I AM, WE ARE . . . Forthcoming Book

Disclaimer:

This particular writing of mine isn’t exactly blog. It’s a short book that can be read in a few hours. It was written with the intent of providing insight, perspective, and most importantly as a reference for people I have counseled. For a brief period I’m providing it here for free before publishing, while making updates to the website. Please feel free to print, read, underline, highlight, make notes in the margin or whatever else you’d like to do to it.  It is my sincere hope that it will provide you with answers and direction in your own life. So, grab yourself a cup of coffee or perhaps a good glass of wine, take your time with it, and enjoy.

I AM . . .

These two words, the mere fragment of a statement, and yet an all-encompassing declaration in and of itself, are the most provocative and powerful utterance in the English language, because whatever word follows is the surmising of a global view and appraisal that we each hold of ourselves and subsequently take into the world every day. Who we think we are is relative at best because at the level of our egoic mind, we see ourselves only through the lens of the “conditioned” self. We see ourselves as separate, detached, isolated, limited to this physical body we reside in. But that is only an illusion. We don’t exist in isolation. We exist in relation to everything else we come in contact with or experience.

It’s unfortunate, but only a short period of our life is lived from our authentic self; that part of us that existed before we were taught what to think, what to believe, and how to see things.

From birth till around the age of eight years old we have no self-awareness, no concept of “I” as something separate from everything else, much less the ability to define ourselves as “I am . . .  fill in the blank.”  There is no “ego.”  Life during this period is completely experiential, like a dream, where time doesn’t exist. There is no sense of fear, apprehension, expectation, or agenda. Children live immersed in the eternal present moment.

Looking into the eyes of a young child, you’ll see that very often there is no self, only an empty yet expansive presence behind the eyes. But by the age of 6 our indoctrination into society begins. We are placed in schools where we are taught vocabulary, colors, numbers, names of everything, not only how to think, but what to think. And ultimately, we are taught to compete. Compete for good grades, compete in sports, compete for jobs, compete for advancement, and compete against one another for not only survival but an imaginary social status that we think somehow defines us. From this level of thinking our ego begins to emerge.

Our ego is an illusion, a mask, a persona that evolves over the course of a lifetime by comparing ourselves to everyone we’ve ever met.  We grow into this mask we wear over our consciousness. This external image we project to the world creates a focus that distorts the perception of our authentic self. We are encouraged to wear these masks so long and so often that we forget the essence of who we are beneath it. As a result, living a life of casting shadows, we are provided with only a few brief glimpses of our “real self,” our “essence,” that lies beneath the veil of our ego; beyond that which we identify with as “self,” beyond name, beyond form, and beyond thinking.

Our ego is like shards of glass in a shattered mirror where each shard represents different roles, we play in different environments with different people to secure something for ourselves. It might be for friendship, for sex, for entertainment, for a job, or a whole host of other reasons. We tend to place people in our lives in the way that is most self-serving for us and meets our own self-interests. Even LOVE is largely an illusion. The modern word LOVE comes from the Sanskrit term lobha which means greedy and self-serving. We are never more greedy than when we find something we love. We obsess about it, want it all for ourselves, and want to make sure no one ever takes it from us. More about this in my series on HOW TO MINDFULLY APPROACH ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS.

Humbled by the knowledge that the end of our journey is approaching, whether through disease or old age it’s often too late to gain the perspective we only wish we had developed so much earlier in life. It’s so easy to lose ourselves in a society of endless propaganda, self-promotion, and marketing that is designed to make us feel insecure, so we fill the gaps with an insatiable sense of consumerism. Unfortunately, we spend most of our lives deluding ourselves with our ego chasing an image of ourselves we can never quite attain, nor can we seem to sustain it. That’s because the ego creates a false image of ourselves by fragmenting us into countless categories of comparison with everyone else. From the perspective of our ego, we never see ourselves as “whole” but instead, always see ourselves as lacking something that always makes us less than whole and inadequate.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO KNOW
WHO AND WHAT WE ARE?

How we see ourselves is ultimately how we see the world we navigate through day after day. Our external reality is and always will be filtered through the perception we have of ourselves. All we see is our beliefs. These beliefs color our interpretation of everything and therefore contributes to the world we collectively create together as we interact with one another and everything living thing on this beautiful planet of ours. We either see ourselves as separate from the whole of existence, or a beautiful expression of it and intimately woven into it.

Everything we do affects the whole of existence. There is no such thing as a benign act. This is very important to understand, because the more we connect with and understand ourselves, the more we understand our connection to others and the world we live in. The world as it is, is only a reflection of how we see ourselves as individuals and collectively as a community. This is how I arrived at the name SHIFT ETHOS, as the name of the website.

The delicate “web of life” that sustains all of us is such that there is an extraordinary “inter-connectedness” to everything. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so as a consequence of its flawless design, nothing in nature is “independent!” Instead, just like a spider’s web, every thread in the fabric of nature is “inter-dependent” with each and every living and non-living thing relying on the other for its continued existence.  When we poison the rivers and oceans it affects all of us. When we destroy a forest, it affects all of us. When we pollute the air, it affects all of us. When we don’t recycle and sustain the planet’s resources, but instead choose to consume them, it affects all of us. What we do collectively as individuals affects the whole.

Something to keep in mind when one considers the world that we’ve divided up into countries, states, politics, social strata, class distinction, race, religion, ethnicity, and so on that programmed into us and only exist in our minds. I have yet to ever see a property line, a state line, or a country border. These imaginary boundaries only exist on map and in our heads. All these boundaries and distinctions often leave us feeling disconnected and cut off from others and the rest of all that surrounds us at times. So, how do we try and feel connected? By purchasing the brand name products media moguls and marketing companies tell us will make us relevant and acceptable in the eyes of others in society.

WHY CAN’T WE FEEL THIS CONNECTION TO EVERYTHING?

It’s our identification with everything material that leads us to believe there is nothing beyond what we can perceive with our five senses, and even if there is, we don’t have time to think about all that nonsense. Consider for a moment that we live in a world where we are surrounded by wonders of science and technology that can detect all kinds of things that lie beyond what can be perceived by our senses and yet, we still cling to the belief that we are our bodies and there is no deeper reality than what we experience on the most superficial level with our five senses that can only perceive a narrow bandwidth that less than a fraction of 1% of all the vibratory energies in the known universe.

Religion tries to bridge the gap between the material and the immaterial, the ethereal realm and the here and now, but I believe for most, religion is insufficient at soothing our fears of the unknown and what lies beyond. It’s ritualized, rehearsed, redundant, mental conjecture, which requires very little to no self-discovery or a peering into the abyss, because the answers are all provided and remain largely accepted and unquestioned. It doesn’t advocate an inward journey but rather an external projection to connect with a divine entity, “out there” beyond the physical realm. And if one questions it, they’re ostracized for being so audacious in their thinking.

Before the age of technology and all the countless diversions from self that come with it, men had accessed a much deeper reality. The ancient wisdom of countless sages who penetrated the veil of this physical reality by going beyond “mind” and “thought” has been almost entirely forgotten and replaced by an epidemic of amnesia, an unknowing of who and what we truly are. We in the western world, as opposed to those in the eastern world, have chosen to accept an institutionalized orthodoxy and very spoon-fed way of seeing ourselves and the world, over a much deeper and profound knowledge discovered by Buddha, that lies beyond the wellspring of thoughts that are constantly bubbling up inside us. We have divided ourselves into our essence and our persona, by dissociating with our essence and replacing it with a surface personality, with an ego, and countless societal distractions and technology. Buddha said, in the Kalama Sutra, “in order to ascertain the truth, one must doubt all traditions, scriptures, teachings, and all the content of one’s mind and senses.”  

Truth and essence lies beyond our persona, beyond thinking, beyond the mind.  In stillness we find ourselves by discovering there is no “self.”

