The Path to Awareness - Part 1

Several years ago I did a class on “The Path To Awareness”. As the overall paper is long, I will present it in parts here.

You live your life with assumptions about what can make you happy. Some popular beliefs are:

1) Happiness is the same as excitement and thrills
2) Living a desire(s) fulfills life
3) Someone else can make you aware/wise
4) It is important to be respected, loved, appreciated and to be important
5) Other people have the power to make you feel good and to hurt you
6) You are defined by the lifestyle you have

Beliefs do not develop in a vacuum. These beliefs are handed to you by your social group or determined by yourself through trial and error.

I will begin and end these notes on the subject of children. The first child I will introduce will the child who is unhappy with life. The story goes like this:

A mother knocks on her son's door. "Bob", she says, "wake up!" Bob answers, "I don't want to get up Mom." The mother insists, "Get up, you have to go to school." Bob says, "I don't want to go to school." "Why not?" asks the mother. "Three reasons," says Bob. "First, because it's so dull; second, the kids tease me; and third, I hate school." And the mother says, "Well, I am going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty; second, because you are forty-five years old, and third, because you are the principle."

Bob is not any different from yourself. The analogy is that we are all children with broken toys and unhappy lives. Bob was grown and still asleep. Are you grown and asleep? Wake up and stop playing with toys. Toys are a wonderful analogy to the life most people have. People say "I am awake", but they still mend the broken toys of their lives. During their apparent nightmare of living, life hands them disappointment. They say "give me back my job, my loved one, my reputation, my success." People who are asleep want their pains relieved, and their broken toys replaced. A cure is resisted. The cure is waking up. Waking up is unpleasant. The bed of our life is so comfortable. It is irritating to awake and step onto the cold floor, to step away from the warm covers.

Path to Awareness - Part 2 - Who Wakes the Sleeper?

While asleep, your imagining of what is true and false, good and evil, are suspect. This ancient Eastern tale demonstrates this:

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The concept that feelings are an illusion of our minds is scary. Consider this: you are never in love with anyone. You are in love with a prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person. When one is sleep they don't love the person; they only love the idea of the person. How about falling out of love? You are not out of love. Instead your idea of the person changes. Trust is like love. Do we really trust somebody? Do you instead trust our mental image of them? When your trust ends, did the object of your trust really change? You become angry at the person. You believe you are angry at them, but you are instead angry at your bad judgement of the person. Does this makes the sleeping us unflattering? No, it merely makes all of us human and asleep.

Here is another truth to consider: People don't really want to grow up. They don't really want to change or be happy. They are like the person with a banana in their ear, and cannot hear their companion tell them that they have a banana in their ear because "they have a banana in their ear".

Listen to yourself before you listen to me. See your reactions to what I say. Be aware (beware!) of what you are hearing. Be aware of yourself before awareness takes me in. The analogy to listening to me is that of driving a car. You respond automatically to the road because you are aware of the road. I may say “turn right here”. Your awareness gives you feedback to what lies in that direction. You have the final say-so. If the car drives off a cliff when the right turn is made, I did not do it. You did.

Do you want to wake up? The first step is to be very very honest about not really wanting to wake up. You don't really want to be happy. This is very very important. Awareness and awakening cannot begin until you know that you don’t want to wake up.

Path to Awareness - Part 3 - The Symptoms of Sleeping

In sleeping you have conditional terms of happiness. You say “I will only be happy when I have _____.” Sleeping fills our lives with attachments, identifications, and cravings. Sleeping fills our minds with crazy ideas about love, relationships, happiness, joy and everything else. Sleeping is full of knowledge but has no wisdom.

Path to Awareness - Part 4 - Selfishness or Who is the Ass?

Selfishness is the act of giving materials, time, or ourselves in the pursuit of feeling good. Let us begin with charity, the most approved form of giving. Is it really giving? No, it is instead the most approved form of selfishness.
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Expect yourself and others to be selfish
See your own self-interest - refined or course.

Here is an important memory device if you are feeling stressed out by the actions of others and you forget the rules of selfishness:

I am an ass, you are an ass, so where’s the problem?

Path to Awareness - Part 5 – Suffering

This selfish ass stuff sounds really pessimistic. Don’t worry. There is a plan behind presenting this less-than-optimistic bit of news. But, before we get there, lets present suffering.

Life is full of suffering. It can be easily said that there is more suffering than happiness in the world. Consider that most people look forward to not being at work, and they do it an average of eight hours a day, five days a week. That is the majority of the time.

