60.000 thoughts

In everyday life our mind is filled with endless thoughts, roughly 60,000 every day. Memories of pains and pleasures, regrets of things we wish we hadn’t done or wish we had, things we wish we had said or hadn’t, things we will say or do in the future, etc., fill our days. Most of our days are filled with struggle, uncertainty, doubt and confusion. We believe that without these thoughts, nothing can be accomplished, that we will be unhappy and unsuccessful in "life" and even in danger for our very survival. We believe that we are our thoughts and so do this thinking, thinking, thinking from when we wake up until we fall asleep and even in our dreams. Unfortunately, this approach, as we all know, is unsuccessful -the stream of thoughts just doesn’t deliver the happiness and peace we want. Pleasures are short-lived, and never measure up to expectations, requiring more thoughts and greater effort, and more disappointments in the pursuit of the elusive lasting happiness.

Self-help..

There’s something about self-help that is fundamentally uncool. Being into coin-collecting is an order of magnitude more socially acceptable than having titles like “How to Get People to Like You” and “You Can Be Happy No Matter What!” staring out from your bookshelf. Somehow it isn’t yet obvious that a persistent interest in self-improvement is probably the defining trait of the interesting and accomplished person. Self-help literature, though, is a particular kind of self-improvement. Turning to self-help is admitting you don’t quite know how to drive a regular human life. It’s like designating yourself with a voluntary “special needs” status. I don’t think the need for some intentional re-balancing is special though. None of us are born knowing how to drive. It’s probably not unusual to feel like you’ve never been taught quite how to steer a human life competently, but it may be unusual to admit.

What makes us most suspicious of self-help is that we’ve all seen people who are constantly absorbing it and not changing a thing. There are self-help junkies out there  -people who get high on the feeling that their life is improving simply by reading the book, yet never actually address their habits in everyday life. They get high on the feeling of possibility, and when the feeling fades they buy another. Their mistake is simple: they’re missing the “self” part of self-help. Insights by themselves are useless without action, which is what they think changes lives. The self-help junkie habit is obvious and ugly to everyone else, and so the whole genre is reviled for its empty promises. Consequently, self-help remains uncool. Another reason these books are uncool is that most of them are crap. They tend to be written by psychologists who know a lot about what’s wrong with the reader but don’t have much in the way of charisma or writing chops, which makes the reading experience dry and kind of embarrassing. Their examples are cheesy and long-winded. Aside from being boring and clinical, they’re often just dorks...

of (no) use?

If 'Awakening' (for the lack of better word) does not bring an end to the actual dysfunctional condition of human kind then it is of no use. 

If awakening is only to be seated on a throne having flowers hanging on your neck and people falling at your feet and staring at you re-enforcing more and more the illusion of 'self', your awakening, more than useless it is an absurd.

What is going on?

As space gets used to space,

I got used to being something.

When I’ll disappear,

There will just be one habit less.

Roberto Juarroz

Some of us have never really felt like we fit in with the so-called “norm”. I used to feel like I must be some kind of alien creature that was somehow dropped on this strange planet. “What the hell is going on here?” We are taught that to conform and fit in, is the only way to survive in life. So we spend years trying to be like everyone else so that we can feel like we are enough. But for so many people this is such a squashing of our free life energy into a teeny tiny box made of thought and belief. It takes courage to stand alone in how it is for you, and not believe yourself to be squashed and limited. To courageously acknowledge that how it is for you, is how it is. You don't need anyone else to confirm that it is acceptable, because the very fact that it is this way, is more than enough confirmation.

Deeds are done

Events happen, 

deeds are done, 

but there is no 

individual doer thereof

The Buddha

--

Simple

Its simple, so simple, to simple for thoughts. There is no ‘me’. There is no ‘I’ in the middle of everything. All there is, is nothing and everything. There isn’t a position of a someone in which life is happening to. There can be this imaginary  ‘I’. Which lives in time and space and is on a journey in that time and space – finding things, getting things, losing things, trying to make sure they are never lost again, rejecting things… and so on … but this only happens in imagination and that imagination seems to come with an energetic expression that gives the appearance that the limit of this imagined ‘I’ is at the edge of the body.

Then there is “THIS”, No-thing and every-thing. Stillness and movement. Form and the formless. This. Where everything seems to happen. What a joke.

Det er enkelt så enkelt at tanken ikke kan begribe det, det er for selvsagt. det er for naturlig for ukomplisert det er det som er før det ble. Der er ingen meg, der er ingen Jeg i midten av alt, der finnes ingen kjerne. Det som er der er alt og ingenting, der er ingen som livet skjer med det er bare en illusjon og det er den kosmiske spøken.

Everybody Knows

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

Thats how it goes

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied

Everybody got this broken feeling

Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets

Everybody wants a box of chocolates

And a long stem rose

Everybody knows

 (Leonard Cohen)

David Lynch- Spiritual Films

In the tradition of The Matrix and Fight Club Mulholland Drive is a film that can be viewed through multiple lenses. It's the rare film that can (and should) be watched numerous times, with each viewing revealing a new aspect, a different nuance. Because it's non-linear and seems nearly impossible to "get" in just one viewing. 

Mulholland Drives characters appear and disappear and the film takes an incomprehensible turn two-thirds of the way through; and there seem to be three or four disparate story lines that have virtually nothing to do with one another. In this way, the film is similar to Lynch’s Lost Higway. In that film, the 40-something Bill Pullman languishes in a locked prison cell. He then, without explanation, turns into the 20-something Balthazar Getty and is released from prison, and the movie goes off on a new story tangent. But what in the world is going on in “Mulholland Drive’s” strange universe. The film opens with garish, distorted footage of people jitterbugging; it’s a hellish version of a Gap ad. Then we see washed-out superimposed footage of a young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face. Then there’s a few seconds of a red blanket; breathing sounds pulse on the soundtrack. Then the movie proper starts, with a few parallel stories. Some viewers see that it’s the same person right away; others are flummoxed because they just seem different. If you look closely, you see they’re the same actress and its all just a dream... 

and then there is rabbits, What is going on?