It’s Closer Than You Think
To tell you the truth, my story is irrelevant. This book is not about me and my realizations. It doesn’t matter how I describe what I see. I’m not going to tell you about my experiences or how to reach the state where I am. I’m just going to point for you, relentlessly, so that you can see it too. When seeing happens, words are no longer necessary. They can be here, or not. Once recognized, it cannot be unrecognized.
It’s not even hidden.
It’s closer than you think.
Literally.
So, let’s start and get right to the point!
The Word “I” Is a Tool for Communication—Nothing More
There is no such separate entity or self who is in charge behind the word “I.” “I” is a thought—a thought that is useful in a conventional way when communicating. It is not “I” who is communicating. It is not “I” who is reading these words.
It is not “I” who is writing this, either.
When I say “I,” it is meant as a tool of communication in the form of language. It is not referring to the individual me who is thinking and writing.
How to Use This Book
You can read this book in different ways: from beginning to end or just picking a chapter that resonates the most in the moment and working with the questions suggested there. Along the way I share some of the conversations I had with people who wrote to me. Or you can jump right to the end of the book and start with the seven steps, then read relevant chapters if you get stuck.
Set Time for Writing Down Thoughts on Paper Every Day
It’s a good idea to set aside time each day to do the exercises using a writing pad. There are two things that I would like to mention:
Writing helps the mind to focus.
Writing every day builds momentum.
When you work with the exercises and the questions presented in them, write all your thoughts down so you can see what thoughts and beliefs are there; it’s easier to deal with them when they are written down on paper. Question everything, and don’t just write questions, but answer them. Answer them for yourself, from your own thinking—not from what you read, what you think, or what you believe—but notice what is actually true in experience. Your experience. What do you really know? What do you really want? This book is your journey deeper into what is and out of what isn’t.
This is my journey too. I thank you deeply for joining me here.
Quit Following
I did not read a lot of books while I was seeking for answers to my never-ending questions about what is actually happening; however, I read a few—some great ones too. The books that had the biggest effect on me were the ones that told me to think for myself. I realized I took other people’s descriptions of how things are to be the truth; they seemed to know something I did not and tried to teach me this or that. I followed methods, advice, prescriptions; I tried a few things, only to see that following a method does not work. Nothing seemed to work. Until I quit following.
I discovered that all the beliefs I had were nice stories that seemed true. I also saw how the usual learning-teaching method worked; it is based on the “repeat after me” principle. I realized that I had not been using my own mind; instead I had made assumptions about what was true from what I was told, what I read, or what I saw on a screen. Using my own head to answer my own questions in the beginning was difficult and rather strange, but at the same time it was also fun. It was much more interesting than comparing who said what. I felt like I had found a muscle that I didn’t know was there and I had never used or exercised.
This is where you have to let go of all that you know to be true, all that you expect and hope for. I will guide you to look, step by step. You will see for yourself, and know rather than understand, that there is no separation from life, from all that is. You’ll realize that “I” is a thought, not an entity, that a separate self does not exist. All you need to do in order to see this is to look. Simply look at what you think that “I” is. This is what I’m going to point you to. Little by little, pieces of the puzzle will fall into place, and the view will be revealed.
Each chapter is a small piece. It’s up to you to connect the dots, do the math, and resolve the question of self once and for all.
Here is my invitation to you: stop reading about, listening to, and watching what someone else has to say about your burning questions. Find out what is true, and inquire until you know—till all is clear. Do this for yourself, by yourself, for the love of truth.
I invite you to put all beliefs aside and to take a fresh look. Don’t just read my words, retest them. Is something true in actual experience? How do you know? What else do you notice?
Questions arise to be dissolved; they dissolve when they no longer make sense. Getting all the answers is not what you want; what you want is to have no more questions. Mind wants answers; the mind needs to know and to explain; it likes theories, models, and philosophy.
So, when spiritual and religious teachers say how it is—what it is like for them, what states they experience, what works and what doesn’t—that’s all about their experience, not yours. You can only know what is true for you. Trying to compare only creates speculation and expectation. That is what distorts the view. And if you can see something clearly, you can describe it in your own words.
Trust that what you need is already here. The next step that you need to take will present itself. Follow your own path—you are already on it. Enough of listening to more descriptions; dive into experience and explore what is happening as it’s happening.
When your friend eats an apple and describes how sweet it tastes, how fragrant it is, how crunchy the flesh feels, how can you know what he is talking about if you haven’t tasted that apple? The description of experience is no help when it comes to the sense of experiencing. We can talk about tasting the apple, but it’s all conceptual: ideas about ideas and not the experience that is happening right now. Ideas are good for directing attention, like this: The next time you eat an apple, remember to experience the taste fully, as if you are tasting the apple for the first time. Dive into the experience, noticing all and forgetting all you know about the apple. Savor every bite of it. See the difference between talking about the taste of the apple and tasting it.