Buddha was a Master and very deep thinker. He proposed four noble truths that clearly suggest the place and purpose of suffering:

1. Life is suffering
2. Suffering is due to attachment
3. Attachment can be overcome
4. There is a path for accomplishing this

Suffering is a sign of being asleep and unaware. Suffering is useful because it points to falsehoods and clashes with reality. Suffering is a path to awareness. Becoming sick and tired of it all pushes us to the point of getting relief to get out of situations. We all stubbornly resist change. Change is hastened when we are prompted by pleasant experiences or painful experiences.

Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. This growth occurs through understanding. Understanding through awareness of pain will allow to break the attachment that causes the pain. Observation reaps the rewards of suffering. This breaking is not a separation, but instead it is the ceasing of grasping it in the first place.

An analogy is the touching of a hot pot on a stove. The pot hurts you when it is touched. Suffering occurs. Is the appropriate reaction to throw the pot away? No. If the pot were thrown away, the new pot would be as hot, and the hand would continue to be burned. The appropriate reaction is to understand how to pick up the pot without being burned. When we are asleep and unaware we touch the hot pot again and again. Suffering is not discontinued. Getting relief only postpones future pain. Psychotherapy and counseling can relieve pain and suffering, not cure it or use it for awareness. This relief of suffering is like getting a healing salve and bandage over the burned hand. It may heal, but if we touch the pot again, we will get burned again and the salve and bandage did not good.

Why do you and I keep touching the pot? Why do we continue to be burned for uncountable times? Why did the big pile of discarded salve bottles and bandages do no good?

Consider happiness to be the opposite of suffering. I will now introduce some concepts supported by Buddha’s 2nd, 3rd, and 4th noble truths.

· True happiness is uncaused. Uninterrupted happiness is uncaused.
· YOU cannot make me happy. YOU are not my happiness.
· Happiness is a natural state.
· Suffering is caused by stupidity and clinging to society, culture, and others.

Happiness cannot be acquired. Why? You already have it! You have it like a mud puddle has pure water. When you drop tour illusions and attachments, the happiness is there. When the mud is removed from the puddle, a basin of pure water is present. Happiness causes life to become easy and delightful. Happiness is only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed and your cravings. Where do these come from? From identification and attachment and cravings! Do not worry if you don’t grasp this now. I will repeat it again (and again and again).

Finally, let us consider further our suffering reactions. Every time you are unhappy you have added something to your life. You have added a negative reaction. Reality provides stimulus in life, and you provide the negative reaction and thus the suffering. A wonderful analogy for our suffering as a reaction to reality is in the actions of a child. When a child falls off a chair while in the act of carefree playing they will not cry. They looked stunned, realize that everything is where it should be, and continue on playing. Meanwhile the parents are horrified. Consider the situation when a sibling pushes the child over while fighting over a toy. The child falls backwards and their behind hits the floor. The physical pain is minimal to the parent’s eyes. Not for the child. The child cries and yells, connecting the pain of the toy being taken from them to the impact on the floor. We are all children making big noises about little pains

Path to Awareness - Part 6 – Society

Being unaware is to be mechanical and programmed by society. People tend to go through life with fixed ideas that can be manipulated like robots with buttons. When you are in awareness you observe the buttons and turn them off. While you are in awareness dislikes may not go away, but the automatic reactions do. You are a slave to these things when we are not aware of them.

People across the world have crazy notions based on their society and tribal norms. Each culture has its norms that are outside of the global understanding. Are individuals to blame? No. They are operating on a cultural or private prejudice. An ideology is a prejudice also. No reality fits into an ideology. Life is beyond it. We all look for the meaning of life, but life has no formulas or set meanings. Meaning can only be found when we look beyond meaning.

Adoration is the product of ideology. Religion thrives on adoration. Beware (be aware) of religion. We will return to religion at the end of the paper. Doubt is the product of reality. Doubt is the product of awareness. If adoration is equated with love, and adoration with the highest forms of ideology, those that you consider terrorists are the most loving people you know. When we see someone as a terrorist we can say “They are attached to a selfish idea that is destructive.” This is very insightful. Now consider what was said before:

I am an ass, you are an ass

You and I are all terrorists in our own selfishness born out of survival and the need to feel good. Terrorists have something else in common. They have approval, appreciation, and attention in their society. Appreciation and attention are an addictive drug given to us when we are very young. As a sideline into child psychology consider that a healthy child is interested in things. An unhealthy child is interested in persons. Interest in people and groups of people (family, tribe) is a sign of attachment. Interest in things is a sign that attachment does not grip us and you are free to explore the world. Nonattachment to the society and tribe is part of awareness.

