Indifferent to pleasure and pain

 Only the man who is unmoved 

by any sensations; the wise man

indifferent to pleasure, to pain,

is fit for becoming deathless.

Bhagavad Gita 

Say we fall in love again, and after a brief and stormy romance things settle just as they were before in the relationship we outgrew. Errands have to be run; children have to be taken care of and two lives grow into one once again. 

Or take a promotion at work. After some initial excitement the job becomes routine again. Employees have to be hired, trained and let go of. Upper management becomes our new constituent. Yes, the paycheck is higher, but the work is more or less the same. If anything, the stress is probably going up with the higher pay.

Our modern brain has a very simple happiness formula proportional to the desires fulfilled. You might say a measure of unhappiness is the ratio of unfulfilled desires to the fulfilled ones. True spiritual living in contrast happens outside of the world of desires. We are content with what comes by itself!

Many spiritual seekers are lost for a while because they don’t understand that they have a foot in each world and are not totally committed to either. We have a desire to be enlightened and we seek a life full of love and outside the established responsibilities. It’s a fantasy! Everything we need and want awaits right in front of us. The desired twin flame connection is also just a relationship between two people like before and the desired light worker role will have the same annoying commitments as our current job. This does not mean that our life will not receive a big upgrade along a spiritual quest. As our vibrations change, so does the environment we attract. 

Make the orientation to the here and now complete and step out of the world of desires without repressing and without jumping on some spiritual ideals. Just look through the illusionary nature of desires. Pleasure and pain come and go. Stay in the “be content with whatever comes and goes” when it feels natural and inquire into the reasons why when it feels unnatural.

Awareness is the answer to all of our problems!

 J. Krishnamurti discovered the law of quantum physics, “the observer is the observed,” but few understand what this actually means. Our mind is a projector. The world we live in reflects what we are all about in the depth of our being. 

The Law of Attraction crowd attempts to use this insight by making this world our oyster. Material improvements and more wholesome relationships can be accomplished as long as this method is used for going inwards and letting go of all inner interferences.

Awareness is the answer to all of our problems! On the inside, using our awareness to shine light on the pain-bodies that distorted our mind perception before, and on the outside, the awareness of the world as is without getting our conditioning reflected back to us.

The observer is the observed—enjoy the beautiful view!

Don’t just do something—sit there!

 Modern society admires goal-getters. In Europe, only the toughest survived the elements during the ice age. In the New World the motto of the settlers became, “grab as much land as you can and do something constructive with it!” We may still have some admiration for Diogenes who lived in a barrel and still managed to argue with Alexander the Great, or the Indian rishis, but we also abhor homelessness. It makes us scared.

Purposeful action seemingly beats sitting on the couch, but what if that action that we consider purposeful is still recycled pain. Is Greta Thunberg a product of her cause? Was Gandhi a product of British oppression? The point is that creation does its thing, and the ones who participate in it will naturally get more limelight than the one sitting it out, but what about our spiritual evolution? The key is to become aware of our pain-body and learn to let go.

The Bhagavad Gita distinguishes three energies—dull, driven and serene. The opportunity for “tamas” is to look through the depressed energy and get moving; for “rajas”, to discover the serene energy in the action, and for “sattva”, to find enlightenment in being. We all contain all of these energies at different stages in our life. Modern man tries too hard and should not be embarrassed to sit it out sometimes.

If you see an opportunity for reform in the outside world, do something about it. If you spot a pain-body on the inside, just sit there and wrap your arms around it until you get to the bottom of it. Reform on the outside, healing on the inside—those are the cornerstones for serene living. Don’t just do something, sit there until inspiration finds you.

#spirituality #awakening #activism

Resting in the eye of the storm

 It’s early in the morning. Something seems off. Thoughts are rushing through me—a feeling of inadequacy, past regrets, worries about the future. This is unusual, typically I am always completely still in the early morning hours. A tune of lost love is humming in my head. I notice a pain-body inside. It’s not specific. It’s the cause of all the regrets, concerns and ill-feelings but it is not subject specific at all. It interrupts the free flowing of energy that I am so used to. I let it envelop me. The temperature is getting warmer. I am inside and the painful feeling stops. It’s like being in a womb, in the center of a storm. Even the humming of the sad tune is getting weaker until it stops. Complete silence, you could even say there is a feeling of well-being. It feels cozy there. I rest in this silence for ten minutes or so and come out of it refreshed. The storm has passed!

Learning and transformation along a spiritual quest

 Whether you like it or not,

whether you know it or not,

secretly, all nature seeks God

and works towards Truth.

