Awareness

Summary:

Awareness is a book about waking up and realizing what we truly are. About stopping to identify ourselves with our desires and becoming free of the restrictions that our minds place upon ourselves.

But at the same time it is about realizing that we are selfish beings, not pretending that we don't have desires, but accepting them for what they are and watching them dissipate once clearly identified and aware for what it really is. Desires fade on their own, if understood. But we fear doing this because it would fundamentally change who we are and we are attached to this image, to this idea of ourselves, and so we stay asleep, unaware, usually for our entire lives. The book also tries to answer the question of "what the I is", by defining the things that it isn't. It's not our desires, nor our ideas, nor our history. But what is it? Part of becoming more aware and awake is to realize the answer to this question on a non-thinking level.

Detailed Notes:

Foreword

The tale of the eagle that lived and died as a chicken because that's what he thought he was.

On Waking Up

Most people are asleep. They never know the true beauty of the reality they live in.

Though everything is a mess, all is well.

Waking up is unpleasant, it's painful, most people want to keep sleeping. Not growing up. Not waking up to the reality that is life.

Will I Be of Help to You in This Retreat?

You are never in love with anyone. You're only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person.

Your reaction to circumstances is yours to uphold. Nobody helps you and you help nobody.

On the Proper Kind of Selfishness

You don't want to be happy.

When you love somebody and you could choose happiness vs. being with that person, you would instinctively choose being with that person.

Being unhappy, while loving somebody, sacrificing your happiness to the end of "love" is misguided.

On Wanting Happiness

Being happy without conditions is not impossible. But we refuse to do so. Happiness is tied to worldly states. Who we are with, what we own, but it needn't be so, as happiness is an emotion completely within our own heads.

Waking up is the internalization of this realization. It's becoming happy regardless of circumstances.

Are We Talking About Psychology in This Spirituality Course?

You can suffer so much, that you become sick of it, snapping out of your confusion by waking up and realizing that things don't have to be that way.

The mystic is the opposite of the lunatic.

One sign that you've woken up? It's when you are asking yourself: "Am I crazy or are all of them crazy?"

Everybody is a lunatic. But we don't put everybody into psychological wards, because there are too many.

Neither is Renunciation the Solution

When you fight something you are tied to it forever.

Waking up is dropping the desire for all things. Because you understand that there is no point in this desire.

Listen and Unlearn

Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.

Thought: This reminds me of the ideas of the unspeakable Tao. And the Koans of Zen Buddhism.

You can only describe the negative space around the truth. The things that are not true. But the Truth itself can't be described, because no map is equal to reality and descriptions are but mere maps.

People listen only to confirm what they think. They don't listen to update their beliefs.

Faith is insecurity. You don't know. You're ready to follow and you're open.

The Masquerade of Charity

Selfishness is the pleasure of pleasing yourself. It's also the pleasure of pleasing others. Self interest is not bad in and off itself. Taking and giving. Both are necessary.

But even better is doing good without the awareness of doing good. As soon as you know that you do good, that knowledge corrupts the reason why you did it. You didn't do it for the good itself, but because of the perception of it or some other benefits tied to it.

Everything we do is in our own self interest. We just contort ourselves to make it not look that way because that's what we have been taught to do. Don't be selfish. Don't look selfish.

Thought: This is Ayn Rand Style selfishness brought to the point by a very different author and from a spiritual instead of a moral standpoint.

We would like to hurt people. Some people. But the opinions of others if we were perpetrating the hurting, prevent us from doing so. It's not that we don't want to hurt people, period, it's that we don't want to be seen doing it.

What's on Your Mind?

Story of people dying of thirst on a raft, where the river meets the sea, where they are swimming in drinking water.

People are like that, but with love and happiness too. Swimming in it, without realization but dying of thirst for it. Awakening is knowing that this ocean exists and that you are already swimming in it and stopping to be miserable searching for it.

Ideas that we have about reality are what make our life a mess. We need to get better ideas and flush out the old ones. The problem is that we are entangled with our ideas. We are those ideas and letting go of them, is like letting go of a core part of ourselves.

We don't want to look, because if we do, we may change.

What you really fear is the loss of the known.

