Life is; I believe; fundamentally, simple.

All things are exactly as they are; unchanging in this moment, and continuously changing in the next moments. Everything in this moment is the culmination and product of all that came before. Change in the next moment is inevitable.

Have you watched your desires as they change from moment-to-moment? Can you capture a desire and follow it from moment-to-moment? Try it.

A simple experiment: Think of what you desire most; the craving which you have been spending most of your time thinking about recently. Whatever it may be, material or intangible. As it’s been in your thoughts it likely has a name, if not, give this desire a name.

Perhaps this desire fits to some ideal for yourself, perhaps it makes you a smarter or more interesting person, or produces happiness or contented freedom. Maybe it’s a desire for world peace, or maybe for a new car — whatever this desire is, look at it openly without any judgment. Imagine how it looks and how it feels.

Now look around. Right in front of your face, see the world in this moment, now. See how this world is absent the desire you just named; if you wished for a new car, see that it is not there — if you desired peace, see the violence in yourself and all around you — see all things around you that produced this desire. See the unchanging reality of this exact moment. Without judging or naming just simply observe this moment exactly as it is.

Your desire may seem separate from this world– Yet is it separate?

Is not this desire part of this world in this moment? Is this desire yours to possess, or is it just a reaction, as a hungry man craves food?

This desire, born of thought, is fundamentally connected with the world as it is. In fact, is there any difference between the ‘you’ who is desiring, and the thing desired? Are these not both the same thought (the ‘you’ desiring and the ‘thing’ desired)?

This thought, this desire, is the very reaction to the world as it actually exists.

Can you be fully aware of the world as it exists, such that desires are seen in their rightful context?

Aware of what you are doing, aware of the movement of life in each breath– What happens?

Gratitude and bliss, loving kindness to all things seems to be the emergent reaction when a mind is fully aware of what it is doing. But forget I said that, find out for yourself what happens.

To really be so aware (not just in theory but to do so actually), you cannot suppress judgment or violence or ideology, just simply let it be and see past it, see the mental concoctions that produce those actions and thoughts — aware, simply aware, and see what happens.

With such awareness, aware of things as they actually are, we are free to live without any constraints of ideology or thoughtless-desire. You are doing what you are doing, exactly as you do it — where you go is the reaction of now, be aware; mindfully aware; and see the actions flow from the insight of awareness, not the limits and anxieties of impermanent desire and ideology.

And now without all the imagined complexities of life, when one is free to see things as they are, beyond the limits of ideologies and beliefs– then in that moment, life is truly and fundamentally simple.

I was once a dreamer.

Wake up, they said, to the real world.

This real world, this actual world, have you discovered it?

Wherever I looked– the academic, the artist, the banker, the politician, the hipster, the mechanic, the soldier, the revolutionary– all with the same striving suffering, each with their own sense of status and importance. All with opinions, beliefs, and ideologies — wake up to the real world, they said.

This real world, this actual world, this earth spinning freely through space — trapped to that radiant star — this actual world, does it care about your status, belief, or ideology? Or is life indifferent to every opinion and belief?

Whether you submit or rebel, it is always to an idea that exists exclusively in your mind, is that not also a fantasy — is that not a dream?

This real world, this actual world, is completely independent of your wants, fears, and sufferings.

Yet you, and only you, are dependent on judgments and ideologies — dependent on your idea of status and importance. You are an illusion within an illusion, all the while there is a real world, an actual world — free of suffering and bounding in endless bliss — this real world, this actual world, is in front of your face in each and every moment. It is there, independent of you, and you may discover it or you may continue to dream.

Slow down.

You are free, as Life is free

Seeking, searching, and endless cycles of asking, inquiring, and wandering. And yet the moment is alive, free of judgment, free of the burdens of expectation and pressure. In each moment there is a sense of elation, a joyous silence in each breath.

