Thursday, March 6, 2025
Reality is keeping me on my toes. I have a hard time predicting how things will turn out. I keep getting surprised. I keep exclaiming “unbelievable!” Reality keeps falling short or exceeding my expectations. Often it meets expectations, but not always. So much of it seems to blow my mind. That’s because I used to feel trapped in my body. But now I realize that I’m not relegated to my body. What feels like an interiority is also an externality.
Spiritual awakening is like having a V8. For years you feel trapped, buried alive in a body, and what’s going on (both inner and outer) is mind-bogglingly unpredictable. It feels like randomness. But that’s what your average person sees. Nothing seems controllable, so I can’t trust it. It all seems renegade.
Well, what you see as reality is renegade. It’s fraught with danger, surprise, and shock. You can’t seem to get a hold of it, and your mind is blown time and time again; but this is what happened to The Buddha. He experienced a type of mind-blowing. He called it nirvana, the “blown out state.” To be more literal, it means “extinction” or “cessation”, like blowing out a candle’s flame.
The cessation of believing that you live in a specific body or mind is like extinction. You die, in a sense, to specificity and awaken to “everywhere,” and “everything.” You know this omniscience or omnipresence through a mysterious “knowledge” called trust. In and out of the body are alike, yet there is still something “other” than that – more to be discovered.
Reality seems uncertain, and death seems to be the only certainty. However, we seem to be on a quest to stop it. But do you really want to live in your mind and body forever? It blows my mind to think anyone would want that kind of unending suffering.