or, how I learned to stop freaking out and grow
Surrender.
For various reasons, this has become one of my favorite words lately. It has a seductive, powerful sound about it. It demands your quiescence, it demands that you voluntarily put down your formidable armour and abandon your bargaining and scheming. Surrender is the touch of a lover, who with its simple, implacable demand also offers solace, peace, and understanding.
In the face of an unavoidable fate, you are confronted with two choices. Fight and and scheme until you are exhausted, broken, bitter and spent. Or. Surrender to what is coming and use the time left to steel your mind and your soul for what you will inevitably face. Both options lead to exactly the same destination.
But the experience along the way is vastly different.
We, if we have any purpose at all in this place, are here to learn and advance our understanding through the experiences we are given. We arrive here naked and blind to our condition, but we are much more than this, even as infants. As we grow up we are taught the name our caretakers have selected for us. We learn about our toes, fingers, noses… we’re shown the whole world by those who love us and taught our place within it. This process is called individuation and during this process our souls become progressively more knotted in these bodies and the sensations they provide. In so doing, we become lost in the illusion of existence. But the truth is much larger than this.
How we will experience what’s coming hinges a great deal on how well we understand what we are. There’s a lot to learn. There’s even more to un-learn. There’s a lot of small realizations to acquire and ponder, in order to be able to assemble in your mind the mental structure of what you are. But in my opinion, at this junction in time there is no greater, more important task than this. Everything you think you are, everything you believe you possess will be coming apart… and unless you can see past these illusions your experience will be torture.
The “I” so meticulously crafted for us by our parents and close family is an ideal vehicle to experience the world we’ve inhabited until now. This structure is called the ego and becomes what we comprehend as ourselves and distinguishes us from everything else. It extends from our bodies to our thoughts, likes and dislikes, and includes ideas like a personality. It’s also a construct that allows for ownership, i.e. “me, mine, I” all notions of personal possession that extend our concept of self to include things we attach to ourselves, adding value and prestige to the concept of “I”. All these attributes flow from the individuated ego as does comparison, envy, and all the facets of being separate from the experience we’re in.
This world we exist in is based on duality. That is to say, we can only experience something in the presence of its opposite. We think of night and day to be two different things, but in fact they are two ends of the same thing. We can only perceive day, because it is punctuated by night. This detail is central to why we are here and why we perceive ourselves as unique individuals. This place, through it’s particular set of conditions, allows us to experience things as distinct from us, as observable and measurable to us, the observer. The unified nature of the spirit becomes localized in our bodies and so gains perspective with which to observe everything else, including other versions of the spirit as shown to us in others. Intangible concepts we experience because of these bodies include time, distance, vertigo, fatigue… and sensation based reactivity. (put a pin in that last one… this will make sense later in your process and you’ll be grateful for the hint)
We have these experiences to grow our understanding of what we are, as seen through these bodies. The limitations of these bodies shape our experience and place limit on us for the purpose of learning. One of the fundamentals of our presence in duality is that we can not learn from these experiences if we understand we are not the body. The limited perspective of the body provides the setting for us to fully experience our lives. That’s why you don’t recall past lives or that you are infinitely more than you see in the mirror.
By the same token, these bodies are a cage. As we identify them as ourselves, we lose the notion that we are in fact not the body nor it’s mind (the ego chattering at us incessantly). We become lost in the sensations and emotions of life and for all intents and purposes can’t see beyond the life we’re experiencing. Except, what you are in reality is not the body, your name, your occupation or your relationships. You are the soul who is animating this body and experiencing this life in much the same way you’d experience a holographic virtual movie of someone’s life. Grasping this, disentangling yourself from the illusion that binds you in a dream fearing pain, loss and death, is the purpose of our lives now. Because the purpose this place was created for is coming to an end. The means of it’s end are the very converging cycles of completion that are bearing down upon us which we have all talked about till we’re blue in the face.
Now. The last meaningful task, as it pertains to the real self… is to remember who we are and find the exit door.
