Jul
6
More Moe Dialogue #3
Filed Under Awakening
Moe’s Question 3: If the me that thinks I am a me needs to die to wake up to the truth of who I am, how can I kill myself?
A guy walks into a bar. The first words out his mouth are, “Should I kill everyone here or kill myself?”
Yikes! Your sentence starts with dying and one comma away comes the killing. Now that is a death sentence if I have ever read one. Is the “me” supposed to kill itself? That would be suicide. Or, is some other part of you supposed to kill the “me?” That would be homicide. Either way, it doesn’t sound like a bit-o-fun.
Oddly, I have to answer your question without giving you anything to hold on to. If I give you something to hold on to, you will strangle it. If I give you something that you believe, you will sacrifice—or kill—other things to make room for it. It’s far more likely you will kill than you will die. You murder the present and seek refuge in the past and future. You murder the flow and worship the blockage. You kill anything that moves and then kill anything that doesn’t. At the same time, you ask how to kill the “me” but you don’t want to be a murderer. Are you willing to become a murderer? Are you willing to kill the me even if it starts, or ends, a killing spree? You want to kill so you can be more alive. This is called human sacrifice, but the very process of it is far from humane. When irony gets tight enough, it begins to chafe and bind and we call that life. This is not living; it is chafing and binding.
There was once a nasty, old man who lived in our neighborhood. He even knew himself as “the nasty, old man.” Well…at least he knew himself.
It takes something (or the absence of something) to be an intentional killer. I doubt you have the stomach for it. It’s more likely you’ll remain an accidental killer. You will accidentally kill off all the parts of you that know better, all the parts that are awake, all the parts who don’t trust who you have identified with or voted for. Instead of seeking to kill the “me,” you might want to catch yourself already killing off all those other parts.
So, you who wish to be a killer, have you noticed? Have you noticed that none of our great spiritual teachers have had convincing successors? Have you noticed that organized religions are more organized than they are religious? Have you noticed that wanting something is a pretense? Have you noticed that having something is a void?
You, sweetly, ask, “how can I kill myself?” You want a “how-to” guide: a formula…a way to go about it. If there really was a formula that was effective, more people would be awake. Or people would be predictably awake. But they aren’t. I’m not sure how many thousands of people have practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). My guess is a lot, for a long period of time. To me, TM amounts to having a mantra and repeating that mantra. In my experience, repeating a mantra (i.e., a meditative word or phase) just makes one dumb and numb. At this point in our endarkenment, we will settle for consistent results; if we can count on something to make us dumb and numb, at least we can count on something. I am not doubting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was someone special, but having a gift and imparting that gift often prove to be rather different things.
Great Smokey Mountains National Park is something special: 800 square miles of pristine wilderness. The tributes we have built to this Park—Gatlinberg, Pigeon Forge, and Cherokee—are horrific. So it is that surrounding an awakening there tends to be fudge shops, bungee jumping, sanctuaries, practices, and/or mantras.
We create cause and effect pairings. Communion is to cannibalism as meditation is to ______________. Fill in the blank.
You’re looking for a formula for death, or at least the death of a certain part of yourself. If I give you a formula, you will follow it in a half-hearted way until you don’t. That is the way we do anything and everything. In sheep like fashion, you will attempt to follow whatever rules I put forth, or you won’t. Either way, a formula will fail. Once we find the formula, there simply isn’t a game anymore. When there is no longer a game, we lose interest and inspiration and attention soon leaves the building. While we are supposed to seek a formula, the formula isn’t the point, it is the object at the end. The seeking is the point. The seeking has us attempt (and in our perception we succeed) to leave where we are in hopes of arriving at some place that is more awake, more alert, more loving, more enlightened, and/or more of whatever we are after in the moment. In this very game of ten questions there is a seeking. It’s likely you are seeking being awake, and me seeking you.
You can convince yourself that you’re more likely to find your missing car keys by seeking them than if you don’t. This is something you’re likely to agree with. And yet, is it true? Like anything else, it is sometimes true and it is not true at other times. If you search your house for your car keys while they’re under the seat of your car, it simply doesn’t matter how long or how hard you seek for them; your efforts won’t yield car keys. The original act (sin) of limiting your search to the place where your keys aren’t, though perhaps accidental at first, is actually pivotal and becomes habitual.
You are searching for who you really are with a part of you (the “me” you mention in your question) that simply hasn’t got a clue. If you don’t know what a car is or what keys are, you could look for your car keys right where they are and still not find them. Not once, not ever. Your search is doomed. Waking up simply won’t submit to a search. It is something of a different kind and species than anything that will abide seeking. And yet, you find you can’t stop seeking. Nor should you, for the simple reason that you are seeking and even identify yourself as a seeker.