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

Before we address learning and transformation we have to ask, is there a spiritual quest? Everyone is on a spiritual quest—consciously or subconsciously. Even if we strive for power, meaningless sex and material riches, we are on a subconscious journey that is bound to demonstrate sooner or later that these things also don’t make us happy. Everyone searches for the inner Bliss.

We may call those who look for a new way to be on a conscious spiritual quest, but nobody is “better” or “worse” than the other. Our perceived identity is the interference that gives us the feeling that we are away from Home, whether it is the identity of the greedy CEO who abuses people and the environment or the spiritual seeker. Everyone is just one insight away from the realization that we are Home.

The missing step in the Home-coming is to look through the apparition into the essence of things. There is no one around after the coin has dropped! A Course in Miracles writes, “All of his miscreations can literally disappear in the ‘twinkling of an eye’ because they are merely misperceptions.” That is true. The breakthrough is a new way of seeing, but the subject-object-knowing connection disappears with it. 

Take the sea that is visible to the traveler in the desert or the rope that got mistaken to be a snake. Is the observer who was fooled before learning or transforming if even his existence was never real? Learning and transformation belongs to a lower plane of consciousness that the spiritual seeker aims to leave behind altogether. In the “body-mind-world matrix,” the “learner” aims to see the rope while realizing his own non-existence too!

The transformation is the switch from mind-centered living to heart-centered and the learning opportunity is to see through the illusions of pride, greed, lust, jealousy and anger, but be mindful of the identity of the spiritual aspirant which might be growing with every break-through. The direct path is understanding that there is no learning nor transforming; in fact, there is not even a spiritual path. We are part of That in which body, mind and the world appear.

Letting go of the story of “me”

 I had a dream the other day, I was in a soccer competition and twice managed to steal the ball from my opponents and scored, advancing to the next level each time. The rush I experienced felt familiar. I spent my youth as a soccer player and afterwards used academics and the financial industry as an outlet to compete with the best, intellectually this time around.

That’s how the notion of the “me” gets programmed. We perceive the highs as us and want to see the lows as the outlier and wish it away. The spiritual quest is the letting go of this conditioning and the insight that life’s ups and downs don’t define us. We realize that the story of “me” was not real and we are free to let go of this story altogether.

Do you know the story of the scorpion and the holy man? A passer-by sees a man rescuing a scorpion but the moment he lifts the scorpion out of the water he gets stung and drops it in agony, only to rescue it again a moment later. When the passer-by asked him what was going on, he shrugged his shoulders and said, it’s the nature of the scorpion to sting and my nature to save!

Our nature is not written in stone—or in the dna in this case—it’s something to be mindful of as it gets activated but it doesn’t define us. The dissolution of self is the realization that body, mind and world are One; the observer is the observed. Everything that life confronts us with is a stepping stone to leave the conditioning behind as long as we acknowledge its existence.

The holy man got hung up on his holiness title that’s why life put him in a painful time-loop to encourage him to let go—of the scorpion as well as his holiness. Likewise, I acknowledge my competitive conditioning but no longer feel compelled to participate in the story of “me.” Universal Consciousness is in charge. There is a time to “win” and a time to “lose”.

#spirituality #awakening #competition 

Have you still not found what you are looking for?

 You might say unhappiness is the number of unfulfilled desires divided by desires fulfilled, and that’s what humanity focuses on. Reducing the perceived unhappiness by fulfilling as many desires as possible.

“When she becomes my wife, I will be happy.”

“When I have children I will feel fulfilled.”

“I am one promotion away from happiness.”

“This house will stay with our family for generations.”

“Retirement is like riding into the sunset.”

Life doesn’t work that way—it only appears that way. A desire creates a tension in our system and its fulfillment releases happiness hormones, but the system is only at rest for a little while, then a new desire is born. In the depth of our being is a feeling of “I still haven’t found what I am looking for!”

Naturally, spirituality has the answer to the problem statement. Buddha, and many others have solved this problem for us which was nicely summarized by David Bohm in a conversation with J. Krishnamurti, “Desire is a thought producing feelings.” Spot the root cause of this thought and the game is over.

We have two areas we can tackle in order to get to the root of our never-ending discontentment. One, notice the games we play with ourselves on the thought level and two, zoom into the pain body that creates artificial desires to voice its presence. Find it, get your arms around it and let go!

You still haven’t found what you are looking for? Work on the outer as before, but dig into the inner until the realization hits, the inner is the outer, and restlessness and unhappiness can be resolved once and for all.