Concentrating on the Reflection vs. the Original

As I was studying the Byron Katie work, I noticed an interesting similarity to her method and the method of self inquiry used by Ramana Maharshi to achieve realization.  I started looking through materials to find any connection between them, and stumbled upon a quote by Sri Maharshi. In describing a seeker who was floundering around in angst and shame (much like me), Sri Maharshi said, “He is concentrating on the reflection and complains that he cannot see the original.”  I’m looking at that quote every day now for the power it contains. 

            Yes, indeed, I have been concentrating on the reflection, and this is an endless cycle of suffering that I choose.  It’s like choosing to stare at a reflection of the moon in a pond, and berating not being able to see the moon even while its right on top of my head. 

Concentrating on the reflection by focusing on other people’s (approval) smiles, nods, and cheers rather than my own heart.

Concentrating on a woman’s affection to feel good about myself rather than being in the joy of who I am. 

Concentrating on escaping/numbing through drugs, booze, tv, internet, food, and/or sex to feel “good” rather than being with what is. 

Concentrating on my “reputation”, other people’s opinion of me rather than being in the joy of creating my own life.

Concentrating on how a woman looks rather than who she IS.

Concentrating on how I look rather than who I AM.

Concentrating on how much money I don’t have rather than what I have.

Concentrating on how I feel rather than who I AM.

Concentrating on my self-judgments rather than the fact of what IS. 

Concentrating on external circumstances rather than the source of all things,

The source of all things that I do not understand but manifests in every thought, breath, word, and deed of my existence. 

I am not my circumstances, am I?

No, I have been suffering because I’ve chosen to concentrate on the wrong thing.  I’ve chosen to concentrate on the shadow of a reflection of the original, the source of that comes before my thoughts, before my feelings, before my judgments, before depression, and even before happiness. 

That source is in and within me, through and throughout every vibrating cell of my body. 

That moon that I see may be millions of miles away, but I can only experience it in my brain through the light traveling through nerves, impulses and pathways.  My whole body fills with it, so it’s not really “out there”, is it?

In fact, it’s reasonable to think that there is no real difference between the light of the reflection and the light of the original.  It’s all a reflection of the original, so even the idea that the reflection and the original are separate is an illusion, and THIS illusion is what causes suffering.   

Deconstructing “the Story”

I had to admit the harsh truth that I don’t believe the death of the body brings an end to emotional pain.  Emotional pain lives in the emotional body, which is finer, more subtle, and thus more enduring than the physical body.  The unfortunate fact (as I believe it) is that consciousness survives physical death, so there’s no “way out”.  So I’ve been searching out a way to put to “death” my attachment to the pain, or whatever is causing my pain.  This has forced me to re-position myself in relationship to my personal “story”. Lets face it:  we “depressives” love telling our miserable stories about how much life sucks, how unfortunate we are, how much we’d be better off dead, what shitty things we’ve done, and so on.    Then someone on the ACT group pointed me toward Byron Katie’s “The Work”, which has been illuminating.  It became clearer to me that it is not my problems causing me so much suffering, but rather the horribly relentless “story” I attach to the problems.  It’s the way I batter myself with it, replaying memories, self judgments, and fantasies over and over in my head.  It’s not that I am having a challenge finding the right job, or struggling to pay my bills right now.  Instead, I tell myself that I am an “abject failure”.  Its not that my marriage didn’t last or that I left it willingly, but that “no one will ever love me”.  Not that I’m going through a hard time right now, but that my “entire life is a failure”.  This story I have been telling myself gathers energy, like dust balls growing in the corners, and the more I focus on it the more elaborate it gets.  Each day I find more reasons why I am a no good piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to live.  My mind has been on the offense and gaining steam, digging up every person who might not like me, and every reason to justify why they wouldn’t like me, and why that will translate into never being able to be successful or happy.  It is a hell-realm that feeds on itself.  It’s my big, dramatic story that I am in love with, even though it’s like rolling around on broken shards of glass.  I’ve always tended to love things that hurt me,  (OK, that’s another part of my story.  Anything I can say to embellish the story fits, building up my personal mythology about who I am.) 

