Failing Miserably

You decided to skip all the lectures—maybe you thought you knew it all—instead, you stayed up all night to cram for the exam.

You failed. Miserably.

Every answer guessed was wrong. A torrent of confusion, pressure, and fear swept through your mind as you went from one wrong answer to the other to the other.

What is your teacher most concerned with now?

Penance? Excuses? Self-flagellation?

How about: action?

All your teacher cares about is corrective action in the future—no words need be exchanged, no presidential commitments submitted. Just do it different next time.

Particularly, care more. Pay more attention. Give it some more effort.

Should you have known better?

If you did, would you have failed so miserably?

Really, you're in a strong position because now you're clear and conscious of what to do next to improve (hopefully, if the failure is to serve a purpose).

The quesiton is: will you?

The child's scream

Do children cry in their sleep?

Most certainly not. Nothing is wrong. There are no needs. There is no danger.

They rest peacefully.

What happens when they resume waking consciousness?

Mental activity resumes. They perceive themselves as a singular 'I' that will not survive without doing something.

This is where the majority of a child's cringe-inducing wails arise from. Their ego that feels separate, afraid, and powerless--that demands attention from the outside world to ease its pain.

(Note to parents: No amount of coddling your child's ego will do him any good. In fact, you strengthen the ego by coddling it.)

It's really wonderful, children do not know how yet to mask their egos--so we get to see its workings in full, unadorned glory.

Ever find it odd no other creature in Nature makes such a disregulating noise as the child's manic scream? No other creature is as emotionally fragile?

Children go from happy to sad about every 5 minutes. Sad when ego doesn't get what it wants, happy when it does (for a short while).

Something unnatural is happening, the ego is unnatural.

See that we never grow out of this pattern of crying to get something we want--we just use different tactics, but they all revolve around using negativity (or positivity) to manipulate reality to feel better. And how we're only happy for awhile, while we have the something we want.

Does any of this occur during sleep? Do we have problems? Needs? Cares?

When are you the most at ease? When you are doing nothing. Wanting nothing. Needing nothing. Being perfectly still.

When the mind is silent, and ego, for a time, is disregarded. Now we know why the goal of meditation and process itself resembles sleep in every respect, and why Ramana Maharshi said your ultimate goal was to maintain sleep consciousness while awake.

You're still you when sleeping. The experience of reality has changed (for the better), but the experiencer remains the same.

With so much talk of waking up, what we really need to do is shhhhh ourselves to sleep. And realize, if we are fully cared for during sleep, we are cared for while awake.

Lifestyle of Self-Concern

Provide for myself and a few members of my family.

Find some happiness for myself.

Create comfort for myself.

These thoughts and behaviors are born from The Choice--go to work, or go to bed hungry. They are much like a coping strategy, a way of self-medicating an experience of reality that hurts at the core.

Somebody builds up a family, possessions, a certain routine, etc. Take any of those things away and you are going to deal with a person who closely resembles a junkie void of their fix.

The fear of going hungry, of not surviving, for most, forces a lifestyle of self-concern--ever in the background is the thought of ending up on the street. Even millionaires suffer from this thought, and is why they can be the most reluctant to give.

You can trace all the ills plaguing our society to this simple cause and effect relationship.

A lifestyle of self-concern destroys community, fragments humanity, and empowers authoritarian entities able to commit murder with little or no backlash because everybody is so preoccupied with their own survival, too busy to be concerned with anything happening outside of their limited sphere of interest.

There are those who levy The Choice, small in number. Then there are those of us who tolerate it, oceanic in size.

How can we tolerate such misery? Such an infringement on freedom?

Do we want to be miserable? Do we want to be prisoners?

It's possible. And then we'd have to ask why, and pay particular attention in our own lives where we choose misery and imprisonment. Where do we censor the impulse of our heart? Why do we live life according to the approval of others?

Why is that?

Those are potentially chain breaking questions consider.