Today I will write of the ridiculous ideas that I secretly don’t think ridiculous. Ideas about which I am laughably inarticulate, but for which I feel compelled to flail about to find words. Next week, I promise, back to meditations on music.
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How about if I lose my ego entirely. Fall into the true self, the infinite consciousness that animates this Clementine, that which watches. How about if every time someone hurts me, I feel a wide expansive love. If there is no ego, then what is there to harm? What is there to risk when there is no fear or shame?
How about if we just recognize every human as light and love. Mother Teresa said: if you want to see the face of God, look at the person next to you.
I have the problem solved for refugees: erase all borders. I have the problem solved for terrorists: ask where it hurts, how we can help. Our reality is a fallacy. You hate me, and are met with hate. These thin emotions just perpetuate misery. We choose sides, we point fingers, we draw boundaries, we kill and are killed. We choose misery because it is familiar and the ego feels it inevitable. We mourn and fight, but really we walk every moment with solution in hand.
The tide rises and falls. The entire natural world plays out an eternal cycle of birth and death and cares nothing for our struggles. It is possible to let go of our whole way of thinking and live in this neutrality. When the ego dies, we live in infinite peace.
What if every person, bad or good, is only light. What if our judgments of good and evil are completely inconsequential in the enormity of time and space?
What if the point of life has nothing to do with good or bad, but is only to love completely. Maybe we are not here to learn and to keep coming back until we know it all. Maybe we are just here to play out every possibility, every single mathematical combination until we are sucked back into the infinite consciousness of love that existed before the Big Bang.
Maybe the point is not that we will have to answer for our actions or teach other people lessons or sacrifice ourselves for the greater good or keep coming back until we learn our lessons and are then allowed to live in infinite light. What if we are already light. What if our job is to just play out the possibilities. What if humanity is one gigantic mathematical equation that keeps spinning out like a big calculator. What if we stop the machine when we see that there is no machine.
What if we just stop and realize we are God. The endless creative output that forms our human reality is just a grand curiosity that occupies us, and yet it is all the dust of illusion. The only thing that stops the machine is to fall into the infinite pool of the heart where there is no joy and there is no bliss and there is no pain or suffering or any of it. Infinite consciousness is beyond bliss and beyond pain. In here, there is not even the dream of the machine.
Oh how everything falls away in that moment, how all reason and politics and misery falls away. You come to kill me and I am here in this infinite heart and see there is nothing that dies. The things we believe, that life is sacred, that we’re here for moral or ethical reasons: what if the truth is more infinite. Then when I open my eyes and walk among the people of the world I witness all the possibilities that the machine is spinning out, and I see a big game. The game is to remember that there is no game. The game is to remember that at the base of ourselves is open and endless peace. This is the deep peace of the soul. This is the deep peace of no soul. With no ego, with no Clementine, there is just a wide expanse of love. The dark energy holding us all together is just that animating love.
So when I leave my house and walk through the world, how can any person harm me. How can any person harm anyone. You want to have a peaceful world? Encounter each person with love: not emotional love, but a deep understanding and neutrality that does not react. I have never been able to understand how we walk through the streets and step over the people in misery. How we react to people lashing out in pain with more pain. If a person comes to ask me to help them, why wouldn’t I do that immediately. Person or animal, how can I not help?
I don’t help though. The ego is afraid. Afraid of being harmed. Afraid of losing. Afraid of being wrong. Afraid of the other. I get caught up in my mind and what I call logic. I get caught up in the fear and the shame and the anger and the hate. Futility falls like an ice storm through my ego. I see how I long to be, with no “I,” but the habit of living gets in the way. Someone says something against me and I react immediately. I protect the ego. I protect what’s mine. I protect what I know and what I have. I hide away and keep these grand feelings of egoless-ness safe. I dream of peace and am rapt with interest as humanity fights its daily battle.
I walk with solution in hand. Let me keep uncovering this truth. Let go of the things I identify with. Leave the ego with its thoughts and emotions and memories and stories. Greet the day knowing there is no day, just infinity. The only universe we can know is what we feel on our skin. We just want to go to the place that feels the best, physical sensations that feel the absolute best in our bodies. I have experienced the feeling of no ego, and know this feels the best. The body tingles as the self falls away and there is no sensation of pain or suffering because the true self can never be hurt. All the hurt comes at the ego, so when we walk in the stillness of no self then nothing that anyone can say can hurt us, nothing that anyone can do can hurt us, and the best sensation is to be awash in this peace.