Actually, it occurs to me that if I kill myself while in the midst of this “hell realm” of consciousness, I very likely can get stuck in it for a long time without the benefit of a body and help from people in this realm.  So, committing suicide is quite possibly the most devastating way to f—k oneself.      

            The light bulb went off when I realized that this story I’ve been listening to is just “spin”.  It’s rhetoric that my ego spins like a press release, and I buy into it like its some kind of divine truth.  I watched a video of the awesome Eckhart Tolle where he was talking about the way we make our story so “special”.  Yes, I am so “special” that my problems don’t just hurt, but I suffer.  Not only do I suffer, but I suffer better than anyone else.  I don’t just suffer, I plan my own death, and not only do I plan my own death but I do it online in a public forum.  Then, to add to my “uniqueness”, I use rhetoric about how to do it in a “dignified and graceful” way.  Yes, indeed, my story makes me so special, even while exerting energy toward destroying this creation of my life.  And all of this is just my ego’s way of making sure I exist, that I have value in life, that I am “somebody.”  So if I buy into this story, I will die just to prove that I exist.  What a paradox!

            The liberating feature in all of this is in the realization that I am not my “story”.  My “story” is a collection of other people’s judgments, opinions, (many of them warped or false) , self perceptions which are influenced by moods, which are influenced by diet, sleep, exercise, weather, external events, physical health, and personal/familiar and cultural values.  And that’s just the start of it.  So my “story” is so subjective, so subject to change, that its completely unreliable. 

            Many people who endure depressions like me struggle to climb out of the hole by finding someone (a therapist or spiritual counselor) who helps re-frame the story so that it is more congenial.  But this is not trust-worthy either, because in truth, the reality is that all personal story is myth.  “I am valuable and lovable” feels better than “I am a failure”, but neither statement is “true” if it’s based on some subjective concept of “good” versus “bad”. 

            Perhaps the truest statement is “I AM”.  Simple.  Just as God said to Moses:  Tell them I AM.  Simply being, without the big dramatic “story” of how “special” I am.  I think I can live with that. 

            I AM.

Ways to die…before I die

I’ll admit I’ve been thrown a bit “off track” on my quest to die, thanks to some very loving, compassionate words that strangers have been sending me on the net.  A few people have tried to talk me out of killing myself, but the more powerful ones have come from people just being compassionate and offering some things to think about.  In particular, some of the people from the ACT (Acceptance & Committment Therapy) Yahoo group have been very persuasive.  Somehow it has helped me to linger a bit in this state, slowing down my downward spiral long enough to think more creatively about how to “die”.

For quite some time I’ve contemplated jumping off the bridge, or hanging myself, or some other less dramatic things.  Sometimes those thoughts are less frequent, but lately, such as during the past month, all the time.  The truth is, my thoughts waver back and thought between killing someone else to killing myself.  Its a hellish state to be in, thus my belief that “heaven” and “hell” are right here in the present moment of consciousness.   One person who wrote me suggested that I was letting my own mind “murder” me.  How right on target!  Indeed, it is my own mind that is killing me.  As soon as I awaken my mind goes on the attack about all the stupid things I’ve done, all the fucked up things about me, all the people who justifiably hate me, how much of a loser I am, and so on.  Yes, my mind is bludgoening me to death and I do not know how to stop it.  (Actually, I DO know a lot of techniques, many of which I’ve actually taught in the past, but I don’t have the energy to do them.  In my current state of mind I no longer believe in them.  If they had any real power I wouldn’t be in this hell-hole today.) 

