“Resistance is futile”

This post tries to strictly delineate between thinking and looking. If you can excuse the informal style and the RT rhetoric it does outline this aspect well. However, the cries to look at reality will bore you and there are a couple of nonsensical bits in there lol!

Whilst looking at resistance to looking yesterday, it became clearer to me what we are really dealing with. Well I already knew, I just didn't know how to state it clearly, in a way that people can understand.

So here is another attempt to look at this for the layman, that hopefully will not confuse too much... I hope :)

Basically what you need to do is look in real life. This is ALL you need to do. There is nothing to understand intellectually. It takes 5 seconds to see universal truth, seriously. It is not a big deal, it is just the truth. Forget about all the new age crap, there is just seeing the truth, this is all it is.

Its like if I told you that the earth revolves around the sun. You can conceptualise it as much as you like, you can draw pretty pictures. Books will tell you the same thing. Hell you can even study the effects of quantum gravity on time dilations through the  ionosphere and the implications of this for a tribal nomad in Outer Mongolia.

But all you are doing is mentally masturbating over a concept. That is all. You are not really looking. You are only resting on your intellectual understanding.

TAKE A LOOK AT REALITY

This is what you must do. You think you have the answer, you won't look because you think you have it all worked out. You conceptualise your understanding, you make these fancy little models and guess what? This is the self trying to protect itself from being exposed as an illusion. Every time you create a concept, it is distracting you from the task of looking. This is the self twisting and turning in every way it can, to prevent you from looking. All you need to do is look in reality. There is no special looking, there is only inner looking at existential reality.

“I thought you said there is no you, how can a self stop itself from looking at itself if it is an illusion”

I did say that, there is an illusion of self. FFS stop with the questions and just look in real life god dammit!!!

Seriously, this is getting annoying now. I can not explain this to you, this is beyond language but I will try and illustrate this.

There is thought, it is real. Pictures can be imagined, memories occur, future projections can be made, things are labelled and analysis of objective reality is done in the subjective realm.

There are feelings, they are real. There are feelings in response to the environment, there are feelings in response to people, other stimuli and there are feelings in response to thought. Feelings come in various colours and range from mild to intense.

There is conditioning, this conditioning is real. This conditioning makes the organism act in certain ways to a given stimulus. Sometimes this conditioning is good but sometimes it hampers an organism as it reaches the adult stage.

The illusion of you is real. There are thoughts that construct the self tied up with feelings and conditioning. These building blocks of false self are absolutely real, look above at the 3 items, these are real things in real life. 

But....

There is no you it is only an illusion. The illusion is real, you are not. Basically the self is a conditioned thought pattern nothing more. You have been conditioned to think in this way from as soon as you were born. “You” is only a thought, it is not a real thing. “I” refers to nothing.

It exists in reality as a thought, thought exists we know this for a fact.

But you is not a real thing, it is a thought.

A thought about a cup of tea is referring to an object in objective reality, a thought about “you” is not referring to an an object in objective reality.

There is a body that “you”, could be referring too... as an object.

But you is only an illusion, there is no entity called you in any shape or form.

You are not awareness, you are not an entity and you are not having the thoughts, there is only thought. There is no you whatsoever in real life, just look at this in reality.

How do I look?

Ok so going back to our earth revolving around the sun metaphor. You base your understanding on knowledge but it is not known to you. It is assumed by you. Your whole understanding of the solar system is second hand knowledge. You have probably not studied the solar system by starting again from scratch. This is a complex undertaking however but to “know” the solar system, this is what you would have to do. You would have to start off from scratch, ditch all the maths and just start again with a telescope and a pen and paper to devise the whole theory of astrophysics from scratch.

At the  moment, you merely understand the current model of the solar system and have applied it, this is understanding the solar system. To know the solar system you must be intimate with the very nature of the solar system. To truly know it, you would have to make all the observations and see them with your own eyes. Now the volume of knowledge is immense, all the work that has been done on the solar system is immense. Such an undertaking would take many life times of work and would require the intellect of some of the great minds like Galileo, Newton, Einstein to name a mere few.

To know “no self”, the same idea is required. All our knowledge has to be dropped and we have to start from scratch. Fortunately we don't need to do a fraction of the work required in our metaphor!