THE ILLUSION OF SELF

Most of us live immersed in our day-to-day activities, often running on autopilot in a very unnatural way merely striving to keep up. We awake to alarm clocks, kick start each day with a cup, or perhaps a pot of coffee, and stumble through the routine of living in a very structured, schedule-oriented life with very little thought of who we are, where we’re going, and why we are here. Most of us have never experienced our essence in a world that through mass marketing keeps us preoccupied and constantly focused on our bodies and the physical aspect of our existence. Living in this rat race we’ve become a society of people that are exhausted, fatigued, often aimless, and simply trying to get by with very little time to just decompress, slow down, and reflect on a much deeper facet of ourselves. As a result, most of us have only known the “illusion of self,” the “conditioned self,” the image in the mirror; believing we ARE these limited bodies we temporarily animate.

In seeking our deeper “self,” that we may only occasionally identify with as the “observer” of our thoughts, or the awareness behind our thoughts, we engage ourselves in all sorts of external ritualistic techniques and practices believing we’ll unveil deeper truths about ourselves and connect to the divine by devoting time to things like church, prayer, meditation, yoga, etc. This too is social conditioning. It’s a form of pathological thinking that has been massaged into our psyche since childhood that claims to have paved the way for us. In a very pre-ordained way, institutions like church intercede and keep us focused on an imaginary path to the divine that simply doesn’t exist. This is because there is nothing available to us in the external world that can point us to the path. Our journey is an inward journey, the destination of which lies in the stillness beneath all of our thoughts, beyond mind. It’s in the stillness that a doorway opens to the infinite.

So, finding our true self doesn’t involve “doing,” it involves “being.”  Connecting with our inner being is the only journey that matters and has any real relevance because that journey eventually arrives at an expansiveness of our being that we knew as a child and forgot as an adult. This is an awareness that is connected to everything and everyone. It’s good to discover this before we die, because beyond the demise of our physical body lies a journey we will ultimately take alone, so connecting with our essence and being comfortable with ourselves is probably a pretty good idea. The goal is to die to the “Illusion of Self” before we die.

Grounded here in the physical plane trapped in these soul cages that we temporarily reside in, how we “experience” LIFE, that is to say our “outer environment,” is only a projection of our “internal environment,” and based solely upon the relationship we’re having with our self within ourselves in any given moment. In other words, our inner world of thoughts and feelings is intimately connected to our outer world. It determines how we experience it and what we “see” in our surroundings as we interact with life itself. Everything we “see” is a product of what we’ve been conditioned to see and it’s all a projection of our thoughts that emerge from our core beliefs that we were imbued with and taught to believe.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

It's unfortunate, but we live in a society where people feel profoundly lonely, isolated, alienated, and alone.  But these feelings are simply the product of an under-developed perspective and an inability to see ourselves in a much broader context, connected to everything else. Whether we realize it or not, we're never separated or alone because as I have alluded to, we are connected to everything. Though it may seem paradoxical, we are literally woven into and out of the very fabric of this reality itself. Notice I said, “REALITY.” That was deliberate. That’s because, as shared earlier, the physical aspect of this reality comprises less than one percent of what we can perceive. That means the immaterial 99.999% of this reality is imperceptible to us, so it understandable that knowing this, most readers would be fixated on and identify with only what we can perceive.

The Law of Thermodynamics have shown that energy is neither created nor destroyed. Whatever field of energy gave rise to the known universe has always existed and that energy is the same field of energy that through eons of time has given rise to consciousness. That statement of course implies that you have always existed, that as a conscious entity you had to exist before incarnating, crossing from the non-physical into the physical. If that's true, then where did "YOU" come from?  I would argue that you and the universe are one and the same.

None of us thinks of our cells, tissues, or organs as living in the ecosystem of our body, as if they're separate from our body or separate from what we identify with as ourselves. We think of our body and all of its corresponding organs as a unit, as one animated entity. Why then do we see ourselves as separate from the universe.

It's easy to hold to the belief that we are living "IN" the universe, when in fact we emerged from the universe.  We are vessel made from and housing the universe. We "ARE" the universe! To give this more context, consider a raindrop. For a span of time, its separate from the ocean, it’s source. But it is the ocean, its source, and will someday return to the ocean, its source. 

As observers looking out from behind these eyes, we delude ourselves by clinging to the belief that we are separate from the universe, that we are here in these bodies, and life is out there, external to ourselves. In ‘here’ and out ‘there’ is a devious trick of the mind.  

The mind always makes us interested in things far away, over ‘there’ so we can be lead from here to there. Our attention is always wandering to another place, another person, another thing.  As a result, we are never ‘here’ and almost always elsewhere. We in western culture have to a large degree lost the ability to just ‘BE’ instead of always looking for the next thing to do and we've lost the ability to be present. Our minds in pursuit of our preferences are always focused on the next external future event to provide us with some stimulation, a feeling to desire to experience. And therein lies a lot of room for boredom, loneliness, and sadness. This constant external pursuit means we lost almost all self-awareness and no longer know ourselves. This disconnect from ourselves is disastrous in terms of our happiness. Consider for a moment that you have never "experienced" anything outside of yourself.  

Sadhguru, an eastern teacher says, "Whatever you look at, you see from within yourself. Whatever you hear, you hear from within yourself.  Where have you seen the whole world? Within yourself. Have you EVER experienced anything from outside of yourself? EVERYTHING that has ever happened to you:  Darkness and Light happen within you. Pain and pleasure happen within you. Joy and misery happen within you. Have you ever experienced anything from outside of yourself? No."

So the question is: What happens within you and who should determine how it happens?  Someone else?  We determine what happens within us. We alone determine how we  experience life. To believe otherwise is the ultimate form of slavery and means how we feel will always be determined by other's choices.

Though many reading this may feel lonely and all alone, we are never alone. This is merely a story our ego has created. It's a failure to see our connection to everything we are a part of. Seeing this connection brings an unceasing joy. It helps to see that we exist, we always have, and we always will.  

"Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal." - Eckart Tolle.

As an analog, the ocean can be used to provide perspective. We, like everything else, are a unique manifestation of the universe much like waves on the surface of the ocean are an extension of the ocean itself. Each individual wave on the ocean's surface represents a discrete and uniquely individual event that is separate from every other wave (seen as a separate event) on the surface on the ocean. Like us, a wave has a brief and distinctly separate life cycle from every other wave, but at the same time is connected to every other wave because every wave emerges from the same source, the ocean, just as each wave ‘is’ the ocean.

So it is with each individual's life in this physical plane. Though appearing on the surface to be separated from everything else that surrounds it, on a deeper level, woven out of the fabric of the sea of energy collectively referred to as the universe, we are all ONE, with each one of us intimately tied energetically into the universe, because we ARE a temporary expression of the universe, just as each wave on the ocean is a temporary expression of the ocean. We have all emerged from the same source, the same immaterial, imperceptible, and formless sea of energy into something taking on or congealing into a well-,defined "form."  But make no mistake, everything of form is only a temporary phenomenon, a temporary expression of the formless sea of energy that everything emanates from.

It may be a bit of a mental catapult, but if you can think of the universe as a vast sea of invisible, formless energy, where non-physical fields of energy coalesce and condense into physical matter, much the way water vapor, though imperceptible to the eye, condenses to form clouds, then everything with "form" in the physical universe, including our bodies, are merely an extension of the same formless ocean of energy that gave rise to the physical universe itself and everything contained within it.

Everything that exists is just variations on a theme; a different wave of consolidated energy in the form of a human, a tree, a planet, a star, a different physical expression of the original "source energy" or "source field;" but nonetheless all emerging from the same source, the same sea of energy as it emerged from something formless, nebulous, intangible, into something of form.

Thanks to the Kepler, the Hubble, and more recently, the James Webb Telescope that has allowed us to see our vast universe, the latest computer counts estimate the presence of over two trillion (that’s 2,000,000,000,000) galaxies in the known universe. Humans are just one of a whole myriad of different sentient beings and species that make up the part of the universe that has become conscious and is interacting with itself. Let that sink in for a moment.

John Lennon of the Beatles glimpsed this idea when in writing the lyrics for the song, I AM THE WALRUS, he wrote, "I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together..."   

He understood after a trip to India studying eastern mysticism, that we're all connected and we are all one.

