what is real

What is real? That’s the question that is oft asked within our selves and in the worldly society. Us humans have successfully blurred the definition of real with all of the sur-real and fantasy of borrowed consciousness made manifest. What is this life that I live day after day? What is life? I’ve been asking what life is for a very long time; so long that maybe I can’t stop questioning these experiences of reality, job activity, possessions/ownership, entertainment, and ways of living in the USA.

In Zen, it is not so much the what, but the how that is important. This and that, all changing over a day, seasons and years, is simply what we have to attend to. Each of us have unique confluences of conditions causing us to be the small self we tend to identify with in living life. Yet, shifting from the identified perspective of ‘what’ being real to a much wider, deeper view of seeing how we live through everything is the key. This is a serious life altering key, which doesn’t allow for turning back, playing games, or pretending. Everything becomes very real, even the ignorant acts of delusional defiance and culture-soaked hedonism and idealism. The delusion is separation and will cause suffering if it doesn’t already. The ism’s fearfully defy change and will also cause suffering if it doesn’t already. The known is a mirage against the empty way, a temporary vantage point where we see what is, but any clinging to ‘it’ will certainly cause us suffering if it doesn’t already. “Is that so?” asks the Zen teacher. Will you cling to these thoughts too?

How to live my life? That is my question as I sit to write here and now about my dilemma of choosing activity. I feel as though I have lost a great deal, but that’s just cause I’ve been identified to it. I am largely alone in my conscious awareness of living life, longing to live intimately with another of great awareness. I am confused regarding activity to choose for maintaining my survival in this contemporary society, desiring a bold, creative, helpful vocation that manifests in coherence with the Way everyday. Even though these thoughts essentially plague my mind as potential dreams of how life could possibly be other than it currently is, they may exist to maintain my suffering. If this and that ‘what’, then I may live the ‘how’ I’ve always dreamed! Of course I want a dreamy life where I may live happily ever after doing exactly what I want how I want it, but that’s just not real.

True happiness is allowing and being present with everything as it is. This is the doing of being beyond thinking, unmeasured by any thought whatsoever. Bringing thought into the view quickly distorts, fragments, and destroys our crystal clear ability to see how things already are with awareness. Now, how can I utilize this aware consciousness in transforming my lonely living and contemptuous career into a path of practice with what is? How do I come to know what needs to be done and how to do it through being with it all? This is where I have no answer and have been struggling to find some sense of authentic direction. I see not here and now; I struggle and suffer with the disharmony and disgust in the separation from finding the Way in relationships and work. I don’t know what to do next, nor how to go about knowing such, for I have tried so much already and have not found the Way manifest in my life. This is terribly bizarre, to see with awareness and to not see what nor how to manifest the Way within my own life. This is my unique struggle with purpose.

healing our understanding

I was listening to Tavis Smiley’s special radio segment called “The Medicalization of Race” (December 20, 2009). It’s a roundtable discussion about race in light of The Human Genome Project and contemporary cultural and scientific understandings. They were talking about how race is a culturally created designation.

I recall in my Cultural Anthropology studies how xenophobia is near to the root of making fearful generalizations of the other; hence, race an easy catch-all for the other colored humans. We’re all colored. In this way, the race designation isn’t entirely about color or physical differences, be they hair, body types, or genetic mutations, it’s about a fearful, culturally conditioned, dualistic, karmic identification with and against the concept of race. Race is a conceptual separation of humanity, based on egocentric karmic conditioning.

Our true nature is essential, free, healing and beyond the separatism and contradictory nature of egocentric karmic conditioned thinking and doing.

In my deep and lengthy investigation into reforming my path towards an authentic livelihood within culture, I realized something central and inspiring at the end of Tavis Smiley’s race panel discussion. It appears everyone needs healing of understanding. If we are openly honest about our co-existence with nature, humans are in a quandry as well another growth phase. The averting socio-environmental disasters and enabling a beneficial co-creative growth phase is dependent on re-under-standing (healing our understandings) as a function of disidentifying from egocentric karmic conditioning and re-co-creating our living practices in accordance of compassionate awareness, loving acceptance, and our indisputable universal true nature of oneness, change, and emptiness.