Your Best Guides Are Fear and Resistance—and Excitement
Fear and resistance come to show you the way through what is ready to be explored. Fear and resistance work together as a protective mechanism, a signal to not go somewhere unknown, unsafe, or dark. But, in experience, this signal is only a sensation triggered by thoughts. This sensation is not to be feared. Just as any other sensation, it comes and goes. It is felt as raw energy. When felt fully it dissipates. Explore it with curiosity, as if you have never seen it before. Ultimately, fear and resistance are sensations that prevent us from going into another sensation. Sensations are not to be feared; they are here to be experienced. And even if they are uncomfortable, they add a richness and juiciness to life.
Excitement is the other side of fear and resistance, and it’s another great guide. It’s inviting, adventurous, and joyful, whereas fear and resistance are made up of closure, insecurity, feeling out of control, and contraction. If something excites and interests you, wakes up your curiosity with a feeling of childlike innocence—follow up on your curiosity, play with it.
You already have all you need to go on this journey. Burn the maps and draw your own; put away all the expectations. For the time being, take a sabbatical from social media and computer games—just for a while. Focus on the focusing itself. Find the observer, and look for yourself—the one who you apparently are.
Your direction is here now. But wait, you are already here, right here, right now. Here it is. That is your path. Go deeper into the now.
Be Aware of Distraction
When you almost see through beliefs, distractions may become very tempting. Distraction is another protective mechanism that works to take your focus awa
y from even the possibility of changing your current perspective. The old existing view is being protected, as if it’s something that is owned and can be damaged. It’s as if an invisible shield of certainty is being threatened.
The current view is temporary. If it is not changing, there is stagnation. If the view is not changing, the train is not moving. There is no final view, so holding on to the current view is not a positive course of action. Distractions come hurrying in to keep the belief system as it is. Sometimes it may seem difficult to hold focus. Just be aware that this scenario may play itself out.
Distractions often come as sudden impulses to do something else. Something comes up with a sense of urgency—a pull to engage in some other activity that moves you away from investigation. It is okay, of course, to follow that impulse and get distracted. It is also okay to notice it and keep focusing. Don’t take the distractions seriously, just note when they show up and see what is behind them. What is being protected?
The I Virus
When I first saw that the “I,” the “me,” the alleged General Manager, the doer and thinker, the Command Center of the Universe is an idea that does not exist as I thought it did, I looked around and described what I saw. The best way I could paint a word picture was to use the image of a computer virus. I could see how this belief in separateness distorts the view of what is happening; I could see how much it affects human life. I could see how this belief in separateness is not necessary, how it is diminishing the whole experience of life to a contracted, ill, uneasy, and tiny space—a painful place, one that feels wrong. This thinking is like a prison without a door. I saw the simplicity of life and the struggle and difficulty it takes to see it, when all the while it is right in front of our noses, as close as it gets, the obviousness of what is.
I wrote down what I saw and named this disease of the human condition the “I Virus.”
Don’t take it too seriously. It is just a metaphor.
Imagine life as an organic computer system governed by software, in which each piece of hardware is run by a specific program. All cats behave like cats, as their programming dictates. All monkeys behave like monkeys, and all humans behave like humans—only the human software has been corrupted by the I Virus.
The I Virus corrupts the very core of the program, the main intelligence, the organizing structure. Human beings have lost direct access to the intelligence program, even though connectedness and oneness are the natural ways of being.
The I Virus overrides the program, and as a result the infected human thinks that it is the “I,” the person, the self who owns and runs his separate piece of life. He assumes the self is something real, something special and very important that must survive. Infected humans feel disconnected from life, and they can be destructive to themselves and the environment.
The I Virus installs itself early in childhood, bypassing the immune system so there is not even a shadow of a doubt in any human’s thinking (software) that there is an “I” at all. Because “I” makes itself at home in the mind, it is taken to be the organism’s default program. The virus is a bit like Windows, OS X, or Linux—an operating system.
“I” exists in the mind as a separating agent. Resistance to what is, is the signature behavior of the I Virus. From an infected point of view, there is “I” on one side and everything else on the other side. One, separate from all, disconnected from everything else, in opposition to all; one who needs to fight for survival. One who needs to always be right, in control, safe, accepted, and loved.
Imagine that you put your finger in the ocean; you take it out and there is a drop of water hanging off your fingertip. You give the drop a name and a story. That’s a separate entity now, a “me” that thinks, I’m a drop, I’m not the ocean, and I am the nicest, most important drop. Look at me, me, me, me. This is what the story of a separate entity, an “I,” looks like: a separated self who owns his or her story—past, present, and future. An “I” who lives life and makes things happen. An “I” who has problems and little time to solve them.
