Live lightly, feel deeply...

My friend and remarkable artist and poet, Paul Bond, posted this on Facebook: "Aldous Huxley, the renowned 20th-century intellectual who wrote 'Brave New World', came to regret only one thing in life: how 'preposterously serious' he had been when he was younger.

"There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling... Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply."

Yeah, leave it to Huxley to pretty consistently blow my mind. He pulls apart two normally connected states: feeling light = feeling happy or frivolous; feeling deeply = feeling heavy. In fact, we even have the hippy vernacular, "That's heavy, man" in reacting to a spiritually deep, existential concept. And we pull back so as not to be sucked into the quicksands of our own life's ultimate meaning.

Huxley is suggesting to instead feel deeply the existential truth in the experience of life, without any need to heap loads of significance on it, or make it more important than anything else in this world.

If you've done any "manifesting" study, you know that usually the lightest of requests submitted to the Universe creates the fastest results. The Universe's responses, our body's needs, the consciousness of non-corporeal beings, God, even the thoughts of others, come into our awareness as whispers. We get used to a certain amplitude of cacophony in our modern society that seems to "drown out" these whispers and makes life seem "heavy" and isolated. We feel we need to work hard, slave away, keep our noses to the grindstone and only accept those obviously physical things as valid to our perceptions. The rest of the whispers lose their relevance.

Remember the butterfly flapping its wings causing an earthquake on the other side of the world? It's the leveling of the playing field between extreme amplitude and zero state--all is the same meaning, all is simply an effect. Everything is important, and yet nothing is, because it is all one system--one infinite connection of everything.

Perhaps it's a habit to only pay attention to big, loud, explosive experiences that rattle our senses and create flight or flight responses, when these types of experiences are the exception, not the rule. By keeping our filters turned up to protect ourselves from the intermittent drama-trauma of life, why not re-tune?

Take down the filters. Allow it all, feel it all, but skip lightly around and through it without caring or needing to somehow "do" something about it. The "doing" is not what is important. What is important is who you are being, because the Universe is responding only to how you are being, one way or the other. Why not lighten your life by being light? Be engaged with the vast and mysterious depths of life and yet enjoy the "unbearable lightness of being"?

Make Life a Meditation

I somewhat cynically used to say in my youth that unconscious meditation--the kind we all do when we are obediently serving The Matrix--is the single most untenable problem in human history.

I'll agree with that now in my mature years with the exception that "obediently serving The Matrix" is not "untenable". Why? Because it's a matter of choice. It's one thing to point out how we are all victims of our own unconscious behaviors (which is a victim statement in and of itself), it's entirely another to transcend that victim mentality with the freedom of choice.

I call the obedience to The Matrix hypnotic compliance. And meditation is the "red pill" available to you anytime to wake up from the trance.

I go further down the rabbit hole by claiming that the whole conscious-subconscious model of human psychology is a myth. We say that a person is "driven by subconscious motivations" when they misbehave or fall victim to depression, criminal activity or insanity. No. Why? Because if it were truly subconscious we wouldn't be conscious of it, and once conscious of it, it is no longer subconscious. I know, I know...sounds like semantics, but is it really?

Isn't it more accurate to say that a person chooses to give up their own power or self-determinism and that's what we're calling "subconscious motivations"? We choose to shut off our awareness of some things and then classify it as the "subconscious", which has a definition that includes "beyond our control". This is a myth. At some point there was a choice. Of course, we can also forget what we chose, but that's forgetting something on purpose in order to dodge responsibility for our actions.

There's a type of hiding in forgetfulness of our choices that got somehow mixed up with victim advocacy. When a person is a victim, others with control issues advocate for them, saying, "This person is not in control of their actions. They need me to help them live." This is all a master-slave crock of shit.

I got into a debate with a Caucasian friend of mine on Facebook who was bemoaning the fact that she felt she was--somewhere down deep inside--a racist. Despite the fact that her grandmother was black and her mother was brown, she saw something in herself that she labeled as "racist"--a kind of resistence or unwillingness to empathize with another person of a different skin color.

