Living Your Life

It is as easy to love as it is to hate. It is as easy to be courageous as it is to fear. It is as easy to do that which is right as it is to do that which is wrong. It is as easy to be still as to be active. To aspire in the inner life is not difficult, to become pure is not difficult. You must make choices that will lead you to freedom and liberation, not to enslavement to the wills and actions and desires of others. 

But what is will? It is a decision. It is a decision to be something. The truth is: we really aren’t anything in particular. We can be anything; that’s the good news. Everything that you are or conceive of yourself as being is just an idea. It’s an illusion. It’s a hallucination. You can completely wipe the slate clean and you can dissolve the person you’ve been and become somebody else. That’s the good news. There are ten thousand states of mind, and you can explore and experience them. You can have an uncommonly fine life. But it takes determination. You have to march to the beat of a different drummer. You have to decide.

Here is something you may not want to hear: no one really understands you. And no one really cares. You will die and be forgotten. The people who are in your life don’t understand what’s going on. You are alone. There is only you and your will. Your life can be horrible or it can be incredibly beautiful; it’s seldom in between. It can be boring or exciting.  The active use of your will will determine what will happen to you in this and other lives.

Do you wish to become conscious? Do you wish to stretch yourself into the infinite and experience not just this world, but tens of thousands of worlds, and where those worlds come from? Do you want to wake up? If you do, then study Zen, apply yourself to the study. Study with me. Study with a different teacher — someone who’s enlightened, someone who’s outside of time and space. And we’ll teach you, if you really want to know. But you need to really want to know.

You have to assess your life. Ask yourself: what is it that you want? There is a world of deaf, dumb and blind people out there, who are shuffling through their lives, not knowing how wonderful life can be. They have their moments, and they’re pretty people sometimes. Sometimes they’re horrible. But in either case, they’re very unconscious. You can be conscious, but you will have to will it. You just decide.

This transitory body, this transitory personality – they are not yours. They are but donations from eternity. As you progress in your self-realization you’ll discover that there isn’t really anything that you aren’t, that you can take on any mood, any action, any personality form, be it of this world or any other world. You have no fixed self. This is only an illusion and this is the illusion that causes you to feel pain and suffering, sorrow and frustration and despair.

At the end of being is nonbeing. At the end of life is death. Beyond the ocean is something else – hard to describe, but also a distant cousin, another part of your being – nirvana, eternal awareness. But let us not concern ourselves with nirvana as yet. Let us come back from our celestial journey throughout the cosmos to this solar system, this planet, the person who’s listening to this voice – their problems, their hopes, their joys, their agonies, their victories and defeats, their life and their death and that which lies between – you.

You suffer because you try to fulfill yourself. You think of yourself in a limited way. You think that ‘I am this, I am that, I am not this, I am not that.’ But who is it who tells us what we are? Where did we get this sense of what we are? True, the sense of self was given to us by the world, by our parents, where we grew up, our friends, the things we read, our experiences, all of these things were given to us. But we’re the one who holds them together. We’re the one who can let them go. We are time. We are the sense of place and position.

If you can gain a sense that you exist in this moment and live that moment fully, and at the same time begin to perceive that you are an aggregate, you are not one personality but that you are a collection of selves that have existed timelessly, and that you even have future selves, which you can perceive, and that beyond all those finite selves is one infinite, perfect reality that human beings call God.

A human being is not made up of one self. You have many, many selves. The old motto “Know thyself,” in my estimation, should be changed to “Know thy selves,” because you’re made up of many, many beings.