Tag: Existence

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Loneliness is the thirst for connection/relationship

Loneliness is a kind of thirst.
A thirst for what? A thirst for relationship/connection.
Thirst for ‘BEING’.
It is the thirst to BE.
BE what? Just to be anything, something…
OR a thirst to be more than what you are.
To ‘relate/connect’ is the same as the ‘Will to BE’.
Greater the ‘Will to BE’ = Greater is this thirst to relate/connect.
It is possible to BE anything only through relationship.
You are a some-body only in relation to other-bodies.
You are a personality only in relation to other personalities.
The self and other are emergent phenomena that are mutually interdependent on relationship.
The other does not have to be a person, it could even be ANY EXPERIENCE including abstract ideas, philosophies, inanimate objects etc.
Remove the relationship, and both the self and other vanish together.
The game gets disbanded, and identity is dissolved with it.
For example: In the movie ‘Cast Away’, Tom Hanks draws a face on a football and keeps talking to it to maintain his identity. If he did not do that, in the absence of all human contact, his humanness ITSELF would fade away (from the disappearance of ‘relationship’)

A ‘Relationship’ is the ‘AXIS’ that creates the respective players on both the sides.
Be it:
To love ——— To be loved [Axis]
To desire ——- To be desired [Axis]
To need ——— To be needed [Axis]
A relationship axis creates polarity, the 2 poles.
The poles are not fixed but can switch too.
A relationship is alive too, it is a dynamic, an alive dance.

We derive profound meaning from each other.
A profound dance transpires in every interaction.
The deeper we understand this, the more it brings out the depth.
Ultimately it is life interacting with itself.
That which is alive in me interacts with that which is alive in you.
I create myself through relationship with you, you create yourself through relationship with me.
Even what we call we call as negative relationship which includes seeing oneself as rejectible, contemptible, unlikeable, unlovable, unworthy, unfit, uninteresting, unimportant, unwanted, undeserving etc. is also a [REAL TANGIBLE INTERNALIZED NEGATIVE RELATIONSHIP IMAGE].
It is not non-relationship, because non-relationship would simply remove everything.

The loneliness is the helplessness of being unable to let go of this [internalized negative relationship image], and being unable to let go of identification with that.
That gets frozen inside us, and keeps getting reinforced in every interaction.
We ignore the interactions where that is not affirmed, and emphasize the interactions where it gets affirmed, and it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All identity works on this internalized bias, isn’t it? (whether positive or negative)
What would you be without that identity?
Isn’t that thought more terrifying than simply holding on to the known identity?
So it is like being caught between the devil and sea.
We hold on to the known devil, than let go into the unknown sea.
Unfortunately, this is trans-rational, there is no rational explanation that can truly convince you to let go into the sea.
The negative relationship identification eventually fades and wears itself out, plays itself out, and a new era is gently ushered.
We can help this process by accepting and fully experiencing everything.
We transcend this by FULLY EXPERIENCING the negative relationship imprint itself.
Feel your deepest loneliness fully with as much as you can muster, with the attitude of dropping into it, and giving in/allowing.
When fully experienced, when you feel it with your whole being and apply your whole mind and soul to it, even the loneliness will look sublime, and you will see it for what it truly is – a phenomenon.
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Illusion and Madness are relative

What is reality? What is sanity?
What is illusion? What is madness?
The cultural/social/political/consensus way of seeing/interpreting existence forms the core of [REALITY and SANITY].
The most solid/enduring/unchanging formation (relatively speaking).
To diverge from this [consensus state of consciousness] and explore other states of consciousness is referred to as exploring [ILLUSIONS].
Illusions are by definition more fleeting because they are not reinforced and commonly held by the collective.
When this feedback mechanism stops, reality becomes illusion.
The sensory world gives the most consistent and enduring feedback and it is shared by all other sensory creatures. So we feel comfortable to call that the REAL WORLD.
Like you have a dream at night.
It is considered to be the most illusory thing because it is not validated/shared by ANYBODY around you and neither is that validated by the sensory input that kicks in the minute you are awake.
So it seems to me that [ILLUSION/MADNESS] represents reality that is [NOT SHARED], while [REALITY/SANITY] represents reality that is [SHARED].
Like if you imagine a BELL CURVE, anything at the ends of the bell curve slides into ILLUSION/MADNESS, while the CENTER of the BELL CURVE represents the CORE of SANITY/REALITY.

