Standing Baba

The secret to a happy life is to never think about anything. Just take that big, beautiful brain of yours, stick it in the back of the closet, and never give it, or anything else, another thought. It’s okay to think about little things like where you left your keys and why round pizzas come in square boxes, but not about semi-serious things like who and what and where you are, and especially not why. In fact, why think at all? Why make trouble for yourself? As Agent J. teaches us; don’t start nothin, won’t be nothin’. 

Quiet your mind, silence your thoughts, empty your pretty little head; sound familiar? Notice a pattern? Who do you suppose issues these directives, someone who wants you to rise into lucidity, or stay where you are? In related news, the search for the only thing that can never be lost is the greatest failure in the history of man. See a connection?

Thought is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Thought is not how you realize the truth, it’s how you reveal it. You don’t use your head to figure out what is true, but to eliminate what’s not, so only truth remains. Your brain is a wrecking ball that smashes complex emotional structures into dust. The edifice of selfhood you’ve spent years constructing is what you need to deconstruct to reverse decades of negative progress and get back to where you missed your turn. It’s not your fault that you’ve wandered into the weeds, but here you are. 

For the purpose of awakening, we only have two tools at our disposal, heart and mind, and you need both working together. Neither can do shit without the other; brain has no muscle, and heart has no sense. At some point, however, you committed fully to one and abandoned the other. Do you remember making that decision? Do you remember deciding to go all heart and no mind? Do you remember when you decided that your magnificent, miraculous brain was the source of all your problems and the solution was to shut it down and proceed without it? At what point did you decide that your brain was your enemy? I’m not asking you, I’m suggesting you ask yourself. If you don’t know when you made this decision, or when it was made for you, then I’d also suggest you use the writing process to shine a light on this matter. 

What could be more sadly symbolic of man’s failed search than the standing baba? The Hindu ascetic who forgoes the use of one of his legs, and therefore, both. What could be more emblematic of the self-sabotaging nature of all religious and spiritual belief systems than a dude who decides that a journey of a thousand miles begins by ensuring that he can never take a single step. By eliminating his means of propulsion, he eliminates any hope of forward progress. All religions and spiritual systems, including all-is-one pop-nonduality, perform this self-hobbling maneuver by taking our brains out of the equation, thus assuring a life undefiled by change or development. With just that one adjustment, one precludes any possibility of progress, guaranteeing a lifetime of going nowhere and doing nothing. Is that what you signed up for?

The species-wide boycott of thought amounts to a universal human doctrine that spans all cultures and ages. There’s no such thing as an all-encompassing morality or ethics. In some cultures, you might beat your daughter to death to preserve her honor, or place a baby in freezing water to test its mettle, or send grandma floating off on a chunk of ice to show your love, but elsewhere in the herd, those things are frowned upon. Maybe where you are, Wednesday is infidel-stoning day and village-razing is a pizza-and-popcorn event, but wherever you are in time or space, you’ll find a strictly enforced no-thinking policy in effect. 

All teachings and teachers, practices and techniques, especially those that promote silencing the mind, come down from herd-boss Maya. Thought is anathema in the herd; the thing most rigorously and vigorously opposed. Nothing else you can do will arouse Maya’s wrath; everything else is okay as long as you don’t try to leave. She doesn’t care what you do in the herd, only that you stay in the herd. 

What good is being able to think if we never actually do it? The person who doesn’t think enjoys no advantage over the one who can’t; either way, a veritable human houseplant. Thought is the destroyer of belief, including your belief that you exist, that reality is real, and that what you do matters. You are the dreamstate vessel of your particular belief-set, and thought dissolves beliefs like waking dissolves dreams. Your life is not about you, you’re not here for you, you’re not here to be happy, or to grow or learn or evolve. You are a character in a dream of the one thing that actually exists; Godmind or Brahman or Alfie (short for the Alpha and the Omega). Alfie is true, and unlike anything and everything else, Alfie does exist. Alfie is the truth of you. You don’t realize your inner Alfieness through thought or meditation or stillness or silence, or by standing on one leg for decades or by making pretty sand mandalas or renouncing the big bad world, you realize your inner Alfieness by removing the built-up layers of emotional blockage that have reduced the flow of your lifeforce to a trickle. This process of bullshit elimination is only possible when mind and heart work together. It’s not fun or pretty, spiritual or blissful. Thinking is shit work, which is why no one does it and it never gets done. 

