Everyday Enlightenment

It occurs to me that one of the main goals of Zen Buddhism, to have a direct experience of reality, is the only way to live a life. Everything else is a third-person experience of a life. We don’t live lives directly. We live them by proxy.

Perhaps we do this in an effort to reduce the mental and emotional pain that almost every life entails. As the mind is a great master in the art of delayed gratification, it has the ability to spread out pain into the past and into the future. This relieves us of the burden of having to experience our pain all at once.

Of course, what seem like the past and the future to the mind are just ideas. One of the things the mind really does to mitigate pain is to use ideas as distractions away from other ideas. Notice that distracting yourself with a new idea does not solve the problem. It is a level of avoidance. Your consciousness will be lowered depending on how much energy you use to shield yourself from the process.

The other way the mind mitigates pain is by using a new idea as leverage against another idea. If my first interpretation of an experience is one of discomfort, then I can use another idea to justify tolerating the first idea. This justification will be effective to the extent that the rest of the mind’s logic is in agreement.

So, this sounds pretty useful, to be able to reduce my stress with ideas. But, it’s interesting to note that the original pain was just a perception. It in itself was just an idea. So, the mind uses ideas as buffers to protect itself against its own interpretations.

Note that this is a great way to ensure the persistence of both the perception of pain and the need for its alleviation, as one feeds the other.

Having a direct experience of your pain bypasses this dysfunctional duality. In the mind’s logic, experiencing uncomfortable sensations directly can only be uncomfortable. In truth, nothing mitigates pain like direct experience. It can cause pain to disappear, and can even be euphoric. Using your energy to attend to the truth in the moment, it seems, grants access to your latent powers.

In the West, we seek enlightenment as freedom from psychological pain. We maintain our ego-based identity, staying true to its paradigm of separation and selfishness, hoping in desperation that we can add something to the ego-complex to fix its imbalance.

“Surely, this next book will contain the answer I’m looking for, even though I’ve already read dozens of other self-help books. I just need one more meditation tape. Maybe this incense will do it, or this bell. This bell has such a magical sound, and it is different than all others I’ve tried.”

This thinking that we need only to “add the missing element” hints at a superstitious past and also betrays a presupposition that the nature of things is somehow defective or incomplete. Partly out of fear and partly in an attempt to “fix” things, we take matters into our own hands. Taking matters into our own hands leads to imbalances of its own. It has led, for example, to an excessive emphasis in the creation and belief of the need for drugs.

Even though most drugs don’t work, and their side-effects are often as damaging as the diseases they claim to solve or mitigate, we continue to hope for that miracle cure. We really haven’t changed any since the days of the alchemists. We’re still looking for the fountain of youth. We’re still looking for that magic elixir, hidden somewhere in the world, that will solve all of our ills.

The thinking that we can find a “miracle cure” reinforces our deep-seated quick-fix mentality, our hope in a never-ending womb-like comfort (along with the ego’s self-gratification in its own cleverness). What we’re really hoping for is that we won’t have to change ourselves, that we won’t have to do the real work. The truth is that you don’t have to change yourself and you have to do the real work.

Of course, it’s your true self that you don’t have to change. The false self, the ego, the personality, will have to undergo many changes. All that’s needed, however, is for you to focus on your true self, and to allow any falseness to fall away in its own time and of its own accord. This is a very natural cleansing process.

That the “real work” entails suffering is a matter of perspective. The falseness is just dirt on the gemstone. There was never anything wrong with the gem, it was just covered with grime from the road of your travels. The more you are identified with the “dirt”, the more releasing the “dirt” will seem like work. All struggle will originate with the lack of clarity that you have between your true self, that which you have always been, and your false self, the ideas of yourself that you have fallen for along your way.

So, you can trust the nature of things completely. The universe is almost infinitely smarter than your ego. As Jesus implied, you have to give up who you think you are to become who you really are. The ego is who you think you are, the concept of yourself. You are just yourself. Do you want to be yourself, or do you want to live one step removed, through an idea?

One of the reasons, I think, that the world of Disney is so compelling, is the promise of the very hopeful Jiminy Cricket character in the animated film Pinocchio:

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

At some deep inner place, I think we all feel like we deserve everything, that we are the center of the universe (in its most holistic sense), that we are the forgotten princess or prince in an estranged land, that we have been given the keys to a great kingdom, but we have forgotten where we left them.

