The Download, Part III

(Note: If you haven’t read Parts I and II yet, you may want to do that first because this is a continuation.)


Time to Loosen Up

 

Just because ‘time doesn’t exist’ does not mean that things are fixed and static, as some try to explain.  What they actually are, we cannot perceive or understand with our normal cognitive thought processes, regardless of our intelligence level. 

 

Our regular thought process simply cannot grasp how this could occur – only ‘NOW’ exists, yet everything is not fixed and static?  No surprise this bamboozles us - Our inability to navigate this area effectively is exactly WHY time exists in the first place – it is the actual purpose of time, so that ‘movement’ can seem to exist for us.  Otherwise, to us, it must be fixed and static.  So, we have time here to help us make things seem to slide by, to ‘happen’.  But time is only a tool for us to use in our present way of perception, so that things seem to be paradoxically occurring in a linear fashion in the NOW.  Yet, the NOW is the only instant that exists, or ever has.

 

Time is another two edged sword for us in this way: On one hand, it is vital to our cognitive minds, so that things may seem to occur and change. Without it, we are ‘stuck’.  Literally.  But on the other hand, time also confuses us as well as conditions us.  We erroneously believe things are actually ‘occurring’ in an orderly linear fashion.  Furthermore, we erroneously believe they MUST occur in this way, that it is a law of nature, or something similar.  This is so ingrained in us that, in fact, to for something to occur otherwise is known as a ‘miracle’, is it not?  But a ‘miracle’ is only an event/expression that has escaped our erroneous thought process of linear time.  Eventually, what is termed as ‘miraculous’ will no doubt be thought of as an everyday event.  In fact, it already is, but this also escapes our cognitive notice.

 

 

 

 

The Beginning or The End?

 

Have you ever noticed that sometimes as we continue on our journey, things seem to not go as we had hoped, but rather seem to do the opposite and fall apart instead?  We envision becoming ‘whole’ and bathing in the rays of enlightenment, and our lives becoming pinnacles of peace, having now attained order and beauty.   And at times, we have glimpses of that, but never truly for long.  We have to keep propping it back up.   So, why the ‘hard times’?  Where does the ‘smooth sailing’ go? 

 

Before you decide whether a perceived adversity is to your detriment or to your benefit, try to take a ‘wait and see’ attitude.  Look at the example of a flower bud.  If a flower bud was the only type of flower you were accustomed to seeing, should it suddenly begin to break open and splay apart, you might easily think it was exploding or breaking apart rather than blooming.  And having no reference to this event in our cognitive minds - having no idea what ‘blooming’ looks like - we misinterpret in fear, and resist by trying to stop whatever it is that we think must be about to ‘do us in’.

 

This flower bud is us, opening, trying to do something we have never done before.  If you try to compare it to what you know, it looks dismal – it looks like things may be coming apart.  But instead, something wonderful is trying to happen to you.  You are trying to bloom.  So, bloom.  Go with it.  Do not resist.  Be fully in the moment and you may find yourself on a magical threshold:  You may find yourself at The Door.

 

 

 

 

The Door and The Wall

 

Most, if not all of you reading this, hope to find ‘The Door’. Where is this elusive Door we have all been searching for so long?  It is somewhat to my surprise that I am actually able to point you toward The Door in an unusually direct manner.  Even so, probably 999 out of 1,000 who read this will not believe where I am pointing.  I hope you are that ‘one’, because this could save you quite a bit of time and struggled, and it is for you – the 1 in 1,000, that this writing exists.  Here is your answer:

 

Q:  Where is The Door?

A:  In The Wall, or course.  Where else would you expect to find one? :-D

 

And where is this Wall?  It depends somewhat upon you, but everywhere, it seems:  You can hit The Wall by watching videos on YouTube until you can watch no more, or by drinking beer and watching TV alone until you are ready to hang yourself, or by slowly realizing that all the info you’ve amassed in your search for enlightenment has failed to take you where you wanted to go.  The Wall appears wherever and whenever.  You can’t miss it.  You’ll smash headlong right into it.  I guarantee it.

