One of the biggest tragedies of our modern Western ego-driven culture is that the materialistic mindset of free will, doing and achieving has also penetrated the spiritual ways in which we seek peace, truth and enlightenment.
“Working towards a goal, doing something to achieve it”, works well in the materialistic world, no doubt. It brought us unprecedented material success and security that our ancestors could only dream of.
I am just a below-average part-time ordinary earner living in Australia, but I eat better, have more pleasures, comforts, luxuries, and much better health than most kings would have had 500 years ago. So, I am grateful for that.
Unfortunately, this materialistic miracle didn’t make us as happy as it should.
Look at the world.
Look at this insanely rich billionaire class that has all this money and materialistic security, and power. Do they look happy and content to you? Does Trump, Musk and Gates look happy, content and at peace to you?
And yet, billions of people look up to the rich and powerful and think they would be permanently happy if they were in their place and had what they have.
“They are just stupid. I won’t be like them. I will be happy and will do only good if I achieve a much higher level of power and wealth.”
Billions think like that. I think like that sometimes.
This is the materialistic wealth and power trance, the wealth and power illusion.
Trump, Gates and Musk might be spiritual idiots, but just give me one rich and powerful man or woman who is a true blessing for themselves and the world?
Of all of those millions of millionaires and thousands of billionaires, just give me one that appears to be in lasting peace, love and happiness.
I only ever heard of one powerful and rich man who turned out extremely happy and content.
His name?
Gautama Buddha.
After he gave away his power and riches he achieved enlightenment and peace.
All mystics knew that, including Jesus.
As most of you know, I am no big fan of any organised religion and very wary of religious scripts, but there are many spiritual gold nuggets in the Bible that survived the meddling and manipulations of the unenlightened religious people and escaped bad translations:
In Matthew 19:24, Jesus says:
"Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God."
There is nothing wrong with a secure materialistic life that fulfils the essential needs of our bodies, but we have passed that point a long time ago. We don’t work long hours to fulfil needs or to survive. We work long hours because of our wants and our desires, and the illusions that it might one day take our fears away.
The day we have hoarded enough to finally feel secure.
That day will never come, no matter how much I hoard.
Just look at the billionaires.
They are full of fear. Why else do they seek even more power and wealth?
Why wouldn’t they retire and live in peace and comfort until they die?
Because “living in peace” has nothing to do with wealth and power. It is not a materialistic achievement.
Wise Western people get that eventually. They realise that no matter what, this purely materialistic life has no happy end.
My body = I = will die.
Worse, looking around me, our current lifestyle and the pharmaceutical-medical bloodsuckers will make sure that I get sick and stay sick for decades, so they can take my wealth from me before I die.
To bring the fact of impermanence of our bodies home, to bring death and disease home, the Buddha advised his disciples to meditate at the ceremonial places where the bodies of the deceased were burned.
The wiser Westerner wake up to this reality earlier or later, and that’s when their spiritual journey starts. This is good, but then they hit many traps.
Firstly, they don’t realise that in the age of power and greed, the elites don’t want truly spiritual people.
Truly spiritual people will stop working like crazy to become like their millionaire or billionaire idols. And the elites need people who work, work, and work like the queen bees need millions of working bees.
In short, rich people didn’t become rich because they worked harder than many normal people. They got rich because they managed to let other people work hard for them.
They didn’t get rich because they were smarter or more intelligent. They got rich because they managed to feed off the smartness and intelligence of the people they employ.
There is no better example than Elon Musk. How the World’s Richest Moron Scammed His Way into Controlling Your Future is an interesting read for those with even the slightest awe-factor left for our billionaire heroes.
Because the elites don’t want truly spiritual people and because the power-greed paradigm is thousands of years old, this whole materialistic culture has developed anti-spiritual institutions to catch those who want to stray off the materialistic trail and capture them.
There are several layers of capturing institutions.
The Scientific Psychological Field
I don’t want to spend much time on it, but this system keeps people from true spirituality by convincing people that all they need to do is work on their mind, their psyche, and their emotions.
I worked as a psychotherapist for a while, so I know this field from the inside out. I also did a lot of personal, so-called psychological work in my life.
