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Copyright © 2018 by Cory Ian Shafer
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
First Printing: 2018

Chapters
The Lone Rider
A Simpler Time
In The Fishbowl
False Gods and Memorials
Mercy
Emptiness
The Road
An Earthly Shroud
Conflict without Ego
A Glimpse of the Master
Try and Try Again
Amalgamation
Sorrow
Acceptance
Identity
Those who are Evil
It’s all about the Fun
The Social Space
A Game with our Shadow
Life can always be taken away
The Primordial Landscape
Never give your life up
Sometimes in Life we Lose Things
Way out West
Magic is all around us
Grief
The Search
Emptiness, the vastness, we are all alone
Death (or the Sunset)
Rejoined


The Lone Rider

“After a relaxing Saturday, I was lying in the hammock towards the evening with my dog, I was swinging back and forth, and watching Jupiter shine in the twilight sky as the sun crept over the horizon. It was eerily quiet with only the random dog bark heard in the distance from probably a half mile away, just enough to pique the interest of my Flat-Haired Retriever's ears for a second. There were no other sounds for the next fifteen minutes, only golden silence, until I heard a lone goose flying above in the dark sky, alone, making frantic squawking noises searching for its lost gaggle, now only a lop-sided V flying somewhere through the inky-black sky. I soon realized that everything is searching for something, man and animal, perhaps all living things are looking, desperately trying to find something in this life.”
We are all ultimately alone in our lives, this is our singular journey, we repeatedly try to connect with people, to find friends and lovers, we will try to join with others, both emotionally and physically, we inherently move towards this goal of union with others, however it is never completely possible, we are alone, conceived into this world alone and upon our exit from this world we will leave alone, it is a harsh and bitter reality to swallow, the notion that, to a large degree, we will always walk alone.
We are, when born into this world, a lone rider; our life is just a curious journey that we must undertake ourselves, feeling as though we’re just an island in the vast sea of life. And so when we live our lives we vacillate between the two feelings of aloneness and loneliness, although these words sound bitter they can be sweet if we learn to embrace them.
Aloneness is the feeling of being present and loving towards ourselves, for when we truly love our self, no other is needed, we are full and complete, you can envision aloneness as existing as complete and closed circle, at both times empty yet full. Loneliness is the void, it is a lack of something, we can envision loneliness as a circle drawn only halfway, with a missing other half.
We are taught and brought up to believe that both of these states are negative, for even now that is how we perceive them, as inherently bad. Both aloneness and loneliness are certain parts of life, they are two states that we cannot ever hope to avoid, but yet we are taught that these two states are negative setting us up for potential extreme failure in our formative and later years. What would happen if we embraced both of these natural feelings and states?
The idea of aloneness does not imply loneliness; it implies rather a satisfaction or a contentedness with oneself, however we are taught that this is bad or negative, for even God said, "it is not good for man to be alone" (Genesis 2:16) and God made Woman From Man to be his companion. This is not to say that being “alone or lonely” should be a condition that is strived after but rather they should be viewed as natural elements in one’s life that should be embraced. We are talking about the ideas of being alone and lonely as a natural course of life and not for instance Major Depressive Disorder or Dysthymia, the former and the latter are very different concepts.
On being alone, history and mythology is replete with stories capturing the essence of magic in moments of time where one has wandered alone. In Buddhism, Gautama Buddha sat beneath a tree where he confronted Maya in a state of meditation with only himself, we can think of Jesus with his spiritual struggle in the desert, alone, or the beautiful world of dreams that present us with such jewels with which to explore ourselves all existed when alone.
Existential philosophers teach as that we alone are responsible for creating a meaningful life in an absurd and unfair world. We create our world by choosing paths, we alone do this, and no one helps us. We find that being alone brings us into our sacred space, into our temple, where magic rituals and personal alchemy take place. When we accept aloneness, we enter into that sacred space, which acts as a counter to the delusions brought on by society and other outside influences. It can be said that by accepting the idea of aloneness it helps us to mature and evolve as both emotional and spiritual beings. Being alone is the classroom that teaches us most about ourselves because there is no one there to project our own struggles or issues onto, we must accept them as parts of ourselves.
Aloneness is a void, the space for creation, the land that Hermes has not yet tread. In the Christian faith, it is stated “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The sacred space of aloneness allows for creation, to create ourselves in the same manner empty lots allow for creation of societies buildings and monuments.
A cup purpose is its emptiness, it has possibilities. The Japanese Zen Koan “A Cup of Tea” warns us against filling our cup with all our ordered and unordered thoughts and preconceptions, for true learning to takes place the cup must be empty. Life contain light and dark elements, life is full of joys, times of bliss, happiness but is also containing loss, grief, sorrow and aloneness. These dark elements, of which, aloneness, is a dark element, must be embraced by all equally without disdain for one or the either, indeed we need to be empty, we need only to reflect that which is around us, our goal, is to be like a still, calm pool of water in which everything can be reflected but nothing obtained. Embracing the opposites helps us to individuate, to evolve ourselves to a more enlightened spiritual being. The Pythagoreans and other Greek philosophers believed that all was sprung from the Monad or the First Absolute.
Solitude, a synonym for aloneness, means a state of being alone without being lonely or “being with one’s self”. Many religious sects and other ways of living emphasize the value of being alone, being alone is considered being closer to god. The Native Americans practiced their vision quests which usually occurred alone, the Australian aborigines practice the idea of the walkabout, and many cultures all over the Earth contain this same theme of the magic of aloneness.
Although inherently alone, humans are also social creatures to some degree, we rely on others for help, resources and social bonding, but how does this work in a world where true connection is not possible, how humankind can be a social animal but yet at the same time be alone with themselves is quite a paradox. Perhaps this is the crux within our civilization, the Achilles Heel of the modern human, the imbalance between our sociality and our limits on connectedness. What a paradox it is, to constantly suffer our needs to connect with our inherent aloneness. History and myth is drenched with mystical places such as Shangri-La, Tír na nÓg, Nirvana etc which can only be achieved on our own in our aloneness.