To escape sentimentality and emotionalism (while trying not to run away from them), we can follow a reasoning akin to Ockham’s Razor, that the simplest thing must be true. What if, simply, you are the star?

This you would be your true self. Your true self is simply you in your true nature. It is everything you need. It is whole. It is complete. It is fulfilled. It is perfect, not as a static object of perfectionism, but as an emanation or beingness complete in its own nature.

You are an emanation of Source. Would Source create you, or create space for your beingness, and then leave you stranded in a dark alley of the universe without giving you the tools you need for your journey? This would presume that you had somehow been separated from life. This would seem to require some effort on the part of Source itself. A simpler answer would be that you are always within the field of life. So, what, then, creates the experience of separation, of needing to struggle for your existence, or to fight for what is yours?

Source, in its infinite expression, gives you the freedom to choose your own identity. You can maintain your identification with Source (stay in the Garden of Eden), or you can choose anything else to identify with, like your body or your mind, and you can even choose to deny your existence as an emanation of Source, or even to deny the existence of Source itself.

So, you are free to journey without Source, to see what you can accomplish, or create, on your own. You are free to delve into selfishness. To the extent that you disidentify with, or separate from, Source, is the extent to which you become your false self. Being a separate self provides for some gratifications and pleasures in selfishness. You get to think you did it all on your own. It can also be very lonely. Inevitably, you discover that the best moments of your existence were the ones in which you forgot about yourself, that is, forgot about your false self, and operated, consciously or unconsciously, in the backdrop of Source.

If you are the star, then you serve as your own compass. You need only follow yourself to your destination, to your “fate”, to your destiny. Certainly, this is too simple, too easy. Don’t I need to discover something, uncover something, find something lost, find some buried treasure, search some deserted ruins, use an ancient incantation employed with the right tone to find myself or my answer?

Go ahead. But what if what’s simple is true? What if following your true self as your own North star is challenging enough, is fulfilling enough? Do you really need to add drama on top of it?

By the way, a journey into selfishness is a journey into drama. False journeys cannot add to your true self, to your “treasures in heaven”. False journeys can only add to the stories that surround your false self. Your true journey may well appear boring from the outside, and it won’t be satisfying to your false self, but it will fill your true self completely.

When you are separate from everything, you are able to have everything. It’s strange to say, but when you are separate, you aren’t separate. Jesus opens the door for this with his words about “being in the world, but not of the world.” Real beauty, real joy, indeed, a real life, can actually begin when you walk through this door.

When I can stay myself around my family, I am able to enjoy them. I experience love for them. I can see the positive aspects of them. If I don’t stand up for what I want now, or fall into an old family role, my enjoyment vanishes. I become resentful. I begin to see mostly the negative aspects of my family members. I have lost my separation.

When those in intimate relationships lose their separation, the spark goes away. Like spark plugs in a car, if there’s no gap, the engine doesn’t fire. It requires separation for the spark to fire and the vapors to ignite. As soon as I become you, or you become me, the battery goes dead. The polarity goes away. The potential is gone. I stop being able to see you. I begin to see you through a concept. I begin to act out a predetermined role. Expectation fills in where surprise used to be. You may say that it’s normal to fall out of love at some point. Maybe, though, our desires for stability and control put out the flames of love.

Spiritual people know that not giving in to your worldly pleasures opens you up to experience true pleasures, treasures greater than you’ve ever imagined. This is true because you begin to put your energy, your faith, in the right place. When the pleasures of the world become too great, when all that glitters becomes gold, you put outer things before inner things. You put temporary things before eternal things. Your relationship with the temporal becomes stronger than your relationship with your Source. The farther a seeker moves into the outer world, the farther away the flame in their heart appears to be. The less fulfilled the seeker feels on the inside, the more they grasp for the outside. Outer pleasures become a vicious cycle. Indeed, you can’t ever be satisfied by things that aren’t truly satisfying.

When you know that there is nothing greater than your Source, when you know that your Source is everything that you’ll ever need, you become completely full and filled. Everything, and everyone, in the world then becomes beautiful. You don’t need anything, or anyone, in the world to determine your state of being, so you become free to be able to enjoy anything, or anyone, in the world. Your separation gives you an appreciation and a gratitude for everything that exists. Certain Buddhist monks practice predominantly the art of seeing beauty in everything. When you put your Source first, this is a natural outcome.

I’m still blown away by the miraculousness of this. Why isn’t somebody skywriting this in the sky every day over our cities and towns? You gain everything simply by putting first things first. I knew but I didn’t know.