Everything and everyone else is merely an extension of YOU just as you are an extension of them. Each being a separate wave emerging from an endless energetic sea so to speak. You experience "YOUR" REALITY" with you as the observer and you as the center of your own universe but, that entire universe lies both within you and without. It flows from you (your conscious awareness) and through you, just as it flows from and through everyone else. This is why we all see things differently. Though we are all ONE, we all see our overlapping realities through our own eyes. This is how the universe interacts with and experiences itself through the medium of consciousness.  

What we each see is colored by our past experiences, what we’ve been exposed to, survived, endured, been taught, accepted as truth, and so on.  As a result, we never see things as ‘THEY’ are, but only as ‘WE’ are. Therefore, reality is subjective at best because no one else sees the universe through your eyes. Quantum physicists, routinely admonish the fact that there is no objective perceptible reality.

Though we all come from the same source no two people are living in the same reality. Our realities merely overlap. This is why relationships can be such a difficult undertaking. How arduous of a task it is to get someone to see the world through our eyes, share in our experiences, and view life through the lens of our thoughts, perspectives, feelings, and opinions all of which were formed through experiences they’ve never had.

Ah, the human experience and the paradox of being human!

Because we identify so much with the physical realm as being “reality” and the unquestioned perspective that we are this body we reside in, I would like to propose it isn’t in the sense we think it is and that we aren’t this body we temporarily reside in and animate. Sound crazy?

The body we so affectionately and intimately identify with as being ‘us’ is a universe unto itself, housing countless life-forms.

In any human body there are around 30 trillion human cells, but that’s only a percentage of our body mass. Our microbiome, (microbial life living within us, that we cannot live without) is an estimated 39 trillion microbial cells including bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on and in us.

Due to their small size, these organisms make up only about 1-3 per cent of our body mass, but this belies the microbiome's tremendous power and potential.

We have around 20-25,000 genes in each of our cells, but the human microbiome potentially holds 500 times more.

The gut microbiome controls the storage of fat and assists in activating the genes in human cells involved with absorbing nutrients, breaking down toxins and creating blood vessels.

These helpful microorganisms replenish the linings of the gut and skin, replacing damaged and dying cells with new ones. Equally vital is their role in preventing illness.

Our native microbes compete with invading ones, preventing them from getting a foothold. We’re born with an immune defence system only partially formed. [1]

These microbes are just as important to our survival as our own human cells. We literally could not survive without them. If that’s true, then your entire body is not uniquely human. The human body is an animated ecosystem teeming with life just like any forest on Earth. How’s that for a mind-bending fact?

Our DNA contains segments of over 145 different species of bacteria, fungi, molds, viruses, and other animal species.  Ponder that for a moment… and then ask yourself, “What truly makes us human (and arrogant enough to think of ourselves as separate from nature), when we are in fact an entire ecosystem unto ourselves for microscopic life, and the culmination of building blocks borrowed from 145 different species that pre-dated us?”

If we contain the building blocks of 145 different species, then what makes us, ‘US?’ The fact that we have a body that we identify with as ‘ME?’  Maybe. Though the EGO will tend to cling to that belief, I believe what makes us, ‘us,’ isn’t our body at all.  I believe what we are is not the body we borrow while visiting this interactive classroom, learning as we’re participating in the physical plane, and something we identify with as having “form,” but rather something altogether “formless.”

I believe the deepest form of spirituality is to truly awaken and see beyond the veil of form, to realize our essence is something beyond form. Clearly, we are something without form; boundless, limitless, immortal, eternal; something that has always existed and always will, a consciousness that temporarily incarnates and takes on form so as to experience duality, interact, learn, and struggle, in order to further the growth, expansion, development, and evolution of a universal consciousness that we all sprung forth from and are always connected to.  How banal and mundane would our existence become if we had everything and had absolutely no needs?  With no struggles, no problems to solve, no pressure, no goals, no desires, and with every need met, what urgency would there be to ever learn anything from that point forward?  I truly believe this is why we take on physical form. This reality, or dimension of reality, is simply a classroom, and we are each at a different point along the wisdom chain.  Each one of us is on the leading edge of the expansion of the collective consciousness.  Therefore, EVERYTHING is our teacher.

As a result, we are all in this thing called LIFE together. And by ‘we’ I mean you, me, every person, every animal, every plant, every insect, mold, fungi, bacteria, protist, rock, plot of soil, planet, alien race, whatever.  Hearing that for the first time may sound silly, but it is a profound truth that every quantum physicist understands and a law that governs all life on this planet that we’re doing a “not-so-good-job” of sharing. Native Americans have always had a very deep, spiritual understanding of this without the benefit of applying science. It was a wisdom they acquired purely through observation as did Buddha and countless other observers of the ancient mystics arts.

So any time we say, “I am this!” or “I am that!” we are fragmenting and marginalizing ourselves, disconnecting from the “whole” that we’re all a part of and reducing ourselves down to the most minuscule aspect of what we ‘think’ we are as opposed to what we truly are.  We are NOT the avatars we temporarily occupy.

To see ourselves from this perspective, we see ourselves as if we are in a bubble, insulated from the whole of existence that surrounds us, isolated, detached, and separated from everyone and everything. We see the world as external to us, we see our choices as separate and our actions as separate as if we live in a vacuum.

But even the most seemingly benign choices we make as individuals affect not only the whole of humanity, but like ripples in a pond, affect every other species, ecosystem, biome, the entire ecological viability of Earth, and though few may understand this, even the collective consciousness of the planet itself.

Because of our cultural programming, the choices we make are almost always those that are an extension of the egoistic beliefs, biases, and prejudices we hold, which always see us as separate and in competition with all others, and for most, even life itself.  Life is perceived as something to be overcome, beat, won at, conquered, controlled, and subdued. As a result, our choices are almost always predicated on survival, self-preservation, self-interests, self-indulgence, constant distraction, and most of all, fear. These are very low-vibrational energies that disempower us and do very little to allow us to have a positive impact on others in our lives and the world around us, as we are primarily consumed with fulfilling our own needs.

There is perhaps no greater fear in western culture than the fear of not being ‘relevant.’ And how do we become relevant in a consumer/consumption-based society?  By making money and acquiring ‘things.’ By getting ahead and “Winning!”

We proudly wear corporate logos on everything we buy with the belief that it projects a certain level of attainment in our social structure. There’s nothing wrong with having nice things, but what could the things we purchase ever possibly say about us as individuals?

And yet we live in a culture predicated on the belief that how we dress, what we drive, where we live, and the size of our bank account, somehow defines us. We buy things, not for their utility, but for their symbology. In other words, we buy things with the belief it markets or projects an ideology we espouse or embrace. Fashion is no longer confined to just clothing. Now, everything has a sense of fashionability to it. Your toaster, your coffee maker, your bedsheets, furniture, shower curtain, dishwasher. It all somehow says something about you. Our society is now predicated on keeping consumers dissatisfied by always offering something a little bit better than what we already have, yet with planned obsolescence built into it so that things lose their luster very quickly, leaving us with always wanting more.

Built on this ideology, happiness is always just one more purchase away, a moving target that we are oh so close to achieving.  Consumerism and shopping has become our drug of choice in the modern era. The world keeps us focused on the superficial, the superfluous, and on our body. That’s because the world has no use for the non-physical, soul-level part of ourselves. The world’s wants us preoccupied and focused only on the body, what’s on the surface, because the world can use our bodies, but an awakened soul offers nothing to the competitive world of commerce and business.

So reduced to competition, our world gets shrunk down to self-interests and often a very self-aggrandizing mindset of habitually striving for more and more. It’s a very odd thing, this detachment we have with one another, other species, the planet, and sadly even ourselves. Few people truly “know” who and what they are. Casting shadows and creating a profession persona to compete in the world, we’ve become detach from our inner essence. We develop more of a relationship with our outer facade and keeping up a false image than we do with our real self.  We’ve been taught to externalize our self-worth, where media inculcates an unthinking populace with a barrage of programming that promotes fear and insecurity. If you’re reading this, clearly something is stirring within in you, searching for more than the surface level of existence.

The term “unthinking populace,” is not meant to be derogatory or denigrating to those who are barraged with marketing by choosing to watch television. Rather, it is a literal truth. Watching television is a passive endeavor where media propaganda and advertising messaging is literally dumped into our heads without scrutiny or the benefit of cognition. To say we are ‘absent minded’ while watching television would be an understatement.

