WEEKLY WTF
01-20-25 Edition
M-O-O-N
M-O-O-N, that spells Monday. Ok it doesn’t but although today is Monday so- fucking- what. You only have to deal with Monday for a day. In fact, you only ever have to deal with anything for just a day and we can handle just about anything for a damn day, that is unless you’re also trying to live in a stressful future full of terrible “maybe’s” that probably won’t even happen or trying to live with regretful ghosts of the past haunting your present. 1 day, that’s all you really have to deal with and if you can deal with one day then you can certainly whittle that down to one moment. That’s what’s up, that’s all you actually have to deal with, this moment right here and right fucking now.
Here you are, right? Do you feel your feet on the floor or your ass in a seat or your back in bed? If not then where the fuck, or I should say, when the fuck are you? Do you notice yourself sucking in atmosphere and blowing it out? Do you feel gravities hug? Do you feel yourself- in yourself. Right now, it’s ok. You’re not dead right? I know you’re not dead because you’re reading this shit. You’re not getting kilt right now are you? I mean, if you were wouldn’t that be ironic, reading about not getting kilt whilst getting kilt but at least you won’t come at me in the comments… having been kilt and all.
But for all of you other Monday motherfuckers- congrats on not getting kilt in this very moment! What other horrors of your fabricated future are not happening right now? What other non existent phantoms are whispering in your mind but in fact are also not actually here right now? Right now, you’re breathing and you’re existing, that’s all you gotta do in each moment and you don’t even have to try because you’re always fucking doing it. All you do gotta do is let all the other bullshit go, at least in this moment while you serenely go about the business of living. Every moment will take care of itself without you worrying about it. You are the eye of the storm, Monday is just a made up thing anyway so fuck It. Happy Moonday.
Toodles!
Wake Up
Freedom, not the political or religious kind but the inner personal kind, requires swallowing a big ass red pill, I think you know the one, the one that breaks your current reality. The blue pill, on the other hand, is small, candy coated and easy to swallow. It leaves us blissfully unaware and unconscious. It gives us the illusion of freedom from within an invisible cage. It binds us in an emotional loop in which we naturally blame everything outside of ourselves for our own internal triggers. Insulated in ignorance we never wake the fuck up.
Then, there’s the red pill. It’s a hard pill to swallow. Large and formidable we have to get it down our gullets dry, frequently coughing as it periodically gets stuck in our throat. But once it’s finally onboard and kicks in, our perspective is forever changed, for better or for worse, to one degree or another, like it or not- we are fucking awake.
Depending on what religion or tradition or culture we’ve been steeped in this universal concept of awakening can have considerable nuance. Not for the awakened though, I suspect that every being that has truly experienced this thing by managing to see it through to its inevitable end result, has had the exact same realization. I also think that far more people have experienced it than you might think.
As for the other folks, the ones that purposely keep themselves comfortably on the outside looking in- they can’t reasonably choose the blue pill and expect to know what the fuck a red pill person is talking about so mythos and theories, religions and cults, scripture and ceremonies, art and worship are the worldly thought cloaks we attempt to throw upon the shoulders of those who have simply become empty.
There are many fallacies about “waking up” and also many descriptors. It’s an experience that lies behind thought that we try to quantify by using thought, it never works. Our linear mind wants this transcendent experience of expanded consciousness, that culminates in your own awareness turning inside, out to conform to its own temporal rules. We want it to be a thing achieved like any other thing. Do A & B and the result will get you to C. Worship this, pray like that, be like this but not like that, tithe all your money, kiss a robed ass, do all the damn things and you will then look like the imaginary concept that you made up based on another persons transcendent experience that you can never understand so long as there is a concept flooding into what should be an empty void of awareness. We don’t even know what the color blue looks like in someone else’s eyes or what pudding feels like in someone else’s mouth let alone such an ineffable unfurling of awareness. But I contend, when you get through all the layers of the tootsie pop, in the middle is the same thing, a kind of awareness of awareness, a primordial consciousness that is strung, like a string, through the beads of all beings. An all pervasive signal, not mysterious and ineffable but supremely obvious, that is never not being noticed because it is that which notices. That’s the gooey layer that is revealed when you stop sucking and finally bite down hard and crack the final layer of your candy coating.
