The suffering of trying to gain self in anything of this world

I’ll go over a list of pleasures.
Sexuality:
Sexuality is a very limited pleasure.
The orgasm is very brief, but the regeneration is much longer in comparison.
If that is the only source of pleasure in life, it is woefully inadequate.

Technology:
Video time, Music time, Internet browsing etc.
All of it has great limits.
For instance: Hearing too much music removes all pleasure and makes you numb to it.

Supplements/Stimulants/Sugar:
Alcohol gives a pleasure for a while, but has a long hangover too.
A recharge period is needed too, to re-experience that pleasure.
Tea/Coffee if taken too often can drain you a lot, make you irritable/antsy.
Supplements also have their limits.
Eating too much sugar brings ‘Insulin Resistance’ and depressive moods.

Hot water bath:
Hot water bath feels good,
But stay too long and you risk burning your skin.

Talking to People/Relationships:
The pleasure of talking to others has a lot of limits too.
Usually there is a charge between 2 people (assuming they get along), and once that charge is neutralized they must do their own things to allow this charge to regenerate.
The same holds true for romantic relations too depending on the level of ‘potential difference/energetic charge’ that has to be diffused and neutralized from both people.
They may still continue to stay together for other reasons, but the pleasure comes only from the ‘charge’ which is also referred to as ‘chemistry’.

Intellectual pleasures/learning:
Pleasure from learning has a lot of limits too.
And a lot of breaks are needed for assimilation/digestion of what you learnt.

Food:
Pleasure from food has great limits too.
You can only get pleasure when you are hungry.
And once the hunger feeling is neutralized, the pleasure goes with it.
And you can get this pleasure only a few times a day basically.

Experiences/Movies/Novelty/Drugs:
A lot of experience seeking pleasure is about novelty.
So it is all a one shot thing mostly.
Once over, you cannot recapture the magic again.

Fulfilling images/Achievement:
The pleasure may be projected to a certain image/goal.
As you come closer to fulfilling that goal, you get more and more pleasure, until it peaks when you achieve it.
But then it gets empty after that, and the mirage updates its location to something else.
Achievements also hide a sacrifice in them. So they are not the ideal deals too.

Sleep-Wake/Birth-Death
Sleep recharges our pleasure as part of the wake-sleep cycle.
But the waking experience exhausts it, and then we have to go back to sleep for the next recharge.
This could be said about birth-death also.
We get most of our pleasures before the age of 25.
After that things sort of plateau.
We would have to wait to be reborn to experience the joys (and pains too) of childhood/learning/growth/teenage hormones and so on.

There are many more examples,
But it seems like the bottomline is,
The pleasure got from everything is:
# Too limited/short
# Followed by a long rest period for its regeneration.
Because all this pleasure is only a tiny part of the cycles.
None of them can deliver pleasure continuously.
Also it is not even 50-50.
Often the regeneration period is far greater.

This got me thinking about the philosophical aspects of Maya itself.
It is as if Maya is never going to satisfy.
Chasing anything totally, leads to its opposite paradoxically.
Pleasure leads to pain,
Achievement leads to burnout,
Gain leads to loss,
And so on.

All is empty,
All is paradoxical/contradictory.

What looks like pleasure today turns into pain tomorrow.
What was an asset in the past, becomes a liability later.
What was a profound source of meaning today, turns into an empty burden tomorrow.
Even the 120 year life-cycle of Dashas from Vedic Astrology,
Is fractal in nature, and it seems like each next phase contradicts the previous phase in some way.

Reality/Source has its own laws,
And it seems like the only option is to abide in and as them.

The cyclic processes of the body mind and the pleasures they bring look ultimately empty.
It’s like there is nothing in it for me.
Nothing will add anything to me.
Everything gets nulled (Shunya).
There is only the empty divine play appearing.
There is no holy grail, no philosopher’s stone, no ultimate prized thing.
All is nothing, All is the same Maya substance,
The same Maya just transforming itself into all these opposites and cycling between them.
It appears as everything, but is itself no thing.
It is that nothing, that 0, which is the union of all opposites.