Looking back and knowing what I know now, depending on the model, it can teach people the useful techniques of self-reflection, meaning they learn to witness their own mind and emotions, and this can prepare them for spiritual practice. That’s the upside.
True psychotherapy will attempt to get us aware of our habitual, dysfunctional core beliefs and change them to something more functional.
While this can help to get us more aligned to our social environment and lessen conflict and pain with it, it is problematic if the social environment and culture it aligns us with is, in principle, a scientific-materialistic culture and deeply anti-spiritual.
The psychological field puts the illusory subjective “I”, the ego, at the core of everything and therefore, reinforces an anti-spiritual worldview.
There is no point in endlessly trying to improve our ego towards a more perfect and happy version of ourselves because all it does is to temporarily make our ego’s feel really good about ourselves. It ignores the fact that the whole cause of our unhappiness and suffering is the illusory ego itself.
The sense of “I”, or “Ego”, means “separation” from the whole.
It means mentally dividing the oneness of a non-dual existence into an artificial, purely mental, dualistic pair of subjects (“I”, ego) and objects (“the others”, “the world”). Therein lies all the suffering and unhappiness.
That’s why we feel vulnerable, lonely and afraid, and no ego-boost will fix this existential suffering.
The opposite will. Ego loss.
Therefore, psychology and psychotherapy will never make people ultimately and lastingly happy; only true spirituality will.
The only positive angle of psychotherapy lies in learning self-reflection and techniques to be aware of our awareness and question our core beliefs that shape our experience of the world.
Because becoming aware and challenging the deepest core-belief there is - that we are a separate body-mind - is our way out of existential suffering.
The psychiatric, pharmaceutical field
I wasn’t the only one who stated on Substack in the past that, if Jesus lived today, he would be very likely locked away in a mental hospital under drugs.
Nothing catches and eliminates our current-day mystics more than the mental health system of the Western world.
That’s not to say that there are truly mentally sick people in our world. There are. Many.
But an emerging mystic person is captured under the same system and eliminated from society because they are not only not useful for the elites that run our societies, but could become outright dangerous if they develop into full-blown, stable mystics.
A “normal” person transforms into an emerging mystic when they go through a spiritual awakening experience.
A spiritual awakening experience is a short rendezvous with the Absolute, a different reality, the only reality.
It is a brief lifting of the heavy, silky curtains to show us the “real world” beyond our mind-filtered illusory world. It is often described as “mind-blowing.”
This can be intended and wanted through spiritual practice, psychedelic drugs, or other means. In this case, most people can handle it and integrate it without losing the plot, but not always.
But it can also happen to people who neither asked for it, nor wanted it, nor are prepared for it.
They then enter into a “spiritual emergency”, a term coined by pioneer LSD - researcher and psychiatrist Stanislav Grof.
Often, these people struggle in integrating their rendezvous with the Absolute.
Having what was believed to be “reality” pulled from underneath our feet without warning can be extremely unsettling. I am talking from my own experiences and I was prepared - or I thought I was.
I could avoid being eliminated there and then by the psychiatric field because I was lucky and had the help of a spiritual healer. These healers used to be around everywhere, but modern science and the elites have driven them underground and replaced them with psychiatrists with nasty syringes that label anyone as “mad” that questions our illusory reality and lock them away in chemical prisons and psychiatric wards.
Religions.
Most people are not aware that all religions have been corrupted to catch people seeking spirituality and divert them away from it.
Even many people within those institutions, the Priests, Rabbis and Imams, are not aware of it.
When they enter those religious institutions, they are as eager, genuine and well-meaning as the young medical students starting medical school.
The former wants to improve the spiritual health of humanity, the latter the physical health of humanity.
Little do they know that they will get brainwashed into a system that serves the elites and the power-greed paradigm. Very few medical doctors or pharmacists will truly heal people, and no priest, Imam or Rabbi will truly help people find God.
To the contrary.
Their clever brainwashing will make them achieve the opposite without many of them even realising it. Those few that do wake up to the scam and talk will be “managed” accordingly, “excommunicated” and “silenced”.
