A Time for Cultural Disobedience
Our culture is pathological because it is based on a fundamental lie. The BIG LIE is that you are a separate being that needs to struggle and compete for scarce resources. This LIE of materialism and separation has led to the chaos, turmoil, and conflict that has driven human civilization for the past 5,000 years.
This LIE leads us to work our whole life to prop up a fake separate persona with self-help and psychological techniques. We try to achieve and consume our way to happiness.
Wait a minute you think. I can feel my body. I am the only one who experiences my thinking, feeling, sensing, and beliefs. I must be separate. I experience myself as so. But do you really?
Stay with me a minute. Who is this “I” you are referring to? Your “I” is the being that knows. It is the activity of knowing. It knows your thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, ideas, and beliefs. It knows these aspects of experience but it is not them. You are not your thoughts, feelings, or sensations. How could you be? They are temporary and ever changing.
You are a Verb not a Noun
Here is the most shattering realization you will ever have: you are a verb, not a noun.
You are the activity of consciousness. You are the act of knowing. In this understanding, your body-mind is an agent of consciousness. By consciousness I mean the intelligent energy that permeates all life. It is the intelligent energy that grew you from one cell, that opens roses, and grows grass.
The world is mental in nature, not material. Life is intelligent energy.
As the activity of consciousness, you have the intelligence of the universe at your disposal. Relying on the intellect of your brain is like using only the hard drive of your old desktop and refusing to connect to the Internet. This is why schooling is such a wasteful endeavor. It is training young people to rely only on their limited brains. Schooling fills brains with information and considers that education.
You are not a noun. You cannot possibly be a separate thing. You are intelligent energy that is borrowing the body-mind for your journey.
The ideas of a separate self is your shadow self because it is an illusion. Your shadow self is only an insecure thought. The idea of a separate person contains all of your thoughts of insecurity, weakness, lack, loneliness, and despair. When you shine the light of understanding on it, the shadow self dissolves.
I used to work with my coaching clients to help them secure their insecure selves. Now I realize the folly and absurdity of that attempt. You cannot secure that which is only an insecure thought. This sets you free to experience the joy of being alive!
Now is the Time for Cultural Disobedience
We need to wake up from the LIE of materialism and separation before this lie destroys our planet. This lie has served humanity in allowing us to create material things. Our standard of living has improved as we invented new things and technologies. But our quality of life continues to decline, as seen in the skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, apathy, and suicide. Our psychological remedies are not working because it is a spiritual problem.
Shadow selves navigate society as an insecure, separate self and wonder why they feel so inadequate and lonely. We have an epidemic of loneliness, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse because we have all believed this LIE.
And our planet is suffering because of this LIE. When we believe ourselves to be separate from nature we are free to pollute and exploit it.
Politicians, corporate executives, and government bureaucrats are wreaking havoc on our society and planet because they are operating from their shadow selves. Some are innocent. Many have dark personality disorders. We can neutralize them by stepping out of the shadows and living in Truth.
You Need a Community to Disobey Culture
My work in self-directed education for the past 15 years has been guided by an understanding that the greatest damage done by schooling is cultural indoctrination. We indoctrinate kids into this pathological society by convincing them that they are these separate shadow beings who must compete against each other for grades, praise, and the right to feel okay about their separate selves. I wrote about this in my book, Instead of Schooling: Educating for Creativity, Resilience, & Happiness.
It is hard to go against your entire culture and its toxic conditioning. You need a community. If this resonates with you, join the Joy of Being Alive group.
Explore and Dissolve Cultural Lies for Yourself
Explore this LIE of separation and materialism for yourself. Don’t believe a word that I say. If this LIE were the Truth, then we would all be thriving. We are not. Even the people who have won this game of competition and material accumulation are suffering. And they believe that if they acquire more, then they will be okay. More money, more power, more stuff, more control. You see both ends of the political spectrum trying to dominate and control. The media is complicit in this game of gaining control using fear porn.
We need a movement of cultural disobedience that is based on Truth, Love, Peace, and Unconditional Happiness. Because this is our natural essence. It is not a state of mind. It is a way of being that precedes any state of mind. Beyond and before any experience, we are peace, love, and fulfilled.
We Thrive in Truth
We only thrive when we live in Truth. Truth with a capital T. Not the fear-based truth that our media, tech magnets, and career politicians try to sell us to control us. TRUTH = spiritual Truth.
Your ideas of a personal self arises within who you truly are: infinite consciousness. Because your consciousness has no beginning and no end, it is infinite. There cannot be 7.8 billion infinite consciousnesses on this planet. They wouldn’t be infinite would they? There would have to be a place where my consciousness ends and yours begins. But we cannot find that place.
There is only one infinite consciousness. This is the ground of BEING. We are all unique modulations of this infinite consciousness. We share the same BEING. Not a being that is an entity, but the activity of life itself.
You are a Wave on the Ocean of Consciousness
We are all waves on the ocean of consciousness. We cannot be separated from consciousness or from the other waves.
We feel an urge, a calling, a desire to experience our true nature. Because our true nature has been veiled by cultural conditioning, we have lost touch with our essential Self. Look at a very young child who has yet to be conditioned. She is in a state of pure bliss. It is who she is. Until someone comes along and tells her she must be different. Then she becomes an entity. She starts building her persona.
Our conditioning begins with our language. Me. Mine. You. Yours. I am sad. I am depressed. I am angry. I am a woman. All you really are is the activity of consciousness.
We spend 18+ years constructing a separate ego and then wonder why we feel so alone, insecure, and unfulfilled. This separate ego is not real. It is just a thought. How do I know? Because my separate egoic self appears differently to me every single day. It is just constructed of thinking.
The Joy of Being Alive
To start on the path of the Joy of Being Alive we must first dissolve this egoic self by staring it down and allowing it to dissolve. This is an act of cultural disobedience because our entire pathological culture is based on our egos consuming their way to feeling good. We look to people, experiences, and things to make our egos feel okay. This is the journey of suffering and misery.
There are many people calling for civil disobedience as our local and state government authorities make draconian policies to isolate us from a virus with a 99.7% survival rate.
Once we realize that we all share the same BEING, then isolating ourselves from modulations in this conscious being seems absurd.
In today’s world where everything seems upside down, we have an amazing opportunity to question everything. Everything.
Our inquiry needs to start with self-inquiry. Engaging in Self-Inquiry is not a difficult task. It is not an intellectual pursuit. It involves questioning how your experience of life arises. Where does experience come from? Who are you truly?