Maybe we can understand no self, maybe we could even apply the model of no self with enough understanding. Whoa I gotta stop there: No you can not apply this model trust me but people do actually do this, I've seen them. Take new agers or spiritualists in “ego” denial.

There is no ego but they identify with having no ego or rising above ego.

But denying what is (an illusion of self/ ego), is resisting what IS that is in their perception of reality.

There is an illusion but it is through this illusion that virtually everyone engages on reality. So an illusion of ego is a component of the perception of reality, for someone who has not seen no self.

They are denying that a product of the illusion of self exists, they are denying it is there and this is akin to resisting a component part of what their perceived reality is, as they think in terms of a self even though they try to deny it. This is utterly useless.

This is why the self persists in these people. They understand no self but they have not looked to see no self. It is the same as thinking about a tree and then denying there is a thought about the tree. This is resistance of what IS.

Without looking we can never “know” no self. We can only understand the idea using logic but even then it is not something that we can apply. A “concept” of “no self” is only as useful, as “no concept” of “no self”.They are both nothing except one concept should lead to looking for those who can muster up the courage to take an honest look at reality.

Fortunately, we are only dealing with an illusion in reality. We don't have to rewrite the rule book of classical and quantum physics and look with a telescope. We are dealing with a lie, simple as it is.

You is an illusion. To see this we have to cultivate some deep inner looking and look at reality without our rule book of the way we think things should be. We have to drop our knowledge and start again from the ground up with no preconceptions about anything.

We are dealing with a lie, so it cannot remain in the presence of truth. The truth burns lie on contact, A lie cannot stand up to the truth and this is how we can know no self. People say “you can't prove this either way”. Yes you can, JUST LOOK IN REAL LIFE WITH HONESTY. You cannot convince yourself of “no self” any more than you can convince yourself the sky is green and the grass is blue. You can only look in reality to ascertain what IS. This is knowing the true nature of reality, this is called enlightenment by some but we can just call it KNOWING universal truth.

Drop what you think you know and look at reality. Take a look at reality, see that there is no self. Every concept that is made about reality is actually the lie moving to stop you from looking at reality. This is why the mind is conjuring up all these fancy models, this is actually the lie trying to defend itself as it is threatened.

Ok, its time to grow some balls (metaphorically speaking) and face reality. Seriously that is all it is, a matter of courage. Muster up the guts to face up to reality, that is all that is required from you. You may have objections but why do you have these?

This is reality we are dealing with here and this is merely truth. Why should we resist or fear the truth?

Look at the major religions of the world. They have the belief that there is an eternal soul, this protects them from the thought of death and the end of self. The illusion fears non existence, this is why it throws up all these objections to looking. They cling to their blind belief, they denounce anything that threatens their belief system. If this belief was so solid they could look upon anything and not fear it. If it was universal truth, it would complement everything that is observed in reality. If it was truth then they would not have to cling to any belief based in circular logic. There would simply just be knowledge of what is but they cling  to blind unquestioned belief. They have no faith, for faith means to test your belief.

If you have made it here  you have already shown that you have a shred of courage within yourself. I'm asking you to be afraid and undertake this looking anyway. That is real courage. You should be afraid somewhat, there is fear but all there is to discover is  universal truth in the end. There is no way you can not see it, if you look in real life. It may take a short time to develop this inner looking but really there is no way you cannot see it if you actually look.

OK ONE LAST TIME: GROW SOME BALLS AND LOOK IN REALITY AT THE TRUTH “THERE IS NO YOU, IT IS AN ILLUSION”. LOOK, LOOK, LOOK, LOOK, LOOK I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO THINK, JUST F**KING TAKE A LOOK!!!!!!!

Phew... rant over, just LOOK at reality seriously this is all you need to do.

I'll paraphrase this statement, (can't be arsed to find the post to quote it) from Stephven's (very good) blog, for you to play with for the next few days if you still have any reservations.

Then you can look at the truth in this statement:

“The opposite of truth is cowardice. It is not a lie that is the opposite of truth. A lie cannot be the opposite of truth because a lie cannot exist with truth”.