Can’t speak to anyone’s individual circumstances including OP but I would tell anyone struggling: do physical work outdoors in the morning until you are worn out, eat a good healthy meal, then go to bed early. Don’t write, abandon language and concepts. Get stupider. Go do work for others. Cut an old lady’s yard. Go to church and pray. Do this every day until you feel better.
What is a good man, but a bad man’s teacher?
What is a bad man, but a good man’s job?
If you dont understand this, you will get lost, however intelligent you are.
It is the great secret.
It’s a scary thing to let go of everything.
To really confront the fact that no experience, no person, no thing can ever truly satisfy the full spiritual depths of our being.
That there is no thought, no concept, no percept that can capture the true nature of existence.
That the only way to touch reality in its nakedness is to become naked ourselves - to let go of everything, of the world, of other people, of ourselves, of all our thoughts and theories and desires and dreams.
At first, when you try to do this, it is natural to feel vulnerable and weak. Without body or words or concept to hold onto, it can feel feel like falling into a fathomless void unprotected.
But when we allow ourselves fall, to truly let go, to give up into total faith in the reality that unfolds from total, complete surrender, what we find is that a force of utter, inconceivable power and beauty takes over. To be naked and vulnerable and unarmed reveals itself to be not weakness but the ultimate strength.
Our natural state, our default functioning absent our grasping and resistances possesses a wisdom far beyond anything our limited conceptual minds could comprehend. It needs no protection by thoughts, no clothing in experience, no motivation from desire. Our natural nakedness is luminous, clear, free and utterly perfect in its emptiness.
When we really let ourselves fall into that emptiness, we find that we are in much more intimate contact with everything we let go of than we ever were when we grasped onto it.
Experience reveals its fullness when we do not squeeze it into the shapes of our desires. People reveal their loveliness when we do not dream them into the shape of what we want them to be. Non-conceptual reality contains all the meaning and purpose that was too vast to fit into the strained little concepts we try to clothe it in.
It may all sound very grandiose but I don’t think we need to be enlightened or some great saint to touch the reality I’m talking about here. I think each time we truly let go, truly open our palms and our hearts and the fists of our unrelenting minds, even for the briefest moment, this reality flashes before us like a bright forgotten Eden, at once inconceivably awe-inspiring and as familiar as returning to our childhood home.
It is actually our home. All of this grasping and resistance and conceptualising is what is truly foreign to our natural state.
I would like to say we must simply be not afraid to let ourselves fall into loving hands of reality. But of course we must be afraid, for it is a terrifying thing to let go of every tangible source of safety. We must let ourselves feel this fear, it is our deepest duty, actually, to feel this fear. We must let ourselves fall into this terrifying emptiness, all the way through it, until we arrive at the inconceivable, loving wisdom of the luminous empty fullness that waits on the other side.
We are not walking home, we are falling home, and the only way to get there is to stop reaching for something to grip onto.
This morning between 3:20-4:00 @markskaggs10 and I captured noctilucent clouds above Seattle! These clouds are the highest clouds on planet earth. I have been after this composition with them, Mt Baker and the Space Needle for close to a decade now! We finally got it! #wawx
learning how to tell when advice is really just someone else’s regret in disguise. your divorced friend cautioning you about marriage, your broke uncle’s take on investments, your unhappy parent steering your career.
they are not advising you. they are processing themselves. once you learn to hear the wound behind the words you stop letting lost people give you directions.
The ideal social media model in retrospect. This social media shit is meant to be microdosed. You’d post a status or a comment and knew the turn around response time from your friends was 24-72 hours. We shouldn’t be snorting and injecting online interaction the way we do now
you might think everyone is unfathomably evil when you spend a lot of time online. then you go outside and meet normal, sweet, well-adjusted people, and realise the quiet truth we don’t like to say out loud: nobody who’s well-adjusted spends much time online.