I am,
at least, three or four, different persons. Sometimes the dark and serious one is at the driver’s seat, sometimes the bohemian. Sometimes a hard working and responsible man is driving, sometimes a nut. So, which of all these people is really me? It depends, I think. Sometimes it is the dark and serious one, sometimes it is the nut…

Most people are not aware of that they really consist of many different persons, that we all have multiple personalities. Maybe this is because only one of them have done the driving for so long. They have been lulled into the illusion that there is only one driver. However, when things changes dramatically, after a divorce for example, many people notice that someone else has taken over the wheel; or in a war situation, when ordinary family men turn into monsters.

However, not only catastrophes changes people. Alcohol, poor sleep, stress, natural mood shifts, even the full moon can turn someone into someone else. A love story or a new job can change a person completely. A depressed man with alcohol problems can turn into harmonic sheep farmer with a wonderful wife and three lovely daughters; a punk rocker can suddenly turn in to a well-dressed stockbroker. Nothing is written in stone in this world of form.

If I, in my youth, am sent to a school of economics, I can be transformed into a neo liberal fundamentalist. If I, on the other hand, happen to go to an art school, I might turn into an artsy bohemian. Or I might get saved or turn in to a Buddhist. There are many options.

No, nothing is written in stone. There is no real me, no real ego, no real driver. All of me is conditioned by circumstances, biology, family and culture.

But who is going to do the driving if there is no driver, if there is no ego? Who is going to the pub? Who is going to work? Who is deciding to not go to work? Who gives a shit?

Even though the ego is illusory, insubstantial and ghostlike it is what operates us.

Without identification there is no ego, says Eckhart, but the problem is that the identification is to such large extent unconscious, we are not aware of what is driving us. Jealousy, revenge, laziness, crazy ideas that we need a make over, that we need to become successful...

After Eckhart experienced his Awakening, he was sitting on park benches for a couple of years, living of his savings. Then he won money on a lottery ticket. He had good luck. But those who don’t have any savings to live from and who don’t win any money on their scratch tickets, what shall they do? They have to go to work, work for endless hours with stuff they don’t want to do.

But you shall do what you love to do! You shall have good luck. Luck will come to you when you are aligned to the greater source. Fantastic opportunities will line up.

To live such happy, loving and awakened life is for the rich and lucky few. They can walk barefoot along the Hawaiian beaches and pick seashells or listen to the songs of the dolphins.

However, someone has to empty the garbage bins, someone has to do the cooking in the restaurants, someone has to clean the hotel rooms. Someone has to pick the grapefruits we eat for breakfast. How shall that work be organized? Shall it be ten or twelve hour days? Shall it be extremely badly paid. There are billions of people out there who need to read more self-help books and lift themselves up by the booth straps, who need to align themselves with the greater source, who need to be more positive. What shall you do with your awakening when you are forced to work like a dog?

The world we live in is a terrible place. Men with horrible ideas have all the power.

When the American government declared war on terror they forgot that they are the greatest terrorists. In the eighties CIA armed and organized the Contras guerrilla in Nicaragua. They terrorized civilians and killed them by the thousands. The aim was to throw spanners in the works for the legally elected government. In the seventies CIA organized the coup in Chile to overthrow also a legally elected government. This happened in September 11 1973. To Chileans 9/11 has different meaning than it has to north Americans.

The list of CIA’s well-documented terrorist activities could be made very long. Now these guys are going to save us from terrorism. In the name of freedom and democracy.

Again, how come spiritually inclined people never even mention all the hypocrisy, the evil, the idiocies. Is it because they don’t care about this world? Is it because they don’t care about other people? Is it because they are filled with -`You get pie in the sky when you die´ kind of ideas or `I'm so happy and spiritual because I'm rich?´

To wake up, I think, it is important to first of all become aware of all the madness and all the mad ideas that we are surrounded by and conditioned by. If we can’t see this, if we live our life with our eyes closed, there is not much point with prayers, mindfulness meditations or positive thinking. A true spiritual path can not be a path of escapism, delusions, hypocrisy and lies.

When you can see the madness clearly and you as a consequence turn away from ideologies, religions, crazy belief systems and crazy beliefs, things begin to open up. Then you can begin to see the real beauty around you, the real mystery, the real magic.

We are all fools. We are all fooling our self. We are all in the same boat, but some of us know about it and some of us don’t.