It occurrs to me then that if my mind is attacking me, then after I kill myself – my body will fall, but what will happen to my mind?  If mind is an aspect of consciousness, then even suicide cannot kill the mind!  If this is so, then I will be stuck with it, this hellish consciousness without the benefit of a body to transmutate this poison!  That seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.  It seems like killing myself is going to be a heck of a lot harder than just stopping my heart from beating.  So, what do I do?

The Sufis are fond of quoting the Koran, in which Mohommad said, “Die before you die.” 

I like this idea.  How does one “die” to the ego and the world without killing the body?  How do I drop this attachment to all my toxic ideas about who I am (“failure”, “loser”, “worthless”) before I leave the body?

Now, if I could do THIS, I would find this peace I am looking for.  And once I find this I will no longer feel the desire to kill myself. 

Perhaps I can retreat to an ashram, perhaps some remote cave in India. I hear Ramana Maharshi has an ashram in a cave down there.  When he was 14 he laid down on the ground and “died” before his physical death by asking the question, “Who am I?”

How do I do that?  Does anyone know?

WHY I want to die

You may be wondering why I want to die now.    I hesitate to answer this for fear that someone may try to dissect this material in an argument about why I “shouldn’t” do this.  I want to be as “objective” about this as possible.   I am not sure if the argument against suicide is just deeply ingrained social conditioning around Judeo-Christian values, or perhaps the human consciousness that is rooted – biologically – in evolution.  Clearly we can’t evolve as a species if people are killing themselves off.  So, maybe we invent a bunch of “laws” to make suicide “wrong”?  As if that duality really exists in all planes of existence.  I doubt it.  In fact, that duality, which saturates my own consciousness as much as I am a part of this collective, is indeed the very root of the problem.  It is the cause for my pain.  It is the nerve behind my suffering.  Fuck duality.  If duality – seeing only two sides of an issue – is the only way of viewing suicide, then I say its a very limited view.  I’m willing to bet that there is a much broader, much more compassionate and workable perspective about it.  Thats precisely what this project is about. 

Nevertheless, we buy into the story that suicide is “wrong”, even “evil” and declare it “against the law”, as one woman blasted me with.  So we pretend not to believe in it.  However, our species self-hatred has permeated our culture in such a way that we have more passive ways of killing ourselves, from ingesting toxic foods, poisoning our atmosphere, our soil, our plants, our livestock, and even our waters with harmful chemicals; smoking cancer causing cigarettes, in”toxic”ating ourselves with drugs and alcohol, and so forth and so on.  The fact is, we are killing ourselves all the time.  All I want to do is get conscious about it.  WHY do I chew on myself, and let all my toxic habits fill up my life and weaken my heart, my body, my mind, and my will to live?

Because I have allowed hatred to infect my mind and soul.

I hate myself.

And because I hate myself, I find it far too easy to hate others.  It would be enought to simply “dislike” others.  No, for me it goes as deep as hatred, and this is a poisonous, painful thing to carry around.  My mind and heart are infected with it.  If I don’t kill myself soon, no doubt this hatred will eat me alive. 

I hate myself because, well, I suppose I was taught to hate myself.  I was taught that I am “stupid”, “unworthy”, and so on.  No matter how many compliments I recieve (I’ve had hundreds of people cheering for me and praising me at once, scorse of times in my career), I don’t believe it.  It doesn’t sink in.  I tell myself, “yeah, you’re praising me because I entertain you, I make you feel good.  If you really knew about me, you’d turn away from me just like everyone else eventually does.”  I’m pretty likable at first, but once you get to know me….

I’ve got few people who want to get close to me.  And now that I am without children or a family, I see old age on the horizon and it sure looks like a miserable, lonely place.  Just as I’d always imagined it.

I’ve fucked up my career all by myself.  Got no one else to blame.

OK, I blame plenty of others, and even hate them.  But in my deepest lucidity, I know that its all my fault.  I manifest what I believe, and I believe I’m not worthy of love, respect, joy and success. 