Living with an inherent aloneness means that we deal with loneliness, the difference between these two concepts is astronomical in meaning and often times I’m sure the two ideas become crossed and misunderstood but yet also vastly intertwined. Loneliness can be defined as one who has no friends or company, they are without companions. It can also be defined as the quality of being unfrequented, remote or isolated. Loneliness is related to sadness, we spend much of our life in a state of sadness or loneliness. We are born alone, alone we pass through the barrier from womb to life and we pass the veil of death with only ourselves to guide us, although there is some help which we will discuss further in our study. Everyone at some time has felt that loneliness, and the depression or sadness that comes with this human state.
I’ve treated many people who feel this way, and it would seem that over the years it has increased tenfold, many are afflicted with classic textbook depression that stems from loneliness, which stems from aloneness. In almost every case it is someone who seeks the necessary idealizations on the outside; externally they seek love and belonging, never really embracing their own aloneness, which then seems to become the monster of loneliness and depression. Depression or loneliness could be lessened by the acceptance of our aloneness; accepting one would lessen the other.
Now it just so happens that life is made up of a mixed bag of good and bad, light and dark elements reign supreme over our life and we can never truly avoid depression or loneliness in much the same way we could never avoid “not breathing” for far too long. We must learn the ability to live within the opposites that are given to us, joy, suffering, happiness and depression are just some of the opposites that we must deal with throughout our lives, there are many others examples but for every beautiful element of life that we treasure there is the opposite that we abhor, but we must learn to embrace each equally.
There was a woman that I worked with a while back she was unhappily married to a narcissistic man who made himself the center of the universe and she was verbally and mentally abused for the span of a 20 year dysfunctional marriage and wanted a divorce, she knew this was the right course of action, she was very unhappy, but she was scared to be alone, she was scared of that unknown, cultivating her concept of aloneness enabled her to not be scared of being lonely and she was able to start living her life, her way, much happier, without her abusive husband. Her fear of loneliness kept her in her abusive relationship but when that fear was made common and accepted life changed for the better.
Aloneness and Loneliness are facts of life not just for human beings but it is being documented throughout the world in many studies and research articles that honeybees can become depressed, ants can become depressed and have lower rates of mortality, abused dogs and cats suffer from depression, fish have been observed having sentience, many animals have sentience and it is found that they suffer with similar forms of very human problems. Aloneness and Loneliness can be thought of as an imposed instinctual state, a condition that life imposes on us from the very start of our lives, it is a life state that we strive so hard to fulfill with relationships, drugs, activity, religion and philosophy but nevertheless Aloneness and Loneliness will never be eradicated, for they are essential parts of life. Being alive creates angst towards many inherent natural states that will always be present in our lives, why do we spend so much time and energy avoiding these natural states?
Human beings and other life forms are pleasure-seekers, we love to feel good, and our pleasure seeking is based in part on biology and psychological avoidance. We are taught at a young age that feeling good is good for us, that we should always be happy, that if there is one sign of sadness there is something off or something is wrong with us and we are told that there is a pill that will change all of these horrible feelings. In this age, any slight change of mood demands a pharmaceutical cure; many medications that work on our biology are out on the market, even advertised in commercials between your favorite television shows.
This and many other things such as social media warp our sense of what is natural and unnatural, leading us on an everlasting quest of pleasure and joy, a state that can never fully be reached and as such we will continue to struggle with this paradox of natural states versus unnatural states always striving towards an impossible goal.
The Human brain and, I would safely assume other living beings have pleasure centers in their brain, these centers release dopamine in bursts whenever we engage in pleasurable activities, all drugs of addiction operate to release dopamine in the brain, and a little dopamine burst feels really good. Pleasure is also a reward, however not all rewards are pleasurable; some can be “not pleasurable”. Many of the great things (ex. evolution of the soul or psychological maturation) that happen to us in life happen in times of despair, sadness, turmoil, or hardship. When we face the forge of life growth happens, change occurs, and lead is turned into gold. What happens if we continue to strive to avoid the natural states of the burdens? It seems to follow then that our growth as a species would halt or stop. In seeking only pleasurable rewards we lose the “non-pleasurable rewards” that really do change lead into gold.
When we cultivate the idea of being alone with ourselves it forces us to look towards ourselves as being our best friends, our loyal companions and in that intimate personal relationship with ourselves is where the growth happens, that Individuation occurs, when one individuates, it knows well and harmonizes all of its components. Individuation is difficult to achieve when we live a world that is driven with external rewards and reinforcements. We are searching for something and that something is not outside of ourselves, but inside ourselves, we are enticed by the false reflection of ourselves that we see in other people and this leads us to stray from our true nature.
It is quite a dilemma, that in being a social creature, and wanting that deep connection, we can never truly feel it with someone outside of our body; we can only truly enter that deep of a relationship with ourselves. I think that once we embrace Aloneness, Loneliness becomes easier to deal with and even the relationships that we have with friends and family, that is relationships outside of ourselves, become deeper and richer. Paying attention to one’s own self brings into focus the clearer image of others.
So, in a nutshell, we are social beings, there is no denying that, we love company, we like to be around people who make us feel good, however, the quandary is that by nature and design we are destined to truly be alone with ourselves. Cultivating our Aloneness with ourselves enables us to find that depth of connection that we are looking for and in turn helps to deepen those external relationships around us. In mastering tha ability to sit alone with ourselves, paradoxically we realize that we are not alone, but surrounded by life all struggling to define the mystery that we live in.
“Learn to be alone and happy with yourself, content in your own company, love yourself deeply, and take care of yourself”




