Archive for category: Explorations in Being

You are always, already whole and complete. This is a very important message to take to heart. 

You are constantly inundated with messages of lack, messages that tell you that you are not good enough, that you are not smart enough, that without this or that product, you are not whole. 

The outer world wants you to believe that you are lacking so that you will spend money and consume in the hopes that you might feel complete for a few minutes. You are conditioned to feel the need to read one more book to be happy, or that that if you attend one more workshop you will finally feel like you “made it”. 

The world wants you to believe that without the nicest clothes and the coolest car you are somehow less than human. If you are not competing with everyone else in society, if you are not taking part in the game where you are in constant material competition with friends, family, and strangers, you are somehow living a half life. 

But this is a lie. In fact, the opposite is true. There is never a “making it” and playing this game will bring you only momentary fulfillment, which will ultimately lead to more dissatisfaction. It is an endless cycle of lack and wanting where you consume constantly in order to feel whole and validated.

Living in this game, this façade, chains you to materiality and enmeshes you in the lie that something outside of yourself will make you feel whole. Nothing out there can complete you because you are already complete. You were born complete. 

This incessant game of seeking and wanting is a societal psychosis that can never be satiated. Once you step off this treadmill and become conscious of it, you can experience a sense of freedom, liberation, and you can know your own instrinsic wholeness.

Never sacrifice your nobility. When you are feeling lost, fragmented, torn apart, remember that this is because you have slipped into unconsciousness and forgotten your wholeness. Take a step back, breathe, and know that you are a sacred being. Come back to your divinity.

I think that our incessant desire for distraction causes us to forget our beautiful and sublime interconnectedness, we forget ourselves, our inner essence. We lose touch with our equanimity and the world as a whole. Our realty becomes anxious and contracted. Ignorance and greed (for money, attention, power, etc.) are born from a power struggle of gaining some kind of importance, retaining it, and fear of its loss. We become blinded to reality and immersed in the illusion of separation. We come to fear silence, stillness, and thereby our true, inner selves as we liken them to dissolution. However, this is where comfort and liberation truly lie. Not in the frenetic, hectic, crazy world “out there”. We are not our incomes, Facebook likes, relationship statuses, or the cars we drive. Evaluation of actions, thoughts, fear, inquiry into the self and the oceans of our consciousness will uncover this stillness and open us to our intimate interconnectedness with everything. We can not exist apart from ourselves or anything in the universe and that often engenders a sense of fear, an ego-based fear that is anxious over loss of power and identity, neither of which truly exist. Once this fear is met closely, eye to eye, it disappears and opens us up to the ground of being. It is beautiful. 

Everything is otherwise and nothing is what it seems. The world wells up from the ground of being, the limitless expanse, formless becoming form. We, which are other bits of that limitless formlessness that have temporarily become limited form, attempt to place our labels of sound and language on all that which arises and no longer see the arisen in the light of truth but as labels and stories which veil our vision and cloud our unity, creating a false sense of separation. They make God something over there instead of all that is here. Truth becomes almost inaccessible, the maze of stories and labels is the game we see as life. Then the forms die, pass away, becoming infinite formlessness again and the dance of eternity continues infinitely. 

Everywhere there was silence; the hills were motionless, the trees were still and the river-beds empty; the birds had found shelter for the night and everything was still, even the village dogs. It had rained and the clouds were motionless. Silence grew and became intense, wider and deeper. What was outside was now outside; the brain which had listened to the silence of the hills, fields and groves was itself now silent; it no longer listened to itself; it had gone through that and had become quiet, naturally, without any enforcement. It was still, ready to stir itself on the instant. It was still, deep within itself; like a bird that folds its wings, it had folded upon itself; it was not asleep nor lazy, but in folding upon itself, it had entered into depths which were beyond itself. The brain is essentially superficial; its activities are superficial, almost mechanical; its activities and responses are immediate, though this immediacy is translated in terms of the future. Its thoughts and feelings are on the surface, though it may think and feel far into the future and way back into the past. All experience and memory are deep only to the extent of their own limited capacity by the brain being still and turning upon itself, it was no longer experiencing outwardly or inwardly. Consciousness, the fragments of many experiences, compulsions, fears, hopes and despairs of the past and future, the contradictions of the race and its own self-centered activities, was absent; it was not there. The entire being was utterly still and as it became intense, it was not more or less; it was intense, there was entering into a depth or a depth which came into being which thought, feeling, consciousness could not enter into. It was a dimension which the brain could not capture or understand. And there was no observer, witnessing this depth. Every part of one’s whole being was alert, sensitive but intensely still. This new, this depth was expanding, exploding, going away, developing in its own explosions but out of time and beyond space.

-Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti’s Notebook