Are You Nuts?

Do you chase after teachers because you have read them, or about them, and you “feel” they have something you don’t have?  What is it you think they may have that you are somehow lacking?  What is your imagination creating regarding their subjective experience?

Are you depressed and seeking an end to your depression?

Are you lonely and feel they have attained a state where they feel no need of companionship and you want that?

Do you feel empty and hope they feel filled or fulfilled, and by clinging to them, their words or presence, will somehow translate to being filled yourself?  This is especially the case with energy gurus who supposedly transfer or awakening energies or Kundalini in you?  Will you find these energies/bliss fulfilling or just another experience out of many?

Do you feel confused, not-knowing, ignorant, and desire to be filled with knowledge and confidence, and listen to their words to fill you up?

Do you feel weak, unsupported, lost, and look to a guru to give you light and direction, as well as self-confidence?

What is I tell you you have all of these completions within yourself and that the fastest way to getting the completions you seek is by finding and dwelling in that sense of lack inside yourself.  That is, rather than run to a guru to end that feeling of lacking, or of depression, or of loneliness, or of being empty, lost in the Void, or of being stupid, instead we run towards those difficult feelings, the emptiness, the feeling stupid or depressed, and wallow in those feelings, sink into them, own them and bring them into your sense of self.

In this way you end the felt need to run somewhere to get respite from these feelings or lacking, by feeling them deeply and taking them into your sense of self.

There are so many different kinds of teachers, some teaching awakening of the Kundalini energies, some seeking Samadhi, many seeking bliss, some seeking to end one’s sense of self by attaining a perpetual state of oneness, some seeking to end obsessive thinking through enforcement of mental and verbal silence.

How many teachers just tell you to be yourself, explore one’s own sense of self, be a lamp onto your self?

You are the only landscape you will ever know first hand.  You are the only canvas you will ever know first hand.  Every point of view is just a map of a different landscape, a different canvas.

Often these other landscapes are based on a very different culture, very different ideals and attitudes.

For example, Zen idealizes autonomy, no-self, emptiness, spontaneity, discipline, and institutionalized religion.  The individual self is not recognized as a value.  It is family, tribe, state, not individual autonomy.

The same holds true of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohamedism. The come out of an ancient culture of tribalism and submergence of the individual to the good of family and tribe.  This is clearly being continuously acted out in the conflicts in the Middle East.  Continuous hatred, fear, killing, brutality of one tribe against another, one state against the other, which reflects the psychological developments of the whole culture of Abraham. Very primitive, simplistically black or white, and brutal.

So, forget all the religions, teachers, gurus, all offering to help you get something. Everything you seek is in you if only you embrace all the negativity within yourself, for by so doing, you gain a complete sense of self.