She didn’t know what to do, nor how to go about finding it. Nevertheless another day has gone by the wayside, because nothing much different happened and all the usual things did. She had a few terrible headaches during work, even an episode of subtle tears where she rested her head in the dilapidated break room. Just a few moments away from the computer, emails, and work she didn’t want to do in order to take a few breaths and regain some composure to finish the remaining couple hours of a typical eight hour day. Every legal break is a necessity, and sometimes a little bit more too.

Life is getting very unbearable at work. This isn’t what she wanted to do, nor what she was hired to do when she started working there. She began well enough doing front-end code and creating templates for new websites. Every so often she’d have to fill in the content supplied by the client, come up with meta keywords and descriptions, adjust some graphics, figure out some browser specific rendering solutions, and fix code that wasn’t integrated properly with the programming. Those were the accepted aspects and details of website work. Though only a few weeks ago she was swiftly relocated to the Customer Service department to train in fielding service requests from a roster of clients she was forced to put her name on as the leading Customer Service Representative. She was given a few Power Point presentations to look through and was told to ask questions whenever she needed help.

“HA!” she said, “this is ridiculous. I didn’t sign up for this! I would never have applied for this job if this were part of the description.” But she didn’t have a choice; all of the front-end developers are destined to go through training in Customer Service and given their own chunk of the company’s clients to serve. It’s a larger scale transition for the company, maybe partly due to the downturn in the economy and an attempt to utilize their current technological workforce for more reliable and better quality customer service. However, not one person who has gone through the training is smiling anymore. No one appears to be happy with this transition into Customer Service, and no one has gotten a raise for their increased responsibilities.

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.

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.

I am. Being is. The Way is not an intellectual understanding.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I frequently feel very jailed within this body/mind and karmically conditioned self. All through childhood, I’ve been rather alone whether I realized it or not. I vaguely recall a moment of staring at my brothers laughing and being silly, and I was thinking “I can’t talk with them, because they can’t talk with me.” They were too young and unconscious. However, this is still my projection of most people in this world. I take my conscious awareness so very seriously, but cannot seem to share in such consciousness, nor open aware presence with nearly anyone. I am often aware, but still longing for very deep intimate connection with a significant other. I want an aware and open exploration of relationship, like an improvisational dance for a lifetime. The choreography is all ours. Sadly, lamentably, none of my relationships have gotten this deep. They got scared, they don’t dance like that.

There’s a massive conscious/unconscious gap that most people don’t seem to even see. This isn’t much of an assumption either! This gap is the difference between being giddy after seeing a movie you just enjoyed in the theater and experiencing the radiant energetic presence during and after resting in alive, aware, spacious being in meditation. If you’ve experienced both, then you know that not only are they so very different experiences, they are also “not two!” So, herein lies the typically non-understandable aspect: non-dual being is all being. The energy of living is within all our lives at every moment. We’re already dancing through our lives. Let’s be with one another, let’s lay here together, why are we missing this vital connection?

When I have conversations with others, I easily get caught up in (attached with) the things, thoughts, and stuff. At work, I may be grumbling and annoyed by the stifled workflow or pressures of expectation piled onto the situations. At home, trying to return to peaceful presence by letting go of and attending to the pained and suffering bodily, emotional, and mental bodies, I am often alone. This is healing work that most people in my life don’t understand and can’t seem to embrace with acceptance and peace. Often, what I hear from others is some version of “why aren’t you responding or attending to me or my concerns?” Maybe I need to reply with “I am working on healing myself so that I may attend to you too with authentic care.”

Life isn’t so much about doing, but about truly being in our living. I say “our” because there isn’t any separation. I emphasize “being” over doing because everything is changing (and clinging to action/activity is no different than any other egotistic stronghold) . And I use the word “truly” because everything is naturally empty. When we’ve gapped from identified borrowed consciousness to spacious conscious awareness, then we are truly seeing. As Krishnamurti said, “the seeing is the doing.” You do change (immeasurable by “time”) when you’ve seen and continue practicing seeing. This is the subtle, yet profound difference between common consciousness and conscious awareness. So, “I am healing with awareness bathing me in the truth.” I am changing, which means I am more Wayward. May egocentric karmic conditioning recede and fade away.

Thank you for your presence in reading, in “being with,” as I like to say.

I’m taking an interesting Zen email class conducted by the inspiring Cheri Huber. I also listened to her podcasted call-in radio show today. ( Living Compassion ) To really say the least about it, I am awake. I don’t know if that means anything to you, but it is the difference between heaven and hell for me. And in this class (sangha), I am deeply experiencing that this is essentially the same for everyone (universal). While the relative is significant, if humans exist primarily in their unconscious relativity (karmic conditioning), then suffering is inevitable. So, we overcome the egocentric voices of karmic conditioning through becoming consciously aware of the truth of this situation and disidentifying from those pesky/hating voices that suggest life could be good if things were different.

The very good thing about my life right now is that I am awake, aware, happy, and present! I can see that I am free of the unconscious voices of egocentric karmic conditioning. Through my persistent, diligent, and disciplined understanding of what EKC is, I get to truly see that I don’t have to believe the lame lies anymore. I am free, OK, and relieved of the stress.

I thank everyone, with particular emphasis of those who choose to interact with me. Peace is here, now, available beyond belief in the true seeing of awareness.