The deeply ingrained mindset of doing and achieving
So, there we have our “normal” wiser Westerner realising that there is no happy end and lasting peace and happiness in the materialistic power-greed paradigm. After maybe dabbling with psychotherapy and religions, they realise that this doesn’t bring them the desired spiritual peace either.
They decide they have to do it themselves.
They read some books and browse the Internet. They join a spiritual group of some sort, be it Western rebellious split-off Abrahamic religions stuff, like Bible or Koran studies or Eastern stuff like Yoga and Meditation. Or even intellectual non-dual stuff. Some might combine it with psychedelics.
Some will work hard and squeeze out so-called “spiritual experiences”.
Bells and whistles, beautiful stuff, peaceful stuff, happy stuff.
They think they are getting somewhere.
They think they are on the spiritual path to enlightenment.
And unnoticed and unrecognised, their spiritual egos grow like mushrooms in a dark, warm and moist basement.
Initially, it works. They really are happier.
But nothing ever lasts.
They become spiritual junkies. Chasing one “spiritual experience” after the other.
But their spiritual practice works less and less.
They change the practice, change the technique, change the Guru, change the books, change the belief systems, travel to India… , you name it.
How do I know?
Because I have done it all, except going to India.
I am sure there is a similar version of this for the rebel Christians, Jews and Muslims that do it within their belief system.
All of us fell for the biggest and deepest trap to catch spiritual people: The unconscious materialistic power and greed mindset of “achieving” something through “effort”.
It is the spiritual version of “The American Dream”.
Work hard enough materially and long enough, and you will be as rich as Elon and as powerful as Donald one day.
Work hard enough spiritually, and you will surely get enlightened at the end of it.
It’s the same greedy, materialistic, doer and achiever mindset, just applied to spirituality instead of the stock market or whatever.
This is not how it works.
How does it work?
No doing.
No achieving.
Just being.
While I feel qualified, through long and painful experiences and mistakes, to tell you how it doesn’t work, I am much less qualified to tell you how it works. But first things first. The common story most “seekers” experience:
Questioner: I am a Frenchman by birth and domicile and since about ten years I have been practicing Yoga.
Maharaj: After ten years of work are you anywhere nearer your goal?
Q: A little nearer, maybe. It is hard work, you know.
M: The Self is near and the way to it is easy. All you need doing is doing nothing.
Q: Yet I found my sadhana very difficult.
M: Your sadhana is to be. The doing happens. Just be watchful. Where is the difficulty in remembering that you are? Your are all the time.
Q: The sense of being is there all the time -- no doubt. But the field of attention is often overrun by all sorts of mental events -- emotions, images, ideas. The pure sense of being is usually crowded out.
M: What is your procedure for clearing the mind of the unnecessary? What are your means, your tools for the purification of the mind?
While I recently had some glimpses and deep insights, I will heavily rely on the teachings from Nisargadatta Maharaj, a mystic who knows how it works and talks about it so vividly and succinctly.
There is nothing to do or to achieve.
Drop this mindset, he says.
Maharaj: Can you sit on the floor? Do you need a pillow? Have you any questions to ask? Not that you need to ask, you can as well be quiet.
To be, just be, is important.
You need not ask anything, nor do anything.
Such apparently lazy way of spending time is highly regarded in India. It means that for the time being you are free from the obsession with 'what next'.
When you are not in a hurry and the mind is free from anxieties, it becomes quiet and in the silence something may be heard which is ordinarily too fine and subtle for perception. The mind must be open and quiet to see. What we are trying to do here is to bring our minds into the right state for understanding what is real.
Much easier said than done, right?
I assume many of you have tried just sitting, and the expected and desired peaceful silence was soon swept away by never-ending worries.
Well, the same principle applies. Do nothing. Just be.
Questioner: How do we learn to cut out worries?
M: You need not worry about your worries. Just be. Do not try to be quiet; do not make 'being quiet' into a task to be performed. Don't be restless about 'being quiet', miserable about 'being happy'. Just be aware that you are and remain aware -- don't say: 'yes, I am; what next?' There is no 'next' in 'I am'. It is a timeless state.
It’s like he can look into my mind.
