Finding Your Original Face: Understanding I-AMness

"Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born." - Zen Koan

How can we understand this Zen koan and find our fundamental I-AMness? The koan is meant to be understood directly rather than metaphorically, which makes it even more challenging. You cannot retreat into your imagination to visualize what it might mean. Nor can you think of an arrow of time going back into the past and imagine what you could have been like without a body. The meaning of the koan is to be found right here in every moment of lived experience. That's what we are going to explore in this post.

Embracing the whole of experience.

Appreciation Transforms The Ordinary Into Perfection

Compared to our not-so-distant past, we are all incredibly wealthy. Imagine for a moment a life without absolutely any possessions. You are out there in nature without any clothes, tools or shelter, left alone to find enough calories and protection from the elements every day of your rather short life. Today we are equipped with a lot more tools, possessions and wealth, yet we are also becoming more depressed than ever before. 

Appreciates having nothing

Better ways to think about meaning

Maybe you have been asking yourself the question: "What does all of this actually mean?" Is there a fundamental true meaning to life?

Maybe this deep question was triggered by great loss or by having had a dream shattered despite the investment of money, time, and effort. Whichever way you arrived at this that life seems to lack inherent meaning, in this article we are going to explore how what we think about the metaphysics of meaning directly influences what feel and how we act. 

Asking a question many times implies that there must be a concrete answer. In the case of meaning any absolute statement about it is going to be inadequate in most circumstances. To start this exploration, the question has to be reframed so that we can actually find worthwhile answers. 

The Difference Between Real and True

We all know what is real, right? But do we know if that is also true? And do we even recognize the difference between the two? Read on to get clarity on what these words are pointing to and why it is so important to know the difference. It might help you in understanding yourself and your relationship to reality better.

Form And Happiness

Do you chase experience in the hope of lasting happiness? Form never has the power to make us happy or unhappy. But unconsciously we often give it that power. No person, thing or experience makes us happy in and of itself. It's only our interpretation that makes it appear that way.

The World appears in infinite forms

A Powerful Dream Yoga Technique

If you are practising mindfulness in daily activities, you may have noticed something interesting happening to your sleep. At a certain point, as you develop your mindfulness, the increased awareness will carry over into your dreams and sleep. And even if this has not happened to you yet, you can learn how nighttime practices can benefit your spiritual progress. Dream and Sleep Yoga are powerful meditation techniques that allow you to extend your practice. 

Bring Joy Into Your Practice

Have you been meditating for a while? Have you settled into a routine and meditate a certain amount of time daily? If this is the case, you may also find that your practice has become a little stale. The meditative practices you apply are always the same and you are not really excited about them anymore. 

In this article, I want to explore how you can bring joy back into your practice and give it a positive quality. This way your practice can become something you look forward to every day.

Constructive Desire

Desire is a double-edged sword, it is mental energy that often seems to arise all by itself. It also seems like we only have little control over it. This is the case when desire develops through unconscious thought patterns. We expose ourselves to experiences and objects while we have certain desirable emotions and thoughts. When we have positive thoughts about something, we increase the pleasurable emotions associated with our desired object or activity. 

When observing any experience in pure consciousness, there is nothing inherently better or worse in any experience. But from our personal perspectives, we create, unconsciously, positive and negative scenarios around the immediate experience. This is based on what the experience means for us personally. As such, desire is based on the very positive end of interpretation and is therefore not at all a given. 
 

Whether the world is perceived as abundant depends on the interpretation

Spiritual Transformation

Spirituality is a difficult topic to discuss with people who are only slightly aware of what its essence is. Even if you are beginning to be interested in spirituality, it is difficult to get a clear idea of what spirituality actually means. We all come to this with our own ideas and notions of what we can expect or what spirituality is about. Once you dive deep into this topic you can expect that all of your ideas about religion and spirituality can be transformed. 

It's in the flow of the river...

Revealing The Beauty Of Every Moment

When we are talking about enlightenment as a way to become free, we really mean freedom from suffering. Self-Created suffering that blocks our view form the beauty that lies underneath every moment of our experience. In this article, we are going to explore five ways in which we suffer and the role of our immediate reactions and habitual judgements. 

Is every moment inherently beautiful?

1. Attachments to good and bad

The first thing that makes us suffer are our attachments. Our attachments are forcing us to categorize our experience into good and bad. The good things we want to attract and Theo bad things we want to avoid. This constant struggle is a source of suffering. Why are attachments leading to suffering? As everything in existence is impermanent, being attached to any certain way of existing, will lead to suffering, because we will eventually lose that thing. Our loved ones, money, possessions and our life. Everything is impermanent.

