The truth will not set you free

If you are sincere in your search for the truth,
you will eventually come to a place
where you are able to see the cruelty of life clearly.

To put up with this unintended discovery
you will now have to find a drug,
a tranquilizer, a religion, a belief system, a hobby
or some other form of delusion that can carry you through
or you will have to kill yourself.
It is too hard to see things clearly.
You don’t need the truth.

Not even the fittest survive

The law of the jungle still applies.
Everybody knows this.
However, life is not about to eat or be eaten.
This is a serious misunderstanding.
In the jungle are all eaten,
everybody end up as food for someone else,
rich or poor, strong or weak, good or bad.
We will all end up as food for worms and plants and insects.
This is an impartial system.

Philosophy

Your philosophy of life is extremely important.
It has the power to make your life miserable.
You can end up as a wreck.
It can also create endless miseries for other people.

Therefore, take a close look at your beliefs,
your worldview and your ideas
and try to figure out if they are useful in some way, or not
if they make your life easier
or if they create serious problems for you and others.

Maybe you are a complete idiot, maybe not.
Maybe you are the only one who has found the truth.
Maybe it is a good idea to get involved in drug or sex trafficking.
Maybe nothing is more important than dollars.
Maybe you have to reach the top.
Maybe life is about success.
Maybe life is about to eat or be eaten.
Maybe skin color is a relevant issue.
Maybe you’re right.
Maybe life is totally meaningless.
Maybe you have not been fooled.
Maybe you have not been hypnotized by your ideas.
Maybe it is important to work hard to become someone.
Maybe it is better to relax and do as little as possible.
Maybe the thinking mind is there to invent excuses and lies.
How knows?

There are so many useless ideas to be obsessed with.
What if they are not really your ideas?
Maybe you have picked them up somewhere,
at home, at school, from TV, from friends.
Maybe you are hypnotized.
Maybe you live your life in some kind of trance.
Maybe you are playing your old Bee Gees cassettes
over and over,
or Elvis Presley, or Frank Sinatra.
Why don’t you throw them away?
Has this thought ever crossed your mind?

Persona

Our Personalities are like clothes, covers.
Also awakened people wear clothes in public.
So what?

Duality

I can observe my own thoughts.
This means that I am not the one I think I am.
I am something separate from my thoughts.

Similarly, if you insult me I feel hurt
and if you flatter me, I feel proud.
I can observe my own ego reactions.
This means that I am something separate from my ego.

I can also observe my bad habits, my poor self-esteem,
my stupidity, my irritation
and the stories I create about the world and myself.
This means that I am something separate from my bad habits
my poor self-esteem, my irritation and my stupidity.

A part of me is stupid; a part of me gets irritated
and I have many of bad habits
but this is not me, the one I am
my real self.

Are you following?
You are not the one you think you are.
You are someone or something else.
Isn’t this a strange thought?

Buddhists and Hindus believe that
this part of us is reincarnating, I don’t.
Christians and Muslims believe that
this part goes to heaven, or hell.
I believe that this part of me will disappear when I die.

Evolution and the thinking mind.

Plants don’t think
and they don’t trot around as the animals do.

Animals and plants have no language.
Animals can communicate with sounds and gestures
but they don’t know how to philosophize,
make plans and crack jokes.

Without your thinking mind
you would have been some kind of thin-haired ape.

Language and the thinking mind is a precious gift
or an evolutionary invention
depending on how you look at it.
The thinking mind makes us human
but it is also driving us crazy.
There is so much suffering and despair in the world
because of mean thoughts and idiotic ideas.

The Buddhists say that the mind can calm down
only after many years of intense meditation practice.
(more than eight hours a day).
It is possible to end the suffering, yes,
but you have to put your back to it.

Eckhart Tolle believes that more and more people
will experience a spontaneous spiritual awakening
and that this awakening is another natural step in the evolution.
All the stupid and terrible thoughts that drag you down
will miraculously disappear overnight when you wake up
and you don’t have to do anything about it.

I believe that we can’t get rid of our stupid thoughts
no matter how much we try
and I am skeptic about the spontaneous spiritual awakening.
This happens obviously to some people
but to me it is just a concept.

What we can do, I have found,
is that we can learn how to deal with thoughts and ideas.
My experience is that things improve
when we discover that thoughts are just thoughts
and ideas are just ideas -not truths.
This is just a thought.
This is just an idea.
This is not the truth.

It is like when you wake up in the morning
and realize that the dream was just a dream.

You have to keep this in mind all day long.
When a thought pops up
and when you notice that you hold on to an idea
remember that they are just thoughts
fantasies, dreams.

This discovery makes life so much easier.

Do all spiritual teachers teach the same thing?

There are so many spiritual teachers out there,
pointing in different directions, saying:
-Don’t look at my finger.
Look at what I‘m pointing at.
There is the truth.
Can you see it?

If you ask four different Gurus
about which way to choose
you will get four different answers
and they will all sound as if they knew exactly
what they were talking about.
How is this possible?

One answer is that if you look deep enough
you will find that all spiritual teachings are very similar.
Yes, it looks as if the gurus are pointing in different directions
but in reality, they don’t.
They are all saying the same thing.

I don’t think this is true.
There are, for example, big differences in the way they look at
the everyday surface level.
Is justice an important matter?
Is it wrong to exploit poor people in order to get rich?
Is competition more important than cooperation?
Is capitalism and spirituality compatible?
Is it important how we live our daily life?
Are such questions something a spiritual teacher
should be concerned about?
The world is a cosmic play, is it not?
The real truth is to be found somewhere inside of you,
or up there, or out there, or in 3000-year-old scriptures
don‘t you think?