A Simpler Time

“I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.”
Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

At the dawn of time, Man was not a complex creature, he was by nature, a basic and simple being, he needed little to survive the harsh reality that he faced. Through the cold, and the heat, and the most trying of times, Man survived, braving then what most of us now would tremble from. The essentials that were needed to survive consisted of food, water, shelter and a crucial, tactical acumen, nothing more was needed, it was both a simpler time, but also a more unforgiving time, mistakes might carry dire consequences, theses mistakes were to be learned from quickly, never to be repeated.
It is a testament to Man’s fortitude as a species that he survived to form and grow into what we are today, complex, thinking and feeling individuals. Just as a child is brought forth from the womb with nothing, Man in his simplest form does not need much to survive; only the basic needs are truly necessary. Think for a moment and pause from reading this book and ask yourself this question, what do I need to survive and to be happy, to live a full and complete life, with safety, security and comfort? After a few minutes of pondering this question, what did you come up with?
This beginning time could best be described as being both “rough and pure”, rougher because it was a time when life spans were shorter, a cold or flu-deadly, and a broken bone possibly meant death. This was the harshness of our early civilization, the part which was unsafe and at times dangerous. But what about that notion of purity that I mentioned? If we think of life before when it was a simpler time; we migrated with the food, moved with the seasons, and slept with the sun and moon, what could be more difficult or purer than that. It is now known that hunter-gatherer societies spent around 3-4 hours per day working to survive; they did not work as nearly as we do in our present situation.
Living simply implies that we survive on only what is vitally needed, nothing more than that is required. When we live simply, we live connected, connected to the Earth, the animals, the stars that guided us, the seasons that helped us to migrate. We would call it being connected with the numinous around us; the ancient Romans called it Numina or Numen, before they were influenced by the Greeks. There was a power that resided in nature and it was to be appreciated and respected and we were connected to it, we were its children and it was our parent. This is perhaps where the Gaia Hypothesis came from, the idea that there is a power or life in the Earth itself, that everything is alive.
I remember one summer being in Joshua Tree National Park hiking along a trail, on one of the bends I stopped because I saw something moving in the cliffs up ahead. I realized it must have been a Big Horn Sheep standing up there on the cliff face, climbing with relative ease what a man would have needed a rope to ascend. With each jump this sheep made there was a loud resounding crack that went through the valley floor, it sounded like thunder, and it had power. I wonder now if this was in some small way that connection to the primal force or the Numina that is all around us. Just as fish swims around in the ocean and lives in the water, it might not know that it is surrounded with water, I believe our ancient ancestors did, I believe they knew what was around us, they knew they were connected because they lived simply.
This loss of connection can also be examined in another way that most of us should understand; it will help us to understand the magic that we have lost in the connection to life around us. How many of our children or adults have seen the magnificence of the Milky Way, that band of white that crosses the sky each cloudless night? Maybe some people have seen it once while on vacation or a few times in their life, but, I would guess that most people have never truly seen the Milky Way in its entire splendor.
Now when we look at the night sky most of us just see an inky blackness, a darkness that is synonymous with our current situation. Where did that power go, the light that humbled us each day and bore down on our heads to tell us where we were and who was in charge. It is gone in our daily lives, almost entirely forgotten and forever covered and shielded from our eyes by our progress. The loss of our Milky Way, another example in how we have become less connected, we have had the light ripped right out from our eyes. What have humans lost in all this civilized life that it so proudly loves?
We have lost the idea of living simply, within our means, taking only what we need to survive, having a respect for our planet, and with that loss of respect, we are losing that connection, that divine part of ourselves that says I live here, I will respect her and take care of her. We have abandoned our mother earth and our father sky; we are lost children, wandering, with no one worthy left to guide us in our life. We suffer from what the modern psychologist would call “parent-child relational issue or V61.20”. This current distorted relationship that we have with our symbolic parents has long term detrimental effects, with it we lose our connection to the divine and our life becomes radically more complex and difficult. We are without a roadmap, our guide has been lost and we are stranded on the side of the road without the tools needed to get us out of our dilemma.
In trying to bend those natural laws of “simplicity and connection” we have created a complex and fabricated a shadow in which we are now under, held prisoner in a cell that has been built with our own hands.
Where did it all start to go wrong? Possibly the formation of the city-state or centralized living is the origin of our problems. Along with centralized living, the formation of the social structure, distinction between “this and I”, the evolution of money, or what I term the “green disease, and religious thinking. Finding out the cause in this case is not as important as looking at what we lost and how to fix it. Imagine if you were out walking in the jungle one day and someone hit you with one of those blow guns, they got you with a dart in your leg and you know there is lethal poison on it. In this situation you have two options run around the jungle to find out who shot you and die in the process or find the antidote and lose the shooter, which would you choose? That’s the way I feel about finding the cause, let the scholars sort that mess out and for us continue to look at our problem.
When the white man started to explore the New World the American Indians observed a sickness that the white man displayed for gold, the white man craved it, it drove him crazy, and it twisted him into an aberrant remnant of himself. Gold and the value of things had an alchemical process on the human psyche; Robert Louis Stevenson described it very well in his book “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, the only thing needed was “a secret ingredient” to change a Man to a Monster. Here was something that was transforming man into a vile creature and this was not the first time this had happened, it had been happening all throughout history. This transformation occurred in central Mexico, South America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, it had been happening everywhere, it had a long history and was repeating itself in a new land.
So with all this said and written, it is without delay that I lapse into my informal writing style and lay it on the line, give it to you straight, what we see as the truth. The thesis of this book lies in the fact that money has twisted man into something perverse that is incongruent with his true nature. It has turned him into a Mr. Hyde, a shadow form of himself, a twisted and perverse monster. The rules of life have been changed, no longer do we live simply and live connected to the numinous life around us, we no longer reside in harmonious balance with the earth and our surroundings. We now can be described as a “cancer”; man is a fast-growing tumor that lives solely to invade other areas and to lay waste to those areas for his own desires. How does it feel when I compare the human race to a cancer or even a virus? Do you feel good about that statement? You are part of the problem, I am part of the problem, and we all are part of the problem. We now lives in the rules set forth by corporations and big business, the rules do not concern us, they concern profits, and it is a “green disease”, a disease of the acquisition of wealth.
Since the rules have been re-written we now live in a mal-adaptive feedback loop that is ruining both the human species and the planet that we live on. We have nowhere else to go after we are done killing this place, where shall we go, Mars, the Moon, the survivability is nil in those places. Besides each other, the earth is all we have. Terra-Psychology is a recent new development of the study of man in conjunction with the Planet, it examines the relationship between the two, and I wonder if the planet could speak what would it say to us?
“Live simply, simplify your life and you will enjoy it and it will become wonderful”


In The Fishbowl
The truth is: we are all born with this “Magic Button” switched on. As kids we find joy and happiness in the simplest of things. We can run around, play with flowers, make necklaces out of daisies and feel like a princess when we wear them. We make our wishes when we blow off the seeds of a dandelion and know they will come true. We climb on trees, fall off again, lie on the grass, gaze up to the clouds and marvel at their forms and puffiness. We imagine what it would be like to sit on a cloud or dance on one. At night we look at the stars and imagine living on one. Our parents thought we had imaginary friends but we knew so much better.