I’m with Freud on this one:  happiness is about finding harmony in two places:  love and work.  I have been an abject failure at both.  Period.

Now, with no job, no way to earn a living, and about two weeks worth of saving left to my name, I am facing devestation.  I think its time to cut my loses and move on. 

Heaven or Hell

It might be important for you to know what my beliefs are. 

I do believe in an “afterlife”.  I believe that we are all manifestations of energy, and this energy cannot be destroyed, therefore I cannot be destroyed.

I do believe my “ego”, my sense of self as a seperate individuated entity can (and must) be destroyed. This body, this name I have, and this current sense of who I am (“man”, “american”, and all the adjectives I claim) are temporary and will fall off like the skin of  a snake.

My attachments can be dissapated, and indeed must be dissapated in order for me to move on to another incarnation.  In the next incarnation I will return (either to this plane or another) carrying the energetic remnants of all previous lives (karma), along with tendencies.  So by no means do I think that dying is a way “out” of having to deal with my tendencies or the “effects” of my actions.

HOWEVER I do not believe in “heaven” or “hell” in the conventional sense of the words. 

I believe “heaven” and “hell” are states of consciousness.  They exist in the moment, whether dead or alive.

As Christ said, “the kingdom of Heaven is within you”. 

Alas, so is hell.  I’m in it right now.

Since consciousness is the means by which “reality” is created, I am sure that whatever state of consciousness I’m in when I leave this planet, that is where I will find myself.  I believe we continue to create our reality wherever we are according to this concept.  Hence, I do not want to exit the body until I have found some peace.  That may take some time.  This is why I am doing this project.

The Choice to Die

Yes, I have decided already that I no longer want to live. 

All of life is a choice, no?  So why not this choice?

I do not want it to be an ugly, messy, hostile affair.  I want this to be dignified, noble, and perhaps even joyful.  I’ve decided I have gone as far as I want to go in this life, and am ready to move on.  I am seeking a “coach” or guide to support me in making this shift.

Will you help me?

The decision has been made: I am going to die sooner rather than later.  It is time for me to say goodbye, and I want to do it on my own terms.  I will not lay around and wait for some horrific disease take me out painfully and slowly. 

Face it:  we ALL choose when we die, consciously or not.  We choose when we eat toxic foods, smoke cigarettes, in”toxic”ate our bodies with alcohol, ingest toxic fumes in the air, refuse to exercise our hearts, so forth and so on.   We choose to live in a way that brings about death.  I prefer to make the choice consciously and deliberately.  I want to go out with my eyes open and my mind clear, prepared for the transition to the next life. 

I am a 46 year old man with no wife, no children, and no assets.  Essentially, I have nothing and have accomplished nothing.  I’ve had some minor sucesses in my life, but chronic depressions, addictions, a pattern of toxic relationships and unhealthy choices have robbed me of joy in my life.  I’ve contemplated suicide for about 25 years, and have looked at the issue from every angle.  I want to approach this in a mature, positive way.  I do not want to create pain and drama for my family or loved ones.  I just want out.  I’ve really had enough. 

I realize that if I go to a professional counselor, he/she will just try to talk me out of it or have me hospitalized and forced to swallow drugs.  I don’t want to be “talked out” of my feelings or my thinking, and I don’t want to be pumped full of drugs.  I’m relatively clean living – yoga, fairly healthy diet, infrequent alcohol, and occassional marijuana., no hard drugs. 

I’m writing this blog to seek support and, if possible, guidance in making this transition as graceful and digified as possible.The point of this writing will be to shift the consciousness I currently hold about suicide so that I don’t enter into the next life in a hellish state of counsiousness.  I intend to write until I have made a sufficient shift so that I can suicide with grace, dignity, and peace.  I want this to be the ultimate transition, the one time I shift the pattern and actually terminate gracefully, with good will for all.  I will review my life in as balanced way as possible, and plan for the exit.  Please be my guide.  Help me move on in peace and dignity.Thank you.