Honor Your Subjective Experience

We live in a reality that is, above all, a subjective experience. Sure, there may be objective truths which we all agree upon, yet still these objective truths are observed through a conglomeration of subjective points of view. You are you, I am me, and though the awareness which is the essence of your experience and my experience may be the same, the experience itself varies greatly. No matter how often spiritual teachers preach about oneness and unity, there is no escaping the relative truth of this Universe; it is, for all intents and purposes, a subjective experience.

Subjectivity is a beautiful thing. It results in uniqueness, nuance and variation. It gives rise to an infinite expanse of experiences for one to behold. Were there only one point of perspective in this Universe, there really couldn’t be any experience at all. The same way that there is really no time, space, or movement until two points arise, if there were only a single point of focus, nothing could really happen. There would be no experience, no contrast, no varying sensations and perceptions: there would simply be the isness of I, the only I there is. The I must fragment itself into multiplicity for experiences to arise.

The problem with subjectivity begins when you believe that everyone is experiencing what you are experiencing, and that everyone should know how you feel and what you are thinking at all times. It’s almost like a covert narcissism. You, being the center of your own Universe, believe that everyone around you should cater to your experience, that they should hold your subjectivity above all else, and that you should be the center of their Universe. But this is not the case. So when people do things that make you feel bad, instead of establishing healthy boundaries and being honest about the way you feel, you just expect them to know that they are making you feel bad and to stop what they are doing.

The divine source of this narcissistic and self-absorbed tendency arises from the truth that, in essence, we are all one. We all share the same basic nature which is the awareness or consciousness that experiences our own subjective reality. This universal awareness is what unites us beyond our apparent surface level differences. Yet we still must honor the subjective nature of this Universe, though true only relatively, and we must be authentic with our thoughts and feelings and establish healthy boundaries.

Too often we can get caught up in catering to someone else’s agenda because we wish to help and we wish to experience the love and belonging that comes along with helping others. But many times helping doesn’t actually feel good to us. It feels like self-hate. This is why you must honor your own subjectivity, you must hold tightly to your own personal truth, and you must even be willing to risk others not liking or accepting you in order to honor your own personal feelings and desires. Because nothing is more important than how you feel.

Everything we do is either consciously or unconsciously intended to make us feel better, so why not go straight to the better feeling instead of beating around the bush? Why sacrifice the way you feel now for some hypothetical better-feeling future that never comes? You must honor your subjective experience and do what is best for you. No one can and no one will do this for you. You must do this for yourself. Do what you know is right, and as Shakespeare once said, always “ To thine own self be true.”

Spiritual Impotency- Heeding the Call to Action

Over many years of investigating different spiritual beliefs, techniques and practices, I have come to find that the modern spiritual movement and its practices tend to be overly yin. Approaches devised for manifesting, healing and transforming one’s life involve quite a bit of passivity and very little overt action taking. Instead of being active players in the world, we instead sit back, relax, and wait for things to change. It is my belief that the time for meditating in a cave is over. Taking massive, intelligent and powerful action is the only real solution to creating world change and a society that we all actually want to live in.

A good example of spiritual impotency and passivity would be the most popular approaches toward utilizing the “Law of Attraction”. Many teachers say that all you have to do is visualize what you want and feel as if it is already a reality or you, and then it will just come to you effortlessly. They under-emphasize the value of hard work and dismiss the importance of hard and fast action taking. Then people become frustrated with the results they are getting and throw the baby out with the bath water. They start to believe that they don’t actually create their own reality. But wait a second. They forgot the other half of the equation. The inward psychology is only the foundation while the subsequent action you take is the structure that emerges forth into the world. Without it, there is really no point in having a foundation in the first place.

Then take a look at popular methods for dealing with intense emotions. Just sit with the feeling, go deeply into it, feel it fully. Observe it fully without any resistance and in doing so it will dissipate and transform. For me, this has been some of the biggest bullshit that I have ever come across. Focusing more on the feeling or the emotional pain would often times just drag me deeper into it. It wasn’t until I claimed my power and even got a little angry that I began to shift out of these depressive states via movement and taking action towards my goals and desires. I’m not saying that there is no place for being with yourself, the Universe is a blend of yin and yang energies and both are absolutely necessary for the functioning of the whole, we have just placed too much emphasis on yin practices and neglected the yang.

If your energy is naturally quite yin, this is not as much of a problem. But for men and women with potent masculine energy and drives, this can be incredibly destructive. Their approach to life becomes overly passive and they wonder why they feel depressed. This has been me for most of my adult life. I would sit around passively trying to change my life by going inward, feeling my feelings fully, and imagining a more ideal life. This was a decent starting place and had it’s use, but when the time came to move, to take action, to even get a little fired up and feel a sense of urgency to make a positive change in myself and the world at large, I just kept practicing the same impotent, yin techniques for life improvement and spiritual growth. And my life became a living hell.

