From Doomblogging To Falling Into The Arms Of The Absolute
No matter how I start, it lately always ends with God
Jeff Childers released below Substack today in an attempt to cheer us up and evoke hope.
I think he does an admirable job and, once again, uses his great sense of humour and excellent metaphors to do so.
And then, there was this one sentence that caught my attention
Support local freedom candidates, or support an influencer who is moving the needle and not just doomblogging
I asked myself: “Am I a doomblogger?”.
I listened for an answer from deep within but didn’t get a clear “No” or “Yes”.
So, I felt compelled to explore this topic a little.
I am certainly prone to see worst-case-scenario outcomes. Sometimes, I think this is a good thing - a kind of canary in the coalmine service I provide. And at other times, I think that I am just a paranoid doom blogger spoiling the day for the hopefuls.
Take this Facebook post, for example, that I replied to this morning as an example:
I am totally on board with all of this. However, something in me needs to drill down deeper and remind people of the much more severe consequences of no cash. Life and death stuff. So, I replied to this Facebook post:
No bribing a captain of a ship to take you out of a country where you belong to a group that is shipped away into camps. Sorry to be so dark, but history tells us this happens occasionally.
I almost added: “And I know of one camp in Australia that is already built - Howard Springs.”
Many people don’t like it at all when I say these things. They hate it. And they hate me for it, at times. And most of these people, sadly, are close to me or used to be close to me.
I wasn’t always like that. Not at all. Quite the opposite, actually. I always have been a happy-go-lucky bloke, trying to enjoy life as much as I could and getting along well with a wide range of people.
“Be and let be” was my motto. “Each to their own.”
I was never really interested in politics or so-called “conspiracy theories.” But I never rubbished them either. I never really trusted the powerful. I wasn’t a naive goody-goody who thought our leaders were loveable objects who really cared about us. But I wasn’t a doomsayer either.
This all started to change somewhere between March and June 2020. I couldn’t comprehend what was unfolding in front of my very eyes. Worse, I didn’t initially find a living soul that felt like me. That saw what I saw. I felt like an alien who woke up on a foreign planet with vastly different rules.
No one, even my closest family and friends, wanted or couldn’t listen to me or discuss it with me. Quite the opposite. They shunned me. Not brutally and openly. They still cared somewhat. But they shunned me secretly and awkwardly.
I started to self-censor and withdrew into my own mental world, trying to reason out if I was insane or the world around me was insane.
Now, a few years later, I have compassion for all these people who shunned me. I can see now that they lacked the strength and mental resilience, or intelligence, to even touch the topic. Unconsciously, they were equally affected, but to protect their sanity, they pretended it wasn’t as bad as they knew it was.
And some of them were so weak they surrendered and aligned themselves with the perpetrators in a kind of Stockholm syndrome. I am not mad at them anymore. I am sad and increasingly care for them instead. That’s nothing I ever planned or aspired to do. I am no religious goodie-goodie. It just happened without my doing, and I am glad it happened. Sharing the pain is healing it for all of us.
I am more angry at the perpetrators, though—no compassion for them - yet. I used to be angry with them because of my suffering. But it healed itself somehow. But billions of other victims haven’t. They haven’t even started to comprehend the pain they will feel when they fully open their eyes and allow themselves to see the terrible truth of it all.
I got fully and properly traumatized by it all. It took me a few years to realize it. I slowly thawed from my frozen and shocked state when I finally realised and accepted that I was properly traumatized. Naming and acknowledging the trauma helped. There is shame attached to being a victim, at least for me. I had to overcome that shame. I didn’t do anything to invite being psychologically and emotionally raped by a bunch of sociopaths. Neither did they.
Except for being a bit naive, maybe. All of us. But not many saw this outright brutal assault coming, though. But there is always a silver lining. In this case, their greed manifested prematurely, I believe. They wanted to exploit “this short window of opportunity” and overplayed their hand. They failed to finalize the great reset and establish their new world order. Instead, they showed their ugly faces to the world.
Before, they operated in shadows. Now we have names and faces. People will never forget this. When the time comes, they will be hunted down until the last woman and man are brought to justice. I am no fan of modern-day Isreal politics, but they showed us how to hunt down the Nazi perpetrators.
