u/BandicootOk7017

It really giggles me that folks pay Jim Newman to sit together in a room with him for the gentleman to say...nothing.

What a gig.

This isn't to say he doesn't offer guidance or perspectives or challenge assumptions and all that. Obviously, and that's why people pay him. It's still a joke.

How much is a crutch worth?

For the man with a broken leg, a lot.

Now who convinced the man he has a broken leg? Maybe life experience. Maybe he looks down and goes, well it's not supposed to wiggle like that, and it hurts. So he goes on the search to find some remedy.

I never paid any of these crutches but I've certainly used them. Hours clocked with Mooji, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, and a couple minutes with Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Ramesh Balsekar, UG Krishnamurti, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Byron Katie...

Then there are the books. The scriptures. The methods.

I've got crutches for my crutches now, all laying against a door frame I've walked out of. I didn't pay for any of it though. The lectures and satsangs were free on youtube and all my documents were stolen.

I Jack Sparrowed my way through this whole thing to be honest. Still am. That's my archetype apparently. No escape.

The crutches offer a promise of escape. The promise disappears when you discover your legs are fine though.

Then you walk right out the door.

It's like that miracle of the man laying dormant by the pool of Bethesda. It's part of the Jesus story. The man was paralyzed in seeking some solution for 38 years. Jesus says, "Do you really want to walk?"

"Well yeah but I don't have anybody to drag me over to the miracle water."

"Get up," Jesus says to him. The man gets up and that's the whole story. He stops waiting for some external authority to not only grant him permission but to drag him to the goal.

I don't know if this post is saying anything. It may be saying as much as Jim. At least it's free though, so there's that.

It's a little after 3:30am at the time of writing this. Woke up around midnight after passing out from a spontaneous nap. Good thing too. Had to floss and brush, and then laid back down afterwards.

Simple stuff. Ordinary.

I was then thinking about another post earlier titled, "Woke up this morning. What happens next might surprise you." The theme of the post is something that comes up often enough, which is that if you're reading this, you're awake.

It's taken to mean something more than exactly what's said and reasonably so in the context of "Awakened." I mean exactly what I say though. Literally you aren't laying down or slumped over drooling. You may say, "of course but that's not what awakenkng means."

Fair enough. Peak experiences, whatever insight comes from them and any practices, methods and models to maintain or integrate such insight all pass with time or change.

The quality of my meditation today is significantly different than when I first started. In fact, life happens within meditation. This is also how I also mean that I'm awake. It's both literal (not physically asleep) as well as literal (not bound to anything).

When I sit to think about something for example, it amounts to me sitting and waiting for a thought. One may come. And then another may follow. Then it's quiet again.

This is my experience. All from making a sandwich to doing magick. There's this enormous space and things happen within it which aren't separate from the space. Altogether it feels absolute without a center.

This is a description, not a model and certainly not a map. It's like describing the flavor of ice cream. You may have a spoonful of the same stuff and describe it totally different.

So when somebody says to me, "You need goals and a plan." I laugh and go, "maybe," knowing full well there's no ground to even begin planning—unless planning happens.

Then there it is and that's all there is to it.

I didn't arrive here on purpose.

I can look at different things like meditation or scriptures and science and see dots connecting. But none of those dots can be said to be a direct cause. I've played with the idea of neuroplasticity though as a possible framework.

The brain can be trained to recognize a more vivid experience.

That still doesn't account for the enormous space which is the context for said experience. Experience can be dull, even depressing while the space remains untouched and somehow known as the ground for it all without separation.

This is also how I end up saying that it's hopeless to try and attain this but also the attempt can't be avoided. Or that this is it.

Or that you're already awake.

It's also why I say the expectation for some ideal to be realized gets in the way.

Anyway, it's time for my morning rituals and caffeine. Later.

This is one of those ideas that floats up out of the ether. Same as that last line and this one too. There's a bit of a competition to see who makes it out the door, and then here they are.

Every thought of this nature desires most of all to live. That's all a storyteller is good for – giving life to things. That's their purpose.

The story then is that This is a consequence of brain activity. All sorts of whizbangs and chemicals between them to produce experiencing. Not directly.

That's the mystery.

We've no idea how earth, fire, water, air and space come together in a variety of ways to produce the feeling of being alive.