This reminds me of the 3 truths in Buddhism:
# Annicha (impermanence)
# Dukkha (suffering)
# Anatma (insubstantiality)
The Dukkha is actually the result of trying to gain self,
In the impermanent and the insubstantial.

There is no real independent essence/substance,
To anything that is appearing/visible/known here.

It is the same Maya substance, but it appears as everything we experience.
It is the great illusion, and we have been bamboozled/tricked into its spell.
But that would be the very purpose of Maya, so it is doing a great job at concealing the actual reality.
Sort of like the game of hide and seek.

The descent into chaos

chaos

Essentially this experience of mine,
Is a descent into chaos,
Where my body loses its coherence,
And organizes itself around a swarm of chaotic desires,
That form the full backdrop of my experience (as shown in the picture),
While the foreground has me doing all the usual jobs to survive.

It feels like the state in-between lives,
Like a kind of bardo,
Like the night sky full of stars (unlimited possibilities),
Vs. the sunny sky (few overruling possibilities).

But this chaos is also the breeding ground,
For offshoots of creativity,
Because of the sheer awareness of swarms of possibilities.
I feel like I’m swimming in the very same ocean of chaos,
That the psychotic drowns in,
Because my eyes are open here in this ground.
I intuit that this seems like the precondition for psychological rebirth,
Where when the season is right,
A certain powerful creative influx will spring me out of this place/phase,
And organize my life into the next higher freq struct.

This lack of organization diminishes vitality though,
And puts me in a state closer to death.
Birth is really a state where an desire/inspiration seed is sprouting.
So in this case, one sort of returns closer to the seed,
Which is likely to sprout again from a new desire/inspiration,
When the outer conditions are favorable, like the Spring season.

Birth is like Spring, Death is like Winter, for the seed.
The cycle of seasons continue,
Resulting in cycles of birth and death continuously,
Until one transcends in their identity,
And when all desires are sublimated.

Birth and Death follow each other.
Every death heralds a birth following it.
This is the principle.
How long it takes is not as relevant,
That is only a matter of degree.

I am a translator

I am only the translator/decoding-instrument,
Of the winds of vibrations I receive.
My in-sight sees/enjoys and translates the experiences,
That pass through me.
That is why my blog is titled ‘perception flow’ (in the URL),
Which is the collection of these translations.

I am just the seer.
I can play with whatever flows/passes through my space,
In the flowing river of content/appearances,
Like a spherical mirror or diamond,
Flying through creation and reflecting it in its own unique way.

All of this is what I have captured,
In the net of my perceptual faculty or vessel.
It is all food from the gods/higher-dimensions,
With which I enrich my being and experience.

But my true nature is simply “NOT”.
It transcends all of this.
I am not the seen nor the implied seer.
The seer-seen appear together and go together,
Like the negative-film and photo go together.
I appear as various seer-seen combos,
In the river of flowing content-appearances.

In my experience,
I alternate between all sorts of extremes.
I [tornado, whirlpool, distill, centrifuge](as a verb) everything into its essence.
And what I see is that the final essence of everything is source itself.
That is why I titled my blog ‘Journey to the Abstract’.
Since I see the greatest unity is also the most abstract.
God/source in a way is the ultimate abstract.

I feel like my life does not have a central sun,
It feels more like,
I’m moving fast in a train,
Post-midnight watching fireflies,
Whose lights bob in and out of existence.
Occasionally I do pass by some stations,
Which are full of bright lights.

A lot of the my life though,
Has been experienced in the twilight/liminal zone.
My favorite time of the day is sunset.
The sun yields,
To let all the lesser lights and the universe pour through.

The ego and the sun have a lot of similarities imo.
When the sun shines,
The whole sky is overpowered by its light and power.
While in the evening as the sun sets,
There is then the “revelation” of the cosmos/universe/stars.
Reminds me of life and death.
Maybe when we die, we will receive a similar revelation.