 

Usually, when we hit The Wall, our entire focus is to scramble away from this painful or unpleasant event as quickly as we can go.  But what happens in that one time when you don’t move away?  When you have no idea what your next move should be?  When you surrender, not knowing where else you might search or what else you might do?  And in that moment of surrender, where ‘you’ have given up your schemes, You can see The Door. 

 

Of course, it’s been there the entire time, each and every time you smashed into The Wall.  But we never see it, instead focusing on minimizing the pain in the ways we have conditioned ourselves to cope with.

 

This is why life seems to constantly be ‘trying’ you – why the bad luck, hard times, or personal demons that won’t go away and stay away.  They are delivering you over and over to The Wall and your opportunity to see The Door.  If for once, we didn’t react in one of our subconsciously conditioned ways and instead recognized we don’t know what to do, we would quickly see that it is in this space of unknowing that the greatest Knowing of All waits to be noticed.

 

Can you walk up to The Wall without being hurled against it?  Yes, you can.  But not many will walk straight up to it, eyes wide open.  Instead we have to be thrown against it again and again, each time thinking it to be a horrible event and wondering what we have done to deserve it.  We are too engulfed in our pain, our discomfort, our embarrassment, our fear, our ‘whatever’, to see The Door.  But The Door is the sole reason we find ourselves hitting The Wall over and over.  It is not a punishment.  It is an unfolding. If your head hurts from all the battering you’ve received at The Wall, it’s high time you took a long look at it before you scramble away.

 

Does it always have to be that way?  Do we only see when we are bashed against The Wall?  No, apparently not.  Now, yes, I had personally been smashed against The Wall repeatedly and never saw The Door, but rather focused on licking my wounds as I scrambled away from what I was certain was a bad thing.  But when I finally saw The Door, I wasn’t being hurled against The Wall for once.  This time, I walked right up it.

 

You see, probably not unlike yourself, I had been actively searching for the Truth for quite some time.  Finally, I became absolutely obsessed with finding it.  It was all I thought about.  I searched high, low, and everywhere in between.  At times, I felt I must ‘have It’, or surely be coming close at least.  I could smell It, like cookies baking in the oven – it seemed to fill the air everywhere.  But I could not taste it or grasp it, no matter how long, or hard, or dedicatedly I tried. 

 

In the end, I had to face the fact that no matter how hard I tried, it just wasn’t where I was looking.  So, I quit trying.  I wadded up all I had amassed in the way of ‘knowledge of the Truth’ into a metaphorical paper ball and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. 

 

Yes, I was in the vicinity of The Wall when I did this.  We all are, at all times, actually.  But this time, I wasn’t hurled against it.  And I didn’t scramble from it.  I looked at it without any preconceived notion of what it was, or what it wasn’t, and examined it as though I had never seen it before.  I found this time The Wall didn’t scare me. I looked at it coolly, I’m sure for the first time.  Seeing nothing remarkable about it, nothing to fear, nothing to fight, I stuck my tongue out at it, then gave it a good swift kick.  And to my surprise, it budged.

 

A ray of light from the ‘other side’ broke into my darkness.  Still not knowing what to expect, I pushed open what I now recognized as a Door, and I stepped inside.

 

What I found there cannot be neatly described in words.  It was the Truth.  The Living Deer.  ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAlbVdsSfq8 )  And to my complete astonishment, It was also Me.

 

And in the twinkling of an eye, what I had been searching for so long made Itself known.  I could clearly see It had been there all along, as It is with you right now, and you are unaware of It.  I could finally see It, because now, it was no longer obscured by the shadow of ‘me’, or any of the futile devices and measures I used to drag along with me.

 

And in a flash, I realized how everything I had ever read or thought about “enlightenment’ or ‘It’ or ‘That Which Is’ actually accounted for literally nothing once you see the Truth.  Seeing the Truth was like the example given earlier of ‘the tiny sip of apple juice that will convey instantly what it would take thousands of words to describe, and still fall short’.  <BAM>  It was there.  It is indeed a wordless knowing, just as I had read before and blindly ignored, too busy searching through all these addictive words to give any thought to the fact that everyone who appeared to know kept saying it could not be found in words.  Oh well – better late than never, right?

