Author: Spiritual Heretic

Pain and Suffering IS the Human Experience

Believing “I create my own reality” was a fun adventure, but it ultimately ended in the realization that the “I” is not doing any of the creating. Furthermore, any Law of Attraction teaching that gets more complex than “the art of allowing” is just another aspect of Maya (illusion).

When you successfully create pieces of your reality, you think you’ve escaped the trap. You think the trap was your limitation. The truth is, the trap is thinking there’s something to escape from in the first place…

Here’s the catch. Teachers tell their students the personality isn’t creating; it’s the subconscious, the mind of God, the Void, that creates. Did anyone catch that? Read that again.

It’s important to be honest about what’s actually true versus what is just a belief. Beliefs are dangerous because we stake our lives on them when they aren’t even true.

No belief is true. You only believe something until something happens that proves you wrong. Then you adopt another belief. That’s not truth. Truth is unchanging and needs no explanation.

The key to enjoying life is to not get stuck in the experience. Any experience. Good or bad. The personality doesn’t create anything, but it’s certainly going to like and dislike what is.

We want to think the personality creates because that belief maintains the illusion of control, the illusion that life is about the personality. The illusion that life is for the personality.

Law of Attraction teachings train our personalities into the mindset that seeking comfort is the right thing to do, that it’s a better choice than not seeking comfort. These teachings train our personalities into the habit of pursuing desires that only get bigger, and if we aren’t good at manifesting, the desires get more desperate.

In desperation, that’s when we have the biggest opportunity to wake up. When we can’t manifest our desires, we’re more apt to question what’s really going on. And that’s the point. That’s why we can’t manifest. That’s why Maya is out there trying to sucker us into another weekend Law of Attraction training course for just 3 payments of $997. The point isn’t to get good at manifesting – the point is to realize we’re not manifesting anything. At that point, awakening is right around the corner…

The idea that the personality is in charge and can create anything it wants keeps us focused on wanting only desirable experiences. Bigger, better, faster, stronger. The misperception that the personality can create maintains the false belief that we can control everything, that we SHOULD control everything.

Investing in this false belief causes us to reject and resist the undesirable aspects of life, aka reality. Once reality is out of the picture, we start on a path to escape pain, old age, and death. Just like the so-called masters… or are they?

The desire to control everything and stay comfortable prevents awakening. To have only desirable experiences is contrary to life. Yet nobody ever eliminates the unwanted no matter how good they are at manifesting parking spaces and winning the lottery.

Everyone is subject to ups and downs, yet it’s the part of life we deny and reject and strive to escape. We’re insane. We’re absolutely insane. Pain and suffering isn’t just an integral part of the human experience – pain and suffering IS the human experience.

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Great Loss

“Great loss is not designed to beat you down and make you stronger so you can rise up and persevere. It’s designed to make you give up the struggle and denial; to acknowledge the reality of impermanence and limitation; to break your attachments where they are most intense; to get you to see, perhaps for the first time, what’s actually going on and why things are the way they are.”

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All Fears Are Not Rooted in the Fear of Death

All fears are not rooted in the fear of death.

Once you’ve been ready and willing to die and/or kill others, fear of death becomes irrelevant and is revealed to be something else: the fear of non-existence.

Ever meet someone who’s “died” and come back? And suddenly their fear of death is gone?

Listen to how confidently they discuss experiencing the continuity of life. The belief that they will exist after death is the source of their confidence.

They say they no longer fear death. But listen closely. Their stories reveal that their “near death” experience didn’t relieve them of the fear of death. They never had a fear of death. It relieved them of the fear of non-existence.

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I Throw My Relationships Off a Cliff Before They Begin

We’re sitting on a dirt shoulder on the face of a mountain watching a spectacular sunset; dancing hues of red and orange shine through passing clouds. A radiant ball of light reaches for the highest peak while I adjust my legs underneath my pillow and reach for my glass of wine.

I’m sitting across from her and we’re talking. I tell her my secret – that in my mind, I experience a dramatic, depressing, devastating, classically tragic romance that crashes and burns with everyone I meet. Its just chemistry, I say, there’s no reason for any of it, at least, not that I’ve found. So I figure crash and burn before it starts. Get it out of the way. Experience the end, mourn it now.

She looks at me sideways.

“You’re a little odd, but… weird looks good on you.”

“So you experience an entire relationship with everyone you meet and it always crashes and burns? Why not make it a happy outcome, you know?” She looks genuinely confused.

“If I made it end well,” I say, “the real script might not go that way. Everyone loves a happy ending. Making it crash and burns ensures I’m already complete with the unwanted ending. So it doesn’t matter how it really ends.” I smile.

“So you wouldn’t be upset if our relationship crashed and burned?” She looks even more confused.

“What relationship doesn’t end unexpectedly? Even when you know they’re doomed, you never know when they’re going to end. There’s always a glimmer of salvation that never pans out, and one day, bam, it’s over. The person you trusted with your life, the person you were so close to just disappears from your life forever.” I take a quick sip of wine.