The deep decision to choose life

This thought current was inspired by ‘Sadhguru (Jaggi Vasudev)’.
This writing is part of my effort to gain clarity.
I still have a lot of work to do myself.

Here are my musings:
A deep decision is made first:
Are you FOR life —OR— Against life?
This is also a bit confusing.
Because: It is like asking are you for white or black.
It seems like there isn’t a right answer?
And it is just about polarization.
That is why I think Sadhguru was saying:
‘Make a stronger choice, else you will be in the middle.
Being totally dead is fine, being fully alive is fine.
It is being half alive half dead that is the torture and strife.’
If I am for life: I have to give myself completely into enhancing my life and all other life around me.
If I am for death: I should commit suicide.
Anything other than these 2 choices, puts me in the middle.

This would be in line with the larger cycle of life-death existentially.
When life is on, you are on.
When death is on, you are not there anyway.
Death is sorta like deep sleep, it is not something you do, it happens existentially.
We can only facilitate it, just like we facilitate sleep at night by turning off the lights and lying down.
Similarly, even life can only be facilitated and harnessed.
So we are sorta facilitators/channelers of life energies,
And in a sense, we do not create anything fundamentally.
We are only co-creators/active-participants in creation.
This is the deep humiliation our ego/self has to accept.

There is only an appearance of choice,
Which is no choice really, because it is only a choice of suffering or not-suffering.
All resistance against the existential = suffering.
One has to be compliant to it.
This free will is only for supporting and enhancing life.
Else, all the free will does is create more and more suffering and unawareness.
The only real desire for everyone is a LARGER experience of life.
And it is the wavering in moving downstream with or upstream against this longing,
That is causing suffering.
The strife between the life drive and the death wish (Eros and Thanatos).
Facilitation of life —vs—- Facilitation of death.
Trying to die is like the same struggle of trying to sleep when the hormone has not yet released.
Trying to live is like overexerting yourself and getting debilitated as a result.
Any effort in any direction seems to be counterproductive unless it is done with total vision/clarity of the higher world of forces.

The ascent to Shiva and descent to Maya

The influx into the earth plane of density,
And the vacating of the earth plane of density,
Are like Shiva moving in and out of Prakriti/Maya/Matter.
This is birth and death.

Breathing/Heartbeat/Sex/Birth-Death,
Waking-Sleeping/Day-Night/Light-Darkness,
All of this goes in-out, in-out, in-out…
In a state of vibration.
Like a dazzling flashing strobe in consciousness.

At the microcosmic the vibrations are incredibly rapid,
While in the macrocosmic, the flux of day and night takes 24 hours say.
We find ourselves in the middle.
Macrocosmic(slower vibration) —“Us/We”— Microcosmic(faster vibration)
Maybe for the earth, each of our lifetimes is equal to a blink on an eye for it.
The life forms on earth would be like multicolored sparking,
And shimmering coming from a revolving diamond in the presence of light.

We are experiencing all of our lifetime in this unique perspective.
As a mote on earth, living what feels like around 85 years of lifetime.
What a wonder it is!,
When all of our life is seen from such an expanded perspective.

Insights on the solar system, mother, body, and world

sunDiag
The structure of the archetypal world:
Sun = Purusha = Prime independent principle
Maya = Prakriti = Nature = Dependent principle
The 9 planets are Maya, the Sun is the Purusha, in the solar logos.
Maya is inherently neutral (it’s like your movie DVD is neutral, but it is you who experiences it, so the experiencer, the ultimate subject of all structs is called ATMAN)
The Purusha is the witness consciousness that penetrates Maya through its different shaktis/forms at each plane from 1 to 8.
Which is exactly what the Shiva lingam represents, the penetration of purusha into prakriti that receives.
And the 9 planets are only what is seen and physical.
But the planes 1 to 8 are filled with structures that are invisible to us.
So every ray of light of the sun is one Jiva.
As shown by the yellow lines, the jiva line of consciousness passes through s1, s2, s3…representing all the maya structures that the ray of light from the sun is piercing through.
The closest to the sun is mercury, then venus, the earth…
So in terms of our consciousness(sun), the mental world is the mercury region(plane 1), venus i.e. plane 2 is the astral plane, and plane 3 is the earth plane.
So corresponding to each of these worlds/planes/spaces we have a body also which are the structures s1, s2, s3 structures = mental body, vital body, physical body.
That is how we land up with 3 main bodies when on earth.

