The Way Forward

     The way forward is the way of now. This moment is our guide. This moment holds the wisdom that we feel we need. We turn away in fear. We fear what this moment holds, when what it holds is always precious. This is natural to turn away. It is apart of the moment. Apart of the Beauty of the Now.
     We feel separate from this world, from this moment. From ourselves. We feel that we are not ourselves. That we do not express ourselves when we are wholeness. We are Unity, seamless Unity. We are the diamonds of our desire. Everything that we turn away from in disgust is apart of what makes us so complete. Perfect. We seek Gold, yet we are Gold. Our hands and words are divine Gold. We are already one now. This moment is already perfect as it is.
     We think with and without certain things and qualities we would attain a fulfillment that we already posses. We look outside of ourselves for fulfillment when she that is looking is perfectly enlightened. Perfectly fulfilled. We cannot find peace in striving. For striving will always lead to striving, and striving is always being unsettled, dissatisfied. Who we are now is always complete. Who we are now always has the answers, always knows the truth. We look outward in fear and delusion, when what we already possess is more than sufficient. This is why Jesus tells us not to worry. "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or stay away in barns, and your heavenly father feeds them! Are you not more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life." Matthew 6:25-27. The Heavenly Father lives within us. He is us. He is who we are now. We are fulfilled now. We think we are without and we feel that we are without, when what we are and what we have is fulfillment. We are already One.
     We possess the Universe within us. When we can see who we are within, we will see that what lies within us is the same as that which lies outside of us. The Kingdom fills and surrounds us. We live in the Kingdom of Heaven now. We are prepared, we are whole, we are one with Christ. Our body is the body of Christ. Our life is the life of Christ. We are Holy. We are reborn in the body of Christ each and every moment. We are the life of Christ. We are Christ.
     We are one with the air, one with all that we can see with our eyes and experience within ourselves. The way forward is not out, but in. When we strive for inner wealth we do not go in, we continue to go out. We continue to run away from who we are. Who we are does not need to change or attain. Who we are now, as we are now, is fulfilledness. When we seek for anything else but this, we will go astray, we will be lost. We must let go of ourself and lose our striving to go within and find who we really are. This is truly to go within. We must let go of who we believe we are and become something else. We must let go of our sight to see. We must stop listening to the world that we know to hear. "He that hath Ears to hear, let him hear." Matthew 11:15. They who have forgotten the outer world and can hear the world within will know this. They will yearn for the voice of The Christ. It will be like rain falling upon a droughted land.
     The way of fulfillment is not through outer or inner attainment. The way is realization of what is. Insight into the nature of the Self. Insight that cuts away delusion and egotism. That eliminates striving. Part of this journey is through the pursuit of personal gain, but personal gain alone, no matter where it is is not the answer. The answer is undividedness. The answer lies within.
     The way is only through outer and inner striving because striving because striving leads to insight. Striving leads to the end of striving. The death of striving is the birth of insight. Only through being incomplete can we find our completion. Only through striving for what is not our being can we stop striving and realize what is our being. This is attainment.
     By searching outwards and striving we will lose faith in the world, we will turn inwards and seek God. Seek truth. When we lose faith in all worlds, outer and inner, we will come to ourself. Come to our senses and float back down to Earth: to our roots. We will discover who we are and we we always have been as a human being. Weak and frail. Mortal. Ignorant. Alive. We will discover that everything is temporary: fleeting. Leaves in the wind being blown away. We will discover that life is formless and formlessness is life. We are empty and without self. Life is pointless. Life is empty of form. This is the way. The way of emptiness. Their is no fulfillment. No attainment. No self. Nothing at all.
     We are Light and empty shadows, reaching into the dark for something beautiful to hold onto. Something beautiful to believe in. We find what is in the emptiness of life. We find who we are in the nothingness that is ourself. Life is born from the void. Life is born from emptiness. This is emptiness. This is the void. This is emptiness. What an incredible mystery. What a deeply moving phenomena. What is, is what isn't. Who I am is nothing at all. This is what I am. A soaring shadow on the wind. The pale moon in the night's sky. What a dream. What a riveting dream.
     The way is that I am. The way forward is to continue to go deeper within. To continue to blossom as I am. To expand as I do, as I have done, forever. I am. Not to attain, but to be. I will attain through my being. Not to attain, but to be. Their is no question of what the way is. Their is no doubt in the mind. My mind. Anyone's mind. There is this. As it is. What can we cling to? what is other than ourself? There is no path. There is simply being. There is no way. There is simply the way that we are. There is simply who we are. What a wonderful thing. Being. Being. Being. Everywhere I am. I am. Their is no way. This is the way. This is where the sidewalk ends. The way is now.
