Spiritual Awakening – Playing A Finite Game Whose Rules Are Infinite
This post is to point you to a great article about spiritual awakening: The Generic Futility of Blue Goo – The Peaceful Self, but first some thoughts…
The below article expresses thoughts that occur regularly for ‘me.’ Thoughts about playing a finite game within infinite rules, if you like. Thoughts of banal and fake actions and words we throw about all day long to others and ourselves, in an unconscious act to uphold a sense of normality. A normality that is far from normal. The word normal itself is a misnomer. The desire for normality or belief in the importance of being ‘normal’ is what gets shed in awakening. Try this: keep saying the word ‘normal’ over and over again. Before long it starts to sound funny, and the focus goes on the sound of the word rather than the meaning. That’s the reality – it is just a sound we create by moving our mouth in a certain way. The meaning attached to the word is a whole host of conditioned beliefs we picked up from a young age. These have NOTHING to do with words, and NOTHING to do with reality. Reality isn’t what you normally think of it. It is not all the stuff your head is full of – beliefs, conditioned responses, judgments, and so on. That’s what you think is reality. The ‘you’ that you think you are – that’s not real either. If it were you would be able to find the ‘you’, locate it and prove it. But one cannot do this, because ‘you’ are a figment of your own imagination.
Awakening occurs when you see clearly the futility of the self you believe to be real. Actually this can be more like the dark night of the soul. Awakening is simply a natural state where the stuff you add to every moment of your life is no longer getting in the way of your seeing natural reality. Natural reality has no meaning, no purpose, no cause and effect. The resistance to this idea is your conditioned response and desperate attempt to hold on to your own idea of reality, one which involves a ‘you’ that is in control of your life. The desperate attachment to a sense of a ‘me’ is behind pain and suffering. But at the same time, whilst such heavy attachments fall away upon awakening, and there is a natural sense of beingness instead, it is still not plain sailing in one sense, because the game must go on, and there is now a conscious playing of a false game, which can be tedious. Awakening out of the inuathentic game occurred for me when I got really tired of playing this fake game – and of believing it. The game has to go on being played, but I guess the difference now is that there is a freedom from believing fake to be true. This is the difference that makes the difference. But even so, and though I now play the game with more ease – most of the time, still, in moments, the strength for this game wanes and I have to step out for a while. Into Nothingness, pure and simple. Into the ‘what is’ and no more. Into Lightness, for the fake game is heavy, and personally I can’t take too much of it in one go. Illusion is dissatisfying at the end of the day. Silence becomes a needed friend, and battery-charger – in this illusory world.
None of this type of stuff will make sense though to one – the majority – who has yet to see the fake-ness of their life. Rather the defenses go up. Justification and self-protectionism arise, and no amount of speaking about how inauthentic we all are will get anyone to suddenly to wake up. So talking about this stuff is pointless. The only way awakening occurs is alone.
If there were a purpose to life I would say it might be enlightenment or awakening, but there again, the real truth is that there is no purpose. Nope, your becoming rich, or getting that promotion, or having the kids or getting married, no they are not the real purpose of your life. You could say that the real purpose is to see there is no real purpose to life. You may not like that. Just see what reactions come up in reading this, or the article below. There is no wrong or right, no good or bad, no better or worse. It is a question of energy. Attachment to a fake identity is simply heavy, hard work and allows for no real freedom of expression. And everyone wants to be free. There seems to be some inward gauge in people towards authentic self-expression, but so few are willing to do what it takes to really look deeper. And that’s ok too. It’s just the way it is. It would not be better were many more awakened, it would just be lighter, energetically. And when there is lightness, there is more freedom, creativity, love.
The topic of spiritual awakening is not of interest to everyone, as I know from having run this blog for a while now, and had communication from people about how alone they feel. If it happens to you you will know it. As indeed some readers of this blog have shared. It will turn your whole views of life upside down and then some more. Everything you believed, and the need to believe what you have believed, will not work the same way anymore. Everything. It will be a shock to your whole entire system – physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and whatever other levels.
You may say, well if there is no purpose to life then what’s the point of awakening? Indeed, you are right. There is nothing better after awakening compared with before. Life is not suddenly interminable bliss. LOL. There is a whole different perspective and thinking and actions are different thereafter, but it is not better, beacuse such evaluations become meaningless. But what there IS is a greater sense of what is pain and what is joy, and one’s own involvement (through inevitable game-playing) in the creation of these, or ability to appreciate these. So, this post isn’t saying ‘you should awaken’, it is not trying to get you to do anything different. There is in fact no purpose to this post. After my own awakening I began this blog, and it was simply a way to connect and share. It was simple creativity expressing itself through words. That’s all. I would love the whole world to awaken (why? because life would be so much lighter and most likely outwardly transformed) but upon awakening you also lose any evangelistic desperation you may have had. You see that all of what happens is a non-judgmental, non-personal and impartial happening within a miraculous Energy that allows for the game of life to arise. But the game of life is not the be-all and end-all, it is the play on the stage…the play ends, but the stage remains, eternally.