It is not discontent that yields to suffering, it is the suppression of discontent, the numbing listless contented mind. Content in the ignorance of opinions and ideologies, where selfish perceptions fail to capture the breadth and beauty of the world as it actually exists.

Rage in your discontent, fuel that fire till it burns away every selfish desire, every bit of prestige and every fetter of power; it is of a discontented mind that freedom is realized and the illusions cast aside, where ego and suffering are laid bare to the truth of your attention.

One of things I love about traveling is the people you meet. There are amazing people you will meet while traveling.

It’s so profound I’d call it magic; while traveling freely you’ll meet people whose very presence uplifts your entire worldview, as if their every breath is a bizarre mix of inspiration and inexhaustible bliss. People without judgments, without comparisons to this or that, just fellow humans who let go of all that silliness.

And it’s not necessarily other travelers, in fact, it really has nothing to do with travelers– it’s people (traveling or not) who are not on destination. They have no place to go except where they stand, and as such you are neither helping nor inhibiting them– there is only a simple curiosity and a spirit of exploration beyond the known.

And I don’t mean a select few amazing people, I mean hundreds, as many as you have the time and effort to meet– they’re out there.

Let yourself go into the world, truly lose yourself, and in losing yourself you’ll find an entire underground of these vagabonds, wanderers, children of no nationality — you’ll be welcomed like family; as you are, in every way metaphoric and literal (in the
grandest sense of life on earth), family.

Gnōthi seauton (γνῶθι σεαυτόν), know thyself.

But what is self? And why call it an illusion? Perhaps because you are, most literally, the continuation of everything that ever was, and the precursor to everything as it will be — the very limited delusion of ego and selfish desire fail to full capture, even in clever metaphor, the totality of existence.

How is a mind to abstract infinite silence? Thought, knowledge, and the very process of a mind cannot capture and constrain that which is beyond itself– beautiful as the illusions may be, there is freedom beyond the constraints of ego and selfish desire.

We often speak of experience as a thing to be possessed or identified with, e.g., “I am happy”, “I feel hurt”, “I am in love”. We become the state of these emotions, attaching and identifying ourselves with these experiences.

But do you possess that which you experience? If you suffer, is it your suffering? Is suffering not universal to all that suffer?

Is happiness, sadness, love, or sorrow ever possessed, is it ever yours to possess?

Perhaps we do not possess sorrow or bliss any more than a drop of water in the sky possess the gravity that carries it earthbound. Our experiences are not possessions nor attributes to who we are, they are the process to which we live.

Realizing the truth of your experience, that those personal and profound experiences are not yours to possess, that there is no you to possess those experiences. You are as the drop of water hitting the ocean — you cease to be, and are a part-of and simultaneously one-with the ocean around you — vast and seemingly infinite.

The mind and body are a piece of a seemingly infinite ocean, as relevant to the universe as a drop of water to the ocean. Yet just as that drop of water experiences something as universal as gravity, so does the mind experience something as universal as love, sorrow, sadness, and bliss.

There is no ‘I’ that is separate from all that is, and there is no ‘I’ to possess that which is as universal as the experience of life.

In his book “First and Last Freedom”, Jiddu Krishnamurti responds to the following question:

Belief in God has been a powerful incentive to better living. Why do you deny God? Why do you not try to revive man’s faith in the idea of God?”

Krishnamurti’s response:

Let us look at the problem widely and intelligently. I am not denying God – it would be foolish to do so. Only the man who does not know reality indulges in meaningless words. The man who says he knows, does not know; the man who is experiencing reality from moment to moment has no means of communicating that reality.

Belief is a denial of truth, belief hinders truth; to believe in God is not to find God. Neither the believer nor the non-believer will find God; because reality is the unknown, and your belief or non-belief in the unknown is merely a self-projection and therefore not real. I know you believe and I know it has very little meaning in your life. There are many people who believe; millions believe in God and take consolation. First of all, why do you believe? You believe because it gives you satisfaction, consolation, hope, and you say it gives significance to life. Actually your belief has very little significance, because you believe and exploit, you believe and kill, you believe in a universal God and murder each other. The rich man also believes in God; he exploits ruthlessly, accumulates money, and then builds a temple or becomes a philanthropist.