You're no better than anybody else in the world. We're all the same selfish bunch. Only most people go to great lengths to conceal their selfishness.

Good, Bad, Or Lucky

Selflessness = Non Being => it's a process of dying.

Thought: This, again, is Ayn Rands idea of altruism being a position that argues from a principle of death, not of life.

Our Illusion About Others

Love people by realizing that everybody just looks out for their self interest, much like you are. This is part of waking up.

The story of the beautiful lady and the tramp in London, she gets him a nice meal, a good bed, and then gives him some company. Move over a little bit the beautiful lady says. The tramp does and falls into the river Thames.

Isn't the future just another trap?

Self-Observation

The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas.

Watch yourself, as if you were somebody else. What is happening to you, and your response to it. As if you have no connection with any of it.

You identify with your feelings. But that is an illusion. You are not your feelings.

Don't "fix" anything. Watch! Observe!

Awareness Without Evaluating Everything

Transform yourself first before you start to transform the world. Often when you're done with the first step, you don't need the second.

Observing, without changing what is.

If you desire to change what is into what you think should be, you no longer understand.

Awareness is creating discipline.

You are conditioned to react to praise or blame. Can you not react to it? That's part of Awakening.

Is it human to live according to the expectations of others? Yes. But humans can be so much more. But they sleep on this fact.

The Illusion of Rewards

Timelessness is beyond our conception. We are hardwired to think of things as existing in time and eternal is still a very long time to us.

Eternity is right now.

But we don't understand this.

Finding Yourself

What is "I"?

Who is the person doing the understanding?

You think you are free, but there probably isn't a gesture, a thought, an emotion, an attitude a belief in you that isn't coming from someone else.

The ego is an aggregation of our past. Hence "I" is nothing but other people's opinions, thoughts, patterns, accumulated over a lifetime.

Thought: The obvious question then, if that were true, were did that amount of thoughts originate? How is originality born? Are only awakened people able to produce things truly "their own"?

Coming to terms with this idea that we are only our programming, that there is no I that is truly ours, we begin to awaken, breaking free of this fake notion.

Stripping Down to the I

A core mystery of human existence: how can I watch me?

Thought: The recursiveness of this reminds me of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

We maybe can't really know what the I is, because the I is wrapped up in the process of knowing itself. It's the same question of the size of the set that contains all sets and whether or not it contains itself because that would form a different set. Again Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Can the knife cut itself? Can the tooth bite itself? Can the eye see itself?

Knowing which things the I isn't is very powerful. It's deconstructing false notions of reality, moving closer to awakening. To capital T Truth.

I am not my thoughts. I am not my body. I am not my name. I am not my career. I am not my beliefs.

The Niagara Falls are constantly filled with different water, yet they stay the Niagara falls. Persistence of things is an illusion that we agree on to make the world simpler to deal with. Boundary conditions and timeless quantum graphs. Labels matter to us, but reality doesn't have any.

We use the same name for an ever-changing reality.

The I is the observer. The me is the thing collecting ever changing labels.

When you step out of yourself and observe "me", you no longer identify with "me". Suffering exists in "me", so when you identify "I" with "me", suffering begins.

Negative Feelings Toward Others

Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you're living in an illusion. There's something seriously wrong with you. You're not seeing reality.

Thought: This reminds me of the idea of "the fog" from WaitButWhy. Awakening is removing the fog, for as much time as possible. True awakening means being out of the fog entirely because you found a solution to stop the fire, or went to a different place, or invented a ventilator. Or something along those lines.

The world's all right. The one who has to change is you.

Thought: this really reminds me of the principle of proactivity from 7 habits of highly effective people. You are the only person to blame. If you have a problem, that problem is upon you to solve, and it's usually not a problem with the state of the world.

Awakening is having no negative emotions, yet springing into action when you see something bad happening.

Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person.

On Dependence

We are depending on others for our happiness and that's creating frustration with the world. We demand they make us happy.

Love is without such demands.

Love is a symphony, two melodies meshing together producing something greater than the parts. But if one melody goes the other doesn't stop. It keeps being beautiful, and it can find new melodies to harmonise with.

Loneliness can't be taken away. Yet we try.

