I notice how the ego-mind keeps telling me that there’s some experience or thing that I can have or find or someone or something that I can be or do in the world that will compensate for or let me escape pain, but I know that there is no escape in consciousness. Consciousness itself is like an itching rash. I sometimes abstain, sometimes indulge, with that knowledge. Even so, I still act out addiction and reside in delusion, addicted to identifying myself as a distinct and separate mind body, getting swept away by all sorts of emotions, gross and subtle experiences. It seems that the awareness of the temporary nature of everything and the knowledge of how attachment causes misery hasn’t made me immune to attachment and pain. It doesn’t seem possible to live completely non-attached. Regardless of attachment, pain, pleasure, changing or non changing of personality, habits, body, and mind, the “I am” remains unaffected.
The delusion is pervasive and deep. My mind believes that if I am clever enough or engage in the right habits of indulgence or abstinence, I can manipulate the universal laws to avoid work, pain, death, feebleness, the trap of life and ego, reward, punishment, collective consequence, burden, debt, extremes of rajas and tamas, the attachment to my body, mind, and personality. What is so twisted is that I hope that admitting this will help me to somehow avoid pain, loss, bondage, and death and even the universal laws; at the same time, I know that ultimately, it won’t. What an interesting psychological knot, another contradiction among a seemingly infinite number.
The ego does NOT have an accurate view of its own personality and attributes.
If all is one, no wonder non-attachment feels impossible.
The most difficult thing for the mind is to remember that all is one when all of the senses (and the mind) say the exact opposite.
It repeats for eternity, the desire for a particular state or experience, the steps and effort to get there, the effort to maintain, the realization that it isn’t the paradise you thought or were promised, the awareness of the disturbance of pleasurable and painful sensual experience, the bondage, the attachment, the dissolution, and then repeat, neither birth nor death are the beginning or the end. The path is the only goal and must always be walked. (The path is all there is; om is all there is)
Pleasure is pain, I return again to om, practice, and the endeavor to find myself beyond consciousness pleasure pain.
sometimes saying that it is in God’s hands is an excuse to be lazy, sometimes saying that everything is God’s will is also an excuse