As early as the late 60’s, psychologists, behavioral research scientists, and even neurologists, became concerned with the effects viewing television can have on brain development. That’s because studies revealed that within 60 seconds of viewing a television screen, the human brain slips into alpha rhythms (the early stages of sleep or hypnosis).  This is because televisions operate on an alternating current operating at 720 Hz, which means your television is turning on and off 720 times per second.  In other words, it creates a strobe affect that, although imperceptible on a conscious level, is perceived at the subconscious level. Television quite literally hypnotizes the viewer by shutting down the frontal cortex of the brain where thinking and discernment takes place.  

As a result, business, news, and media corporations, capitalize upon this fact, bypassing our conscious reasoning, literally programming (some might even call it brainwashing) the unsuspecting populace by painting for the viewer a prescribed view of the world that surrounds them.

It’s not hyperbole to say television advertising can be very insidious in nature and anything but benign in that, the business of marketing to a dismally conscious viewer extends beyond simply selling solutions to our needs. Advertising, through repetition and redundancy, is in the business of artificially creating our needs or what we think we need to have in order to have a more fulfilling life.

One need look no further than the launch of each new iPhone and the hordes of people that turn out to purchase it as soon as it becomes available, as evidence of our Pavlovian conditioning and the need to have the ‘latest-greatest.’ It is literally a Pavlovian conditioned response, an automatic behavior displayed as a result to being exposed to repetitious stimuli.

Television’s sole purpose is to create consumers and prop up the economy and Wall Street; and sadly, it works. Retail therapy (otherwise known as “shopping”) and endless entertainment have become the opiates of our time in a culture that wants to die amused to death.

It’s unfortunate, but this view of surviving life and all its challenges by getting ahead, or better yet, ‘winning’ at life, leaves a lot of room for us to be robbed of joy.  As a result of this conditioning, through messages relentlessly massaged into our psyche, we create a negative view of ourselves by focusing on the superficial as opposed to anything of substance. Is it any wonder why we can end up feeling like a failure with each of us carrying inside what I see as the most prevalent societal attribute of individuals swept up in American culture . . . the belief that we don’t measure up, or more specifically, we simply aren’t good enough?

Society, along with decades of cultural programming, has disconnected us from the natural world and worse yet, made us invisible to ourselves. To feel relevant, we spend our lives trying to maintain and defend a fictional identity, an idealized version of ourselves, an ego that is always comparing ourselves to others. Rather than just being and being present, being patient, learning to stop bullying ourselves and accept ourselves; we enter the fiercely competitive routine of chasing this idealized version we’ve created of ourselves to prove to ourselves and others that we’re relevant and successful.

We find that we’re rarely present and find ourselves constantly striving to become someone of higher ranking, with more titles to add to our resume, subscribing to the idea that we are actually defined by our jobs, our income, and the material wealth or possessions we accumulate along the way.  So we set goals to have more, earn more, travel more, buy more logos and things; thinking that if we can just get ‘THERE’ we’ll be happy.

The problem is “once we get there, there is no THERE, there”
Buddhist proverb

We never arrive because we simply keep making new imaginary mile markers for ourselves. That’s not to say one shouldn’t have goals, but the danger is attaching our sense of happiness to the attainment of those goals. If someone makes a million dollars, they’re not twice as happy if they make two million dollars. This is the illusion that society continues to constantly spin. The idea that happiness is something we find through the externalizing of our needs and sense of self-worth, and the idea that the cumulative sum of our acquired possessions will inch us closer and closer to a state of bliss, are all illusions that society continues to spin.

Making better decisions for ourselves and to the benefit of others means to awaken; to move beyond our cultural programming, and to begin “choosing” to consciously “respond” to life instead of unconsciously, automatically “reacting” to it.

To understand what I mean, consider the fact that studies in behavior research have shown that an estimated 94% of the population do not develop emotionally beyond the age of an thirteen-year-old adolescent.  

This is because our behavioral patterns are developed in our early childhood through observation by modeling our parents behaviors. Because of something called neural-plasticity, repetition creates very strong neural pathways in the brain that make most of our behavioral responses automatic, reflexive behaviors that occur with virtually no conscious thought. These patterns of behavior are largely solidified by the age of eight prior to our emotional development and express themselves in the form of “reactive” behaviors that we can be plagued with for the rest of our lives.  How easily we’re triggered into reacting to people and things we see.

In other words our core patterns of behavior are developed before we can apply any logical reasoning to them and are created by either emulating the behavioral patterns of our parents or by rejecting them. These behavioral patterns are unconscious, automatic “reactions” to life’s events, and occur below the level of cognition or conscious thought. What’s important to understand is that they are not based on a choice we make, they’re automatic reactive behaviors.

How many times in life do we react to things and later regret the way we acted out? This occurs because we react before we even have time to think about what we are doing or saying. Again, the behavior pattern is unconscious and automatic. As I am sure we have all experienced, these reactions often lead to regretful behaviors when later we think about what we did.

Most people will live out an entire lifetime unconsciously reacting to life and others, from a series of rudimentary emotional patterns that they developed as a child. Only when we can become the Observer and the awareness behind our thoughts are we empowered to make better decisions by consciously ‘responding’ instead of being triggered into unconsciously ‘reacting’ to everything. The reactions themselves are just poorly designed coping mechanisms developed as children that were designed to protect us.  As adults they no longer serve us but our ego, which again, always sees ourselves through the lens of comparison to everyone else, utilizes these patterns as the only way to protect itself.  As long as we continue to unconsciously react to life, we will be a slave to the consequences of our reactions and the internal rantings of the mind. In this sense the mind will be our master.  When we become the awareness behind our thoughts, pause, and choose to respond to life; the mind becomes our servant.

To awaken is to see ourselves as whole, sufficient, loving, and lovable, not insufficient or lacking. It’s to realize we are here to learn; only learn. It’s to see ourselves as connected, not separate, and to make decisions that supersede the will imposed upon us by the ego.  Not an easy task, but with a little practice we can learn to completely overhaul these automatic behaviors and live consciously.

Seeing ourselves for who and what we really are is paramount in a society where short of a natural disaster, cooperation and a sense of community are no longer highly regarded and revered values, and whereby contrast, competition is perhaps our society’s most revered and highly glorified value.

As a result, connecting with oneself can be an extremely difficult undertaking in a economic model built on entertainment, self-indulgence, celebrity status, and the cult of personality.

There are so many things to distract us from ever truly getting to know our true nature.

It is only in knowing ourselves (our true nature) that we are able to see and feel comfortable with ourselves and allow our true self to emerge through the masks of the ego.  What we really are beneath these mortal coils that we temporarily reside in is not our persona.

Believe me, understanding this can be a very daunting task to say the least.  It’s a very foreign concept to us in the western world.  It’s our failure to see this that keeps us always thinking LIFE is out there happening to us, instead of for us, acting upon us in fairly unpredictable ways, which is why we strive so hard to create predictability, continuity, and security in our lives.  And let’s be honest, life can be scary. It was quite an arduous journey for me to learn the deeper truths that I now lean on heavily to guide me through life, but my journey is far from over.

In a society where we have been conditioned to blame others and life’s circumstances for the way we feel it’s important to understand that how we view ourselves and/or feel in any given moment is paradoxically the result of the internal workings of our minds and the thoughts we choose to ruminate on.

Contrary to popular belief, the way we feel in any situation or at any given time, is not the product of anyone or anything external to us. It’s the result of the internal dialogue that we are always having with ourselves in any given moment and the internal narrative we choose to project on to any circumstance in our life. This internal dialogue we’re always having creates the picture we’ve painted of our self or the narrative we’ve created about our life’s circumstances.

For most, our internal dialogue tends to be very self-deprecating in nature. This shouldn’t be surprising. Our society is predicated on competition and comparison. But it is this internal dialogue we are always having that determines what we tell ourselves, how we react to others and treat ourselves, how we show up in the world, and how we interact with everything: the earth, the environment, and all living things. How we view ourselves in relation to the world around us determines every cognitive, psychological, and emotional aspect of our lives. The key point here though, is how we see ourselves in relation to everything else.