How Happiness Happens

Watch yourself. Awareness is the key. Nobody can teach you how to do that. There's no technique. Just be aware.

Once you care about the outcome, you're not aware anymore. Playful mastery fades. Play the game for the sake of the game and not for winning and you'll play much better. Freely. Not worried.

I'm an ass, you're an ass so where's the problem?

Awareness is not identifying with your state of mind, but observing it as from the outside.

Enlightened, yet depressed. The depression is there, but it has no more power. It's just what is. Nothing more nothing less and so it passes on its own.

We're all addicted to pleasures. Not just the alcoholics. Anything that gives pleasure. We're conditioned to seek it, over and over again. Food, sex, even reading good books.

Can a tree say "I'll give my shade to the good people who rest under me but will withhold it from the bad"?

This is a metaphor of what love is about.

Fear - The Root of Violence

Who is incapable of violence, is the person who is fearless.

They don't bother, because why should they use violence, what's in it? There's nothing to be violent against, because there is nothing to fear.

Gandhi was like that. Awakened people tend to be like that.

Awareness and Contact With Reality

Only when things concern "us" are we worried. But there is no difference. Us, not us. Who is "me"?

Good Religion - The Antithesis of Unawareness

Religion can go in the way of spirituality, of its own true purpose. If the ritual becomes more important than the meaning of the ritual. Adherence to the tradition, more important than why the tradition is there in the first place. Cargo Culting. A step opposite to awakening.

We often say things without being aware of them.

Many people are machines, reacting to stimuli, all the time. Predictably because of conditioning. Of society, education, our parents, whatever. But to be human is to be not that. It's to be more than that. To act, instead of reacting. To be aware, awake.

What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you.

Disassociate from yourself.

Labels

Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions.

Suffering is designed to show you something is off. That you are not aware of reality. Suffering only comes from being non-aware.

Suffering occurs when you clash with reality.

Obstacles to Happiness

The main preoccupation of society is to keep society sick.

The error is to identify the "I" with something external beyond your control. Money, fame, status, other people's opinions.

You say to the awakened person, "Why are you happy?", and the awakened person replies, "Why not?"

Four Steps to Wisdom

Spirituality is about unlearning. All the habits and patterns society taught us. Becoming free of them, so that we can wake up and be unconditionally happy.

Step 1: Get in touch with your feelings. Know that they are there. When they are there. How they are.

Step 2: Distance yourself from the feeling. Know it's not you. It's in you. Neither is it in reality, trying to fix reality to fix your feelings, is ultimately misguided.

Step 3: Don't identify with the feeling. Saying "I am sad", is wrong. You feel sad, therein lies a world of difference.

Humans who have awakened are free, society can't control them any longer, hence any awakened person is a danger to society that can cause it's unraveling.

Thought: These ideas remind me of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

You don't do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you're free.

Thought: Is the absence of a step 4 intentional? Like a Zen Koan? A riddle in and of itself. He promised 4 steps, but the 4th is missing, yet it might not be, and that's the whole idea.

All's Right With the World

The story of the boy and the crocodile, freeing the crocodile, then being clenched in its jaws, while wondering why the world is like that, asking all the animals about it. Eventually the rabbit says they need to discuss it, but with the boy outside of the crocodiles mouth. The boy runs. Then his tribe kills the crocodile. And their dog kills the rabbit. What the fuck does this mean?

Reality is not problematic, you are the problem.

Sleepwalking

Everything becomes beautiful when you change.

Thought: Paulo Coelho's Idea of traveling in order to change in order to come back home, and find home beautiful and your purpose in it. Your home didn't change, you did.

When you change, everything else changes too. Because all your perceptions are yours to begin with, so if you update them in your mind, your world literally turns into something different. Something better. Awakening is realizing that you have that choice, that your mind can make everything into hell or heaven, because it's entirely up to you.

Change as Greed

Do I do anything to change myself?

Winning over somebody makes you feel good. A sign that people are truly mad. Making somebody else feel bad so that you can feel good is twisted.

Selfishness is demanding things from others. Not living how you would want to live. Yet we all try to dictate and manipulate the lives of others. Our whole society is built around that notion. Of puppets with feelings and wants that can be shaped so that they do our bidding. And we compete to see who can manipulate better. And society keeps running as the result of this madness.