Another way to look at this from the personal level is to look at your own personal conditioning.
When you are in a state of mind that is fully in alignment with your DEFAULT MODE OF EXPERIENCE (CONDITIONED BY YOUR CONDITIONING) – you say you are SOBER/SANE/REAL.
Whereas, when you are in a state of mind that is very different from your usual mode/structure of perceiving existence – you say you are in an ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS/IN ILLUSION OR FANTASY.
Like say, to feel HUMAN (the experience of being human in a body) is normal/ordinary/sane/real.
Now, how will you interpret an out of body experience, say you feel like a bird and you are flying? Is it real? Is it an illusion?

To me, this question of real or illusion is more related to SOLIDITY than its PURE REALITY.
It also ties to the question:
What is more real? the visible or the invisible?
OR What is more real? – SOLID? OR LIQUID? OR GAS?
OR What is more real? – PHYSICAL BODY? OR HEART? OR MIND/IMAGINATION?
Suppose I release a bunch of smoke and it looks forms a figure.
Would that be less real, than if I showed you the same figure made in stone? or sand?
Usually what I notice is that – the reality of something is associated with its ENDURING-NESS and SOLIDITY.
What is fleeting, relatively unformed/fuzzy/wispy, is referred to as illusion.

In summary, what others call reality and illusion, I see it as:
PERSISTENT ILLUSION(Reality) ———-vs———- FLEETING ILLUSIONS (Illusion)
This is if I consider everything to be an illusion of different degrees.
OR I can also put it as:
PERSISTENT REALITY ———-vs———– FLEETING REALITY
UNCHANGING REALITY ———-vs———– CHANGING REALITY
This is if I consider everything to be reality in different degrees of enduring-ness.
This kind of breaks the duality between illusion and reality.
Illusion is real and reality is illusion.
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Reality as a platform for the play of duality

Let’s revisit the various forces at play.
Reality is the platform that supports all of the below force spectrums.
Like imagine each of the spectrums below to be columns in a spectrum analyzer (like the one in your stereo system).
It is in this platform that the music of reality plays.

Supporting forces ————— Opposing forces
Loving forces ——————- Hating forces
Enhancing forces —————- Thwarting forces
Constructive forces ————- Destructive/Scattering forces
Inspiring forces —————– Depressing forces
Pleasurable forces ————— Painful forces
Life forces(with memories of death) ———————— Death forces (with memories of life)
Creative forces —————- Destructive forces
Other serving forces ———– Self-serving forces
Truth telling forces ———– Deception spreading forces
Eros forces ——————– Death drive forces
Forces the synthesize/stitch ———— Forces that analyze/separate
Forces of transcendence —————– Forces of the world
White suns —————————— Black holes
Memory creating forces ———- Memory forgetting forces
Light shining forces ———— Light absorbing forces
Healing forces——————- Disease creating forces
Anti-entropy forces ————- Entropy forces
Forces of becoming ————– Forces of unbecoming
Forces of doing —————– Forces of undoing
Forces the fill you ————- Forces the empty you
Harmonizing forces ————– Disharmony forces
Ordering forces —————– Disordering forces
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Chronic anger develops from Chronic violation

emergence

Say you are a child.
And your parents were over-controlling, over-protective, over-bearing, over-intrusive, dominating, smothering, suffocating, over-powering, and infringed on you in EVERY POSSIBLE WAY.
Say they imposed tyranny on you, threatened you in all sorts of ways (psychological, mental, physical), played all sorts of emotionally debilitating games, and constantly used guilting and shaming to get you to comply.
Let’s say, whenever you raised resistance they decried it, minimized it, laughed at it, brushed it away, denied it, gas-lighted it (mind-gaming, perception-blaming), performed circular arguments, somehow twisted the blame back to you, guilted you for even raising resistance, mind-gamed you into thinking it was unreasonable and actually your fault, and so on.
Imagine, this was taken a level even further and you were physically beaten into submission as brutally as possible, until you were filled with nothing but fear and terror.
Supposing they opposed your every attempt to individuate yourself or separate yourself from them, and thwarted every such effort on your part.
Say, they always wanted you to be their slave(but they would never admit this), and fit their image, and be exactly the way they want you to be (a clone of them or living up to their ideal/role/expectation), and always be under their control.
Now, let’s add to the suffering. Supposing you had a sibling whose only mission in life was to compete with you and actively and violently suppress all of your expression and minimize everything that you can possibly do.
Would this not be an EXTRAORDINARY hostile environment for you to grow up in?
Would not your life purpose become just about emerging from all these hostile forces and gain the most basic of freedom and liberty?

