Quiet Wednesday night here in Toronto. I'm tired, I drove my daughter to doctor's appointment in downtown. I picked her up at 1:30 pm and I returned home exactly at 5 pm.
I have finished all spring apartment cleaning. Tomorrow I'll wash linen and that's it. My girlfriend is coming on Friday night. I will work both days but my mind is already somewhere else. Vacation starts on Friday and a great adventure with my girlfriend.
Maybe it is a first time in my life I am really satisfied with things as they are. Of course it could be better, but generally I am a lucky guy. What will I change? Maybe my place of living... Toronto is too cold. I did not go for a walk for a long time, yesterday was snowing and it was freezing. Other than that very few things I would like to change.
I am happy that I have found this path of spiritual liberation. I could easily miss it just like other people did. My main goal in life is self-realization and everything what I do it is related to that. But lets return, what would you do?
If you could live life again...
6 of 10 people will not change anything. They are, at this very moment, the
sum of all their experiences, good and bad. To change anything in the past
would be to alter their current situation, therefore altering who they are so
they don't want that. The other 4 of 10, will change things. The list of
changes is endless but mostly predictable - like marriages, schools, grades,
jobs...
My mother died in the palliative care in January 2015. I
was with her a month earlier and I spend considerable time in that hospital
department. The palliative care is the place for dying... I read an article
about the last words of the patients there.
Those patients in
their last days has revealed the most common regrets they have at the end of
their lives and they come in this order:
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I had let myself be happier.
Unfortunately, growing up old does not mean growing up by
understanding
The truth is simple, you create your own reality, but you lack the energy to
understand that. You're too busy thinking how wonderful you are, how
sensitive, how unique. I have a news for you... You are not unique!
What
is "unique" in people when fear posses them to such an extent that they
play with their mood, wishes and desires? Everyone is a subject to such
variation. Can there be any serious attitude toward anything? People are not
"special", they are rather uninteresting example of automated
machines.
You think that a "soul" and even 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 purposeless web of associations again
and again.
From this background separate thoughts are selected
with attempt to connect them into a whole and pass them off as a valuable and
as your own.
You pick up 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 God, about eternity, about
eternal life and other "high" matters.
You speak about everything
imaginable, judge, discuss, define, evaluate but you omit to speak about your
real self, about who you really are, about your real value, for you are
convinced that if there is anything lacking in you, you can acquire it. The
truth is far from it.
I sat by my mother’s bedside as she lay dying of liver cancer. It was a late day in the end of November 2014. The rain was knocking into the hospital window. She was restless and agitated, frustrated by being confined to the bed. I asked her if she wanted to get up and she nodded but she was incapable to do so even with my help.
We sat in silence, side by side, for a few moments and then I began to ask her questions, just to fill the silence. “Are you hungry?” No answer. “Are you cold?" No answer. “What are you thinking about?”, she answered me - "Nothing. I don't think about anything." A long quietness.
In that moment I realized, she, as a person, never existed. There is no such thing as a person. There are only hopes and regrets. The sum total of these two defines the person. It is all imagination, the person merely appears to be but it has no existence.
Cease imagining yourself to be "unique", "special", "particular". Personality comes and goes and what comes and goes has no being - existence. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all.
Fuck the right ideas, that also will take you nowhere. Just cease imagining. Don't try to understand! Enough if you do not misunderstand. Don't rely on your personality for awakening. It is the personality that brought you into slavery of hopes and regrets. Go beyond it altogether.
