There’s something you don’t know about me:
I’m an arsonist.
I don’t burn buildings to gleefully watch them burn; I set fire to ideas, to beliefs and concepts to gleefully watch them burn. Why? Because I want to find the diamond underneath. The TRUTH. I want to expose, to dis-cover. What will remain when the illusion is burned away?
Most people stay in their comfort zones, trying on repeat to win or keep winning or at least not lose as badly as their neighbor at whatever game they’re playing (Make more money! Get a bigger house! Get ANOTHER bigger house! Look 20 years old forever! Be famous! Get appreciation, approval, validation, admiration, all of the above….you pick).
But why? Why do we keep playing when everyone knows that in the end, we lose all the games? It’s like we’re all monkey-see-monkey-do, running around with our hands over our ears—don’t tell me don’t tell me!—and repeating over and over to ourselves: I’m never going to die!
Which we all know is never going to be true.
I think it’s because either that’s all they know and nothing else has occurred to them (is this possible?), or they’re afraid. Deeply afraid.
But what’s the fear? Perhaps that what they’ve spent their life pursuing ends up not being important, that in fact, it doesn’t matter much if at all. Maybe they find they’ve squandered their time in this body, sacrificed their time and their kid’s time and their money or whatever else on something that meant nothing.
Isn’t that true? That we don’t want to see before our death that perhaps death washes away all meaning to our lives?
No one wants to face THAT reality, if that’s what appears under the ashes. So, better not to look at all.
The biggest fear is that when they really look, that the ultimate answer that appears is: NOTHING.
Seriously, isn’t that it? Isn’t that, at the end of the day, what keeps us awake at night? Isn’t that what keeps us clinging to our familiar little rafts of garbage, floating in the middle of a sea of a fear of NOTHINGNESS?? What keeps us circling the drain, covering our eyes, desperately trying to believe that what we’re worried about—how we compare to others, how to solve the challenges we find ourselves engaged in, the way we or others SHOULD be behaving—actually matters?? Aren’t we afraid that we’ve missed the point, missed the boat, and that NONE of that matters??
Maybe it’s just me.
But let’s check it out.
I lay awake, three a.m., setting fires.
In one sense, I’m different. Only because I’m not afraid. But of course, this also isn’t true. I’m just as afraid as you are. I’m just willing to go there because I know there’s buried treasure here and I desperately do NOT WANT TO MISS THAT BOAT.
Who are your masters? Who are mine? I want to expose this, because I want to be free—I want to really LIVE. But do I? IS there a truth “underneath it all”? that WILL set us free? Or is that just another game? Just another con that keeps us spinning the wheel, crossing our fingers and wanting the needle to land on a bigger prize? And what is freedom, after all?
Are you ready? Let’s burn it all down and see.
Here’s the catch though: I think I know the answer.
Full disclosure, I think I already know what’s True. But it may tear our worlds apart. Or it may set us free. Or possibly both. I’m good with that. There’s always the chance, of course, that I’m wrong, and what is left after the blaze I’m setting here is something altogether different. Or even worse, what we were deathly afraid of all along: the abyss, is all there is. The Nothingness. Meaninglessness. Chaos. Absence. It’s certainly the answer many have come to.
But not me.
Want to step into the fire with me?
If not, here’s your turning back point. Just close your laptop, switch off your phone, scroll away to something easier, less scary, more comforting.
Still here??
Okay then, let’s look. Stare into the fire. Watch it burn. Let’s see what we’re left with.
____________________________________________________________________________
Truly focused attention is like holding a magnifying glass, finding the ray of sunlight and patiently waiting for the subject to begin to smolder. I’m going to hold up the glass now. Whatever we look at will begin to smolder and then burn. Then we’ll look at the charred remains, or rather, sweep them away to see what, if anything, remains.
WARNING: This is all going to be very bad news to the part of you that thinks your life raft is flammable.
I warned you.
Still here? Okay.
This isn’t about what I think. Because I’m willing to burn that up. This isn’t about what YOU think, or you liking me, or you liking you: I don’t care. This isn’t about notoriety, appreciation, affirmation or validation; that’s all just kindling. This is about freedom.
