choosing the way
What does it mean by choosing your way in your world? Or maybe you should ask yourself have you chosen your own way in the life. What is actually about freedom? Do we really have the freedom of choosing our own life? Some people might say yes but some people will doubt on the answer whether we are able to do so or not. Most of the time we are too busy with what we are doing and don't notice the reality happened around us, but sooner or later, that awareness emerges again, telling us that something is peculiar about the view of things, end everyone else's, too.
There is something still basically wrong. For example, if you went to the movies and there was something odd about the projector or something strange about the camera that was used to take the movies in the first place, but the images themselves seem normal, but the way they being put together is out of sequence, or playing at different speeds. That's what I mean. There is actually something wrong with the structure of the world but you might not notice it for a long while. It's not until you really examine your experience that you catch sight of the peculiarities. It just isn't the way you've been told.
Time makes no sense. It doesn't really apply to me. My thinking is totally different to the previous years and I can't stay up all night without taking rest as the way I used to. But physically I don't change. I'm looking out a window at everything that passes by. Time passes and one day I will die, but these things don't fit that clear place where I am. You get older and everyone around you gets older and you see your birthdays clicking away every year like numbers on mileage meter in your car, but I'll bet there is something inside of you that doesn't feel it is changing at all; inside you're like some kind of mirror, reflecting everything without absorbing it. The mirror doesn't change. You watch time pass, and perhaps believe it when people tell you that you'll die. Time fits my body and the world I see, but it doesn't fit me, because the soul in the body is chemically changing.
Maybe we can consider this matter from other angle: Time flows like a river as it would seem. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow seem like a road stretching far behind and far ahead. But the route in front of us is the road, and on that road any place seems the same as ten feet ahead or ten feet behind but it's not that way with Time. Ten seconds past and ten seconds ahead is nothingness, just smoke, but this moment, where I am, is clear and bright. On either side in Time, there's nothing similar to Now, only memories (past) or imaginings (future). The place you were ten seconds ago has vanished, and what is the place ten seconds ahead? There is nothing there. It's very odd. Because of TIME, now that you notice, that something is wrong? The "road of Time" is a thought, but unfortunately the thought doesn't fit.
You have been told that you are alone. "We enter the world alone and we exit alone," and so forth. What is the nature of the universe? Our scientific "realists" tell us it is a fascinating, orderly biochemical machine composed of electrical charges, but meaningless, purposeless, and indifferent. So you are basically alone in an indifferent world. You are told you are basically alone. But try to think about this, when you love, are you alone? When you look, unguarded, into another's eyes, clear place to clear place, are you alone? When you wholeheartedly engage in work, study or play, are you alone? There is only one way to be alone: by thinking about it. The thought creates the aloneness; the concept is the problem. "Aloneness" does not fit experience.
If I ask myself that question and take a look to see, it's very curious indeed. I thought that I was happy, that I was thinking, that I was seeing, but when I pause and look inside it seems as if I've been looking out a window at "my" feelings, at “my” sensations, and at my thoughts. If I'm looking at them, how can they be me? There is some kind of awareness, something basic that observes everything, and, although I usually don't notice because it is drowned out by all the noise, it's always there. If I turn back to find myself, look forward to the deepest, the very heart of me where I actually live, that awareness is me. It seems to have been there always, just as it is, while everything else changes. Try an experiment, right now. Close your eyes and ask yourself if you have disappeared. What's your answer? Now, cover your ears so sounds are absent have you disappeared?
No matter what part of the world or your thoughts or your feelings you make go away, you stay there. Now, what is that you? That's what I'm talking about — that place. And, in fact, it's not even a place but it's you. That is what you are and that is what I am now. But when I ask that question and look to see, I'm that window, that lookout, that awareness. It isn't just a theory; it's what my experience actually is and yours, too. It's really very obvious, but you were told nothing about it through all your years of school. The most basic factor of your existence, can be quoted “Everything else is: the everything else that is not you”
How about satisfaction? Satisfaction doesn't last. We're used to that principle and accept it, but isn't that a strange arrangement? You work for a goal that evaporates when it's in your hand. "True, so true, that's the way life is!” . Nothing is perfect especially ourselves. Everything's flawed, everything's a little off. How come? It's not so obvious that life must be defective. Would you have constructed it that way?
