Category Archives: Perspective

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Beyond busyness

There is busyness and then there is busyness. The first is the level of thought activity that has become accepted as normal in our culture, the second steps it up a notch and looks a bit much even to ‘normal’ people.

I have a few people like this in my life, do you as well? They are so busy that I can be around them only for short periods of time. It is that intense. They can barely sit still and have a hard time focusing on anything, or on the person in front of them. Not only are they incredibly busy in their thinking, they also have to pay attention to every single thought. It is as though they live in a constant state of heightened alertness and can never shut it down. Every thought is interesting, every idea has to be considered, every notion looked at. It never stops. I look at them and wonder how it is possible for someone to do this, and to be unable to stop it. One thing that has occurred to me is that they are addicted. Completely and utterly addicted to their thinking. This is a very hard way to live. Much like a physical addiction, we crave the object of our addiction all the time and in increasing doses and levels. Only that in this case there is no object to the addiction. It is untouchable, immaterial, comes and goes and yet makes us possible: Thought.

In and of itself thought is a wonderful tool that gives us the ability to function and create. Without thought, we would not exist. It’s a wonderful ‘thing.’ For someone who lives beyond busyness however, thought runs amok and takes up the entirety of their existence in a way that makes it impossible to be present. For people who are addicted to their thinking in this way, the present is hidden. They cannot see it or experience it, because they are in their thinking all the time, or rather are their thinking. And thoughts are always time bound, about the past, present or the future. They have lost the ability to be the thinker and have fully become the thought. This really limits their abilities and possibilities. All they are is whichever thought they have, and since there is one thought after the other in constant succession, they cannot see that they have a choice about the thoughts they have, because they aren’t having them, they are them. When I am something, I will do whatever necessary to defend it, for by defending it, I am defending me. I am my thoughts, so I will defend them and go to great lengths to do so. To the point of harming my own body. People like that will develop physical symptoms sooner or later, or they will end up in physically dangerous situations due to their lack of presence. And unless they are interested and willing, they will never change this.

It would not be so hard. As always it has to start with a choice. To entertain the possibility that we are not our thoughts, but the thinkers. That they don’t show up on their own, but have to be thought by us. We do the thinking. Not someone else. They are not put in our minds by anyone but us. A thought addicted person considering this is akin to an alcoholic admitting that he has a problem, it’s the first step. This will open the door to more choice. When we are completely our thoughts (or completely ego identified), there isn’t much choice. Thoughts simply come all the time, unstoppable. The moment we consider that we are the thinker, choice reenters the picture. Just that bit of awareness will change our perspective. We see that thought is happening, rather than being it. This opens the door to stop. To simply choose not to have a particular thought. To see it, acknowledge it and send it on its merry way. Once we start this and stick with it, our perspective on our thoughts gets clearer and eventually our minds quiet down and less thoughts show up.

Then we enter into a world where we are the thinker. We realize that we have thoughts and thus get to choose them. We are no longer victim to them and develop a natural kind of quality control which makes sure that our thinking is serving us rather than the other way around. Thought becomes our vehicle to create our experience at every moment, whatever we choose that to be. Thoughts that feel too busy or intense are of no interest to us anymore and thus they move on quickly and show up less and less. Our lives go through a tremendous shift. To the fully addicted this sounds at best practically impossible and at worst like a nightmare. The nightmare being that we end up having no thoughts to speak of and turning into empty, thoughtless vessels. Far from the truth. We are able to have the thoughts that fit the moment, no more and no less. It is far more efficient than any busy mind could ever be.