To resolve this source of suffering we can take a couple of steps. First is the recognition that fundamentally there is no good or bad. These are human categories in which we put our experience. The things don’t have these attributes in and of themselves. Like understanding your mother language, this is an automatic process which is very difficult to transcend. Try not understanding your mother tongue and you will see how hard it is to get past habitual, automatic interpretation. Something very similar happens with every experience.

After this realization the practice of mindfulness can follow. With many hours of training, we can stay absolutely present. This is done by constantly reminding ourselves to step outside of our judgmental mindset and into the observer mode. At one point the directing of our attention towards some aspects of our experience will be replaced with an open and restful presence. Our actions will flow unrestricted and we naturally respond to the events in our life without feelings of inadequacy.

The third step in this process is the acceptance of existing as a human being. Existing as the form that we are we have specific characteristics. One of which is this habitual judgmental categorization. Becoming aware of it is the most important step. It is not necessary to completely stop doing it. Operating in the world requires that we make decisions and judge our experience. All we have to do is to make it a conscious process.

2. Survival based judgements and actions

The second source of suffering is our habit of evaluating our experience in terms of our survival. We judge situations by their meaning for mental and physical survival. This pulls us out of being and into a stressful state with the need to survive. What has to survive? The illusion of being a separate entity, of being a human. This illusion can only survive as a mental idea. The idea of being a human with a certain life-time exists only as a mental concept. It there has to be maintained with constant effort. But we deny it and instead think we are real. It is hard to grasp how deep this lie runs in our psyche. But to keep us from detecting this lie, our mind needs to employ a strategy to keep us from discovering the deeper truths of our being.

Here consciousness is again the solution to the problem. Making those processes conscious and revealing our tendencies to act on survival based thinking is the first step towards freedom. With the realization of our survival activities we open up to the possibility of experiencing the transcended state of pure being.

3. Existence in time

When we go through our daily life, we usually do so in a highly rational state. We observe only very little in our actual experience and filter for what is relevant for our future. We make these judgements based on our past experience. This is troublesome because we are pulled into the emotional energy of our stories. Instead of resting in the always peaceful energy of the present moment, we are living out a story that seems to spread out in time. But this time is illusory and we are therefore living in a mental construction of our mind. More so than living in what is actually true and real in the present moment. The result is distorted view of reality. We mistake our own personal story for reality because that is where 99% of attention goes. Rarely do we experience moments of clarity, where all of our personal story drops away.

Again, consciousness and the development of our mindfulness muscle is the simplest solution. An object or reminder can be of great help for beginners. Either set a timer on your phone which reminds you with a certain interval that you want to be mindful. The trick is not to overlook or overhear the reminder because it has become a habit. At the beginning you have to work on really becoming mindful every time you hear the sound or see the cue.

As an alternative, I like to make an object part of my regular experience, which I then associate with the goal of staying aware in the present moment. An armband for example. In the first few days of wearing the armband you have to instill the habit of making the connection between the armband and mindfulness. You can even use it during your regular meditation practice as you object of awareness. Feel the armband on your skin and let the sensation be your constant reminder and anchor for mindfulness in the present moment.

4. Comparing yourself to others

We only observe the facade that others present to us. We never know what truly goes on inside them. I often find myself thinking that I am pretty good at judging others by their facial and bodily reactions. But I also think that I am equally good at hiding my true emotions from others. So which is more accurate? And can I really trust my judgments? If I am honest I would have to answer no.

But we always compare ourselves and our own life to our idea of the life of others. If we judge our life or current experience as inferior compared to that of others, we create those feelings purely based on our own mental construction.

Doing this gives us a certain kind of security. But it comes at the price of feeling inferior and this is only exaggerated by social media today. When most people only display their greatest moments on their Instagram feed, we compare our own lives to the greatest moments of others.

Conscious awareness is curative. Observing the mental constructs you create around the lives of others helps you to discern facts from illusions. The hard truth to accept here is that you will never know the internal experience of others. Personal experience will always stay personal and we cannot share this realm of experience other than what we can share through language and images.

Accepting the fact that there is only you in your experience has a liberating effect and may free you of the grip of mental constructs. I have found that experiencing them as a part of my reality but not giving them more weight than necessary had a positive impact on my well-being.

5. The illusion of happiness as a future state

We believe in the illusion that happiness has certain prerequisits that we need to fulfill before we can be truly happy. The exact opposite is the truth. But we will get there.

