Today I tried to explain the unexplainable.

It’s actually my job.

People come over and throw problems and pains and discomforts and doubts and worries and fears at me, and then they ask:

‘What should I do?’

‘How should I behave?’

‘Why do I keep doing this?’

‘Why don’t I start doing that and stick to it?’

‘How can I change?’

‘How do I make the world change?’

And of course the one I hear almost everyday:

‘Do you have any tips and tricks?’

Let’s start with the last question.

When I ask them what kind of tips and tricks would be helpful and powerful and transformative enough to get rid of things they’ve been stuck with for years, they have no clue.

Still, most people really believe that ‘just doing something’ will wipe away the debilitating experience of being a specific someone they are so used to.

As if one activity (‘wake up early and make your bed!’) or habit (‘meditate every day for 23 minutes’) or bloody obvious insight (‘when people talk about you, they never really talk about you’) instantly lifts the heavy fog of the fundamental misunderstandings you have about life.

True clarity is the absence of knowledge, not the accumulation of it.

The confusion we live in derives from being totally attached to and caught in our amazing imagination, and the automatic and full attention we give the mental creations we are constantly presented with.

All this can be tremendously painful and complex (an it often IS), and the way to stop it is seeing it for what it really is.

The ONLY thing people need to really see to get over it, is that they are actually Consciousness caught up in a tiny, temporary and very realistic fabrication.

But most of them don’t.

Because, well, that’s not how it works.

That’s now how WE work.

We experience what we experience, and that seems to be way more important and realistic than understanding how and why it actually feels that way.

When we’re confused and fucked up, most of the time we’re too zoned out in discomfort and misunderstanding to appreciate the subtle peace that still exists somewhere in the back of our experience.

Telling people what is actually going on, just pisses most of them off.

So I talk about psychology and the intellect and opinions and the past and habits and angels and the future and relationships and labels and triggers and pain bodies and whatever comes to mind in the moment, just long enough to get them to settle down.

And the settling down is where it actually happens (although I like to believe that my amazing eloquence is very important too).

It takes just a couple of seconds of pure, untainted awareness to feel that deepest spark of unlimited aliveness again, to smell the faintest whiff of home, and when that connection is somehow recognized, people are on their way up.

Like miracles waiting to happen.

They will not be free from their habitual suffering straight away (not even close: most of the time there’s still a lifetime of habitual shit to see through), but at least they are in a much better position than they were for a loooong time.

This first glimpse is the turning point, the fertile ground for a profound awakening.

And it is way, WAY more important than the perceived helpfulness of any tip and trick.

The thing is: we can be caught up in endless mazes of mental complexity, underlined by powerful feelings, and most of the time we are.

We can get lost in things that don’t exist and never will and we can even understand that, and STILL do it and feel it and hate and fear it again and again and again.

We can totally understand the utter subjectivity of our experience, at least theoretically, but since it IS our experience and the only one we have, the idea of what’s really going on quickly loses its power in the daily grind of habits and ideas.

‘I know it’s just my thinking, but….’

And after the ‘but’ there’s just more thinking.

And even more thinking.

And thinking about thinking.

And thoughts we are not even aware of.

We are very much caught up in that huge, swirling pile of fantasy because that’s exactly what makes us human beings.

In order for this thing to work, it HAS to look and feel incredibly real.

In order for the intelligence behind everything and nothing to feel confined to a body with many limitations, it needs to fully forget what it actually is.

And there we arrive at the core of waking up, and the end of suffering.

It’s remembering what we really are.

Remembering.

And that’s what I am all about.

Consider this a most loving slap in your face.

 

—

 

(Photo by @wheremikeat, for Unsplash)