However, the moment you fully realize that you have deceived yourself, you are not deceived anymore, simply because you know now that you have been deceived. It can be an extremely unpleasant experience. So you desperately grasp for another illusion, something to hold on to, almost anything will do, and the story repeats itself, over and over again.

Eventually, after a number of terrible blows, all bullshit is burned off and you will be born again, like the Phoenix. Now you will not be anybody's fool any more, not even your own, at least not in five hundred years. This can happen when you are in your twenties or in your seventies, or it may not happen at all. Maybe most people die without knowing that they have have been completely fooled all along.

Why is life set up this way? I have no idea. How can one part of me fool another part? Are there really two or more different me’s. Are there really a swindler and someone who is being swindled? Who is that fool that let himself be swindled so easily? Why are we so easily deceived by our self?

Should one take life seriously or not? Now I’ve got it, at last. Sometimes one has to be very serious about things, sometimes one must not be serious at all. Only crashing bores are always serious, and only complete idiots are never serious about anything. How can one laugh and have some fun if one is dead serious, and how can one discuss a serious problem that has to be solved with someone who feels that life is but a joke?

*

Yesterday I was very, very tired. I felt like lead, worn out and burned out. I’ve been working too much and I haven’t had enough sleep for weeks now. But, as I walked through the park on my way home from work, I suddenly felt very happy, for absolutely no reason at all. It was a wonderful summer afternoon. The air was fresh after a rain shower, the sky was blue with a few white clouds and the trees where luxuriant green. I took a photo of a puddle. Isn’t it silly for a man in his fifties, to take photos of puddles? A boy was playing with his German shepherd pup on the big lawn and I was thinking about how strange life is. “I have absolutely no reason for being this happy now. Isn't this unconditional love? I love everything for no reason at all.”

Today, as I write this, I’m back in a more normal state of mind. I have a day off from work and I plan to do as little as possible.

Just before I begun to write this I was watching Elisabeth Lesser being interviewed by Oprah Winfry on her soul series. I was thinking: Life is not necessarily a school. It is a good way to look at life. It makes life worth living, it makes life easier to digest, but it is not necessary how life really is. It is a world view. “Life is not a school. The deathbed is not a braking-up. Life is not a meditation practice, not a rehearsal. All this is just thoughts.” This is also just thoughts. How is life really, if one doesn’t have any thoughts at all about it? Isn’t thinking what makes us human? Is life about finding a good world view?

Thoughts are generated in the subconscious mind. They have their source in life strategies and core beliefs.

Core beliefs are something you get from early childhood conditioning. Life strategies and are strategies we develop later in life to try to cope in this world. We act from our life strategies. The thoughts are mostly justifications,rationalizations and explanations to our actions.

For example:
Core belief: Everything is meaningless. There is no hope, not for me, not for humanity.
Life strategy: Take whatever you can get now. Tomorrow is another day.
Thought: So and so is a jerk. Is that a way to live?

Core belief: A big, jealous and vengeful God watches over me.
Life strategy: I must always do as the priests tell me to do.
Thought: How I would like him to fuck me. Oh my Goodness!

However, there are “deeper” levels. Maybe synchronicities and clairvoyance are not not even psychological or physiological phenomenons. Mayne they are not made of mind stuff at all. They are mysterious, metaphysical phenomenon’s. To try to find scientific explanations to them is futile.

But there are even more deeper levels. I'm thinking of revelations and mystic experiences. On this level, words are completely useless.

The words, the thoughts and the concepts in the left brain hemisphere are good and useful tools, if they are used for what they are made to do, socializing, jokes, gossip, politics, science and plan makings, but to describe or discuss mystical experiences they wont do. It is like trying to repair a software problem in the computer with a hammer. It is wrong kind of tool.

How can one be happy in this terrible world of war and terror? And how can one be happy when the head is filled with all kinds of urgent problems? Maybe one has serious money problems, maybe one has a lot of problems at work, maybe one doesn’t have the time to take care of one´s elderly parents, whatever. Is it really the ego that construct all these problems?

Born again Christians and people who belong to certain religious sects are often very happy. Should one become a born again Christian, or should one adopt some other ecstatic belief system? Should one start to eat Prozac pills? Should one simply skip all the problems or let someone else solve them? Should one go and get drunk and let the problems hover over the head like vultures? Witch strategy is the best?

How can one be at peace in the “Now” with a lot of problems? It is of course a different story if all people around you where awakened, but how shall one deal with it today?

