Dying

¡Hola! Everybody...
People are always asking for solutions, it seems. You mention an injustice, or document an inequality, and right away, people will pounce on it, or skirt the issue by braying for a solution. Never mind that issue hasn’t been adequately defined or discussed, it’s uncomfortable, so let’s move on!

LOL

It’s a common enough trait, the tendency to be uncomfortable with ambiguity, just as it is to live with an open heart. But then we bemoan lives without intimacy, while we erect moats around our poor hearts...

I live in that neighborhood. The truth that will set you free lies within paradoxes. Today, I will explore one...

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-=[ Dying to Live ]=-

“Everything you know is wrong... ”

The Disinfo Company has a book with the above title, and Ill start my rant from there. I had a professor once who hired me as an assistant. The first day at work, she instructed me to take all the files from one of her cabinets and throw them in the air. “Make sure you get them good and mixed up, Eddie,” she added.

::blank stare::

We spent the rest of the day going through the resulting mess on her office floor. I was terribly confused, thinking that perhaps my dear professor had either lost her mind or, more likely, was playing a head game with me. But as we sat there on our haunches sorting through her files -- saved articles, notes from books, newspaper clippings, jotted post-it notes and all manner of scraps -- she started making connections with ideas that weren’t previously considered congruent. Eventually, we created a mandala of sorts on her office, an intellectual map.

I didn’t know it at the time, but she was teaching me an intellectual exercise that would serve me in what she said would be my “knowledge workbench.” My professor was the daughter of a carpenter and she approached her work much like her father did: getting and learning about tools and how to apply them.

Clearing out her file cabinets in such a way was her way of clearing her head from all the “isms.” She taught me that our primary disease is our addiction to intellectual knowing at the expenses of experiential knowing. If we want to save the world, we will need to begin by undefining it. Only by giving up all our ideas, beliefs, values, morals, ethics, hopes, agendas, blah blah blah will be able to survive. The fact is all these things are static -- frozen snapshots of a reality that is in context flux. We freeze reality in order to conform to it, but maps tend to get outdated.

People ask me why I know so much, and I really don’t, but I think what people are noticing comes from my basic premise: that I don’t know anything. LOL! I remain teachable because though I am well-read and an intelligent individual, I always entertain the notion that I really don’t know jack. I start from the assertion that everything I know is wrong. Well, almost everything.... *grin*

You want peace on earth? Stop fighting reality. Stop trying to become something other than what you are right now. If you surrender your defenses, you will become more effectively you and your relationship with reality will become more intimate. More than you can ever imagine. Our survival doesn’t depend on our actions. Our survival depends on our willingness to surrender, to give up trying to control anything and everything.

Many of you know I am a “recovering addict.” Ands I am truly grateful because my addiction taught me this lesson in a profoundly life-changing way. In order for me to survive I had to die. Yes, you read that right: I am alive today because I died. Think about it: we are the ones killing us. Like me at one time, we are killing ourselves, making ourselves extinct. Like me, we must sacrifice ourselves in order to save ourselves.

Man! I love a good paradox! LOL

You might wonder if I have lost what little claim to insanity I can claim, but listen just a little longer. The form of dying I am talking about comes from creating new relationships to everything.

That’s all.

All the old relationships were based on either our conditioning or our responses to our conditioning, in which case, they very little to do with reality. We’ve been living in a fantasy world. In order for us to make this next evolutionary quantum leap, the old world, our way of relating to it and the identity connected to it must be pushed away so that we can find reality. That’s what I mean by dying.

I can already hear you saying, “But Eddie, I don’t want to die.” But that’s it right there: the you that is afraid of dying is the very same you that is disconnected from the stream of reality. It’s the false you, the tamed you, the you stripped of all of its essence. It’s the mask that you wear so that you can pretend you’re in control. It’s the persona that you adopted in order to manipulate those around you to accept you. All those isms, all those frozen thoughts -- all there to keep you stalled.

The only way to break out of the prison of your mind is to leave that tidy, managed world behind and go live. It’s not so simple or as painless as it sounds here, but the alternative -- a form of mass neurosis -- is more painful.

Love,

Eddie