Aloneness

Why do so many people hate to be alone? Do they hate themselves? No. Well, at least not their true selves. When they are “alone” they are not really alone – they have a constant companion: their ego. It is a terrible companion, for it is what brings fear, desire, resentment, depression, and other negative feelings. That is what makes being “alone” so awful, and leads us to reach for externals such as television, food, alcohol, and Facebook: we are trying to distract ourselves from our nemesis. It is better to have no companion at all than an unpleasant one, so if we can cease the egoic thought pattern, we can then be truly alone, and we will enjoy it because we will finally have peace.

Awakening in a Nutshell

Awakening simply means to wake up from the self-created dream and regain the pure awareness we had so long ago, before our parents, teachers, schoolmates, and the media told us who we were. That untainted awareness is our natural state. We cannot force it to happen. All we can do – and indeed, what virtually everyone does – is create ideas that obscure it: the belief that we are a particular nationality, color, gender, religion, political position, social class, or job title, and that we must do or acquire certain things in order to uphold that image. Awareness is like breathing: we can’t force ourselves to breathe. We just breathe naturally. However, we can interfere with breathing by holding our breath. If we simply let go of our breath, breathing will happen with no effort on our part. Similarly, if we simply let go of our egoic ideas, awareness will happen without our trying to be aware.

Why We Give Up the Present Moment

Why do we focus on the future and the past instead of the present? It seems like we have a love affair with what was and what will (or might) be. We obsess about it. We regret the past, worry about or anticipate the future, and ignore the present. Why? What’s so bad about the present? It is only when we are totally immersed in the present that we can truly enjoy being. An engrossing hobby, a beautiful landscape, delicious food, a funny joke, a great song, and lying on soft sheets are all wonderful because we are completely involved in them, not thinking about anything. Why would we give this up? Why would we turn away from the bliss of the moment?

We – our true selves – do not turn away from the moment. The ego does. The ego is not a being but a thought process. A thought process can deal only with thoughts. The past and future are thoughts. The present moment isn’t a thought, it is an experience. There is no thought in experience. Only the true self can truly experience. The ego can only think about experiences. It thinks about how past experiences affected it, how future experiences will affect it, and how the present experience is affecting it. But it cannot immerse itself in experience because the act of experiencing anything is not a thought process. As long as we live via the thought process of ego, we will continue to think and thereby fail to fully experience.

The Importance of Things

When we allow something to bother us, it is because we give it more importance than it deserves. We ignore who we are and focus on a particular thing to the point where we make it our entire world. Without the light of our own being, external things seem to be very important. But if we are conscious of our true self, external things have much less effect on us. It can be likened to a candle. If there is no other light, it makes a big difference whether the candle is lit. But if there is light from another source, e.g., a light bulb or the Sun, then the candle ceases to be important.

We might observe the mountains-out-of-molehills behavior in others. For example, a child becomes upset when he loses a toy. We, from our more learned position, see how trivial this problem is. But the child cannot see that. Well, we still get caught up in mind-made drama of our own sometimes.

We are much bigger than any worldly object or event. No matter how big they might seem, we are bigger because we are the space that contains them.

The Need to Be Liked

The need to be liked stems from the ego. It is insecure and fearful, and needs others to like it in order to assuage its negative feelings. It worries that it isn’t attractive, smart, or likeable enough, so it acts or dresses in ways that it believes will garner others’ acceptance.

But even when others accept it, it remains insecure. Why? Because it knows that the ones who accept it are other egos, not true selves. Egos are by their very nature judgmental and negative. Their default mode is to reject others for being different. Acceptance must therefore be earned via actions, words, or appearance. That acceptance is never secure, because as soon as someone says or does something that egos deem unacceptable, they will reject him/her. Each of us is aware that we are interacting with other egos, not true selves, so we know that our “acceptance” can be taken away at any time. This cannot do anything but add to our insecurity.

The true self is the opposite of the ego. It always loves and accepts other true selves. Even when it is confronted with an ego, it looks past that ego and tries to find the true self behind it. If everyone were to drop their ego, then everyone would love and accept everyone all the time, so there would be no need for fear, insecurity, or putting on an act in an attempt to gain acceptance.

Object Consciousness versus Pure Awareness

The world of duality that most people focus on is one of object consciousness. Physical items, thoughts, accomplishments, and other people are seen as things to be observed, acquired, or avoided. This way of viewing the world is based on thought, and it is what causes desire and fear.

We are pure nondual awareness. We don’t have to think. We can put thoughts aside, thereby exiting object consciousness. Our beingness, awareness, true self, or whatever you want to call it, is simply aware; it does not need to think or to focus on objects.

This is a difficult concept to grasp when our entire lives have been an exercise in thinking. For example, in school, every class we took taught us to think. There was no class called Not Thinking 101. We are so used to expending effort in thinking that we don’t realize that not thinking is easier than thinking, or even that we’re doing it.

When we stop thinking and sit in pure awareness, we begin to discover who we really are.

We cannot “attain” pure awareness by trying not to think or by any sort of effort, for the following reasons:

• We are pure awareness. We cannot become what we already are!
• When we try to attain something, we are in object consciousness, so trying to attain awareness is an attempt to make awareness an object.
• We use our mind when we try to attain something, and since the mind is an object, all it can possibly understand is object consciousness. It can never fathom pure awareness, the true self, or the absence of thought.

Seeking

When we seek something, it is because we feel a sense of lack. We cannot or will not embrace what is happening now – we feel the need to obtain something in order to create a future that is better than what is going on right now.  So the very act of seeking is an attempt to escape from the Now.

Why do we feel a sense of lack?  Because we believe that we are an action figure that needs accessories such as money, adulation, beauty, etc to “complete” it. Even when we get something we sought, we know that it can be taken away or used up, so that we will “need” more of it in the future. This causes us to focus on the future instead of the Now, even though the Now is perfectly fine.

The true self needs only to recognize itself in order to feel whole. Its resources (awareness, love, peace) are infinite, always available, and not dependent on the world, so it can never run out of or fail to obtain them. It is only when we stuff ourselves into the idea of being a (false) self consisting of a body, beliefs, possessions, and social status that we believe that we need the limited things that are obtainable only in the world.