I speculate if it could be the moon that is causing the phenomenon of birth and death on earth for a relatively eternal jiva rising from the ray of the sun (ray of consciousness/ray of source)?
moon

Now on the human mother in this earth plane:
Now let’s go step by step logically.
You are born on earth from a mother.
The physical body has grown from the mother, so it is really made of the mother only.
First mother -> then body -> then world.
So if you reject your mother, which existentially is the source/manufacturer of your body itself, then like a cascade, automatically you will reject your body, and then you will reject the world also.
Because the “physical world” is the projection of the ray of light of the sun through the physical body(s3).
[Just like the mental world is the projection of the ray of light of the sun passing through mental body(s1).]
When the mother is loved, then the body is loved, and then the world is loved.
A very important note: This has little to do with your mother’s ego and who she believes she is. This is about the existential maya structures. This is “what” she actually is in an EXISTENTIAL sense.

Once the mother is rejected, then your body instrument gets rejected too, the world gets rejected (projection of the body instrument)…all in a cascading order, and you fall into the underworld/desert. Where the rest of life in this body is spent trying to escape it by dissociated trances/states of consciousness/intoxicants/distractions.

So it would follow – if your mother does not like you, it would feel like the world does not like you. But in truth it is her ego that does not like you. Because the deeper truth, she does not like herself. Since you came from her, if she loved herself, she would definitely love you, existentially speaking.
It is the ego that has confused the perfection of everything.
The ego is the obfuscating force.
I have another theory for what the ego is. The ego is of the earth.
Because the sun rays can only hit its surface.
So the solid earth represents the “unconscious” = which is ego (as pertaining to earth and body life).
Which might mean every physical planet and all physical nature is basically unconsciousness, i.e. whatever sun light does not penetrate.

So there are 2 mothers possible:
# Self loving mother (ego aligned with her higher truth and serving it) —-vs—- Self hating mother (ego in delusion and not serving truth)
Fear and Hatred are all from misalignment.
Depending on whom your born too -> you’ll have a different body and a different world experience.
Like the 5 blind men and the elephant, you could get a body that either allows you to feel the tusk/trunk of the world or tail of the world.

You are going to be shaped by the raw material of your mother.
Her relationship to your body is going to condition your relationship to your own body and this will in turn condition your relationship to the world.
Because then we will attract the exact circumstances in the world that treat us the same way as our mother treated our body.
If a person X kept getting physically violent, because his mother’s relationship to his body was like that. So he sees the whole world as people coming to beat him up, which is the kind of perspective that is natural given such a mother.

Prakriti (mother) vs. Purusha (father)
The body is of the mother.
The soul is of the father.
I have another theory possible theory for men and women, that women are generated by the influence of moon, while men are generated from the influence of the sun.

If your mother was your devotee,
That is actually the relationship of the whole world to you.
Because you were born in that light ray point,
So that will be your world vision too, shaped by that experience.

Another very important point to note here is,
The mother is not the final agency or true cause.
Because she was shaped by her mother…and so on.
It is a cascade from mother -> mother -> mother…
All tying back symbolically to what religions call the “great mother”.