Well, this is what I have arrived at: one can have a lot of problems, deal with them, and be in the “Now“. To be in the “Now” is not an escape. To be in the “Now” is not necessarily pleasant.

So, if all ideas and ideologies in history have proved to be disastrous, how shall the new world be organized? Should we drop the idea of governments all together? Should we let go of laws and juridical systems? If all people where awakened would there be any need for laws and governments?

For the first, I think democracy is a good idea. (Jesus Christ! What is this now? You have just explained that all ideas have proved to be disastrous.)

Well, democracy is a good idea, but what do we mean when we talk about it? The official name for East Germany was: The German Democratic Republic. Everybody knows that East Germany wasn't a democratic republic. The official name for North Korea is: People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea. And everybody knows that North Korea is not a democratic. The word democracy doesn’t mean anything here.

In the U.S. you are free to choose between two right wing parties, or as Noam Chomsky puts it, two fractions of one and the same party. And think of all the extreme fascist dictatorships that the U.S has supported through the years, and all the democratic regimes that has been overthrown or thwarted by the CIA. We are not living in a democratic world. There is not a war going on today between democratic countries and different totalitarian regimes and terrorists. It is a fight, as it has always been, between all kinds of madmen.

Augusto Pinochet was a deeply religious man, a devout Catholic, a Christian. Silvio Berlusconi is also a Christian. He is modeling his life after the Lord Jesus Christ. Al Capone was a Christian. The drug lords in Columbia think of themselves as Christian and so did the slave traders. The word Christian simply doesn’t mean anything.

It is the same thing with many words, they don’t mean anything or they can mean just anything. Freedom, Love, Honesty, Brotherhood, Spirituality, Decency, Justice, Awakening, The true Self, Eternity… We’re talking and talking but we don’t know what we are talking about. We have a problem here.

Anyway, a democratic world governed by elected and awakened people would be good.

*

I think that many people all over the world have had it with ideologies and religions today. I have met many serious people that just don’t care about politics or religion anymore. What if we could get organized? What if we could form a new church, a new party without any agenda, without any specific ideas about anything, without any dogmas, without any idiotic hatred, just life, as it is, in this moment. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

*

Think of a man who is waiting for a phone call. He is waiting and waiting for the phone to ring, but nothing happens. “What the hell is this. Why isn’t she calling.” So, he tries to call her, but she is not answering. He gets upset. He gets worried. He gets all sorts of crazy thoughts in his poor little head. He feels irritated and miserable. “Is it over now?“ Everything goes wrong. The weather is terrible. A strong wind takes he’s new baseball cap when he is on his way to the library. The whole world is against him. The world is a terrible place.
Then he suddenly remembers that she had to go to the doctor today and then she had to meet up with her sister. Everything is changing now. “How stupid I am. What an Idiot I am.” Suddenly he is happy again. The world is a fantastic place. Life is wonderful.

Not only men in love get things wrong. How much of our misery is not simply misapprehensions, misconceptions and misunderstandings. Maybe we have got it all wrong. Maybe we have just mixed things up? Maybe the world is a fantastic place.

All the endless man made problems in the world, war, injustice, starvation, murder, hate, exploitation, pollution and so on, are products of ideas. The Nazis in Germany had the idea that they belonged to a superior race and because life is a battle between races, they had to defeat all other inferior people. They didn’t mind to kill little children if they belonged to an inferior race. Ordinary family men gladly killed little children.

Today we live by the idea that a completely free and unregulated market is the supreme goal. Human beings are egoists by nature and if we struggle like hell for our own benefit everything will end up in perfect order. The strong will survive and the weak will vanish. (Blessed are the strong for they shall inherit the earth.) That is why all the industries have been moved to China and countries with fewer regulations. No inhibiting rights for the workers, no inhibiting taxes, no inhibiting laws against pollution. Many people know by now what the result will be: an environmental world catastrophe, but we can’t change it. The Germans couldn’t change their ideas either. They where forced to change.

All political ideologies, all religions, science, misunderstandings and resentments, everything, is driven by ideas. But what are ideas really? What do they consist of? Are they material? Can we free ourselves from them? Is it possible to wake up from the hypnosis?

I’m going on and on and on and on about the same thing. Are there really no other people out there who have had enough of ideas? Life is about this, life is about that. I love myself, I don’t love myself. For heavens sake, all you idiots out there: WAKE UP!!!