In other words, the only relationship we are ever having, from the day we arrive, until the day we depart this world, is the one we are having with ourselves in any given moment, and that relationship is always and only taking place in our head.  How we see ourselves isn’t based on what others think of us. It’s based on what we think others think of us.

So, all other external relationships essentially serve as a mirror reflecting back to us the beliefs, we hold about ourselves. I think it’s safe to say that our self-perception is pretty important, especially in a world where there are 7.9 billion people/mirrors reflecting back to us different aspects of what we believe to be true of ourselves.

In a world polarized by political views, ethnicity, religious identification, color, class distinction, sexual identification, vaxxed/un-vaxxed status, pronouns and the national fervor that is a product of identifying with our country of origin, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of labels that we identify with and may choose to pin on our self  and others.

An accurate depiction of our self is elusive because that very depiction is completely imaginary and always filtered through the complexion of a whole myriad of different emotions that unfortunately, are always changing.  In other words, we see ourselves through a different set of lenses every time we choose to look at ourselves and contemplate the essence of who and what we are.

For the most part, as mentioned before, our perception of self in any given moment is reactionary and myopic in nature, usually in response to an external trigger, or some circumstance we find ourselves in. It’s illusory, and making an accurate appraisal of ourselves “as a whole,” in an isolated moment of “feeling” something, is virtually impossible because we are not what happens to us nor are we the wellspring of feelings that bubble up to the surface in response to the events that transpire within a given day.

It’s often said, we can never step in the same river twice and that is indeed, very true. But, what is left out of that consideration, as a friend once reminded me, is that the same person never shows up to the river’s edge either. Who and what we are is never the same from one moment to the next.  We are tied into a constant state of transformation, always changing.  So to see ourselves for what we are perhaps requires a different perspective.

Because life is fluid, dynamic, and ever changing, our feelings are always changing in response to it.  If that’s all true, how could we ever form a clear picture of what we are from moment to moment based upon how we feel in any given moment?

So, to say, “I AM” . . . anything, to label our self as anything, is a grossly limiting and terribly inaccurate statement. For your own sanity, try and refrain.

“THE ILLUSION OF WHAT WE ARE” 

A memory from my childhood might serve as a good analogy here.

As a child I remember seeing an object on the bottom of a pool of water, but making out what exactly it was, was very difficult because the surface waves made by other people in the water caused the object to jump back and forth. In each moment, each cascading and turbulent wave at the surface created glints and refractions of light magnifying part of the object for a fraction of a second and then another part of it for just a moment, revealing different aspects or a different portion of the object with each wave. To figure out what it was involved either waiting for the water to become tranquil and smooth out or required observing it long enough to mentally piece these fragments together to create the whole.

To see who we are is just like that and it involves looking deeper inside ourselves, past the image in the mirror. It takes time to see beyond all the illusions of ego and all the internal narratives we’ve created about ourselves, to discover the real entity living beneath the skin we wear. That’s because the stories and the illusions we create in our head have so many feelings that are entangled and associated with them.

Feelings are a horrible lens to take a mental snapshot of our self with.  It’s like trying to take in an enormous painting that covers the entire side of a building with our nose up against the canvas. Depending on what part of the canvas our nose is pressed up against will predetermine the guestimation (our best guess at an estimation) we make of what we are looking at, or in this given analogy, who we are. The picture is always incomplete and always will be until we dissolve our association with form.

Our conscious awareness is formless and is such a profound mystery that we all take for granted. Consider that science has probed every orifice, fissure, sulcus, gyrus, and organelle in the human brain and yet has never identified or discovered where the seat of consciousness lies within the brain or anywhere else in the human body. It appears to be completely nonlocal. And yet, paradoxically we all have the experience of being the observer looking out at life from behind these eyes we possess. We each experience ourselves as “I,” and being in this body. This is why we experience ourselves as being separate from everything we observe. And therein lies the illusion. Life is always only occurring in our heads, or perhaps more specifically, within our conscious awareness that seems to have no fixed location within our bodies.

It bears repeating, and is important to understand that at the level of our emotions, life is never happening ‘to us.’  Instead it is always and only happening ‘within us’ as we consciously project our feelings and what we’re experiencing outward onto what is happening in our immediate environment.

We create stories about what’s going on as our thoughts seem to form a narrative or explanation without any effort. Thoughts seem to bubble up from an unidentifiable wellspring within us painting our interpretation of what is going on around us. Only when we develop awareness and become the observer of our thoughts, can we rise above them by realizing there’s a much deeper aspect of ourselves behind the thoughts that are a product of our automatic, unconscious thinking. We become consciously aware, creating a gap between us as the observer and the thoughts themselves, and stop reacting to the thoughts, understanding that they’re simply “patterns” of automatic thinking we learned along the way.  We stop judging others and judging ourselves and realize that our judgment of others and how they may treat us is really only a reflection of how we see ourselves.

Only then can we stop unconsciously reacting to life, pause, and consciously respond to life, knowing how others are behaving, even if in a way directed at us, has nothing to do with us, but rather is simply the result of the unconscious and automatic patterns of behavior they’ve learned along their way.

Reactions are always an unconscious provocation of the mind and involve no choice. Responses are always a conscious endeavor, a choice.

From this viewpoint, every experience in life; good, bad, or indifferent is teaching us something about ourselves. EVERYTHING and EVERYONE is our teacher if we choose to examine the internal dialogue, we’re having with ourselves. Everything happening in our lives chips away at the beliefs we hold about ourselves. When we really develop our awareness, we will realize that every time we look outside of ourselves as an explanation for how we are feeling, there is no absolution, only more questions. We never find an explanation for why we feel the way we feel or why others are treating us a certain way.   We surmise, guess, imagine, invest and waste so much time and energy in a vain attempt to make ourselves feel better by protecting our ego, that peace of mind becomes impossible and is something that will continually elude us.

“When we blame others, we will always suffer.”  –  Buddhist proverb.

Our experiences only reflect back to us the feelings, thoughts, judgments, and perspectives we project on to them, which are only a projection of the feelings, thoughts, judgments, and perspectives we carry about ourselves.  So, to reduce this concept down to a very elemental, punctuated statement, it is not LIFE itself, but rather US, who create the way we experience life itself.  How we ‘experience’ life, short of physical abuse, is all a product of our own thoughts. Simply put, our thoughts create our beliefs, our beliefs create our story or the internal narrative we make up (in response to everything we experience), and our story creates all our feelings.  Change our thoughts and everything changes.

As Wayne Dyer stated so simplistically,

“Loving people live in a loving world.  Hostile people live in a hostile world – Same world.”

Since we’re the only one “creating” the stories about our self and everything going on around us, everyone else in our lives is “off the hook” so to speak. No one is responsible for the way we feel, other than us because it is “us,” and “us” alone; not others, creating all the stories in our heads and therefore all the corresponding “feelings” that we experience.  It is our own self-deprecating internal dialogue that creates virtually all our suffering in life.  Pain is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice, because it is a product of the thoughts, we “choose” to mull over and fixate on.

The only one capable of hurting us is US . . . NO ONE ELSE.

When we rely on other people to make us feel good about ourselves, joy will always be temperamental and elude us because someone else can decide whether we feel joy, happiness, sadness, anger, abandonment, or any other emotion. We will have rare interludes of happiness and feeling good about ourselves, but we will always be dangling ourselves precariously between emotional bliss and annihilation, and our emotional well-being will always be based upon how others are treating us, which of course is something we have no control over. Not a very good methodology for approaching life.

The reality is most of our emotional wounds in life are self-inflicted where, as victims of our ego, we bully ourselves endlessly and convince ourselves we are nothing.

It is this internal, self-deprecating dialogue we’re having with ourselves that chips away at our sense of self worth.  For many, it can be downright debilitating.

Most of us try to control our minds and avoid negative thoughts finding it to be paradoxical. When we attempt to control our mind, it becomes increasingly more difficult to control. What we resist, persists. We resist our feelings by living in denial of them and ultimately spiral into catastrophic thinking instead of learning to accept our feelings and process them by offering no resistance and choosing to feel them instead of ignoring them. In learning the art of detachment, by simply observing our thoughts and suspending all judgment of ourselves for what we’re feeling and allowing our emotions to come and go; eventually the mind will clear itself.