 

Many things can and will bring you to The Wall, over and over.  It can be the quiet disillusionment with all your ‘enlightened knowledge’, as was the case with me.  It can be a personal tragedy too big to be processed by your normal coping methods.  It might be a silent but insistent restlessness that leaves you virtually ‘camping out’ at The Wall.  It could be anything.

 

The Way to The Wall can be hard or soft – the approach is actually irrelevant.  All that matters is the ONE TIME you hit The Wall (for whatever reason and in whatever circumstance), and this one time you do not scramble away.  Instead, you stop, and you decide to be with whatever is there.  Be with your pain, your frustration, your embarrassment, your whatever.  Don’t run this time, and instead find the courage to realize that you don’t actually have a clue on how to truly resolve whatever brought you to The Wall.  And if you fall into that moment – which may seem sad, or frightening or angry at the time (or all of those things simultaneously) if you fully embrace that moment when you consciously realize that you haven’t a clue and instead say “NOW what?” you may just find your answer.

 

Then The Wall may budge and you will see you were never resting against a wall at all, but a Door.  Please listen to this next part, as it is very important, and is almost universally overlooked or dismissed as unimportant:

 

As illogical or amazing as it may sound, your utter acceptance of ‘not knowing’ is your key to this Door.  It is your key.  This ‘Nothingness’, this emptiness of ideas, this surrender is The Key to The Door.  And you are wasting your time at The Door without this Key, even if you know it is there. It won’t open for you.

 

This surrender is often the most difficult thing for your ego-self (Karen, Mike) to do.  He will not at all care for laying aside all his supposed knowledge and moves and plans and calculations and ideas and schemes.  He always has more.  We are always pulling one more rabbit out of our hats.  We think we can ‘do this’ or ‘handle that’.  But in Truth, we slowly learn that this is actually not the case, and this is especially true here, of all places.

 

Yet we cling to this knowledge with everything we’ve got because without our amassed knowledge of assembled comparisons and contrasts, we (our ego-self) doesn’t know who he is, as you have already learned.  He fades, ceasing to ‘run the show’.  He doesn’t like that. 

 

So, it’s extremely hard to get our ‘selves’ to do this, to lay this aside and surrender, which is precisely why we find ourselves hitting The Wall over and over and over.  It’s not always a spectacular hit.  It might simply be the quiet desperation born of your innate knowledge of the Truth calling to you, making you dissatisfied in everything you do, causing you to derail one train after the next until you turn to medications and drugs, or drink, or sex, or trances, or postures, or program, or guru, or religion, or ‘whatever’ to try and numb your pain and dissatisfaction as you still scramble from The Wall.

 

The problem lies in the fact that we don’t understand The Wall.  We think it is a bad thing.  It fills us with dread, like the Monolith in Stanley Kubricks 2001.  We’re afraid of it.  Things we don’t enjoy or understand what keeps happening around it.  And yet, despite our misunderstandings, it is always out there, waiting to serve you – waiting for us to return and see it is not a Wall, but rather The Door we seek.

 

 

 

 

Second Star to the Left, Straight On Till Morning

 

In contrast to the story of  ‘Peter Pan’, where happy thoughts allowed you to fly, or ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ where childlike levity allowed you to rise and float about, our normal way of thinking weighs us down, confines us, and imposes rules upon us that actually do not exist.  Ironically, we see the ability to think in this ‘logical’ way as desirable, progressive, and respectable.

 

Because of this unfortunate fact, we find ourselves against The Wall again and again.  The very next time you hit The Wall, can you instead refrain from scrambling away and pulling yet another rabbit out of your hat in effort to remedy the situation?  Because it will be a long, long time before you run out of rabbits, you know.  Your ego-self will make sure of that.  It is up to you to decide that you don’t CARE if you possibly have more rabbits – you see they are of no use anyhow.  In our search for the Truth of who we are, we cannot pack pride or prejudice and bring it along with us, because they do not exist where The Answer is.  We must surrender those, as well.

