it can be done.

By 'it' I mean that I'm increasingly coming to think that it is possible to trigger a large scale (global, preferably), self-sustaining and self-amplifying process of change.

Maybe I'm wrong.

But if I'm right, I might be able to make enough money to buy that new diamond-studded loofah I've had my eye on, and do a lot of good doing it.

Anyway, it's late and I'm going to pass out now. I hope I don't forget about this blog in the morning.

I'm like that sometimes.

Ciaran