Like most things in the realm of powerful truth, it’s a slippery paradox. “Subtle is the Lord”, said Einstein. God doesn’t sell God. It’s a shame, for those of us not always sure what to do with our attention, or those of us who haven’t yet committed fully to relinquishing control of our lives to a greater power, the only power that really matters, our true self, the Source of life.

A man called me one day from Nevada. Let’s call him Bill. Bill wanted a long-distance healing for his wife, who was stuck in Morocco. Even though he is an American citizen, and legally married his Moroccan wife, the American embassy would not let her out of her own country, and it had been this way for two and a half years. Bill was supporting her with his work in Nevada, and would lose 40% on the exchange rate every time he sent her money.

Every day or so, Bill would call me and check on my progress. I was enjoying having something to do each morning for someone else. There is nothing like using healing abilities to try to be of service. Bill would tell me about the Moroccan sorcerers and about his wife’s family and about their experiences with the embassy. With each new bit of information, I would delve deeper into the world of his wife’s day-to-day life.

It was all going great until his wife had a breakdown episode. She was very sensitive to energy, and the healings were affecting her directly, and immediately. Bill let me know and urged me to change my healing techniques. Though it wasn’t my typical style, I took it on as a challenge. I would try to direct my healing efforts in such a way as to affect Bill’s wife in the least manner possible.

Now, this wasn’t the easiest thing to do, as it isn’t usually possible to tell what the effects of any given healing will be. By its nature, the pathway of energy is like the path of a lightning strike. You can know basically how lightning appears and moves, but you can’t predict where its going to strike exactly. So, some healing efforts would work, and others would trigger an unexpected reaction in Bill’s wife. I adjusted my technique as best I could. It was turning out to be an impossible task.

Eventually, Bill got angry with me. He said, “I want you to get my wife home without her having to go through anything.” Bill finally made clear what I had sensed all along. I was failing in his eyes because I couldn’t deliver on the typical Western expectations of “control your reality”, “make it happen” and “I shouldn’t have to change to get what I want”. Bill would ultimately ask me to stop healing altogether.

If I’d told another healer about Bill’s attitude, we would have had a good laugh over it. It’s ludicrous to think that you can go on any worthwhile journey without being altered by it in some way. And why would you want to do otherwise? From a spiritual perspective, what’s truly important is the soul that you’re creating through your life experiences and your responses to those experiences. Do you really want an empty gift, one that you haven’t earned?

It’s a shame that Bill and his wife and I couldn’t have on a physical level what I had experienced with them on a spiritual level. I grew and changed with Bill’s wife as I worked with her and performed healings on those around her. I knew that the real reason Bill called me was to get spiritual communication and validation for himself, and I did my best to provide this for him. I will never be the same from the experience. That’s the amazing that about spiritual growth. It’s growth that you never give back. It can never be taken away from you.

You are the true gift. The greatest gift that you can ever give anyone, including yourself, is the gift of your true self. When you get an opportunity to polish the diamond that you are, take it as the gift that it is.

Weeding out the thoughts that we have accepted from outside of ourselves is one of the main tasks that we have as human beings in the “pursuit” of true freedom. Whether we accepted them voluntarily or not, and whether we accepted them consciously or not, doesn’t matter. We are ultimately responsible for everything that ends up in our personal sphere.

The focus of existence in this reality is our physical body. Our bodies are conduits of life. The more cluttered they are with obstructions, the less they can pass the vital life force energy. True freedom can be found in two forms related to this. You can transcend the physical body, achieving a consciousness whereby the physical body has relatively little importance in relation to your true self and your true life. This is the ultimate path of enlightenment as, in the end, the physical body cannot be counted on. It is always temporary. It’s something that we have to come to terms with.

The full expression of a human being would include the health and vibrancy of the physical body as well as that of the true self. In fact, having a healthy spirit, and an unhealthy body, is somewhat of a lie. Can you really have one without the other?

The second level of true freedom can be found in the body. You can relieve the sources of obstructions to its vital life force energy.

Most of us engage in bypasses to true freedom. We think we can outwit our destiny, and thus we seek shortcuts to bliss. We settle for false bliss in pleasure-seeking. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with pleasure. Pleasure and pain are enforcers of truth. The body, however, can be trained to experience true pleasure. It’s opposite, and typical manifestation, is addictive pleasure, those pleasures which we aren’t in control of. Of course, the mind will pretend that it is in control, and this obscures the addiction.

