How do you make your decisions? Do you plan for tomorrow? Do you consider yesterday?
You shouldn’t.
You already know everything you need to know right now. The moment you step forward or back — you have become lost. Much like the moment you argue with anything or anyone — you lose.
Tomorrow doesn’t exist. Today depends on tomorrow — not the other way around. What you do today does not produce “tomorrow” but what you expect for tomorrow DOES produce today, because tomorrow is just a story you are holding in your mind. That is how the illusion of time is created.
It is the heavy burden of yesterday & today that creates the “sequence” of your “now” experience that is so misleading. It is the expectations of this sequence that keeps you moving from one page to the next, rather than skipping ahead or changing books.
Reality does not divide neatly into yesterday, today, or tomorrow, but the rising of the sun & moon, the tracking of calendars and the outputs of clocks give clever devices to fooling you. When you sleep, you loosen the reins of your iron grip for a little while on this game you are playing and let the universe play with you a little more freely.
When you understand that numbers on a clock and the sun in the sky are part of a “program” deep within yourself then you understand your entire experience is “you.”
All of these things produce expectations, habits and motions in which you continually repeat “sequence” even when the sequence no longer serves you, or turns into suffering. It creates the “buffer” of reality, like a boomerang you are throwing in every moment. But the throwing of the boomerang is the mistake in the first place — not a design to glorify.
You are the clocks, the sun, the moon and the stars. You are the land, the houses, the people. But they are also themselves and they join you at your request. And they are everywhere and nowhere. You are what is happening on the “computer screen” of your experience that unfolds in the boundaries of your senses, including what unfolds in the privacy of your mind.
With this apprehension of Unity, time loses all meaning, because in the totality of “you” time loses the context it requires to work. When you remove the stage, what does time measure? Time requires a start and an end — an introduction and an epilogue — but you have no such thing and are no such thing.
Only “segments” can be measured. Only stories that require sequence, because time is just a coordinate between two points — a reference. You are imposing this upon yourself because you value this sequence — this stability. But continuum and sequence are not the same thing and an immortal chooses sequence when it serves him and discards it when it does not — while maintaining his continuum.
“What” is deciding to maintain this continuum over sequence? That is the real you. It is silent. It does not speak. It does not think.
Time is part of the “scene” like a leaf on a tree. The time has a meaning, just as the leaf has a meaning, but only in the context of the story that it appears within.
Time requires an agreement of a “place” to monitor — it requires an agreement of segments and divides — of history and expectations. But what happens when this agreement is broken, disregarded or discarded? What happens when this agreement is offered from different perspectives — different people? Then the stage becomes interchangeable. And if the stage is interchangeable then time is just part of the scene, like a tree standing in a field. You cannot perceive the tree without the ground and the background. It is just paint on a canvas.
A clock becomes merely an interchangeable photograph, measuring nothing but a memory, or a place or description in your imagination.
If you go to work everyday at the same time — say 6AM — is it that you are responding to the stimulus of the alarm clock going off at 6AM, or surrendering your will to a “play” in which you feel the sensation of waking, getting dressed and driving to work? You are not the scene and the “time” is part of the scene that you keep agreeing to play out. You are behind the scene. Your sense of agency & lucidity come after, because they are already baked into what you “are” and they are forever and constant.
It is just as fake as arriving sharply at a theater production at 7PM and there is a clock on stage as part of the story that reads 2PM. Neither the clock on stage, as you watch in the audience, or the clock you used to arrive at the theater is any more real. They are both part of the same scene — YOUR scene.
An immortal does not give a second thought to the idea of tomorrow, because the immortal is completely aligned to his expression of life and what he wants to experience. And so this aligns him to others of like-kind. To spare one moment worrying about tomorrow opens the door to creating delay — to misusing your will in a way that creates extra time for yourself.
The plan? You already know the plan, because you can only do what you can do right now. What else could you do? You must rise from bed and live. You must make “decisions” whether this is to sit still or move forward, or dwell on the yesterday or tomorrow that don’t exist. You do not live in the future — you live right now.
