My mind explodes again, and stays angry for a considerable amount of time
Anger, disappointment, and sadness are familiar, old friends who always seem to be close by, even in the midst of happiness pleasure and joy
One of the things they tell me is that I am not as renounced as I would like to think I am.
while I may not enjoy them, they do serve a purpose, helping me to stay aware and discern between the true and the false, the real and unreal.
I know intellectually not to be attached to anything (gross or subtle) but what actually happens is that the mind still clings to things (habits, roles, people, experiences, emotions, thoughts, pleasure, pain, planning in order to experience pleasure and avoid pain.)
How many more times? Perhaps an infinite number. And actually when I look really closely, I see that my mind is almost always exploding in some way. It is always burning to some degree, sometimes in pleasure sometimes in pain, constantly replenishing karma and reinforcing illusion and ego with new desires and fears.
I sometimes seem to be free of it, but it doesn’t last
all of my actions, even my attempts at giving and helping are tainted with selfish motives and delusion.
It seems there’s no way to avoid unpleasant things completely, especially my own ignorance. It is unrealistic to expect that pleasure and pain won’t happen and that one of them happens without the other.
after decades of practice, and study, and trying to achieve liberation or freedom from ego or whatever you want to call it, the sadness and anger still surface, and I still lose sanity and/or self discipline.
In this respect, I am a recovering addict that has a relapse over and over and over.
I experience periods of intense dislike. I attribute the dislike to various things including myself, body, mind, the to-do list, God, systems, my job, relationships, pain, my obligations, effort leading to more effort, the illusion of achievement, the luxury-comfort trap, the home that I take care of, and past decisions I have made, but in a sense, the dislike just is. It is a symptom of personal delusion, ignorance, and ego. When I am experiencing that state, I hesitate to make changes and decisions because I don’t feel sane. During that experience, I want to get rid of everything and every relationship, and I feel like destroying things.
At times, I feel like a failure just as much as anyone else in the world. I feel angry that there’s actually no permanent escape, no achievement which will finally satisfy me. There is not even a guarantee of a final and lasting death. I fail at intimacy and relationships of varying types. I fail at achieving happiness and liberation. I struggle to earn permission and forgiveness from an elusive, mysterious and unpredictable entity that ultimately I can’t control or manipulate (even though as far as I can tell, I will probably try until the day I die). I struggle to surrender to a neverending reality without the illusion of security. I struggle to see and live Truth, and realize that my personal perspective is always incomplete and merely one of an infinite number.
The words only get me so far…..
as does the action …..
as does the inaction……
as does the practice…..
as do wisdom, love, compassion, logic, intuition, keeping or breaking vows, scripture, reason, war, peace, study, virtue, vice, austerity, indulgence, knowledge, the five senses, information, work, play, relationships, solitude, abiding by, participating in, or abstaining from systems and organizations of religion, science, economics
etc etc etc
I thought I was so smart with my organized life and system, attempting to keep my person simple and small.
Even so, there are always duties that need to be done and seeds of action and inaction to be sown and fruits to be experienced.
And honestly, when I assess myself without bias, I wouldn’t call myself a success in the aspects of life which I have prioritized (practice, simplicity, duty, honor, commitment, compassion, self discipline, and order)
I see the illusion of characteristics of being better or worse, good or evil, support or burden and know that there’s really no where to go. There is no progress towards a perfect state of paradise, and that idea is so contrary to a certain fairly strong aspect of my personality and way of life that it freaks me out in often dramatic ways. It may cause me to go insane, lose control, and destroy my life one day.
I see the illusion of finding pleasure in indulgence. I see the illusion of finding satisfaction in abstinence.
I aim for compassion and unconditional love and confess that much or maybe most of what I do is work for conditional love (doing things to please people for acceptance, survival, and love) and to sustain a system (for acceptance, survival, and love). How much systems and I aim for unconditional love and succeed or fail is part of the mystery of life. Often, my so called helping isn’t really helping after all. It may give myself or someone a temporary good feeling or relief but my anger and frustration show the delusion associated with it. At this point, I seem to need to accept the anger and frustration as part of the mystery, experience them, receive their message, and act and not act accordingly.