Here we can see how “doing” and “achieving”, the motor of materialistic success has sneaked into how “we do spirituality” and becomes counter-productive for spiritual “success”.
There is no spiritual success either, of course.
There is nothing to achieve.
Everything is already there. All we need to do is discover it.
That’s what I mean when I say that the Western materialistic culture and way of thinking have poisoned true spirituality to the core.
And the religions deepen it by telling the believers to do or not do many things, and keep them religiously busy.
In the materialistic world, it is all about becoming, not being.
Q: If you could tell me what I shall become, it may help me to watch over my development.
M: How can anybody tell you what you shall become when there is no becoming? You merely discover what you are. All moulding oneself to a pattern is a grievous waste of time. Think neither of the past nor of the future, just be.
Q: How can I just be? Changes are inevitable.
M: Changes are inevitable in the changeful, but you are not subject to them. You are the changeless background, against which changes are perceived.
Q: Everything changes, the background also changes. There is no need of a changeless background to notice changes. The self is momentary -- it is merely the point where the past meets the future.
M: Of course, the self is based on memory, is momentary. But such self demands unbroken continuity behind it. You know from experience that there are gaps when your self is forgotten. What brings it back to life? What wakes you up in the morning? There must be some constant factor bridging the gaps in consciousness. If you watch carefully you will find that even your daily consciousness is in flashes, with gaps intervening all the time. What is in the gaps? What can there be but your real being, that is timeless; mind and mindlessness are one to it.
Once again, there is nothing to do or to achieve:
Q: So far I have been following you. Now, what am I expected to do?
M: There is nothing to do. Just be. Do nothing. Be. No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. I do not even say: 'be yourself', since you do not know yourself. Just be. Having seen that you are neither the 'outer' world of perceivables, nor the 'inner' world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind -- just be.
The next one is for those, including myself, who occasionally think they are making spiritual progress and are almost there. Or worse, ahead of others:
Q: Surely, there are degrees of realisation.
M: There are no steps to self-realisation. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions. Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realisation you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.
I recall how he once used the metaphor of digging in gravel to find the gold of self-realisation. You just dig gravel every day. And, if grace is with you, one day, you will suddenly strike gold. It isn’t like the gravel becomes gradually more golden. It is either gravel or gold.
The digging is just sitting and being aware.
Another huge spiritual misconception, mostly driven by religions, is that we have to change to find God.
Q: If I am beyond the mind, how can I change myself?
M: Where is the need of changing anything? The mind is changing anyhow all the time. Look at your mind dispassionately; this is enough to calm it. When it is quiet, you can go beyond it. Do not keep it busy all the time. Stop it -- and just be. If you give it rest, it will settle down and recover its purity and strength. Constant thinking makes it decay.
Non-duality is actually very simple, logical and almost scientific.
It is all very simple and comparatively easy; be earnest and patient, that is all. Dispassion, detachment, freedom from desire and fear, from all self-concern, mere awareness -- free from memory and expectation -- this is the state of mind to which discovery can happen. After all, liberation is but the freedom to discover.
Q: If my true being is always with me, how is it that I am ignorant of it?
M: Because it is very subtle and your mind is gross, full of gross thoughts and feelings. Calm and clarify your mind and you will know yourself as you are.
That doesn’t mean Advaita Vedanta (AV) is right for everyone at a given point in time. There are other paths to self-realisation and finding God, of course.
It is the path of understanding. Other methods are more suited to the path of worship and love.
As I understand it, in AV, we melt with God by dissolving our false ego through understanding, through realisation.
In the path of love, we melt with God through true love. In true selfless love, we melt with the beloved and become one. This path is much quicker, sometimes instant, but not many people are capable of true love. The path of understanding is work and takes time, but open to everyone who is earnest and persistent.
When I describe Advaita Vedanta as I understand it, which is only one of many ways and not the truth, of course, I frequently get push-back from people who chose a path of worship and love, mostly Christians.
No one is stopping anyone from following their spiritual path, which they believe in and that works for them. Their path is neither better nor worse. It is not comparable.
There is no hierarchy in spirituality.
As soon there is hierarchy there is religious indoctrination.