This is about mastering the small self so that we are its master, not the other way around. Why? So that we can LIVE freely and not simply thrash around in our self-made cages, reacting-reacting-reacting and all the while believing the lie that we’re free.
First we need to define s/Self.
By small “s” self, I’m referencing aspects of being which we require to function in the dualistic world but that are not essential to or the essence of Who We Are.
Okay now let’s start out by torching two things that will be helpful in this endeavor:
STRUCTURE & STRICTURE
Structure, we need. Stricture, we don’t. Let me explain by way of a dream I had last night.
My dream (long, weird and involved, like most dreams) included attending a birthday celebration in which my daughter was given a present. This was the gift: a small sea-monkey-like plastic container that held a large light blue and pink plastic butterfly suspended in some kind of liquid. As I peered more closely at it, I realized that the “butterfly” was actually a plastic case clamped around a live insect—I think perhaps a grasshopper—who was impotently moving its legs around trying to escape. I reacted in horror. I leapt into action to free this poor bug—what an awful “toy”! I could make out two small screws that appeared to hold the two halves of the plastic butterfly case together and began to desperately search for one of those tiny screwdrivers for eyeglasses…
Let’s bypass interpreting what this dream might symbolically mean in my life (ahem—although I believe I’m discussing it in detail in this post) and just jump straight to using it as an illustration of Structure and Stricture.
STRUCTURE: The body of the grasshopper is the Structure. We need it. It’s what we move through life with, without it we are an amorphous blob probably incompatible with sustainable life. Structure can include not only the body but the way we function in the world—our work, our home, our schedule. At most, Structure is a functional aspect of our lives. Small “s” self stuff.
The fatal mistake is believing we ARE the Structure. We are not.
STRICTURE: The plastic butterfly case is the Stricture. It’s the superficial, the unnecessary and the untrue that blocks our functioning fully in life, just like in the dream in which the case, along with the container, limited the grasshopper from being…a grasshopper, rendering its movements impotent. Stricture can include beliefs, concepts and ideas. Small “s” self stuff.
The fatal mistake is believing we ARE the Stricture. We are not.
Take away your job, your home, your concepts and ideas about who you are and what your life is and what’s left? You (we’ll further define what YOU means). You’re still there! So, by process of elimination, none of that stuff can be YOU.
*While sure, you can’t actually survive without some parts of a body, in my estimation it’s more a functional means, not an end. You can cut off parts of it (not advised), insert or attach not-you-things (not advised) to your body, even change your DNA—and, hmmm, you’re still there.*
So what should we douse next? How about what’s left of the “I”?
So if we’ve burned up Structure and Stricture as defining of Self, relegating them to small self, what’s left? Who do you think you are? Who do I think I am? And who is thinking what?
Let’s start with my dogs, current and past.
My dogs have all differed greatly. But only in this: how much could they LOOK? How much fear, because of past trauma, got in the way of the ability to stay HERE and engage with What Is?
That’s it.
My current dog, Abby, is exuberant. I think she loves just about everyone and everything. Even when she’s growling or barking at another dog, or at some phantom she thinks is at the door, it’s because she loves it. She’s IN. Because she’s HERE. Exuberantly.
But wait a sec—not always.
Sometimes she loses her mind and I can’t get her attention—she’s just GONE and in some altered state where she’s not really LOOKING anymore, she’s not seeing. She’s insane. I can eventually bring her back by calming her in some way, then she’s HERE again, and we’re connected by that HERE. Other dogs I’ve had were more or less in that state of HERE. Mostly less.
So what comes and goes? We think of whatever comes and goes as her. I couldn’t get to her, I couldn’t get her attention.
Here we go. Attention. HER attention. There’s something there that has the ability to attend.
You and I are no different than my dogs in this way—with the exception of the ability to notice and influence when we are attending and when we aren’t—at least post mortem. When we burn everything else down, which we will in a moment, there’s nothing else left but is the attention HERE, or are we not attending to HERE, engulfed in some story and attending to what we think or feel is happening but is not (insanity)?
So I’m already giving it away. Attention. Like Abby, we have the ability to attend—but the we behind that—what is it? Now we’re getting somewhere.
So: ARE WE THE AWARENESS OF THE ATTENTION? No. At the root, we are the BEINGNESS that is present for the awareness of the attention but does not come and go and just IS.