For example, we may have unconsciously created the idea of money being a requirement for happiness in our mind. Over the years we have unconsciously adopted this as fact, maybe from society or even our family. Therefore we subconsciously created a barrier in our mental space, that does not allow us to be fully happy before we have not reached our financial goals. But this is purely a mental construction as well.

This delayed gratification has a danger. We are building the habit of always needing some future goal (in this case money) to be happy. We may live a lifetime in the illusion of happiness just being right around the corner. Just that next goal seems to be needed to make us fulfilled. But as soon as we reach it, our habitual behavior to search for the next thing is much stronger than our capacity to enjoy our present experience. 

This is our default state. If we do not practice some sort of mindfulness or have had some luck in our upbrining, the tendency to always see our happiness in a future scenario is very strong. This default state is not to be mistaken with the best way to life. Working against it with a regular mindfulness practice is a wise move. The earlier you make it and the longer you practice it, the better the outcomes may be.

Is Your Spiritual Practice Worth The Effort?

What do you hope to gain from spiritual development? Is it a practice that will benefit you in any way? And is it worth the time you have to invest into it? To answer these questions, we have to become clear about two things. First, about the you (the ego) that you identify with and secondly what a benefit to that ego structure actually is on a fundamental level.

In other words, gaining clarity about what you are and how spiritual practice can benefit you, in the context of this new understanding. With a clear understanding about the ego and what can benefit is, are you able to create a solid basis of motivation for your spiritual practice.

Who is dreaming?

What you are

The idea of being a separate entity is something that developed over time in your early childhood. As you learned to separate one part of your experience from another, you gained the ability to survive. For basic survival it is necessary to make the distinction between you and other, so that you are able to distinguish between beneficial and harmful objects. We get so used to this helpful distinction that we no longer recognize that we even do it. Once we have become more or less conscious beings we have already many years of training in this way of perception under our belts. To perceive our true nature, the consciousness that contains all of experience, we have to overcome this automatic function of our nervous system. And that requires work. That realization brings us to the second point. When we see that the ego is fundamentally no more than an automatic response of the nervous system to distinguish between self and other, the question of a benefit for that distinction becomes even more interesting.

Your life in one goal

One way to look at what you are trying to achieve in all activities is to define it as the striving for benefits for yourself. But what is a benefit?

A benefit to a subject can be defined as circumstances that support its persistence and as something that helps to overcome obstacles to its survival. For biological systems this is obvious in our needs for food, water and staying physically intact.

Spiritual work though happens in the mental sphere. The ego is not limited to the physical level. Much of it's survival requires certain mental behavior. And here we come to the point where the question of receiving a benefit out of spiritual practice gets to the root of what spirituality is. When the goal of spiritual work is to overcome the separation between self and other and to eliminate the illusion of an individual ego, than we are exactly doing the opposite of what we defined above as a benefit.

Successful waking up eliminates that thing that could receive a benefit. Certainly the thing we identify with when we ask this question. Even though that thing always was an illusion to begin with. Which is the reason all of our effots to achieve lasting happiness for that illusory ego are predetermined to fail. Something that has no substance can't hold on to any lasting circumstances that would lead to happiness.

Trading the ego for the solution?

So why then engage in spiritual practice? Why spend all the time and effort on something that is of no benefit?

The solution that spiritual enlightenment promises to deliver is simple but uncommon and generally not easy to achieve. Enlightenment eliminates the illusion of being an autonomous and separated identity that has the need to mold it's experience to it's benefit. In enlightenment there is not a hint of resistance left over. No resistance to whatever is arising. No struggling, no effort. A natural flowing in and out of the emptiness that is the center of the universe.

The Realness In Reality

Have you ever asked yourself the question, why it is that you think about reality as real? In this article, I would like to take you on a journey towards realizing some insights into that matter for yourself.

To start our investigation we might begin with the one state that we would consider to be not real. Besides our waking awareness, the only other state that we all share and visit on a daily basis are our dreams. This you might call an experience that is not real. 

Real or unreal? In relation to what?

1. What dreams teach us about reality

Why is it that we say dreams are not real and is that even true?

In order to answer this question, we have to analyze it from two points of view. And by making that distinction we can learn what we mean by “real”.

In our direct momentary experience, dreams appear to us as very real. Inside the dream, we are usually not aware that we are dreaming while the story of the dream is unfolding. If we become aware of the fact that we are dreaming, an ordinary dream turns into a lucid dream. But in regular dreams, we only are able to label it as unreal after we have woken up and the content of the dream is put into a larger context. The context, in this case, is that the experience took place inside of our heads, while the body was asleep.