A Changed Person

People are not accepting or rejecting you. They are only dealing with their image of you. It's theirs and not yours, not what you truly are that matters to them, but how they perceive you.

Things like happiness can only be defined by the absence of their opposite. You can't define happiness, but you can define all the ways to be unhappy and simply not be like that. Because that's a choice you have.

You have no right to make demands on anybody. Not even people very close to you. Like the tree that gives shadow to everybody equally, an awakened person gives love to everybody equally.

Demands means demands on creating my happiness. You can ask people to do things, but you can't expect them to create your feelings. And if you ask them, they can always refuse.

Arriving at Silence

Dropping the errors is the only way to arrive at truth. You define the shape of truth by knowing to a better and better degree what it is not.

Thought: This is funnily enough also what the scientific method is doing, iteratively decreasing and dropping the errors. This idea of negative space and defining things by what they are not is so much of Zen Buddhism. Because getting at the truth with words alone is impossible. Buddha is three pounds of flax. Whack, stick on the head. Waking up.

Book Recommendation: Summa Theologica - Thomas Aquinus

Defining God is done the same way as defining truth. By carving out the things that God is not.

Reality, God, Divinity, Truth, Love are unknowable. They cannot be comprehended by the thinking mind.

Losing the Rat Race

You lose things when you are not aware. But trying to lose something is bound to fail because you will keep thinking of it.

You are not the dancer. But the dance itself.

Permanent Worth

Suffering points the way to growth. Happiness doesn't.

If your happiness depends on the fulfillment of desire, that's the problem. Not the desire itself but it being tied up with your happiness.

Desire Not Preference

Desire is energy. Understanding it is more important than suppressing it. Don't seek to fulfill it but to understand it. The more you suppress it the more you are tied to it. Unfree.

You can have preferences, but they are not necessary conditions for your happiness. That's awakening.

It's about seeing the world as it is, removing your bias from the observation. It's the state of no delusions.

Changing the world does not change you. Chasing happiness outside you is bound to fail. Over and over again.

Most people spend all their energies trying to rearrange their exterior world to suit their tastes.

They fail always, eventually. Because reality keeps shifting underneath them, so they will never be content. Peaceful. Happy.

Clinging to Illusion

Not even the greatest guru in the world can take a single step for you.

You are happy, unless you believe that you need something else to be happy. Once you start believing this, your happiness ceases to exist. And you believe a lot of things like this. Things that you need in order to be happy.

You become happy by contact with reality.

Hugging Memories

Perception has devastating consequences in the matter of love and human relationships.

Falling in love has nothing to do with love at all.

True love and the way we use the word normally are very different concepts.

Concepts and reality are different. The map is not the territory.

Getting Concrete

Concepts only point to reality. But our words are not enough to properly describe it. A leaf can be many things, some of which are not alike at all. Banana leaves versus an old yellow oak leaf. What does "leaf" mean then?

A person is beyond the thinking mind.

If you don't look at thing through your concepts you'll never be bored. Every single thing is unique.

Every sparrow is unlike every other sparrow, despite the similarities.

You can't bring a river back in a bucket. Capturing reality fails. Reality is whole. Words are fragments. It's slicing up reality into chunks.

Thought: This slicing up idea also crops up in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance more than once. Quality in a way is seeing reality for what it truly is and then making judgements to make it better, as an undivided whole.

Reality is always moving, we need to be aware of it, looking at it, past our concepts. Watching, observing, looking. What? Anything.

Returning to wonder, but intelligent wonder, is what waking up is about.

At a Loss for Words

Neti neti - not that, not that.

Book Recommendation: A Grief Observed - C.S. Lewis

How many minutes are in the color yellow?

We know that we don't know, but sometimes we think that we do know and then we stop discovering. We stop wondering.

Cultural Conditioning

I salute humanity, not a flag with an army around it.

Things that could be merits could also be compulsions. Doing something every time, or every day, without a choice, without awareness being involved is not virtuous.