And speaking of hot dogs (we weren’t, but let’s), a hot dog may be exactly what you want in a gas station or on a city sidewalk or at a ballgame, but the key to enjoying hot dogs is not to think about hot dogs. As soon as you start thinking about hot dogs – how they’re made, what’s in them, allowable percentage of rat droppings, etc – you hit a big red wave of anti-thought emotional energy urging you to turn back. Being hungry, you’re happy to comply; thinking and hot dogs don’t mix. It takes doublethink to eat a hot dog – to actively not think about it – but now you are thinking about it. The eating satisfies your hunger, but the thinking alerts Maya. I am your Morpheus. I FedEx you a phone and the first thing I say is that the agents are already coming for you. They’re not wearing dark suits and sunglasses; they look like trusted herdmates and beloved spiritual advisers, and the reason they’re coming for you is because you summoned them. When your brain starts working, your heart starts panicking. You want to be saved from yourself. You want to eat the hot dog.

Everything under Maya’s domain is geared toward cultivating and maintaining a comfortable state of ignorance, which emotion-powered belief lets us do. It doesn’t take much to convince us not to do something we desperately want not to do. Look at nonduality, for example; it’s been completely replaced by its own counterfeit version. Everyone prefers the impostor, and who can blame them? Which sounds better, a spa day with friends, or repeated acid baths alone? 

This has nothing to do with good and evil. Asleep isn’t wrong and awake isn’t right. We might paint it that way to add an element of drama to our search for the Great Whatever, but there is no better or worse to any of this, just your personal preference as determined by vanity and your spiritual DNA. Thinking is not prohibited, just strongly discouraged. Maya controls us through finesse, not force. The door to your cell is never locked; you’re free to leave whenever you want. You have a perfectly good brain and you’re perfectly free to use it, but emotion is your only source of power; mind is the weapon and heart is the muscle. You have to claw your way back to your inner twelve-year-old so you can set out in the right direction; anything else is just a stall tactic or an evasive maneuver.

To be asleep is to allow yourself to be led by the nose, to hand off all functions of your life to costumed strangers backed by major ministries, all under Maya’s dominion. Trust and believe, allow and accept, abdicate self-sovereignty and hand your life over to a higher authority, or whoever’s handy. Just keep your mouth full, your brain empty, and let the herd be your guide; how much more sheep-like could we be?

Behind us is black-and-white Kansas, and ahead is the Emerald City, but we’re stuck in the poppy fields where, due to the intoxicating effect of airborne opiates, we’re happy to remain. This is Maya’s valley and we are her mindless little munchkins, doing as we’re bade. Beyond the poppy fields lie dark forests and steep mountains, with sheer drop-offs beyond, so does that make Maya our shepherd or warden? A good witch or a bad witch? Both, really. Her job is to keep us in the herd and sub-lucid so we can perform our dramatic function. She’s both your friend and your enemy – your frenemy – and which face she shows you depends on which way you’re going.

The hard part isn’t waking up, it’s staying asleep. The protective membrane between your internal imaginarium and your external environment is as thin and delicate as an eyelid, so it doesn’t take much to pierce it or pry it open. As soon as you open your eyes and see that self and other are one, the matter is fully resolved; no more conflict, no more ridiculous beliefs, no more need for intermediaries and intercessors. By facing your situation squarely and honestly, all the deceptions fall away and you’re free to expand, explore and express your authentic life experience.

The reason billions of sincere, intelligent seekers have been unable to find that which can never be lost is because you can’t get there from here. You have to smash the undo button, and keep smashing it, until you get back to where it all went wrong. That’s when you were supposed to undergo second-stage birth and grow into your full human potential. Instead, we are trapped in a state of 24-to-1 heart-mind imbalance. At what percentage of its butterfly potential is the caterpillar at? As Buckminster Fuller informs us, there’s nothing in the caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly. The child you are and the adult you’re meant to become are not different stages of life; they’re different paradigms of being. Progress on this journey is not about growth, it’s about transition.

It doesn’t seem possible that creatures so lavishly endowed with intelligence could manage not to open their eyes and see for themselves, but that’s the twisty-ass contortion that makes the dramatic dreamstate possible. It’s emotion that lets us keep our heads down and our eyes closed, and the source of all emotion in the herd is fear. In trying to awaken, your goal is not to defeat fear, but to enter it. Not to by-pass it, but to pass through it. When you come to that big red wave, you have to stand your ground and press forward. Maybe you just want to eat the hot dog and watch the game, but now another part of you wants to spit out the hot dog and take the field. This game takes brains and brawn, mind and heart, working together; slightly mind-dominant like an adult rather than super heart-dominant like a child. The only one holding you back is you.