Denying the body is a form of trying to transcend the physical structure before you are ready. You are done with pleasure when you are done. Can you admit to yourself that you are a pleasure-seeker and that this is where you are right now?

Obsessively engaging in trying to remove obstacles to health in your personal sphere is also an avoidance technique. Health is important. It affects everything that you do. But, if your life becomes about removing obstacles, haven’t you lost a real life?

Most “problems” disappear when we get out of their way. In the West, where the mind is king, how do you accept the idea that, most of the time, all you really have to do is observe the situation? Your attention is ultimately all-powerful. It is the great solvent of your reality, a stream of life that flows down, in its own time, and cleanses all things.

Being present solves most issues. That’s because you are part of life. Life always works out. You can separate yourself from life to the extent that you engage in the identification with mental abstractions. Ultimately, though, life will fold you back in, and won’t take any consideration of your comfort.

Being present means facing our own foolishness, our own baggage. We’ve all done things that we aren’t proud of, and even that we can’t forgive ourselves for. But, facing these things is only a problem if we have accepted the notions of others into our personal sphere. The ideas and thoughts of other people become judgments in our own consciousness. Only your own ideas truly work for us.

At some point, we have to either kick out all of the notions of others from ourselves, or we have to transform them into our own ideas through full acknowledgment. In the latter, the foreign substance gets expelled anyway, as its nugget is freed in the fire of your awareness.

That judgment doesn’t work is a frightening concept for the Western mind. Conventional wisdom would say that without judgment, we would be surrounded by chaos and anarchy. That’s because the mind takes everything to be equal to everything else. Though the physical world and spiritual world mirror each other, they are not identical. You could restrain a violent person, because that is what works on a physical level, without being in judgment of that person. The physical action doesn’t change. The reason for the restraint does. This completely alters the quality of the encounter.

Judgment is pernicious. All the concepts that we have accepted from others, we unconsciously turn onto ourselves, and worse, onto those around us. We force others to live by the same set of rules that we feel forced to live by. “Everyone has to follow the rules.” “Everyone has to be treated the same.” Again, the mind takes a spiritual truth to be a global truth. You could certainly, for example, treat everyone as an emanation of the divine, without forcing them all to have a Spam sandwich for lunch.

Non-judgment is the great dissolver of ills. Your true awareness doesn’t contain any judgment. Judgment limits your awareness by denying you access to that which is interpreted as unacceptable. You become obligated to blind yourself to the full spectrum of life within you and around you.

Under the microscope of judgment, all of your personal history takes on a charge. This makes it difficult to allow things to be as they are. The things in your past deemed negative can loom large, hanging over you like a dark cloud. With just a moment of silence, you can hear the skeletons rattling in your closet. This is all thanks to judgment. Take away the judgment, and you have a patchwork quilt, a mandala, of almost infinite breadth, of indescribable depth and beauty. Behold the splendor of your true self.

The personal ego is nothing more than a collection of things that you identify with. It is this collection that wholly comprises your balance of karma. Your karma is that fun thing that you get to carry around from one incarnation to the next trying to understand and resolve.

From the Cartesian model, the loftiest goals for a Westerner derive from the idea that the mind is senior to any and all things around it. It is my ability to think that can solve any problem, remove me from any harm, create the most beneficial circumstances and provide me with the most freedom. With this as the loftiest goal, you’d be a fool not to identify with your ability to think, and that is, of course, exactly what we do.

Most Westerners don’t actually think, but rather just have thoughts. We have some thoughts that we’ve internalized from our life experiences, and we have a lot of thoughts that are channeled through us from the collective consciousness. Internalized thoughts usually come from traumatic personal events that precipitate in us making some kind of decision about ourselves and/or our world. Surprised by the “thoughtless” tyranny of our more powerful attacker, we repeat the thoughts about the event over and over in our minds. Thoughts from the collective basically boil down to a bag of rules, things that you should or shouldn’t be doing, the right things to do and the right times to do them.

In both cases, these thoughts stem from, or actually are, incursions from forces outside of ourselves. Does it really make sense to identify with this endless stream of foreign propaganda? Unfortunately, most of the things that we do, most of the time, we do unconsciously. This comes almost entirely from our fear for survival. One of the primary rules for survival is to go along with the group.