In a way, it’s all semantics (which is a really, really stupid phrase, because “semantics” means MEANING—and people say that like meaning doesn’t matter). But what I’m saying is that in a way we can define this in any number of ways, but it’s helpful to have some vocabulary around this to relay and affect the actual experience.
The awareness of the awareness comes and goes too, just like the attention, doesn’t it? So there’s something under that as well: the BEINGNESS, the ISness.
There’s so much talk about awareness, isn’t there? But is ISness aware? I don’t think so in the way we think of awareness. Awareness of awareness requires duality, a body and a mind. Something has to be aware of something else. Underneath everything, duality is a construct—a Structure—and a truth, but not the Truth. Under duality is the ISness. And in a sense, that Nothingness we maybe dreaded a few paragraphs above.
Have you ever suddenly become aware that you’ve stood up out of your chair and gotten a snack out of the cupboard without deciding to beforehand? Or found yourself on the toilet peeing? Your body just did that, and as it did, at some point in the process you became aware that it was doing it.
ISness was doing it.
Mindlessness. We think we are controlling things with our minds and our brains, when ISness is actually the puppeteer. The truth is that the body just runs on its own without conscious input. Studies show that we become consciously aware of decisions that have been made a full 6+ seconds after the brain has begun firing to complete the action. Think about that one.
Sorry, you can’t! It was decided 6 seconds ago by the ISness!
Do you figure out when your heart should beat? Do you schedule your bowel movements? Do you attend Mastermind groups focused on making your toenails grow or your blood move through your veins? Do we create flow charts and action plans to digest our food or heal a wound?
Not unless we disrupt the naturally occurring systems and run into trouble and need to unblock so that the innate wisdom can function well again and win.
The intentional part of us’ only power is to not create blocks, or to dissolve them and get out of the way of the healing and other innate workings of the body. The body is a tool of the ISness: it doesn’t belong to you as the small self.
Wowness. Wonder. Care. That’s the brain’s job.
We have awareness of the ISness because we are in duality—we perceive that we are NOT everything at once—and have a brain and a mind to experience all of this—and voilà! The fun of being alive! Being in wonderment of the ISness of everything! Look at a flower, a flax seed, your own hand! Total mystery. Total wowness. Total amazement.
Without the awareness of HERE, we don’t experience the ISness in form. ISness is the Everything/Nothingness that just IS and is all that IS. It’s just there. What we do experience is awareness. Which, as we noted, comes and goes. Which is why the next section is about creating and influencing circumstances to foster the staying of attention.
But wait, isn’t the ISness just doing it all anyway? Sure. But if we are aware of it, we can enjoy it. If we’re not, we’re just grasshoppers fighting the plastic butterfly case. And we can work with awareness.
THIS JUST IN:
***The theory is that because ISness can’t experience itself without duality, it created duality so it could experience awareness of itself. I say you can argue this, but it cannot be any other way, in my estimation. ***
If the I is the body and the awareness, the pupil is the ISness. I’m going to just blithely go on now, as if we didn’t just uncover a diamond. But we did. We just discovered, as Hawkins puts it, the eye of the I. Mind, consciousness, it turns out is everywhere—non-local. But that’s another discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that for the sake of experiencing ourselves, we’re tricked into the illusion of duality.
BTW, I’m just relaying conclusions that have become obvious to me, but they’ve become obvious to scores of others as well. I am so unspecial here it’s dumb. Or flipside, I’m just as special as everyone else.
But so what? We’re still here, in these bodies, existing in this duality realm, or so it seems, most of us desperate and in pain a lot of the time. So what now?
Well, we can get off the bus here if we want to—continue to live in the world of pain and suffering, enjoying what we can, in a way, the experience of being human. Or we can REALLY experience and enjoy it by unclasping the irons that occlude our aware perception, unscrewing the butterfly case, and see what it’s like, flying out there in the open air. In this way, we are in the Wowness, not just enjoying the “good” things, but enjoying ALL of it.
Sound fun? Feeling brave?
Let’s burn some more stuff down.
If we don’t want to just be reacting-machines, slaves to our emotions and programmed perceptions, we have to be able to consciously, awarely, direct our attention.