Seekers want this state of awareness to be a title, like a badge we wear on our chest or a big ass crown we wear upon our inflated heads. We want it to be a thing we work for then achieve, an accomplishment, a destination that we reach so that we can then proclaim: “I’m finally fucking there!” Sorry, that’s not a thing, there is no there, there’s only here. Awakening is a never ending process, one that pulsates periodically throughout all of our lives whether you want it or believe in it or not. Evolution is the current that carries us all, true for both our biology and our awareness and it doesn’t give a shit how we regard it.
We see evidence of evolution, which is the tendency of the universe to become more and more complex, in cosmology, biology, society and now- technology. Why should consciousness be left out? But evolving consciousness works differently. Perhaps it is the complexity occurring in the other fields of life that actually obscures our awareness. Everything else is racing downhill to become more complex and here you are trudging up this huge hump in the road against nature itself to become more simple. Consider that the expansion of consciousness only requires removing the walls of complexity that box it in. Life evolves by becoming more complex, consciousness evolves by revealing its inherent simplicity and fundamental nature. When the two collaborate together- Blamo, the gravity of nature can be escaped. She won’t like it though, and she will pull out all stops to bring you back into her fold… it’s kind of her job after all.
Not to be all woowoo and shit but I’m here to say unequivocally that different states of consciousness are an actual thing and in its extreme you can indeed find yourself in a state in which the line of demarcation between your own sense of individuality and the entirety of reality has mostly dissolved. A person can experience profound physical bliss, a euphoria that bubbles up into the belly then into the chest that’s like a thousand orgasmic suns burning every fiber of who you thought you were to ash. But as with all things that come, they must also go because if a thing or a state of consciousness wasn’t perpetually there in the first place then however metaphysical or quantum or mystical a state or experience is, it means it belongs to the ever changing nature of reality and is therefore impermanent and is not worth clinging to.
Also, to be clear, I am absolutely not talking about tripping balls. I’m talking about something much more profound, a thing that requires no interaction from anything outside of yourself. The use of psychoactive substances can definitely give you a glimpse, a temporary expansion of awareness by connecting parts of your wrinkly pink meat computer that normally don’t talk, but it can also be a trap if you solely rely upon a substance to experience these expanded states. You use a canoe to cross the river you don’t proceed to drag the fucking thing through the jungle and up the mountain. It’s not about what it shows you, it’s about experiencing the fact that we are not necessarily stuck in the 3 standard states of consciousness (waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep) with their slight fluctuations of happy and sad, joy and suffering. These are the dualistic surface waves of a vast and ineffable singular sea. This experience people call waking up- is a deep dive under the surface. We may periodically get a tiny sip, or a gulp, or we may find a firehose stuck in our mouths. Waking up is not an end all be all or a full stop. It is a constantly changing process, a vacillation occurring around an unchanging center. How we experience it depends on the shape it currently takes. Like water conforming to a container, a drop falling from the sky, a rivers flow or a pot of piss- it’s all equally wet.
The benefit of an unmedicated conscious expanding experience, whether you want to call it awakening, grace, merger or realization, is its corrosive effect on the strings that tie us to the ego, these gossamer strands are made of identification. Awakening experiences, be they glimpses or sustained mergers, are only useful if they dissolve enough of who you think you are in order for you to uncover that which you’ve always been. It’s a strange process that takes many forms throughout life but initially is meant to reveal one thing that’s true by simple dissolving everything in us that’s not. When you experience this you’ll laugh, I promise you will. It’s like you’re the last fucking person in the world to see it, so incredibly simple and obvious it is. You realize in your feverish seeking you’ve just been chasing your tail the entire time. I can’t say much more about it without lessening it or obscuring it in thought. We each must get there on our own and experience it ourselves, that is the way. Here’s a hint though: you are experiencing it right now and in fact, you’ve never not been.
