Chasing the Phantom

We all have a phantom that we’re chasing. This phantom could be anything from health, wealth, freedom, romantic love, lasting peace, or even the highest levels of spiritual enlightenment. Any ideal state of being or life situation that we wish we could permanently abide in is the phantom we chase. But we can never seem to really find it. We may have glimpses, brief tastes of our most sought for desire, but it never stays. We are teased to the point of torment. But let me tell you this; the only thing worse than never getting what you want, is actually getting it.

Let me explain why. Before you got what you desired, you at least had hope. But as soon as you get it and you realize that it doesn’t really make you happy, your hope is taken from you. There is nothing left to chase, no idealistic goal to move towards, no tantalizing fantasy of the grass being greener on the other side of life. This is the point at which you have two choices; to either kill yourself, or to kill your idea of self.

The ego self has a great many mechanisms to maintain its own survival. Most of these are deeply habituated and have their roots in the subconscious. But the most powerful of all its survival mechanisms is the idea that things would be better if. If only this were the case, or that were the case, I could be happy. This is an inherent denial of the now, as wanting something else, by default, means that you do not want or accept what is. The problem with this is that all you ever have is what is at this moment. So you create a dynamic of continuous suffering. Yet the ego itself loves this, because it cannot survive without suffering. Resistance is the structural tension which holds the ego in place. Without it, the ego collapses in on itself. Without any suffering, the ego ceases to exist. Because without suffering, there is only complete love and acceptance of what is.

The Buddha said that there are two base causes of suffering. Attachment and desire. Without desire and without attachment, there is no suffering, and one’s true nature is fully realized. So what does it mean to have no attachment and no desire? It means that you do not cling to the fleeting forms and experiences that come and go in this temporal existence, and you also do not desire for things to be a certain way, for them to be other than the way that they are right now. This state of being is the essence of self-realization or enlightenment, as the true self, your true nature, is beyond all that comes and goes. It is untouched by passing sensations and experiences, and it is the only constant in an ever-changing reality.

The reason why we chase our phantom is because we believe on some level that the phantom is us. We believe that the only way to be our true selves is to achieve this certain state or circumstance and that only then can we be free from suffering. But the truth is that we first free ourselves from suffering by realizing that no state of being or circumstance could ever bring us lasting happiness or bring us closer to who we really are, and then our life circumstances fall into place effortlessly. At this point, we know that nothing that comes and goes can bring us happiness, so we don’t really care if things fall into place. There is no desire. And even if we do get what we want, we don’t care if it leaves us. There is no attachment. Therefore, we have found lasting freedom, we have achieved the ultimate liberation, and we have come to find that the destination had been exactly where we were standing all along.

Death and the Value of Life

“I do not believe that people seek the meaning of life so much as they seek the experience of being fully alive.” - Joseph Campbell

I witnessed someone die today. The irony is that not five minutes before this experience I was questioning whether or not I even wanted to continue with my own human existence. Whether or not I wanted to continue with a life that often times feels burdensome and void of real purpose and meaning. Not that I felt acutely suicidal, but merely in a state in which I felt the pointlessness of my mundane existence, knowing deep down that I could be living more fully, more vibrantly and purposefully.

I think that often times we walk through life oblivious to the fact that someday, we will die. We don’t like to reflect on this deeply sobering truth, because it threatens our personal ego, the person who we think we are. So we hide death, we lock old people away in nursing homes, we put dead bodies in caskets and fill them with fluids to preserve the body and then cover their face with makeup to make death more pleasant to look at. But why? Why is death so bad? It is a natural and normal part of life which should be celebrated the way that birth is. Because, as far as we’ve seen in all of human history, no one gets out of here alive.

So there, in the street by a corner store, a man lay dying. The people around him appeared to be in a state of simultaneous confusion and despair. A state which I imagine a lot of people experience when confronted with death. But there is a profound beauty in death. Without death, we could never really appreciate the magic and wonder of this all too impermanent existence. Our mortality is a burning fire, pushing us to be our best selves now, to taste the fullness that life has to offer, and to leave the most inspiring and impactful legacy that we can.