Sometimes I wonder if fish know they live in a fishbowl, do they realize how much more is out there? Or are they confined to a world that can only be described in inches, sand and plastic flowers? I used to have fish, but they have all left, leaving an empty tank of water. I have been meaning to foster some more fish but have neglected to do so. I used to watch them sometimes, slowly swimming from side to side, as though taking part in a dance, like slow moving whirling dervishes.
I imagine what is must be like to live in a small world measured only in inches or feet. When I was younger I used to fish a few times a year; though I have long given it up, I do recall those same thoughts with fish in the wild, and did they know there was so much more to the world. Some fish do temporarily fly out of the water but that is according to their biology and nature, most fish stay underwater, so I guess some fish must know of another world.
We can ask this same question of ourselves, what world do we live in? And is there more than we know? We live in and sometimes understand the material world that we inhabit. This is our world of the five senses, touching, tasting, and feeling, hearing and seeing, this sensory world is the only one most of us know. However, something wonderful that drives the human being is the desire to understand, to know who built this sensory experience that we are flitting through. This is the beauty of being human; we have the need and the attitude to explore and discover. Humans are infatuated with discovery; one of the greatest questions we still ask is why.
Our own reality is questionable. When we ask ourselves-what do we truly now of reality, it becomes a tentative word. We find that both modern science and ancient philosophy tell us of other worlds and other states. The sensory world that we are born into is only one facet of the existence of being; many practices and teachings exist that tell us of these other worlds. Science tells us of the microscopic world which exists outside of our seeing, a world that exists outside of our own awareness that we cannot see without the aid of technology.
We live in a sensory world; this means that our tentative reality comes in through our sensory experiences. We see things happen, we can smell, taste, touch, and hear thing happen, we orient ourselves with these senses, these sense are kind of like our guiding compass. When there is an outside ripple in the sensory world we perceive this disturbance in some way and it is interpreted in our brain and this forms our world. Whatever we sense must pass through our mental filters, simple experiences can be ultimately become twisted into a monstrous crisis.
Our mental filters are known as schemas, they are kind of like glasses that we see the world through and if our glasses or our schema are cracked or dirty we perceive the world in that same cracked or dirty way. We must be strong and struggle to keep our filters free from contaminants, otherwise we will continue to experience the sense based on our past experiences.
Our species seems to be fascinated with this “other world” idea, the idea that something can exist that we cannot see or perceive has mesmerized us for thousands of years. The Earthly life that we live is bleak much of the time, sure there is some joy and happiness, but we also must agree that life is dark, life like everything else is composed of two opposites, to keep it simple, life presents as light and dark, and there is an awful lot of dark present here. So it seems functional to think about these other worlds, humans feel their own restriction and build ideas that there are other states of being.
We like to think of ourselves as free creatures, but as one comedian said, “If you think you’re free, try going somewhere without money”, is freedom just an illusion? If it isn’t, then why do people feel trapped? Humans need to realize that they are trapped; perhaps even all living things are trapped by the earthly realm, trapped by an unjust economic system, trapped by indentured servitude, and even trapped by their own mental illnesses. Once we come to accept the idea that we are trapped on multiple levels, we can then start striving towards breaking out of these restrictions, we move towards an exploration of these different worlds.
The most important world is our own psychological landscape; in becoming adept at strolling around our inner landscape our outer landscape will appear to change and will even become more magical. The old alchemists used the phrase “as above, so below”, what I feel this means is that what is inside a person will continue to seek the same on the outside, that there is a pull or attraction of like elements. It is not too far fetched to believe that by nurturing the inside, or our own mind, the outer world will change. Whatever dominantly exists inside the person be it, depression, chaos, good, evil, that element inside of us will be attracted to that same principle in the world. So in changing the phrase “as above, so below” just a little we see that the “the inside, is as the outside”.
There exists the idea of seeking the magic of life, to change our prison state we need to see our relationship to this magic of life. Life’s magic is a difficult concept to explain and involves in using our five senses but also going above and beyond these normal routes of seeing, we need to involve feeling and emotion, we need to merge the psychological landscape with the outside landscape.
A woman once came to me with relationship trouble and issues of co-dependency, very quickly that patient brought up a scenario that she needed to talk about and that was her relationship to a black Crow. Every day or at least every day, she would take a break from her job and spend her time in the break area which was an outside area that people would congregate to a couple times per day. She recalled that there was a crow that would sit on an adjacent building from her and caw at her whenever she was outside. At first thought one would think that this is a serious problem of losing reality and in some cases perhaps it can be, but she gained a little freedom from that crow and that crow solved most of her issues without much intervention from me. She was establishing a relationship between herself and that magic of life; she was opening herself up to signs and synchronicities, in establishing that connection and with a little research on the proper symbolism of the crow, she received her little bit of magic and realized that the crow symbolized new beginnings for her and a letting go of her co-dependent behavior. She bypassed logic and went for the intuitive feeling and was rewarded through using intuition.
In another example of the bit of magic, a colleague of mine was providing counseling in prison to inmates and every jail has their frequent attendees and this particular jail had “John”, the old man who drank too much and always got himself in trouble. One his last visit of his last arrest my friend suggested that “John” resembled a fragile animal who is always trying to make his way down to the pond to get a drink, but each time he attempts to drink from the pond he is snatched by a crocodile. This truly was “John’s” last visit as he died shortly after; everyone in the prison really liked him and most were grieving with the loss at losing their jail ‘mascot”. A number of days later my friend woke up late one night and forgot to turn his television off, he woke up to a small animal being taken by a large crocodile on a random animal television program. In some way this synchronistic magic helped him deal with the grief of losing his client.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time, a Chronos and a Kairos, Chronos is the personification of time in pre-Socratic philosophy and later literature and also stands for time as we know it, a minute, a day or even a year, a chronometer indeed measures time, we have them on our wrist and in our cell phones and they wake us up for our day of slavery. But the important word here is Kairos, a Kairos is the most opportune time, a moment when something of significance happens, it is a time out of time, a more qualitative time, the time when life’s magic is most likely to strike us. Opening ourselves we can strive to see and perhaps catch a glimpse of those other worlds, and in seeing, feeling and perceiving those other worlds we build a living bridge connecting the world of magic with the world of earth. If this bridge cannot be connected, then the person will remain living in his or her very small world.
Many people throughout history have uncovered this bridge, the bridge is a deep connection to the worlds around us, we are an exploring species but at the same time we are scared of looking inside ourselves, so scared that oftentimes when you turn on the television it is other peoples realities that we watch. Life should be approached from a strange angle, a different viewpoint, only then, when we remove our logic, can we see with intuition. That is not to say that logic is bad, it has its place in our day to day use. When we approach something from upside down view we see life from a different perspective and it allows us to break out of those earthly bonds and we can begin to perceive the magic around us.
Most people have developed a very rational and sometimes dysfunctional relationship to their surroundings and it helps to approach life with a slightly irrational approach. An irrational approach helps us to plant seeds in ourselves and our children, so that they can see they are not truly separate from the world but rather a part of it. We begin to understand that the world, ourselves and all life around us is one big web or tapestry, and therein lays interdependence. I try everyday to have my patients see that there is a large world of spirit that needs to be connected with and needs to be nurtured, but few, very few, make that connection, when I talk about this connection to the world of spirit and how it can help them they just tend to look at me like I have seven heads. This is, most of the time, my biggest failure in my professional career, helping people to see their own worlds of spirit. It feels as though I am trying to explain colors to someone who is blind.
Everyone should work at expanding their worlds, both physically, emotionally, and spiritually, we should strive to bridge the world of above with the world of below, “as above, so below” goes the quote of old which can be perceived many ways. Here we perceive it as forming the bridge between the world of flesh and the world of spirit.

“Strive to enter those other worlds, for they are the greatest teachers”






False Gods and Memorials

“Seek not the image on the outside but rather seek the image which lay inside, seeking the Imago Dei, or the image of god on the outside of yourself is akin to grasping at your image in the reflection of water”

Pascal once said that “all of man’s folly results from the simple fact that he cannot remain quietly in a room”. He also stated that man is in conflict and denial about their mortal state. With human beings in such a position of denial concerning their mortal state-distraction seems a likely friend. Sufis, who practice their whirling dance, strive to dissolve worldly attachments through their frenetic, daze-like dance state; they strive to become closer to the imago dei.
Humans are like this, we constantly strive to find peace, god, calm, tranquility on the outside of ourselves, as if we could walk into a supermarket and order a pound of tranquility from the local butcher. This is not the way to find that higher state.
This has led us astray from who and what we actually are, it makes us avoid ourselves, to know thyself, is not the most important precept anymore. We wander as though we are on an eternal penitential pilgrimage to nowhere; we have constructed a self-imposed purgatory.
Not all those who wander are lost, but all those who wander to find something on the outside of them are lost. Cain was forced to wander for penitence for murdering his brother; human beings have a sense of wanderlust, a constant walking towards one mirage or another. That wanderlust is evident in our biological history, as hunter gatherers we wandered according to where it would be most sustainable, humans also once engaged in transhumance or the movement between winter and summer pastures, in fact some still do, and our psychological history, remember that humans were once foragers and traveled with the seasons and the food and it is this idea of wanderlust that has crept into our deep longing to a higher connection. We don’t heed the ancient wisdom of the more ‘primitive humans”, life is a bridge, but a bridge only to be crossed, we should never try to build our house on the bridge.
Religion can be thought to exist on multiple levels, for one, it is a system of like-minded people who follow a shepherd or god-figure and also a control scheme and in that respect it is no different from any other modern day corporation. The religious are the wayward spiritual ones who have lost faith in themselves and need a master to follow.
Why does mankind continue to follow the invisible gods and the false memorials? Well, the answer to that is that the world is a pretty scary fuckin place and once you tear away all the candy and the sweet toppings it is a brutal fucker, it takes us in and casts us out without a thought, it holds no prejudice as do we, but is impartial to anyone, life is very random and will fuck you up in an instant
This beautiful brutality of life scares us; it forces us to search for protection from its random brutishness. We are so egoic, we develop a tendency to think ourselves very special and unique and in this specialness we imagine that life is out to get us, that it wakes up in the morning and says let’s get them. In our fear and panic we conjure up gods and goddesses, we hope that they are real, that they are here and that they will take care of their creator children, praying that they will keep us from harm.
Carl Jung once said “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being”. As children we were scared of the dark, some adults are still fearful of the dark, we find it empty and void, it is the unknown, and since the darkness is void of light no images of it enter our eyes, so we concoct our own imagery of what may be in that dark.