I sort of think of it, when I have to think of it, as an “extraordinary mundanity”. It is definitely extraordinary as viewed through the dualistic lenses of our learned paradigms but ironically if we are looking through these lenses we can’t see it. There are pivotal moments in which our lens dissolves and briefly we experience singularity through the last fading remnants of dualism. It is by this contrast that it seems extraordinary. But should the old paradigm and identifications completely vanish for a while it all, in a way, becomes no big deal. You’ve always been that, you always will. It’s an intimate familiarity that becomes an extraordinary mundanity. A deep sea fish has no concept of wetness unless it’s been pulled above the surface of the water long enough to dry out.
The different states we can experience are extraordinary and truly achievable. There’s no singular road map how to get there though. Entire religions have been formed around such paths. You can’t make it happen and yet effort seems to be required. One factor seems to be that you have to really fucking want it. You have to want it more than you want to maintain who you think yourself to be. This wanting, this raging fire in your middle, is called aspiration and you either feel it or you don’t. I suspect though, like sparks yearning to rise and be absorbed by the sun, we all have this inner yearning but how it manifests in our lives depends upon the strength and nature of our egoic firewall. There is only one way to extinguish this aspiring heat and that is by, after letting everything else go, you must then let it go. We use this devotional fire to burn through our lies but in the end it is just a tool and tends to be the biggest hurdle to overcome because thinking we need it is the biggest lie of all and we’ve become overly attached to its efficacy.
The red pill is hard to swallow. This kind of mad aspiration feels like both a blessing and a curse. You can be awakened for a second or a year but nature is hyper intelligent, ever vigilant and is a colossally stubborn beeotch. Our bodies, our psychology and our circumstance continually move and change right along with day and night and with the seasons and the very machinery of the cosmos itself. Should enough of your “you” (your self referential story) be digested in the ineffable divine or quantum belly, then you will experience the witnessing state. It’s like the lightbulb in the back of a movie projector that shines through a strip of moving film. It is like being in the eye of the storm of yourself, your now, little self, the one that oddly becomes like an unnoticed appendage or like a tv playing in another room, barely regarded for a time. You are the awake stillness in your middle, unmoved, unaffected whilst thoughts and emotions and life’s many tempests rage around you. But remaining in this aspect of your nature, though very expansive, is not the fucking point.
Egos are like lizard tales in that they always grow back. Many Eastern traditions know this and so monasteries and strict disciplines and systems such like are employed so that an adept, after awakening occurs, grows his or her ego back within the tradition that helped them to neutralize identification with it in the first place. Their dualistic seed has been modified so as to regrow in a particular garden with a specific bloom. Various traditions help untangle psychological knots along the way so that the ego will grow back without a bunch of old and shitty baggage. Spiritual “rules” though, while emphasized as being crucial during the process, aren’t actually all that important, they just give an awakened soul a smooth landing strip on the way back into life and identification. They grease natures meaty mechanism so that there is something reasonably clean to slide back into so to speak because marinating in the one thing true (which is just the actual you) means that you have shaken EVERYTHING off and re-entry into life without certain constructs can be very painful.
Imagine a strange juxtaposition in that you are permanently aware of your own awareness, it is the one and only thing you know to be true, and yet at the same time the mind has all of these old knots that still need untying. Perhaps the individualistic mind has never really faced the concept of death before because it hitherto had a scaffolding of belief in place that calmed that fear with the idea of an individual soul or heaven or the astral plane or fucking a bunch of virgins on a cloud and so forth. Suddenly your ego is forced to face the possibility of annihilation for the very first time. When you experience the one thing true, belief is no longer possible, I know it sounds weird but it’s a thing, at least it was for me. My lizard tale grew back weird and crooked and contributed to an entire year of daily panic attacks. When the light of awareness turns on within you all of your nasty little mind roaches come scurrying out en masse. Going rogue with this shit is not easy, it can even be devastating for a time.