The men who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima said that God was with them; those who flew from England to destroy Germany said that God was their co-pilot. The dictators, the prime ministers, the generals, the presidents, all talk of God, they have immense faith in God. Are they doing service, making a better life for man? The people who say they believe in God have destroyed half the world and the world is in complete misery. Through religious intolerance there are divisions of people as believers and non-believers, leading to religious wars. It indicates how extraordinarily politically-minded you are.

Is belief in God “a powerful incentive to better living”? Why do you want an incentive to better living? Surely, your incentive must be your own desire to live cleanly and simply, must it not? If you look to an incentive you are not interested in making life possible for all, you are merely interested in your incentive, which is different from mine – and we will quarrel over the incentive. If we live happily together not because we believe in God but because we are human beings, then we will share the entire means of production in order to produce things for all. Through lack of intelligence we accept the idea of a super-intelligence which we call ‘God; but this ‘God’, this super-intelligence, is not going to give us a better life. What leads to a better life is intelligence; and there cannot be intelligence if there is belief, if there are class divisions, if the means of production are in the hands of a few, if there are isolated nationalities and sovereign governments. All this obviously indicates lack of intelligence and it is the lack of intelligence that is preventing a better living, not non-belief in God.

You all believe in different ways, but your belief has no reality whatsoever. Reality is what you are, what you do, what you think, and your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life. Furthermore, belief invariably divides people: there is the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Christian, the communist, the socialist, the capitalist and so on. Belief, idea, divides; it never brings people together. You may bring a few people together in a group but that group is opposed to another group. Ideas and beliefs are never unifying; on the contrary, they are separative, disintegrating and destructive. Therefore your belief in God is really spreading misery in the world; though it may have brought you momentary consolation, in actuality it has brought you more misery and destruction in the form of wars, famines, class divisions and the ruthless action of separate individuals. So your belief has no validity at all. If you really believed in God, if it were a real experience to you, then your face would have a smile; you would not be destroying human beings.

Now, what is reality, what is God? God is not the word, the word is not the thing. To know that which is immeasurable, which is not of time, the mind must be free of time, which means the mind must be free from all thought, from all ideas about God. What do you know about God or truth?, You do not really know anything about that reality. All that you know are words, the experiences of others or some moments of rather vague experience of your own. Surely that is not God, that is not reality, that is not beyond the field of time. To know that which is beyond time, the process of time must be understood, time being thought, the process of becoming, the accumulation of knowledge. That is the whole background of the mind; the mind itself is the background, both the conscious and the unconscious, the collective and the individual. So the mind must be free of the known, which means the mind must be completely silent, not made silent. The mind that achieves silence as a result, as the outcome of determined action, of practice, of discipline, is not a silent mind. The mind that is forced, controlled, shaped, put into a frame and kept quiet, is not a still mind. You may succeed for a period of time in forcing the mind to be superficially silent, but such a mind is not a still mind. Stillness comes only when you understand the whole process of thought, because to understand the process is to end it and the ending of the process of thought is the beginning of silence.

Only when the mind is completely silent not only on the upper level but fundamentally, right through, on both the superficial and the deeper levels of consciousness – only then can the unknown come into being. The unknown is not something to be experienced by the mind; silence alone can be experienced, nothing but silence. If the mind experiences anything but silence, it is merely projecting its own desires and such a mind is not silent; so long as the mind is not silent, so long as thought in any form, conscious or unconscious, is in movement, there can be no silence. Silence is freedom from the past, from knowledge, from both conscious and unconscious memory; when the mind is completely silent, not in use, when there is the silence which is not a product of effort, then only does the timeless, the eternal come into being. That state is not a state of remembering – there is no entity that remembers, that experiences.