I have a piece of advice for you. If you are learning to juggle, don’t start by trying to juggle washing machines or automobiles. Put more simply, don’t attempt to learn juggling by starting with objects you can’t even lift. This makes juggling a far more difficult task. And yet, you’d rather not start where you are—you’d rather start a little closer to your destination. You want to start where you pretend to be. Let’s assume you see yourself as partially full of shit when, in actuality, you’re full of shit right up to the brim. This being the case, even if you bail out the shit you’re willing to admit to, you still have shit left over. Thus, you miss the destination, which is the present: no shit. Starting the search from a place where you’re not, you color the search erroneous right from the start. If this makes searching more fun, then lucky you. But you make your search serious. Often, you make it a life or death search while throwing yourself on the ground in protestation. “Woe is me,” you scream, or whine, or whimper.
Yes, parts of you need to die. More accurately, parts of you need to step back into the choir and stop trying to steal the show. Parts of you have become very spoiled and have consistently been rewarded for less-than-productive behaviors and agendas. These parts must voluntarily turn themselves over to the proper authorities: being. They get to admit they never really did have a clue in the first place and that they’ve been pretending all the while. These mischievous parts get to cop to pretending that they aren’t pretending and that these admissions are just another ruse (because ruses are the only toolzes they have).
If you play poker with people who simply can’t tell when you’re are bluffing (which is almost everyone you know), would you ever be honest? What in the world, or what in the internal world, would be your motivation for being honest? You have lied with your “me” part so many times that you have lost internal credibility. You have become so fictitious and so unbelievable that you have to search to find someone or some part of yourself that will believe you. You have Ponzi schemed yourself into a world where you can’t find anyone you would respect who believes a word you say or think. In a sense, that is a whole lot like death. The death of the “me” you pretend to be will be accompanied by the birth of parts of you that simply can’t not know better. These are parts of you that never have and never will buy the lies you live by.
Have you ever read Wind in the Willows? In this precious book, Toad—or Toady as his friends call him—falls in love with motorcars. Could be motorcycles, it would be the same thing. Something comes over Toad when he sees a motorcar. Toad can’t drive; he is the worst driver in the world. Toad just wants to drive. He steals cars, he gets in accidents, he makes messes that his friends try and bail him out of. Toad has found the love of his life and it simply isn’t the least bit good for him, at least in one sense. But it is also good for him in another sense. He has found his form of inebriation. He has found the only thing he always wants in life. Toad, of course, ends up in prison because he is simply incorrigible. He can’t stop and won’t stop.
You, Me, We are Toady.
Another book, Pinocchio, is one of the best selling books of all time. It is, in its long version, a book about a puppet trying to become a real boy. All he wants is to be a real boy, like Toady wants a motorcar. When Pinocchio lies and his nose grows longer. He misbehaves though he knows better. He wants to do “good” and he keeps doing “bad.” This is who we all are in a nutshell.
And the dying you speak of is falling in love with exactly that. It isn’t, as it might seem to be, getting rid of that part. It is falling in love with exactly how we are. It isn’t about changing a darned thing. It is falling in love with how it is. It is embracing the is-ness knowing full well that it is unlovable. It is loving ourselves without conditions—both the lovable and unlovable parts included. It is dying to the distinctions that separate us and waking to the lack of distinctions that join us together. At the same time voraciously making ever more cogent distinctions about everything and watching them die into judgments. It is about watching our best laid plans go amuck while both loving and hating the laying of the plans, the going, and the muck. It is the irony of planning a new way to live without plans. It is like practicing spontaneity. It is like wanting to meet John Travolta more than you want to meet those parts of yourself that don’t make your case. It is like building a suitcase that is too heavy to carry your stuff in. It is like denying yourself anything.
This dying is about the parts of us that depend on dichotomies and opposition and having them jump headlong into a world where these things don’t exist. It is about allowing the parts of ourselves that are beyond compare to come off their soap boxes and jump around in the mud.
This dying is about not editing (or predetermining) which parts of us meet what other parts of us It is about the entrance into a world where there are no diversions. But be careful. If it seems that, even for a moment, I am suggesting a formula then this is undermining and not contributing to your opening and awakening.
I will, at this point, ask some questions of myself. Have you, Jerry Stocking, made any progress? Do you have any evidence at all that you have a bloody inkling of what in the world you are talking about? Or, what evidence do you have in the real world for what you are saying, Jerry? Or, why in the world should anyone listen to you? Or, what is this bullshit anyway? Seeing you have already told us that nobody knows and yet you go on writing?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the final question is the (a) question.