Just for fun, lets engage in a little experiment, just for an hour, follow someone around, only doing what they do, only going where they go, while doing this, look at your mental state, how do you feel doing only what someone else does? This is the craziness we build in our world, this idea that we must follow someone or something else other than ourselves. Following something around like a lost puppy is not naturally correct, we are free thinking people, and we have, over many other species, a deeper wisdom concerning life.
Our own mortality surely plays a role in our search for the divine, we realize that our corporeal body is temporary, our body is just a loaner; we must, at the end, give it back from whence it came. It is this mortality, this weakness that we perceive which drives us to search outside of ourselves. We need something permanent, some thought, image or ideal that we will last forever.
Death is now something hidden from us, we see it in movies, the news and other forms of media, but many of us truly don’t encounter death on a personal level. The church bell in the town does not ring anymore when someone’s dies, families don’t wash the body of the departed, funerals are held in business establishments, and there is a disconnection between us and death.
People have this burning need to categorize and define their world and their life. This life is the great cosmic joke, we are born against our will, given a name we never chose, we are anointed with a religion that we most likely didn’t want, perhaps a family we didn’t want. Over time we find that we must compromise between our true nature and the nature that was imposed upon us.
We are also sent to school to train us to be productive citizens of a government that most of us don’t want, followed by a job or career that most of us hate or at least strongly dislike and then we die, this is the great cosmic joke and this is part of mans quest to define and make sense of this world. It is akin to trying to describe colors to someone who is blind, to try and make sense of life is a fruitless endeavor as it is fluid and ever changing, we also must be ever changing, or non-grasping. Remember if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. All systems of thought and control are made by men and emptying our cup is the only true way forward.
Money is now something that is highly treasured, money is power, control and happiness. This is another delusion brought on by the powers that be; it is just another form of control, as the comedian Bill Hicks once said, “It's all about money, not freedom, y'all, okay? Nothing to do with fuckin' freedom. If you think you're free, try going somewhere without fucking money, okay?”
One old quote of unknown origin sums money perfectly-“When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money”. But money continues to rule the lives of human beings, there are those that have it and those that want it; this prison is imposed on us from a society and government that is not following true nature. Money can almost be thought of as the new god, for if there was no money the world would cease to spin.
There is also the problem of too much self love, people who become enveloped within themselves, they become narcissistic, and they become egoic. They form for themselves a tyrannical diadem of importance. The idea of learning about yourself is so that you can let yourself go, you can become that empty cup, however many people travel inside their psyche in the wrong way and become trapped in the illusion that they are so important.
“Follow no one other than yourself, create and deepen your own philosophy of life, realize that you need not heroes, gods or goddesses, for all you really need is within yourself




Mercy


“The willingness to forgive is a sign of spiritual and emotional maturity. It is one of the great virtues to which we all should aspire. Imagine a world filled with individuals willing both to apologize and to accept an apology. Is there any problem that could not be solved among people who possessed the humility and largeness of spirit and soul to do either -- or both -- when needed?”

In the film The Karate Kid, John Kresse says “We do not train to be merciful here. Mercy is for the weak. Here, in the streets, in competition: a man confronts you, he is the enemy. An enemy deserves no mercy”, this quote gives you an idea of what mercy is by looking at the inverse meaning. Mercy is defined as the act of kindness towards those that are suffering, when you are in an argument and knowing full well you can verbally tear that person apart but you do not. Are you merciful?
Nature can be merciful, as when a tornado veers off the path from a populated town or it can be unsympathetic when it destroys it, it can also destroy and take away everything that you love. Nature does not do this to you because of some personal grudge, it is just that shit happens and shit will happen often.
We can try to be merciful towards other people, but mercy must be received as well as given, and most of the time I find myself perhaps not giving mercy, but also not be merciless. We cannot alleviate suffering outside of ourselves, only the actual person can do that, sociality can dampen those radical, unwanted feelings, but it cannot alleviate those feelings and mercy cannot take them away either.
In trying to talk about mercy, we will focus on mercy as compassion, combined with forgiveness and acceptance. Acceptance is a key to living a good life, when we learn to accept that life can sometimes be harsh, we discover that we can embrace the bleakness of life and we learn to accept that rough treatment as lessons to be learned, the darkness becomes an event to grow from, it becomes a period of self-discovery. As a psychotherapist I treat many people with anxiety, (anxiety seems to be a very common diagnosis in today’s society), acceptance is a vital solution to resolving their feelings of anxiety and panic, it is quite funny that when patients learn to accept and not to control themselves the anxiety many times goes away or reduces to normal levels. We learn to have compassion towards ourselves as well other human beings and other forms of life.
We must learn to be compassionate and forgiving towards ourselves and others, with compassion towards ourselves as being most important, being compassionate towards yourself provides a template on how to treat others.
The question then rises if we cannot relieve others of their suffering, how then, can we be compassionate towards those things which we cannot fix? I suppose the only answer is that we must bear it with strong shoulders and let others agonies humble us, for it could be us that may be filled with anguish at any time. And perhaps if we can do no good, then we should do no harm.
There is one thing that helps me to develop compassion and that is the idea that the earth that we live on is akin to a school and some just haven’t learnt their lessons yet, they haven’t studied enough. I imagine that people are in different grades, some are in elementary school, some high school and some college and there are those of us who have graduated from the earth program. Everyone is at a different stage in their spiritual, emotional and psychological developments.
The sad state of affairs is that most are still in elementary school, a stylistic adult kindergarten, where the teacher continues to smack us with the ruler and instead of looking at ourselves and what we can do we develop our own sense of ourselves we develop this tendency to blame others, to point fingers and externally blame other things on our own problems and dilemmas. If I had a dollar every time a patient blamed someone else for their problems, I am not joking, I could retire today.
Acceptance is a vital key to living a good, strong life, when we can accept that life is sometimes a wicked adversary we expect life to beat us up from time to time, we expect it and we accept it. Acceptance makes it easier to let go of wrongs that either were done to us or perhaps we have done to other people.
The past does not exist, it is only a memory, a single sliver of a grander picture, it can also be a behavior that is played out over time, but it truly does not exist, the only place that the past exists is in our mind and our memory. Until the gods of physics make a seminal breakthrough in their research and determine that the past and future exist together with the present the past won’t truly exist. We live within a self constructed artificial draconian philosophy that is as fallacious as a pig that flies across the firmament.

“All things comes from that single burst at the beginning of the universe, from that single big bang everything comes forth, in that single point of time and energy existed apple pies, human beings, dog, stars, planets and plants, everything comes from that one thing, you don’t even have to imagine that you are everything, because you are”



Emptiness

Nature is singing its anthem, the ensemble of sounds play amidst a civilized chaos, The crickets at night, rubbing their wings, burst into song, telling me there is another way. Their song is sweet, sacchariferous, as delicious as a spring well. Is this what Mumon meant when he talked of the gateless gate? Could that door to bliss be always open, staring us boldly in the face and all this time the jester performs his hidden dance waiting to give us our applause.

