The collapse of Beliefs

It seems so obvious that certain statements are true: that we are humans, that we are born, that we will die, and so many other things. But the most profound realisation that comes with awakening to reality is knowing that all beliefs are conditioning, and as such, all beliefs are false. This is because all beliefs exist in the realm of ideas, which may refer to something we experience, but they are not an experience in themselves. The idea that we are born is one fundamental belief that we cannot refer to in our experience: none of us knows the experience of being born as a reality. Can you find, in your self, the experience of your own beginning? Maybe we can recall being a child, but even then, that experience refers to an idea in the past which is not being experienced right now and is therefore in the realm of memory or imagination. The future is the same. What about beliefs and ideas in the present, such as ‘I am a man or woman.’ This belief is just as questionable as beliefs of past and future. The concept of gender, for instance, assumes an identity based on physical perceptions, but these perceptions are temporary and changeable and last only as long as we believe ourselves to be bodies. Are we bodies endowed with consciousness? Or are we consciousness having a temporary experience as a body? The idea that ‘I am a body with a gender or race’ is breakable. Every idea is breakable.

When belief collapses, reality begins. It doesn’t begin in time, but flowers in a timeless moment, for time is just another belief along the illusory past-present-future continuum. Time has never been experienced by anyone except as an idea in our minds. The things we demand from time are projections of our thoughts. The ever so complex interplay of form, manifestation and time is not so much our experience but our beliefs being taken for experience. What do we experience without beliefs? Emotions are the residues of decades of beliefs imprinting themselves on our physical perceptions. Without a belief in an enemy, there would be no emotion of anger or revenge. So when wiped clean of beliefs, what is left of thoughts and emotions? Nothing.

In this space of nothingness, reality is experienced. This is the letting-go we are practising: unlearning the conditioning of being born a human.

Film-making

Last night I had a ‘bad’ dream. I dreamt that I was watching a horror film, and I knew that the film or movie I was watching was not ‘REAL’. In the dream, I was sitting next to a friend, watching a horrific scene which he found entertaining but I found very unpleasant. When I woke up, I wondered why I’d dreamt about watching something like this, which is seemingly unrelated to my life. It consisted of a mentally disturbed serial killer who eventually gave himself up.

Eventually it occurred to me that this was a way for me to understand the ‘scenes’ reported by the media about what is going on in OUR world, like the reports about crimes, violence etc. If you believe in universal spiritual laws, you probably believe that reality as we know it is a projection of our collective imagination. I don’t feel the need to argue this idea through quantum physics, because you either agree with the view or you don’t. What I wanted to understand is: why are we creating a world which has these horrific elements? It was almost like trying to understand why people enjoy watching horror films. Watching and experiencing are different, though. I think we watch in order to understand things that are not in our experience, to have a feeling of catharsis. But why do we want to make these things a part of our world?

Then it occurred to me that, in a sense, we are making a film on the ‘world stage’ (sorry, Shakespeare, your descriptions are too perfect to change). The horrifying elements have come from our FEARS being realised and played out. Why are we fearful? Because we feel the world is UNKNOWN to us. In a gist, we’re not aligned with our true selves, and a myriad of inexplicable, sometimes horrific things have surfaced as a result of that.

But if we are film-makers on this stage, wouldn’t we want to create the MOST BEAUTIFUL PLAY IMAGINABLE? I think we would, but we just don’t know how. Maybe we think it’s GOD (or Godot) rather than we who has the power to write the world script. There are some limitations to what we perceive as our CAPACITY to change things right now. But I think a better reality is definitely possible. It’s time to retrace our steps back to the core issues of who we are so that we can let go of the fears that feed a horrified imagination and embrace the knowledge of a beautiful mind.

Don’t lose the magic

We create reality on so many levels, but how can we know what is actually real? Are our thoughts, perceptions, feelings, intuitions actually real? If we can see something, taste it, smell it, touch it, hear it, does that mean it’s real? What if what we can see or hear cannot be seen or heard by others? Usually we define reality through collective perception, but what if the collective cannot perceive something which we perceive very strongly – are they blind or are we mad? We give validity to collective opinion, but is this correct?

I think that it is necessary to rely on the collective to define everyday reality because the collective is what keeps society going. But I think that this is something we need to do for convenience, not something which defines reality. I don’t believe in reality, or to put it another way, I believe in multiple realities. I believe that reality and illusion are not opposites, they are part of the same system which creates experiences. These experiences are relative and they come from personal perception. For instance, when we are children our parents look very big to us, but once we grow they look much smaller. Our perception changes according to our relative position. Sometimes we take collective reality so much for granted that we STOP QUESTIONING. We think ‘that’s just the way things are’. We lose the magic of being alive. We forget that reality is elusive and personal, not rigid and enforced. We lose our imagination, our freedom.

This is a very sad fact. Sometimes it takes a visionary to remind us of our magical life, to show us that we are capable of creating wonderful dreams and transforming them into everyday ‘reality’. Such visionaries have a versatile mind which can see beyond limited ways of understanding reality. They see beyond relative reality in order to search for something enduring, something ABSOLUTE, something which never changes. And sometimes, they find that absolute reality, and they spread the word about something wonderful which connects us all in a bond of enduring love.  But we take that message and often do not understand how to appreciate the wonder of it. We feel the power of God’s message in the messenger’s words, but we don’t know how to keep it alive in our everyday worlds, so we create a system for that message, we make a religion, we make a doctrine. In trying to solidify the message of God, we make it into something rigid, which is exactly what the messenger was trying to free us from. We create commandments and we say that the messenger gave us these ‘rules’ to follow. We become followers, when the messenger wanted us to be the leaders of our own wondrous reality. And that’s when the magic is lost.