Society will not like you exploring the role of attachment. Society uses it to control you. Society will be very unhappy. Turn back now while you can!

Path to Awareness - Part 7 – Renunciation and Desire

There is the realization now that you and I have attachments. These attachments are give to us by society. The attachments lead to suffering and are destructive to ourselves and others. What do you do? How about renunciation of attachments? Will this work?

Renunciation = delusion
Renunciation = bondage

You are tied forever to the thing you renounce. The guru reflected “The prostitute comes to me saying she wants out of her life and wants God. The priest comes to me and only talks about sex.” When you fight something you are tied to it forever. You give power to whatever you fight, as much power as you use to fight it. You must receive your demons instead. Don’t renounce it. See through it. Understand its true value and it will drop from your hands.

Selfishness breeds desire and desire breeds cravings. Remember that selfishness is natural. Do not suppress desire. Desire is energy. Instead understand it. Don’t renounce objects of desire; instead understand them.

Hermann Hesse’s book “Siddhartha” has a description of common people, seen through the eyes of Siddhartha:

"All these little simple, foolish, but tremendously strong, vital, passionate urges and desires no longer seemed trivial to Siddhartha. For their sake he saw people live and do great things, travel, conduct wars, suffer and endure immensely, and he loved them for it. He saw life, vitality, the indestructible and Brahman in all their desires and needs. With one small thing, only one tiny thing, they lacked nothing that the sage and the thinker had, and that was the consciousness of the unity of all life. And many a time Siddhartha even doubted whether this knowledge, this thought, was of such greater value, where it was also perhaps the childish self-flattery of thinkers, who were perhaps only thinking children. The men of the world were equal to the thinker in every respect and were often superior to them, just as animals in their tenacious undeviating actions in cases of necessity may often appear superior to human beings."

Remember that renunciation equals attachment. Understanding transforms desires into preferences. Preferences are not required to be fulfilled for our happiness. The examination of preferences is another entire topic, and I very much encourage you to pursue further study of it.

Path to Awareness - Part 7 – Words

Information does not equal insight
Analysis does not equal awareness
Knowledge does not equal awareness

In non-awareness we are the center of the world – the dancer. In awareness we become the dance. Are these words the answer and the truth? No, these words are hints and clues.

Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly as a result of a certain attitude. The attitude is one of openness, and a willingness to discover something new. You don’t have to agree with me. I can never express the truth. I instead give a description of falsehoods. We cannot define happiness. Only misery can be defined. We cannot define bravery. Only fear can be defined. Listen and unlearn.

You will never know who “I” is or what “I” is. You will not succeed. There are no words to answer this question. Labels intrude. Labels create their own negative illusion. Drop labels. Truth cannot be searched for. Once labels and opinions are dropped, and the unreal removed, all that is left is the real. I will tell you “I am a human being” is a useful label. It does not block the truth, but it tells very little.

Writing and words are hints and clues, not a full description. A word or label always carries overtones of approval or disapproval. It can never be truly neutral. There is much terror in a sincere believer who says “we know all” and much peace in one who says “we don’t know.” The sincere believer says “I am successful”. The other says “I am”.

Do not say “I am successful”. It is crazy. Success is not part of “I”. Success comes and goes, and the “I” remains. Clinging to labels leads to suffering. Identity with success will ensure a time when success is not sufficient, and that will make the attached “I” not sufficient. “I” is always sufficient.

When we look at something we don’t really see it. We instead see something fixed in our mind. The more fixed it is, the more blind we are. Reality is present when we look without prejudiced impressions.

What happens when one arrives and becomes aware? There are no words or formulas to describe it. All that is left is the silence of continued observation. Words are realized to be identifications used by “me”. We cannot say what God is, rather all we can say is what he is not. Scripture and wise writings are like the wise man pointing at the moon. All the fool sees is the finger. God is unknowable as is divinity, as is our own divine nature. None of these can be understood with the thinking mind. Instead they are realized in silence when those things that are NOT God, divinity, and divine nature are removed.

The final barrier to God is your concept of God. The highest knowledge of God is to know he is unknowable.