Throughout this tumultuous life we lead, it is wise to keep yourself empty; it's one of most important feats that one must strive towards throughout one’s lifetime. It is beneficial, it is healthy to mimic a calm, pool of water, with no ripples and no waves; we should imitate that water and reflect back all that we are exposed to. From the time we are born we are pumped full of others ideas and societies culture.
The mind is multifaceted, it can be thought of as the trickster in the most primitive form, the mind is the joker who sets out to hinder our way, mind must be mastered for full evolution to occur. The story of The Ten Bulls by Kakuan Shien describes this journey well:
“In the pasture of this world, I endlessly push aside the tall grasses in search of the bull.
Following unnamed rivers, lost upon the interpenetrating paths of distant mountains,
My strength failing and my vitality exhausted, I cannot find the bull.
I only hear the locusts chirping through the forest at night.
Along the riverbank under the trees, I discover footprints!
Even under the fragrant grass I see his prints.
Deep in remote mountains they are found.
These traces no more can be hidden than one's nose, looking heavenward.
I hear the song of the nightingale.
The sun is warm, the wind is mild, willows are green along the shore,
Here no bull can hide!
What artist can draw that massive head, those majestic horns?
I seize him with a terrific struggle.
His great will and power are inexhaustible.
He charges to the high plateau far above the cloud-mists,
Or in an impenetrable ravine he stands.
The whip and rope are necessary,
Else he might stray off down some dusty road.
Being well trained, he becomes naturally gentle.
Then, unfettered, he obeys his master.
Mounting the bull, slowly I return homeward.
The voice of my flute intones through the evening.
Measuring with hand-beats the pulsating harmony, I direct the endless rhythm.
Whoever hears this melody will join me.
Astride the bull, I reach home.
I am serene. The bull too can rest.
The dawn has come. In blissful repose,
Within my thatched dwelling I have abandoned the whip and rope.
Whip, rope, person, and bull -- all merge in No-Thing.
This heaven is so vast no message can stain it.
How may a snowflake exist in a raging fire?
Here are the footprints of the patriarchs.
Too many steps have been taken returning to the root and the source.
Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning!
Dwelling in one's true abode, unconcerned with that without --
The river flows tranquilly on and the flowers are red.
Barefooted and naked of breast, I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden, and I am ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life;
Now, before me, the dead trees become alive. “
If we remember what the trickster is in mythology and folklore, it is usually seen as a force outside of us, for the Native Americans it could be the fox, coyote, raven or rabbit, even Thor had to deal with his brother Loki, who was the archetypal trickster. This idea of the trickster is evident in almost all cultures on earth. How many times does our mind get us into trouble?
The old Zen story ‘chasing the bull” perfectly illustrates the idea of catching our own mind; it is a wild horse that continues to buck and neigh until it recognizes its master. It is a wonderful story concerning our own relationship with our own minds and I encourage you to search it out for yourself. You can liken the quest for mastery over your mind to the game Pokémon where you must journey out and catch these creatures, as an analogy the creatures themselves would be a projection or image of your own mind that you are trying to catch and train, eventually fighting Pokémon against Pokémon.
When we speak of creation, we think of it beginning in the void, in the empty space. That emptiness is what allows for creation to take place, without that emptiness there would be nothing to have and to hold today as you presently read this book. All things come from that same emptiness or that nothingness. The notion of being empty is quite a bit of wordplay, being empty allows you to be all, the usefulness of a bowl or cup is the that very emptiness provides the means to hold anything.
When we speak of emptiness we must think in a very non-dualistic way, the western world is plagued with dualistic thinking, even the nature of our politics is very dualistic, the vast majority of people are either republican or democrat, both of which carry little meaning these days and in some twisted way the definition of one can be interchanged to describe the other.
The nature of keeping yourself empty is not actually giving everything up or refraining from things but rather to hold opposing thoughts in our mind, we give up the useless categorizations and compartmentalization’s that plague our thought processes. One thing I try to stress to patients that I work with is that life does not wake up and decide to torment us, for the most part life is like cancer, it does not discriminate as to who it lays the burdens on, it never chooses, tall or short, fat or skinny, white or black, life will try, at one time or another, to fuck us all. The life around us is akin to the pleroma, it is everything and nothing at the same time.
We can never be total masters of our own mind; we can never fully rid it of all our worries or thoughts, for we will always have a hintergedanken. That obscure German word means, ‘things at the back of your mind’, there will always be memories, drives, emotions, thoughts, fears etc. lurking in the recesses. We can becomes masters of our minds, we can empty our mind, but it will never fully be under control, there is still the trickster or the joker will be there to laugh at us………..sometimes. That joker is an archetypal image that exists in all cultures, he is the court jester, the small injection of humor into a bleak and hard world, the joker, the clown keeps us humble, but some of us have failed to pay him any attention.
Emptiness has been conversely defined as boredom, alienation, apathy and voidness; however, it is nothing like those bleak definitions but rather the exact opposite. An empty mind is driven to not cling to any artifacts or emotions, by not clinging it has access to all around it, it sees the neutrality in the elements of life and living. To create a new painting you must first have a blank canvas, a canvas of non-duality, non-judgment, a middle road.
Some Buddhist sects have the word Sunyata, which defines the end product of emptiness, it is the not-self, it is the merger of the flesh body we carry with us to the pleroma around us, we see then, a vital interdependence with ourselves and our environment, everything is us and we are everything, we remain in this world but not of it, and we are as above, so below.
When we move through our lives we accumulate many, many things, things such as emotion, feeling, memories, thoughts, fears, anxieties, depressions and the list could go on for quite some time, an emptied mind, a mind that does not attach should mimic that clear mountain lake, reflecting back all that life bears to it. There is no grasping, no holding of either good or bad.
The human body is made up of atoms, many, many atoms and most of those atoms are empty space, it would appear that emptiness is natural to us, but in this waking life we are drawn to it like a moth to a flame. When we are born we are born empty, we are a Tabula Rasa, a clean slate. Emptiness is a beautiful state of non-attachment, but the idea of emptiness has been twisted by our cultures, it now seems to be a negative “in thing” with our younger generations. It appears in our culture of the west as a self-deprecating term, a negative idea of oneself, interestingly enough among many of our children and youth.
I believe that one must first master being alone and accepting their aloneness to next embrace their own emptiness, quoting William James, one of the earliest Psychologists, “the greatest source of terror in childhood is solitude”, accepting aloneness and embracing emptiness is a hard path to follow and is not without its many pitfalls along the way.
On cultivating this path in your own life it is best to consider the phrase from Nietzsche ““Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
The treasure box that enables us live a passionate life without excessive worry is buried inside our own mind, the best place to hide it is the place where people have failed to look or are too scared to look. A quote by Friedrich Holderlin tells us “But where there is danger there grows also what saves”. The very remedy for all of life’s ailments and ills are hidden inside the one place that is the repository of all our fears, where our shadow self resides, it is where that jester lives, laughing at us as we bumble through life as apparent idiots unable to read our own maps to our own buried treasure.
We must also be aware of the illusions in life or the Fata Morgana, ships out at sea would see these illusions that sometimes appeared at islands in the skies and on your own journey you may see what can be a mirage, do not get enticed by the illusion but rather go beyond the illusion, look to see who the real wizard is behind the gates of Oz, realize that you are Dorothy and all the others characters of The Wizard of Oz wrapped up as the current flesh body you are, the journey is the same, “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore”. In the Wizard of Oz, Kansas is the prime earth that we live on, Oz is another world to be uncultured into our souls and then we return to our prime earth or “our Kansas” with our newfound wisdom and insights.
The aim of emptiness is to become the bodhisattva or the Brahma, we reach a state of interbeing, existing in concert with every other thing that has ever lived or has been created. In emptiness, we strive for no-thing, no-self, we strive to only see one gigantic life interwoven and spun together resembling a spiders web. One could also call emptiness, an ego death, the killing of one’s sense of “I” leaving only an empty ‘we”.