Filtered Reality

We don't perceive reality directly we filter it through our perceptions, concepts, models. And that's why we often don't see, don't observe. We are biased by our past.

Sometimes you won't see things that are there.

We learn to depend on things for our happiness, but this learning is a lie. In fact, we don't need them to be happy.

Awareness can change this programming. When aware enough, you break free and wake up.

Detachment

Say to your friends: I don't need you to be happy. This belief is delusional. But I chose to be with you, because I enjoy our company, but you and I are free. We can be happy without each other.

If you desire things, it changes the way you interpret the world. Your brain evaluates everything only in the light of fulfilling this desire. It's carving up reality, and you miss out on what is really there.

Addictive Love

It's a great thing to have suffered. Only then can you get sick of it.

Anger is your problem. Not mine. It's your perception, your brain, update it and deal with it on your own terms.

More Words

The guru, showing that words entangle us by calling his student a son of a bitch and then excusing himself for this lapse.

Hidden Agendas

Before enlightenment I used to be depressed; after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.

The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived.

The problem is that there's nowhere to go to. Enlightenment and Awakening are not goals to be reached. You are already there.

I helped you? Great. I enjoyed myself, I had fun, no credit to me. Congrats to you.

Giving In

The more you resist something, the greater power you give it.

Seeing reality as it is, you give up the fighting against it. This is not money just a scrap of paper. You are not attractive, but I'm programmed to see you as a sexual object in order to procreate.

Assorted Landmines

As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished.

How many people spend their lives not eating food but eating the menu? A menu is only an indication of something that's available. You want to eat the steak, not the words.

The Death of Me

The end of the world for a caterpillar is a butterfly for the master.

Insight and Understanding

Did you really think this was going to make you happy?

Not Pushing It

If a car breaks down, you fix it, don't push it to the next city. Why don't we treat our other problems the same way? With understanding instead of more toil and work?

Getting Real

Understanding of awareness is important. Just as understanding of self is important.

Assorted Images

Pain originates not from the world, but from within us, because we cling to our rigid versions of how we want the world to be. If we were more fluid, accepting the world as it is, we would stop feeling pain.

If the mind is unobstructed, the result is wisdom.

Wisdom is to be sensitive to this situation, to this person, uninfluenced by any carryover from the past.

If the heart is unobstructed, the result is love.

Saying Nothing About Love

Most people would much rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person, each thing in its present moment of freshness.

Losing Control

Society teaches us to crave things like power, success, approval, just like somebody would crave drugs. This makes us not free. We want to change reality to have those things, which means we'll do anything within our means to get them. Society uses this to keep existing, to keep its own structure up by the work of people addicted to these drugs.

When you are ignored or disapproved of, you experience a loneliness do unbearable that you crawl back to people and beg for the comforting drug called support and encouragement.

We always look at people through this lens, will they approve of me? But we can't bear solitude either, even if the thought of what others think of us, pains us greatly, loneliness is still worse.

Listening to Life

Watch your cat after it's had it's breakfast. Look how it relaxed. And see how it springs into action, look at the suppleness of its limbs and the aliveness of its body. We've lost that. We're lost in our minds, in our ideas and ideals.

I'm satisfied with very little and I enjoy it intensely.

The End of Analysis

Information is not insight, analysis is not awareness, knowledge is not awareness.

In awareness, you keep your softness, your subtleness, your gentleness, your openness, your flexibility, and you don't push, change occurs.

Dead Ahead

Many of you don't want to see reality. You don't want to think of death. People don't live, most of you, you don't live, you're keeping the body alive.

The Land of Love

Think of a life in which you depend on no one emotionally, so that no one has the power to make you happy or miserable anymore. You refuse to need any particular person or to be special to anyone or to call anyone your own. The birds of the air have their nests and the foxes their holes, but you will have nowhere to rest your head in your journey through life. If you ever get to this state, you will at last know what it means to see with a vision that is clear and unclouded by fear or desire.

Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you. You do not have the wind, the stars, the rain. You don't possess these things. You surrender to them.

Book Recommendation: Summerhill – A.S. Neill

Every child has a god in him; our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil.

Show me an individual in whom there is no inner self-conflict and I'll show you an individual in whom there is no violence.