Entangled

 

The only way to solve your problems is to realize that there are no problems. Our inflamed egos create everything in our perception, and our conscious minds give everything worth, generally good or bad, but often different variations of the same duality, based purely on expectation, which is not something we are born with, but something given to us during our development and helpless defining of our ego, so we believe it to be true, and waste our entire existence chasing something to fix our problems… that only exist in our ego. A rational mind would point out that the ego is a problem to be fixed, to alleviate thinking there are problems to fix, but our ego is our greatest teacher, which in time we learn our greatest lesson from: feel this and let it go until there is no this to feel and no one to feel it.

There is a zen conundrum involving attainment of enlightenment: to be enlightened, one must basically admit that there is some ego to attain enlightenment, thus negating the concept of enlightenment altogether. Id est, there is nothing to attain; you are already it, if you can just get rid of the you that is trying to get it. There is no you, nor is there anything to get.

When you hold on to this ego, with all these problems to solve, you are constantly searching for things to fix these problems, and no matter what you try, where you go, what you get, or who you put this absurdly unnecessary weight upon, you will eventually learn that the only thing you needed to fix the whole time was letting everything go and simply enjoying the journey in this vessel. I see too many people missing out on enjoying their nature because they are spending so much time trying to define what nature is or how it should be experienced based on something outside of themselves.

This vessel and journey are simply here for our consciousness to enjoy, even if our ego’s expectation has decided that it is not enjoyable; especially if our ego has decided that, because that’s where the lesson is. I feel like souls spend too much of their precious energy trying to connect with something that is already spanning time and space. Stop trying to connect with something that has given us the ability to fully experience, with all these beautiful senses, what is right in front of us.

I feel like we are missing out on the experience it gave us; the gift of this life and journey and this silly and fragile human bag of nerve endings; because we are so busy trying to figure out what it is exactly that is experiencing everything. This is the enlightenment equivalent of overstimulated nervous systems who are constantly chasing places and friends and lovers and diets and workouts and jobs and money and every other temporal thing that will never fix what is inside of us, right next to every tool we could ever need to make everything exactly as beautiful as it already is.

You can not enjoy your life as long as you allow so many external things to affect how you enjoy your life, but it is all those external things that your ego has decided IS life, and we are born into this ego, so it is debatable whether we were put here to live this ego in the fullest, for the sake of the universe’s experience (which excuses going on a killing spree because nothing turned out how you decided it should), or whether we are meant to transcend the ego, or be doomed to repeat it. The conundrums go deep and wide here, and even in not being what we think it is, it is still what it’s supposed to be, or we wouldn’t be experiencing it.

What do we do about it, though. Nothing? We know that the perpetual search for happiness outside of us causes nothing but pain and misery because it never lives up to the expectations that were given to us, and that has been very well documented. What has also been very well documented is finding peace and calm in ourselves, while choosing to be happy no matter what “happens” is the secret to happiness, which is something just about no one can wrap their ego around. Meditation teaches us to acknowledge thought and let it go, while practical development teaches us to feel things and let them go.

Enlightenment teaches us that there are no things to feel and no one to feel them, but we are all feeling the same things and having the same experience through different filters and lenses. Regardless of the chaotic paradox that exists in all that, all we can really do is just laugh at all the stupid shit and enjoy this journey, because if we have learned anything from 5,000+ years of the human “soul” being very well documented, it is that nothing changes. None of us is going to make it. All we can do is choose to enjoy it, or wallow in the ego/self inflicted misery.

…and that, ladies and gentlemen, is my review of Bufo (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine). While I can admit that having to smoke it made me uncomfortable, testament to how removed I am from recreational drug use, as soon as I held that beautiful medicine in my body, I just muttered, “oh,” and everything made perfect sense as I laid back on the cushion in the center of the room, and fell into the cosmic whispers of the universe. I became the drop in the ocean, and the ocean in a drop, which I have read countless times, but didn’t truly understand until that, “oh.” I became a molecule in infinite space and time. This, naturally, raises the greatest ego conundrum: did I feel what I felt because the universe was giving me information, or because they were things I always knew and was finally experiencing?

Will there always be a contradiction and duality as long as ego exists because without ego things would cease to exist? If something is wrong or not good enough, won’t something always be wrong and not good enough, and you just haven’t realized it yet? Is that just life and an overstimulated nervous system, or is that your ego teaching you how to transcend? The biggest thing that I learned, which I didn’t expect, and beautifully embodies the lesson, is that when you are searching for something, specifically “god” or a spiritual experience, things that we read about in the self-help romance novels, you never find it. If you just keep your heart open and stop looking, you will find it everywhere, which ties in to the most confusing and beautiful thing I ever read about Zen and now understand with every fiber of my “oh,” ironically penned by Saint Watts: Stop reading about Zen.