Journey into yourself, look beyod the most superficial parts. Try to separate yourself from your thoughts. Emotions are very powerful desires trying to wrench you back into the cycle of desire and ego. The tricks it can use to fool you are unbreakable. You can't outsmart it. It can not outsmart itself, you are it. You are ego, you are thoughts, you are emotions. These things are temporary. There must be something else behind the machinery that makes it run with a strange manner, unlike any other machine. What is the difference between a dead body and an alive one? There is no spark. Something happens when we die that removes all the fight from us, all the struggle has ceased and it becomes something like a willingness to co-operate, a willingnes to acept what has happened, what is happening.
There is no way I can experience such a thing. By its very nature I must be absent. There is no possibility of me garnering any particular benefit, apart from another sense of perspective - another version of the truth. Or perhaps not. There is really no way for me to know.
There are so many tricks I use to maintain my sense of self. This sense of reality is flawed, I know it because I can't remember everything perfectly. I act despite myself. I am delusional. I don't understand who and what I am (are they really two separate things?) Any effort to distill the mind seems to make me less tolerant of myself, sometimes to the point that I can't stand to be like this. I need to escape somewhere, anywhere. The list of aces left to escape to are dwindling - drugs, alcohol and tobacco are losing their appeal, I no longer feel such a need to go out and indulge in pleasures of the flesh as much. My coveting of women continues, but on a much more subtle level. I still succumb to it sometimes, I let myself be tempted by big ideas and possibilities that by their very nature can not be fulfilled, ever. And if they are, the reality is so diferent to the idea of it that the desire remains unfulfilled, and manifests itself in another way, waiting to sneak up on me at another opportune time, just after I've forgotten the lesson I've just learned.
The cycle of self is such that I don't really know what's going on. I think I'm making some progress, but progress toward what exactly?Why am I doing these things? To find out what I am. Plato said that all we see is just a shadow of the outside world we see on a cave wall, and the true unseen, unseeable reality is outsid the cave. I don't know why I'm referencing a 2000 year old philosopher, probably because there were much less distractions back then that people would actually be courageous enough to leave their utter boredom behind to pursue truth. Perhaps they were stronger men, whatever that means, or perhaps the conditions of living at the time were such that it was conducive to this sort of thinking and practise. Perhaps those individuals were nothing like me, perhaps they are exactly like everyone who has every lived. It's not important, it doesn't help me.
There's always a finish line. There's a point, somewhere in the future, where everything will be OK, I will have realised what I wanted to realise, I will conduct in the most optimum way possible for this individual and I will know death and fear will be a thing of the past, a sideshow, a distant memory of what it was like to be so aware of something that wasn't at all important. This point is always in the future. One day I will have to accept that the future is always today, that the past is always truly dead and gone, nothing will ever bring it back. There is only one way, now, the future is just an idea in my head. It's an estimate based on things that have happened before in the past, the dead past. I carry the past with me lie a Bible. It holds the key to my behaviour, my treatment of myself and of others. There is no impulse to let it all go now, for some reason. I think that if I let go of the past, truly let go and assign no importance to it, then I will give up my identity. I have my own self-image that I want to believe and realise is not who I am, but there must be something deeper that says "you can't let me go for no good reason". Up until this becomes unbearable, all of this, I don't think it will be possible to drop it. There I go making up ideas about the future again.
Enough for tonight.
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