Therefore God or truth or what you will is a thing that comes into being from moment to moment, and it happens only in a state of freedom and spontaneity, not when the mind is disciplined according to a pattern. God is not a thing of the mind, it does not come through self-projection, it comes only when there is virtue, which is freedom. Virtue is facing the fact of what is and the facing of the fact is a state of bliss. Only when the mind is blissful, quiet, without any movement of its own, without the projection of thought, conscious or unconscious – only then does the eternal come into being.

I have heard this expression in many forms. Philosophers and religious texts often come to this idea, to live “in the world, but not of it.” So common is this idea that it seems to me to be part of the human condition, expressed not as an isolated cultural tradition but a universal feeling expressed through many cultural traditions.

It’s a common theme and narrative device and follows almost any discussion of altered states of consciousness. The language varies, some call it rapture, others enlightenment, others call it truth. One of my favorites is in the William Blake poem ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

When you experience such a profound awareness, some would say the most profound, what are you suppose to do afterwards? In a quiet meditative state, alone in the woods or meditating in an ashram, this all seems quite easy.

Give Thoreau his Walden and Huxley his mescaline and profundity seems natural.

But without the Walden, without the drugs, outside of meditation, outside of the temples, churches, and mosques, what is one to do? Separating oneself from the insane world can often reveal paths to truth, but how do you live those truths and still live in the insane world?

It’s easy to look around and see the horribleness of war, poverty, corruption, greed, and the rest of the evils discussed daily. A natural question then, how do you live in this world, with all it’s problems, while maintaining awareness of that transcendent state? That is, how do we keep the perceptions cleansed, how do we experience heaven, how are we to be aware of nirvana, how are we to be aware of bliss while living in the world?

How are you to be happy while also aware of the suffering around you?

Like many problems, perhaps examining the question can shed light on a solution. What do we mean by an “insane world”? Some would say, look around, the world is not a happy place, suffering is everywhere! Religions tend to agree, Buddhism starts with suffering and inquires into the nature of suffering, Scientology blames disembodied aliens, and Christianity blames your great-great-…-great-grandmother for eating an apple.

But what is this other world, the non-insane world? It seems a place of calm existential freedom, a place of enlightenment. It seems very different than the office buildings, schools, markets and highways of human civilization. How does one function in human civilization while maintaining that calm blissful freedom of enlightenment? Is such a thing possible?

Do others cross back and forth between the sane and insane worlds? Imagine an oak tree. How does an oak tree live in an insane world? I guess it would be an oak tree and it will live and die as oak trees do in any world. But oak trees do not plunge themselves into outer space or into inhospitable environments. Even if we’re just dressing in warm clothes or bringing sunscreen to the beach, we’re giving ourselves the life support needed to live in an inhospitable environment. Can we live sanely by adapting, with a bit of life support, to the insane world?

I suppose we’ll need more than a jacket and sunscreen to live sanely in an insane world. There is nourishment and also toxicity within human civilization, can we prejudice ourselves with facts of what is nourishing and what is toxic and successfully navigate human civilization the same way we navigate any inhospitable environment? If so, what is toxic and what is nourishing in human civilization?

At first glance, that which is most nourishing in human civilization is also the most toxic, we depend vastly on cooperation with other people. There is cooperation and there is competition. Are these things separate? And if so, can you have one without the other? If so, is there any advantage to a situation that is competitive but not cooperative? Let’s look at this closely, is there competition with no cooperation that is nourishing and not toxic? Competition separates you from others, it creates division and where there is division there is conflict. This conflict is competition, competition is always conflict. Is there a nourishing form of this conflict that is separate from cooperation, i.e., where there is no cooperation only pure competition? Such a thing is hard to imagine, we cooperate by speaking the same language, by adhering to cooperative social conventions. There may be competition in who most successfully cooperates. But to cooperate fully there can be no conflict, in fact, pure competition erodes and destroys cooperation– it will create a barrier, a division that brings conflict.