Period.
So we work with the awareness, because that’s what we have access to. And I’ll tell you, I’m just in the hard-core learning process of this. Some days, I’m really, really unskilled at it—but when the awareness returns, I can appreciate and be in total Wowness of even the pain of it.
I see quite clearly that we create all of our own pain—it’s not outside of us. Pain is merely and ONLY in the unwillingness and inability to fully experience our emotions without running from them. Period Period Period.
But let’s start here: My awareness depends a lot on my physical state of regulation. I must be an “integrated entity” to experience consciousness and awareness. If I’m not regulated and thus not fully integrated, then my experience of awareness and consciousness will be impaired. So let’s go there.
Just like my dog, at least at first, the ability to direct attention is determined by how regulated our systems are. When our systems are not regulated, in general, as regular just-born-yesterday-folk, we experience difficulty attending to anything but the disregulation—if it’s big enough (if it’s smaller, we think of our attention as being distracted, or diluted. **But we’re still not Here, and thus still insane.**).
So anyway…
Regulation of the system is a fantastic tool that most of us, if not all, no matter the circumstances, have access to.
We have this physical system that in general, for the lay person, regulates our ability to experience HERE (I say “at first”—above— and “lay person” because for those who have become their own masters—i.e., FREE—their attention isn’t entirely dependent on the regulation of the physical system… or so I gather. I haven’t seen this actual person in person—but have certainly read about them).
The system chokes down when it’s disregulated and impairs or occludes the awareness and thus the ability of the awareness to focus the attention HERE, rather than NOT HERE. Rather than absent, gone. It doesn’t matter where it goes at this point (to sleep, perhaps), the fact that it blinks out, that it’s not HERE creates the insanity.
And I don’t use that word lightly or humorously—I mean ACTUALLY INSANE. NOT SANE.
If our attention is focused anywhere but HERE, we are in-sane. We are someone who isn’t dealing in shared reality. Someone who’s walking down the street as you’re driving by, and they’re yelling at someone who isn’t there about something that’s not happening. That’s what we’re doing when the awareness isn’t focusing the attention HERE; it’s just less obvious than the street-screamer, partly because everybody else is doing it too. It just becomes apparent when we’re bumping up against ACTUAL reality, or against someone else’s insanity that doesn’t match our own.
So. First lesson: learn how to keep the system regulated.
But perhaps I’ve put the cart before the horse. So let’s get to the horse. Because I don’t like to see animals suffering, rather than “horse”, I’m going to use the other analogy: trash. Let’s burn away more of the trash, the illusion, to get to more diamonds, if those are there.
Most people think who they are is what is actually just an historic collection of habits and behaviors and thoughts (and also that that garbage collection is somehow special or unique—eye roll). But it’s a slippery slope!
What about the not-cool, not “good-person” thoughts you have?? Everyone has horrible thoughts, they’re just part of having a brain. So if you’re assigning yourself worth based on those thoughts that happen to you, you better start running right now. Run as fast as you can—plugging your ears and squeezing your eyes shut—away from the fact that sometimes this weird shit breaks through in your brain:
What if I throw my purse off this bridge?
I’d really like to rip out this person’s throat right now.
What if I drove off the highway now.
What if I didn’t stop at the stop sign?
And on and on. Can you keep a cap on that? Can you control something you can’t control? How good are you at explaining shocking shit away to yourself and to others?
It’s not needed.
Thoughts, no matter how disturbing, do not equal action.
All that’s needed here is attention.
But if we burn the bad thought meaning down, then how do we decide WHICH thoughts DO mean SOMETHING?? Do you see the structure collapsing? The answer is that none of them mean ANYTHING. Let me repeat: None of those thoughts mean anything. They’re there, just like all the apparent circumstances in your life, to bring up emotional charge, energy that is begging to be released from your system storage. But to the average person, this is who we think we are. So where did we go then, if we’re not the thoughts? Follow me further down the rabbit hole here.
Habits and behaviors. No, I’m not about to say that habits and behaviors are meaningless or not important. In fact, they compose the quality of our lives, in a sense; they are necessary Structure. But if we start thinking they are who we ARE, we’re sunk. We have to go deeper. What determines the habits and behaviors?
