Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved as D.H. Lawrence said, but do you know how you live? You live like a slave, like a mindless robot going through the motions of life, but not really alive.
If you think you're free because you've some fancy alternative beliefs and outlook, you eat healthy, maybe you do yoga, you don't eat meat, you have an alternative business, you don't watch TV, you're trying to save planet for future generations and you're trying to save your body for retirement...
Well, these "alternative" lifestyle doesn't make you different from the rest of us, the "uninitiated" crowd. You do exactly the same then like the rest of us, in your own way. You're only dreaming that you're different. You don't recognize this so you think you're unique and no hope for you to change really exist.
Your thinking and your beliefs are the cause of your failure to wake up. You don't see what's perfectly obvious. You do things to earn money, to get rid of stress and to have a happy life. But all that are the smoke and mirrors!
By having a lots of money, a large house and a new car are things to keep you fooled and they maintain your self-deception. Your happiness is ill-defined: it's about acquiring it, it's not about enjoying it.
You are so busy, you don't have a time for the enjoyment anyway.
You think that a "soul" or a "spirit", is necessary to do what you do and live as you live. But perhaps it is just enough to have a key for winding up the spring of your mechanism.
A daily portion of food helps you to wind up and renew your purposeless web of associations again and again. From this background you select separate thoughts with attempt to connect them into a whole and pass them off as a valuable and as your own.
You pick up your feelings and sensations, moods and experiences and out of all this you create the mirage of inner life, call yourself conscious and reasoning being, talk about yoga, meditation, God, about eternity, about eternal life and other "high" matters.
You speak about everything imaginable, judge, discuss, define, evaluate but you omit to talk about yourself, about who you really are, about your real value, for you are convinced that if there is anything lacking in you, you can buy it or you can learn it...
Alice came to a fork in the road.
"Which road do I take"? she asked.
"Where do you want to go"? responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know." Alice answered. "Then", said the cat. "it doesn't matter".
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
You are actually not going anywhere! You're only convinced yourself that you are going somewhere.
Yeah, you are waiting for a perfect job, perfect spouse, perfect house and retirement with a lot of sunshine and long walks on the beach. So you watch how you live... You call that self-conscious living.
However, the subtext of your current life is in a future. You are missing the present, you are really missing the life but so what, you take care of your Facebook page, world peace, your health, prosperity, and so on.
Your life is like a race car without an engine. It looks very cool, large house, a good job, happy kids... but it has no engine. You slip in behind the wheel like a foot slips into shoe, and then you make whroom sounds and turn the wheel and shift gears and pretend you're rocketing toward happiness.
But when you get tired of it in five or ten years, you'll get out of that exactly where you got into it. Lonely, tired and disappointed. You have missed the awakening my friend.
You see, the awakening is neither no mind, blank mind, empty mind nor stopped mind. Awakening is not Nirvana. Nir means not or without and vana means a flame. Desire-less mind is an oxymoron. Awakening is not The Now. Awakening is neither the Oneness nor any other transcendental state, such states of consciousness are experiences. Awakening is not the Ethereal Bliss. Awakening is neither a special status nor some kind of attainment.
You are awake when you clearly see that your beliefs, knowledge, understanding, experience, the world, your life, your self sense... when you clearly see that none of it, means anything. When you see that, then it begins...
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