There is No Safety Net

There is no safety net, and it’s not all good. You can take a leap of faith. You can fall, and you can crash. The story they sold you about there’s always someone or something to catch you if you fall is a lie. If they told you the truth, you would not believe them and if you did believe them then they would have no control over you. It’s not all good. It’s about 50/50, as long as we are still looking at things as bad and good. Whatever we consider good in this lie that we are living is also 50% bad, just depends on which side of the coin is flipped up in the moment. If you had a choice to physically incarnate as a human being and were told that you going to be shown an illusion so grand that you would fall madly, deeply, passionately in love with it.... You would become so attached to it that you would feel you could not exist without it. It would be so magnificent, so beautiful and seem so real that you would forget it was only an illusion. Then at some point they will tell you it’s not real, and no, you can’t have it. Would you sign up?

When you’re on the beach looking out at the beautiful ocean, you see the foamy, white tops of the gentle waves rolling in from a soft blue horizon line, and you feel peaceful. You don’t see the sharks, piranhas and other flesh eating creatures that await you underneath the beautiful top layer of the sea. I don’t think most of us ever even think about the perils below while watching the sweetness above, but it’s still there. For most normal folks, there is something innate within us that seeks beauty over ugliness that seeks pleasure over pain … so we look for what we want to see. However, that doesn’t mean the ugliness and pain is not there. It’s there and that tsunami could blow in, that school of piranhas could infest the calm waters… and then the coin would flip. What was “all good” just turned “all bad.” What was pleasurable would become painful in an instant.

Now what can our mind do with this? It can do nothing. If we hold a concept of good and bad, and we all do, it is impossible for the mind to process that what once brought us so much joy, now makes us hurt. So what to do? Approached from the perspective of the mind, we can only think about it, because that is all the mind is capable of doing. Thinking will create new concepts and ideas to deal with the new data. The mind doesn’t really know anything. It only thinks it knows, and it will think it has discovered something new. It really hasn’t, though. It has only created another pattern of thinking that creates another groove in our psyche. There is nothing wrong with this process. If the mind could not do this, it would certainly blow, and “we” as a body-mind system would become completely dysfunctional.

I am beginning to understand that to break through this cycle of creating patterns and treading the grooves of our conditioning, the mind does actually have to blow blasting the container held together by its perceptions. The rug must be pulled completely out from underneath us, and we must give up on the sense of being grounded to anything. We must become groundless… petty scary, huh? How many would walk a path, join a religion or follow a teacher if we were told upfront nothing is what you think it is? What if you were told upfront that none of us really know anything? There is no destiny. Life is much more random than you can ever imagine. No one is enlightened. And if you seek the ever illusive enlightenment, you will surely go mad trying. And if in your pursuit of enlightenment, you actually find Truth, you’re mind will blow. I think very few would walk, or join or follow, but there are a few who will, a few that are willing because they have nothing to loose. They already saw the complete, total mind fuck of the lie they live. Somewhere in someway the rug was pulled out from underneath them, and they lost their footing in the illusion. This has probably happened to them many times and at first they reach for anything to gain ground with concepts and patterns of thinking. This happens over and over again until something happens that shakes our very core… something so hurtful, so painful, so horrible that we loose hope. We give up. We are fed up. We are too tired and have no energy to keep supporting the lie. Giving up on hope is where living a raw and truthful existence begins.

As long as we entertain the hope that something will be different than it is, then we also have to continue to entertain the fear that it won’t. Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin. A life without hope may sound sad to imagine. Can you imagine a life without fear? Really, ask yourself, “Can You?” If you can then you will see there is no need for hope. It is wise to keep our hope until we are truly ready to look fear straight in the eye. Avoiding fear does no good. Fear will keep knocking at your door until it is acknowledged. Fear only wants your respect, not your power. There is no path, no religion and no teacher that can do this for you. Until we become intimate with fear, there is no one you can count on or trust, not even yourself.

The only way to know Truth, to know what is real is to know fear, to know pain, to know loneliness. When we can sit with our self and watch without the need to change anything, to fix anything or to hope for anything different than what is happening in the now, then we will have achieved self-mastery. Tsunamis will devastate. Wars will explode. Death is inevitable. There are sharks in the ocean. It’s not all good, but half of it is. The sun will rise everyday. Someone somewhere will love you. Babies will be born. There all dolphins in the ocean too. So what can we do? We can only watch, become a witness of the story be told. Our intelligence will do the rest. When I see the straight fin of a shark, I will stay out of the water. When I see the curved fin of a dolphin, I will jump in with playful delight.

Nature takes care of itself. Evolution occurs in all of nature, including the human being. There is no safety net. There is only Divine Order. Don’t bother trying to trust in it, because you’re mind can’t really grasp it. The mind can be transcended, though, when we learn to sit and just watch it do its thing, think. Beyond thinking is awareness. In awareness is Truth, and that is what you can count on, that is what you can trust. Don’t try to trust, just be truthful and trust will well up from the Truth inside you. There is no hope we will ever discover the Truth, but there is no fear that we won’t. Enlightenment, I don’t know about, and I am not seeking it. I think, perhaps, I will stick with freedom.