I never read a true mystic who would compare and rank spiritual belief systems. To the contrary, they very often connect the systems and show us that they all point to the same God.
Q: To know myself, must I practise awareness?
M: There is nothing to practise. To know yourself, be yourself. To be yourself, stop imagining yourself to be this or that. Just be. Let your true nature emerge. Don't disturb your mind with seeking.
Q: Is there any particular place you would advise me to go to for spiritual attainment?
M: The only proper place is within. The outer world neither can help nor hinder. No system, no pattern of action will take you to your goal. Give up all working for a future, concentrate totally on the now, be concerned only with your response to every movement of life as it happens.
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
Q: I respond to what you say, but I just do not see how it is done.
M: If you know how to do it, you will not do it. Abandon every attempt, just be; don't strive, don't struggle, let go every support, hold on to the blind sense of being, brushing off all else. This is enough.
Q: How is this brushing done? The more I brush off, the more it comes to the surface.
M: Refuse attention, let things come and go. Desires and thoughts are also things. Disregard them. Since immemorial time the dust of events was covering the clear mirror of your mind, so that only memories you could see. Brush off the dust before it has time to settle; this will lay bare the old layers until the true nature of your mind is discovered.
That’s my prompt to weave in my personal experience I want to share.
I have been reading a few random paragraphs of Nisargadatta almost every night for many years. I have long given up trying to understand or make sense of what he says.
Over the years, I have learned to completely trust his teaching and how it is implemented.
I read something and I might understand it on a deeper level straight away, but this is very rare.
Often the understanding comes weeks, months or sometimes years later. It just happens in its organic way, and there is no urgency, and I don’t strive to understand when I read.
These topics are not understood intellectually, and no thinking or trying will change anything. Time taught me that the deeper wisdom will be revealed when I am ready.
His words are like seeds that will nestle into my mind and will start to sprout when conditions are right.
The “What is in the gaps?” is such a seed. I read it years ago for the first time.
And then the “gap seed” suddenly started to sprout.
I was ready, it seems, to become aware of the gaps between the objects.
Ready to face me, the subject.
As soon as I focused on the gap, I noticed a huge relaxation of my whole body, which felt very nice. Naturally, I dwelled on that and wanted more of that. And gone was my gap meditation.
Because “the sense of relaxation” is, of course, just another object in consciousness. It’s a thing. It’s not a gap.
That’s when I realised on a deeper level that the subject, the gap, can’t be anything at all. As soon as it is something (some “thing”), it is an object.
The gap is “no thing”.
I, the subject, am “nothing”.
Just empty awareness.
Then I realised that it is impossible to notice emptiness, nothing.
I can only get aware of some “thing”.
Getting aware of something means knowing it.
And, after years, it finally clicked, why “we can’t know who we are”. But we can be it.
By being it, we know it. The mind can’t grasp it or know it.
This turned the gap mediation into something like a black hole for all objects.
By focusing on the gaps between objects, by just being, I simple dismissed all objects as “not me” and withdrew my attention from them. They all died a quick death by inattention.
I then realised that everything that exists in our consciousness only exists because we give it attention. And another deep understanding of two phrases I heard numerous times: “We don’t live in a world. The world lives in us”, and “We each create our own individual world by what we give attention to.”
You want your world to be good? Be aware and dismiss all bad. Or even better: Dismiss everything and rest in your beingness. That space of awareness is permanently blissful and loving. It’s the objects we attach to that tarnish it.
In pure beingness, it feels like the subject and object divide is transcended.
A flicker of non-duality?
I wish.
The mind fooled me once again by pulling me into this story and intellectual concept I just written about. That whole thing is just another object in awareness, of course.
Thinking and writing about “pure beingness” isn’t “pure beingness.”
The very last non-dual teaching will be:
There is no teaching.
There is no path.
There is only you, and you can’t be talked about or thought about.
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The inner peace you write about is difficult to attain in a reality where “ they “ want to murder as many of us as possible but I am now heartened and have found a limited sort of peace by the fact that it’s not personal to me alone.
Thank you for the continued reminders... to just be. It is a feat to ignore all that is spinning and spiraling around us and just be. But that is the challenge of being, no matter the time of one's existence.