It seems like no one ever talks about this, more challenging, side of this age old experience that people have been having since people became a substrate for the signal of consciousness. I think that this is the most I’ve talked about this subject because it’s a difficult one to convey. I always feel like I dirtied it up or tarnished the experience a bit by attempting to wrap it in such crude narratives. It almost feels like lying because the actual experience is so far removed from any amount of words I put together, however well woven they may be. There is a much longer story behind all of this but I don’t think I’m ready to tell it. 20 or so years after the fact and I’m still at a loss. Is it divine? Is it quantum? Is it psychosis or madness? Is it all those things? In a way the process itself, however bizarre or extraordinary, isn’t the point anyway. What matters is what the process exposes in you, an ever present awareness that you realize that you’ve never not been. What matters is how you integrate it back into duality. What’s significant is the aftertaste it leaves in your experiential palate, the ethereal odor that lingers in the mind that you carry into your new lizard tale life. I can say with confidence that it’s tricky fucking business growing your ego tail back on your own, in default mode, whilst no one is initially at the helm steering your ship, it’s not pretty. In a very real way you’re born anew but into the same old meat suit in the middle of a half life lived, but now you no longer have belief or any paradigms at all to comfort you. How the fuck can you believe any mental constructs when you are primarily aware of the one thing true? It’s like a bright light of knowing that burns away all of your previous psychological shadows. It’s a hell of a fucking process and sometimes, it’s hell itself, a hell you have to walk through- and barefoot at that.
As long as I can remember I’ve always been someone who has wanted to peek behind the curtain of reality even if it meant forsaking the visible world itself to get “there”. Actually fuck that I’ve, as long as I can remember, wanted a back stage pass valuing experience over knowledge. I’ve always held the “absolute” and original nature of existence, a thing I used to call God, in the highest esteem and to be the only worthy goal of my embodied existence. But the one thing true, or what I sometimes call awareness without the “of”, caused me to realize that that’s not the fucking point. You’ve spent an eternity before this birth being “that” and you will spend an eternity after physical death being “that” so hello, wake the fuck up, the whole point is for our asses to be a deluded amnesiatic little bubble blowing in the winds of conscious embodied life for a minute before we pop. After which the conscious air trapped in the ego bubble becomes the entire atmosphere once again. I’ve learned that it’s not about transcendence, that’s just the fish out of water part of it. The more important part is integrating that inner knowing with outer doing. It’s all about integration: living life to its fullest, forsaking nothing but also perpetually aware of your own awareness. After all, going to a movie is the most fun when you forget you’re part of the audience.
By the way, if you’re feeling some kind of way because it seems that I’ve previously implied that there’s no heaven or astral realm, no soul and no cloud orgies, you can relax. I’m not saying that there’s is or isn’t. I don’t fucking know if there is or isn’t and that’s right where I want to be. Knowing that I don’t know and making peace with every possibility no matter how terrible some of them seem to the poor quivering ego. Like I said, I only know one thing that’s true. Not being bound to any tradition or religion means that I’m not required to support anyone’s narrative about all that shit. Besides, I love a mystery. One thing is apparent though, and that is that energy is never created or destroyed. Do with that as you please. Go sit in a forest during Winter or a graveyard and contemplate it.
It seems clear that some folks have had this expansive awakening experience that I’m talking about, to one degree or another, but that it immediately gets hi-jacked by their ego. Perhaps someone has their first “glimpse” after which the ego immediately claims it as its own, making it a new characteristic or title or attainment and it adds it as another layer unto itself and proclaims: *que angels singing and shit* “I am holy as fuuuuck” or some such nonsense. This is where you get your holier than thous and false gurus and cult leaders and the like. They might have experienced enough to realize that there’s much more going on but it was not sustained long enough to dissolve the identification between the one thing true and the ego in order for them to experience what’s up. Eventually the ego puts more and more self referential layers upon itself and becomes denser and darker. We have all seen unfortunate examples of this involving Kool-aid, Rolls Royces, rape and abuse and… you get the picture. Of course, some of these folks have not even had the glimpse. You don’t need to see the nature of your own existence in order to be a megalomaniac asshole, but it sure can feed that part of you if it’s pre-existent. I’ve found that some of the most egotistical people I’ve met have been ones who claim to have no ego.