And those who get away will always be prisoners of their fear of being caught for the rest of their lives. There will be people taking care of that. They are born for that.
Some of us can start the healing now. I didn’t want to wait for revenge. I didn’t want to spend more time in this traumatized space.
I joined a messenger group with like-minded people, which was a lifesaver. What a tremendous relief to hear that other people saw events the same way. Had the same trauma. Experienced the same shunning by loved ones.
Then, I started writing about it here on Substack. Hesitantly, at first. What do other people think of me? Especially the ones that know me?
Deeper into it, I got worried about the “deep state” reading it. If not now, they might in the future. Paranoia was my constant companion. But through some wise words from one of my readers, I embraced my paranoia. Worked with it rather than trying to push it away. I befriended it as a wise and careful part of me with something to teach and balanced it with hope.
The dualistic nature of our mental existence intrigues me tremendously. To transcend dualistic, seemingly opposing values is my hobby. That’s how weird I am. Fortunately, some of my readers not only tolerate it but enjoy it. I do believe in this:
This “new normal” is doing the opposite. It herds people increasingly into “good” and “evil” groups. The established churches always did that. This is grotesque because their own scripts - the Old Testament - very clearly state that we should not do it:
It got us kicked out of paradise. And yet, the churches and religions promote and feed this divide, deliberately keeping us away from the middle way - the way of transcending it.
Why would they do such a thing? The only conclusion I can make is that these religions do not have our best interests in mind. I think, nowadays, they are deeply anti-spiritual. Maybe they were not in a long-forgotten past. But nowadays, it appears that they don’t want us to re-enter paradise by transcending our dualistic mental world.
They turned paradise - or heaven - into a commodity like almost everything else. And they are selling it. But it is fraudulent because they do not have the key to paradise. They pretend they have. If they had, countless people would have entered it by now through the religions. (See
for his poignant observations on how unrestrained capitalism turns everything into a tradeable commodity, creating a meaningless world. )I have put out the “good and evil” bait into several posts, but no one, so far, is really interested. I challenged several religious Christian writers with this very interesting and fundamental Old Testament story about the original sin. I even started a long discussion on “good and evil” with Mrs. Good and Evil herself, Sasha Latipova, in the comment section of some forgotten Substack. It all ended disappointing. None of them had any answers. They believe. They don’t think. They don’t reflect. They cling to “hope” and “good” but don’t touch “paranoia” and “evil”. They don’t explore the opposite.
I believe that we can only transcend both if we allow ourselves to visit both without getting identified with either of them.
Yesterday, I listened to a podcast with Mooji on Spotify and did his signature guided meditation as part of it.
It has been years since I engaged with Mooji. I have a very ambivalent relationship with Mooji. I did a multi-day online meditation retreat with him once - locking myself away in a sleep-out in my garden in New Zealand for several days. It ended with me tearing a photo of him off the wall and shredding it into pieces because I got very angry, feeling deceived by him. I was convinced that he was fake.
Little did I know at the time that it was impossible for us mortals to judge if a so-called spiritual master is, in fact, enlightened or not. I trust Nisargadatta on that. Enlightened masters are beyond morality or social norms. We can not know if they are real or fake.
Since then, I have also learned a lot about how we project our unconscious material on such masters in order to face it. And they want to facilitate that projection, similar to a good psychotherapist.
So, after years of avoiding Mooji, I was opening my heart again to him. And that is so easy to do. It freaks me out. He is so lovable. Therein lies my challenge with him for me. He sweeps me off my feet.
I reached this amazingly clear and still state following his guided meditation and got answers to questions I had pondered over for years. I want to share it with you, even if it might not relate to many of you. I trust you stop reading if it bores you.
Firstly, there was no new content. If you read “I Am That” by Nisargadatta Maharaj eight times in a row over eight years, with it being the only book worth reading to you, you know every non-dual gemstone by heart.
Mooji repeats the same non-dualistic truths as all the other non-dualistic teachers do. But, at least initially, these are just words, mental constructs. The world is full of online teachers repeating them quite correctly. And many people, including myself, feel compelled to accumulate spiritual knowledge habitually. But this is only intellectual, only mental.