If you find yourself to be beyond busyness, and managed to read this post to the end, I invite you to consider the possibility that your thoughts are simply that, and that you are the thinker. Play with that idea and see what happens. You may just end up choosing something else entirely. Or not …

Cheers,

Ralf

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Rationalization

If opinions are the currency of the ego exchange, then rationalization is the Federal Reserve for this currency. And it will print endless amounts of currency…

Living in ego identification requires a lot of rationalization to justify all the crazy bs our ego comes up with and make it seem at least reasonable and at most absolutely necessary. As a matter of fact, justification is the flip side of this coin. Those two live in beautiful harmony and co-dependence with each other. When we are totally into our ego identification and thus fully committed to being the story it makes up about us, we have to follow through on the story in order for it to work and continue. This is where rationalization comes in. It is a tool for the ego to make us believe and do what is necessary to perpetuate the story, and for it to make sense. Have you ever done something that later on made you wonder whether you had lost your mind? I certainly have, and this is only possible because our ego id story has this built in bs justifier, called rationalization.

The ego will make anything look rational and reasonable to us if it serves its perpetuation. Literally anything. When taken to the extreme this can lead to what we may call mental illness, or horrible trespasses against others (or us). There are mentally ill people that will very reasonably and rationally explain to you, why garbage trucks actually eat people and this is why they have to stay away from them. There are people that can very rationally explain to you why they have to take drugs. This list is as endless as humanity may have thoughts on this planet. There are also a lot of normal people that will rationally explain to you why they knowingly make a product that will harm others. There were (are) people that will very rationally explain to you why they are standing on a train platform at a concentration camp and send people to ‘work’ or into the ovens. Do you see how intricate and perfected this ego tool is? Rationalization will have us say and do things we would never do if we had some perspective. But when we are completely immersed in our ego story and its perpetuation, the perspective we have is limited to the rational and justified options of my ego story. In other words, the perspective is limited to me, me, me.

Rationalization starts out really harmless and takes us wherever we need to go in our story in baby steps. The drug addict didn’t start wanting to kill themselves with drugs, they had to get there one step at a time. It takes time and a lot of rational ego id thinking to get us there. The doctor on the train platform did not start out ready to send people to their certain death, it took time and step-by-step rationalization to get to that point. The ego identification route is one of constant whispers in our mental ear, constant little compromises to get us to take that next step into the story, so that it may continue and make sense. Rationalization provides the ego with the mental ammunition we need to close that access point to our Self, the observer, the common sense, whatever we may call it, that would give us a broader perspective. To open that access point, we have to be willing to stop.

Stop the train of thought even for a moment. To create a space in that deluge of our ego thinking that immediately opens up a gap. Have you ever found yourself going crazy over something and out of the blue you saw yourself going crazy and literally stopped, because you saw the craziness? That is what I am talking about. None of what I write in this blog is rocket science or some big secret that requires years of earnest study, it is ultimately simply a choice. At any and all times, a choice. Whenever we choose to stop and see where we are coming from at any moment, our perspective shifts. We see more. We realize that we can choose to walk away from the story. When we step out of the story, we find ourselves in a land of opportunity, a state where we do not have to rationalize anything in order to do it. We simply feel what makes sense to us at any moment, and our actions are no longer about perpetuating some story, but are about expressing our choice, knowing full well that no one else has to agree or made to agree with it. The motivation is no longer me, me, me, the motivation is being in a space of boundless expression. In that space we are not interested in perpetuating anything about us, we are interested in what is. To be with it, to experience the life situation we find ourselves in, whatever it may be, and move through it. Movement is more interesting than anything else. Life takes on a flow that is pretty amazing actually. When something ‘bad’ happens, we experience it and move through it, when something ‘good’ happens, we do the same. There is nothing to hold on to. That sounds pretty irrational and crazy, right? Well, it does to anyone living in their ego identification anyway…

As always, I invite you to play with this. The next time you see something crazy in yourself or someone else playing out, choose whether you are going to step in and do something to stop it or not. If you don’t, the craziness will only build, if you do, something will shift instantly and your perspective right with it. Promise.

Cheers,

Ralf

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Choice

Choice is a beautiful thing. It’s also a real toughie, because if you believe that it exists, your life is your choice, and if you believe that you don’t have a choice, then someone else is choosing for you. In either case, not easy.