If you had your first insight by now, you might have noticed the first pattern here. What we call real always needs another context. Keep this in mind, as we will build on top of this understanding going forward.



From the point of view from inside the dream, on the other hand, the dream appears as real as everything else in life. This is important to notice. Because we have no “outside”-reference to our actual life. In other words, we might say, that we have never woken up from the dream called life. If that would be possible, it would put life into proper perspective. Just as waking up from a dream does with the content of the dream. Try to imagine right now, how radical of a shift that would be. How different would waking up from life feel? What could you wake up to? And is it possible to wake up while remaining “in life”, just as you do in a dream when you become lucid?



Think about these possibilities and you might arrive at some deep insights for yourself.

If dreams are not important to you, you might even think that you aren’t dreaming that often. But in fact, everyone has several dreams each night. How much attention we give them determines if we remember them or forget about them the moment we wake up. This might also give us a clue about how our current life might feel or matter in a larger context. If waking up from life is more radical of a shift than waking up from a dream than also the shift in context is something to think about. How different would you live if the context of life becomes much vaster than what it seems to form your current point of view? What would change? Would you gain some clarity and truly be living your dream life?

Did you have an insight into the state that you are in? You may have noticed that you never asked yourself these questions and that you have no reference outside of life. That is a very important first insight to have. It’s better to know that you don’t know than living in the illusion of never asking those questions in the first place.

If you deeply grasped the fact that you lack a larger perspective on life, then it can be a great motivation for spiritual work. And to invest time into answering these questions for yourself and gain direct knowledge of what your life is about.

2. Shared human experience

The second more important aspect of reality that makes it appear real is found in our human relationships. Since you remember, all of your experiences took place in a social context, whether you were with other people or alone. But mentally, you always put your experience into the frame of experiencing what it is like to be a human in a social environment.

I would like to ask you to try and grasp the fact, that you project onto other humans the idea that they share basically the same internal life as you do. You can only experience yourself as a human being through this very idea. This apparently self-evident fact is in truth a projection that is created by your mind.

From personal experience, I can tell you that it is possible to experience reality with a total lack of this idea. To see another person without the projection that they have their separate internal lives. This is only possible when our direct experience is seen for what it is. Normally we don’t experience reality like this. Just like you cannot stop your brain from understanding your native language. It just happens. And every time you see a human being, you automatically assume they possess internal experience. Even if you think that you don’t want to do it. Just like thinking the thought “I will try not to understand these words” won’t stop you from making sense of the words which you are reading right now… Do you begin to grasp how tricky this is?

We might, therefore, conclude that reality becomes real because we share a part of reality (external reality) between all humans. Even though we see it from slightly different angles, we have some overlap between what we consider objective reality. The discovery that shared experience with other humans is just a belief rather than a feature of external reality, will reveal a deeper truth to us. This information is something that needs to be contemplated until a genuine insight arises. It has to feel similar to the experience of looking at these words without also interpreting them at the same instant.



These are two important aspects that make reality real. But it’s important to notice that there are probably countless more details to reality that create the overall packages of realness. Contemplate the difference between dreams and waking life. And, secondly, the importance of other humans to your sense of reality. This will take you very far in your discovery of the true nature of reality.

The Final Frontier

In mindfulness meditation we become aware of the concepts that build up our self-identity. What we have formerly identified with and have unconsciously seen as the subject, is slowly turned into an object in awareness.

The Zen-symbol for the oneness of existence.

We dis-identify with the tendencies of our psyche. Through that process we gain freedom from our worldviews, that shape our behavior and determine how we feel about the world. Just by holding these concepts in our awareness, we become clear of their underlying mechanisms and see through the ego-identification that is there.

In that process we come to a point where we have separated from all mental phenomena and recognize them as not-self. This is also called the neti-neti method. Finally we come to a state where we seemingly have nothing to let go of anymore. At that point we continue to ask the question: what remains?

The last identification that remains is that of the Do-er. We think we are directing our attention. We think that we are the source of our thoughts. That we produce our actions.

This is the final frontier which needs to be investigated.
Finally we might discover, that this deepest of all identifications is also illusory.

The Irony of Reasoning

The irony of reasoning is hidden in its own blindspots. Every line of reasoning has its origin in faith.

Maybe you remember the time when you were a child and it seemed appropriate to always continue to ask "why?" no matter the reason your parents told you.

I remember having that period in my childhood, where I wouldn't spot asking why and probably driving my parents crazy. I just never stopped asking for a deeper meaning and why things are the way they are. But at some point we stop and usually settle for some answer.
An answer that usually explains how some event is caused by some other thing.