I am not saying it is useless. It seems to be necessary to soften us up for more to come. I believe the value lies in the paradoxical nature of many of these statements. They subtly erode our materialistic mental worldview, which can sometimes be quite unsettling and scary, as if the carpet of everyday reality is pulled from under our very feet.
But then there is this next level in the presence of a master. I read so much about it.
I never really had a living spiritual master. My first one, Osho, was already dead. So was my next one, Nisargadatta. It doesn’t render them useless - far from it. The written direct words of a master can transmit immense wisdom and power, and I want to include Jesus in that, too.
I am often highly critical of Christians and other religions, and I don’t trust that the current Bible is a fully authentic account of what Jesus said. Yet, the Bible's gemstones illuminate millions of people's lives.
Still, the ultimate teachings are always between a true living master and a true disciple.
This meeting with Mooji, via a recorded podcast, was still miles away from that, but it somehow felt very poignant and significant in a new way that I didn’t get from the written words of dead masters.
I am also very aware that this has nothing to do with the master and all to do with the disciple's attitude. The master is always the same. Always offering, always sharing, always healing, always loving. It’s a question of how much the disciple can bear of it before his mind loses control and freaks out.
And I did freak out at the end. It didn’t help that Mooji saw it coming and warned the listeners about that particular phenomenon. But before my mind wrestled back control by fleeing like a coward and wildly projecting nonsense on Mooji, I got blessed by some amazing insights, deeply personal and possibly meaningless for most of you readers. But I am compelled to share them,
The first was a new, much deeper understanding of the identification process with mental constructs that are so pivotal in forming not only a false ego-identity but creating a wholly imaginary mental world that has nothing to do with reality.
There are, in principle, only two mental conscious states.
State one is identification with a mental construct. A mental construct is like a digital cloud on Google. It is a cluster of images, thoughts, feelings, body sensations, memories, fears, desires and more grouped together under one banner. There are millions of them, and they appear and disappear in rapid succession.
Let’s use a banal example. For some reason, caused by trillions of previous things, I suddenly considered seeing a dentist. This downloads a whole cluster of memories, likes and dislikes, pros and cons, fears and hopes, feelings and even very specific body sensations to my mental space.
The next step is that my sense of “I Am”, my causeless sense of existence, my “am-ness”, my pure unattached sense of Self, void of “I am this” (a man, a woman, a father, a son, a lover, a sinner etc.) or “I am that” (a body, a human, a God, a spiritual person, enlightened, dumb, useless etc.) - this pure sense of timeless aware Self, this ball of pure universal consciousness attaches itself and identifies with this momentary conceptual cluster and literally becomes it.
I then feel all the horrors of this body going to the dentist, enduring more past trauma. I also literally become that biological entity called my human body. That’s when the ego is born, our small self, that always becomes what appears to it.
This attachment is so strong that the unattached pure Self is totally forgotten.
Further, the mental dentist cluster is soon replaced by another cluster that keeps me mentally hypnotized. For example, the internal mental ramifications soon turn to which dentist and how and when to get there, which downloads another cluster that has all to do with stories about the local dentist, which is soon replaced by a memory that the car is overdue for a service and a cluster of anxiety about not wanting to spend the money for it.
This goes on and on, and to make things worse, it is almost always unconscious and automatic. And 99.99999999% mental.
At that point in time, no one actually went to the dentist or took a car to the service and paid for it. It is scenario upon scenario upon scenario played out in a cloud. In reality, while all this is happening, we might sit on a soft sofa and drink a cup of tea but totally miss how the tea tastes, how hot it is, and how soft the cushions feel.
This is state one, and we live in it all the time. To call it a “dream state” is incredibly accurate and fitting. Like in a sleep dream, the dentist and car all feel very real. But in reality, we sit on the sofa and drink tea.
State two is often called “the witness state”. It means we are here as pure, unattached awareness, as the big Self, the “I AM”. It is a sense of existence independent of anything that is perceived or conceived. It is body-less, just a space, an aware presence. If you want to taste it, do Mooji’s guided meditation during the podcast.
It is the act of conceiving and perceiving itself, not the content of it. Using the same examples as above, the same scenario happens: A sudden thought about going to the dentist appears in consciousness.
But this time, it is seen as exactly that by the “I Am” presence: A thought about going to the dentist. The “I AM” not only sees the thought appearing, it also “knows” that it sees this thought appearing.