Awareness of death gives us a powerful context for life. We need not despair nor preoccupy ourselves with imaginary “problems, for as some wise sage once said, “this too shall pass.” None of us will be around too much longer. So the next time you see people; friends, family, strangers, bring into your awareness that these people, all of them, will one day die. It could be tomorrow. It could be 100 years from now. But either way, it will happen. And it is inescapable.

So I ask you, with this awareness of your own death, what are you doing with your life? If today were your last day, would you be content with the way in which you had lived it? What would you have done differently? And how can you live tomorrow differently so that you would be pleased if it did end up being your final day upon this Earth?

We have all heard the saying “Live everyday as if it were your last.” But how many of us actually do this? How many of us live every precious moment of our lives to the absolute fullest, to the best of our capacity in that very moment? Very few. Most of us live with blinders. We remain in monotonous, mundane routines that drain us of life, hoping that one day we will reach a place where we are free to live the life of our dreams. But that “one day” never comes. So the only choice is carpe diem. To seize the moment, to milk it for all it’s worth, and to arrive at death with a smile on our faces and joy in our hearts, knowing that we did everything we possibly could with this most precious of divine gifts: our human life.

The End of Suffering

"There is the state of being wrapped up in or identified with something, then there is the state of detached witnessing, and then there is the merging with it and the becoming of it; your presence transmutes it into itself. This point is the end of all suffering."

The unwillingness to experience even the worst hell is literally what creates it, as the resistance we have to suffering is what holds it in place. An open willingness to explore all experiences and sensations that could ever be is the essence of enlightenment.

The original polarity was the split between the essence and the experience, or the observed and the observer. This then fractured infinitely into a fractal of polarized reality, the mind being a by-product of such. We, as the eternal underlying essence, then lost ourselves in this fragmented and fractalized reality experience so that we could recognize ourselves once again to gain a higher level of self-awareness. It is a perfect ever-evolving eternal process of expansion and evolution both within and without. Both on the level of experience and the level of awareness, as both are perfect reflections of eachother.

This polarity is what in fact gives rise to all of creation. Nothing could be without it, there would be no matter, no sensation and no experience. It is the original split or division that occurred within the space of consciousness when it first had the desire to know itself. This polarity exists on an energetic spectrum. Everything in experiential reality is the same substance expressed at different frequencies, or imbued with ever-changing information. Hot and cold are really the same thing, just expressed differently. This difference in expression is what gives rise to the conception of duality.

Polarity is what gives birth to the conception of the "self" and the "other", both being mind-based perceptual delusions. The belief in the "other" gives rise to the feeling of separation and fear. We fear that which we feel is outside of our control, that which we feel is separate from us. But how could anything be separate from you if it all arises within your own consciousness, your own awareness? All that could ever be must be within the space of your consciousness, for nothing could exist without a witness for its existence. Your truest self is the space in which all that is arises, and all that arises is an inseparable part of that. So in reality, there is no other. There is only you.

Reality itself is an ever-flowing expression of life-force energy which perpetually emanates from the one. The movement occurs in a toroidal flow pattern, whereas the center point is the singularity of consciousness or awareness. Creation bursts forth, projects itself as an externalized reality experience, and is then perceived and received as the cycle repeats. This occurs at such a rapid rate that we have no conscious awareness of it. It appears to happen instantaneously.

In the picture above, you could think of one half of the sphere as being positive and the other half as being negative. Reality is the interplay of these two polarized forces, and so long as we believe in it and identify with it as being real or "self", we are stuck in this polarized dance of highs and lows, expansions and contractions, joys and sorrows. When we recognize our true Self as the singularity, we integrate polarity into the wholeness of the Self and transcend it all together.

When you surrender to the entire spectrum of happiness and suffering, of pain and joy, you transcend it by experiencing it all simultaneously. The way in which black is not truly a color, but is the absence of color because it absorbs the entire light spectrum, the state you achieve is not so much a feeling or emotion but rather all feelings and none simultaneously; it is the peace that passes all understanding. That which Jesus described as heaven and the Buddha described as nirvana. In other words, it is the end of suffering and the beginning of your liberation as a self-actualized being free to experience the infinite magnitude of creation in whatever way you choose.