completely mad, Reg. well posited and expounded upon, but mad nonetheless. it's beautiful and so moving, this vale of tears, this cascade of delights, this cruel romp through thistles, this fountain of marvels, this undulating web of juxtaposed shadows and lightning strikes. a riddle inside a conundrum wrapped in...a flour tortilla, actually.

the egoic mind seeks, craves, wants, desires. if we are here, we wish to be there. when we get there, we wish to be here. the mind keeps moving the goalposts. there can be no victory, no relief, no rest, no peace. the seeking must always continue! or the ego self tells us we will cease to be.

this is not so.

since suffering is caused by desire and attachment - which are the primary manifestations of the egoic modality - it can be inferred that the individual self/mind/ego is unreliable as a source of direction and guidance in our quest for happiness. its solutions never ultimately deliver the long- lasting results we're looking for. yet we continue to take our marching orders from this forever unsatisfied general, primarily because we are trapped in the illusion that we are the thinker of our thoughts. we are so identified with the incessant thought stream going on that we take it to be the holy grail, as if the thoughts in our heads are in fact who we truly are.

this is not so.

total reliance on something that has proven to be totally unreliable. we keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. this is Einstein's definition of insanity. he went on to say that a problem cannot be solved by the same mind that created it.

what to do?

perhaps there is a better way. perhaps there is another modality to tap into, a universal mind, a source of power and direction beyond the finite in our heads, a boundless dimensional energy that exists within and is supportive of this one.

eh. sounds like some Shirley Maclaine shit. besides, it might take a lot of reading. maybe a bunch of rituals or meditation. who has time to sit down and shut up each day? to just sit there and listen to...nothing. nothing at all. please. boooooring.

but then again, what if the search for spiritual truth was a red herring because you already are the spiritual truth, and only the constant voice in your head is the one and only barrier to realizing your true nature? what if you had to give up your identification with the mind's noise and you saw that it was all a fictional broadcast all along? (and what if, instead of being somebody, being nobody was what it was really all about?)

as St. Francis noted, what's looking is what you're looking for.

"The word Buddha means simply, "awakened, an awakened one, or the Awakened One." It is from the Sanskrit verbal root budh. "to fathom a depth, to penetrate from the bottom"; also, "to perceive, to know, to come to one's senses, to wake." The Buddha is one awakened to identity not with the body but with the knower of the body, not with thought but with the knower of thoughts, that is to say, with consciousness (aka God); knowing, furthermore, that his value derives from his power to radiate consciousness - as the value of a lightbulb derives from its power to radiate light. What is important about a lightbulb is not the filament or the glass but the light which these bulbs are to render; and what is important about each of us is not the body and its nerves but the consciousness that shines through them. And when one lives for that, instead of for protection of the bulb, one is in Buddha consciousness."

if it was easy, everybody'd be doing it. but it is doable. your path is waiting (for your head to be quiet long enough) for you to find it.

the greatest barrier to you being awake is the belief that you're not.