Why You Must Be Selfish to Reach Enlightenment: Part I

"If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple." - Luke 14:26

At the age of 29, Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, abandoned his wife & child to search for truth and along the way engaged in extreme self-mortification. So important to him was finding the truth that he stopped caring about earthly life, and indeed Buddhist monks were encouraged to do the same. Like Jesus, he seemed to be making a rather harsh and seemingly irresponsible demand of his followers: to stop having any regard for themselves or their families, to in fact completely abandon worldly concerns and worry only about their faith in Jesus Christ or their desire to reach enlightenment. To a lot of people, this seems rather harsh, but the truth is, it's not.

Why? Because the entire point of spiritual practice is to expand your worldview beyond just you and the few people you care about to everyone. Why? Because we are all God's children, or to put is the zen way we are are all one thread of consciousness and every living being is animated by a part of that thread.

As silly as it sounds, let's be honest: no one knows what happens we die and no one knows exactly what it is that separates a dead body from a living one. We may know the cause of death but that still does answer the question of why death occurs, nor why life comes into being in the first place. All we know is it's an endless, constantly changing parade of new life forms popping into existence and gracefully fading away to make room for new ones, and we are part of that dance.

Jesus and the Buddha were people who learned to do that dance with more ease and grace than most human beings will be able to in their lifetimes. They did this by setting out to do exactly what they demanded of their followers: separating themselves from the daily world of obligations and responsibility and constant distractions that ruined their ability to see what was going on underneath the surface, what made us tick, and what a human's ideal life would look like. Then they decided to pass on what they learned.

In Christianity there is an emphasis on renouncing this earthly world, in Buddhism a focus on letting go of attachment. The reason for this is rather logical: we know that all of these earthly things are going to pass away. Every living body, every wine glass, every experience, literally everything is going to pass. To focus only on a few select objects that will eventually disappear - and this includes you and your family - is to set oneself up for a lifetime of misery. Every time a relationship fades away, or a glass shatters, or a family member dies, we are surprised and upset. We feel as though our world has ended even though we knew it would; indeed if we're paying attention we realize the world is changing every minute and we are not who we were two seconds ago - with our moving lungs and blood vessels and skin cells shedding everywhere and our mouth now closed where before it was open - and the environment around us is forever and always in a state of flux. Why then cling to *anything*? Why then not just cling with all your might to this very moment, the only thing you ever really have that's not going to go away?

Try it. Try it for a day. Treat everything around you as already broken, every experience as already gone, every person around you as already dead. They are if we're honest with ourselves and free of fear. Sit down somewhere and don't look at your phone, just notice everything around you. As you eat a piece of fruit notice the texture of its flesh on your tongue, the juice as it squirts between your teeth, the slow creeping fullness of your belly. When you're with a family member notice the smell of their hair, how hard they make you laugh, how loved they make you feel. As you drink swankily from your crystal wine glass tap it with your spoon and enjoy the soothing ringing sound, appreciate the crisp scent of that chardonnay, stare at the light reflecting off the crystal. Do this so well that when the fruit is digested, or the family member's life force fades, or the wine glass is inevitably dropped, you can't even feel sad because you loved them so well. When you can joyfully let everything around you go, you've reached the right level of non-attachment, which is quite literally heaven or nirvana: being present in and enjoying every moment, always.

So yes, I am saying you can reach heaven or nirvana if you practice enough. You begin to feel it, maybe once at first and then all the time: this feeling that the constantly fading images around you are not real, indeed that "you", this body-person, one image out of so very many, are not in fact you - you are everything, all of it, all of the now constantly shifting and changing, the stream of consciousness in every life. When you see the world this way, the view is breathtaking.

Perhaps you can see quite clearly now why one "gives up" one's family and self to follow Jesus or the Buddha - it is not a harsh commandment to have *no* regard for one's family, it is simply foolish to value or cling to one's temporary self or family when both disappear and even more foolish to only take joy in you and your family's joy instead of everyone's. It is necessary to be temporarily "selfish" to reach spiritual understanding, but that's a topic I'll address in Part II.

Is Consciousness Relative?

You are going to die one day. This seems scary. But is it really?

Every cell in our body dies so that we may live. The individual cells are shed constantly so that we may transform into new beings every moment of every day. These deaths do not scare us because we do not consider ourselves to be these cells, but the truth is we literally are those cells; they compose our body.

Similarly, matter is made up of atoms. Atoms are tiny, of little consequence to us, inconceivably small. On an even smaller scale atoms are composed of tiny electrons which revolve around a nucleus. Even though these particles are microscopic in nature, we know that there is a huge amount of space between electrons and the nucleus.

It almost reminds one of how there is a vast amount of space between the sun and planets and how the planets revolve around the sun, does it not? It's almost uncanny. Which begs the question: are we just tiny beings on one of the electrons on an atom?

Let us go back to our fear of death. We are convinced that because this one tiny inconsequential human body we inhabit is going to die, our being, our consciousness, will die too. But why do we assume that? Are cells not part of a greater whole & are we not like cells? If we look at how nature arranges itself the truth is we are simply a tiny part of a greater whole but because we are tiny humans with simple brains we don't yet understand how this consciousness works.

Let us theorize, then.

What if not only time is relative just as Einstein said, but consciousness itself is relative? What if each and every one of us only has one tiny perspective at a time and we just don't know that yet?

Some may say we can never know for sure, but I disagree. After all, our time of being trapped in this tiny pocket of consciousness is only temporary. Is that not wonderful? Is that not extraordinary? Your physical death is no different from the literal death of every moment and experience you've ever had. Literally everything ever vanishes simply so that we may have some more. What a grand experiment of being! What a lovely, wonderful world!

