The true revelation of the ‘mystical experience’
Is your utter estrangement from nature.
#Idea – ? / 01.03.19
#Idea – Happiness Is a Simple Thing / 15.02.19
All you need to do is
Forget to remind yourself
Of your unhappiness.
With thanks to Anthony de Mello for the idea.
#Idea – 10.01.19
#Idea – An Argument Against Believing Your Own Press / 03.02.18
One of the problems with having a self-concept
Is that it’s another thing to attend to
Another thing to protect from
All the complications of the world.
Photo by MJ Klaver 
#Poem – Persistence / Nihilism / 31.10.18
Try again,
And again
Until
You are dead.
And then
It will be
As if it had never mattered
At all.
#Idea – ‘Enlightenment’ is a trap, set by your ego / 20.03.18
If your ego is invested
In not being invested
Your ego is still invested.
In this way, ego turns ‘being more spiritual than others’ into yet another way to assert its devilish agenda.
In this way, the very idea of enlightenment could be considered a trap for the mind.
#ThoughtExperiment – Taṇhā / 18.10.17
If your last desire was to be free of your desires,
You would still desire,
And you would not be free of them.
#ThoughtExperiment – Self Sacrifice: Apocalypse Edition / 11.08.17
Consider a hypothetical scenario;
A catastrophe faces humanity – everything and everybody is doomed.
Some cruel twist of fate dictates that only you can avert the apocalypse.
To do this, you have to give your life in a heroic, but painful fashion.
The caveat; you will never be remembered for this act. Your sacrifice will go completely unnoticed.
No glory, just ‘the right thing’.
The choice comes down to dying now, in anonymity and perhaps doing the ‘right thing’. Or dying later, alongside everyone else, perhaps your loved ones.
You’d have no conscience to nag you because you’ll be wiped out with everyone else (…unless you happen to believe in some kind of meritocratic afterlife… perhaps)
There is an old saying that, paraphrased, ‘glory is eternal’; this is a lie.
Whatever good (or, dare I say, bad) that you do, will eventually be forgotten. The paper or hard drives that hold the information about you will eventually fail and never be replaced. The people who hold you in their memories will eventually pass away.
Knowing that, would you still be willing to ‘do the right thing’?
Can you find a better reason to do the ‘right thing’?
Is the ‘right thing’ even right for you?
“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi”
#Idea – Spirituality Vs. Religion / 12.07.17
When a spiritual system becomes more involved with behavioural control than matters of the ultimate, you could call it a religion.
#ThoughtExperiment – ‘Intellectual Consumerism’ OR how being ‘well read’ doesn’t necessarily count for anything
Disclaimer: you are more than enough
One for my fellow bookworms and knowledge junkies…
Considering the times you live in
You’ve been able to take in far more, and far ‘better’ information than the likes of Marcus Aurelius, Jesus, Buddha, Pythagoras, Einstein (etc.)
You’ve been able to read more ‘great’ books
(…and maybe more ‘not great’ books)
You’ve been able to access nearly unlimited culture and art through the wonders of the information superhighway
Learn about almost anything you want
Look up more information than you could ever consume for your entire life.
Yet,
On an intellectual or philosophical level
You have not necessarily made ‘better use’ of this information than these people.
(…though I probably don’t know you and even if I did, this would *not* be a judgement on how you have chosen to spend your entirely unique existence).
Anyway
What I am getting at here is this:
Perhaps reading more is not the solution,
Nor reading better
(…both of which can be seen as a type of intellectual consumerism also predicated on the idea of you not being enough).
Perhaps the solution is what you make of this information
These books you read
Conversations you have
Artworks you scrutinise.
After all, what you think about
Will determine what you do
And thus the trajectory of your life.
So,
Could you find alleviation for the human condition
Standing in a check out line?
Or utter profundity in an episode of Jersey Shaw?
Maybe – I’m sure some people have
Was it Bodhidharma who found enlightenment staring at a wall?
(…no sacred books, 7 day meditation retreats, dogma, gurus or online bootcamps required).
Ensuring that you expose yourself to the ‘right’ stuff is relatively easy
So, I suppose the question is how do you make ‘more’ of what you are exposed to?
That I don’t know.
This is the big mystery.
Of course, it doesn’t matter anyway, unless you want it to.