Life drive vs Death drive

Desire for activity vs Desire for quiescence
Desire for sound vs Desire for silence
Seeking social expansion vs. Retreating from social interaction
[Family children relatives friends business work expansion] vs [retreat recluse hermit isolation ascetic]
Becoming/learning vs Withdrawing/fading
Descent(into form) vs Ascent(back into formless)
Health(body wanting to live) vs disease(body wanting to die)
[High amplitude cycles of wake-dream-sleep] vs Near flat-lining of these cycles
Interest/passion/libido/hedonia vs Disinterest/dispassion/anhedonia
Exploration/Expansion vs Contraction/Self preservation

The devouring mother and the death drive

The mother wanting the son for herself,
As an extension of itself instead of a separate being.
This is the classic devouring mother.
She punishes/guilts the independence/autonomy of the son.
Leading to the son internalizing that “Autonomy is bad and ought to be punished”.
So then that sets up the death drive,
Where there is masochism/self-punishing,
To end the self and get back to the state of fusion.

The son may adopt the adage: “If you cant beat em you join em”.
Since his mother is actively or passively against him becoming a separate individual,
He starts actively trying to merge back into fusion with the mother to the prior egoless state,
Rather than having a separate self,
Which is constantly attacked and opposed by the mother.

In reality the son’s self-attack against having an autonomous individual self,
Is preemptively done, because the mother would oppose it anyway.
So here, the son starts to do that attack to himself in a controlled way,
Which is an internalization of the mother’s attitude towards his self/independence.
The over-attached/possessive/protective mother is clinging on to her son,
Expecting him to be a nobody and act as its slave.
This may be totally unsaid and well hidden,
But the mother’s behavior will show it.

So the son is guilted and threatened about this time and again,
That he ought to be the slave of his mother, but is acting independent.
His independence is actively attacked and discouraged and even threatened by the mother.
She threatens him that “he is not strong enough and will die if she withdraws her support, and that he better be her slave instead”.
That is why later the son is attracted to dominators/abusers/manipulators/narcissists etc.
All of whom who use him,
Which is basically the repressed anger of his mother against him,
Which he has internalized,
And projected onto the dominators/abusers/manipulators/narcissists.
The dominator/abuser/manipulator/narcissist is openly punishing,
Which represents the same unconscious relationship the mother has towards the son’s becoming a separate self.
The son via. the projection of the vengeant-sadist aspects to the dominators,
Gets to keep his mother image pure as being the caring positive mother.
The mother also may keep gaslighting the son and reinforcing that whatever he sees in her is all good only.

This anger of his mother is essentially against him becoming an independent self,
I.e. him betraying her, and leaving the state of fusion, and the state of being an unconditional helpless slave,
Is then internalized, repressed (made unconscious), and then projected as a punishing world that wants to destroy him.
Because it is much more scary for the son to see his only care-taking figure as the devil.
So he would rather make the whole world the devil and keep the mother pure.

This sets up the death drive, where the son is constantly trying to escape himself or destroy himself,
Constantly trying to escape the terror of being himself.
Because he is expecting the brutal attack of his mother for being autonomous.
So the only action of his self is to destruct itself, masochism essentially.
Be it through attracting abusive partners or by self-inflicted harm/abuse,
OR by consuming intoxicants constantly to drown out the awareness of the self as much as possible.
His mother only wanted a slave, an extension of herself, and did not want “him”, and would have killed him as a baby if he were to express himself in his true individuality.
So this is the primary trauma, of the fear of the wrath and punishment of the mother who would have killed him because she never wanted “him” per se.
So then the son/child escapes this by developing an ego that is on the mother’s side.
His own ego is against his self, just like his mother was against his self.
So the ego formed for the son is inherently self-destructive and antagonistic to itself,
And only attracts destructive forces to itself.
That was the very way it was formed,
Because of identification with a mother who never wanted him in reality.

Neglect compounds this, because neglect simply implies the mother is not interested in the independent self of the son at all.
Neglect then is an expression of unconscious hostility on the part of the mother.
It also clearly conveys the intention of the mother to not have her son individuate at all and remain in fusion with her.