To be practical we have to stop at some point of abstraction that is appropriate for the situation. We don't dig deeper. In our daily life, we usually settle for very shallow answers.

We settle for one or two levels of reason. If it fits into our model of the world, we are happy with the answer. Therefore reasoning is rarely practiced consistently to the deepest levels and is instead based on faith. One thing is caused by another and that is enough to satisfy our curiosity. But what is the consequence of this? 

I suppose that we hide deeper, uncomfortable truth about reality from us. To be a philosopher in the truest sense of the word means to be committed to the truth on a deep level. To love truth for it's own sake. To be a philosopher also means to be an advocate of reasoning, but not only at the shallow levels of daily discussions. Exercising it on the deepest levels is instead the way to apply reasoning in order to obtain true insights. 

This is self-inquiry. The exercise of applying curiosity and reasoning to one's own self. This can lead to interesting experiences and I find it worth exploring.

The Survival of the Mind

Psychological survival has become more important than physical survival and is the reason for most things we do. 

Modern times make it harder to become enlightened. Distractions are plentiful.

This is the hypothesis we are going to explore in this article and discover why survival is still the driving force behind most of our actions. Consumption, travel, entertainment and most forms of distractions beyond that which is demanded by physical survival is a direct extension of this drive to survive. Our need to survive indeed extends beyond securing physical survival. You might wonder what I mean by this and why this is the case.

If we dig deeper into the nature of reality, we find that all experience is an illusion. Including our physical body and the sense of separation between us and the world. By definition an illusion needs to employ some mechanism by which it becomes invisible to the one who is deceived. We could think of this illusion as a metaphysical entity with it's own drive to survive. In eastern traditions this illusion is called ego and is the center of our being. We are literally deceiving ourselves into being. How marvelous is that?

In our modern world, most work and most activities are far removed from immediate survival. And even though we have to earn money to survive, this is only partially true. Much of what we work for is not contributing to this end directly. Only to the degree that it feeds our own self-deception. 

But with that deception comes also a lot of trouble, suffering and the covering up of Truth. This illusion has an easier time to maintain itself when we are distracted of course. When we are not even asking any suspicious questions. When we are so caught up in what life presents us with that we are not bothered to take a closer look or become serious about discovering Truth for ourselves. From this point of view, all action could be considered distraction. There is nothing wrong with that, but we have to be aware that is also the root of all suffering in the world. With a firm realization of Truth there is no suffering. Fully realized beings perceive all experiences of life as the perfect manifestation of the infinite nature of reality.

To solve this issue I recommend following the practice of all-day-awareness. Training the mind to be fully present in every moment. With the full spectrum of sensory experience, without slipping into conceptualization and thoughts our mind is constantly coming up with. Over time this will quiet the mind and facilitate the state of no-mind. A state where the joyous nature of reality shines through in every moment. Beware though, there will be no you anymore. But then, you could say, there was no you to begin with. The veil of illusion will have been lifted.

Characteristics of a Total Illusion

In this article, we are going to explore the psychological process of an Illusion. We will discover how Self-Deception works in every one of us and how it arises from deep underlying mechanisms that are interconnected with reality itself.
With that understanding we will be able to make the connection to spirituality and what are the difficulties that make true enlightenment so rare.
And in the end, we will see why this is ultimately a good thing and how we can use this knowledge to our advantage.

The deception in video games

Let's take a look at the shallow illusion of video games. This technology offers an experience that many of us today can relate to. To discover the characteristics of a total illusion we will first have to define what makes an illusion shallow and obvious. The historic development of video games reveals that the illusion becomes more realistic the closer it is to what we are used to experiencing in real life.

Game designers work very hard at giving characters more life-like movements and the overall behaviour of real humans.

It is also easy for us to imagine that at one point in the future video games will have surpassed the resolution of our senses, eventually becoming indistinguishable from our real sensory experiences.

So what else would it take to make us believe in the illusion? If we might join with all of our senses into such a game of the future we still bring with us our memories. From that, we can conclude that a total deception must also include our own memories besides a perfectly simulated sensory experience.

If we ask what makes video games so popular, we reveal another interesting aspect of psychology. What benefit do we get from spending our time in those virtual realities while obviously achieving nothing of value in "real" life?
Their appeal may lie in their ability to trigger our reward centres without requiring exertion of physical effort. They reward/cost relationship is high.