OSHO, arguably one of the greatest modern spiritual teachers of eastern philosophy, says this is the first step to enlightenment.  He said that “this insanity that we are so prone to can be overcome and alleviated by ‘being a simple witness’ of our own destructive thought processes.”

When we sit with our thoughts and just observe them, we create a gap between us (the witness) and our thoughts. In doing so, we suddenly become aware of the fact that we are not our mind nor our thoughts, but rather the ‘observer’ in the theater of our mind. In doing so we give ourselves permission to feel our feelings and process them, realizing our feeling aren’t us. They’re automatic behaviors we learned a long time ago. It allows us to be gentle and loving, forgiving of our self and others.

Taking responsibility for our own feelings instead of blaming others, is not a very popular concept for many because it requires too much accountability and divorces us from the luxury of blaming others. It’s so much easier to just blame others for the way we feel, but when we blame others, we’re not taking responsibility or accountability for the way we feel. We don’t process our feelings when our focus is on what others have done.

Something I teach, in working with others, is positive affirmations. The human mind is a fascinating thing.  All discernment, the idea of determining what’s true or untrue, takes place at the level of conscious thought. The subconscious mind by contrast, exercises no judgment. Judgment is a product of cognition, applying thought to something. There is no evaluation, judgment, or critical thinking, taking place at the level of the subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind sees all incoming information as equal, relevant, and true. Because of this simple well documented fact, we can take advantage of our own minds. Quite literally we can train our minds to think differently, simply by programming ourselves to think differently. Just as in the pre-cognitive stage of our development, between birth and 8 years old, we learned automatic behaviors through repetition, without applying any cognitive judgment to these behaviors we were learning, we can do the same thing as adult.  It merely involves paying no ‘mind’ to oneself with a simple exercise.

An exercise I have a lot of individuals do, is to replace every negative thought they have, with a simple four-word phrase. Understanding that everything is our teacher, and every experience is revealing to us the beliefs we hold about ourselves, then every experience holds a lesson for us. I teach others to have a gratitude for every experience even the bad ones, by repetitiously repeating (out loud, if possible, but if not, in their heads) the phrase “I LOVE MY LIFE!”

Something miraculous happens every time and in every individual practicing this. To date, I’ve had 100% success with the exercise in every individual I’ve had try this. If at first, as the phrase is repeated over and over, the individual does not believe the statement, it doesn’t matter.  Again, the subconscious mind doesn’t know any better.   And since it is estimated that about 98% of our conscious thoughts bubble up from the subconscious mind, as we continue to program the subconscious mind, our conscious thoughts begin to effortlessly become more positive. As our thoughts become more positive, the beliefs we hold of ourselves change. As the beliefs we hold about ourselves become more positive the internal dialogue we are having with ourselves becomes more positive. As a result, we begin to see the world and ourselves in a different light and all of our feelings shift to a more positive and uplifting emotional state. Again, “Change our thoughts and everything changes!”

HOW DO WE FORGET WHO OR PERHAPS WHAT WE ARE? 

Most of what we experience in our waking state is superficial at best because our view of the world, our perception of self, and our way of thinking has been prescribed to us by well-intentioned parents, teachers, church practitioners, and through the redundant and repetitious nature of marketing.

Our indoctrination into society and the corresponding debilitating view that most of us have of ourselves, started at a very young age before our cognitive development, where the lessons and beliefs we’ve come to accept were internalized on an emotional level without the benefit of applying any rational thought or logic to these beliefs.  I believe that is why these beliefs are so hard to change as adults, because the labels we wear so proudly (religion, political affiliation and the corresponding political views, class distinction, titles, etc.) have been woven into the very fabric of who we think and feel like we are. They lie at the core of all our emotions, our sense of morality, and serve to create our view of the world.  Religion and political affiliation are great examples of how hard it is to have opinions that run counter to what we’ve been taught to believe.

So let’s pause for a minute and ask a question. Do you remember who you were before you were told what to be, what to believe, how to think, and how to view the world around you?  When you were a blank slate?  When you were open to life with no judgment, no prejudice, no bias?  For most of us to remember that person requires going back to life before schooling and our indoctrination to life and society began . . .

If I had to guess, what most of us would remember is a child who felt a boundless freedom and a sense of ecstasy with life by merely waking up each morning and being alive. Every day was a gift to be experienced. We lived moment to moment with no agenda for the day and countless opportunities of things to explore and get into. Life was this mysterious, cornucopia of experiences that we were a part of and thrilled to immerse ourselves in. We were always present and took no thought of the future or what was coming next. We had no agenda, no urgency, no anxiety, other than the occasional fear inducing thunderstorm that cropped up from time to time or spider that appeared out of nowhere.

We didn’t identify with any political affiliation, religious organization, or country.  We had nothing to identify ourselves with other than just being here in this wonderful, magical place, and experiencing life.  These emblematic ideologies, affiliations, and labels that we identify with and categorically define our lives with as adults, all had to be programmed into us by well-intentioned adults.  Eventually we grow up to have children of our own and in turn inoculate them with these often unquestioned and unexamined beliefs bestowed upon us in our childhood of what the world is and how it works.

 And on, and on, and on the cycle goes . . . .

Life is fluid and dynamic, where we are hopefully constantly evolving and moving from a nebulous state of “being” into a state of “becoming” a better version of ourselves (and by that I don’t mean more successful by any measure of societal standards).  Each year holds countless opportunities to move into a deeper understanding of oneself.

Arriving at a place where we know ourselves can be a difficult pursuit in a culture steeped in programming the individual out of the individual, where our Federal and

State guided educational syllabus vs. a student-initiated learning model, spits out individuals that have been programmed with institutionalized thinking, built upon rote memory versus critical thinking, where questioning authority and culturally accepted beliefs is discouraged. This creates a culture where the very idea of sharing our counter-culture thoughts or ideas can be unnerving to the individual that doesn’t accept the ‘status quo’ for fear of being ridiculed or dismissed as crazy. Combine these controls with the rigid beliefs of religion and political affiliation, and the ever pervasive, yet subtle and insidious nature of media that is constantly cultivating and creating our perception of the world just below our level of cognition and the individual disappears by identifying with a series of labels we’ve been taught to attach to everything and unfortunately even to ourselves. Only when we drop all labels are we able to see thing as they are.

The minute we label something it ceases to exist. Children, for example, only believe what we tell them. The moment a child is told what something is, from that day forward that child will project on to whatever the object or thing may be, the label they were taught to give it. In other words, from that day forward they’ ll never see the object again, they only see their thoughts. That’s because by labeling something we’ll never see it for the infinite number of possible things it could be. We only see it as the label we’ve place upon it rendering it trivial.

It took me years of what I could only call a “cultural detoxification,” to begin refusing to identify with all these labels and to deprogram myself from all the cultural programming that trained me to think in a certain way and see myself and the world through the fisheye lens of endless media, marketing, and news propaganda. Giving up television almost entirely, starting in 2003, was a big part of that. It was literally like waking up from a deep slumber and my view of myself and the world around me has never been the same.

The reason I titled this article “I AM, WE ARE is because I hold the fundamental belief that how we see ourselves is ultimately how we see the world, and because our view of ourselves and the world has been prescribed to us, we all tend to see the world in a similar fashion with only minor differences in religious and political beliefs. I would even argue that most of our beliefs are based in fear as opposed to love.

So how does my preamble leading up to this point in this particular writing shape the way we view our self and the world around us?  Since LIFE is only and always going on inside of us, let’s expand this concept of “SELF” to include our perception of the world around us, since after all, our view of the world is just a construct of our ego that we carry in our heads, based on the beliefs we cling to.

The original impetus for writing this particular article, before I used it as a reference for those I counsel, was to address an individual who chose to attack me in a public forum for choosing LOVE over fear and offering a perspective on world events at that time that stirred in the American public ethnic and religious hatred and bigotry.  After a long rant from him, I was told I am, “A freak!  A dreamer! A libtard!”  