I choose to believe that we have choice. About everything, every moment of our lives. No exceptions. As a matter of fact, this really showed up for me in the book towards the end during an exchange between the bird and the protagonist, where they discuss that everything is made up:

“”…I can make up anything I want about anything then.”

“Absolutely.”

“So I am made up as well?”

“Continuously. As long as you choose to.””

It’s such a short little line with incredible implications. This basically says that we choose to make up ourselves, or in other words, we choose to exist. Now, I have heard something of this nature before, but never in that context. Think about this, we choose to exist. As long as we choose to exist, we continue to have this human experience. When we choose not to, it’s done. What happens after, well, who knows. The point is that by and through our choice, we exist every moment of our lives. If and when I choose to end my life, it ends in its current form. Now, this is where an interesting conundrum arises, because this concept makes sense when we actively choose to end our life: we can jump off a building, drown ourselves, take pills, shoot ourselves, set ourselves on fire, drive off a cliff, jump into a volcano, in short there are a lot of ways that we could do this. It makes sense that this is our choice. But what happens to that choice when we die of natural causes or through a tragic accident or event? Is that still our choice or is this the point where we say that someone or something else is choosing that for us? We like to believe that, because who would ever choose an untimely or horrible death, right? But this is where we have to make a very fundamental decision about our take on choice. If I believe that I can choose my existence to end, than this is how it is, no matter how that choice shows up or plays itself out.

I either choose me or not. If I do, than this happens all the time, under all circumstances, always, and in all ways. The kinds and number of choices available to us depend on two things – whether we believe we have a choice and our awareness of it. In the past few years this has become increasingly visible to me. I have been experiencing my own life as a result of my choices more and more. It begins with the mood I find myself in, moves through the circumstance I am part of at any moment, and ends with my place in the universe. It’s my choice. I choose every thought I have at any moment in my life, and when I am aware of this, I choose and thus create a kind of thinking that is clearer rather than confusing, that produces calm rather than agitation, and puts me in charge of the experience I am having. This is very empowering and also freeing. The choice is mine. All the time. To believe this changes our lives.

How far does this choice thing go then? As far as I can tell, all the way, and I am not sure what this means exactly, but I can feel it. This goes as far as believing that even if I was murdered today, that this was my choice. That I chose to find myself in that circumstance, to act the way I did, and to end up getting killed. I truly believe this at this point, and with this I also believe that we choose our lives at different levels of awareness, some of which are not visible to us in our current state of humanness, but are nonetheless ‘there’ and real. I believe that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and that we may only be aware of different aspects of this at any time. Including the choices we make at different levels about this human life we are having. By choosing to believe this, the horrors we create, the trespasses we commit against each other, look different. When we dare to believe that we are the creators of our experience at different levels, obvious and hidden, at all times, then the possibility comes into view that we also choose all the horrible things mentioned. We choose this outside of our human view, but we still choose this, and we choose from a place where the duality of good and evil, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, have no meaning. Because limitless, all inclusive beingness is all there is ‘there.’

Told you this was a toughie. It still is for me, and I could be completely wrong, of course. All I know is that choosing to believe in choice this way has made my life more spacious, peaceful and fun. I choose my life at any moment, and am grateful for that. How about you? As always, I invite you to play with this in your life. Will you or won’t you? What’s your choice?

Cheers,

Ralf

 

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Crazytown

Have you heard of this place before? We probably have all gone there at some point. It’s that place where all the craziness makes sense to the people who are there, and they will support each other by confirming and justifying their different crazy stories. It’s a happening place.

Have you ever gone, or had a friend or relative that went to Crazytown? You could tell when they were on their way there, you could see that this was the direction they were going, you may have even pointed it out to them on the mental road map, but they just kept going. Depending on what they were going there for, it can be frustrating and scary to watch them disappear into town. We have all been there, and made it back out, sometimes we stayed for a while, sometimes we only had a short visit, sometimes we only drove by the outskirts, sometimes we drove past it, and sometimes it doesn’t even show up on our maps…

In order to have Crazytown on our maps, we must have ego identification going on, and the story that comes with it. Our story. The story we believe to be, because ego and the story are one and the same. The nature of the ego and its story is, of course, perpetuation. It’s compounding, and that part is the road to Crazytown. Let me explain.