The ego is not a villain by the way. It’s simply an evolved construct, a sort of software installed in our wrinkly pink meat computer that was brought about by nature in order to segregate a singularity into endless iterations of itself that, being bound by the concept of time and space, can appear to exist as an individual for a time. I’m talking about you by the way. People hate and vilify the ego… maybe don’t do that because it’s not actually productive. Do you hate your car because it’s not a plane? Do you resent the fact that you need to enter a vehicle in order to move quickly through space and get to and fro? Some folks say shit like “I’ve destroyed my ego” or “I’ve experienced ego death”. That’s not really a thing. It’s the identification to ego that is dissolved not the ego itself. Show me a person without any ego and I’ll show you a motherfucker that’s literally in a coma.
I didn’t mean to go down this particular rabbit hole but here we are so fuck it. I wanted to write about something more practical but perhaps someone needed to hear this shit. I just hope I didn’t give anyone the wrong idea, I don’t want to imply that there is some magical state to be achieved or some exalted status to aim at. This is a thing that is outside of religion and spirituality and science and yet all those things aim at it equally. If you get a past a glimpse into a sustained experience it’s a big fucking deal to realize it’s no big fucking deal. When you swallow the red pill a process starts and like any other process there are ups and downs and extremes of delight and of incredible suffering. You’re not some motherfucker levitating and shit, it’s not that, it’s not a thing learned or gained. It is simply a truth revealed by letting go. In exchange for surrendering everything you think you are you get one single thing that’s true in return, that’s it.
Swallowing the red pill is an allusion to, through various methods, thinning the egoic layering enough that the heat of aspiration can be felt, allowing it to gain more influence over you than your attractions and aversions, desire and suffering. As to what practices- figure it out, start seeking and you’ll start finding. Meditation helps thin those layers effectively. The OG meaning of yoga is “to yoke” like sparks seeking the sun or like drops yearning for the sea. You’ll find your own way guided simply by your own aspiration. Aspiration is the real canoe you use to cross the river of the mind, just don’t forget to leave it on the other bank or you’ll get stuck.
And so- I finally have come full circle to the more practical thing I actually wanted to write about: the freedom acquired by letting go. It’s one thing to be spontaneously swallowed into some incomprehensible belly of bliss, partially digested, then spit out over and over. It’s some kind of process that just seems to happen. Afterwards, maybe years later, the ego starts growing back by default, then it’s on us to find ways to free ourselves through the medium of conscious choice. It’s one thing to know that your little ego bubble of sequestered air is actually the entirety of the atmosphere but its another thing altogether, from the standpoint of the bubble skin, to live the movie of life with all of its excitement and joy, tragedy and pain. After many many years of looking I am at last understanding the mechanisms of actual freedom. Freedom from thought and from suffering. Freedom from expectation and emotion and yet, fully experiencing these things because hello, that’s the fucking point.
The perpetual signal of consciousness that is our shared wakeful middle doesn’t give a shit what kind of bubble skin you blow or what kind of storm you create around it. The light bulb shining in the back of the movie projector gives zero shits what kind of thought film you load and life movie you play. Besides a pristine unpolluted form of singular awareness the only other attribute I can discern about this intimate mystery in our middle lies at the event horizon between the primordial original awareness and the individual thought plane. In that impossible demarcation there seems to be a sense of enjoyment. Enjoyment of happiness and of deep suffering alike, all of it, nothing is excluded. No one wants to be terrorized in “real life” and yet we enjoy watching horror movies, get it? I hate to anthropomorphize and reduce such a thing to some mofo eating popcorn in the back of your mind but it’s no weirder than the actual truth of things.