This is Socrates’ famous “I know that I know” part of his quote. I am conscious of being conscious. The third part, “that I don’t know”, refers to the tremendous complexity and infinite cause-and-effect relationships since the beginning of the universe. It refers to the wisdom that it is impossible to know anything for sure.
In the “I Am” space, everything simply comes and goes, including the sensations of the pillows on the body, the taste of the tea, memories of servicing the car and not having the money for it and so forth. Everything is seen as objects appearing and disappearing from nowhere to nowhere. This includes desires, fears and emotions.
In short, instead of becoming it and seeing it as real, it is seen as what it is: MMM. Meaningless Mental Masturbation. The only thing that makes it real is our interest in it. (It is far from dry and boring - it can be a quite hilarious exercise to follow the neurotic patterns of our minds like an arty uncensored movie)
The trick is not to get engaged and either cling to an interesting story or trying to push an uncomfortable story away. Both hook us, and we are gone, only to wake up ten minutes later with a cold cup of tea in our hands.
Seeing the coming and going of phenomena in this mental space of consciousness is seeing them as what they are in reality: Unreal clusters of mental illusions that have no meaning by themselves. They do not affect reality at all. They only affect reality when they are believed to be true and real - in state one. Then, they can compel us to act in one way or another and actually manifest the mental energy in some action. This is often referred to as creating Karma.
Does that mean we sit still in State Two and never do anything? Far from it. Life goes on, whether you are in pure awareness or not. Actions still happen, but they are prompted and responded to spontaneously, not habitually.
The doorbell might ring while you drink your tea and joyfully see things coming and going. This might jolt you back into a strong identification with your social persona, and you do your thing opening the door to greet a friend the way you are programmed to do, or you stay in the “I Am” presence and see a body opening the door and making noises from a mouth. Your friend will experience a difference between the two versions.
So, we fluctuate between these two states, which serves a vital spiritual purpose.
All of this only works if you ever had a “taste” of State Two, and Mooji confirms that. True spirituality is impossible without an awakening peak experience. It is like talking about swimming and never been in the water.
Until then, most people exclusively lived in state one, constantly identifying with whatever the universe throws at them. It’s a roller-coaster, to say the least. It is exhausting and looks like tremendous suffering from the perspective of State Two. Those people who are in State One probably have stopped reading by now, thinking: “What the fuck is he talking about. What a madman.”
The fish living in the deep ocean doesn’t know what air or land feels like. But the fish, assuming he has the same dualistically wired brain as us, also doesn’t know what water is despite living in it full-time. Expierently yes, but intellectually no.
Only by discovering air and land will the fish “know” what water is because land and water define each other.
The same is true for people in State One, the “dream state”. They not only know nothing about the “I AM” space, but they also don’t know anything about their own dream state. That’s why they think we are dreaming when we tell them they are dreaming.
What dream? Right now, somebody somewhere is swearing their heart out because their football team just lost. This hurts so much. They have not even played. They weren’t anywhere near the game. But they are hurting physically from the defeat. If that isn’t madness, I don’t know what is.
After an awakening experience, they will know both, and the spiritual journey truly starts. Until then, it is just mental noise.
The awakening experience also directs us to who we really are - the “I AM” and not what we think we are, the identified ego. How?
The proof is quite simple the moment we witness (from the “I Am” space) the identification mechanism with a certain persona. Let’s use the “parent” identification as an example.
There are times when we fully identify as being a mother or father. We literally “become” mother or father. All of us slide into that role, and a rich cluster of instructions and qualities is downloaded, including the tone of our voice. It is a strong ego state.
Now, if “we” really are a parent (as opposed to being in a mental illusionary state), how can this state come and go? The fact that it is coming and going shows that it is unreal.
Mel Gibbson plays Hercules but doesn’t stay Hercules for the rest of his life. That’s not happening. He also plays other characters. The consistent factor here is Mel Gibbson.
Similarly, the “I AM” is Mel Gibbson. Depending on the spiritual maturity and ability to reside in the “I AM”, some people act out roles 24/7 on one end, and a few retire from acting altogether on the other end of the spectrum.
But the observable fact that we constantly act out different identifications implies that there must be a constant unchangeable background from which the acting appears and goes back to after.