Enjoy.
[Start]The Generic Futility of Blue Goo
Ahhhh…waking up to another day of ‘doing’ things and getting things ‘done.’ Not just things, but fooking important things that give a sense of self-actualizing grandiosity in the battle against the deeper sense of your abject insignificance. Sliding down the smoothly polished pipeline of productive people participating in perfectly normal pastimes and polite dinner parties. As Bill Hicks so accurately stated “it’s only a ride.”
It’s a “normal” ride though.
You find it normal negotiating through traffic to arrive at a place where you’ll perform pointless tasks to secure your daily bread and you will do this until the years long burden of earth gravity and brain senility accelerates your physical and mental feebleness demanding an exit affording you the opportunity to make countless trips to the doctor to remind you of the fact that, not only are you physically dying but, more importantly, you’ve have been psychologically dead for years.
You believe it normal to sculpt your delightful little progeny into socialized little lambs, institutionally educated to memorize the required scripts and engage in the same weary roles so that they too can be constructive members of a bipolar communalism and “work” at insipid, vacuous tasks, feeding their faces with chemicalized faux-foods to eventually copulate their way to the formation of new herd members. You believe that working hard to contrive “rest and relaxation” through sporadic episodes of “vacation” as symbolic of a well rounded “lifestyle.” You participate in various causes in defense of your values, but in the black of night when you’re most alone, the angst of your actual condition permeates your every pore and so pills are eventually a precondition to slumber.
But most of all, you believe it “normal” to live a “meaningful life,” denying that every tiny scrap of meaning you have ever held onto for dear life was handed to you from the moment of birth and even now you can’t remember the last time you had a unique and exciting idea that did not come directly from the socio-cultural lexicon of herd grazing normalcy…. baa, baa, baaaaaaa…
Do you even know why you chose marriage, career and children? Nah, you really have NO clue, other than the fact that everyone else was doing it and still is. Essentially we all do what we believe we’re supposed to do. Nothing more, nothing less.
But what do you do when one day you awake and realize it’s all a sham and you’ve been duped from the start. That somebody else wrote the lyrics to your song and that every choice you’ve made was weaved into your cranial neurocircuitry. Will you have the wherewithal to cut yourself free from it? Will you have the courage and fortitude to self-lobotomize your own habitualized thought patterns?
What happens when getting outa bed to start your glorious, awesome “day,” is a test of mental endurance never before experienced. When all the things that you must do, you have not a shred of desire or even the slightest drop of willpower to get done and all you can do is stare into the abyss of nothingness and perseverate on how you must be mentally ill not to want to play the games and follow the rules as you’ve always done, like everybody else does through the assistance of diversified distractions.
This is a level of ‘awake’ that absolutely no one would choose to engage, because it’s so damn fooking inconvenient. The problem with that “Dark Night of the Soul” is that it can last years.
When you understand that all the things you have done are as utterly pointless and banal as the things you will do and you become completely drenched in the Generic Futility of your entire life project, you can then consider yourself ‘spiritually evolved’ or, in other words, ‘fucked.’
If reading this post offends or disgusts you then, rest assured, you’re about ready to pop. If this post makes you depressed, angry, anxious or guilty, then brace yourself for impact. It may still be a ways off, but you’re racing to the wall. A wall of complete and total despair.
But be of good cheer! Buddhism will save you or maybe the No-Mind of Zen. Or maybe years of diligent meditation or adopting the precepts of Advaita, the Power of Positive Thinking or the Law of Attraction. There are plenty of drugs to aid in abstaining from your deepest dread.
But if you’re here, then make no mistake, you’ve been traveling to this point all your live long days. and there are very few who ever make it this far with any regular consistency to their despair, because egocentricity will play with you like a fish on a hook, reeling you in and letting you out, reeling you in and letting you out. The rule is that despair MUST be sporadic and inconsistent to avoid the potential that you might wish to exit the herd.
This is why your life themes are so dualistically repetitive and it seems no matter how much progress you ‘believe’ you’ve made in your spiritual practices and life goals, here you are once again playing out the same old patterns, conforming to the same rules, playing the same weary games, on an on, ad nauseam.