“You really feel it when you get sick and there’s no one there to hug or to bring you soup. Or when you come home from work and there’s no one there to cook dinner for. No matter how bad it is, you never expect it to end. You could be two peas in a pod and have the best relationship in the world with open communication and total commitment, and something unexpected will make it end. So, experience the end before it begins and it won’t matter how it really ends.” I pause.

“Ah.” She says. “Does that mean you’ve already experienced us having a crash and burn relationship?”

“Yep. Absolutely,” I say, casually pouring another glass of wine.

“Really? how did it end?” A slight smile reveals her curiosity.

“Hmm…” I take another sip of wine. “It started off great. But then after it got comfortable I stopped doing dishes out of laziness and you got mad. I found out some random dude you met at the club kissed you on our anniversary, and I got mad. I became a major asshole after that and you lost interest. You said I wasn’t the same guy you met 10 years ago.”

I take another sip, surveying the valley of the mountainside below, watching her reaction out of the corner of my eye.

“You got tired of being the breadwinner and supporting my JNCO jeans habit, so we decided that was it. We were done. It was really tragic, you know, because we were so close in the beginning. Kind of like we are right now.”

She looks at me with a combination of curiosity and intrigue. “We were together for ten years? Did you ever remarry?”

“Marry?” I say. “Oh, we were never married. I’m not a marriage sort of guy.”

With her, I feel only heart-centered connectedness and I keep looking for some hidden want or need but I always come up empty handed. That’s why I don’t say anything. There’s no need. I’m content to just admire her genius from whatever distance she’s comfortable with allowing me into her space. I don’t even feel the need to give endlessly. I know that to be just another form of selfishness.

Still, somewhere, in the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder… what if? My rational mind always brings me back to reality. No, Dan. It’s a certain improbability.

The odds that are in my favor are the crash-and-burn odds. The odds that say I’ll be seen as interesting despite the obvious incompatibility, which will be suppressed long enough to create and explore that curiosity and then eventually that incompatibility will resurface, take precedence, and then I’m out the window like yesterday’s trash.

///

Why is tragic romance satisfying? Because it’s real. All that fluffy bullshit isn’t. Real people crash and burn; they don’t ride ponies with half-naked men into the forest of eternity where they’re fed grapes and fanned by more naked people. How being fed grapes by naked people became anyone’s fantasy, I’ll never know.

I was complete with the end of that relationship because I gave it my all. I didn’t hold back. I knew I was going into a crash and burn situation, but I went all-in. Not because I wanted a particular outcome. I wanted something real. And what’s real is experience in the now. Right here. Right now. It doesn’t matter if, when, or how things end. It’s all about the experience. You’re either all in, or you’re all out. There’s nothing in-between.

What makes us love someone with all of our being? What makes us risk being vulnerable? Is it only worth being vulnerable when you know the story will be your “happy ever after?”

Is it possible that love itself is made of tiny moments of vulnerability? That outcome has nothing to do with the purpose of loving another human being? So what if your relationship crashes and burns. That’s inevitable. That’s a given. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke up your ass.

What isn’t inevitable is having an authentic relationship with someone where you don’t hold back, where you don’t allow your trauma and fear to drive your decisions.

Who would you be if you loved people without reservation? You just might fall in love with the world.

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I Flushed My Pearls of Wisdom Down the Toilet

In my 20’s, my spiritual pursuits led me to the “Law of Attraction” and authors like Louise Hay, Napoleon Hill, and Neville Goddard. I listened to Abraham-Hicks audios nonstop in the car, in the shower, and while falling asleep. I practiced meditation, yoga, qigong, and considered myself to be a “spiritual person.” I wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing “enlightenment,” but concluded it must be the pinnacle of experiences.

I thought “enlightenment” was when a person has unfettered access to the cosmic symposium of information, knowledge, and superpowers. For instance, I automatically assumed an Avatar – an omnipresent being who can cause mystical experiences for others – was an enlightened being by default. I figured with enough practice and discipline, I would reach that state and then I’d know I was “enlightened.”

Several mind-blowing mystical experiences brought my awareness to things like oneness and cosmic consciousness, and those experiences launched me out of my depression. Although, as I went further along the spiritual path I was on, no mystical experience could satisfy what this existence craved. Each new experience – from telekinesis and manifestation to seeing through a blindfold – ended with, “nope, that’s not it, either.”

I woke up within the dream many times. And I went right back to sleep.

When I woke up from the dream – what some call “The Maya Matrix” – everything changed. Prior to direct experience, I pictured Awakening as the end of suffering – the dawning of eternal bliss with a few super powers sprinkled in-between.

What I got was something far more profound. The experience did come with a side of super powers, although in relation to being Awake, powers are irrelevant. Superpowers turned out to be the booby prize.

Here’s an analogy:

Imagine being given $500,000,000 in cash and then being immediately exiled to live the rest of your life in a country that doesn’t accept or convert USD. The paper in your pocket that was worth so much where you came from is now worthless.

What else can you do except burn it or flush it down the toilet?

After the Awakening experience, that’s exactly what I did with super powers, unity consciousness, and other spiritual achievements that are supposed to be the height of attainment. I threw them into the fire. Burn baby, burn.

To be clear, I didn’t burn the powers or my achievements; that’s impossible. I just burned the significance I had placed on them. And then I ate the ashes.

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