How can you possibly control of your life, if you can't even control your thinking, particularly if even thinking that you’re in control of thinking is delusional?
If it is delusional, and you have no such control, do “you” even exist except as a delusional thought of having control? From whence was this thought learned? Who taught you that you had control? Is egocentricity nothing more than the thought of having control of thought? How can that be true if thought is always prompted by external circumstances and your response to those circumstances is always predicated on the nuero-circuits wired up in your brain?
The “Return to Pure Consciousness” folks authoritatively inform you, through their weary and worn out “Ancient Lexicon of Profound Concepts,” that thought is the problem and to achieve this “Direct Experience of Consciousness” you must be thoughtless, or have “no-mind,” and they provide numerous abstract ideologies, esoterically magical techniques and amazingly mystical practices to help you in returning to pure consciousness. Of course, you have to think about what they teach, because teaching requires thinking, which seems a bit counterproductive to a direct experience of pure consciousness that does not include thought.
Egocentric mammalians are plagued by thought from the very moment the “I-me” neuro-circuit begins developing. Following this momentous, but obviously cursed occasion, you were taught to take great pride in your ability to “think for yourself” by accurately judging between good and bad thoughts based on the prevailing morality of the herd in which you are a member. Hence, the post-modern world is inundated with “positive thought” prognosticators, not to be confused with the magical “pure consciousness” proclaimants, who insist that thinking specific thoughts, as taught through their miraculous thought-control techniques, will enable you to make all your dreams come true, which only demonstrated that they were culturally programmed with the same delusional idea that one can control their thinking.
Obviously, all this tends to be smashed to smithereens at the very moment you suddenly become ‘aware’ of the fact that you’re outa toilet paper and just when you need it most (and ain’t that a bitch).
In that very moment your pursuit of the elusive “Direct Experience of Pure Consciousness” dissolves into mid-air like a fart on a windy day . In addition, now you’ve suddenly engaged with a negative thought like, “Crap! How’m I gonna wipe my arse?” (apologies for the scatological references) which then causes you to realize that the thought is negative and, with all your years of struggling to maintain self-affirming thought processes to help you feel good, you’ve now once again plunged down the black hole of abject failure. Needless to say, this kicks off a cascade of subsequent culturally programmed thought processes, all bordering on varying levels of self-loathing, which then only causes more sloppy thinking, demanding you fortify your future efforts to have the life you’ve always dreamed of just by thinking the right thoughts that will aid you in literally “manifesting” those dreams.
In a dualistic world, negative thoughts are like pink elephants, as hard as you “choose” not to think about them, you’re right this moment thinking about a pink elephant simply because I mentioned it and you never had a choice. Does the world control your mind or do you? Are you in charge of your thinking or is your thinking in charge of you, because if thought is in charge of you, you basically cannot exist as a free-willed being. So then what dafook are ya?
As you floated in an amniotic sea, the first genetically programmed neuron reached out its microscopic dendrite arm, grasping with its little synaptic fingers the next genetically coded neuron and this went on and on until the moment you were painfully dumped into reality, causing a billion more neurons to transmit signals resulting in a continuous ‘linking-up’ of circuit after circuit. For the first 5 years life impacted upon your grey matter cursing you with all the joys and sufferings of a developing egocentric brain. From the start, you had no idea how to define the experiences impacting the fat between your ears and you soon learned that no matter what you wanted to happen, essentially, sheit just happened and your reactions were already hard-wired into the network.
Fortunately, there were other brains, with greater circuit density, caring for you and teaching you to adequately develop your grey matter to process external world perceptions within the correct socio-cultural format, so that you could believe that you had a choice in what happened and would then attempt to make the "right" choices. In fact, you were taught that all the neuro-circuit signals firing off in your brain in the form of “thoughts” were highly indicative of a unique and separate “I-me” that “you” must now assert against a world full of other “I-me” neuro-circuits who are also asserting their right to control their environment. People, situations and events were impacting upon your developing brain every day and you responded quite easily based exclusively on the genetic and culturally programed circuits tangled up in your noggin. At first, you simply bawled your eyes out, but then you learned the effectiveness of just yelling “NO!” as a means of getting what you wanted. In fact, you could NOT have responded in any other way and you will never respond in any other way than the conditioning demands.
However, you may contend that you’re not the child you once were, although you cannot deny that the neuro-circuitry that you now call “me” is a direct descendent of the child you once were and you would not be in this moment right now if not for the neuro-circuitry of what you once were and still continue to be. If not for your specific neurocircuits there would have been absolutely no chance of your reading this right now. The path you follow has always been in your cranium and nowhere else but there. It is an external world that has always controlled you, because your responses are completely hard-wired and will unfold naturally as they always have. This is often why everyday seems exactly the same, because your responses have always been exactly the same and only tiny miniscule changes can ever be expected for the programmed responses you have become used to (but, of course, that’s wired in as well)
Not one thought belongs to “you” because there never really was a unique you, merely genetically spawned neurons which have been acted on by experiences that you had no choice in encountering. The universe shaped and molded “you” and every thought you now have is evidence of the fact that who you “think” you are has never existed as a unique and separate you. What does exist is a monstrosity of nerve fibers constructed exclusively from the past and all you attempts to break from that past must ultimately lug it along everywhere "you" go.
Obviously, there do seem to be times when a thought comes up and you wonder, “now why the hell did I think of that?” and no doubt your years of “Return to Pure Consciousness” training compels you to frequently consider this, because the training, and not to mention all the circuits that led you to that “spiritual” path, has added its own circuits to be included in the random signals bouncing around in your cranium.
Let’s face it, your attempts to move your thought processes down distinct channels has been, at times, a test of endurance but, for the most part, a complete failure. To stay focused on your “Return to Pure Consciousness,” in that inopportune time when the toilet paper is absent, is a true test of the “enlightened master.”
You are a universal construct that has become confined within a social construct, with as much free-will as the gravitational movement of the planets. You can no more break free from this fact, then the earth can break free from the sun. Not one thing in the entire universe was created by itself or for itself, yet egocentrics actually believe they have the power to sculpt and shape their lives to what they WILL and that they have the power to disengage from the very WILL that gave life to everything around them. Your current course was made certain from the moment of the “Big Bang.” The direction you are now on has nothing to do with any willpower you could assert because even the very belief in willpower was a product of socio-cultural indoctrination allowing you no choice in direction. There are only so many ways you could go and each one of them has been provided to you with no volition on your part.
Take a good long look at your life and note the repetitive patterns that have brought you to this point, and will continue to dualistically fluctuate, back and forth, as experiences in your brain, and understand that there will be no end to this. Some of what you want you get, because the patterns never fail. But patterns are always dualistic and what goes up must come down. There is no direct experience of pure consciousness only the direct experience of patterns within consciousness. They can easily be seen by those NOT seeking to be separate from the patterns or attempting to deny, through assertion of some nebulous “willpower,” that they have not had one tiny speck of control over the direction they have traversed and will have no control in any future that manifests.
This way it becomes so much easier to just enjoy the ride…
Artwork by Naoto Hattori- "Genesis"
