The Hollow Dreamer [1]
The idea that we have of ourselves spends all its time dreaming of what it would do if it were real – not that it ever will be, of course. Not that it ever could be! Or perhaps we should say that the idea we…
Alan Watts
The Ultimate Addiction
Our basic ‘everyday’ motivation in life is the drive to obtain the illusion of ontological security. ‘Ontological security’ might be explained by saying that it is when we get to feel that we are (without any question) ‘living life in the right way’ and when…
Recycling Time
The everyday self, according to Joseph Campbell, is ‘a fraction that thinks it is whole’. The everyday self thinks or assumes that it is whole but it is all the same persistently acquisitive, persistently restless, persistently fearful of unwanted outcomes and this shows that it…
The Movement Away From The Known
We can’t move towards Wholeness deliberately – nothing was ever more impossible than this! We can express this impossibility in lots of different ways, but they all come down to the very same thing. In terms of mental health, we can say that we can’t…
Looking For Freedom Outside Ourselves
It isn’t just that who we are (or the way that we are) is in itself ‘good enough’, and so on this account we don’t need to be constantly striving to ‘better ourselves’ or ‘improve ourselves’ (and be constantly recriminating against ourselves if we can’t…
Thinking is Suffering
Thinking is suffering, as Eckhart Tolle says somewhere. Thinking is all about problems and the search for possible solutions to these problems. This is all thinking is – over and over again. The unspoken assumption is that the thinking is ‘a means to an end’…
Escaping From Ourselves
How can the tyranny of a fixed repeating pattern ever bring itself to an end? The answer to this question is simply that it can’t. The pattern has no way to bring itself to an end – whatever the pattern does is the pattern and…
The Prison of Purposefulness
The cruellest prison we could ever find ourselves in is the prison of purposefulness. What could be crueller than this? The funny thing is though that we are more than likely to have very little (if any) appreciation of the truth of this statement. We…
Trapped In The World Of Duality
When we strain to change our situation (when we make the mental effort to control the way that things are) then we ‘separate the opposites’. When we don’t strain to change things, then the opposites remain unseparated. When the opposites are (apparently) separated then a…
The Creative Universe
‘Being in the world’ is a completely spontaneous thing – it’s not something we do on purpose, it’s not something we do as part of a plan. We don’t intend to ‘be in the world’ – we just are! Being spontaneous isn’t intentional and neither…