the meaning-less mess
When I find something that makes sense to me I like to tell people. And it's not easy to tell people. Writing is telling but in a less intrusive way, in a way that's optional, even. You could just stop reading now.
Because what I have to write isn't important, nor is it essential, it's optional.
This is the beauty of us, the choices we make. Although I would love more readers and subscribers, the word 'subscribe' now has an ickiness for me - it has a kind of 'juicing' vibe ever since youtube, or maybe forever. 'Like and subscribe', an empty command for the modern age. Subscription is like having a fixed belief ("do you subscribe to this view or that view?"), something that holds us back, maybe. I mean, who needs beliefs anyway?
A sobering thought is that perhaps I don't even make my own choices, that maybe I'm some kind of automaton, spieling through several filters, which combined completely separate me from my subject. I have no idea. All I see is that clarity is a lovely idea. I like the phrase "we don't see things things the way they are, we see things the way we are". It kinda sums up everything I've written so far but in a far less effortful way. When I write it's like unblocking a pipe. All the gunk comes out first, followed by...you know...the rest.
So, choices, are they real? Not real but are they ours? I'd say yes, for the most part. Sometimes I know I make choices from a position of not wanting to get hurt or to hurt others, for example. I love the example of my two year old, who, if he doesn't like some food item he'll just let it fall back out of his mouth or better still lean over the side of his highchair and spit it out in such a nonchalant way, it can actually be torturous - and so beautiful! In that moment he's perfectly expressing his non-conditioned ways. I would never dare to spit my food out to show I didn't like it, not because I don't think it's a cool thing to do but because I'd be scared that it would be socially unacceptable and therefore is 'not allowed'. So in that circumstance I don't choose not to do it - it's just not considered any more, since I was around 2 - that choice was made for me by my parents' conditioning, just like my little boy will eventually be conditioned out of his bleurgh-ing. If it was rotting food or something I think that would be ok for us big 'uns but otherwise, nope. That is not an option.
Think about it for a second. It feels kinda wrong. But it's not - that wrong feeling is just a meaning we've attached to the action through conditioning. That's a really basic and mildly entertaining example.
We are conditioned in so many ways. The word 'conditioned' doesn't really do the condition of conditioning justice. It's almost too soft a word. 'Brainwashed' is a more conspiratorial word. I'd like to make up a new word, maybe? One that sounds like it is. Cos conditioning is kinda sneaky, we don't talk about it and we don't like to think that it's happened and happening to us all the time and that we're doing it to ourselves every day but it is how we can also do amazing things. We learn and build on learning and then some. So I suppose it's negative conditioning and positive conditioning but we'd have to decide where the line between positive and negative lies, which itself would likely based upon some kind of moral conditioning.
So, while I'm here still trying to unclog a pipe, you'd better have made yourself ready for learning that nothing exists apart from the stories we tell ourselves and everything is empty and meaningless until we tell ourselves enough times that it's not.
By the way I do cool things too like naturey healing connecting events (only two weeks to go!) and sit-down-face-to-face-things that can assist people in magical, powerful ways, type things. Soon I'll have a page on my website explaining more about that.
See you soon