To be a little more specific about how this realization is important in my personal vocational path, I have needed to re-understand life in order to live it. The personal and cultural conditioning I’ve learned has brought about significant suffering in my identified life. I’ve also observed that there are many people who don’t perceive or feel like I do; which is further evidence of the grounding fact that identification with our constructed views is largely our existential understanding and worldly doing mode. However, the universal human commonality is the same: identification with our karmic conditioned enculturation and idiosyncratic coping mechanisms causes suffering for ourselves and others. While our contemporary social understanding may be that this is an unfortunate side of our limitation as human beings, this is not the truth. Healing our understanding is re-under-standing that views, beliefs, opinions, values, goals, purposes, and such complicated, conflicted and fragmented thinking is not our true nature; it is egocentric karmic conditioning, borrowed collective consciousness, and learned historical enculturation. Hence, healing our understanding is vital towards over-coming our stubborn egos, sheepish complacency, and oft hidden suffering.

I suppose one of the amazing previously uncherished strengths of my character is the ability and tendency to investigate my and others’ experience of life with the curiosity of it’s universality. In this sense, I am more like an adventurous mountain climber, independent avant-garde artist, or homestead permaculturist. Typically, I care much less about a fleeting view than the intuitive intention that causes it. I both experience and observe gut wrenching suffering and physical pain, unexpected crisis and the woe of lament, though I recognize a deeper aspect to this living. As such, I simply consider myself a bodhisattva because my path has been an investigation of suffering–it’s causes and cessation. Unwittingly and authentically, enmeshed in my experiences of suffering due overwhelmingly to the firm grip of egocentric karmic conditioning, original nature is known within me as the opening door of conscious awareness that is finding original harmony with being alive here and now amidst everything as it is.

In conclusion to this particular post, “healing our understanding” may be the authentic work that I may be capable of and suited in doing vocationally. This is about healing my understanding into original nature as much as helping other people heal their understanding and healing our collective human understanding too (a paradigmatic shift towards natural, original being). “How?” is the practical question I must also attend to, fortunately there are uncountable directions for manifesting this Wayward purpose. The arts are certainly a viable means for engaging re-under-standing, however, seriously cultivating authentic conscious awareness practice is inescapably at the core of personal actualizing and enlightening. Also, I enjoy how this phrase so caringly addresses the possible change from a limited egotistic view to a healthy aware conscious presence. The idea that understanding could be healed is truly heartwarming rather than judgmental and conditional. Like the body, our mind (as if there was ever any separation) may heal naturally too. Oneness is our original nature.

healing energy and presence

How do I choose to commit to a new vocational direction in life with all my ignorance and unassuredness in making a good and right decision? It sure is a risk, to change, to switch careers, to listen to a deeper sense of my being in choosing the work that I would appreciate doing each day. I suppose it is not as big of a risk as I took when I was younger and knew even less about myself and the world when I decided on my current work field. Seems true enough. Now I feel a bit more confident. Nice.

I want to become a “healer.” I think I have a lot to offer others, if they want my assistance in their movement in change. This is a reciprocal function as well. By helping others, I will be helping myself too. I need the support as much as you do, and this is nearly always true for us humans. I think that embarking on a vocational path of helping others heal, I too will continue to heal.

This is a large step of opening for me: from wounded to healer. But it is in deeply knowing the woundedness that I am rising with self knowledge into loving compassion. Awareness is the key for healing into being harmoniously present. A process of unconditioning and re-learning trust of our natural being is in staying true to the Way things are. How can deep irrevocable healing take place in any other way? We certainly cannot dupe ourselves into healing! That’s simply swapping out one illusion with another, and then, another after that. That’s conditioned existence, not living with and accepting emptiness.

Today, the day of the new moon, an irrevocable synergistic opportunity of possibility in harmonizing myself with the Way, I want to commit to my new path in being “healing energy and presence.” This is my consciously aware recognition that I have been headed in this direction for a long time and that I am very deeply interested in helping others who may ask me to assist them in healing changes.