I believe we are everything all at the same time but we can't be conscious of that because it would be incomprehensibly overwhelming and our collective mind would literally be blown, unable to function properly anymore. We need our separation to be as one.

So this, then, is all one grand experiment, our consciousness playing with and deceiving itself. Even better, if you think about it, is that our experiment is continuously improving. Just as our iPhones keep getting better with each new generation, our human bodies improve and adapt to our environment more efficiently with each successive generation. Life keeps getting better and we know this to be true because we now understand evolution!

But some people are scared that one day the human race will die out. Those people are adorable. First off, in all likelihood those people will not witness the exinction of the human race. But more importantly, of course we will be extinct eventually! We will inevitably go the way of the dinosaurs (though really, have we not just developed better hardware on top our base reptilian brains? Are not dinosaurs still alive inside us? And are not human beings the iPhone to the the dinosaurs' rotary phone, the same exact thing but vastly improved?). We human bodies are doomed to be as obsolete as iPhones will someday be in the future when something better comes along, but this will merely be because we are not the best phyiscal vessel of consciousness available anymore - we will be something even better.

So there you have it. The cells in our bodies die so that we may live. We as individuals die so that new beings on earth may live. And one the day the sun will expand and the earth will be swallowed whole and the entire planet will cease to exist.

This is not a problem; this is a solution. Don't hate your individual death, a cell's death, the earth's death. Instead ask yourself: what great and awesome being does the earth die for so that it may live?

The Great Escape: Enlightenment

Here's the thing about enlightenment: you have to understand that you are trapped. Physically speaking, there are aspects of your current reality you are never going to be able to change. Books such as The Secret like to claim otherwise: simply think positive thoughts, they claim, and only positive things will manifest! Eliminate negative thoughts and negative life experiences will gradually vanish!

What a load of horseshit.

You will never be able to will away your diabetes. No amount of positive thinking will ever remove the emotional scars left by an abusive parent. And more importantly, as much as self-help gurus like to claim otherwise, no one can eliminate all of their negative thoughts. One can reduce the number of them, certainly. With practice and discipline one can change their overall thought patterns from a net negative to a net positive, but no one is ever going to be able to eliminate all negative thoughts from their brain. If anyone tells you otherwise they are lying or trying to sell you something, probably a self-help book, and that's for one simple reason: we can't control the thoughts in our brain any more than we can control our physical reactions to external stimuli (which is to say, we can to an extent, but not completely). Think about the number of stupid, irrational thoughts that pop into your head on a daily basis and you will know this to be true.

In fact, it's not just our thoughts we can't change! Think about all the other things you wish you could change about yourself but can't, not much, anyway: your looks, your intellect, your natural proclivities & talents, your level of social aptitude, your athletic prowess or lack thereof, the number of social connections you possess to ease your way into a job you want, your physical health, your mental health, the number of years you'll likely live, your attachment style in relationships, your geographical location (many of us can't afford to move), and so many other things. I'm not saying we can't change at all, but the amount of change we capable of achieving is very small.

What, then, are we to do? How can there possibly be freedom when we are trapped as we are? When we let go of the illusive freedom promised by pushers of positive thinking and face the cold, harsh reality of life - that our genetics and environment doom use to to be a certain way, that there is really very little we can change about ourselves - how then can we be free?

Simply put, you have to look at this truth from a different perspective.

Some way, somehow, you were placed in a random body that is capable of many things. This body you were given is temporary. And for as long as you have possession of that body, you are free to do whatever the fuck you want with it. There are no permanent consequences to your actions! When you are done using this temporarily animated shell, it will wither away and you will be free of it. There is literally no need to be attached - and why would you unless you were an unbelievably foolish person? What idiot would get upset when his loaner body got old, or if it were a little dumber or uglier or weaker than he had hoped for? It's just a loaner body! So make use of it while you can, be prepared to let it go, and realize: the body is not you. YOU are free.

What, then, are you? That's the great question, is it not? It's actually very simple: you are merely one cell with a predetermined role to play in a body. As one of countless cells, you are not so very important even though you are necessary for the body to go on. We as Americans are very focused on the importance of our individual identities, but this is the wrong way of looking at things. While it is important to recognize the role you play - we couldn't function as a world if you didn't - it is far more important to recognize that the body is what matters, not the individual cells. So let go of your own sense of self-importance and realize you are the body. The whole body. The entirety of the universe...that is you.

Once you truly understand this, you will be enlightened.

Quit Your Bitching: Your Life Doesn't Suck

All day, every day, people bitch that this system is awful.

As the Creator of this system, it's rather offensive. Do you people not remember the first time you had sex? (Point taken, ladies, go ahead & relive that first orgasm instead.) Are we forgetting this system gave you uppers & downers & psychedelics galore to ease your pain? Have there not been moments in your life where you honestly thought you could have just died of happiness...?

So if I gave you all that, then, why are you still complaining? Because you have *temporary* discomfort sometimes? I lovingly designed a system where suffering was always designed to end & instead of embracing & loving my masterfully crafted playground, you've all made it into a shithole. You panic, constantly and unceasingly, every time something goes wrong. Has it ever occurred to any of you as you worry and fluster that you know damn well it's only ever a temporary problem and that if you want to have a happy life all you have to do is wait awhile until another good moment swings by?

I hope this got you thinking. It's about time you all woke the fuck up and got your heads out of your asses. As I said, I'm a loving Creator, but even I have my limits. I want this simulation to go well because it's the  best one I've designed so far & I'm really proud of it & since I'd prefer not to wipe out most of the human race again via flooding just to get my point across - and because a lot of you guys finally stopped enslaving women and minorities and murdering and torturing each other like I asked - I've decided it's time to update the Guidebook again. Come back for more advice on how to play this video game called life; I'll try to make the human writing this for me post every day.