We being taught that that's the way everything is. We’re even annoyed that someone bother us about it. But stop, consider what you've been taught: time, aloneness, dissatisfaction, imperfection; are they really logical? Are they facts? Are they "realistic" or have you been swindled, conned so well that it feels like home to you? It's almost funny! You thought you were being mature, adult, strong, looking life straight in the eye. Maybe you've been duped.
For if you want to know reality and act in it with your creative power, dependency will bring you in. Perhaps it's not listed because it's so often hidden and has so occupied our perception that we are not aware of how tyrannically it binds our lives. What we are told is dependency is a the man or woman still tied to the mother's apron strings or dominated by a spouse.
Dependency is more subtle and disguised than that: it is just the wish to have parents. Dependency is a fantasy. In that fantasy parents know what you should do; they give you what you want and what you need. They are powerful. With their power, parents can control what you cannot: love, anger, and fear, sickness. They give attention and esteem and love you no matter what you do. They make no demands except submission. Parents will provide if you bend you knee. Who are the parents of our adult years? Anyone will do. Husband, wife, children, our employer there are too many to be listed. Basically everyone can be the parent.
Dependency is a disease, an insidious fantasy of protective power looking down, guarding you, judging you, rewarding you. The disease has symptoms: helplessness, envy, vanity, jealousy, and admiration, blaming, exploitation, and reproach. Perhaps you thought you left all that behind you when you left your home for college, job, or marriage. Not likely. Remember the moment when you said good-bye? You didn't really. Let me sketch the scene as, psychologically, it really was--and still may be, now.
Then are you never to be cared for? relax? in the arms or lover, friend feeling cared for, at peace? Of course you can, such letting go needs no fantasy and no parent but only trust: trust in yourself, that your need will end, that you will want to work again and care for others, that you emptiness can be filled; trust in others, that they receive in the act of giving, that they need you to need them. It is an inward process through which you turn to others, as they are, to receive that which you must have. You do not need parents now, and you do not have them (as you had them then, or wanted them to be). To resurrect parents requires fantasy, and the price of fantasy is high. You pay with fear. Pretending you are helpless, imagining you are small, feeling needy for protection, you scare yourself. It's part of the game, to be afraid.
You pay with greed. The child is needy, and feeling needy, how reasonable to seek possessions, love and power, money, sex and food. But the fantasy of needfulness turns pleasure into possession and power into tyranny. A millionaire will seek more millions, beyond consumption, for the emptiness will not be filled and the desire for security is not appeased. That hunger can consume the world, yet the appetite stays sharp. So your greed whips you on.
you pay with vanity. You must be special and attractive in your body or your mind to catch the eye and hold the person who must save you. It's competition to the death, to win the prize from all the others. Fame entices in the hope that all-out war will capture entire populations of providers.But if you win? The people crowding toward you have dead eyes; they are blind, grasping, dependent, and self-centered. Throwing their own ropes of fantasy, they tie you to the book, performance, reputation, whatever object you have created. You have summoned angels to provide and find yourself with vampires that feed their own vanity by possessing you. In consolation, they leave money on the floor. You gather it up thinking money means more pleasure, except that pleasure done too often fades away; and so you find, instead, the death of pleasure.
Dependency exacts a further price: it murders creativity. Creative action plays with the unknown. But as the child fears the dark, full of big dogs and mental monsters formed from fantasies, the adult child will be fearful, too, faced with the dark world of the unknown mind, with vast concepts looming enormous just beyond the front yard. Peering out, he sees no parents in the darkness of that land where he has never been. The unknown is uncontrolled and no strategies exist that will enclose the endless territory of the new. Only trust in yourself and in this world can carry you past the w fears and dependency locks you in, secure.
In order to create, you must move forward into what you cannot see and urge it into being. You cannot do that in submission, doing what you're told nor in rebellion, not doing what you're told. In both, the focus is the same: turned back to them. To be dependent, you stay a child. To stay a child, you stop reality's forward motion, roll back to a past time and freeze it there, preserved forever.
So to keep a fantasy, do not peer too closely at the world; fuzzy vision suits you best. Your creative power, turned away, is aimed inside to juggle fantasies, to solve the problems of a child's intrigue. Thus, "What am I? Who am I?" the cardinal questions of our life, are never asked. These guiding questions direct creation in a thousand cultures; they are the points by which we navigate our voyage, carrying us as far as we will leave the land. They do not orient our lives in dependency. Aborted in its course, the creative thrust misses the world.
