You are not who nor what you think you are
You are not who nor what pretty much all of the world has told you, including the very personal voice in your head and the various emotions born of desire and fear that seem so real.
You are not what your various personal and impersonal experiences of pleasure and pain have told you.
You are not the healthy and unhealthy habits in which you indulge (neither the ones that you desire to stop nor the ones that you desire to continue; nor the ones that liberate you, nor the ones that bind you)
The truth of you cannot really be named or described only experienced, investigated, lived, and died.
While seemingly contradictory, light behaves simultaneously as both a stream of particles and waves, omnipresent and localized, separate and unified, digital and analog, directed and all-pervasive. This is as close to the truth of you as words can get.
Your habit of seeking results and attachment to things and people and circumstances often causes anger and misery for yourself and others.
Your mind can never know your TRUE intentions behind the actions that you perform, nor can your mind know the TRUE intentions behind the actions that someone else performs.
Your mind can never know your own nor anyone or anything else’s true impact or influence. (The mind can never know Truth.)
At some point, every goal must fall away, the words, the story, past and future, categories, preferences, and opinions of good and bad, self and other.
Your habit of striving to embody ideals and self discipline (yamas and niyamas) is a never-ending commitment and experience of successes and failures. This is perhaps the one thing that you should not give up, even though you will never achieve perfection in these things.
No matter how true you think your view of “how things really are” is, you must remember that it is merely one perspective among an infinite number.
An important thing to do is to break your mind of the habit of indulging in opinions.
Another important thing to do is to break your mind of the habit of acquisition and accumulation. Accumulating things, relationships, money, experience, all of it. This is contrary to the way of life that you have embraced, which seems to pervade so much of the planet right now.
The feeling of unworthiness that you try to erase by doing “things of value” will never go away, yet still you must participate.
The experience of anger, sadness, and disappointment when the fruits of action are manifest and then fade or aren’t what you expected is unavoidable.
There is no person or system or thing manifest that can truly give you permission to practice, eat, shelter, live, experience, be, create, destroy, and preserve.
Nothing in existence can completely absolve you of guilt, unworthiness, and shame.
Sometimes people (including yourself) will behave honorably, sometimes not. Sometimes their actions will appear to hurt your heart, and/or your gross or subtle bodies. Sometimes your actions may appear to hurt another’s heart and/or gross or subtle bodies. The only thing you can do is feel it, forgive, and proceed, even though it is perhaps one of the most challenging forms of non-attachment to attempt.
It is impossible to live in this realm and not be a hypocrite in some way, and it is advisable to keep trying and essential to keep forgiving.
You may never get beyond the “fake it till you make it” stage, but you must persist.
Seeing manifested circumstances clearly will often appear to cause anger and/or sadness to your mental/emotional state.
Your only real goal is Om. The only thing you can really do is make that one goal your priority and allow everything thing else to happen. Sometimes it means that you will experience pain and feel like things aren’t fair, and sometimes your heart will ache for Om. Sometimes you will experience the pain of “heavy existence”, and being around people who are deluded by “heavy existence” will be unpleasant. Sometimes you fall back into heavy existence also.
Do not cling to people nor push them away, no matter who you think they are.
Have you created a home or a prison? Sometimes you experience the manifest as a home, sometimes a prison. The experience of the manifest has and always will change.
The real secret of action is to perform what needs to be done, not attaching to liking or disliking the experience, present in the moment only, and not overly fixated on the result. The mode of action that prevails right now is effort leading to more effort, painfully, with ignorance. Action does not itself lead to freedom, but action is absolutely necessary. Be aware that to a certain extent, your participation in ignorant and painful action is unavoidable. You are not separate or special; we all create and share each other’s burden.
Feeling and living with the idea that you will always be a servant and will always be an aspirant has benefit.
Aspire to be a servant.
You wish love/ahimsa/practice/life was something that you could do and then complete. This desire subtly pervades much of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Until you let go of that impossible and false desire, you will forever be disappointed.
Part of you does desire death, for many reasons, but a major one is because every aspect of life gets annoying at one time or another. You also fear death at the same time. Death, like everything else, is not lasting.
Ultimately, even seemingly unchangeable urges like food, sleep, sex, and self preservation are habits. It is worthwhile to learn how to embrace the experience of managing and experimenting with them with a compassionate spirit of ahimsa, tapas, and brahmacharya.
These are just thoughts; they are not absolute nor permanent. Remembering them and acknowledging them serve you at the moment, and at a certain point you may no longer need them.