When a child is faced with this sort of debilitating, imprisoning, torturous, blind, abusive, crippling, stifling, controlling, maddening, and disabling environment, he shrinks in terror and seals oneself off from relationship (killing off the possibility of love).
In this heart of darkness (like a dark prison cell with a window), the child looks out at the world from the grilled window.
This dark cell the child creates is the protective cover of the heart against this level of assault and it permanently seals off many many possibilities of relationship with the world.
The dark cell always serves as a reminder and houses all the traumatic memory in its very walls.
Every time these situations were faced, tremendous rage and anger was aroused, as a protective system against the assault, but no amount of rage could do anything to stop it.
The child is absolutely powerless and helpless no matter HOW HARD he tries.
This sends him into a deep despair.
Should he fight to live? OR should he dissociate and just let himself die?
If the former option is chosen:
A super high degree of rage becomes the default mode of being because there is always a background of infinite threat against which one has to defend and fight.
An “extreme fear and defense/attack” disposition becomes the default against an infinitely threatening environment and others.
Life itself is then perceived as an ‘extremely hostile other’ that is out to destroy the child against which the child is woefully under-powered to fight.
This takes on archetypal/mythical levels of reality penetration, and thereafter the child will live his whole life in background FEAR AND TERROR – and live in a state of being ever-ready to violently fight at the most primitive levels.
The default mode of perception is of SUPERLATIVE THREAT and SUPERLATIVE DEFENSE.
The ATTACK is nothing but Pre-emptive defense.
Defense is the first goal and attack is from the hope of destroying the threat so that one can do away with the NEED AND PREOCCUPATION AND FEAR about defending.
This leads to compulsive power seeking which can take on multifarious forms such as – physical domination, emotional domination, intellectual domination, social power and status seeking, and so on.
If the latter option of death is chosen:
It could also take on the reverse side of seeking to submit/surrender/give up/self-abnegate/die because that also ends the conflict.
Both the choices of:
Extreme fight ——————- Extreme surrender
They both look like opposites, but the unity in them is that, both endeavor to END conflict, and “suffering” is always from conflict.
The child may alternate too between the 2 options:
Rage at one time —————– Feel depressed and empty at another
Ultimately, the more the child deeply sees and looks into the matter, a lot of dross falls away, and it leads to singular truth seeking.
What is the truth of existence? Why is it so hostile to me? Am I guilty of something? How am I to ever emerge from this hellish circumstance? How can I heal this? Should I fight to live or just resign and die?
This kind of metaphysical preoccupation plagues the child’s mind.
He can never invest in anything like ordinary people do, because his heart carries all the frightening memories of evil that keep voiding all investments apart from temporary reprieves.
This may also take on a morbid obsession and a PTSD like repeating of the torturous memory like a constant repeating playback in the mind, in an attempt to somehow assimilate the experience memories.
Or the child when grown up may keep having a tendency to gravitate towards those very same super hostile circumstances, in an attempt to go beyond them.
He may obsessively seek self-improvement, self-empowering, or self-transcendence.

In this situation, I see no way out apart from taking apart that dark prison cell of the heart brick by brick, and developing more and more courage to see/accept/transcend what’s behind each brick.
That is the singular life purpose for such a child.
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Silence, Void, Deep Sleep, Absence, God

silence

Silence contains the all
Silence is abundance
Silence is the ultimate satisfaction
Silence is the ultimate contentment.
There is nothing that silence lacks.
Silence needs nothing

Similarly, I could say,
The ‘Zero’ contains all
The ‘Void’ contains all
So Zero, Silence, Void -> are all complete, and contain all
There is nothing that they lack

Deep sleep contains all
Deep sleep is complete
It is the plenum we return to every night
After a long day of exploration, we long to return
To this cornucopia of deep sleep
The deeper one sleeps, the more rejuvenated one is the next day
Existence arises and returns to the void of non-being/non-existence.
It gets it’s replenishment/rejuvenation from this return.