Here it is though. I have a basic sense of what it feels like to be who or what I am. It isn't different than any other sense.

I'm aware of them all equally as a unified experience.

I don't say, "I feel the heat of the Sun, the breeze against my skin and hear the rustling of fresh leaves." I go, "Hoo-boy! It's nice out man."

Automatically too without thinking about it.

Altogether it's one experience, and it's undivided from every form of experiencing before and after it. This includes dreams.

It's the same unfied picture and sense of myself. There's no difference in experiencing. I may fly around a bit but it's still me who is experiencing the sense of flying.

Experiencing is the dream.

There are gaps between events of course. I don't remember everything. Sometimes I remember in ways that only show up as nighttime dreams.

Either way the flow of experiencing remains unbroken since any gap is also an experience.

The best things in life are free it's said. There's a song that goes, "you can give them to the birds and bees. I want money." Anybody who claims they don't want money may be lying.

Money means opportunity. Everybody loves opportunity. I'm making a lot of claims about everybody. Either way, opportunity is what everybody wants in some way.

You can be after the opportunity to relax or discover some major truth or fall in love or out of it so that you're free to do it again with somebody else. Money lets this sorta thing happen.

It's why folks get mad at "the rich." The thought is, why do they get to have so much opportunity?

You don't care about the yacht, unless you're into yachts. You don't care about the villas in europe, unless you're into villas. You especially don't want to be bothered with what it takes to manage a pile of cash and the envy that goes along with it.

People can love money so much they hate the folks who seem to have it. This is what it means that the love of money is the root of all evil. Not having it or wanting it, but seeing that somebody else might have more of it.

I thought I had to give everything up to be awake.

Turns out it was my attachment to things that had to be challenged. Notice I say challenged rather than given up. I don't know if anybody can surrender on purpose. Much like I don't know if a baby can decide to start walking.

It just...
sorta happens.

First baby is rolling around, fumbling through letter blocks to make sense of it all. Then next thing you know she's up and stumbling through her first steps to a hysterical Mama. "Good job baby!" This is what Mama says about a surprise.

Baby smiles, not really sure what happened or why, but it gets a smothering hug from Mama so why not?

When there's no attachment to things you may look up one day surprised at your level of comfort and contentment. All without a pile of cash laying around.

This is the opportunity we miss. Not for lack of trying mind you. It's the trying to let go, trying to be detached, trying to fulfill a spiritual ideal that gets in the way.

You're already awake.
You really can't get anymore awake than this right now.

Once this begins to settle and the search and effort for something else recedes from view, everything else ends up being perfect. There are still challenges every now and then. Baby isn't walking on flat ground all the time.

There are hills and steps and cracks in the sidewalk to avoid. And lava. All part of the adventure of living which is the greatest opportunity of all time.

Everything else comes out of it. Including money.

Nondual Reality as two words becomes Nondual-ity. Okay it's cheeky, but let's see if this holds true.

There's the Sun up there doing its thing. Been doing it for about 4 billion years as far as we know. The Earth is a little younger than that. Both are suspended by gravity (or some other astrophysics thing) in the Milky Way Galaxy which is about 13 billion years old.

There are stars older than our sun, and planets older than ours, and they're in every direction for trillions of miles. These are some really big numbers. They're so big we can only think of them in abstract terms.

Nevertheless(!), this is still the human condition. Some say it's suffering. I say it's experiencing. And the condition of experiencing isn't exclusive to humans.

Dogs and cats experience things. Spiders too. Have you ever seen a fly sit and clean itself? It literally eats shit but doesn't like being dirty. Maybe something with aerodynamics.

Nobody taught the fly about air flow though. There's no such thing as dog school (owned and operated by a dog). These things come naturally – whatever things any of us do.

We call it instinct but it happens regardless of whatever name we give it. "Breathing" is a name for a process that nobody really needs to be taught. Some folks are born different than expected and they need help breathing, but overall, we come pre-programmed.

Everything does.

The way the wind blows and shakes the trees loose of their leaves is a billions-year-old process.

The only division between things is language. Calling Reality "tree," "wind," "dog," "cat," "spider," "human," "Earth," "Sun," or "Milky Way" is the only division.

Otherwise it's all undivded.

Calling this right now "Reality" may even be saying too much.