On another level they have become so good at presenting a life-like scenario that some people may be able to completely forget about their life. Usually only for a limited amount of time though.
An additional aspect of the illusion of video games is their storytelling. Great games not only have great graphics but also a great story. Some goals are presented to the player that seems to be of value to achieve within the game world. The background of the characters become ever more complex. For the players to identify with them even more, in-game decision influence the development of the story and it's outcome.

If all these aspects seem to you as representative of real life, than now you can contemplate the difference between an obvious and a total deception. You may want to ask yourself the question: What is missing in these perfect game scenarios that we can still distinguish them reality? 

Self-Deception

In order to make the illusion whole and difficult to uncover, all of our own being must be included in it. Which, again, doesn't mean that this is a bad thing. It just means that reality does not work the way that materialism makes us believe. The very mechanism by which reality comes into being is through an illusion. That is how it works. So in a sense, we could also say that it is real. Just not in the way we previously believed.

In order for the self-deception to be completely convincing, our own thought process is part of it. If you tend to disagree with me here, then ask yourself, what are you listening to, when trying to find out about the illusion? The answer is likely, that you rely on your own reasoning and your own thoughts. But beware that you have no "objective" background against which you could compare your thoughts and then say that they match reality.

This is why waking up is so tricky. It is a long and difficult process to reveal all the self-deceptions of the ego. But the reward is incomparable joy and bliss that exceeds all human expectations.

Why would we lie to ourselves?

I want you to think about a past experience when you lied. What made you use a lie in that situation?
It's purpose was likely to serve you in some way. You felt threatened by something and lying seemed to be a solution to avoid that thread. So it served you or your agenda.

So why would we deceive ourselves?
First, who is deceiving who if the individual we thought we are does not exist? We could answer, that only god exists and therefore god is deceiving himself.

Similar to the Movie "The Game", we might say God became bored with resting in it's own infinite existence and wanted to feel what it is like to be a part instead of the whole. To have a limited existence and feel what it is like to identify with a part of himself.
So the ego came into existence and is believed to be limited to the human body. That very thing, the ego, must be deluded in order to become a limited thing when in reality there is only one infinite whole. If that thing wants to survive, it has to feed the lie and keep deluding itself to stay alive... 

Insights On How To Act And Achieve Your Goals

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to have an easier time to challenge themselves than others? Why can some people stick to their exercise routine and others not? Why do some people take risks and work on actualizing a vision they have in mind and others stay stuck where they are?

Maybe wakeboarding is your goal

During meditation and contemplation I have gained some insights into how the mind works in this regard. At least how it is in my mind, and maybe you will find some of these to be true for yourself. 


Envision these following steps with me here to arrive at these insights for yourself.

1. Feel what you basic mood is right in this moment.
1. What is on your mind when you try to be as neutral as possible?
2. Are you generally in a positive mood or a negative one?
3. Is something bothering you right now?
4. Get a general picture of your current emotional situation without reference to one particular situation or object.
2. This is your baseline happiness. Research shows, no matter what happens in your life, you tend to always come back to this baseline level of happiness.
3. Now think about some project, some goal, something you would like to do, but are not currently doing because something holds you back.
4. Now that you have this vision in your mind, notice how the baseline mood which you identified before has blended in with this vision. 
1. They are not separate
2. It would take an enormous amount of imagination to actually elicit the feelings that come with that action you envision
5. What can we take home from this observation? 
1. It is not possible to judge any of our visions by how we feel when we think of it.

Example:

You have the goal of doing exercise first thing in the morning. You want to go for a run. Now you woke up and you feel tired and not yet energized. Exercising seems like an impossibility. You tell yourself that exercising now will feel way to hard and difficult. How do you come to this conclusion? By observing your current mood. Notice that thinking about exercising didn't give you the same mood as actually exercising does. If you actually end up going out and start exercising, you will feel the outcome of that vision after maybe 10 minutes. 

We can see from this simple example that our visions happen in a completely different state of mind than the actual lived reality of these visions. 

Conclusion:

I think that people who have an easier time acting on their goals and actualizing their visions, have a greater ability to imagine and evoke the feelings they associate with their vision. In this way, when they think about their goal, they actually get a little boost in how good they feel and that motivates them to achieve it as well. Whereas someone who has little imagination will not have an emotional response to his visions, and that leaves him with no reason to achieve his goals. 

You can take this insight and test it for yourself. Try to infuse in your vision or goals as much emotional power as possible. Thinking about it rationally from your current level of happiness won't really motivate you. But actually connecting to the emotional level of your goals will give you a boost.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think it is important to mention that this can be taken too far. I have found that overly indulging in positive emotions associated with a certain goal can be so pleasurable that it seems unnecessary to put some actual effort in its realization. Just something to keep in mind.