It’s astronomically easier for the collective to remain in control of you if you identify with the thoughts that are channeled through you. When you treat these thoughts as your own, as coming from you, you automatically become your own enforcer. You make yourself stick to the rules, even when it’s really not in your best interest.

For the Westerner, then, the mind and the ego are the same thing. What we identify with is our ego. We identify with our mind.

It’s a natural course of events, really, to become mired in the world. It’s part of the evolutionary path of a human being. Identifying with the mind makes it a much more complicated affair. We have become mired in a world that is almost completely conceptual. We put our life force energy into things that are representations of truth, and not truthful in and of themselves.

This is natural, too, this heightening of the entanglement with this reality. The stakes will always be made to go higher. Fortunately, as Eckhart Tolle says, “When you have suffered enough, you will be enlightened.”

The mind takes its energy from us. Without us constantly giving it our energy, it would not survive. That’s why the mind must constantly try to find a game for us to play.

The mind uses concepts out of the collective consciousness and sets up really fun premises like “You aren’t good enough”. If you aren’t good enough the way you are, then there are an unlimited number of things that you have to do to try to become “good enough”. It’s a never-ending game. Capitalism is a perfect match for a mind-based reality. There’s always something else you can buy to make yourself better, or at least to placate your insecurity.

Advertising is the perfect handmaiden for capitalism. “Product image” is often more important than the product itself. How many people can tell the difference between the functionality of a product and its image? How many people have stopped to consider that the image is just a concept, and isn’t real, but only a perception, a belief that has been sold to them?

Descarte’s “I think, therefore I am” was an expression of truth insofar as it perfectly expressed the symptom of our disease. We identify with our thinking process.

Those who actually use their ability to think can control their thoughts. Perhaps that is the draw, that there is something that we can control, when everything else seems beyond our control.

Unfortunately, most people don’t actually think their own thoughts. Their thoughts are provided for them by the collective consciousness. When we don’t think our own thoughts, we can easily fall prey to the mental images that fill the collective consciousness. For most of us, it’s really, “I have thoughts, therefore I am.”

If I am the thoughts I’m having, then a lot of things become true, and a lot of them are contradicting. That these thoughts aren’t your own, and that they contradict themselves, causes a drain of life force energy and lead to a life that is diffused in intention and purpose.

The Western mind is an entity unto itself. It is created by the concepts that we inherit that aren’t our own. The mind only has a life because we give it our energy. The mind is enforced by the collective consciousness, which is almost entirely a collection of rules, things which constitute right and wrong.

I say “collective consciousness”, but it’s really mostly collective unconsciousness. You can tell when someone’s speaking for the collective when they blurt out something that is supposed to be a truth for everyone.

I heard a young man suggest something to the effect, “Everyone knows that women have to shave their legs. Otherwise it’s just gross.” Apparently, a woman has to fit into a preexisting image of what she’s supposed to be. Is her body not good enough the way Mother Nature provided it?

I police officer once told me, “Taking any job is better than no job at all.” It’s a perfect thing for someone who is primarily concerned with order to say. Forget about soul searching, or trying to create a life truly worth living. “Just get back in the box so that my reality is as safe as possible.”

There is nothing wrong with physical care, safety and freedom. The problem comes with the overly simplistic, black and white, interpretations of the collective mind. “Being a good citizen means having a job. It’s part of being responsible, of not being a drain on society.” What if your job is unhealthy to you or to the environment? What if you hate your job? What if you’re passing your disgruntled obedience on to your children? Is a half-lived life better than no life at all?

In “democratic” societies, we consider ourselves to be free citizens, but we are almost completely controlled by the rules of the collective consciousness. At an alarmingly fast rate, these rules are also being turned into laws. We have begun to enforce morality.

Very few people have the audacity to ever question this bag of rules in any meaningful way. These people are often considered geniuses. They are also sometimes thrown overboard, their “wild notions” perceived as being too risky for the general populace.

Questioning the bag of rules is something that we should all do. It isn’t until we’ve made our own decisions about things, and about life, that we actually begin to live our own life, instead of just following that which has been laid out before us, and laid out mostly unconsciously.

Why choose, or seek, enlightenment at all? Let’s start at the beginning.

When spirit first started trying to embody itself on this planet, mystics have said that at first spirit moved into rocks. And then it moved into plants, and then animals, and eventually it came to inhabit human bodies.

Spirit is always becoming something. Beingness comes from nothingness, and seeks somethingness. We need somethingness to validate, to complete, our nothingness. When we take physical form, we make real what would otherwise just be pure potential. Potential that never gets used is worthless.