“We must de-condition ourselves if we ever want to find our true nature, we must leave society’s influences out of the equation. We must, at times, shed the outer world of sense, and enter into that part of the world which is more akin to our primal state, the state of truth, just as you are”


The Road


“I feel like we have to keep our eyes on the road. Being nostalgic is like taking an off ramp and getting a sandwich - and then you get back on the highway. I don't want to be spending the rest of my life at the gas station.”


Eddie Vedder

The Road lies forever in front of us and forever in the rear of our gaze, it exists in both states independent of our not seeing it. Thinking about the meaning of that word will deepen the experience of your life, a road is a connection between two or more places, it bridges A to B and A to C, it is a means travel, either physically or psychologically, we travel both roads, they are related and interdependent on one another.
One can argue whether or not the road of your life is predestined or can be altered with applying your act of free will, I don’t care much for the argument because I believe it is a little bit of both. It is slightly pre-destined and slightly in our control, so in my mind both camps are correct and an argument is not necessary, besides it far more important to talk about the journey itself and that is where the richness of the idea of one’s life road can enlighten us.
One cannot argue that the road we travel is bumpy and sometimes with seemingly endless mountains, sometimes even of course, straying into darker and darker terrain before seeing the sun rise and moving into territories of light. Our life’s road resembles the picture of an unequal serpentine winding its way through the land. Our road is made from many choices, some of these choices will play out immediately, others in years to come and even others can be very impactful, some may hurt and some may feel good, we are the sum of the choices along our road and each choice a nail in a plinko board.
The road is like a game and it can be either a game well-played or it can be a time where we get beaten and hammered, not playing the game well can force us to feel like hating life and its journey, viewing ourselves as victim and not survivor. If we take the position that life is a game, and we play on that idea for a while it then follows that how you view a game plays on how you will experience your life. Why does one play a game? In the western sense, one plays a game to come in first, to win some trophy, to overcome others, but it puts people in a me versus them frame of mind. I prefer to think of a game as something you would do to have fun, a game should be challenging but rewarding, it should carry a rising difficulty that is dependent upon the level of the player.
Our road is similar to our DNA, it is ours and it is unique, we will share our road with others who will come and go, some of those people that come in and out of our lives will stay longer than others and some shorter, but all serve a purpose, each one of the people in our lives are meant to be there, even if they are the bane of your universe, they are there to teach. Our road and all our visitors will look like the image below.


People will be popping in and out of our lives, some visiting and some staying, sometimes our road will be what appears as traumatic, but whatever happens and whatever it looks like, it is ours, it is the culmination of all of our choices and all of the positions that life sometimes puts us in.
In Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, among all of the decay and the crumbling landscapes there is mention that the father and son carry the fire, and the boy asks the father “Do we still carry the fire?”, here the road is not as important as the way that we see our own road. Do you carry that fire? Here we see that the journey is not all that important, nor is the destination, the rich man and the poor man will be buried in the same hole, what is important is what you carry on this road and what choices you will make.
There are an infinite number of paths to take, at any point in time we are presented with more than one option to continue our journey, Robert Frost tells us this in his poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, 'Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood', two choices are there for us to make, one choice is not necessarily better or worse, it is just a choice, it is just a path. We will encounter the literal fork in the road many, many times, we will make a choice and our road altered.
Across the world cinema and literature is populated by “out-of-this-world” stories concerning the road as both presenting in the physical form and the allegorical, the road movie as it exists, always concerns the journey of someone or something and this journey is often eye-opening or magical in a sense as it alters the perspective of those who spend time on its road.
This journey that takes place within the plot of the road movie is akin to the idea of the heroic myth laid out by Joseph Campbell, these twelve distinct stages of the heroic journey always yields some treasure or some insight, similar to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and we ride this road facing its troubles and temptations, letting each rough road smooth us over as we travel.
We learn while on this road, our road is a map to our life it is a map that is designed both by us and the powers that be, so it rests on the assumption that we can control some of our destiny, not everything is left to chance.
If you looked at a road from the sky, it would appear as a definition against the whole plethora of the world. This road is a definition, it is something that defines us, how we tread on it decides our character, our nobility,and the meaning of our life.


“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it'
-Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller


An Earthly Shroud

A green sarcophagus rolls along, alone Mist for a friend, death begins to pound, throwing green embers form the box, Discernment strikes the owls eye, the victim claims the lottery


