How can a world that only exists in your head, feel like a world that mostly exists on the outside?

Knowing that our brains create what we see (and do an amazing but still pretty sloppy job) doesn’t change the experience.

It’s still like we’re looking at the world out there.

It still seems a direct experience of reality, perfectly captured by our senses.

I mean: fuck!

Where does this kind of knowledge become helpful, or even transformative?

We KNOW that we have very personal opinions and preferences and judgments, and we also know that we’ve learned them from other people, so they’re quite random and don’t have any intrinsic value.

We know that a prediction about tomorrow is not the same as what will actually happen (because we’ve seen this kind of unreliability many, many times before).

We know it, we fucking know it, but we still suffer from it, like it’s a big secret we can’t seem to find.

Being human is about forgetting what is obvious.

It’s about constantly trying to acquire the stuff that will seemingly keep us safe and comfortable and admired.

Even when we know there’s no end to that.

We can read spiritual books and listen to wise teachers, we can even pretend we know everything and do the teaching, and we STILL get lost in bullshit all the time.

It’s one of the crooked miracles of life.

Amazing, astounding, but really shitty too.

Knowing stuff, but not really feeling it or trusting it, so it doesn’t really have any practical value.

We’re delicious, innocent fools, mesmerized by our thoughts.

We keep believing and fighting for stuff we somehow know is not really true.

We keep falling for habits we don’t appreciate.

And we fight other people while we know they’re just doing what we do:

Defending their subjective worldview.

How can we stay lost and confused when we know so much?

Well, because the available clarity is never found in any knowledge, not even the most intricate spiritual or philosophical systems.

The only way to freedom is to get away from what we know.

Being the stage for all our experiences, instead of being the play.

The gateway is attention.

Not attention for something, but attention itself.

Awareness.

Intimately knowing THAT which is prior to all experiences and never touched by it, and feel the connection.

How?

By following the signs, dummy.

Bliss.

Flow.

Happiness.

Beauty.

Love.

They are gifts!

All there to help break the spell of our mental addiction, our tendency to look for more thoughts, and our obscured views that seem so real.

We can become aware of the confusion, the interpretation, the perception, and then…

We can be AS that awareness, instead of simply living in the content of our lives.

From there, the world outside will still be created within, but it will have a different quality.

You finally, deeply realize what’s going on.

And life just keeps on evolving.

Exactly like it did, but totally different.

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(Photo by @marcojodoin, for Unsplash)