Humans are both cooperative and competitive, this is true from observation — but the strength of our survival is in the cooperation and less the competition. We cooperate to survive, which is itself a competition, a division between that which survives and that which does not. But this is a fact, this is something we can discriminate and make prejudiced decisions. We are the product of all that has survived, and we cooperate to survive, we cooperate so that we can compete to survive. It is a struggle, and like all struggles it is easily perceived but complicated in its nuanced perceptions.

Whether or not we call it insane, this world is exactly as it has been shaped by all that came before us, we are the offspring of those that shaped this world. And now we shape the world.

It seems that the insane world and the sane world are the same place– that there are many patterns and perceptions of existence, some more nourishing and some more toxic towards the specific world you would shape. But shaping the world is the inevitable outcome of your existence, your mind and body are a dependent piece of the world as it will inevitably become.

What to do now is a simple question, with a simple answer: anything you can; do what you want, do what you are told, or do as you will– there are many perceptions and none of them are any less nourishing or less toxic than another. Find the strategies based on the facts and not the perceptions, and take with you that which is most nourishing so that you have sustenance when in a toxic environment.

In the insane world, and what we mean by that is the world filled with suffering and attachment, how do you live sanely? Often times the toxic world is only toxic to your delusion of self. Does this mean the nourishing world is only nourishing to your delusion of self? Yes, and be more careful here, anything that builds the self is violent and divisive. Nourishment, true nourishment, is to the body and mind, not to the delusions of self and ego that are themselves toxic to the body and mind.

Knowing what is nourishing and what is toxic is a decision based on fact about your body and mind, not about perceptions and ego.

The ego is toxic, nourishment cannot exist while an ego is present– the ego seeks its own nourishment, nourish the body and mind as you would water a plant and place it near to a window. Do not nourish the plants’ illusion that it is not a plant. Maybe the plant fancies itself in the image of god, and that it has a direct link to god, or that it has an eternal soul; nourishing the plants eternal soul isn’t helping it get proper soil, water, and sunlight– things the egotistic plant probably takes for granted.

That is how you live sanely in an insane world– do so without ego, without delusions of self, do so with cooperation, and do so freely, with total freedom in mind and body.

There is a beautiful perfection in this world, and in that perfection there is order, there is unity, and there is a harmonious balance– only in the illusionary divisions is there violence and insanity. Remove the violence and insanity by seeing through the divisive illusions.

Living sanely is to realize that the world is not insane, and the world need not be saved, it is in no need of salvation. Change is inevitable, and the world is exactly as it has been shaped and it will become exactly as it will be shaped. And your hands are one of the many that shape this world.

“I am an infant born anew– a child. My eyes are filled with wonder and bliss. An infinite expanse of possibilities is before me and I have not the benefit of experience to prepare me for what I am about to partake.”

There is an existential freedom, a life in accord, it is easily attainable to anyone given the mental discipline– connecting the world within to the world external– realizing there is no “in here” and “out there”, that the separation itself is an illusion. It is fascinating as this understanding precedes awareness of self (consciousness); a simple recognition of the world as it truly exists, and from that recognition there is a realization of all things beautifully connected.

There is no path to lead to truth, be it profound truth or trivial, there are no limits and as such there can be no path.

As a stone tumbles down a mountainside it lands in its inevitable resting place at the bottom– looking back, it may say “there was the path”, but such a thing is inconsequential. There are many paths infinitely conceivable and infinitely plausible. Where you are is where you are, and there is no one path that brought you there.

You traverse the infinitely conceivable paths towards the inevitable moment that you are now. There you are, and if you look back you may see where you were– but do not see one path, look to see the truth, see the infinitely conceivable paths you have traversed.

If this seems odd, then look forward. Obvious are the infinitely conceivable paths in front of you, where did the path from the past go? Does the past path perpetually stop in the present? Look and see for yourself, there is an infinity all around, all the time, equally conceivable towards the past as towards the future.