The Power of Yes: An Approach to Mindfulness

All Day Awareness or mindfulness in daily activity is the extension of formal meditation practice into your daily life. Over time I have found this practice to be extremely powerful in transforming my outlook on life, my happiness, my capacity to witness emotions, my ability to concentrate, my contentment in difficult situations, my ability to reason and in general my feeling of well-being.

Embracing all of (your) reality.

But there is an important aspect to this practice that I want to talk about in this article. And that is how to approach this state of radical openness of whatever arises in the present moment. 

When you practice awareness of the senses and your thoughts, automatically another function of your thoughts will arise. Your thoughts (or your ego) will try to hijack your higher state of awareness. You will start to hear comments about your mindful observer mode. Thoughts will try to take over this new position of being aware of the rest of your experience. This happens in really sneaky ways. If you are mindful you will hear a lot of commentary when you witness your current experience. Comments about other thoughts, about emotions, about sounds, sights and feelings. And those commentary thoughts will claim to be the observer, it is easy to identify with those commentary thoughts. Include those commentary thoughts also in your mindful observation. Treat them as any other sensations. This is difficult step and requires and additional level of mindfulness.

And the main reason for this article is the attitude with which we approach mindfulness. It is like the color of the filter through which we observe our moment to moment experience. As soon as an  experience has some special meaning to you, your mind is going to judge and comment on it. And with applying the right filter we can learn and embrace more of what we experience. And the filter I recommend is a Yes to all of your experience. 

What does this mean? Welcome everything. Be of no resistance to what appears in your consciousness. Be a superconductor. Let everything flow through you. Open the flood-gates as wide as possible. 

A Yes feels widening and freeing, whereas a No feels constricting and limiting. Allow yourself to feel also the emotions that are commonly labeled as bad. You begin to embrace the full spectrum of your humanness. Experience will become richer. You will learn that challenging emotions only become problematic when you try to resist them. We cannot change what actually exists. We can only observe and learn, so that we may create a different future. 

When you allow all emotions to flow through you, they quickly resolve and you can observe them with an open and genuine interest, like a scientist who wants to learn more about how his inner mind works. 

Learning by observation greatly helped me to understand situations and my resulting judgments and desires. Often times the root causes will be revealed, but without a rational explanation. Instead you will know in every moment the underlying emotions that triggered your current state of mind. This is a kind of self-knowledge that only observation and no rational talk-psychotherapy can teach. 

You always have the possibility to control the level of openness though. Should the emotions become too overwhelming ,for example when you are dealing with some serious trauma, you can still put the lid on. But as long as you remain firmly rooted in the presence of wide open awareness, you will feel that none of the content that appears can actually hurt you. Your identification with any content in your awareness will greatly decrease. You realize there is no difference between you and consciousness. There never was any separation. You are consciousness. And all that ever happens IS. Changing, fleeting, ultimately groundless and substance-less, self-aware appearances. On a deeper level of reality consciousness is not separated from that which appears. It is all just ISness as different forms and in different dimensions (as the sensory experiences and thoughts). 

Summary of the benefits to approaching your experience with a Yes instead of a No:

• negative emotions don't last as long the less we resist them
• as an open observer we are not longer fully controlled by our emotions 
• we gain the ability to do the best in more and more situations
• from observation we can learn where our current motivations are grounded in
• our experience becomes richer and we act more authentically
• we open ourselves up to have realizations about deeper aspects of reality
• we will feel happier with our moment to moment experience
• fears and worries have less of grip over us
• getting lost in mental scenarios about the future or past is less likely

The Nature of Memories

How our minds construct memories

When I think about my past, I unconsciously assume that what I have in my mind is actually a pretty good representation of the events that happened. You have probably already learned that this is not the case. Our brains are not truth machines. But rather survival-machines. Energy was highly important in our evolutionary past and conservation of energy an important adaptation. This resulted in a sorting mechanism for your memories that is geared towards securing your survival, so that you can pass on your genes and keep your offspring alive long enough so they can do the same.

The further we go back in time the more vague our memories are

This situation is fundamentally counterproductive if we try to remember the past as it actually was. Emotions and sensory input blends into a vague feeling of who and what it was that we encountered in that situation. Inner and outer world have no clear distinction. And to make it worth, every time we remember or tell our friends about a past event, our memory actually changes. What we remembered in the past of an event becomes the event. This is where it get's interesting.