What do you want to do?
You could say that it is an abuse of your awesome imaginative power to do anything but engage with your immediate reality because you already know what you want to do if you simply stop procrastinating, rationalizing and arguing with the “devil.”
Tomorrow means you are distrusting yourself to “get there.” You already know what you want and how to execute it. So why the doubt? Your doubts create additional explorations of time which you have to burn out. They create anchors — debts — that have to be paid. Karma is simply the effects of your own will you have forgotten about. Your will that have you have disowned that comes to remind you that it is yours with a slap in the face.
Dwelling on the past is like worrying about last night’s dreams. It is already gone and cannot touch you … unless you agree to let it. Unless you reinvest in it, like — what? A habit? A behavior? A responsibility? An obligation? The strength of yesterday is another story that you value because it creates higher highs and lower lows.
You should learn to keep what you treasure and throw out what you do not — but most humans are conditioned to throw their trash in the same place as their treasure — their “One World.” They do not think to return their trash to the cosmos — to the universe — to God. To just “let it go” as if it no longer existed. No, the trash “lives on” in the one world — rather than in the mind of God (the universal library.) It becomes “historical.” It lingers there, lurking, needing explanations, needing attention, needing resolution — perhaps even demanding.
But there is a difference between history and remembering. God does not forget. Only a human writes history because he wishes it to be part of his story — to influence him — to bind him. And history is fallible and God’s memory is not.
And this trash — perhaps once treasure, perhaps valued by others, it is not meant to be an evaluation from any perspective but your own — haunts you because you have not truly let it go. It is there — buried under the surface, because you still think you “live” in the world, right?
You “live” in New York, or Tokyo, or California, or England … right?
No, you do not — because you read this blog. You understand you are “behind” your senses, or even behind the observation itself. You “are.” A player does not “live” inside the computer monitor when he plays a game. This isn’t about “ego.” This is you understanding that what happens on your “monitor” is yours. The players playing the game may move pieces on your screen but even if they piss you off, you cannot punch them through the monitor — you only hurt yourself.
You have not earned the right to call yourself a player. You can’t turn the game off. This is the work that we do — that I do. We are working backwards from the mind of the player. If you keep trying to jump out of the screen, or punch the screen, you will never escape. You are just Mario going from tube to tube. Just … lean back and see you were playing all along. Put the controller down.
Death is not this end. Death is a change of state — but death is not enough. You must choose your own change of state. You must choose your own “death!” But you have probably given away this power too — letting the world decide how you should die.
Again, how do you make decisions?
If you work backwards and are living in the ideal world — how do you make your decisions? This reveals the character you must embody for yourself. You must “fake it until you make it.” You must learn the behavior & the mindset even if it seems unreachable or crazy.
You must live in your ideals as a full-time job. You cannot compromise, because this sets you back. Because your soul — your spirit — will remember and will carry your decisions forward. And what is the span of a single life in comparison to that of eternity?
Do you visit doctors? To prescribe your health? Then you have disowned your will and given it to these doctors to play out the experience of being “treated.” And that is fine — it does not make doctors evil, or wrong, or unhelpful, only that you value this exchange — this drama — more than you value retaining ownership over your health.
You place value on the experiences of being “sick”, being “treated” and “recovering” more than the suffering it would take to overcome these stories for good. You have decided you are not strong enough to prove that your health is in your own hands — you simply do not believe your will is this powerful and well — so it is (not that powerful)! So you need tests and pills and time. Your flesh must knit and your bones must mend.
Where does Mario go when he “dies?” Nowhere, because Mario can’t die anymore than you can.
If you do not value this drama, then why engage with it? A fear of suffering, perhaps? Understandable — most of us cannot maintain a perfect record of choices and I am not an exception. But it is persistence that makes us idealists, not perfection or “mistakes.”
What you value can — and should — be dynamic. You should not put yourself in a straight-jacket.