Concepts are meant as tips and hints and clues. To take them as anything more is dangerous. Concepts are universal and apply to a group. Concepts are valuable, but small in scope. Their weakness is their own universal theme. They miss the small details. Concepts are there to help lead you to reality, but when you get there, you must experience and intuit directly.

Concepts are static – reality is in flux. Reality is a whole, and when it is cut into concepts it no longer exists in its fluid form. A hurricane and tornado cannot be put in a box. The image of a hurricane or tornado on a radar screen does not tear communities apart. The physical reality of the hurricane and tornado do. Words do not equal reality. Words are only pointers. The modern idol is not a statue of wood or gold, it is instead a mental icon and a religious dogma.

Awareness knows beyond knowing and cannot be expressed in words or concepts. Knowledge is not the same as awareness. You cannot do evil in awareness, but you can do evil in knowledge. In knowledge you know you are doing something bad, and it is still done. The act is rationalized in some way.

IMPORTANT

You cannot do evil while in awareness

Path to Awareness - Part 8 – Self Observation

Q: Are you enlightened?
A: Does it matter?
(or better)
A: How would I know?


The only way somebody can help you is challenge your ideas. You have to be ready to listen, and ready to be challenged. No one can help you but yourself! How do you help yourself? Through self observation.

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Path to Awareness - Part 9 – Negative Feelings

Feeling fear from the truth? We cannot fear something that we do not know. Nobody fears the unknown. We instead fear the loss of the known. Truth removes the known sleeping world. Ultimately we hate what we fear.

Fears:

Fear of Loss
Fear of Alienation
Fear of rejection
Fear of mutual control

Negative feelings are gloominess, moodiness, self-hatred and guilt. They are present when life seems pointless and makes no sense. Nervousness and tension are the calling cards of negative feelings.

Understanding that negative feelings are in YOU involves unlearning the rubbish the world has taught.

Statement: I am depressed (WRONG)
Statement: It is depressed (OK)
Statement: Depression is there (BETTER)

Remember: no one event justifies a negative feeling, and all events are singular occurrences in their moment.

Remember that everything, joys and pains, pass. They pass but our level of attachment and identification and clinging can affect our lives. There is the story of the African tribe that banished its unwanted members to the wilderness. These were people could normally survive in the wilderness with no issues. Banishment was seen as a death sentence, and the people so banished did often die without the support and approval of the tribe. To prove this is an attachment and identification, consider if you were banned from your State for a real or imagined crime. Would you die? No. Our society, and thus us, is not programmed to work that way.

Path to Awareness - Part 10 – Loneliness

Loneliness is when you miss people or a specific person. Loneliness is the result of attaching importance to being ignored or disapproved. It is an attachment to support, encouragement and reassurance. To be with people is to live with their rules and expectations. Meeting other people’s expectations leads to tension.

Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality – dropping illusions, making contact with the real.

Dying the need to have people: in the beginning it can feel awful and lonely. After a time you will find it to be no truly lonely. It becomes a solitude, an aloneness. At that point you will know what love is, what God is, what reality is. Giving up attachments can be tough unless we have a keen understanding or have suffered. Suffering can be used to end suffering. The solitude path allows suffering to run its course and inevitably breaks the attachment to the suffering. Jesse Herman expresses this in “Siddhartha”:

"The river laughed. Yes, that was how it was. Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone."

· loneliness is when you are missing people
· loneliness is cured by aloneness
· aloneness is when you are enjoying yourself
· aloneness is real

What is REAL? It cannot be named and can only be contacted when the unreal is dropped. The unreal can only be contacted when you detach. You can only know true aloneness when clinging and dependency is dropped. Aloneness is full of reality. Loneliness is full of emptiness. We try to fill loneliness with T.V., radio, books, people and toys. This is a big business in our culture. This business would be bankrupt is you and I felt aloneness instead.

Path to Awareness - Part 11 – Awareness

You filter reality – you decide what of the millions of things that come at you to pay attention to. The primary filters are attachment, desires and cravings. The root of sorrow is craving. Craving distorts and destroys perception. Desire haunts us while fear blocks out all things. Desires are programmed when we are young – acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause. Programming continues through your entire life.

Understand: All is right in the world. Consider the story of the teacher and the student. There is no explanation to all the sufferings and evil and torture and destruction and hunger in the world. It cannot be explained. Life is a mystery. Reality is not the problem, you are the problem.

