Those who seek will find what they want to find.

The word culture stems from the Latin word cultura meaning “to cultivate”, to grow. Humans have been cultivating plants for more than 10 000 years now and many different varieties of many different plants have been bred through the years. We grow many thousands of different varieties of potatoes, for example, King Edward, Bintje, Flava, Early Puritan... Some varieties grow better in the north with long summer days and some varieties prefer the south. Biologists know of about 100 000 varieties of rice and more than 50 000 varieties of garden roses.

In a similar way many different varieties of religion and philosophies of life have developed through the centuries. History of religion scholars know of more than 20 000 different varieties of Christianity but the varieties of Hinduism are uncountable.

Rich people will read the Bible and come up with their interpretation and neurotic people will make their their neurotic interpretations. Those who seek will find what they want to find.

Much of modern spirituality is heavily influenced by Indian spiritual teachers. Most Indian spiritual teachers don’t have to work for a living. Their devotees will feed them. Sometimes they have to spoon feed them, like the devotees of Ramana Maharishi did to keep him alive. He had freed himself from all worldly desire and cravings, also the desire to eat. It is crazy to give up eating, I think. Such yoga is for crazy people. Nevertheless, he had a lot of poor and a lot of completely sane followers. I don't understand how this works.

Poor people all over the world support the rich peoples Christianity, read the Bible with a rich mans glasses and pray to the Gods of the rich. Working class people vote for the rich peoples politicians. Explain this to me, please. Isn't it like if the Jews in Germany in the nineteen thirties had voted for the Nazis?

As I see it. It is better to give up the religions and the philosophies of life than giving up eating and and growing vegetables.

Hot air

 

I know people who have been drunk for decades. I have never met them sober. I have been to parties and got involved in discussions with neo-Nazis. Not the violent and howling kind with baseball bats but the more sophisticated. I have known born again Christians and fanatic Muslims. I have also known non-fanatic Muslims, who enjoyed drinking whiskey, and I have known Christians who where completely possessed by the idea of getting rich. I once knew an American guy who had worked as a mercenary in Africa for many years, in Angola and Mozambique. He said that it was good job because it paid well. He was a nice fellow, relaxed and with an good sense of humor. I have had friends with strong left-wing opinions and I have had friends who were deeply into Buddhism. It turned out later that they had a secret agenda and that they were really social climbers who used their Buddhism or their intellectual left wing stance as a cover. I have met so many different kinds of people in my life and I have learned now not to listen too hard to what they have to say. I no longer care much if someone is a Christian a Muslim or a high brow intellectual. I don’t care if someone believes in astrology or in an unregulated market. I have myself, through the years, frantically defended so many strange things. I know exactly what it is all about: hot air. Not only politicians are hypocrites. What if the climate change is due to all the hot air we emit?

Reverse alchemy

 

We can transform life and the world around us into something small, stupid and totally meaningless. “There is not much point with anything. Life sucks and then you die. Nothing but money counts, really.” However, it is possible, I think, to see that this is not the reality as it is, but a conditioned habitual way of looking at it, an idea of what the world is like.

Sometimes we have to make ourselves completely stupid in order to fit into a group. We have to adjust to others, at work or in school, and because it is not that easy to find a new job or a new school we have to a put up with a lot. So the stupidity gets reinforced and after a number of years we don't know about anything but stupidities. Life and the world has been completely transformed into something totally stupid.

 

Consciousness; awareness, attention, the sense of I am, the observer and the observed, all of it vanish at night and comes back in the morning. A doctor can put you to sleep in a second before an operation. And then he wakes you up again after the operation. A good hypnotist can do the same thing only by using words. Consciousness is very flimsy.

Consciousness comes and goes; presence, the now, awareness, attention, awakenings, thoughts, discipline, love, joy, suffering, the sense of I am, meaning, everything comes and goes.

 

When the physicists look deeply into matter they get confused, they find that it consists of more than 99,9 % empty space, empty space between the electrons and the nucleus of the atom, empty space between the atoms and empty space between the molecules. And when they look further into what an electron or the nucleus of an atom really is, they get even more confused. Likewise, if you look deeply into yourself, who you really are, you will also get confused. Who am I? What is the sense of I, really, the observer of it all? What does it consist of? Chemical reactions? You will not get enlightened if you look deeply into yourself, you will get confused. And the more you dig the more you will find and the more confused you will get. What is this all about? You will not find any final answers. It is not possible for us humans to understand life and the world. We have to accept this fact.

We can, of course, invent tons of theories, mythologies and speculations. We can also convince others and ourselves that we know; we can fool ourselves, but eventually, if we look deep enough, we have to accept that we don’t understand much. We have to accept that we are lost. We have to live in this world, on this level of understanding things. You are sitting on chair, it consist of something, it is not just empty space, and this is a computer screen you are staring at. We have to bring home the bacon, one way or another, and do the best we can with the cards that have been dealt to us. However, we don’t have to fight furiously to defend our crazy beliefs, we don't have to beat ourselves up, or others, if we don’t want to. We don’t have to mess up the world around us with wars, violence, neurotic hatred and extreme selfishness. All this is due to misunderstandings and delusions. We think that we know what life is about, but we don’t. It is all very sad.