I could use a little writing about my core issue. It’s after midnight, yet I have had an interesting evening of discussions and observing myself as well as others. I talked with my best friend about my persistent loneliness and sense of disconnectedness from others. Fabulously, I recognized that my suffering in loneliness and disconnectedness is not entirely habit and attachment, but an incomplete healing of my own relationship with my father. I say “my own relationship” because this is about how I view and experienced my father growing up and how I was conditioned through my childhood. Obviously a grand mix of experiences, it is fascinating to see and know that nearly all of the break-ups I’ve had in my life seem to be filtered through the deeper suffering of a lack of connection and love with my father. I say “lack” because that is how I perceived it as a youth and habitually still do. This is actually the root of my core issue number one. My issue isn’t reducible to a concise statement that the relationship with my father was lacking in love, but that I still need, want, desire, crave a profoundly authentic deep relationship with a significant other. Do you see how this is coming together past into future, all merging into desire for that which is not? Hmmm, the root of all suffering! Anyways, this is for me to see and free myself from the conditioning and causes of that conditioning. There really wasn’t a way out of it. But now, with conscious attention and seeing with compassion into my conditioning and root causes of suffering, I may let go very intelligently. I’m certainly not running away, and I am not ignoring my issues. This true letting go is compassion, releasing my egocentric karmic conditioning through the seeing of how it causes suffering in my specific life. Interestingly though, this is a large open window into the suffering of all people. Tonight, in my conversations with people, it seemed quite clear that lack of connection kept people suffering and moving to relieve that suffering. But if we can be with ourselves as we suffer, really getting to see our own suffering and the causes of it, and the potential for ending the suffering, then our issue dissolves from the deep seeing into the True nature of our being. (Yes, I am loosely describing 3 of the 4 noble truths.)

This has been a late night writing session, so please forgive my less than stellar structure and flow. Gratitude.

Reference: “two core issues” – Core Issue One

I might as well get a bit playful with the fear that has plagued my life. On the radio this morning, I heard a coach tells his team to work hard and don’t return off the field saying “I wish I had… .” I reflected on my own life and thought about how hard I work on overcoming my own personal issues, at authenticity in relationships, at my jobs, exploring beneficial new activities, and trying to be open to others in life. I usually feel very undervalued for this hard work. I don’t have a coach, guru, significant other, or parent that supports my work. I’ve discovered I need to do this work for my own self and in relation to being with others.

obeygiant.com

The wet cement of suffering I wade through in life is conditioning and the causes of such conditioning. Early coping mechanisms for dealing with perceived abuse, social dissonance, and high sensitivity are now very inadequate ways of living an adult life. It’s clear my childhood was fraught with fear which enforced intended behavioral patterns of listening, obeying, paying attention, and doing things as instructed. I was really taught how to follow and fear was the primary method of coercion for making me do what I was told. I’m playfully calling this fearification as I dive into how this has functioned in my life, because this word allows me to seriously view the use of fear–by using intended or actual verbal or physical punishment or reward–to make someone act in a preferred way through the lens of unconscious ignorance.

No aware, loving, compassionate, and true human would use fear to force an egotistically desired result! I know this now, yet I still stumble along far too much in the unconscious conditioned coping mechanisms I learned as an innocent little bubba. I am trying to let go, but no one every taught me nor showed me how to live this day-to-day life in calm, open, careful, and energetically masterful ways! The old coping mechanisms and habits are the actions I learned for dealing with a life of stress, condemnation, rules, criticism, limitation, and fear. I wonder who may have actually seen that me and my siblings weren’t just well-behaved, but fearfully coerced into doing so. God, all parents (not just my own!), adults, teachers, and all authorities were the enforcers that my parents unconsciously recruited in their memetic structure of raising the people they procreated. Sounds a bit odd, but even now it resonates with tons of twisted relative truth. My life is thusly stained with patterns of rebellion, fearful obeying, silent resignation, expressive outbursts of stifled energy, reading volumes of self-help and health resources, self-marginalization from society because I think I don’t fit in with others, and thinking I am strange and inappropriate. This is the one result of fearification, though it appears to be prevalent enough. I sure don’t have a statistic, but the abundant “problems” of our contemporary world suggest that people are highly identified with their own conditioned coping mechanisms.

So, how shall I move on from the conditioning? Conscious seeing of the conditioning with both compassion and the authentic aspiration for transformation to the other shore of naturalness and being. Meditation is clearly key practice. But what about the unknown and unexperienced living activity that exists beyond the abandoned unconscious habits, learned strategies of behavior, unrealistic thinking patterns, and typical routines? Often times I think that I can’t let go of my father or fiancee because then, I will have abandoned them in the pool of ignorance and conditioning. Isn’t it my purpose to help those whom I love? Or is this too a conditioned way of considering relationships, love, and conditioning?

Enough with the questions about the unknowable. Fantasy will only provide another story, not living presence in actual life. I don’t want to create another ignorant story, however masterfully devised. Here I am reminded of the Constructive Living tenets: know your purpose (how, by what means is true authentic purpose known? meditation?), accept your feelings (I’ve been practicing this for nearly 15 years), do what needs to be done (attentive action is our real relationship with everything), and Naikan reflection (how I have caused trouble for others, gratitude for everything). Constructive Living provides a way for us to practice living beyond the conditioned ways we’ve developed. This is just one way, yet it is a good one for supplying a structure to work with in transforming our lives from identified fearification to authentic conscious presence in our own lives.

I also want to mention that yesterday was Class 2 of Cheri Huber’s What You Practice Is What You Have email class. Her class is copywrited, so that is all I can mention about it. I’m following the rules.