Be aware of your present condition – no matter what it is. Stop being dictator to yourself. Don’t make demands on yourself. As you becomes more aware you more at ease with everyone and everything. Why? You are no longer frightened of being hurt or not liked. People are not mean and negative to YOU, they are mean to whatever he or she thought of you. There are mean to the perception of you. This is also true with anger, love, or acceptance.

Awareness should not be a goal. It is better to be the way you are, simply aware of the way you are. Simple awareness is happiness compared to reacting all the time. As awareness grows, reactions will lessen and acting will grow.

Gaining awareness is not a contest or a seeking of ego glorification. True awareness is like true charity – it just happens. The harder you try to change an attachment, the more entrenched it becomes. The more you resist something, the more empowered it becomes. You do not combat evil by fighting it. Instead you strive to understand it. How do you cope with darkness? Do you hit it with your fists? The more you fight darkness in this way, the more the darkness envelops you and deepens.

Striving and fighting to be aware does not hasten it. It can actually make it much harder. The Japanese have a saying, “The day you cease to travel, you have arrived.” People see awareness as a high point, a plateau, beyond experiencing every moment as it is. This is making a goal. True awareness has no destination and there is nothing to achieve.

The suggested approach is to state:

“I want to be aware, I want to be in touch with whatever is and let whatever happens happen. If I’m awake, fine. If I am asleep, fine.”

The acceptance of whatever happens requires faith. Faith is an openness to the truth, no matter the consequences, no matter where it leads you. Faith is not belief. Belief gives you security; faith gives you insecurity. Dogma, and the religion that relies on dogma, gives you security. Awareness, and the faith that awareness relies on, gives you insecurity. Security is bondage. Awareness is freedom.

Challenge everything with a sense of openness and not stubbornness. Have a readiness to understand, to listen, to challenge your entire belief system. Beliefs are religious, political, social and psychological. True awareness is removing conditions to our happiness. It does not involve piety, devotion, religion or orchestrated spirituality.

Awareness = observation. Watch yourself – watch reactions. Watch yourself watching reactions. You can only change what you understand. When you observe and understand things change. This awareness can be gradual or sudden. An average change can be felt in a matter of weeks.

I have a story about sudden growth.

There was a lion raised as a sheep. The lion went out to pasture each day with the sheep and grazed. The grasses upset his stomach, but he said “This is the life of a sheep, and I am a sheep.” Many things bothered the lion, but he knew they were part of his role as a sheep. One day a fellow lion was passing through the countryside. He spied the lion who thought he was a sheep, and nodded sagely. He had seen this before. He knew the cure. As the traveling lion walked up to the herd the sheep and the lion who thought he was a sheep all ran away. The traveling lion gave chase to the other lion. They ran over hills and through valleys. Finally, both exhausted, the traveling lion cornered the lion who thought he was a sheep on the edge of a lake. The lion who thought he was a sheep pleaded for his life, begging the traveling lion to allow a poor sheep to live another day. The traveling lion shook his head, and directed the lion who thought he was a sheep to look into the mirrored surface of the lake. The lion who thought he was a sheep saw his reflection. It was one of a lion. From that moment on he was the lion who knew he was a lion, and the sheep had one more lion to worry about.

Understanding who “I” is will result in no fear. The lion who thought he was a sheep was released from fear when he realized his true nature. With awareness and understanding of “I”, you will fear no one and nothing. Nothing will touch you again and no one can hurt you again.

Aware People:

React Less and Act More
Are more energetic and alive
have no tensions created by cravings holding them back.

In awareness:

honor means nothing
disgrace means nothing
success and failure mean nothing

Before enlightenment I was depressed, after enlightenment I am still depressed. What is the difference? I don’t identify with the depression and it is allowed to pass. Clouds of depression and anxiety still happen, but you don’t fight and get caught up in them. You are anxious and not troubled. One can be happy in anxiety and depression.

Being aware leads to:

Living your own life
Going your own way
thinking your own thoughts
Follow your own inclination and tastes.

Only a very aware person can refuse to pick up guilt and anger. Only they can say “You are having a tantrum. To bad. I don’t feel the slightest desire to rescue you anymore and I refuse to feel guilty.” They continue, “I am not going to hate myself for anything I’ve done.” Self-hatred is the source of guilt. An aware person does not whip themselves for anything that is done right or wrong. “When I did something wrong it was when I was in unawareness. In being aware I am not obliged to reconnect to the moment of unawareness through another moment of unawareness.”

