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Do you choose to read this or not?

When I was a kid, I used to sit for hours and think about God’s omniscience. Something about it tripped me out. If God knows everything, then God knows the future. If God knows everything, then God knew the moment he created man what the outcome would be. If God knows everything, then God knows what you are going to do next.

Pretty strange. Where is the elbow room for free will?

When you look into it, the idea that there is free will is contextual.
Contextual doesn’t mean wrong, it just means not absolute.

Everything you do is the culmination of something larger and out of your control.
Everything you say is channeled and not your own.
Freedom is empty.

I am just using words of course, so they are limited and ultimately silly. But let this view sink in for a minute if you care. Not as a new philosophical position or spiritual argument. Just for fun maybe.
A character in a film can appear to have volition, until it is remembered that there is an author and a script.
A thermostat can be said to control the temperature of a room, until it is remembered that it is a hand that turns the dial.

Similarly, it can seem like decisions are your own; within an innocent daydream that there was ever a fixed locus of identity and control.

That my position here can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility is not a logical argument against it. Almost anything that works as a way to avoid responsibility is used, including the truth.

Who am I? Who are you? So regularly and so deeply is it assumed there is a discrete I and a separate you somewhere(!) at the deepest foundation of our experience. Must be hiding. And so we seek.

Yet this “central experiencer” can never be identified distinctly from that which is happening.

The fact is, there are processes occurring in your brain that collectively create the conviction of a consolidated, executive sense of self, typically behind your eyes, making creative decisions and enjoying or suffering their outcomes. This phenomenon of self-creation is part of evolution and does have relative value. But these processes are themselves without independent nature.

In other words, they dependently arise. This is called pratityasamutpada in Buddhism, arguably the only distinct doctrine to come out of Buddhism that did not have precedent in earlier religions. This view considers the western mechanical model “A (me) is the cause of B (my actions)” as naive. The other side of the same coin is the doctrine of sunyata, or emptiness.

When I say empty I don’t mean it in a materialist sense; lacking abundance, an empty wallet, etc. I mean interdependently co-arising with and in and as Tao, already and always. Empty is a word that has an indescribable, blissful feeling from my experiences in meditation. It has a brightness to it. It’s the dark light in the void, and also the light within manifestation.

An incredible story is being told by no one, to no one. Or by God to God. However you want to look at it.

There is no mistake here. There is nothing wrong with illusion. All great art is a lie. Nature herself is the biggest liar. Choice is an abstraction that is convenient and necessary and good and beautiful in context, as is a sense of self. Without these we would not be human. Yet truly, choices happen without a chooser. There is no thinker of your thoughts.
There is no one who one day wakes up from this dream. One is already awake.

This great illusion of choice is part of an awesome creative game being played by God, our deepest Self, for no comprehensible reason.

In other words, for Love.

This is it folks.

On the Enneagram of personality I am a 4 with a five wing. Fours with five wings are introspective, moody, analytical, melodramatic, melancholic, sensitive, romantic, artistic, addictive, searching … tend to feel as if something is always missing, oscillate between feeling defective at a core level and feeling distinctly special and unique even in a superior way and sometimes for identical reasons as they felt defective.

Fours struggle with the transition from the really deep connections we are capable of (and crave) back to “ordinary” practical communication “ok, but what do you want to eat?” and even worse to disconnecting, ie: having to walk away or say goodbye after a connection. I feel this difficulty especially around the eyes. This difficulty with emotional transitions I think is one of the factors that can lead to fours getting into a pattern of being either fully on or fully off in connecting, our eyes functioning as a major component of our on/off switch.

When I started reading descriptions of a Four it was like getting punched in the stomach. I couldn’t believe how accurate it was for me. I felt embarrassed actually. Since then I’ve read just about every Enneagram of personality book/article I could find and feel like I have learned a lot about myself which in turn has helped me to grow.