Egocentricity is essentially defined by keeping all your tenuous and fragile beliefs delicately interwoven to support the routine drudgery you define as “life.”
Yet, like a cloth weaved out of Silly String, one wrong move, or even the slightest contradictory thought carried to its obvious conclusion, could rip it all asunder leaving you in a mess of blue goo.
Such is the nature of your “stress.” Day in and day out egocentrics must senselessly struggle to make it all seem “sensible.” Common sense and wisdom are merely egocentric mental farts that seek to make meaningful the generic futility of blue goo.
Forget the wise masters and go for the goo!
One must do this, one should do that and never must/should one do this. For egocentricity to survive, and keep on popping out humanoid-like mimeographed copies, it must have a hierarchical belief system of prioritized fears and worries for which to pass on to its progeny as a means of positive reinforcement for itself. Maslow unintentionally proved this through his “Hierarchy of Needs” and the higher up the scale you go, the more entrenched “you” become in mundane mental constructs and whimsical psychological abstractions that reinforce the egocentric self as real and, more importantly, true. The concepts that you believe give life meaning, i.e., good and bad, right and wrong, beauty and ugly, honesty, truth, pride, fidelity, etc, etc, are so muddled and complex that they tend to loose all differentiating boundaries, only to merge into one cacophonous concerto of dissonant noise.
The only way to maintain this pathetic structured existence is to see it mirrored through other bodies that seem to have minds of their own and who also believe in the same vacuous values you claim to own and that you must defend through your choice of “lifestyle.” It’s all about the car you drive, the clothes you wear, the school you send your kids to and the square feet of your living space. It’s about the causes you support and the political parties you cheer for.
It’s all about blue goo…
This begs the question, if it’s all a dream, an hallucination, an illusion, an atomic mirage, an apparition, a shape shifting fog, a mass of undulating dualistic energy, then who gives a sheit? If everything is a “lie,” why worry about telling the truth? If everything is true, then you can’t tell a lie. Why care about “honesty” in your dreams, if dreams are false? If it’s all bullsheit who cares about values or morals? If it’s all illusion, why concern yourself with working for a “living” and paying your bills? Why even concern yourself with your next meal?
Why not let it all crumble to pieces around you? Let it all fucking die and take “you” with it? Because without the pieces that make up this delusional puzzle, all you have is an empty box and nobody wants to hold onto an empty box (even though that’s exactly what they do).
Egocentrics have “responsibilities,” because without pieces to fit together what the fook would you do with yourself? They have ego-centered structures to maintain. So rather than nothing, egocentric mammalia must not evolve beyond it’s confinement to normalcy, allowing the dream to incorporate every thought in your head, while you claim it real and true by simply not looking close enough.
But one day, when you SEE it for what it is, you will recognize a generic quality to EVERYTHING, so it all becomes nothing, lending a dazzling sense of utter futility to doing anything at all.
Once you dive into the Blue Goo of Generic Futility, you will likely swim in it for many years, completely and totally…alone.
But no worries, I’m here. Come in and join me for a spell.
The Blue Goo is always warm….
Artwork by Illathias – “Blue Goo” Posted by mike.
[End
BA, H-hp Dip, Dip. Spiritual Counselling
- How to achieve true peace of mind - Nov 09, 2022
- What is Self-realization? - Oct 27, 2022
- The Mystery of God in Human Form – Swami Krishnananda - Dec 24, 2021
This last blog brought to ‘mind’ instantly the title of Milan Kunder’s book, read yrs ago, when I was still reading fiction (and now that I live fiction daily, there is no need or desire to read more dramas or stories): “The Incredible Lightness of Being” and your text expresses that so beautifully. In French the title was if I recall ,’L’Insoutenable Légèreté d’Etre ” – which could be in English, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ – such is translation – Is it Incredible or Unbearable? Some of each, and mostly Surpirising. Or how bout delete the adjective and go with ‘The Lightness of Being”? It would surely sell fewer books.
That Lighteness is being felt lots; I cannot and do not ‘think’ about it too much (is there any volition to do or not to do that?) ; living the lighness is plentiful and joyful, and yes indeedy still deeply frustrating that the whole world doesn’t get it yet. Yes too, needing to be alone lots and lots; the need for interaction, for approval has lessened (that did come from Byron Katie’s books). It is mostly descriptive, like living the ‘next espisode’ of the sitcom that is lived in the present and then deleted. It all just happens. Thanks for beautifully explaining what I have the grace to live much of the time, and with great gratitude. Your text is clear, gutsy and encouraging. With gratitude, Phyllis