Path to Awareness - Part 12 – The Power of Change

It is OK if you are asleep – is the only model we have. What do we do about the programming? We address it by being aware of the programming. We cannot change it by effort of will, we cannot change it by ideals, we cannot change it by building of new habits. Behavior may change, but you will not. The furniture is being moved around, but the house is the same.

Most people swing into action to change the world and do not emphasize changing themselves. Swinging is the same as reacting. Reacting replaces one hurt with another, one injustice with another. Reacting does not mean to, but there is not an awareness present to change the situation to good, or allow it to move to good. In awareness good things are meant to happen. They just do. Everything real that happens to you is good.

How do we change things? How do we change ourselves? It starts with remembering that you are the one that must change, not others.

The only way to change is to change your understanding. Instead of being connected to programming and conditioning, false beliefs and fantasies, you need to be break out into reality. Reality is lovely; it is an absolute delight. You are fish in the ocean oblivious to the water. Become aware and experience the water around you.

Consider the enslaving attachments below. You are all imprisoned by one or more of these. This is not a bad thing. It does not make you a bad person. It is a only a thing and you are only a person. You can do something about it.

I need to rearrange the world because it is a constant threat
I fear that a friend may stop loving me if she or she turns to someone else
I have to keep myself attractive to get and keep another person

Exercise:

Think of someone or something that you are attached to. This is someone or something that you think you are not going to be happy without. Some examples are job, career, profession, friend, spouse, or money. Say:

"I really do not need you to be happy. I’m only deluding myself in the belief that without you I will not be happy. But I really don’t need you to be happy. I can be happy without you. You are not my happiness; you are not my joy."

By saying this you will make contact with the truth and smash through the fantasy. Happiness is a state of non-illusion, or the dropping of illusion.

Exercise:

Think of a time you are broken hearted and you thought you would never be happy again. What happened? Time went on and you picked up another attachment or managed to find something else you were attracted to. What happened to the old attachment? You didn’t really need it for you to be happy!

Don’t ask the world to change. You change first. Don’t ask the world to die. You die first.

You don’t have to do anything to change. All you have to do is understand. Demands are dropped.

An aware person will state “You go ahead and be yourself, that’s all right, but I’ll protect myself, I’ll be myself.”

The aware makes a statement that they will not be manipulated.

After you have changed you will be able to change whatever you think ought to be changed. Take the log out of your own eye before you attempt to remove your neighbor’s log! If you don’t change, you will lose the right to change anyone or anything. Till you are aware of yourself, you have no right to interfere with anyone else or with the world. When we do not change, we are changing the world for our own selfish reasons – convenience, pride, dogmatic convictions and beliefs, or just to release negative feelings.

When one becomes awake, the people who are moody, inconsiderate, unreliable and treacherous become only frightened. The day you are different, the world will be different. Frightened people cannot hurt an aware person.

There is a simple word that removes the controls of others: NO. Say NO to others. NO removes other people’s control from you. That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else live their life as you see fit.

An aware person can be very hard on others and still be loving. The surgeon is hard on the patient and still be loving. Love can be very hard indeed.

Living and happiness require flow. Life is always changing. When you cling to life, that life is destroyed. When you hold onto something, you cease to live. Happiness is a moment-by-moment contact with reality. You embrace memories and past impressions, and this removes you from the present. Attaching to memories removes you from the flow of the present.

Freedom resides in the heart. When you have attained wisdom, who can enslave you? You can only love when you are alone. Love means seeing a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be. Seeing is blocked by attachment. You can also have attachment to what you or others feel the future should hold. Life in the moment has no attachment to the past or the future. Concentrate on the now instead of hoping for better times in the future. An aware person is not enslaved by the wished attachments of the non-present future.

Path to Awareness - Part 13 – Wisdom and Love

IMPORTANT

There are four steps the wisdom of Awareness:

Identify feelings in you that you attach to – good and bad. Attaching feelings are negative feelings.
Understand that they are in you, not in the world or external reality.
Do not see negative feelings as essential parts of “I”. Negative things come and go.
Understand that when you change, everything changes.

IMPORTANT

An attachment “good” or “bad” destroys your ability to love. Love is sensitivity. Love is consciousness. A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life and to all persons. A loving heart does not harden itself to any one person or thing. Love entails clarity of perception and objectivity. Attachment is blinding and hardening. A heart in love remains soft and sensitive. A heart focused on getting this or that becomes ruthless, hardened and insensitive. You cannot love people when you need them. When you need people you are using them instead of loving them.