Am I done being deluded by ends, body and mind, likes and dislikes? It seems that this is also part of the mystery and is not for me to decide. Regardless, life must still be lived, decisions must still be made, causes and effects must happen.
((my personal experience is merely one of an infinite number))
I notice that I spend a lot of time focused on future or past, it is all but impossible to just be content in the present moment without guilt. The habits that I regularly indulge called my personality do not permit it easily, and the systems in which I participate (religious, spiritual, scientific, secular and non secular) often don’t help, as long as I let myself get swept away by thoughts and emotions, pleasure and pain. Identifying with these things leaves me with a false sense of who I am.
I pray to see beyond the delusion of stories, my personal perspective and for freedom from attachment to experiences, whether they be pleasant or unpleasant. (Freedom from slavery to mind ego).
divine oneness, eternal now
I am that I am
…………………………….
Most of all, I feel like I have been and am being fooled and trapped, not only by other people and systems, but especially by my own mind. Tricked into thinking that the false is satisfying and real. Tricked into acquiring things, experiences, and duties, and trapped by the resulting bondage. Tricked into believing that any of it leads to lasting happiness. Trapped in the conflict between desire and fear which leaves me with inescapable bouts of anger. Realizing that there’s a very real possibility that I will die broke and alone, as I rage and scream to myself for people to leave me alone and stay the fuck away (afraid at the same time that people will pick up on this vibe and leave me homeless and starving). My interactions with many of them in mundane life are not pleasant from a certain extremely subtle inner perspective. Underneath the polite conversation and niceties, there is always fear, anger, insecurity, distrust, resentment and/or delusion waiting to be expressed or experienced, right alongside of their polar opposites. As I am aware of how I am not completely genuine and free of hatred, judgment, violence, and avoiding things I don’t like, I expect that they are too. They ask me to agree with the way they see themselves and the world and their version of happiness and ask me to do things so they can get what they want, and I do the same thing, even though I try to avoid it, hoping to be independent and free. I get tired of the game of pretense, and above all, I get angry at myself for not being true and not completely free of anger, violence, delusion, insanity, and hatred as well as attachment to comfort, personal desire and fear, and habit patterns of action, thoughts and feelings (all of the things associated with mind-ego). I get tired of hiding my depression and anger and the weariness of the way that I experience and perceive life, putting forth effort to achieve and maintain a paradise that either never comes, or doesn’t last, or just keeps requiring more effort. This realization contributes to recurring sadness and anger for me which is an inescapable part of the prison that I have created (or inherited). For a while now, and it looks like from now on, I maintain the awareness that sensory and emotional pleasure is fleeting and unreliable. I keep coming back to the delusion of stability and so called love. The conflict between my inner self and outer self never gets resolved. I seem to keep forgetting that it is an eternal cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth, expansion and contraction, always in motion. (Even things that appear to be still and unchanging are in motion and changing.) Every single thing, no matter what my experience of it may be, has its appropriate place, and no particular role that I take or circumstance lasts forever. I can crave stability all I want, but it is never found at the levels of the physical, emotional, or mental bodies, ego , or mind and the birth life death story. All manifests and unmanifests for “who am I”. In love I am everything, in wisdom I am nothing, and life flows on and on, regardless of existence and my inner and outer personal experience of attachment or non attachment to the gross or subtle bodies that I have called my own.
Most of the time, I’m not free of the game of pretense. I act like I am calm and cool to others when I am really feeling angry, sad or even terrified. Sometimes I act like I am interested in their stories and conversation, when really I am not. With others, I tend to be inclined to go for the middle, and quiet rather than over expressing and sharing high energy emotions. That’s what comes easier to me most of the time. I admit that what most people consider to be joy is a challenge for me. The joy that I do experience is so subtle that I wouldn’t even really call it that. I accept that I don’t really understand it and admit that I don’t maintain a continuous awareness of it. I feel like I am not good at sharing it, because I go along with the status quo, permitting more time caught up in the heavy states of being and doing, trying to avoid pain and experience pleasure, accumulating all sorts of things and obligations, placing more and more conditions on the experience called life, more layers of the false which make Truth harder to find. The joy I am talking about is so subtle that it is difficult to perceive, and contrary to what we would like to believe, it includes both pleasure and pain, growth and decay, stability and instability, increase and decrease . The ego-mind has no use for it as it has nothing to do with progress, solving (or creating) problems, achieving goals or even maintaining its existence. The ego-mind cannot have knowledge of it.
