Please Read This First

The following provides a very important context I'd like you to understand before reading my essays.

Please Don't Believe Me
It is common for people to give a lot of weight to the words of teachers who confidently assert their awakeness. I'd like to ask you please not to do that here, if you can. Not everything awakened people say or write is Profound Truth. Because most of Being is hidden from any perspective, nobody can know all of everything. In fact, no one can ever know more than a tiny fraction of reality. Therefore, nobody is the "ultimate" expert on anything.

I don't even believe that everything I say or write is true. Sometimes I'll read back through something I've written in the past and feel it's off. So feel free to take some of the specifics of what I write in the essays with a grain of salt, and focus more on the overall feeling and meaning of my communication.

I'm inviting you to simply feel into what I'm transmitting. Compare what I'm saying to your own experience and intuition. If something I say feels useful for you, good. If not, feel free to discard it, or put it on hold for reconsideration later.

I Am Not The Perfect Embodiment Of Everything I Say
It is also common for us to expect that spiritual teachers who make bold proclamations about life and stuff must have traveled so far on the path as to have earned the right to confidently assert whatever they are confidently asserting. In my experience, however, I don't find this to be always true, and it's certainly not true in my own case. I'm not meaning to disclaim the distance I have actually traveled (which is a fair amount by my own measures of distance), but I do not wish to collude with allowing you to imagine that I have traveled as far as my vision has taken me.

This is my personal crucifixion: that in this life I am forever blessed and cursed with a potent vision of what is possible in the future and what is cosmic in the present. On the positive side, I see how life and things can be, long before they are even ready to become them. I often cognize (at least what seems to be) monumental, divinely human principles for the benefit of whoever cares. On the negative side is the fact that future/cosmic vision can distract from present/local vision. So I often miss obvious dumb stuff that is right in front of me because I'm off into the future or expansiveness of my next invention, revelation, or cosmic intuition.

I'm not saying this because it might be seen as hip to be self-revealing or self-deprecating. I am saying this because not to do so would perpetuate a form of violence that I do not wish to continue participating in (that is, the violence of making it appear that I know it all and therefore, you don't -- the violence of superiority). I want you to know that I am highly aware that my gifts don't make me superior to you or anybody. They're just my gifts; you have your own unique gifts. I want you to find your own genius and live it in the world for real.

So let me state it plainly: I am not the perfect embodiment of everything I say. Please use my words as questions for your own investigation of Being. By all means, go where I have not gone. Push the envelope in your own ways. Exceed us all, because that is how we all succeed in arriving here.

Maps Are Not The Territory They Represent
I am painfully aware that any attempt to divide Being into parts, to name those parts, and to create a map that shows their relationships to each other and to the whole will always be partial, incomplete, and, at best, distorted. This is because Being exists in a practically infinite number of dimensions, and so any attempt to map it in a finite number of dimensions is absurd and doomed to ultimate (if not instant) failure. It's like trying to force a map of the world onto a flat surface (like a Mercatur projection - Greenland isn't actually anywhere near that big), only far, far worse. Maybe it's better to say that it's more like trying to describe a woman in 10 words or less.

The various maps I draw in my writings may appear to be linear, but such is not the case. We are all engaged with all levels of Being simultaneously, with some levels being more engaged than others in any moment. So if I describe some progression along steps on a path, I'm really trying to use words and ideas to talk about phenomena that are far more like waves than particles. 

But, with that understanding in mind, we can proceed and know that any map I offer is just a pointer to your own absolutely unique and totally mysterious whole Being truth. My purpose in using maps is to help you find yourself in the larger process of awakening, so you can honor your reality and find the edges of your own growth. 

The Paradox Can Never Fully Be Spoken
Being is the great grand-daddy of all paradoxes. Being contains within itself all possible opposites: Absolute/Relative, light/dark, eternity/time, wholeness/parts, good/evil, one/many, emptiness/fullness, and life/death. From the human perspective, it appears that Being is endlessly contradicting itself. Therefore, whatever can be said about Being must eventually be balanced by its opposite. You will notice that I often struggle to hold both sides of a paradox in my writings. Being human, I'm sure I've often missed one or another sides of a paradox, which might piss you off because I spoke an incomplete truth. So I want you to know in advance that I'm really not that attached to the "truth" of what I"m writing; I just want to help you awaken.

Awakening Is Not Synonymous With Depth, Evolution, Or Maturity
Throughout my writings, I speak of stages in the awakening process that go beyond what many of us were taught was "ultimate." Most of the images of awakening, enlightenment, and self-realization we were given were confused with depth, evolution, and maturity. In other words, it was often presumed that one who had awakened was highly evolved, very mature as a human being, and possessed a tremendous depth of insight and understanding. It is clear to me that these things do not automatically go together. It's true that a certain minimum amount of personal development must take place for each stage of awakening to be possible. But the minimum isn't much, and awakening shifts don't automatically match predetermined ideas of depth or maturity, nor do they necessarily say much about how "evolved" a person is. It is just as possible for a psychopath to realize Onlyness as a lawyer (no comparison intended); it's just not as likely.

So when considering the merits of an awakened person's teachings, please don't assume the person is deep, evolved, or mature. By speaking of advanced stages of awakening, I am not meaning to suggest that I myself am a "highly evolved" person (whatever that means). I especially don't mean to suggest that I'm deeper or more evolved than other spiritual teachers or other humans in general. Part of my aim throughout my writings is to help de-condition the belief systems that presumed you had to meet some invisible standard of evolution before you were worthy of any particular stage of awakening.

This is for You
These essays are for You – the Divine Person as (your name here). It is my most earnest attempt to communicate to you what I have learned about life, Being, and God that I consider to be important in the process of spiritual and Whole Being Awakening. May your following this trail of breadcrumbs bring you to your own doorstep in complete readiness for the plunge into the Great Mystery. I pray this helps you to accept, to realize, and to embody all of Who and What You Are. May it help you free yourself to bring your love and your gifts to the world in the fullness of your realized Being.

 

Return to Free Essays