Perfect Love casts out fear. No demands or dependence are created. The company is enjoyed, but not required for happiness. Enjoy on a non-clinging basis. Enjoyment is something bigger than the two people. It continues after company is parted.

Perfect love makes no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy. My happiness does not lie in you. I enjoy company and do not cling. If you are attached to appreciation and praise, you are going to view people in terms of their threat to your attachment or their fostering of you attachment. Perfect love is not possible when you are attached to praise and adoration.

Love is understanding what is meant to be alone and comfortable with aloneness, with nowhere to rest your head, to leave everyone behind. Understand that people are free to be and we are free to be ourselves. Love is being special to nobody and treat all the same (love all).

Love in our culture: desiring control, possession, manipulation, fear and anxiety. True love is clear sighted. Attachment is blind. Clinging, craving and desire are blind. We don’t perceive people clearly because of emotions, conditioning, likes and dislikes get in the way.

Why don’t we have bliss? We focus on what we don’t have.

There’s not a single evil in the world that can’t be traced back to fear. Ignorance is caused by fear, and that is where violence comes from.

A person who is nonviolent is also fearless. People get angry because they are afraid. They are afraid of losing their attachments. Angry people are frightened people.

Wisdom arrives when you have dropped the barriers you have erected through your concepts and conditioning. Wisdom is not acquired. Wisdom is not experience and wisdom is not applying yesterday’s illusions to today’s problems. Wisdom is being sensitive to a situation or person while being uninfluenced by the residue of the past.

A wonderful example of this is the need for detachment for wisdom to be present in an intuitive reading. Objectivity is key to developing an accurate sense of intuition. An indicator of accurate intuition is a lack of emotion. Impressions are clear and completely unemotional. When you read for yourself or somebody with an energy connection to you, the accuracy of intuition can be compromised because of interference of emotions and desires of “what should be”. Detachment is essential to accomplish an accurate evaluation. Nothing causes more interference than the need to be "right" or to prove that you can do an intuitive evaluation. Detachment becomes critical to the receiving of correct information.

Path to Awareness - Part 14 – Death

Statement: You must lose yourself to find yourself. You must die to live.

Depression and pain tie us to ourselves. Happiness through awareness releases us from self-absorption. We die by understanding our true natures, and not the suffering that clouds who we really are.

People mistake living for keeping the body alive. Living is instead an intimacy with death. Think of the grave and the moldering corpse. This will bring the moment into perspective and push you to live now.

If you drop the illusions you have you would be alert. The consequence of not doing so are so terrifying and inescapable that you lose the ability to love. If you wish to love you must learn to see again. If you wish to see, you must learn to give up your drugs. Give up depending. Drop the bonds of society. Externally everything will go on as before, and you will continue to be IN the world, but you will no longer be of it. You don’t have to go to the wilderness. You can be among people and enjoy it. People will no longer have the ability to make you happy or miserable. That is what aloneness is. In aloneness the capacity to love is born.

The process is a terror as you must invite yourself to die. Like the addict, there are withdrawal symptoms and emptiness as the drug is removed. For a time nothing will seem to fill the emptiness except the drug.

After this passes, you will have awaken. All is clear and unclouded by fear or desire.

It has been asked if one can only be fully human by experiencing tragedy? The only tragedy there is in the world is ignorance. All evil comes from it. The only tragedy there is in the world is unwakefullness and unawareness. From them comes fear, and from fear come everything else. Death is not the tragedy. Dying is wonderful. Death is only horrible to those who do not understand life. It is only when you are afraid of life that you are afraid of death. Death is resurrection. IF you die to the past, if you die to every minute, than you would be the person who is fully alive. A fully alive person is one who is full of death. We are always dying to things and shedding things. If you do this with awareness of the dying and shedding, you will be fully alive and resurrected at every moment.

Path to Awareness - Part 15 – Nourishment of Awareness

To become awake you need awareness and nourishment. Learn to enjoy the solid food of life – good food, good wine, good water. Taste them. Lose your mind and come to your senses. Good nourishment is the pleasure of the senses and the pleasures of the mind. Read a book, have a good discussion. Those are rare now in this crazy world. We have lost our sense of nourishing enjoyment. If you really enjoy life and the simple pleasures of life you would develop the extraordinary discipline of the animal. An animal, in its natural habitat, will not overeat and will not be overweight. It exercises as much as it needs. It relaxes as much as it needs. You’ve lost this. When you enjoy something intensely, slow down and taste and smell and hear and let all your senses come alive. The road to mysticism requires that you sit and open your senses to the OM of life. Again from Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha”:

"When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind himself to any particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: OM – perfection."