<<I admit that it is also a challenge for me to experience pleasure in the presence of others.>>
I am challenged by finding the right balance of keeping things and giving things away or just getting rid of them. I try to minimize the things I call my own. I try not to desire complicated or luxurious things for myself (even though I see how various decisions I have made will definitely cause me to fall short of this aspiration). I do not find joy or peace or love in them and to be honest, part of me dislikes them, sometimes rather strongly. My experience is that they come with a cost well beyond their price tag, contributing to a never ending list of tasks and obligations that grows beyond being manageable, and yet keeping things small is not perfect either. Everyone must experience, experiment, and come to their own working conclusion about ego and the proper place and amount of material wealth, ownership, fame, reputation, obligations, food, sex, group and one on one relationships, austerity, indulgence, desire, fear, sensory and emotional pleasure and pain.
while I accept that in my case the interplay of inner and outer involves bouts of acute and inescapable mental and emotional pain, it doesn’t make it easier to take when it is happening, and when it’s in full force, I feel inclined to violence and irritability and I just want to get rid of everything and all of my relationships and go off somewhere and die. The urge to renounce is strong, and attempting care for others and myself and keeping my word are what keep me from acting on it. What is wrong with me that I just want to live in a simple room with just a few things, free of tending to my and other people’s accumulations? I see that pretty much everyone around me doesn’t see things the same way, and because of this, I may end up very much alone. (Perhaps that desire is just as delusional as any other, or maybe that desire is not fulfilled in a way that I find pleasant.)
the eternally recurring challenges of person (and mind) as I experience and accept them:
maintaining the appropriate balance of manifest and unmanifest, which is a never ending endeavor that always changes
remembering that the actions that I think I do personally, I don’t really do.
there is no way to predict the cumulative result of all of the actions, intentions, and habits of daily life with 100% accuracy, nor is it possible to avoid being affected by actions of other people and beings. Therefore, faith and surrender are essential
(the person is false)
remembering that the way I think I am and the person that I think I am are not really accurate.
(the person is false)
I struggle to break free of giving first place to the false (the world, ego, illusion), and thus I am bound by it and experience the trap of results.
Ultimately, personal progress is an illusion of the mind, and the mind ego (as I know it) eventually experiences anger sadness disappointment. I walk the path and experience the endless cycle.
Even drug free, I am under the influence of a drug called illusion (ego) karma destiny
Forms and names (person, groups, systems, experiences, etc) appear and disappear. The Real causes the unreal to appear and disappear.
the Truth is that everything is one, boundaries, person, forms, names, labels and rules always change in past present and future.
I get tricked over and over into believing that body mind (and separation) and how I define myself is real. Certain aspects of life are unavoidable and circular.
Absolute and pure qualities cannot be completely achieved in the manifested realm which is by its very nature limited and relative/ impure but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep striving.
I never know what someone else is going through nor the totality of what someone else’s experience of something or someone or me is. And truthfully, I don’t even know the totality of my own experience.
I may never feel certain that I am completely operating from a place of goodwill towards others. The work is never done. The road is the goal, and there is no resolution.
the most important thing is to make it possible for others to walk their path
….……………,…………………………………..
How many of us are kind and polite as long as we get what we want?
……………………………………………………
past present and future are one
(separation is the illusion and so is “me”doing anything for anyone which entitles me to a special life)
I am thankful for access to the ability to endure my delusion and selfish rajas and tamas,,,
the body mind ego is made for movement and experience
What is the message that the recurring anger sadness pleasure pain cycle is telling me?
I keep getting the message that I need to get rid of more. It is not what Martin wants, but there is a part of me that wants it. A growing part of me is ready to live in one room and give it all away, at least give it a try.
who am I
I am that am
faith is all there really is.
Who am I to know the will of om?