This is expressed in this spiritual maxine that can be used to check on ourselves: If it changes, it is unreal. If it changes, it isn’t our real Self. We are acting a role in an imaginary dream state.
Whoever experiences the “I Am” will very soon notice that it never changes. It is always the same. This is so because it has no qualities at all to it. It is pure presence, and, once again, it has to be experienced. It can be experienced, and Mooji’s guided meditation is a great way to do it.
So this was the first great gift I received - this absolute certainty of State Two and its relationship to State One.
The second gift was the amazing insight that State Two, despite its huge benefits, is still a mental conceptual state. It is probably the last and deepest one, but it is not enlightenment.
The guy conducting the interview did a marvellous job by asking the one question that had haunted me for years:
“Why am I losing the “I Am” state and getting identified repeatedly, and what can I do not to lose it?”
That is what is happening to me and, assumingly, many meditators worldwide. We jo-jo between the pure witness and identification.
And the answer, as I understood it, was this:
“There is an “I Am” state prior to when we learned the concept of “I Am” state and the concept of an opposing “Ego-Identifycation state. In other words, this sense of “I Am” we get through this guided meditation is still conceptual. It is a mental crutch, possibly the last one, possibly the last pair of duality there is to transcend. This is way deeper than “good and evil”.
He is talking about the birth of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness creates duality. It is the seed of the ego. Without an “I” experiencing the world, there is no world. There is only oneness and peace. No dualistic tension. In short, paradise, enlightenment. Newborns are enlightened until we fuck them up. But there is no other way or shortcut. That’s just how it goes. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.
There is scientific proof from human developmental theory that a newborn is egoless and has no sense of self. It is one with the mother - existentially - for some time. I don’t know if the first appearance of self-consciousness is biologically caused or learned from the environment, but it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that it can be undone. Enlightenment is the very act of undoing self-consciousness, transcending the last dualistic pair, and becoming unselfconscious. There are many accounts, several of them by Nisargadatta himself, where fully realized masters describe their state as unselfconscious.
There is no point even imagining how that would feel like. Like the fish in the water, we won’t be able to know until we experience a contrast.
However, there can’t be any contrast in this case because contrast only exists in duality. As we define it, intellectual mental knowledge depends on duality.
Becoming unselfconscious, or egoless, one with all is beyond duality and, therefore, beyond knowing.
Hence, the timeless repeated words of all enlightened masters: You can’t know who you really are, your true nature. You can only be it. Nothing can be said about the enlightened state except in negation. Not this, not that. Nothing that can be described. Words and thoughts can’t go there. Every imagination is wrong. And so on.
So what is the mental “I AM” state good for then?
It calms the mind tremendously. It stops us from jumping from one identification to the next. Only a calm mind can be transcended.
The sages also all agree that enlightenment can’t be induced or transmitted. It is still a miracle if and how, and why it happens. Nothing can be done to achieve it except to be ready for it in case it happens.
And ready means to have a totally still ripple-free ocean of mind. Only in such a mind, so the stories go, can God, the Absolute, be reflected. Only in a totally still pond can we see a true reflection of the full moon in the sky.
The still pond doesn’t guarantee that we see a true reflection of the moon. It needs the moon to show up. But the moon can show up every night and will never be seen if a pond is whipped rough by the roller-coaster emotions of our identified lives.
Thank you for listening. I hope it made some sense. This one I wrote for myself. It is peaceful and fulfilling to bring years of pondering and enquiry to a satisfying conclusion.
And it gives me tremendous peace to know that I have reached my quest's final destination. All that is left is to reside in this last mental “I Am” for as long as possible and enjoy the tremendous peace this calming of the mind provides. The rest is not up to me. I can relax.
This also deepens the understanding of this other metaphor often used by masters: When the fruit is ripe, it falls. The ripening is long. The fall is sudden.
The fruit has no idea when it will fall and doesn’t care. But fall it will one day.
We are not fruits. Humans fall into the Absolute, into God, too, after long, long ripening. No one knows when and how. But fall it will - one life at a time.
Thank you. I am 'one of those' readers who very much appreciates your perspectives. Duality is secretly non dual.
Dang it -- wanted to sub, but my card is not accepted. I'll try a different brand of digitized plastic.