God is ‘total absence’ in its infinite nature
God is ‘absolute nothing’ in its infinite nature
Anything present lacks this absence/infinity
Anything present is finite/limited
‘Absence’ is unlimited while ‘Presence’ is limited

We could abstract it further and say:
God is NOT! OR God is ‘Presence of Absence’
Just like “To know that you know nothing is the greatest knowing”,
Similarly, “To see the emptiness/absence in all existence, is to apprehend the infinite god and is the greatest seeing”
Emptiness yields the clearest vision
Emptiness/Absence is true freedom
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The final rites of letting go

letting-go-hazel-billingsley

I have relinquished almost all investments with others.
Now, I stand alone with only my parents around me.
As I let go more and more, I am falling into an energy space that has no overlap with my parents.
My parents are my final investment, and I am getting desperate in trying to connect with them in some way.
This is because if I don’t achieve some connection/structure/basis then I will fall into no-self, chaos, the dream, and emptiness.
This is scary to me, and that part of me is driving my efforts for desperate connection.
Even if it means finding fault with others(parents), and infusing urgency into the fact that they MUST solve their problems, and I will help them, and so on.
I can see through this though, and I have compassion for that part of me.

In fact I see that there is no overlap between my energy and ANYBODY else.
I see the part of me that is freaking out
That part which seeks out support/connection/bolstering for my identity.
That part is actually my identity/ego/social-self itself.
Without this bolstering one falls into the unknown, into the dream, and into emptiness, without a story, continuity, identity, or a structure.
That is how it appears.

The illusion of continuity and structure is maintained by others.
Without others, there is nothing to UPHOLD the self/ego.
Our self/ego is only a social-construct thriving on continual reinforcement.
The grief is in dropping this mega-project of the hope of securing validation of my value and worth from an other, and of contact with an other who would give me the respect of fully seeing me.
I have never received the “seeing/validation of worth and value” in any consistent way all through my life.
It has come in bits and pieces and has created so many fragmented selves.
Maybe that is what drove me towards the project of freedom, because the chaos and a lack of a stable pov was getting painful.

But now, I want to be emptied of all these dependent coagulations/structures/identities and give up everything that is not upheld inherently by existence itself.
The price to pay feels like everything, but I can also sense that nothing of true value is ever lost and all I am losing is my burdens.
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Night sea journey

nightsea

I often ask myself the question “what do you want?”
When I look inside myself for the answer I see a huge soup of impossible contradictions.
And because I want opposite things, it becomes impossible to move forward.
It is like a boat that is still in the middle of the ocean without a rider.
And say you ask the boat “where are you going?”.
And lets say it communicates the answer to you through its movements.
What would you see?
You would just see it randomly bobbing back and forth in random directions based on the wind forces around it and the undulations in the water surface.
My internal forces, drives and will-power have become like that.

Imagine you are in a boat traversing the night sea.
Say you had a map with you and now that is lost.
The waves, winds and other external pressures determine your steering and movement, but to you it all looks meaningless.
Everything is equally relevant, meaningful, and meaningless simultaneously.
My internal psyche feels like that.
This state of my psyche gets projected to the external world I inhabit too.
The world is only a prop for the movie that you project on it from your psyche.
This is a very strange, liminal, and limbo-like peculiar state of experience for which I have given a kind of poetic expression.
Basically it is the loss of the map.
It is being adrift and directionless.
Mirages of lands emerge at a distance, making me pursue that direction, but it is only temporary for it vanishes and it is replaced by another mirage somewhere else.

The map of reality tells you what is relevant, where to go, what to ignore, what to pursue, what to collect, and so on.
Without this map, now you do not know where to go(what direction), what is relevant or irrelevant, or what is to be pursued or let go.
You do not know what is a blessing and what is a curse, and the perception of things can flip flop too.
Your whole world views can change in a day which would reorder all your energies only for it to change again the next day and once again reorder all your energies.
So how can you make any investment if it can be voided anytime by a fundamental shift?
What can you do if your very ground and frame of reference is constantly shifting? (like undulating waters).

I don’t know if a stable map or a deeper map of reality will ever emerge again.
Will I learn a new way of living without having a map?
Will strong desires ever fill me up again? OR am I moving towards transcendent silence?
Such questions circle my mind.
But all the questions and answers in this territory are again only temporary appearances.
Every emotion arises and vanishes.
Every concern, Every doubt, Every focused area, Every meta-narrative is appearing and disappearing rapidly like a shimmer.
To say I am lost, is to imply that I believe I can be found.
But even that belief does not stay constant :).
I bob in and out of various creative potentials.
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Linear causation is only an appearance

television

Structures emerging like an organic process (Implying linear causation), are only streams or channels coming from the uncaused.
There is no linear-causation at all in the larger context.
It all exists at once.
Causation is an APPEARANCE stream coming from the uncaused.

