Becoming Fundamentally Real
Understanding Essential Reality
In the last piece I wrote I used the term “getting beat up by the Energy” to describe the excess flow of information emanating from the fundamental reality that exists beneath all of our concepts and beliefs about what life is. With our stories, fantasies and desires, and beliefs, we are constantly weaving a shroud that covers the essential nature of reality and life. When this leakage between realities happens, a dissonance is created in our minds between what fundamentally exists in a state of ISness and what we have been taught life is. The greater the leakage, the greater the dissonance and the sense of being beaten and pummeled. Some aspects of this leakage are hailed as spiritual or mystic experience, but mostly we try to numb it.
My greatest power as a human being is that of observation. While mystics like Rumi wax poetic about the experience of being enveloped by light or love or both, my nature is to observe the experience and penetrate beneath it to understand its source. This yields a sense of profundity and clarity. One of my greatest spiritual experiences occurred crawling around under a house repairing rotted floor joists, not while in a monastery or in a high mountain cave. I was simply repairing the floor on which people walked. Everything suddenly went still with no chatter of thoughts, and my breath became tied to everything that existed. It was like every moment was a clear jewel for me to examine and understand. Meanwhile I kept on doing my job. I’m trying to offer you what I’ve learned about the fundament from which we spring, and I do it freely. My selfish motive is that I cannot accumulate this experience of fundamental reality without being overwhelmed. I have to pass it on. My hope is for people to begin to understand the nature of the internal beatings they experience, and with understanding, begin the steps toward mastery and healing. The alternative for me is to go away like Lao Tsu did and give up my concern for the fate of this world. If my effort fails, I’ll retreat to my shop and make furniture that you may or may not ever see. I must create beauty that draws from the true nature of things, from the sheer ISness. I’ll write poetry you’ll never read, never hear.
The universe is a conscious enterprise, a Great Mind, and you are a subset of that. The Great Mind is always seeking conscious points of observation of itself, an evolutionary experiment in the different ways the part can truly see the whole and report back with the news. We are the eyes and ears of the Great Mind, but reject the nature of the commission and the nature of the quest. When the Great Mind intrudes into our small minds and egos, we are battered, because there are no elders to teach how to explore the great vastness. Our consensual reality is made of our agreements as to what is real. Money has no fundamental reality, but rather is an agreement. Wall Street and its futures and derivatives don’t fundamentally exist, except as an agreement. To a real human being who can explore the trackless vastness of the Great Mind, the agreed upon world is shadowy and nebulous and full of unnecessary suffering. We base our identities upon our belief and attachment to these agreements and lose our fundamental reality and forget the reason we are here.
We all suffer. We live in an ocean of suffering. The response of many people is to try and mask their own suffering by inflicting more suffering on others as they cling to the wealth and power they claimed in the process. Others rebel and try to inflict suffering on those who profit from suffering. The only way out is to become fundamentally real, a real human being, and to reduce the ocean of suffering by even a cupful. Then, you can help others become fundamentally real and further reduce the ocean. And, on and on. This is what I live for. This is the meaning.
See the Great Mind, hear the Great Mind. Become real and help end suffering.