     What is the way forward? Is their a way forward? I think there is. I think it is wonderful. I think it is right in front of us. We are surrounded by doors of the mind. All of them leading forward. Some forward, some backward. All doors going where they already are. Many ways all leading to the same place, going through the same place. All through here, to here. Nothing to attain. Nothing and no one to be. Just this. Forgetting the way.
     What's strange is that though these doors lead to the same place, they always go somewhere new. It's like the heart is always the same, bu the content, the form, changes. We are always in new terrain, but we remain unchanged. Maybe our heart too is temporary. I don't know. It feels like the same thing is reoccurring each moment. The same sense of Self. The same sense of being. I feel like this being, or sense of being, pervades the whole universe. it is the whole universe. This doesn't mean that it won't change or end. Why can't the nature of the universe fundamentally change?
     There's a part of me that wants to do things. A part of me that is striving. I suffer when I grasp on to things in fear. When I won't let them be. Our suffering is our psychological collection of this kind of grasping. We grasp onto what we believe will keep us out of painful feelings, feelings incurred by grasping out of fear. We think we need to avoid these feelings because they are the death of ourself: our comforts and our ambition. We think this is wise. This is simply avoidance, fear of what is. It increases negativity, it does the opposite of what we imagine. We are adding to the heap, adding to our grief. Such is life. It appears that the Buddha's words are true. Life is suffering. Humans are ignorant beings, creatures. We are afraid of death. We are egoic. This is natural. We do not need to avoid these things. We simply think we do because we are often deluded and afraid. Such is life. We are afraid of not being great, beautiful, appreciated socially. This is all that that these are, nothing more. It feels good when we grow into deeper health and deeper balance. We feel joy sometimes when we get what we want. This does not mean that we need to hold onto these things. This does not mean that suffering is bad. Suffering is. We naturally learn from it. It shows us more about our selfs and life, just like anything else we experience does. It is inseparable from anything positive we enjoy. Not that we need to suffer or should seek suffering. As we naturally become wiser we learn to avoid much of the suffering that plagues us earlier in life. This is not something we need to seek, not that we can help ourselves.
 Life is suffering.
 Life is suffering.
 Life is suffering.
     Much of our life is spent anxiously attempting to hold onto what we are attached to and keeping at bay what we afraid of or dislike. When we do this out of fear and anxiety we are blinded to wisdom. Our intelligence is lost in fear and anxiety. We were attempting to stay on track by holding onto something we perceived was good, but in our fear of loss or change we chose a greater darkness and actually gave up what was good. We chose to give up ourselves, our sense of right and wrong to maintain control of what we were attached to. This is when we have fallen into the fear of loss. The fear of change, the fear of suffering. The fear of dukkha.
     I don't think we can avoid this fear. i don't think we can avoid falling into the darkness of our fears. At least not immediately or entirely. I don't think avoiding this fear needs to be a matter of concern. It simply is a part of life. I don't think we need to do anything or need to be concerned about anything. Not that we need to be free of concern. We just are often concerned. This is life. This is being a human. We are often very anxious. So anxious to the point of being anxious about letting go of our anxiety. We are afraid that we won't be able to take care of ourselves without being constantly anxious. This is one thing we are fearfully attached to that causes us great grief and suffering. We are lost in a cycle of anxiety. This cycle becomes deeply ingrained in us to the point that we forget that we are worrying. We think it is normal, typical, healthy behavior. It's much easier to adopt this attitude when this kind of worrying is a key component of the mass psychology of society. When nearly all advertisement is geared towards perpetuating hysteric anxiety. This disgusts me. It's so incredibly dangerous and debilitating of the human spirit, of culture and of freedom.
     When we are this anxious, we often lose sight of wisdom and common sense. We lose sight of what really needs our attention, what we really care about. In this way we lose sight of the truth. This is a precarious place to be. I'm not saying not to be anxious. I'm pointing out the pitfalls of being too anxious and the wisdom in dealing with this kind of anxiety before it becomes much much worse individually and throughout general society.
     A large part of the madness of the world is driven by this cycle of anxiety as it has become unhinged. It turns into mania and mental illness. It makes us obsessive about achieving external wealth at the cost of our health and wellbeing. We become disingenuous and develop artificial personalities. At this point we often don't know where to begin to take care of ourselves. Who we are gets folded under layers and layers of artifice and delusion. We fall into a quiet, terrible and suffocating darkness within our minds. We lose the ability to express ourselves and our energies build up in our bodies and our minds. We grow increasingly tense and uncomfortable, even to the point of disease. We become increasingly and frighteningly mentally ill. The energy lashes out in anger, violence and manifests in chronic substance abuse.