 

After all, the saying goes ‘Ask and ye shall receive’, not ‘Guess’ or ‘Wonder’ or ‘Surmise and you shall receive’.  ASK.  Have no idea.  Wait expectantly.  This is the true asking and seeking, not the running about we do right now in pursuit of knowledge.   So, enough of what you don’t need, what DO you need?  Only one thing:

 

Your ‘not knowing’ is the ONLY thing you need to know.

 

 

Because what you are really doing here at The Wall is laying aside all you think you know, all you believe you are capable of, all you are doing or think you can do.  You are surrendering to whatever prevails, and from where you sit at the moment, you have no idea exactly what that is - you are blind to It.  This surrender is surrender in the truest sense of the word.  It is your Key to The Door.  Karmic circumstances may have delivered you to The Wall, but surrendering your thoughts, concepts, theories and ideas is what hands you The Key to unlock The Door.

 

So, the next time you find yourself at The Wall (or walk over to it right now, if you like), just dig deep, empty your pockets, and find The Key.  Then all that’s left to do is open The Door and step inside.  That’s truly all there is to it.   Yes, probably it is indeed ‘Easier said than done,’ however it is absolutely do-able by anyone at anytime.  Why not do it?

 

 

 

The Silver Bullet

 

We are all on this same path, seeking Truth, seeking Oneness.  Yet all on this path still suffer from an acute (if somewhat hidden) hallucination:  The stubborn belief in our own individual existence.  Here’s a question to consider:  Would you actually welcome a quick and tidy end to ‘you’ (Bob, Mary, Jane)  - your ego-self?  If I pulled out my gun loaded with silver bullets and offered to shoot your ego-self with it, killing this ‘monster/werewolf’ that obliges you, and releasing you back to your true Self, would you ask me to do it?  Would you ask me to fire away, if I assured you that You would indeed survive, but ‘you’ were nearly certain to be left fatally wounded?

 

Yes?  You really do want to be rid of the ego-self that keeps you imprisoned in this Land of Illusion?  Great.  Here we go.  You may notice a slight stinging sensation…..

 

<BAM!>

 

Here we go:

 

First, let me ask you a question:  Do you really believe in the Truth of non-duality, in the utter Oneness of All?  Probably most of you reading this would answer ‘yes’.  After all, this is the point of your search, isn’t it?

 

If you believe in the Truth of Oneness, you must also realize that there is no middle ground here:  If you believe there is a ‘you’ in any way, if you believe there remains a trick or rationalization of individual identity anywhere, then by that thought you have abolished all possibility of the One. 

 

How can there only be One, if there is a ‘you’ entity of any sort, or a ‘me’ entity of any sort?

 

If you follow your innate Truth and realize there is only the One, then you have abolished your entity – you’ve shot John, Sally or Carol right between the eyes with that silver bullet.  

 

There is no middle ground on this.  If the One exists, then you really don’t.  If you believe you exist as a separate entity, then the One cannot because then, there are two.  Please stop and absorb that for a moment.  Is there you, or the One?  Which actually exists?  For both cannot truly exist simultaneously.  If there are truly more than the One, then there cannot be the One.  There would be two, or three, or more.  Not One.  Please consider this thoroughly.   But don’t let it worry you because the One is You.

 

 

The Real You is The Dance, The Interplay, as you have already remembered.  You are beyond Eternal, residing completely outside of the medium of time.  It’s just the ‘little you’, who likes potato chips, and works as an administrative assistant and drives a blue car that isn’t ‘Real’.  He is a transient expression of the Interplay, The Dance – the Real You.

 

And that’s how we can ‘fatally shoot’ your ego-self with the silver bullet.  Or at least take his imaginary little hands off your imaginary reins.  But even though he is NOT the Real ‘You’, he can still be an okay guy to hang out with, once re-assigned to his proper place.  But he is not You.  Rather, he is OF You.

 

 

 

(To be continued….as soon as I can find the composition book where the rest of it lies waiting in longhand….)   -unASLEEP

 

 

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Click here to go to Part I

Click here to go to Part II

 

 

 

unasleep@unasleep.com