The message of the devouring mother is “I will take care of you, but never leave me, if you leave me, you have betrayed me, and will face my wrath”.
So then the mother has instilled the need, fear, and guilt of:
“The outside world will kill you, you will not survive without me, you need me.”
“Also never become anything other than what I want you to be, else I will be very angry at you, and punish/abandon you for that.”
So then the son may internalize this mother’s message and project this out to his world view itself.
He will see the world itself as being a bad hostile evil place that is best abandoned.
He thinks: “It is better to not invest in the bad world at all (this also means the very act of having a self is seen as bad, because it is investing in the world that creates a self in the first place).”

So the son actively keeps attacking his own self, independence, autonomy, and sabotaging himself,
Where all his decisions serve the death drive (his own wish to end the self and return to fusion) and he therefor attracts only destructive forces to himself,
Including addictions to abusive people/narcissists/sadists/self-harming/painful information/bad news OR to intoxicants that will eventually kill him.
The intoxicants may also help him escape by numbing the awareness of sense of autonomous self itself – by fusing him into the intoxication-state as long as it lasts, which makes him repeat that again and again.

This may also lead him into the spiritual paths of self-abandonment and surrender.
Where he justifies all his self-destructive actions as the ending of his own ego and reaching god.
The son cannot pursue his own self interests, because that would mean betraying the mother and incurring her wrath and punishment.
The son also cannot become a pure slave to the mother, because that slavery feels unbearable.
So this constant suffering with no remedy makes him look for every single escape/relief/or source of pleasure he possibly can, to make living bearable – this may include an attraction and/or addiction to porn, intoxicants, and various forms of dissociation etc.
This is the inner turmoil, double bind, the archetypal struggle,
Of becoming an individual and separating from the mother.

If the father figure is absent or self-absorbed in dealing with his own suffering,
And if the mother figure is also wounded and dependent herself,
Then the only identification left is with the mother, because the father has not invested in you.
The only option then is to identify with the mother who does not want you,
And this is the classic death drive setup.
Because you would then treat yourself the same way your mother treated you,
Which is to invalidate/neglect/abuse/gaslight/deceive/sidetrack etc.

So then you are trapped in a place where you don’t belong,
For too long a time with no escape.
And there is no help from the father, he is unavailable for you,
And neither is the mother helping you in any way because she herself is dependent and in her own grief.
And add to that the mother also has the unconscious agenda to have you not separate from her,
Which is why she may never nurture your independence and keep treating you like a helpless baby,
Because in truth she wants you to remain helpless so that she has something to do (so that she can fulfill her own narcissistic needs for purpose, esteem, usefulness through serving you).
The mother will then go around telling others “Oh my son needs me, he cannot manage without me”.
That is a truth that she herself has engineered,
Where she wants to maintain you as such.

Change and Death

Generally we think of death as an event,
But really, when we look into our experience,
We see, all change = death.
Total change = Total death.
And the change is in the contents of consciousness.
Total death = Total newness/total rejuvenation.
So every death is also a rejuvenation.

Expansion and Contraction

Expansion and Contraction,
Is the constant pulse of life.
The heart is expanding-contracting,
The lungs are expanding-contracting,
The pulse at your nerves is expanding-contracting,
The digestive system peristalsis is constantly pumping,
i.e. expanding-contracting,

Even at the subtle layers,
Your mind also expands and contracts,
Your emotion also expands and contracts,
Wakefulness also expands and contracts,
Really life and death are the grandest expansions and contractions.

The better you are at releasing trapped stuff,
The more you can take in, in the next cycle.

Different masters have different kriyas or techniques for this purpose.
For instance:
# Osho’s Dynamic Meditation
# Sadhguru’s Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya
# Sri Sri Ravishankar’s Sudarshana Kriya
And so on.
Journaling/Writing is an excellent way too.

We all need to purge things from our lives that do not serve us anymore.
The idea is to keep the flow going.
Empty yourself fully, to receive fully again.
And this dance goes on,
Carrying you through evolution itself.