Strip away all you identify with, such as political or religious affiliations, beliefs, philosophies, causes, friendships, education, notoriety, acclaim, social status, ownership of things, career or school, positions, accomplishments, etc., and you end up in a place where no thought can stick to anything. At least anything worth thinking about. Do you see?
What you see yourself as, in human perspective, tears you away from knowing what YOU are. Your mind invents drama and game playing that is so superficial and unimportant that it usurps the very freedom you think you are entitled to, but don’t have, because what you think takes form in the game your mind is playing. Set the game aside, even for just a short while. This is the power of quiet, silence, and meditation. No purpose whatsoever, and no trying to get something you think you need. Keep even your most sublime memories out of the quiet, and YOU emerge, unremembered, but never having gone away. Then, enjoy, YOU; that’s all that’s left.
Bozebits
Don’t worry about being your brother or sister’s keeper until you master keeping yourself. A pretty good rule of thumb is, “you’ll likely never master keeping yourself. “I want to help” is a statement of “I know what is best for you,” and while it looks like you may be helping, you are serving your own “wants,” whose ultimate aim is “getting” something you want. Do you see?
Be kind, gentle, and humble, and offer others only love, unnamed, and unparticularized. That is, what “keeps” you, and it will be enough for others, too.
Bozebits
Happiness, for most, looks more like an escape from the mundane routines and stresses of everyday life than an innate nature that bubbles up from within. Go here or there to destress, get this, own that, a great career, money, responsibility, great marriage, beautiful children, etc., are all the things we chase after, and when we “have” and the thrill of having is gone, happiness seems to have disappeared as well. Now, to escape to the next source of joy. “Getting” is the nemesis of happiness. Its very nature is based on the conceptual idea that something out there is a cause for a felicitous experience. Not only is joy not about “getting,” it is about releasing what you’ve already got, along with the striving to get next, and next and next. Getting is an endless, unfulfilling cycle.
YOU are happiness; YOU are joy all wrapped up in a neat little package that needs nothing to know it. So get “knowing” (YOU) by not “getting” anything to find IT!
Bozebits
What YOU are that precedes all thought is untouchable. That is, not touched by any concept, philosophy, religion, ideas, beliefs, fantasies, heritage, etc. What you think yourself to be is the progeny of your mind and the focal point of your identity, judgments, and points of view. Your image of reality, in other words, is not only touchable but likely deeply touched by the things listed above and many others, all of which contain the fuel of anger, contempt, and insanity. No search for awareness that takes you to or through more conceptual nonsense will ever lead you to the destination you seek. It takes shedding, not searching. Do you see?
Untouchable, YOU cares nothing for what you seek because nothing you find sticks to IT. Shed instead of search. YOU already are everything, but it’s likely buried beneath a whole lot of junk you picked up while searching. Just Sayin’.
Bozebits
Your mind is a thing that generates thoughts that seek out things in three-dimensional form, which culminate in your identity with those things. Do you see? Accumulation of “things” does little more than give your mind reasons to identify with those things and just more things to think about.
When you are told to surrender “things,” your mind goes into a struggle, that something must be given up, but that is not surrendering; it’s resistance, and another thing to get you thinking. Surrender and the ultimate freedom it ensures is taking away the power that your thoughts have invested in things. In other words, it frees you from thinking about “things” to think about.
Identity is a thing, and anything you think you are (identify as) distracts from the real. YOU cannot be thought or imagined, but YOU can be known, but that happens only when you have nothing left to “think” about. What to do? Start undoing things by not thinking about them!
Bozebits
Your thoughts run contrary to reality. While seemingly noble and with good intent, there is always an underlying motive your mind controls, and that is to blind you to the otherness it cannot comprehend and never will. It will adopt words, phrases, spiritual concepts, movements, and causes, wrap them in glitter and eloquence, only to seduce you and other minds doing the same thing.
The silence of nothingness is where reality takes form, and it has no voice that can speak words of beauty or ears to hear them. You will “know” when every concept you have mastered, every word, description, and identification your mind harbors is struck dumb, and in that silence, YOU are inseparable from the real. There is no “getting” IT. There is only being IT, and being IT, well, there are just no words!
Bozebits
The “path with heart” never forsakes another heart, regardless of the fury it encounters along the way. Love is written in the palm of every hand, but it sometimes takes another’s hand to notice. Is that “hand” yours?
Bozebits
Freedom is not what you think. The inalienable has no definition and is no possessor of the free. If you “think” you have a “right” to anything you believe qualifies as freedom, you are no longer free. You are a slave to your thoughts; we all are. However, you will always have “what is,” and that requires nothing from you but living it.
Bozebits
YOU, that is what YOU are, that is not human, are found in every encounter. The walk in nature, the tree you embrace, the flowers that fill your senses, sunny days, storms, moonlit nights, and the myriad brushes with everything imaginable or unimaginable. YOU are found in all of it, but your mind seeks the comfortable, the easy, and stimulating. Regardless, YOU are there, not as a witness to experience, but as the creator of it, and it just doesn’t matter what you encounter.
Remove anger, emotion, and judgment from your experience and let the purity of your creation, your love, be the focus of your gaze. Creators find peace in all they create and smile a lot, even when their mind is telling them not to.
Bozebits
Beauty recognizes only beauty and nothing else. It knows nothing of your mind’s judgments that pick and choose what it labels such. Just because you have determined something distasteful does not make it “not” beautiful. It is said, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but it should also be noted that “any judgment in the beholder makes the eyes blind.” There is something in all of us that transcends the mind’s limited purview that is only recognizable when the mind disengages from its unique assessment of reality. You are real when you are quiet, non-judgmental, and when you are real, beauty’s narrowly focused beacon becomes life’s all-encompassing light. YOU are that light; let it shine!