Over time we construct a story of who we think were in the past. The further we go back in time, the more we become the stories which we have told ourselves and others about ourselves. A few of our memories stand out more than others, even though they only represent a tiny slice of our past. We need to realize here that what we think we are, is mostly a self constructed story. Our egos are these self-constructed, biased stories we believe was actually our past. The ego is larger than this, but this is a fundamental part of it.

How this understanding leads to deeper insight into ourselves

The first step is the realization of this. If we understand that the past is mainly a self-created story in our minds, which is geared towards survival and not a mechanism to accurately represent truth, it allows us a greater degree of freedom. In not taking the past so seriously, we gain another degree of freedom. It opens us up to the path of truth-realization, in the sense that we can now begin to realize what we truly are. A story, among an infinite number of stories, playing itself out as it has to. Because otherwise, absolute infinity would miss exactly your current experience. We gain the freedom to realize that in all this, there is no consciousness which is separate from appearance. That appearance is inherently self-conscious, and that what we are is not what we thought we were.

We become free from the limitations of the ego through the realization that the self-identification is no more than a story. And this story is playing itself out without a separate I. But with strong attachments in the dimension of thought and with a particular strong emphasis on thoughts about a largely illusory past, which it calls "I".

Further down this path, it opens us up to the deepest insight into our human psyche. Which is the insight that we are not that story and that what we are is not separate from the ground of all being. The stateless state that already existed before our universe with all it's inherent qualities and dimensions of time and space was born. That state where all of existence is fundamentally one and not yet manifested as the seemingly separated world which we perceive now.

The practical methods

There are people out there, many of them following the neo-advaitans, who believe that the logical understanding of this is already enough and all is already realized. In my experience this is not true. The manual is not good enough, we also got to practice. And most enlightened beings have worked hard to reach a high level of truth realization.

If you want to improve your capability to deal with your every day life, than I recommend you install a daily meditation practice. Meditate for about 30-60 minutes every day and make it a habit. Largely focus on developing concentration. Sit still and allow yourself to rest in simple being and focus on the breath.

If you are interested in seeing through the illusions of the ego for yourself you got to do self-inquiry and probably psychedelics.


If anything, I would wish that this article gave you some sense of freedom. I hope you were able to realize that you are in the position to choose how much of yourself you want to be defined by this story of your past. Maybe it can even set you free to discover those realization and insights for yourself.

If Consciousness is the Ground of Reality, can we explain everything with it?

Theories of everything have an interesting aspect to them. Whenever someone tries to explain the universe, he has to be granted at least one ultimately mysterious agent. In the religions, it is god that is never questioned. But where did he come from? That can never be answered within the religious world-view.
In the scientific world-view, we could say it began with the big bang. Where did it come from? What was before the big bang? We don't know yet. And, if our theories ever predict what was before the big bang, than what caused that thing? What was before that? This line of reasoning will also never end. You can always ask another why.

At one point every explanatory model, a so called "theory of everything", has to be granted it's one free and unexplainable variable from which the theory can then explain everything else.

Now it gets interesting. Once it is understood, that we will always have one fundamentally mysterious and unexplainable event that "caused" everything or with which everything can be explained.

In the scientific world-view there is a physical universe outside of ourselves, which needs to be explained and it should have started with the big bang. In the religious world-view there is also an independent outside world and it was created by god.

What do both of these have in common, making them a very risky model to base our world-view on?
They are both events for which we, in our own experience, have no direct evidence. Where is the big bang or god? Do they really exist? No. Not more than any other idea. They might be true, but we have to say that we do not know. If we could see visions of god or the big bang, does that proof that those visionary impressions of ours had anything to do with creating the whole thing? We can never know.
The thought of a physical, material world outside of our perceptions is already a believe. Empirically we can never know this. Postulating this and then trying to explain all of reality on that underlying, unspoken assumption is never going to be successful. Science is hiding it's most basic assumption from us. The assumption that there is an underlying, independent physical universe. Science, in the field of quantum physics, has also already shown that everything is based on consciousness.

The moon really is only there when we look at it.

So it would be wise to base our explanation of the world on something we know for sure, 100%. What is it, that we unmistakably know for sure? Imagine you had an accident and all your sensory inputs would be wiped out. Imagine that that accident even wiped out your ability to think. What would be left? What could you still know for sure? If the world does not exist anymore, what remains?

I am conscious. I am. I exist. Could anything else ever be known for sure? Everything else arises within consciousness. But it is possible to explain everything from this knowledge:

If this interests you, I can really recommend you read Bernardo Kastrup's book: "Brief Peeks Beyond".