Dependency kills us, for it is the unknown that gives us life. The unknown flowers when we are receptive to it, allowing it to enter. The unknown carries us to the constantly forming edge of the world where light, beauty, and ecstacy are found. There is no other path to the spiritual, to the creative, to reality.
There is something still basically wrong. For example, if you went to the movies and there was something odd about the projector or something strange about the camera that was used to take the movies in the first place, but the images themselves seem normal, but the way they being put together is out of sequence, or playing at different speeds. That's what I mean. There is actually something wrong with the structure of the world but you might not notice it for a long while. It's not until you really examine your experience that you catch sight of the peculiarities. It just isn't the way you've been told.
Time makes no sense. It doesn't really apply to me. My thinking is totally different to the previous years and I can't stay up all night without taking rest as the way I used to. But physically I don't change. I'm looking out a window at everything that passes by. Time passes and one day I will die, but these things don't fit that clear place where I am. You get older and everyone around you gets older and you see your birthdays clicking away every year like numbers on mileage meter in your car, but I'll bet there is something inside of you that doesn't feel it is changing at all; inside you're like some kind of mirror, reflecting everything without absorbing it. The mirror doesn't change. You watch time pass, and perhaps believe it when people tell you that you'll die. Time fits my body and the world I see, but it doesn't fit me, because the soul in the body is chemically changing.
Maybe we can consider this matter from other angle: Time flows like a river as it would seem. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow seem like a road stretching far behind and far ahead. But the route in front of us is the road, and on that road any place seems the same as ten feet ahead or ten feet behind but it's not that way with Time. Ten seconds past and ten seconds ahead is nothingness, just smoke, but this moment, where I am, is clear and bright. On either side in Time, there's nothing similar to Now, only memories (past) or imaginings (future). The place you were ten seconds ago has vanished, and what is the place ten seconds ahead? There is nothing there. It's very odd. Because of TIME, now that you notice, that something is wrong? The "road of Time" is a thought, but unfortunately the thought doesn't fit.
You have been told that you are alone. "We enter the world alone and we exit alone," and so forth. What is the nature of the universe? Our scientific "realists" tell us it is a fascinating, orderly biochemical machine composed of electrical charges, but meaningless, purposeless, and indifferent. So you are basically alone in an indifferent world. You are told you are basically alone. But try to think about this, when you love, are you alone? When you look, unguarded, into another's eyes, clear place to clear place, are you alone? When you wholeheartedly engage in work, study or play, are you alone? There is only one way to be alone: by thinking about it. The thought creates the aloneness; the concept is the problem. "Aloneness" does not fit experience.
If I ask myself that question and take a look to see, it's very curious indeed. I thought that I was happy, that I was thinking, that I was seeing, but when I pause and look inside it seems as if I've been looking out a window at "my" feelings, at “my” sensations, and at my thoughts. If I'm looking at them, how can they be me? There is some kind of awareness, something basic that observes everything, and, although I usually don't notice because it is drowned out by all the noise, it's always there. If I turn back to find myself, look forward to the deepest, the very heart of me where I actually live, that awareness is me. It seems to have been there always, just as it is, while everything else changes. Try an experiment, right now. Close your eyes and ask yourself if you have disappeared. What's your answer? Now, cover your ears so sounds are absent have you disappeared?
No matter what part of the world or your thoughts or your feelings you make go away, you stay there. Now, what is that you? That's what I'm talking about — that place. And, in fact, it's not even a place but it's you. That is what you are and that is what I am now. But when I ask that question and look to see, I'm that window, that lookout, that awareness. It isn't just a theory; it's what my experience actually is and yours, too. It's really very obvious, but you were told nothing about it through all your years of school. The most basic factor of your existence, can be quoted “Everything else is: the everything else that is not you”
How about satisfaction? Satisfaction doesn't last. We're used to that principle and accept it, but isn't that a strange arrangement? You work for a goal that evaporates when it's in your hand. "True, so true, that's the way life is!” . Nothing is perfect especially ourselves. Everything's flawed, everything's a little off. How come? It's not so obvious that life must be defective. Would you have constructed it that way?
We being taught that that's the way everything is. We’re even annoyed that someone bother us about it. But stop, consider what you've been taught: time, aloneness, dissatisfaction, imperfection; are they really logical? Are they facts? Are they "realistic" or have you been swindled, conned so well that it feels like home to you? It's almost funny! You thought you were being mature, adult, strong, looking life straight in the eye. Maybe you've been duped.