I said that it was a matter of choice, whether or not to be racist. And if there were racist thoughts and feelings coming up for her, that she could practice mindfulness meditation--a type of meditation that allows undesirable thoughts and feelings to simply float on by like clouds in the sky, and from this, infinite options show up to choose something different.

Well, this got her dander up. "I love meditation, but I find it incomplete as a means to address issues of social justice. There's more to do. And ingrained subconscious beliefs are not so easy to release... I worry about hiding behind spiritual concepts." Then don't hide. These "spiritual concepts" you speak of are what make the world go 'round. The thoughts we create that lead to the feelings and actions we do out there in the "real world" are all driven by our own choices. Failure to choose is at the heart of complacency and victimhood.

This discussion illustrated for me, once again, what I refer to as the "Quantum Reality Gap", which I've written about before. It's the perceived difference between what we desire to see in the world and what we think we see in the world. I'm saying that there really is no difference. It's just that everything is happening just as you've chosen (or not chosen) it to be. There's just time in there to make you doubt yourself.

Life can be a living meditation every moment by simply paying attention to your thoughts and words, allowing them to flow, and choosing something different when you want to change things. There is no powerful "subconscious" that is causing all the ills in your life--that's victim behavior. Choice is more powerful. Choose to be happy. Choose to be healthy. Choose to be the very best of who you are.

The Quantum Reality Gap

As kids we were all educated with the underlying premise that solid things acting upon solid things is the only way a solid thing changes. This, in fact, is still the prevailing worldview held by the majority. However, with the advent of quantum physics--that snarly and deeply subversive science that claims NOTHING is solid, has, well, created a whole new level of cognitive dissonance. That is, if you're tuned in.

The problem, in my view, stems from a deeply ingrained over-dependence on our almighty tool-using perceptions. If you can hold it in your hand, bang it on something, it's, well, real. This could not be argued with for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution here on planet rock. But now, it can.

I don't think people get the full impact of this extreme change in reality. It's like your postman came by with that blimp you ordered, and just put it in your curbside mailbox. You went out to retrieve it, realizing it was quite impossible that it was there at all, but then, you pulled it out--all 100 yards of length--and scratched your head, loaded the kids in the blimp and went off for ice cream.

That's cognitive dissonance, my friends. And that's basically the world we live in now, but we don't really get that it is.

Anyone who knows me, has heard of my current fascination with Access Consciousness. I love this modality because it requires you to "live in the question" as opposed to always seeking answers. This flies in the furry face of all us monkeys trying to "figure out" what "tool" to use to find the next answer. Because if you have the Answer, you can solve that problem, and by solving that problem with that answer, you think you'll be happier or at least understand why that problem is going on. Well, this is all bullshit, actually. With Access they push to stay in the question, ignoring answers, and simply being content with what awarenesses show up as a result of being in the question. By using this approach, you create a far greater range of potentials and possibilities--or quantum entanglements--from which you can choose your preferences.

The challenge with this mode of thinking and knowing is that it is pretty much the opposite of what we try to do, so we're much less willing or even able to accept that a question can create so much change. It's a reality gap--a quantum thinking gap. You mean we are actually creating every single moment that is happening to us? Yep. Even if you buy that--even a little bit--it is a bitch to wrap your head around it. In fact, the more you buy into the self-as-creator paradigm the more cognitively dissonant things become because you realize that because nothing is actually solid anymore (which was an illusion in the first place), a mere passing thought or intention can completely change your life. Of course, this was always true before, but then we attributed big life changes to "fate", "karma", "coincidence" or "synchronicity" without realizing that all those "escape terms" are actually code for You-Create-Everything.

The trick, I think, is to acknowledge that the way we think and how we feel about it, are fundamental drivers even more than that hammer on that nail. In fact, that hammer and nail were created by our thoughts, intentions and feelings. It's confusing and a little or a lot scarey, but it makes the world a completely magical place!