All you have to do is this:

Who you are, baby.

Recovery from alcoholism wasn’t doing it for me. So I decided to get drunk.

I made a conscious decision to pick up a drink.

The funny thing is that at the point of writing I seem to be ok. For sure, I’ve got no money and no cigarettes and I’m watching my mind like a vulture for the first signs. But this is day 3.

I can tell you that I’m powerless and it seems to be true.

On the other hand I will probably be dead in six days.

But – and it’s a big but – I’m not dead now. I am alive and kicking and in your present experience.

Can you stop thinking for a minute?

Listen.

This is who you are.

The silence isn’t something that happens to you. It is who you are.

What is the one thing that has always been here: that has never changed?

Abandon Your Everything

There is a phrase in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous: it says “abandon yourself”. It’s somewhere around the end of the basic text.

Bill Wilson was right (about turning our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him).

But he was also right about the enlargement of a spiritual experience.

Is “turning my will and my life over to the care of God” judging people who don’t fall into line with my likes and dislikes?

And who am I anyway?

Who’s telling me what’s right and wrong? My family? My friends? This particular moral code which I’ve inherited and think is God?

Everything that you believe is crap. Get used to it.

Because we are all the same.

I don’t have to tell you how I think.

I am you anyway.

What are we doing with the world?

What are we doing with our own consciousness?

Ask yourself.

Who is it that I think I am.

You are not what you think.

You are the awareness of that.

All those beliefs and concepts: disregard them.

I know they keep coming up. They’re habitual. We are programmed. You need to break out of the programming. So you need to keep telling yourself: “I am awareness; not the thoughts and feelings arising in it.”

In fact: these are things that are independent of me: the one who sees.

You are not this.

If you are like me, there is no getting away from what you are.

You are consciousness, regardless of how drunk you are or how you may feel about it.

This is why you keep waking up all the time.

There is no getting away from who you are.

Even if you were to die, this situation would repeat itself. That’s because you are the only thing in your life that is real.

Think about it.

Who has always been there?

Who was looking out of your eyes when you were five years old?

Is the person who’s looking out of your eyes now any different?

No.

You are what you have always been. Maybe you’ve picked up some new beliefs on the way. We all do. You can safely disregard them: they’re nonsense. They’re conditioned patterns of thought which arise in the mind and nothing more. They are harmless and fruitless. And yet I know that you have built your entire life around them.

You are not this.

You are that which is always here. Like it or not.

Bill and Ebby

One day I decided I was going to kill myself.

The thing was, I had a lot of people relying on me. I wasn’t sure how I could do it, without them all being a bit disillusioned.

The thing is, you’ve got to realize: if someone wants to kill themselves, it’s their business. It doesn’t mean that the things that they believed in were wrong: it doesn’t mean the things they told you were wrong: take Marcel Proust. He had the answer to everything, but couldn’t live that way himself.

Take Ebby Thatcher. He gave Bill W. the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous but couldn’t stay sober himself.

Take Jesus.  He couldn’t let it go. He thought he was responsible for whether we got this or not.

It’s not Jesus’s fault we didn’t get it, nor Ebby Thatcher’s, nor Gandhi’s, nor anybody else’s.  When we’re ready we’re ready. When we’re not, we’re not.

I’m thankful to Jesus, to Gandhi, to Ebby Thatcher and to Bill and Bob who told me that whatever happened, it would be alright. And I’m thankful to the Father of Light who presides over us all, for giving me an opportunity to get my brain back. You’re a star.

Bill W. and Ebby Thatcher

Who are you?

People come up to me in the street and ask me to keep blogging.

God knows why. It’s not like I’ve got anything interesting to say; just an interesting way of saying it.

It’s all crap.

This is what I have to say: nothing. I’m just a poor cunt trying to make sense of everything, like you.

But there is one thing I know: the world is an illusion, and if you take it to be real you will suffer.

You are awareness, I am awareness. We’re the same awareness; we’re the same thing.

In fact there is only one thing and we are it.

To call it “one” is misleading because “one” implies “many” and there is nothing else.

Even if there was something that existed outside of awareness it only exists as an idea in awareness.

We take ourselves to be the body. We are not the body. The body is a something (like the world) that we perceive when our eyes are open. Close your eyes and the body and the world are gone.

If you look honestly and directly into your own experience you will see that when your eyes are closed there is no body, there is no world; there are sensations which thought tells us are the body and the world.

But they are not the body, and they are not the world. They are mental arisings in awareness. Do we believe ourselves to be the mind (thoughts, feelings, sensations, beliefs and ideas) or that which is conscious of them?

Who are you? The mental arising or the awareness in which it takes place?

Vanishing Point

For the last few weeks I’ve been suffering from a bad case of transcendental boredom.

Actually, that’s not quite true.

I’ve been witnessing a bad case of transcendental boredom.

No, that’s not true either.

I am aware of certain thoughts and sensations, which my mind interprets as transcendental boredom, even though upon investigation my mind turns out to be nothing but a series of thoughts that arise and subside in awareness.

There is no-one who is bored. There is the awareness of restlessness.

Restlessness comes and goes, but awareness remains.

The one who is aware of restlessness is the one who is aware of excitement, happiness, fear, anger and the whole array of experience.

As soon as a feeling arises, an “I” thought arises too.

It says “I feel this” or “I feel that” or “I am this” or “I am that”.

But when I look into my direct experience the owner of the "I" can’t be found. There is no separate self. The “I” is just a thought. A single thought. A habitual thought. The whole idea of a personal identity is based on nothing but memory, which is also a thought arising and subsiding in awareness.

I am that awareness.

The Man Who Bottled the Truth

I didn’t go out of my way to be a scientist: it just sort of happened. I’ve never had much interest in things like snails and worms or developing new kinds of rubber, so it’s surprising that I should find myself now, approaching middle age – hair shooting madly from every cavity; eyebrows with an agenda of their own; undergarments in a state of open revolution – standing at my bench in the laboratory, about to discover the meaning of life.

It’s been a long and arduous journey that has taken me from the backstreets of Bombay to the open sewers of Calcutta; from the Rocky Mountains to the Great Plains. I have been a man obsessed. I have neglected my children – they are nothing but a memory – and my wife is welded to the settee.

You may think me cold and heartless, but it’s not like that, really. When I discovered that the meaning of life lay within my reach I had no option but to pursue it with single-pointed determination. At times I thought I was going quite mad. The police tried to bust into my lab. I disguised myself as a hippopotamus to evade capture. The government and their psychiatrists have spent considerable time and effort trying to keep me incarcerated, but I am a master of escape. The lengths to which I have gone are extreme.

And yet humankind will remember me with fondness, as the man who bottled the Truth.

And the Truth can be yours if you want it, for just $100 plus tax. Grape or blueberry.