So in the higher truth,
There is no static measurable discrete force in me that is working against chaos to build order nor is there is a me making steady progress in understanding the world.
Those linear appearances are snippets happening in the vaster context of non-linearity and multi-dimensionality.
Everything is only an appearance/a certain unfolding of possibility in a context channel and when the context channel shifts, 100% of reality can shift.

I think full structures/worlds/dreams are already present and all we do is tune into them which then creates our linear reality like selecting a TV channel.
It is like that the cymatics experiment -> the pattern just instantly emerges when the frequency resonance is right.
Or it is like a dream where the whole dream just instantly comes in.

Like take the television set example.
You turn it on and BAAM a channel is running, say with a TV show.
It instantly appears -> and appears to have a situation, some characters, and some movement.
Now say you change the channel, then that linearity and that scene and all the characters just vanish, and are replaced with an entirely new context.
So that is what I meant by saying that linearity is just an appearance.

Like have you had the experience of dreams fading in and out?
In my lucid dreams, after getting lucid in one dream -> I would pursue that dream thread and situation, however soon-after the dream would start to fade to black.
If I stay relaxed in that black space -> then a new dream would SPAWN from there. And the context would just materialize. Like suddenly I would find myself in a beach, or a strange apartment which would be completely different from the former dream -> and then even this would fade to black and again return to dreaming, but each of these returns would be dramatically different with no overlap.

This can be observed even in your normal dreams.
Like say you hear the alarm in the morning (you are jarred awake out of your dream) and you snooze it and go back to bed.
Now again you start dreaming and once again the alarm rings after a while -> again you are awake, but just compare the 2 dreams you had. Weren’t they radically different qualitatively? Were you even the same person in them?
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The relationship between fear and desire

Fear is a relationship between “Your desire” and the “World’s condition”.
Even your definition of ‘What is a fear/threat’ is relative to ‘Your desire’.
Right now, if your knowledge (whatever you have) gives you enough freedom to pursue your desire, you will have well-being.
Once your desire grows far beyond this world, you will want to transcend (maybe now or later this life or after 100s of lives).
To give an example, say a bird sitting at your window threatens to leave you.
It is not a threat at all, if the bird is not your desire at all.
Only things that are your desire can be threatened.
If you have insulated yourself from all threats and ensured your desires stay confined to only where you have 100% control, then you will have 0 fear.
There is no fear for LOSING something you never desired.
Fear comes only when we desire something that is out of our control.
For instance, desire of human relationships is much more precarious that desire of material objects, because they are not as controllable as the material counterpart. One then is more vulnerable to both fear, and the pain of loss which is the eventuality that the fear guards against.
All fear is a defense from loss.
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Your experience is the relativity of your soul development to the world’s condition

babywomb

Only when your desires grow large enough, does the world-game get painful.
Only after that stage is there a motivation for transcendence.
And this game getting painful happens from worlds beyond, like how the baby suddenly finds itself too large in the mother’s womb and wants an out.
Neither is the mother determining what happens within the womb nor is the baby controlling its growth speed.
They are only witnesses to the happening.
The baby simply finds itself in that situation. The baby’s nature of growth and the nature of the womb is already determined from levels above.
Everything is just following its nature.
When we grow enough, the world’s bounds start to rub against us.
The greater this perception of limitation, the more is the desire for transcendence.
So there is a spectrum:
Super happy people —————————- Extremely world weary people
The super happy people are like new borns within the womb of the world system.
When their soul reaches enough maturity, their desire becomes much greater and this world system and condition is very dissatisfying.
So whether or not you find the world pleasurable/wonderful depends on the relativity of you soul growth to the world’s condition.
Very new souls find this world wonderful.
Very advanced souls find this world terribly imprisoning.
Whether or not the container you are in is a prison or not, depends on your size(growth level) relative to the prison boundaries.
Just like the analogy of how the tiny 1 cm baby experiences itself in a vast womb, but then later it hits the walls of the womb and starts stretching the walls into the 7th, 8th and 9th months finally to make the passage way out – the final throes before transcendence.