As I said, the ostracizing came as a personal attack and was directed at my apolitical affiliation (because I see the whole system as profoundly misguided and corrupt corporate interests) and at my spiritual views.

The particular individual was promoting anti-muslim rhetoric that I challenged him on by asking questions to determine how he arrived at his conclusions. My questions were met with indignation and my character and universal acceptance of others was attacked, which lead to his question, “Seriously, who the f*ck do you think you are?” I believe his hope was that my response would provide him with a way to categorically reduce me down to a label so that my point of view would have no relevancy in his eyes and anyone reading his rant and provide him with the excuse to just dismiss me.  Perhaps.

With that said, here was my response, that was the initial fodder of all I’ve written here up to this point:

“I AM, WE ARE, THE WORLD WE’VE CREATED”

Since I have been woven out of the very fabric of the universe and the energy that created it, what I know to be true to the very core of my being, is that I AM a boundless, infinite, eternal, non-corporeal, non-physical entity having a temporary human experience; here to learn, love, grow, and evolve, in this three-dimensional classroom called “LIFE.”  I AM of NO religion, NO country, NO state, NO political affiliation. I see NO boundaries between countries, states, or provinces; NO distinction, and NO lines drawn between me and others. I see NO race, creed, color, tint, or hue. I temporarily belong to only one race, the human race. I AM NOT a citizen of America; I AM a temporary citizen of the planet. I AM one with the planet and every living thing. I AM one with the cosmos. I’ve crossed from the non-physical to the physical, from the immaterial to the material, from the formless to a dimension of form to expand consciousness and to lift and magnify others.

To ask what I AM?  I AM nothing and no one in particular and yet everything and everyone at the same time. With every element that comprises the physical aspect of myself having been formed in the crucible of a star, I AM not only existing within the universe, the universe is within me. As Rumi once said so beautifully, “I AM not a drop in the ocean, I AM the entire ocean in a drop.”

Separation is only an illusion. We’re all intimately connected beneath the surface at a much deeper level.  WE ARE ALL ONE.

To label our self or others as anything is a dangerous and violent act.  It is with unrecognized prejudice how we categorize, alienate, and separate others from our self. It creates duality and segregates the world into groups of ‘us’ vs. ‘them.’ It’s to focus on our differences instead of our similarities. It’s to divide instead of uniting.

The reality is we are all far more alike than we are different, having the same basic needs, and for the most part wanting the same things for ourselves that others want for themselves and those dearest to them.

We tend to lose our true sense of identity because society’s labels put us all in boxes that count us as part of one group or another.  This is dangerous because in today’s world, faced with countless challenges jeopardizing our survival, we need a cohesive sense of community more than ever.

Worse than restricting ourselves with these labels, is to apply them to entire groups, stereotyping them, and reducing them down to a monoculture of unidimensional beings that can be represented by a banner, a sticker, or a tag line.  

To make broad-sweeping generalities and point fingers at an entire culture, ethnicity, or religion because of the interests of an infinitesimally small portion of the population (governments included) is reckless and irresponsible and only serves to perpetuate stereotypes, promote bigotry, racism, profiling, and is at its very core of the bias, hate, and prejudice that breeds pride, antagonism, hostility, and war.

I’ve never personally met a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Jew, that showed me anything but love, kindness, and compassion, and saw in their eyes, the same beautiful kindness, love, hope, and aspirations for themselves and their families, that I see in every person I meet.

Our churches, mosques, and temples are filled each week with those who listen to the message of “universal love and acceptance,” that has been preached for millennia, but does what we hear ever move from our head to our hearts?  Beyond our societal programming? Beyond the pride and prejudice of believing our country, our religion, our way of life is better than everyone else’s?

How can we claim to “believe” in the practical application of such divine principles and still subscribe to the pride associated with the archaic concepts of patriotism and the vitriolic fervor that arises in individuals by identifying with such an abstract notion such as a country? After all, what is a “country?” Is the flag we wave representative of the people that live in it? If so, what people? Does it represent their values?  If so, whose values does it represent? Are they the values of the most predominant ethnicity? Religion? Race? The Dominant political party?

I tend to believe that the banner we wave as representative of our country tends to be emblematic, like team colors, signifying the cumulative sum of that country’s corporate interests, since the only thing that tends to identify a country as a world power or not, is their economic viability and the size of the military defending those interests. The concept of one’s country is really not representative at all of what any one given individual may hold as righteous, dignified, respectable, or as an inalienable right.

With all the racial bigotry so evident in recent presidential campaign rallies, religious profiling of Muslims in recent years, and the degree to which we were appalled by a sports figure’s choice to sit during the National Anthem, there’s little evidence that we believe in the very values that our forefathers fought for.  So, what does it actually mean to say, “I AM AN AMERICAN” or “WE ARE AMERICANS,” or Russian, or Serbian, or Greek, or Kurdish, or Iraqi, or anything else?”

To collectively make such a claim with any degree of pride or arrogance, elevating our nation as being better than others, is a profoundly underdeveloped mentality tantamount to that of a high school pep rally, pitting one country against another through the segregation of ideologies that may or may not represent the collective interests of the individuals living in each country. How can we believe in something as amorphous as the concept of a country or believe that that concept can espouse divine spiritual principals, that on Sunday morning we claim to hold so dear, when the idea of a country is in fact imaginary? Every country today is made up of countless different kinds of people of every ethnicity, with countless different points of view based on the heritage and the beliefs passed down within each group’s ancestry.

Viewed from space there are no visible boundaries dividing the Earth up into individual countries.These boundaries, though universally believed in and accepted as real, are in fact imaginary and only serve to polarize and divide ourselves into groups based on lines and labels that don’t exist. And yet, there are those who will die defending these imaginary lines and labels.

These wars we fight are fought for resources, political/economic dominance, corporate profiteering, or to sustain an existing system that perpetuates a cultural point of view, all in the name of “country.” This is no different than the fighting that took place in the sandbox when we were children, played out on the grandest of scales, with the same basic argument of, “This is mine, that is yours!”  

“ . . . My point of view vs. yours (Egocentrism/Bigotry), my religion vs. yours (Dogma/Institutionalized Thinking/Profiling/Stereotyping/Pride), my political beliefs vs. yours (Conceit/Idealism),  my possessions, wealth, and social status vs. yours (Selfishness/Pride/Arrogance/Conceit), my people vs. yours (Ethnic Prejudice/Racism/Radicalism), and my country vs. yours (Nationalism/Pride/Arrogance).”

Which of any of these abstract precepts for war epitomize spiritual values claim to espouse on Sunday? Where is the universal love, compassion, connectedness, acceptance, forgiveness, stewardship, or sense of community as a collective family inhabiting a shrinking planet? How can these values even exist in a world that has become predicated on the belief that life is competition and it’s “every man for himself?”

What humanity is painfully learning is that we haven’t matured much since we played in the sand box as kids. There are very few grown-ups left in the world. They’re a dying breed. We play sycophantic games as individuals to get ahead in life, while we collectively plunder the planet, consume natural resources to fuel commerce and the “marketplace,” destroy animal habitats, bringing about the extinction of countless species, destroy the Earth’s life support systems, and exploit entire ecosystems to complete collapse in the pursuit of economic dominance and marginal gains on Wall Street. All the while we further detach from our essence, our spirit, and the divine within us.

The good news is, life in the physical plane is fairly short and subsequently ends, so it’s only a temporary state of insanity we suffer from.

All this DIVISION is caused by the lack of a relationship we have with our self.  We remain polarized with others having different political beliefs, religious beliefs, and national affiliation, because we simply fail to understand ourselves and understand our connection to one another. Society has divided us by perpetuating a constant focus on the superficial and everything external to us. Society grooms and cultivates a constant focus on our egos, where again, we only live at the level of comparing ourselves to others, never reaching the ever-elusive perspective, that we are all one and that we are all in this thing called life together. - End of Response

So then, let’s examine some otherwise unexamined beliefs.  This insanity notwithstanding, WHO ARE WE when we pull ourselves out of the realm of such contrast and contradiction?  