Let’s say that we have hit a rough patch in our story, lost our job, went through a breakup, or feel totally and utterly unappreciated by everyone in our life, or anything else that may put us in a state, if you will. Not a nice place to be. At that moment we have a choice to make: Am I going to believe this story and go with it, or am I going to become aware of of my ego id and the story, and choose to disengage from it? One puts us in the state where Crazytown is, the other takes us in the opposite direction.

If I go with the former, things are going to get worse, it’s part of the deal. I will justify my ill feelings, confirm them with others, and do whatever it takes to make it real. Now, once I am so full into my story, I will do what I can to feel better, no matter what that is, or what it looks like. I will try to change the circumstances that have caused my drama, I will assign blame to the person(s) that are at fault (sometimes that can be us, also called the ‘poor/bad me’ story line), and I will not stop until the pressure of my bad feelings releases. This can take a few minutes, days, weeks, months or years. Time is of no consequence here, it is all about the level of identification I have with that story that my ego sells me as ‘me.’ You have arrived in Crazytown. We hope you enjoy your stay.

The latter decision above changes the dynamic drastically. I realize that the car is my story and that I am the driver. This ‘I’ is the one who also built the factory that makes the car, is the designer, the worker that puts it together, the one who builds the roads the car drives on, and on and on. The second we remember this fact, we are back in the driver’s seat and regain full control. That’s usually the moment when we want to pull over and catch our breath. It’s the pause that allows us to see what is. As in we see that we are not the story, and bam!, we are thrust back into the moment. And with that moment comes instant perspective. The perspective that gives us an opportunity to take another look at the situation we find ourselves in, and thus an opportunity to choose a different route. Away from Crazytown.

The beauty is that it does not matter how long we have been hanging out in Crazytown, how much we have liked or hated it, when the moment of pause happens and we choose to stop driving around, we can head out of town immediately. We can also work our way out of town slowly but surely, we can do whatever we choose at any moment. It is all about waking up to the fact that we are headed to or in Crazytown, and then making a choice about that. Sometimes someone else says something that triggers our awareness, sometimes it’s a hug, a firm but loving reminder, and sometimes we just have enough of it, it does not matter what triggers our moment of waking up to our own drama – what matters is that this can happen at any moment and we get to see it or not. Our choice.

So the next time you find yourself heading towards Crazytown, make sure you’re prepared for the trip. Bring lots of guilt cookies, indignant huffs and puffs, lots of blaming supplies and self-pity. Or pull over, stop the car, get out and take a deep breath. Take in the beautiful surroundings, called life, and have a picnic. As Crazytown will surely fade away at the horizon, plot a new course and see where it takes you.

Cheers,

Ralf

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Standing next to yourself

Have you ever experienced this, where you are in a situation, you react to it and almost at the same time you hear yourself think or talk and then wonder what is the matter with you? I certainly have. It’s an interesting and odd feeling when it happens, almost as if you were talking to someone else. But aren’t we?

In my mind this is exactly what is happening in those moments. We are literally seeing ourselves in action, we notice what we are thinking, and doing or saying as a result and we literally wonder what is wrong with us. But we never stop to see this moment as impactful as it actually is. We are actually watching our ego in action. We are being the observer. And what do we usually do with it? We laugh it off or turn into a funny story to tell others. Every single one of those times is a missed opportunity to see something beyond the usual story of who we tell ourselves we are.

Rather than thinking of it as standing next to yourself, think of it as being next to yourself. Because we have to be in a moment of awareness or being in order to see ourselves operate like that. That’s a beautiful thing. We get to be aware of the part in us that is doing the reacting, the story telling, in other words: the ego. The one who is aware, is the being. This is good news to me, because I used to believe for years that all this being stuff was for the evolved, the enlightened and real devoted spiritual people, and that unless I completely changed my life circumstances I would never get to be. Not the case.