This impotent approach to life creates men and women (especially men) who are, for lack of a better word, wussies. They don’t really stand for anything, they don’t hold strong to core values and beliefs, and they don’t take radical action on a daily basis to create the type of reality and world that they truly desire. Instead, they listen to society, institutions and the media, they work jobs to support a dysfunctional and ego-based economic structure, and they wait around hoping someone in the government or politics will change things for the better. And it never happens.

“If you don’t have something that you are willing to die for, then you aren’t really living at all”

In this world, you have to take action if you want to get anything done. While aligned action is by far the most effective and having a positive focus and emotional awareness is certainly of tremendous value, nothing ever happens until something moves. That’s the bottom line. If you feel stuck in your spiritual progress and in achieving your goals, try implementing some more yang practices into your day to day life. Take action, do something that scares you, practice cathartic release exercises, speak out and express yourself, vocalize your authentic truth and do not give a single fuck about what anyone thinks. Then watch things change.

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 Power of Thought

The reality that you experience is a by-product of the thoughts that you think. Thoughts are information, or psycho-emotional impressions that over time imprint themselves upon the subconscious mind.

If thoughts are seeds, your conscious mind is the top-soil whereas the subconscious is all that is underneath. The origin of a thought could be likened to dropping the seed on top of the soil. Over time, the seed begins to sprout roots, and as it is watered and nurtured, the roots spread deep beneath the ground and into the subconscious mind.

The most frequently experienced and practiced psycho-emotional impressions become deep-seated core beliefs. These are often rooted by intense, traumatic experiences that happened during childhood. The vibrational signature of that experience created a recurring reflection in your external reality, which reflects your thoughts back to you.

Even more impactful than individual traumatic experiences were the constant impressions being made upon you by your family and the environment that you grew up in. You could think of these as the seeds that got the most water, sunlight and nutrients. Although the sustenance itself, in this case, is the attention and focus of your consciousness.

“Where attention goes, energy flows...and something grows.”

The more attention is focused upon a thought, the more energy it is fed, and the more it grows. This is the case regardless of the nature of the thought: whether it be positive, negative, or anywhere in between. It will begin to express itself in manifested reality in increasingly prominent ways.

Attention equals intention, and your intention is what your life becomes. There is not a force in this Universe more powerful than conscious intention. Remember that.

The Heart is the Way

"The heart is the space where desire meets will, where sexuality meets psychology, where yin meets yang. It is the conglomeration of mind and body, and together in unison they overcome each other to a transcendental state of pure loving bliss." 

 

The life experience of a human being can be summed up by three phenomena; mind, body and emotions. In other words the physical, mental and emotional experience. All three are intimately intertwined and interdependent. They are inseparable from one another yet can still be contextualized in a sense as three independently unique phenomena.

The heart is the center point of one’s life experience and the storehouse of all emotions. It is the starting point for your human incarnation and the primary point where spirituality and physicality unite. Therefore, the heart is the space for transcendence. The mind can mislead you, the body can even mislead you, but the heart never will. It is pure and unadulterated intelligence, far beyond the comprehension of the mind.

An open heart is the solution to all problems in life. Problems are an aspect of resistance, and resistance always begins with a closed heart. One cannot have their heart open and experience suffering and resistance simultaneously. The two are mutually exclusive. So the key is to focus on opening the heart and surrendering to the flow of life, which literally occurs in the heart as the flow of blood throughout your physical organism. When you do this, your resentments, judgments and confusions will melt away into a simple heart-centered compassion. All is allowed in the open space of your heart’s embrace.

You know your heart is truly open when your love and acceptance is unconditional. That is, it is not dependent on external or experiential phenomena manifesting itself in a certain way. There is no “should” when it comes to love. It is just there, no matter what, independent of whatever may arise.

The challenge is to keep your heart open in a world that is mostly closed. We have all been hurt and as a result have built walls around our hearts. The harshness and callousness of our collective society as a whole is a reflection of this internal state. So to keep one’s heart open in even the harshest of circumstances is great spiritual practice.  By doing so, you lead by example and give others an opening into a heart centered world view that will literally create heaven on Earth.

Should you catch yourself closing your heart off in fear, just remember that even this needs to be loved with self-compassion and forgiveness. The walls we have built around the heart to protect us have kept us safe in a harsh and unstable world. We felt too vulnerable to leave our hearts open as children and were hurt so many times by those we loved and thought loved us that we chose to close ourselves down. But we needn’t perpetuate this cycle anymore. To open the heart is a simple choice. Surrender above all, allow and accept all as it is, recognizing its inherent perfection and welcoming it with an unconditional embrace. Breathe it in deeply into your heart and feel yourself opening with each breath. That is the pathway to freedom.