Consider that the vast majority of the world believes in life after death, which is to subscribe to the belief that some part of us survives the demise of our physical body, which taken a step further is to believe that we are in fact, something formless, intangible, ethereal, nonphysical. If we are something nonphysical then how could our bodies, or the mental construct we create of ourselves by attaching these prescribed societal, political, and religious labels to ourselves, ever truly represent “US?”  Simply put, they can’t.

So if the essence of what we are is something that is inherently non-physical, lacking “form,” how is it we are “here” in what we perceive to be the physical plane in the “form” of a human being?  I view our “physical” state as no different than the different states of matter that molecules can take. Just as water can take on the different states of water, steam, or ice, we as spiritual beings can take on the temporary state of coalescing or condensing into a physical being (or what appears to be a physical state) in the physical realm, but our essence is and always will be non-physical.

Everything, both physical and non-physical, is cyclical in nature, including us. As a science teacher, I developed the realization that everything we need to know about ourselves can be observed in nature. Earlier, I alluded to the idea that we are “formless.” Let’s expound upon that idea here with an analogy.

Every square inch of the air we breathe is saturated with water vapor. Within every droplet of water vapor lies the entire constituency of its source, the Ocean. It is temporarily separate from the ocean (its “source”) but it is the ocean (its “source”) and will someday return to the ocean (its “source”).  Likewise we are separate from our source energy (the non-physical/ethereal/formless) from which we all originated but will someday return to the source. WE ARE THE SOURCE, and we ALL came from the same ONE SOURCE.

Our bodies are nothing more than a temporary housing, a wrapping so to speak, a vehicle for our spirit when we incarnate, that we let go of and is recycled back into the environment. “Ashes to ashes.” It’s all cyclical. Just as a star’s lifecycle involves dissolution (usually in the form of a violent explosion), going from something with form and structure to something completely nebulous and without form, the gaseous scattering of stardust over time coalesces, creating new stars, and the process repeats.

Drawing upon the laws of physics and going on the presupposition that prior to evolution of this universe of ‘form’ things were ‘formless,’ us being ‘formless’ as the “ghost in the machine,” had to exist before the physical universe, or what we identify with as ‘form.’  In other words, we’ve always existed.  We always will.  We’ve always been immortal, eternal, limitless, formless, as a field of energy with no beginning and no end. We never die because we were never truly born in the first place. Being born is a product of ‘form.’  We are ‘formless.’

Though we inhabit and animate this sophisticated machine we reside in, we are not the machine, we are the “ghost in the machine.”  Once the ghost leaves the machine, the machine ceases to function.

Our true essence is that which is formless, infinite, boundless, eternal, with no beginning, and no end. Therefore, the religion, political affiliation, or national flag we choose to identify with in this temporal experience, as a human can never define us.  And yet, within this 3-dimensional hologram, we believe the illusions we’ve spun so much that we can wage war on one another in the name of these bizarre ideological concepts that only serve to separate us. But they are just that, intangible concepts . . . ideas . . . beliefs, and are completely imaginary.  Seeded and cultivated almost since birth, and systematically imbued with these beliefs relatively, they endure.

Nationalism, politics, social status, and religion are nothing more than socially acceptable forms of separatism and prejudice that serve as the pretext for justifying competition instead of cooperation, pride instead of humility, egocentrism instead of collectivism, fear instead of love, hatred instead of acceptance, and intolerance instead of freedom, as we indulge ourselves in the competitive money sport this world has become . . . where we believe our lives are defined by what we do and how much money we make, by an imaginary class system creating an imaginary hierarchy of importance that is horribly lopsided in favor of certain groups, races, or even entire countries versus others.

To identify with a nation, a political group, or even with a particular religion for that matter, is to separate from that which connects us as a whole.  It is incongruent with the most sacred, divine spiritual principals, and everything that quantum physics is now revealing to us . . . “Everything is inter-connected and inter-dependent.”

To awaken is to see that the world is only a reflection of what we choose to believe it is, that LIFE is for the most part imaginary and illusory, lived out entirely in our heads.  What we see in the world is only a reflection of what we believe and what we see in ourselves.

“WE SEE THINGS, NOT AS THEY ARE, BUT “AS WE ARE!!!”

Sadly, most see a scary world where we’re all just competing with one another as individuals, groups, corporations, and even as entire countries in this world that we’ve reduced down to a competitive money sport. We have to protect both our self-interests and our collective interests.  We have to protect our way of life. Instead of sharing, we hoard, we plunder, we conquer, we compete despite science showing us two of the most successful species on the planet are ants and bees, who cooperate on a level humans can only dream to emulate. With the exception of perhaps sports, instead of working collectively, we strive for greatness individually, holding in the highest regard people with celebrity status and wealth.

Almost every belief we hold has the underpinnings of fear as its foundation. Fear of death, fear of our eternal inheritance after this life, fear of entire ethnic or religious groups, races, and countries, fear of terrorism, fear of each other, fear of being alone, fear of insufficiency, fear of not being relevant . . . basically, a fear of LIFE.

Since most have never learned to love themselves, we see very little love in the world, and yet, starving for it we continue to look for it, like a pirate searching for hidden treasure, with the belief that if we can find that special someone all our problems will disappear, as will we in a sea of bliss. This is why the world hurts so much. We have forgotten who we are. Humanity suffers from global amnesia. Externalizing our feelings, we look outside ourselves for something that can only be found within.

Love is nothing external. It is not something addressed to someone, it is something we ARE. When we externalize love and acceptance as something we receive from others, we develop codependency. We rely on others to make us happy and in essence reduce others down to a prescription to provide us with a hoped for feeling. When the drug wears off we move on to a new one and look for the next soul to glob on to.

I’ve always believed that the greatest human addiction is not drugs, alcohol, work, gambling, shopping, or sex. Rather it’s our addiction to our emotions, specifically those experiential preferences we believe will provide us with an eternal sense of bliss. That may be why the world believes in the idea of “true love” as something found with another. Statistically speaking, most people will never find that with another person.

What we’ve lost as civilization has continued its advancement, is our understanding with respect to the value of pain as our greatest teacher. Unfortunately we have developed several strategies as poorly designed coping mechanisms to keep us from ever having to deal with it. We seek distraction in a plethora of ways that keep us largely unconscious. As a result, seeking the path of least resistance, retail therapy, constant entertainment, and institutions like prefab religions providing us with ready-made answers, have become socially accepted outlets and methodologies for avoiding our pain and ever taking the journey inside to reconnect with oneself.

So, we continue to see ourselves as separate from everything. Separate from one another, separate from other species, separate from the environment, separate from nature, separate from the cosmos, separate from an ethereal source field of energy we’re only beginning to understand, and sadly, even separate from the different aspects of ourselves:  our body, emotions, intellect, and soul.  

Peace of mind is only found when we “integrate” the four aspects of ourselves as one. Only then will we truly connect with ourselves on a level deeper than the automatic behaviors learned as children and “respond” to life instead of being slaves to our ‘reactions’ to life.

The world we’ve created in its current state, is a fabrication, a consensus hallucination of countless generations, each collectively inoculating their children with their unquestioned, unexplored, and limited understanding of what the world is and how it works, teaching what it is we have been taught.  Never questioning the status quo we accept the world the way it is for the most part and teach each new generation the way we were taught to see it.

Love, acceptance, compassion, and kindness are mere conjecture in a world where money, nationalism, political leverage, religious and racial bigotry, monetary segregation, education for profit, and a tiered hierarchy of class distinction exists.  To free and subrogate one’s self from the bureaucratic thinking that governs our world is truly one of the greatest feats any spirit that has incarnated can accomplish in a single lifetime. To awaken is to discover that we are all one, we are all connected, we are all interdependent, and we are all free …not because of the country we were born into, but because we are made from the very fabric of the universe itself which is an extension of the source field/energy (some call GOD) and permeates everything.

To ask what I AM . . . . . ???

I AM EVERYTHING AND NOTHING AT THE SAME TIME!!!

Love and Light to You in your continued Journey of Discovery.

Love David

References:
1. Mon-Keat Looi (2020, July 10) The human microbiome: Everything you need to know about the 39 trillion microbes that call our bodies home https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/human-microbiome

Love and Light to each of You in your continued Journey of Discovery.