The problem is that often times when spirit becomes “something”, it then forgets what it has become. This is tragic. Spirit becomes somethingness to validate its nothingness, and loses its nothingness. It becomes stuck on the side of somethingness. This is death for spirit. Life then becomes a dry husk, pointless and meaningless. It has, as Jesus warned about, “gained the whole world, and lost its own soul.” This can lead to apathy, depression, loneliness and despair, and on the other side, greediness, disrespect for physical life, raping of resources and pleasure seeking.

So, let’s just say that this is of primary importance, as Jesus said, the idea of “being in the world, but not of the world”. This would be reinforced by his recommendation to “seek first the kingdom of God”, to make sure that we get our priorities straight at the outset. For what good is a lifetime if we lose ourselves? Sure, it happens. A lot of strange things can happen, and they’re all wonderful and beautiful, once you wake up from the experience. A party that never ends is not a party. It is hell. Ask any addict. If you’re stuck on the merry-go-round, it doesn’t matter how good the ride was to begin with. Once you’ve lost your perspective, you’ve lost everything.

There is nothing wrong with swinging from one extreme to another, from one state to another, from one level of consciousness to another. However, there is a particular beauty in being able to have it all, in the middle, as in the eye of a storm. You can keep the consciousness of your nothingness while experiencing the reality of somethingness at the same time. You could even be fully experiencing your nothingness and at the same time fully immersed in physical reality. You could call this enthusiasm, bliss, ecstasy or passion. You could even call it enlightenment, living a life that is full of light. Everything worth doing is worth doing full out. Why not?

So, isn’t this a paradox, being fully yourself and being fully immersed in the world at the same time? Yes. Spiritual truth is always paradoxical. Only a paradox can contain the truth. A paradox has an infinite number of solutions. The truth is always infinite. The two go together.

This goes against the black and white thinking of the mind, where everything is either good or bad, right or wrong. The truth is, every circumstance is always slightly different, the variables are always slightly different. No situation can be treated in exactly the same way. If a running back in football expected every hole that opened up in a certain location to always look the same, he would successfully penetrate the hole a very low percentage of the time. We can generalize about holes, and this helps for preparation and for planning. But during a game, all preparation must be subconscious and we must be fully in the game, in the moment, to successfully navigate the situations presented, each of which is completely new and different.

Children are often in a state of coming from their nothingness and being fully immersed in the world at the same time. Unfortunately, we train our children out of this state. It would be nice if for every grain of information we provided a child with about the world, we allowed them to enlighten us, to remind us, of the larger perspective of God-knowledge.

As adults, it’s not so much that we have anything to learn to find enlightenment, but that we have many things to unlearn.

Descartes nailed our current level of consciousness on the head when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” We are in a conceptual age, a mental age. Currently, concepts are as real to us as physical objects. Advertising relies completely on this fact when it tries to convince us that a certain product is “sexy”. This, of course, can’t be objectively true. A product can only have certain attributes and be lacking in other attributes. No judgement can ever be objectively true. It’s only when you buy into a concept that it becomes true for you. You make it true. As Jesus said, “As you believe, it is done unto you.”

The most important concepts to address are going to be the ones that you have about yourself. These are going to be the core concepts. They will affect everything else that you do.

After taking a physical body, we gradually begin to identify with it, with its traits, capabilities and characteristics, with its environment and privilege and with our personality. We come to know ourselves as sexy, beautiful, homely, nerdy, smart, stupid, exciting, boring, slutty, prudish or any of a million other types.

It’s really a lack of precision that gets us into trouble. Instead of saying, “I have the ability to think quickly on my feet” or “I have a good memory”, we say, “I am smart”, and this lends itself to becoming a stereotype, an embodiment of a concept, like “the brain of the class”. A stereotype is a very limiting, one-dimensional concept of self. Others include “the jock”, “the whore”, “miss congeniality”, “the stoner”, “the most likely to succeed”, etc.

Identifying with the physical body is really a trap. This is why people who get into serious accidents or develop serious illnesses and their bodies are disfigured in some way are sometimes very thankful when the event is over and things have settled down. They are relieved to not be stuck with the same limiting concepts of the body any more. They have seen the bigger picture. They have seen what life is about. They now know that the body is just a body. It is not them.

Identifying with something is great as long as you think you are winning. And therein lies the hook. The mind always thinks it is winning.