Being is what we are all the time, whether we believe it or not. There is nothing we can do to change that. Whether we are aware of this makes all the difference, and that is also all that it takes.

To be aware.

Awareness is powerful, it changes our perspective on whatever we focus it on. It gives us a chance to step outside of the routine of our story and ego identified ways and see them. Seeing ourselves operate like that gives us a choice at that moment to walk away from our own story and let it pass, and instead stay in the awareness. When we choose that, we are instantly in a state of being. It really is as simple as that. But as simple as it is, it is also as powerful. It’s also very hard to do when we are completely committed to our story and think that this is who we are, because this story needs perpetuation in order to keep us from realizing the one thing that this story of ours is designed to hide from us: that we are not permanent. And that scares the hell out of our egos.

But it is really simple. Seeing ourselves operate and going further with that awareness is all it takes to break the cycle of ego identification and instead be. The good news is that this is not a one shot deal – we get to choose this every moment of our lives, again and again. And when we do choose awareness instead of the ole story, our lives are transformed instantly. And then we look for it more and more, because it feels so natural and wonderful. And eventually we lose all these important ideas of who we think we are, and what we think our lives have to be about. It becomes uninteresting and instead we are filled with this sense of momentness (just made up that word).

Next time you are watching yourself do something, stop for a moment and realize what is happening. You are being aware of yourself, plain and simple. Question is, what will you choose at that moment?

Cheers,

Ralf

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About

As we are coming to the close of another year, the idea of resolutions comes up a lot. It feels good to look back at what has been and to look ahead to what will be, what the new year may be about. Why is that?

I find that when we are fully in ego identification that every thought we have should be about something, it should have a reason to exist, at the very least it needs to mean something. The ego abhors idle or meaningless thinking. Since in this state of identification everything is about me, me, me, it’s always about something that somehow relates to me and my needs. This is serious business that requires my attention, because by having these thoughts and expressing them, I make myself known to the world. Without doing this, I would not exist, the ego tells us. By doing so it operates under the guise of fear, the fear that we may not exist without having all these thoughts about ourselves and the world. After all, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

This fearful thinking can show up in all kinds of forms, but it always has at its core the idea of disappearance without it. It does not matter what the content or flavor of my thinking may be, it is designed to make the experience of me more real. I may be scared, hopeful, depressed, arrogant, happy or sad, as long as my thinking happens from an ego identified perspective, it has to be about something. That is very limited and tiring thinking. It never lets me rest. The project of me is a 24/7 affair after all, and it is the most important project we can undertake. If there ever is a moment of idle thinking or even no particular thought, it may feel nice for a moment, like taking a rest, but then we quickly turn back to the business of thinking about something meaningful.

This type of thinking always has to be about the past or the future, as usual all of this has to be time bound and focused. And at the end of a year it makes perfect sense to reminisce about the past twelve months and look forward to the next twelve. But when we are our ego, the future cannot be unknown, because that feels uncontrollable. What if we didn’t do that? What if we allowed ourselves not to have any particular thoughts about the future? In ego identification this is at the very least a weird idea and at worst frightening.

But what will happen if we simply say to the future, ‘I don’t know you and I have no reason to know you?’ That is what is actually going on of course. We have no idea what the future is, or rather, that is actually all we have, an idea. Why not simply be now and here instead of nowhere, which is what it feels like to the ego when we don’t have an idea about the future. Let us be open, trust that our thinking will serve us in the best possible way given the situation. Let’s trust that we will have the right ideas at the right time, the inspiration to create something new, and the means to put it all together in the perfect way. That our thinking naturally shows up in the most meaningful and appropriate way given the situation, that it will do its job and move on. What would life be like?

Let’s welcome the new year without an agenda, a goal, or a fear about the future. Let’s instead welcome the year as an unknown, something that has no meaning yet and something that will unfold in whatever way we choose. Let’s be willing to say “I have no idea what will be.’ And because of that, anything is possible.

Cheers,

Ralf