fuck this shit. I'm out ✌️

Here’s the thing: while the major spiritual systems do share many commonalities among their respective writings and observations, they don’t tend to totally agree about what finally constitutes the Truth, or the Supreme, or the Ultimate. But this disagreement is not an indication of their invalidity; rather, it is a reflection of their difference in perspective. That is, their experience is a by-product of their means of questioning, of looking and interpreting, of perspective.

Each system seems to lead to a different endpoint, a different Ultimate. Some see God; some experience Shiva; some find Buddha Nature; some say sat-chit-ananda; some say Consciousness; some say Emptiness; some say Presence; some say Empty-Presence, and so forth. And they are all correct.

They are all correct because Reality is infinitely creative, infinitely intelligent, infinitely responsive. They are absolutely legitimate—each in its own domain. It all depends how you look. They are like the blind men describing the elephant. It is the trunk; it is the leg, it is the tusk; it is the tail. Reality is all of that and none of it—because Reality is not a specific thing, not something to be pinned down or finally defined. Reality is not a thing at all.

So there is no right or wrong here. There is no final say. There is only the Experience and the Experiencer, only Consciousness and its infinite manifestations, and these are not-two. There is only Reality, and it is Everything and every thing and ultimately not a thing at all.

However, the esoteric side of the religions tends to be more mystical in its nature. That is, these “memes” concern themselves with passing along a body of precise knowledge from generation to generation regarding certain specific practices that, if understood and applied, result in a deconstruction of the ego-personality.

This “ego-I” is actually a cognitive construction (and constant reconstruction), that is, a psychosomatic self-story composed of memory traces and forms of sensory feedback that we—falsely—take to be “who we are.” Theses cognitive structures form in early childhood (and to a lesser degree throughout life) and become the unconscious matrix of our identity through which we view ourself and the world. This then becomes the problematic basis for most of our inner and outer conflicts, confusions, and existential anxieties.

But “what we are” is far richer and deeper than just this self-story. What we are is, in fact, of the same nature as everything and every thing. And these esoteric practices are all designed to reveal in an experiential, ontological way, this “true, underlying Self,” ultimately freeing us from being the mere psychological and socially ordained marionettes we tend to be. These practices expand our minds and open our hearts in truly profound ways.

What is it that separates homo sapiens from all other life on this planet? It was the evolution of complex language. This created the ability for conceptualized thinking. All other living species have only perceptual thinking. There is a theory, the cognitive trade off hypothesis. Humans developed these complex language abilities by trading off the area of the brain that governs short term memory. The area of the brain where other animals experience Now. All the intense training in martial arts is to expand the brain back into the area of Now that we lost millenniums ago. All the meditation is to peel away the Ego-I created by conceptual thinking and once again see the Now that all other life sees. There is no truth in Now. Only the experience of it. There is less suffering in Now. Right up to the moment that there isn’t.