In my opinion, many will not be able to cope with their illusions collapsing and I can’t imagine a harder thing to experience unprepared, clinging to illusions that can no longer protect you from knowledge. But ready or not, the events are already in motion. You can either be prepared to flow with the river of events or be dragged backwards as you fight to cling to something intangible. And resistance, IS suffering. Ask any woman who has given birth. The more you allow fear to cause you to resist, the more violent the experience will get. The end goal is not optional, the baby will come out. the only way out is through… and the ony way through without being torn apart is to surrender to the forces that outweigh you 100 to 1.
When I say “Surrender” I’m encouraging everyone to make peace with the inevitability of what’s before us. The energy you’ll save fighting uselessly you can then turn to understanding that this is happening for very specific reasons, and in meaning and comprehension, find a peace that will surpass any you’ve ever known.
There’s a greiving process to go through. We’re all readjusting the very motivators that keep us moving and changing that focus to making the most of what we have left. That’s never going to be easy, but it will be a lot easier to do when you can still do it with mental health professionals and a functional society to help ease the way. To say nothing of the ability to put it down and come back to it all later.
You’ll begin realizing that all the things you thought were important are actually distractions. They served a purpose of creating experiences to frame your learning. But that is over now. It’s time to wake up and readjust your perspective.
There’s a world of articles pointing the way. From philosophy to ancient mysticism… but at this point, you don’t have endless time to dig willy-nilly. So I suggest meditation to begin to find the sensation of what you are under all the conditioning. I used Vipassana for my start. Vipassana is a tool for self observation, because the first step to freeing yourself is to understand what you are and what you are not. Once you begin to grok that distinction, you can’t unsee it and it will continue to reveal itself to you. Vipassana is taught around the world in centers that offer residential courses in retreat centers in almost every country. The courses and your stay are entirely free of charge as was the wish of the founder. Your only commitment is to decide to do it, there is no financial barrier because this tool is viewed by the teacher as a vital lesson for mankind. The introductory course lasts ten days. And no, you can’t do it from home or break it up into shorter sessions. It is not easy, and yet it is effortless. It was both the hardest thing I have undertaken and the most transformational experience of my life. It was so incredible that I did a second retreat in the same year as I did my first.
The perspective I gained through meditation allowed me to start distinguishing the different parts of myself and identify what was me, and what was conditioning. You will be amazed at how much we are driven by ideas. Ideas which are just concepts we can drop, concepts which we must drop in order to not suffer when they begin to disintegrate around us.
It’s time to start disentangling ourselves from this world, especially the man made structures we believe are real, but are not. This place is a lot like a sandcastle. Its time is over and as the tide rolls in, it will return to the foundational beach it rose out of. Those left clinging to the sand will be have the hardest experience. Those who understand what they are will awaken from this dream and this long before the tide is truly here.
We all are waking up to discover we have a lot less runway left than we thought we did. We don’t know how fast this will move and how long we have before our lives change gears and preparation is in the rearview mirror. But this year science has admitted they were too cautious in their predictions by an order of magnitude. Effects predicted for mid-century, are happening now and at the most extreme level of the scale.
This process the world has begun will be challenging for all of life. From my understanding this is the first time consciousness (us) will be expereincing this directly while incarnate. It is, from all accounts, a phenomenal opportunity to have this chance. But I feel that like skydiving, your enjoyment is in direct proportion to how you have prepared for it.
Personally, I am quite averse to landing on the ground at several hundred kilometres an hour.
If this resonates for you, I suggest you begin at least to ponder these concepts. There is no singular path. This is the one I followed, it isn’t the only one by any stretch. What I do believe is the kernel of most importance is to learn to live from a place of mindfulness and to observe yourself so you can disentangle yourself from those things which will be falling away in the coming period. Everything is up for re-evaluation, to suss the real from the illusion, the you from the conditioning. The goal is to reach the understanding, through experience, that: You are not the body. Neither are you the mind. The mantra of self knowledge and illumination.
We are all exiting this dream, so no one “goes to hell” hell is a creation of our mind in this dualistic place. But as I suggested with my birthing analogy, If you spend some time wrapping your head around the coming process it will be a heck of a lot less traumatic to get through. Just ask a woman about the wisdom she gained after giving birth.
We have quite the ride ahead of us.