Remember my dog?
There is one answer: the quality of the presence; the ability to be HERE. We could take the opposite side of the coin and answer that TRAUMA determines the quality of our presence. The degree of presence or absence of trauma that diverts our attention to something other than HERE is what determines where our attention is, and more specifically, whether it is HERE or NOT.
Lesson 2: Expose & release stored trauma in a regulated state.
Exposing trauma in an unregulated state leads to NOT HERE, to more insanity. But if the system is regulated, and trauma is brought into the light and attended to—just focused attention on it until the difficult feelings dissipates, the body metabolizes and heals it. The body. The ISness. Not some fictional “us” that does something. Allowing the energy of trauma to release little by little naturally clears the way for the attention to be HERE. The insanity thus decreases by degrees.
How do we expose trauma in a regulated state?
We need to define regulation. Regulation is the body in a state of calm homeostasis. Disregulation is upset—whether that’s physical or mental or emotional—all of these can disregulate the physical system and steal our ability to fully attend. Our job is to bring the body and emotional system back into regulation. Tools to bring the body back into regulation are Exercise the body, get as much sleep as you need, eat clean foods, connect physically with the earth, be with people you love, do things you enjoy….there are conditions our bodies do well in. If I eat clean food I feel good. Moving my body generates the disbursal of endorphins in my brain…these are the things I’m talking about.
Lesson 3: Be in awareness with the feelings
But after we’ve achieved (or returned to) physical regulation, there is emotional regulation (emotional disregulation will disrupt the physical regulation and the ability to attend) that will both affect and rely on our ability to attend. By giving ourselves the foundation of the above physical regulation of the body, we increase our resourced-ness for emotional regulation. Emotional regulation requires either A). running from mental/emotional pain and securing ourselves in a state where pain will not be triggered (an impossibility that most people attempt, thus caging themselves further) or B). desensitizing to emotional charges. This requires a practice (which provides a space and a habit for us to use in accomplishing desensitization) of sitting with or allowing the emotional pain to surface and placing equable (non-judgmental) attention upon it until it dissipates. And it does. Described above, this is the process by which we become willing and able to withstand what before felt unbearable, and in doing so, we find that ALL of our pain emanates from this unwillingness to experience what feels initially unbearable. When we don’t run, we become aware of the fact that emotions come and go, can be withstood and simply witnessed, and that we no longer feel the need to react to them. They are allowed, welcomed and even appreciated. Wowness.
Then…Freedom.
Once we become free of the illusion of the Emotional Master and become “our own” (Self) masters, free to experience what is here (self) without stress (even if that is stress) we (the awareness of the attention) have become truly free to be in the appreciation and OH MY, WOW of All That Is. We don’t have to try. Or not try. We don’t have to want to be a butterfly if we’re a grasshopper. Just BEing and experiencing that ISness of BEing is the whole point.
So what are the diamonds here?
We can unlearn the lies we’ve been taught about who we are as thoughts, ideas, actions and possessions. My worth or essence has nothing to do with Structure or Stricture and my experience does not need to either.
That the “I” we really are is the awareness of the ISness—or more accurately the ISness itself—but we only experience that through the awareness that we think of as “me”.
And the pathway toward the only appropriate and true response (awe), to the glory of Life lies in regulation of the physical system, which can be accomplished via meeting basic needs and then releasing stored trauma and becoming friends with our emotions.
ABRUPT ENDING: I realize this post is not only long, but also probably full of errors, a bit rambly and worse, somewhat out of order. But I have limited time, and hopefully the point came across. The energy in it is expended for me, and I must clean my house. Perhaps I’ll return and clean up the post at some point as well. But for now I’ll leave you here, if by some miracle you made it this far, and wish you well in your experience today, whatever that is!
If you want to read more of my more artfully expressed arsonry, there’s lots of it in my very favorite of my own books (which is FYI SUPER CHEAP AT $5 RIGHT NOW), The Brush Fires Essays: Modern Examinations of Consciousness in Form.
ExCELLENT RE~D0 ChRiSTY!🧜
~~~~~~~mE LiKEY~~~~~~❣️
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wiLL0 MAkE YE SmiLE ; }
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