How does you get there? Ceaseless awareness, infinite patience and compassion. Develop a taste for the good things. This is different form getting a habit for the good things.

Good Things:

1) Love of work you enjoy doing for love itself
2) The love of laughter and intimacy with people who do not cling and on whom you do not emotionally depend, but who’s company you enjoy
3) Take on activities with your whole being
4) Engage in activities you love so that while you are doing them. This will remove the need for success, recognition and approval from the activities.
4) Send the crowds away

Go to the mountains and commune silently with trees, flowers, animals, birds, sea, clouds, sky and stars. It is a spiritual exercise to gaze at them, and to be aware of things around you. Words and concepts will drop and you will make contact with reality. Only aloneness is the cure for loneliness. At first this will be difficult, but that is because you are not accustomed to aloneness. The wilderness will blossom with love. The drug will be out and you will be free. You will understand what freedom is, what love is, what happiness is, what truth is, and what God is.

An awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of music that springs up from within.

Path to Awareness - Part 16 – Religion

This section starts with a story showing the relation between awareness and religion:

There was a man who invented the art of making fire. He took his tools and went to a tribe in the north, where it was very cold, bitterly cold. The taught the people there to make fire. The people were very interested. He showed them the uses to which they could put the fire – they could cook, could keep themselves warm, etc. They were so grateful that they had learned the art of making fire. But before they could express their gratitude to the man, he disappeared. He wasn’t concerned with their recognition or gratitude; he was concerned with their well-being. He went to another tribe, where he again began to show them the value of his invention. People were interested there too, a bit too interested for the peace of mind of their priests, who began to notice that the man was drawing crowds and the priests were losing their popularity. So they decided to do away with him. They poisoned him, crucified him, put it any way you like. Afterwards they were afraid that the people might turn against them, but the priests were very wise, very wily. Do you know what they did? The priests had a portrait of the man made and mounted it above the main alter of the temple. The instruments for making fire were placed in front of the portrait, and the people were taught to revere the portrait and pay reverence to the instruments of fire, which they dutifully did for centuries. The veneration and the worship went on, but there was no fire.

The world does not lack from religion; it lacks from love and awareness. The world does not lack from veneration and worship; it lacks from love and awareness. Love can only be generated through awareness. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire through religion. Love is not something you have through a sacrament. Love is something that has you. Surrender to the reality of the world to experience love.

Path to Awareness - Part 17 – The Divine or God

God wants our transformation instead of worship of him. He wants us to love the world instead of adore him. He wants us to love, and only then are we further transformed through love. People are more important than dogma. Awareness will cause religious beliefs to be questioned and fall away along with the rest of the attachments.

Path to Awareness - Part 18 – Conclusion - The Child Returns

Identification with concepts of the world is the death of awareness. The child and the Fool are naturally aware. Every child has a god in him. Our attempt to mold the child will turn the god into a devil. The world beings with children, and they are the salvation. The world is lost to the adult, and only the children after us can save it.

To have awareness to watch and observe what is going on within and around you. Reality is always moving. We should strive to see through the eyes of a child instead of the labeling eyes of the adult. The uselessness and lunacy of adult labeling is seen in a recent Delta Airlines ad. People walk through the airport with luggage tags ephemerally attached to them. They say “Student”, “Cares”, “All Business” and so on. This makes perfect sense to us as adults, but is crazy to a child. Are these people all their tags say? Here is the lunacy.

The literature of the spiritual world proclaims the insight of the Child and the Fools. The archetype of the Child and the Fool have one thing in common: They are not afflicted by the blindness of attachment, and see reality for what it really is. They see it, and cannot describe it. Our blindness says they cannot describe it because they do not the gift of education, the power of words. The truth is that they cannot describe it because it cannot be described. When reality just IS, the magic of the Child and the Fool reign. Anything is possible, nothing is assured. (shades of Alice in Wonderland)

Children needs no conscience, no dogma, no rules when they are sensitive. Be sensitive. Be a child. Nourish the children and nourish yourself.

And lastly...

Spirituality is awareness awareness awareness