     The answer is simple, but seemingly impossible for many of us to reach. This anxiety is intensified by environmental factors: culture, economic opportunity, food access, living conditions(including exposure to all kinds of pollutants), and information accessibility(including education). Many of us are locked to some extent in a wall of anxious fire in our minds. We can't let go of it for fear of the consequences. This fear is often deeply tied to genuine needs. Tied to our survival. We can't take the chance to slow down because we may miss a vital opportunity for sustenance. We can't take a closer look at our beliefs/perspectives because they are what may keep us from falling into shark infested waters. If we look closer at them we take our eyes off the road and may crash. Even though wisdom lies deeper within us, we can't reach for it. If we do, we might perish. This is how we feel anyways. For some it's more of a reality, for others it is more imaginary.
     The solution is to learn to discern between real and imaginary need. This becomes more complicated and more difficult the more we become lost in a cycle of anxiety and madness. It also may become more complicated and difficult as our world becomes increasingly complicated. More complexity requires more skill and intelligence. If  the complexity evolves faster than adequate education to deal with this change, then people are left behind "progress". The solution for the masses is for the culture to change. There needs to be enough inertia behind the social habit of wise discernment to overthrow the senseless development of new technologies and new systems. I do not say senseless development meaning that all technologies and societal change is senseless, rather I refer to the aspects of their growth that are created by senseless culture; and in being senseless are not grounded in real need and therefore have little value to us in general. They add non-essential work to our social systems which overburdens them; taking away attention from vital components; and they confuse us with their facade of importance which corrupts truly grounded social culture further undermining appropriate attention of our societies vital needs.
     This makes me think of corrupt government and the materialist consumer culture. The latter heavily influenced by systemic corruption of tradition, character and conscience. Corruption driven by egotism, greed and mania. This culture is perpetuated by naivety, massive corporations, rapid environmental change, it's general adaption by society, and basic need to satisfy material security. Both were driven by corrupt management of power and money. The availability of wealth corrupting one's senses from modesty and community to excessiveness and egotism. The mainstream acceptance of this corrupt conscience makes it all  the easier for it to spread and the more difficult to recognize as a threat. The corruption becomes so widespread that it undermines our societies basic life support systems. You can see this in the U.S. where the Federal Government has totally botched their response to the coronavirus pandemic. They won't even send appropriate aid to hospitals in  which people are dying in large numbers. There's so much corruption of conscience that they can't accept scientific fact or don't care to do so. This is who we elected. This could only happen if society at large was severely corrupted by senseless culture.
     It can be terrifying to witness the madness of our times. It makes us very anxious often. This can make us anxious and impulsive in our actions, even if we intend to do good. We can easily get caught up in the hysteria, even when well intentioned, and lose sight of sense. This is why it is important to learn to recognize the difference between rushing anxious and composed grounded wisdom. We may not have the luxury to be comfortably grounded in wisdom, but we can still learn how to reach for it. We can takes steps towards it, when each step is better for the world.
     Being wise makes you feel good. Being senseless may give you greater pleasure, but it does not truly feel good. Wisdom and folly are often mixed together in complicated ways, so the choice is not always easy or wholly one or the other. We often have to choose between the better of two devils. Through consciously using our conscience and by taking responsibility for our lives we can reach more and more wisdom through what may be a series of difficult choices and experiences. We can climb out of the darkness, but we have to face the music. We have to face our sins and our karma. The weight of our conscience can be enough to turn aside from the path of redemption. But the alternative, the guilt, shame, potential insanity, and even death doesn't seem worth it. The truth is, that many people don't see, to a great extent, the ramifications of their actions. They would have to be wise to. We go along with corrupt culture because it appears to be wise and rewarding to do so. It will take many of us to step up and speak up so that others can see the dangers that we all face. So that enough of us can take action and end these threats before they wrought the full extent of their potential havoc. It is our duty, for those of us that hath ears, to listen to our consciences, and the crying consciences of others, and resist the evil of our times. Resist it, fight it, and defeat it. We can if enough of us stand up. We can hope if we sacrifice our lives for the greater good. We must turn away from the blindness of our selfishness to the glory of our unity. We must have great courage and great strength to fight off the suffocating weight of our complacency we are entombed in. We must reclaim our power and reclaim our minds. Only then can reclaim our hearts and the hearts of others. We can restore ourselves, our communities, our lands, and our world. In the spirit of togetherness, compassion, love, and wisdom do we have this power. Not only to rise up, but to be free of guilt and our concerns. To not only liberate each other and our planet, but to liberate ourselves from the prison of delusion.