I am currently particularly attracted to Rolfing, Feldenkrais, and Zentherapy. I am nearing the final (tenth) session with my friend who is a Rolfer. This is influencing me, as I learn the structural aspects of the body. I have received a small amount of Feldenkrais instruction which helps me to understand the function of the body. Zen practice also inflences me greatly in re-directing myself in the Way. I practice Qi Gong and Butoh too – healing movement modalities. I am also influenced by Traditional Chinese Medicine in receipt of acupuncture, herbs and Taoist wisdom. In these ways, I have been moving into a general field of movement, awareness, mind/body practices, and healing. I do not know what else to say at this time other than list these wonderful influences and continue to be grateful for their presence in my life.

learning about purpose

Today is the first day of a distance learning class that I am taking: Living on Purpose via the ToDo Institute. This should help me grow in understanding MY purpose versus my usual perspective of eliminating personal viewpoints and goal-building. I guess I would say of myself that I have been reeking of zen in my thinking and talking about the Way, rather than living life in this moment without fabricated purpose. Oh, I do my best, but it seems much more like hypocrisy to me than equanimous fulfillment. Thus, I am on my way to continue learning about purpose.

doing my best is choosing thusness

Here, now, being with and encouraging myself authentically as rising conscious energy, I offer myself and the world these reflections on awakening and becoming into the fullness of being here and now in this.

(Sentence reads in a redundant manner, though it is simply cycling through being and conditioning.)

accept and practice with what this is now as it is,

be caring and sensitive of yourself and the environment (all form),

be especially mindful of your/others’ deepest needs,

all of the conditional views and attachments will pass as you surrender to flow with the current of conscious awareness deep within all being;

this is equanimous presence, big buddha mind, co-creative conscious awareness, inner primary purpose, contingent interdependent co-arising of being.

moving along without purpose

I started attending a four week Zen & Depression class at A Single Thread this past week. It was beneficial to meditate, walk, and focus awareness to the body and outside, but also to hear the some more info about depression, anxiety, and such things. Just being open to hear what others have to say about depression is important for my how of dealing with life.

Another interesting thing is a conversation me and my fiancee had earlier today. She asked if I’ve ever had a goal that I tried to do but felt bad about afterwards. I had to answer no, because I really haven’t had my own goal. She hit it right on the target! She revealed the fact that I’ve been observing, trying things, and adopting others’ goals through life. Then, we talked about purpose for a while. Due to being conscious beings, we determined that purpose is necessary for us to be active in our life choices. Purpose changes along with everything else in reality, though, it’s lack in life–which is what I have been experiencing for quite some time–appears to cause depression and anxiety. Tired of attaching to the next interesting or necessary thing that comes into my life, I have been lacking purpose and thus, focus, goals, perspective, grounding, connection points to others, depth of action. I have been dwelling in existential misery.

Conversely, one thing I have learned is the subtleness of darkness and emptiness. I am not afraid of death, boredom, nothingness, not knowing, etc. but it is still challenging to work with these aspects of life, particularly when I am purposeless. I am noticing that belief may take the place of purpose. Belief is “an attitude of acceptance or assent toward a proposition without the full intellectual knowledge required guaranteeing its truth.” Purpose is “determination: the quality of being determined to do or achieve something.” But purpose is not simply a goal towards which we act and work, it is the whole life path that we choose. It is the process and the intended goal, that we decide to entirely align our lives with intention, attention, and conscious awareness as creative and free beings. Our purposes are unseparable from reality and the nature of reality (contingency, creativity, change, and ambiguity). However, it seems belief and thought can distort the realistic connections of our purpose. Thus, the phrase “rest in presence, move from emptiness” comes to mind again as a way of reharmonizing with reality, instead of belief.

So, I’m learning and thinking anew about purpose, but I am not aligned with my purpose, because I don’t have one. The words of advice I have for myself are… “creating your purpose is part of your process of healing, continue with how for now.”

peace and gratitude