Taking one of these online test is not the best way of discovering your number or getting the most from the personality Enneagram. The best way is to get a good personality Enneagram book, read through all of the type descriptions until one of them freaks you out with how much it nails your hidden agendas.

There is an interesting flaw in the way men tend to relate to attractive women, myself included. I think women are used to getting attention and having men more than willing to sleep with them, love them, etc. before any real criteria on the man’s part is applied. Men too easily assume because there is attraction that a woman has something we want or is worth our time whereas I think women tend to learn very early on the value of selectivity. In my own life these observations point to where I want to cultivate deeper sexual honor. Women already have to go through Lezlie before becoming intimate with me, a trial in it’s own right, but it’s not enough. Who are you? What kind of energy do you have? What are you about?

I could swear I read somewhere about a study done where monkeys were presented with two switches. For some time only the first switch worked and it delivered the monkey its food. The monkey learned to flip this switch and be fed. At some point the second switch was activated. This switch was hooked to an electrode connected to a part of the monkey’s brain that stimulated an instant orgasm. The monkeys would push this orgasm button until they passed out from exhaustion only to wake up again and do it over again. This to the point of starvation and near death, the food button completely forgotten. Does anyone remember this study or am I making this shit up?

In any case, we aren’t monkeys, we have the capability of a more refined consciousness. And deeper still, DNA is merely an expression of the spiritual, matter a thought in the mind of God. I find the depth of sexual desire, or any desire for that matter, to be intimately related to the intensity of our longing for reconnection with Truth. It’s not a failure that men have to consciously cultivate selectivity. Man’s lack of selectivity had an evolutionary purpose. It’s a big part of how we survived! But something new is evolving. And perhaps ironically I think it’s the highly selective men nowadays, the men that can find a girl incredibly sexy and simultaneously brush her off because she is lame that get the most women and the sexiest women.

What is the difference between Taoism and non-Taoism? In order to engage in even this conversation, you have to pick a reference point.

Which is then, canonically, not the Tao. True?

There is no distinction between Tao and anything else. “The principle that can be enunciated is not the one that always was. The being that can be named is not the one that was at all times.”

Yet there is a Tao that is distinct from something else. In a way. It just cannot be grasped by the mind. Still, we can discuss it and point to it as long as we remain in truth and are not lost by our own words. Furthermore, this discussion is about Taoism, the historical Chinese religion that has specific characteristics we can clarify and discuss, not unlike antique dealers might talk about the evolution of a culture’s furniture.

Once something becomes an “ism” it is lost. “When the oneness of humanity is forgotten a distinction is made between good and evil. Focusing on goodness leads one down the path of self-righteousness which separates a person from others. Self-righteousness leads to justice and since justice is as arbitrary as goodness and righteousness, it degenerates into a facade of justice or ritual.”

Perhaps in the same way that someone might merely hear of Christianity and then by chance stumble upon a spiritual relationship with what she might call Christ and then come to call herself a Christian — all without approval from the Pope or the meticulous reference of Biblical scripture … well, perhaps one can follow their heart and remain more “true to the Tao” than slaves to intellectual analysis of what is authentic and what is spontaneous.

A good friend of mine from Mexico used to tell me that he thought it was silly whenever he saw the term “Authentic Mexican Restaurant”. He felt the term “authentic Mexican” was strange.

What does it mean for something to be authentically Mexican? That a Mexican makes it? A Mexican can make a cheeseburger. Is that an authentic Mexican cheeseburger?

Is it that it tastes like food from Mexico? When you live in Mexico, you realize that all the food tastes different and that, in actuality, clever innovation is appreciated in a restaurant. Not a bizarre attempt to distill the essence of what makes Mexican food Mexican food and sticking to that.

But we do mean something intelligible when we say “authentic Mexican”. If a bunch of white guys that had never eaten Mexican food or even met a Mexican opened up a diner serving scrambled eggs and spring rolls and called it “Mexican food” it would strike most as strange and inappropriate.

Reading what I’ve written, essentially I’ve said nothing. I fail to see my own point. Sorry. Carry on.