The Symptoms
If you see yourself as a separate being to whom life is happening, as one who is trying to keep everything under control, you are infected. If you think that something is wrong with you or the world around you, you have the I Virus. It can show up as fearful thoughts and worries about how you are too much of this and too little of that; it makes you think life is unfair and that all should be different. If you are trying to escape your present conditions and are looking for a happy tomorrow, you have the I Virus.
The I Virus is very clever; it attaches itself to your very core, to the operating system files of human software, and creates a lens through which humans see the world. It becomes the master organizer of experience, and it’s through this process that suffering begins as the never-ending illusion of “not enough” in varying degrees and stages. Suffering mixes a cocktail from the heavy emotions of sadness, hopelessness, despair, clinging, shame, anger, and guilt. You name it. And as you drink that cocktail, you end up feeling like I don’t want this, get me out of here! Not again… Why me?
Infected humans live in constant frustration, fighting unwanted intense emotions. Their main fears are of death, nothingness, nonexistence, lack of control, pain, and bad things happening in the future. From these, other fears are spawned, and, like a spider’s web, fear connects to all areas of the infected human’s life. Another great fear is, paradoxically, the fear of life, the fear of living and loving freely.
Self-centered humans always feel like something is wrong with them. They compare their assumed selves to other assumed selves and try to become better, improved, and more like someone else all the time. The feeling of wrongness comes from the deep knowing that there is no separation, but the I Virus never allows any kind of questioning of the existence of “I.” It’s just not in the programming. Such questioning can’t happen by accident.
Infected humans know that there is something wrong with the “me,” but they do not see what it is exactly. They think that happiness is connected to the quality of “I,” so they try to improve themselves, to become a better I, an I who is always right and wise beyond measure. They think that they have an ego; they feel that happiness is somewhere outside, that it has to come from someone or something else, that there is someone or something out there that can give it to them—and that they have a right to it, whatever it is.
What do humans infected with the I Virus want the most? Attention, energy from others, praise, compassion, understanding, love, and…peace, even though there is a great fear of peace. Peace, in fact, feels threatening.
The Antidote
The antidote to this madness is truth. Truth is seen by looking at experience, at what is actually happening right here, right now, in experience, underneath all thoughts.
After the Antidote
Humans who become free of the virus are plugged back into the main power supply—life. They no longer need to feed on the energy of other humans. Some people call this “enlightenment.” I’d say it’s more like en-Life-enment.
Once enlifened, humans slowly or suddenly come back to their natural state, free from neediness and dissatisfaction, and find themselves out of the drama, out of “not enough,” and look around with fresh eyes. Everything is the same but looks different. There is lightness and a feeling as if some heavy baggage was dropped. The story changes. Truth is realized. Truth is recognized. The symptoms of the I Virus start to loosen up and eventually, in time, disappear.
More About the Virus
Let’s imagine for a second (please don’t take this too seriously) that the I Virus is a small code that attaches itself, unnoticed, to the core human life program, just like a malicious computer program that gets into the operating system without your knowledge and damages the machine. Some computer viruses can replicate themselves and use a lot of memory, bringing the system to a halt. Some attach to your e-mails and spread to other machines, bypassing security. In a similar way,
the I Virus takes control of the Infinite Intelligence Program (life itself) and makes the host think that he or she is a separate self. This new “self” comes with the illusion of free choice.
In natural life, what is free choice? For example, there is the seed of a tree containing a genetic code that activates itself when the requirements and conditions for growth are met—soil, water, heat, light, air. The seed contains all of the tree’s information, which is deployed at the right time. Now what choice does the tree have? To be a tree or to not be a tree… ? A tree is always a tree, not a bee or a bird. In whatever form or shape the tree comes, it is dependent upon genetic code and environmental conditions.
How Do You Know You’re Infected?
Infected humans think that they are self-regulating managers who can manipulate life and have independent choice. These people think that it is up to them to decide what they are and what they want to be. They compare themselves to others and follow those they want to emulate. Whole fashions and followings are born. Suffering arises when a voice in the head says, I have a choice. But life shows us that it is not like that. No matter what humans want, all they can ever get is what life brings to this present moment.
Choices like whether or not to have a pizza or a green smoothie are just preferences determined by past experience in a given situation. Everything is dependent on everything else. Choices to study or to work are not up to the human; they are decided by the pattern, by the software code that runs the human. Skills and talents are not up to the human; no matter how much one likes to sing, if talent is not there, the song may be a funny noise or an annoying sound (as seen on TV talent shows). Only infected humans feel that independent choice is real. The free human completely surrenders to what is and is at peace with the flow of life. He or she no longer sees separation. Actions are taken without owning them. Everything that happens is okay.
Liberation Unleashed Page 2