I have been in the proximity of people waking up. While I don’t claim to be the cause of this, I do accept the responsibility of being a catalyst for it. When I am in their presence, the signs of waking up are obvious and undeniable. Moments after the waking up these same signs are totally negotiable and they disappear. If you miss them, you miss the waking up. While I am not specifically certain of what causes people to wake up, I continue to hone the specificity of the time and conditions in which they awaken. I continue to be in their presence as they awaken and go back to sleep. I also play consistently with the nuances of the awakened state. In other words, I am hot on the trail of “awakening to awakening.” And I don’t suspect, even for one tiny moment, that discovering this will make anything even the littlest bit better.
A wise man once said, “Anything you seek from waking up or from enlightenment you can get from growing up.”
Against all odds, I am growing up. I am blinking less, pretending less, deluding both more and less, and observing. Other than myself, the longest amount of time I have been in the presence of someone waking up is two years. The shortest is a matter of seconds. In most of my workshops there are varying degrees of waking up, from extreme to very subtle. I could tell you stories.
I will tell you a couple. Ray was in a workshop. Ray is into crop circles. Ray went to the bathroom at one point and he simply woke up. He came out of the bathroom and, “Yikes,” I said, “What is that, Ray?”
Sidebar: My work isn’t about producing these conditions of awakening. It is about augmenting awareness of the state when it is there. We have gone way beyond trying to produce conditions. If you produce them without getting to know yourself in the process, then awakening really is of no use at all. And I simply insist that awakening be of use. I am that kind of fella.
Ray spent the next hour or so in the spotlight as thirty people got doses of his being awake. He knew he was awake. Once I pointed it out, so did everyone else in the room. They knew it with very deep parts of themselves, parts of themselves that were in the presence of what they had been seeking for so long and parts of themselves that have never left that Ray place.
Ray was brilliant, Ray was funny, Ray was the sun, the moon, and the stars. Ray was the best parts of each of us with nothing left out. Ray had no interest in crop circles. Ray was pure and simply Ray…connected with everybody and everything. The arrival of Ray awake was instantaneous, and surprising. (How did he get there?) His return to the Ray of great limitation was gradual and graph-able. Ray never came back to do another workshop. Although while he was awake he indicated he certainly would. Ray is into crop circles.
I have discovered through decades of play that one of the fastest ways to chase people away is to give them what they are seeking. Not only do they go away, but sometimes they also go away mad. Though, as odd as their going away is, they almost, like a comet, return. When you give people what they’ve been wanting, they instantly (or a little more slowly) discover that it wasn’t really what they imagined It might be. People almost universally prefer their fairy tales and pacifiers to the real thing. They need a Coke—which poses as the real thing—and love stories of great awakenings, stories they can be told as they fall back asleep, to dream of their own awakening.
People don’t really want to wake up anymore than they want to die. People like the idea of waking up. They want to want to wake up. They are like Toad, in love with the idea of waking up. And, lest you missed it, I will repeat: people who have searched all their lives for awakening while following incredible paths of denial, pain, meditation, or prayer aren’t more likely to wake up than someone who hasn’t ever done a darned thing. Oh, does this piss the seekers off.
I have many other examples of waking up. Each was accompanied by specific and fairly universal qualities. Each was unique as well. Sometimes one person wakes up completely, like Ray, other times everyone in a workshop wakes up. Each time, we study the awakened state. Each time we try, to the best of my/our ability, to explore awake. So, in answer to an earlier question, I can’t call forth awake at will. But I do have many very specific ways of inviting it in and coaxing it to show itself. And it does so consistently. Give me someone and they will become more awake. Again, this is both an individual process and it has similarities between individuals.
The next obvious questions that might be worth asking at this moment are, “Jerry, are you awake?” and “Are you enlightened?”
My answer is simple. It is “yes” and “no” and “I don’t know.” Yes, obviously I am, because everyone is. No, because I can miss just about anything at any point in time and sleep soundly throughout my day. (The more you wake up the more you will discover that you are asleep; wishing to wake up without falling more asleep, while possible, isn’t likely. Ray did it for a bit, but then the light went back undercover, into the shadow of his personality.) I don’t know, because awake, as discussed in previous questions, can’t be known in any normal way. Only awake can know awake. If asleep knows awake, then it isn’t asleep anymore.
Light is simply light. Dark is the absence of light. We can’t drop the dark, we can only shine the light on it. We perceive, and experience, and sometimes know that light is one thing and dark is another. When, in fact, light is one thing and dark is the absence of that same thing. Dark isn’t something, it is the absence of something in particular.
The dying that you seek—and will do anything and everything to avoid—isn’t really a dying at all. It is a melting into living. What you currently call living is really death. We simply have it backwards. Should we be the least successful at finding anything we can reproduce in ourselves, we call it progress. TM makes people dull and numb, and we celebrate it. At least we were able to produce something. Then, all we need do is redefine dull and numb as peaceful and present and we have found the cure.