A human being treads on the crust of the Earth for only a short time, he or she, may live out a certain number of years, like a play on the stage with only a finite numbers of acts, sometimes in joy or pain or boredom. This journey that everyone takes leaves only a few footprints that fade over time. Some people live but an instant while others may last for a century or more, it seems unfair or unjust at first glance, but nature does not play favorites. Although we all must leave at one time or another no one knows when they will hand in their key and check out of their room. We all know we must leave and many of us become sad with the idea of death, of giving up our Earthly shroud.
Think about your own life for a moment; think about how much time you have already played, think about how much time you may have left. Will you be ready when you leave this beautiful planet with its blue skies, green trees, chirping birds, family and friends? We are here for such a short time, a short time to get to know this feeling of self, to fully accept this self, and to ultimately love your self unconditionally, but at times we are our greatest judge, our most evil critic, often smashing the gavel on the courtroom table and shouting guilty, never truly living the life we should.
Perhaps if we engage in a little wordplay we can better understand death as a natural part of life, perhaps it may even lead us to think of it as a new life. Take for instance the word shroud; think about that word, what do you think it means. When your vision is shrouded it means you cannot truly see what is right in front of you, to shroud something is to conceal it, we wrap a dead body in a burial shroud, a blind on a window is also a type of shroud, a shroud is that which conceals. A simple thought exercise concerning the meaning of the word often times leads us to a greater understanding of the concepts related to it.
When one is born they are born into their certain shroud, into their body and their skin, as a small infant grows its body dies over and over again, constantly shedding pieces of it here and there, most of the body that you have is not body you were born with. Science tells us that our skin is renewed ever month or so, we are constantly shedding parts of ourselves. The only parts that we may carry over the full course of our lives could only consist of our brains, bones and enamel; it is safe to say that most everything else dies and then replenishes itself. We still grow old however, time takes its toll and we march towards our expiration, every single living thing takes this death march throughout its life. Everyone has an expiration date even though the manufacturer does not stamp it into our skin; it is there, our end date of finite existence.
In philosophy the word identity means roughly “relation”, quite the opposite as to how modern psychology labels identity as our uniqueness. It stresses that sameness of a thing. It could also tell us how this shroud may in fact work, how it may keep us all very different but yet all the same, and how it keeps us all very confused. Of course when we’re shrouded we feel confused, it is only logical to think that a shrouding obscures one’s vision, its physical vision, but also its psychic vision. Death is our universality with other people, animals and all living things, perhaps maybe even with “non-living things”, it is the one thing that we have in common, we will all meet our end, there is no disputing that fact. It is good to have prepared ourselves for our own death and we have our living moments to help us to understand what death means to us.
The following parable of the mustard seed is a beautiful story about the universality of death, Kisa Gotami who was a devoutly spiritual woman had lost her beloved only son. She was unwilling to accept his death, before her son died she went house to house begging for medicine to save her son. Her son soon passed away and people saw her grief and told her to go to see the Buddha, perhaps he could help with her suffering. She brought the body of her deceased son before the Buddha who instructed her to gather mustard seeds from households not touched by death and from these seeds he would make a medicine that would bring her son back to life. She felt for once since his death some relief and with a bag in her hand went from door to door collecting mustard seeds from houses not touched by death, everyone she came in contact with was willing to give her a mustard seed, but they all told her they had been touched in some way by death, after many days she started to understand the universality of death.
At times people try to satiate their fear of non-existence with ideas of the afterlife or nirvana or reincarnation, there is however no solid evidence for any of these afterlife ideas, the Buddhists' speak of the Pure Abodes, the Christians cling to the idea of heaven, others that they will return to again engage in the things that they love. No one has any idea about the afterlife and if they do you can be absolutely positive that their wrong, everything we know is wrong, even this book that your reading doesn't know, it has no answers, it only helps one to plumb the depths and to accept the life their given.
The appreciation of life can be increased if we keep the idea of death in our pocket, everyday that you wake up realize that your going to die, life then becomes something magical and precious. Thinking about our death in a playful way allows us to truly live our lives, it is liberating. There is no morbidity in wondering about your death, reflection on the idea of Memento Mori is in fact healthy, it is good to ponder your own non-existence.
The Grimm Fairly tales gives us another meaning of a shroud, which can mean “a rest or sleep”, the tale is below:
There was once a mother who had a little boy of seven years old, who was so handsome and lovable that no one could look at him without liking him, and she herself worshiped him above everything in the world. Now it so happened that he suddenly became ill, and God took him to himself; and for this the mother could not be comforted, and wept both day and night. But soon afterwards, when the child had been buried, it appeared by night in the places where it had sat and played during its life, and if the mother wept, it wept also, and, when morning came, it disappeared. As, however, the mother would not stop crying, it came one night, in the little white shroud in which it had been laid in its coffin, and with its wreath of flowers round its head, and stood on the bed at her feet, and said, “Oh, mother, do stop crying, or I shall never fall asleep in my coffin, for my shroud will not dry because of all thy tears which fall upon it.” The mother was afraid when she heard that, and wept no more. The next night the child came again, and held a little light in its hand, and said, “Look, mother, my shroud is nearly dry, and I can rest in my grave.” Then the mother gave her sorrow into God’s keeping, and bore it quietly and patiently, and the child came no more, but slept in its little bed beneath the earth.
Here the spirit of the boy is begging the mother not to cry for he to is crying along with her, which is wetting his shroud making it impossible to get any rest. Rest and sleep are in fact important in living life as well as concerning the life of spirit. Our body is finite and has limited energy, we have only so much gas in our tank and rest and sleep is required in both states, as the old alchemists said, as above, so below.
Death is often times personified as a tall being in a cloak, sometimes with a skull for a face and other times the face is shrouded from human eyes. Death often times carries a sickle or scythe, a simple old farming tool used in a harvest. Death in some way is a harvest, it is a culmination of all that has grown, what death is exactly or what happens after is speculation.
Death is now thought of as more of a process than an event, although the event of the last respiration or blip on the electronic machine is an event, the event of death is buried in the greater process of dying. Indeed it takes courage to view death as a move to a different spiritual state. Death has been and will continue to be a feared event until we change our idea of what death is. It is wise to remember that no one truly knows what life is or what death is.
Whether we think of death as an initiation, a harvest, or an end, there is no mistaking the fact that it hurts. It was mentioned before that death is the great universality among all sentient beings, In no other way is there such a great equalizer. Even now they know that animals grieve, they miss and remember and feel death and the loss that comes with it. Elephants will mourn and even return to the site of death of loved ones to gather and to even feel the bones of the deceased. Countless stories are written about pets missing their owners. Everything feels death and loss, there is no escape from that truth.
Senescence is a word many people might not know about, it is simply the states of being old, of one living out their life and dying of old age. Senescence is a beautiful word and it implies that one has lived a long life, what it doesn't define is how someone lives their life. Most people would want to pass on from senescence and there is a beautiful zen story that talks about this:
A rich man asked a Zen master to write something down that could encourage the prosperity of his family for years to come. It would be something that the family could cherish for generations. On a large piece of paper, the master wrote, "Father dies, son dies, grandson dies."

The rich man became angry when he saw the master's work. "I asked you to write something down that could bring happiness and prosperity to my family. Why do you give me something depressing like this?"

"If your son should die before you," the master answered, "this would bring unbearable grief to your family. If your grandson should die before your son, this also would bring great sorrow. If your family, generation after generation, disappears in the order I have described, it will be the natural course of life. This is true happiness and prosperity."
The story above talks about the order of things, the order of life, and because life is so unpredictable there are times where this order is disrupted by some force of life and the order of things is not followed. When the order of things is not followed a trauma may develop, causing pain, pain and anguish. Trauma is derived from a word meaning “to tear”, meaning that the wound never heals or never closes it is always reopened in some way. When this happens there is work to do, to help the self heal from the trauma to avoid the re-opening of the wound. The Chinese have an old saying, “Life is a dream walking, death is going home”.




Conflict without Ego


“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be”
Alan Watts

Ego is usually defined as someones sense of self importance or sometimes as the mediator between the conscious or the unconscious, it is your personality and your story. It's one of a three part structure of the mind, The other two structures are the Id and the Superego, together they form the trinity of the human mind. The Id is usually defined as the impulsive part of the mind, the inner child who tantrums when it can't have a cookie, it whines and stamps its feet, the child wants it now. The superego is thought of as the internalization of societal and cultural norms and rules, similar to a moral compass. The Id takes a lot of heat in the modern world of psychology and is generally defined as the trouble maker of the three.
The tides of modern thought seem to be reverting to something entirely different and there is a general consensus that Ego may in fact be just as much of a troublemaker as the Id. Many people say the Ego is the concept of the personal “I”, Ego is from the Latin language and is translated as “I”, so when you say “I need” or “I want”, that is presumably the Ego talking, and I suppose the Ego has a name, it's your name, whatever your name maybe.
We can think of the Ego as a veil between what you think you are and what you actually are. Defined this way Ego becomes an illusion, a great deception that we play on ourselves. We think we should be this way or that way. It is the great trickster, the Achilles Heel for the human being. Great expectations arise from this deception and of course those great expectations are for the most part never met, which then creates more suffering. We suffer then because there is a rift or an unbalancing between who we are and what we think we should be.
When was Ego formed in our history is hard to say, biblically perhaps it was formed when we ate the forbidden fruit separating us from nature or perhaps it was during the Aurignacian period when cave paintings were created. It formed when we considered ourselves separate from nature, an observer of nature and not a complete part of nature. a part that was special and unique.