There’s only so much benefit to knowing that different, more expanded, states of consciousness are possible and in fact that knowledge can be the very obstacle to experiencing such things, it can become a carrot on a stick. This thing can only be pointed at but people get mesmerized by that pointing finger. There are things we can do right now to begin emptying our mental cache in order to reduce its density and experience a freedom of beingness hitherto unknown to us. It’s the middle ground between being gobbled by a big ass ego eating goddess and simple pragmatism. Let’s call it the purple pill.
So for the sake of practicality it works like this: if something happens in your life that disrupts, disturbs, annoys, hurts, causes suffering or anger or misery or any of that shit it’s because of one thing and one thing alone: resistance. If you take a hit and are fucked up about it, first notice it, then accurately name it for what it is- resistance. Then you work on neutralizing the resistance with its opposite: acceptance. If your resistance is too great to allow acceptance and you’re stuck then you know exactly what you have to work on, if that is, you want to do so. Goodie for us that life gives us endless opportunities to learn this, over and over, ad nauseum, escalating things until we do.
Perhaps you are butting up against a paradigm of belief that thinks it has any control whatsoever of the outer world. This may help you to understand the one thing you do have control of- how you deal with uncontrollable shit.
Maybe acceptance means destroying a narrative that you’ve identified with. Our bubble skin is made entirely of stories you see. Stories of: “I like this but I hate that and I don’t give a shit about those.” You can mix innumerable brands of liquid soap with water and then blow a bubble but if you try to somehow remove one particular brand of soap from the bubble skin you threaten to pop the whole damn thing. Maybe, juuuust maybe, you actually would benefit from popping. Red and purple pills have a funny way of doing that and in fact, life gives us opportunities to pop all the time but we panic and just keep adding more fucking soap.
There’s nothing to lose in letting go, you are made entirely of existence. The only thing to lose is our inherent ignorance and our suffering. The only thing the bubble has to lose is its soapy sheen but it has the entire atmosphere to regain. *POP* goes the wee soul…
Circumstance after circumstance, stressor after stressor, tragedy after tragedy. These are all opportunities, every single fucking one within it has the seed of growth, you just have to want to find it.
A person who sees the opportunity in the most dire and tragic of circumstances can set themself free in a way that cannot be quickly achieved living a blue pill life.
I’m not saying go look for tragedy, don’t worry, life will deliver it to you in time, but when it does make it a gift. You can start practicing now. What little things fuck you up? Can you accept them? If you can then you can use their gravity, like a satellite sling shoting around a planet, to gain momentum to keep going further into inner space.
It is possible to milk some sort of benefit from every single fucking thing that happens to you no matter how terrible. I realize that some people will not like hearing this and I understand. The blue pill creates a “me” and an “it”. A self referential process in which we define ourselves by our circumstance and often by our suffering. The story of our suffering is a stubborn soapy sheen. I’m not here to try to pop anyone who is content in their bubble.
When hardship or tragedy strikes it’s not immediately possible to accept, let alone utilize, a circumstance for our own growth. We have to fully feel and express it first. We have to blow that terrible foam off the top of our heartache so that we can see where our resistance lies. Waking the fuck up, like anything else in life, is a process. It requires us to be aware enough to consciously collaborate with this ineffable holographic movie we call life. But don’t worry, you can’t fuck it up, in an infinite multiverse every possible movie needs to play itself out. Even without trying, we all do our part so kuddos!
Did I get a bit too Woowoo here for you? Well, Woowoo is not really a thing it’s just a label that some folks love and some folks hate. Woowoo is what we call shit that we reject because it doesn’t conform to our paradigm. It’s also what people proudly proclaim about shit that doesn’t fit any previously established religious doctrine or scientific knowledge. Guess what? It’s all the same shit and yet it’s also none of it. Maybe it’s our birthright. Maybe it’s madness, maybe it’s quantum, maybe it’s a simulation, maybe it’s divine, maybe it’s just our original state, maybe it’s Maybelline, figure it the fuck out. Toodles.
Dedicated to Miracle Maisie Mae
Toodaloo