Victor Borge once said that his uncle found the cure there wasn’t even a disease for yet. Years later his wife caught the cure and died.
You get to die into a world that is just as it is. A world in which you aren’t numb, and you notice nearly everything but there is nothing “wrong.” Currently you are so busy rewarding what is “wrong” that it’s little wonder that “wrong” surrounds you. Wrong is the company you invited, and the company that came, and the company you keep. You think of your car a number of times per day, probably a similar number both yesterday and today. But if someone sneaks in to your garage and damages your car, you think of it much more often. You focus much more attention on it and thereby reward the damage. You look for what doesn’t work, you define yourself by attempting to fix what doesn’t work. You pour your energy into what doesn’t work. That is the essence of searching. It is seeking.
You die into the present. Anything you have built in the past or the future reveals itself to be unreal. The very process and filters you use to think, to sense, to know, and to experience begin to reveal themselves. My work, which does seem to work, is a continued focus on what is less tangible—and then converting it, with attention, to more tangible. Coaxing out the intangibles. Out into the light they come. And we discover, constantly, that something was going on before we noticed that something was going on. And appreciation for that pre-something as something generates a magical mood of reverence and acceptance bordering on presence. We are playing at the border. To get near the border you have to live more fully; to cross the border, you have to have enough to lose that you don’t want to lose it and you have to “knowingly” cross the border anyway. This is the dance. It is crossing and knowing that: you will lose what you most care about; what you cultivated will pass away; what you want the most will leave; and, what you don’t know is on the other side but bet on it completely. That is the dying. If you want to die, that simply precludes dying. If you seek to die you will likely become some degree of numb, because that is something we can produce.
There is a relationship between risk and aliveness; but as soon as I say that, the relationship undermines itself. What I mean by risk varies so quickly that it eludes us faster than we can chase it, even if we are really fast.
Examine what seems to wake us up: non-attachment, prayer, mindfulness, meditation, giving, receiving, laughing, watching Oprah, going to Sedona, worship, going to California, knowing yourself, focusing, The Secret, letting go, being in the present and so much more. Each one of these is perfect, and wonderful and at the moment of discovery is sufficient. But each one, in very short order—when it becomes THE answer, or the thing to do, or is ritualized, ruled, defined, or repeated—becomes just another waste of time and energy.
Yes, you do need to die; but dying isn’t what you think it is. Dying by degrees isn’t the least bit fun, and once you start the process you quickly lose control of it and interest in it. You want to die when you want to die, and you want to go to dinner when you want to go to dinner, and you want to make love when you want to make love. You want to be in control of anything and everything. And you can’t ever be in control at all. Dying to the idea, the fantasy, or the “reality” of your being in control might be a really powerful first place to die. Not the death into passivity, but into an active attention on your lack of control. And yet, even prescribing this is giving you a nasty tasting medicine for a condition you don’t have. The cure without a disease.
Osho said, “The man isn’t feeling well. He goes to the doctor and the doctor gives him a prescription. After all the doctor needs people to doctor, he needs to help people and get paid for it so he can go on being a doctor. The man goes to the pharmacy and fills the prescription. After all, the pharmacist has kids he needs to support and it is important that he take care of himself and views that he is helping people. Then the man goes home and throws out the medicine. After all he has to take care of himself.”
So, I will not tell you what to do. Though it will sometimes seem that I do. I do not advocate a certain approach, though it will sometimes seem that I do. I do not think that I know better than you, though you will certainly both think that I think I know better than you and really think that I know better than you. I will use you. I will use you for my own exploration, for getting ever so much closer to what it is to be awake and how we awaken. You have just the qualities I seek. You are human and don’t know it. You seek to be awake. You are to some degree successful—successful enough that you can enter into the luxury of self-exploration.
What you may not notice is that you are already dying…melting into life. What is missing here, what comes pre-distracted, is your attention. Your attention is elsewhere while the process that needs to be going on in you already is going on in you. It is important that you, at least for a while, remain distracted. Because if you weren’t distracted, even for a moment, you might get in the way, you might discover that the Emperor has no clothes or you might pay attention to the man, or woman, behind the curtain.
3) If the me that thinks I am a me needs to die to wake up to the truth of who I am, how can I kill myself? By living.
Love, Me
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2 Responses to “More Moe Dialogue #3”
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“If the me that thinks I am a me needs to die to wake up to the truth of who I am, how can I kill myself?”
How can you kill your fated yet to be experiences?
By accepting each new moment of experience as it is , unprecedented , and fully open to a fully open awareness.
(Or Jerry has a 30 ought 6 that will get the job done!)
That was wonderfully confusing!
I once hated not knowing what you were talking about, now i dont know!