Give Up Your Plans to "Awaken" (and "awaken")

To plan your “awakening” is to create defenses against "awakening."

The idea that YOU know the way is absurd, simply because your best thinking got you here and that’s because your best thinking is most likely somebody else’s.

Recycled thinking means that your plans of “awakening” are recycled plans and this is exactly what the world suffers from and it’s called “repetition compulsion.” The ego-self has a need to repeat the past simply because without a past to refer to, it (“you”) could not exist.

When you adopt another's plan you adopt their fear and your defensiveness proves this true. The world is nothing but centuries of recycled fear. Just look around you and notice how, with all the incessant planning and preparation, nothing ever really changes. Maybe we should just give up all our grand plans and see what happens. Just be prepared for a SURPRISE!

By Giving up your plans, you give up your defenses.

If there is nothing to defend against, then there is nothing to fear. This is because, once you plan, you will then seek to defend your plans from doubt. Yet, ironically, to defend your plan is to doubt that your plan is the way, otherwise, why defend it. If it was the way, it would need no defense from doubt.

Fear causes us to defend against doubt, because your plan is to “know” and doubt is not part of that plan. This is why doubt is considered negative, and defended against, while the planning goes on, ad nauseum.

I merely suggest the inverse, that doubt is the fuel that will take you "there," but only when you give up your notions of what "there" is.

However, the ego demands anchoring to a plan and that plan must come from the world, since where else would you get your schemes of "awakening." As if there is a plan to finding God and that plan is available in the world. Ha!

Adopt a spiritual ideology and you have adopted a plan and most likely it's someone else’s plan.

Obviously, we adopt the plans of others primarily because we fear we are much too weak and inadequate to devise our own plan. Of course, that’s part of the plan, because if you considered yourself powerful enough to know God, you would find your own way "there." To be fearless is to surrender their plans and make your own, but, of course that would assert your power by denying your weakness.

The plan you adopt from another was never theirs to begin with.

They adopted it from someone previously, who adopted it from another, who adopted it from another, on and on, through 'time.' So who constructed the first plan? Buddha, Jesus? Nope. Because history tends to show that most of those plans, or paradigms, existed, in some form or another, before the devout ones gave lip-service to them and this lends credence to the suggestion that Jesus and Buddha never really existed.

It’s just that we needed someone to give us the map, since the map could not have just materialized in our thinking, from absolutely nowhere. Yet, maybe it did. Nevertheless, the ego-self demands another ego-self, wiser and more superior, to provide direction.

There are many plans available to help you negotiate a difficult world and many are good plans. So feel free to use those plans. However, if you plan to transcend the world, or the ego-self which constructed it, then recognize that every plan found IN the world only reinforces your bondage to the world.

I would suggest that if you make your own plans, that you simply allow in your plans this clause: “all plans subject to change without prior notice.”

That way you won’t have to defend against your doubt and you can live joyously through it. Because, make no mistake, you will never be free of doubt. But that’s okay, since doubt has always been part of the plan. To be completely free of doubt means there’s nothing more to learn and all is known. But that would deny that we're all playing an infinite game.

I always find it interesting how the ego compromises with the infinite (or eternal) by determining a fixed point in time for which it can be known. I’m sure that those who are “awakened” clearly recognize this contradiction. However, the "unawakened" will probably continue to plan in preparation for what someone else predicted as “true.”

“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends!”
- ELP