We are told that a strong actualized self is the way to happiness, but that is not the case. The self can still hurt and be in pain. When I let this false self fall away, this empty beauty is really the definition of pure beauty. This is perfection. The soldier comes to the room to shoot the monk and the monk does not react. Nothing the soldier can do can hurt him. If you must shoot, then that is what you will do. This peace I am feeling is available to you too. Feel the misery fully and watch it pass through without reacting. Live eternally in what is left, the warm bath of the true self. Watch as it washes over humanity, one person at a time.
We can stop the big machine by merely closing our eyes. We stop the whole thing when we fall to this place of infinite stillness. There is no misery, no fighting, no us versus them and only an vast plain of quiet. They say that the energy it takes to hold the matter of a human being together is equal to 30 nitrogen bombs. This energy is all as innocent as the ocean that rises to meet the shore. This power is enough to change reality. Empathy and love are what we breathe.
I see a bird stretching out on air. What if there is no air and no bird. What if instead, I hear the peal of a ringing equation echoing into space, a bell of peace that stirs in every soul eternally.
I had somewhat troubled childhood (to the extent occasionally having suicidal emotions even before reaching teenage years). But somehow I always felt that there is something bigger behind all this pain, struggle and misery. And when my body had seen about 17 years, I discovered that kind of infinite tranquility you write. Then, of course, the experience faded away and I was back to the pain and angst. What followed was kind of a back-and-forth movement between experiences of eternal tranquility and daily pain. But those moments of infinite stillness confirmed that there indeed is something indestructible hidden under the illusion of pain and struggle. That kept me going.
I especially remember one chilly winter evening. It was January, around 3 pm, which at my latitude means that the sun was setting. I was walking home from school, watching the sunset colors glimmering behind the trees of a woods to the west. And I was humming to myself “There’s a feeling I get when I look / To the West. / And my spirit is crying for leaving.”
Today, at the age of 42, reading your words (“And the voices of those who stand looking”), everything kind of a feels fitting and at-its-place. Sure, this is how everything is. And I quite do like your using of machine metaphor, your words carry to the edge of what is beyond words, gesturing towards the infinite stillness which is always there. Just like clear sky reveals itself once the clouds fade away.
All in all, these big and small stories we tell about ourselves – stories about spiritual growth, rebirth, good and evil – they are stories and they can come handy when trying to make sense of human existence. But I’d guess that those stories are also like the raft used to cross a river. Once you’ve crossed the river you don’t need the raft anymore and you can leave it behind. There is no story to explain the infinite stillness. Stillness doesn’t make sense, but it is the sense of it all. The sense of existence.
Oh Well, it is 30 minutes to midnight here, I still got some computer work to be done today. Better go hammer the code, but once it is done I’ll go to my yard, light a small camp-fire and sit by the fire listening how the early winter clouds quietly ramble on the night sky, echoing the same message that there is in your words. Keep it up, Clementine, and thanks for being there =)
Hello Erkka,
Thank you so much for the thoughtful comment. I so appreciate your ideas and get so happy to meet like-minded people. I really love your idea of the raft, and I can just imagine the beauty of your home with your gorgeous descriptions in your blog. I’ve been enjoying investigating your writing and I see we have much in common. All best wishes to you, and I am looking forward to reading more.
All great wishes to you!
Thank you for your kind words! As a teenager I read every book on zen-buddhism I could find, and the raft metaphor is from one of those books.
Ah, I browsed back my own blog – seems like it is nearly three years since I discovered Zepparella =) http://www.enormouselk.com/?q=erkkasblog/heroes
Oh, that’s so cool! Thank you so much Erkka!
Last night, I started reading at the beginning of your blog and made it through several of the posts before I fell asleep. I love your story and I love the way you write. The photo of your cabin is so evocative, and it is a fantasy of mine to live so remotely so I just love to look at it. I’m excited to keep reading through and see what brings you to today! Clem
Clementine!! I don’t want to shock you, by not writing my usual thesis on your blogs!! So I’ll simply state this… Your writing is intensely deep, and incredibly cerebral!! Thank you for expanding my mind through yours!! Much love, my friend!! xoxo
Ha!! Thank you Geno!! Lots of love!