You say, well, everyone gets sick, or everyone dies, but you are still thinking in terms of a single life. What if you thought in terms of many lives? Or one continual life that never ended? Have you actually ever experienced being “dead?” How do you know you will die, then?
Would you still compromise if you had to make decisions for more than one life? What does your mind look like now? How much more gravity do decisions have when you know every decision may delay peace, or extend suffering? There is a saying: “If not now, when?”
Why do I push creation over consumption so hard on this blog? Because you “are what you eat” and if you do nothing but eat, then you are consumption. And if you understand the discussion above — that you are the whole world — then the whole world is EATING YOU because you are EATING YOURSELF.
What is the only thing an immortal has to eat? His own continuum. You can’t stop being immortal, but you can forget it. You can victimize yourself and play pretend. You can become lost. You can mistake yourself for the sequence instead of the continuum ; the symptom, rather than the cause.
Just how dependent is your life on “the world?” How dependent is your mental sanity? Those “dependencies” are where you have hidden away your will. Why do you negotiate? All you have to do is confront them.
If the expression of your “physical” body is entirely dependent on the stories you are holding within (because it is), when do you decide that you have had enough “terrorism” holding your health hostage? Are you not wasting your time in comfort & complacency by letting something other than your immediate will decide?
What do comfort & complacency cost you? If they cost you anything, they are too expensive.
You don’t need to believe in “reincarnation” to understand the incredible value of living as an idealist. It takes around 5-10 years of jumping off the deep end within a paradigm to show tangible progress. Yeah. That long.
Try not to consider this an expression of time, but expression of how tangled stories require unavoidable resolution. Can you boil water without first putting water in a pot and starting a fire? These are stories with hundreds of little dependencies, rules and expectations — not things that “require time.”
As soon as you measure these things with time, you are creating a boundary. You are creating a reference that didn’t exist before you measured it. The reference itself has a feeling or expectation of duration and you are giving yourself a noose.
Why do we talk about concepts like surrender, faith, acceptance? Because these destroy time.
Apprehension and intellectual understanding is woefully insufficient. It doesn’t get into your bones without obsessive contemplation, practice, and persistence. You have to go “all in” as a true believer before any crops yield.
Anything less keeps you in the same place. Your intellect and ability to understand is useless. Your soul / spirit does not operate on that level. You are not a computer no matter how much you pretend. You cannot “reach” the soul with just brains. And so approaching spirituality as an academic will get you exactly no where.
Or you can just keep being OK with what is comfortable to you. It has worked out for (likely) thousands of years. But I didn’t create this website so I could go along with the “status quo.”
Making decisions as an “immortal” or for your own eternity often means making decisions that are uncomfortable rather than convenient. It means letting go of aspects of yourself that make it easier to remain stuck in repetitive cycles. It means breaking boundaries that you may be holding onto for dear life.
Does that seem like common sense or cheap wisdom? Pop psychology? No, it is a question of scope. Are you making decisions with the expectations of living for another day? Another month? Another year? What does your mind look like when you are making decisions as if you will never die? As if time is irrelevant? As if this is just one never ending story? Can you handle living like that?
Even if you know a story will take 1000 years to unfold, do you start to work on it — or do you say screw it, because your impact is too little, or you aren’t certain you will see the results? Do you just become a “dweller” who convinces themselves they are content in their cave? Perhaps you are a little more awake and decide to “coast” instead — developing a kind of stockholm’s syndrome for letting the world bully you around.
If something seems dangerous or even life-threatening, do you do it and decide to retain authority over your death, or do you choose fear — and allow something else to decide?
Are you confusing a certain threshold of suffering or pain with “death?” Can you remember having ever experienced death? So how can you speak so definitively about its inevitability? Have you considered it is your belief in its certainty that erases your mind — breaks your continuum — when you feel “life is too much to bear” and your back breaks? That you have disowned this “drama” of death for you to experience something impossible?
Here is a riddle for you.
Though you can never have it, you can give it
When others have it, they can’t keep it
If you ever receive it, you won’t know it
What am I?
DEATH