For if you want to know reality and act in it with your creative power, dependency will bring you in. Perhaps it's not listed because it's so often hidden and has so occupied our perception that we are not aware of how tyrannically it binds our lives. What we are told is dependency is a the man or woman still tied to the mother's apron strings or dominated by a spouse.
Dependency is more subtle and disguised than that: it is just the wish to have parents. Dependency is a fantasy. In that fantasy parents know what you should do; they give you what you want and what you need. They are powerful. With their power, parents can control what you cannot: love, anger, and fear, sickness. They give attention and esteem and love you no matter what you do. They make no demands except submission. Parents will provide if you bend you knee. Who are the parents of our adult years? Anyone will do. Husband, wife, children, our employer there are too many to be listed. Basically everyone can be the parent.
Dependency is a disease, an insidious fantasy of protective power looking down, guarding you, judging you, rewarding you. The disease has symptoms: helplessness, envy, vanity, jealousy, and admiration, blaming, exploitation, and reproach. Perhaps you thought you left all that behind you when you left your home for college, job, or marriage. Not likely. Remember the moment when you said good-bye? You didn't really. Let me sketch the scene as, psychologically, it really was--and still may be, now.
Then are you never to be cared for? relax? in the arms or lover, friend feeling cared for, at peace? Of course you can, such letting go needs no fantasy and no parent but only trust: trust in yourself, that your need will end, that you will want to work again and care for others, that you emptiness can be filled; trust in others, that they receive in the act of giving, that they need you to need them. It is an inward process through which you turn to others, as they are, to receive that which you must have. You do not need parents now, and you do not have them (as you had them then, or wanted them to be). To resurrect parents requires fantasy, and the price of fantasy is high. You pay with fear. Pretending you are helpless, imagining you are small, feeling needy for protection, you scare yourself. It's part of the game, to be afraid.
You pay with greed. The child is needy, and feeling needy, how reasonable to seek possessions, love and power, money, sex and food. But the fantasy of needfulness turns pleasure into possession and power into tyranny. A millionaire will seek more millions, beyond consumption, for the emptiness will not be filled and the desire for security is not appeased. That hunger can consume the world, yet the appetite stays sharp. So your greed whips you on.
you pay with vanity. You must be special and attractive in your body or your mind to catch the eye and hold the person who must save you. It's competition to the death, to win the prize from all the others. Fame entices in the hope that all-out war will capture entire populations of providers.But if you win? The people crowding toward you have dead eyes; they are blind, grasping, dependent, and self-centered. Throwing their own ropes of fantasy, they tie you to the book, performance, reputation, whatever object you have created. You have summoned angels to provide and find yourself with vampires that feed their own vanity by possessing you. In consolation, they leave money on the floor. You gather it up thinking money means more pleasure, except that pleasure done too often fades away; and so you find, instead, the death of pleasure.
Dependency exacts a further price: it murders creativity. Creative action plays with the unknown. But as the child fears the dark, full of big dogs and mental monsters formed from fantasies, the adult child will be fearful, too, faced with the dark world of the unknown mind, with vast concepts looming enormous just beyond the front yard. Peering out, he sees no parents in the darkness of that land where he has never been. The unknown is uncontrolled and no strategies exist that will enclose the endless territory of the new. Only trust in yourself and in this world can carry you past the w fears and dependency locks you in, secure.
In order to create, you must move forward into what you cannot see and urge it into being. You cannot do that in submission, doing what you're told nor in rebellion, not doing what you're told. In both, the focus is the same: turned back to them. To be dependent, you stay a child. To stay a child, you stop reality's forward motion, roll back to a past time and freeze it there, preserved forever.
So to keep a fantasy, do not peer too closely at the world; fuzzy vision suits you best. Your creative power, turned away, is aimed inside to juggle fantasies, to solve the problems of a child's intrigue. Thus, "What am I? Who am I?" the cardinal questions of our life, are never asked. These guiding questions direct creation in a thousand cultures; they are the points by which we navigate our voyage, carrying us as far as we will leave the land. They do not orient our lives in dependency. Aborted in its course, the creative thrust misses the world.
Dependency kills us, for it is the unknown that gives us life. The unknown flowers when we are receptive to it, allowing it to enter. The unknown carries us to the constantly forming edge of the world where light, beauty, and ecstacy are found. There is no other path to the spiritual, to the creative, to reality.
posted by Bacon C. at 5:44 PM
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