The Art of Breaking Character

We are not who we think we are. Real Love beckons.

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  • AoBC Essential Lessons #1

    The book-in-progress The Art of Breaking Character (Volume I) contains writings on over a hundred different topics related to the path of awakening, healing or wholeness. Each of these begins with an Essential Lesson on the given topic. Here is a selection of five key concepts from the book and their Essential Lesson.

    I. Breaking Character – Essential Lesson: All religions, spiritual traditions, and schools of psychotherapy teach us how to shed the limitations imposed on us from the inside of our own minds that keep us chained to confusion, dissatisfaction, suffering, disharmony, and disconnection from Reality itself. Whilst they may describe this in many different ways, they speak of a single, universal process of conscious evolution and expansion that involves the healing and resolving of all trauma, and the gradual awakening of all dormant parts, capacities and insights to unlock the ‘True Self’, ‘Deep Self’, ‘True Nature’, ‘Higher Self’, or ‘Divine Self’. Breaking character is therefore the universal process of forgetting who we think we are so as to remember who we actually are.

    II. The Character – Essential Lesson: We become who we need to become to survive the uniquely challenging circumstances of each of our early lives. We learn what to fear, shame, trust, believe and identify with based on what will get our needs met – for love, safety, acceptance, witnessing, belonging. We shut away vast portions of our potential in order to remain safe, and yet when our environment changes – when we leave home, meet new people, or travel across the globe – we remain stuck in this ‘false self’ that obscures the deeper diversity, beauty and virtue now dormant within us. Now we are dysfunctional. Now we may find ourselves anxious, self-conscious, pessimistic, wound tight—haunted by strange fears and reliant on distorted rituals meant to recover the self-worth that once slipped through our fingers in childhood. In spite of all this we never seem to stop clinging to and defending this version of ourselves that we don’t even need to be any more, because we have been wired by life to believe this structure of  confusion and resistance is the precise thing keeping us safe. On the surface we may be pessimistic and imagine this to be the real, finished picture of us. But our optimism, as quiet as it may seem, always runs deeper. For at a deeper level, something in us knows that we are merely stuck inside a psychological prison that we built from the inside, and which we can therefore escape from. We are playing a character, and a character is always significantly more limited than the person playing it.

    III. The Taste (for breaking character) – Essential Lesson: at a certain point, the process of breaking character reaches a kind of escape velocity, where the ongoing rewards of the process are so obvious, and the future rewards so tantalising, that the process begins to be self-motivating. We see that in shedding the character and all its false beliefs and distorted behaviours, we automatically and reliable become kinder, wiser, saner, calmer, better able to love and receive love, less judgemental, less resistant to everything life may throw at us and yet paradoxically more capable of changing the world around us in the image of our deeper values. We may have spent most of our lives resisting this rediscovery of our potential – for fear of all the pain we might have to face in doing so. Now we have acquired The Taste (for Breaking Character), and feel firmly on the path to our deeper destiny – and this pain can begin fading into insignificance.

    IV. The Totality of the Self – Essential Lesson: Being made of the same essential stuff or substance — energy that shifts endlessly between forms — our psyches share a universal potential for every emotion (fear, anger, grief, joy, love) and for every quality born from them or distorted by them (kindness, cruelty, humility, power-lust, compassion, deceit). Not all of these will surface in a single lifetime, but any of them can, given the right conditions. The long journey of breaking character demands that we recognise and accept this full spectrum within ourselves — the Totality of the Self.

    V. Repression – Essential Lesson: The mind automatically and unconsciously pushes down emotions, traits, and other parts of ourselves to avoid overwhelm and survive the challenges we face. Much of this happens in childhood, when we are wide open, highly sensitive, and more of our potential is visible and vulnerable to the pressures of the world. Yet at any challenging moment in life, we can repress into the unconscious what we cannot yet bear to face. Repression is entirely reversible, but until we recognize its effects, it will continue to keep hidden everything in us that we secretly long to reclaim.

    Disagree? Tell me. 🙂

    ______________________________________________________________________________________________________

    If you enjoyed this post, and want to stay updated when I post new writings, which I aim to do regularly, consider subscribing via the link at the bottom right of the screen.

    If you are interested in learning more about or supporting my work in any way, please see the page About The Art of Breaking Character, at the bottom of which are detailed some types of help and support I am looking for in my mission to bring the path of healing/wholeness/awakening to as many people as possible.

    If you would like to explore the possibility of working with me 1-on-1, I offer reasonably priced, flexible spiritual coaching. Find out more about this here.

    And I’d encourage you to explore the rest of this site to find other resources, recommendations, tools, and writings.

    Thanks for being here.

    Love

    R

    @photosivetaken

  • RobBlog #1: The Kundalini Awakens

    10 months ago, a trauma-processing motor switched on inside of me.

    It was about 10 p.m., and I was sat in the bath, listening to a podcast about the nature of consciousness — minding my own business, relaxing before bed. All of a sudden, my head tilted back, and my experience went black. My awareness seemed to switch off and on again, like a computer rebooting itself, and when I came back online, there was a strange, frenetic energy at the base of my spine. It felt a little like I was now in the bath with a snake flailing around beneath me.

    I had a sense of what this was, based on my years of reading about spiritual awakening. On instinct, I rushed to my bedroom (still rather wet) and lay down. Immediately my body began contorting itself into strange shapes — shaking, constricting, and scrunching itself up into a kind of spontaneous supine fetal position. I would have been terrified if I were not already certain what was happening: my body was now spontaneously releasing trapped emotion.

    Kundalini awakening is a phenomenon not well known in the West, because it usually occurs after many years of dedicated spiritual practice — and most of the people who are dedicated enough to reach this point have historically been in the East, in countries like India, known for their spiritual heritage and culture.

    But in recent times, there has been a resurgence of cases of people in the West spontaneously having these awakenings. A friend of mine from the same town as me had recently experienced one, in fact. A quick search on social media, and it seems people were popping up all over Europe and America with their kundalini now active.

    The ultimate reason for these awakenings is hard to gauge, to say the least. I’d give you my opinion on it, but you’d think I was crazy, so I’ll save that for another time.

    As for me, the awakening set me on an irreversible path of what appears to be an exhaustive process of trauma release. No stone will be left unturned — and that is what it feels like.

    I have since spent hundreds of hours processing the emotions of fear (and its scary older brother, terror), shame, sadness (and its scary older sister, grief), anger (and its not-so-scary partner in crime, disgust, which together constitute hatred).

    This has been very intense, to say the least. I do not feel it is an exaggeration to say that, in the past 10 months, I have processed more trauma (trapped emotion) than the vast majority of people do in a lifetime. This is what the kundalini does — it cracks you open and radically transforms you, because somehow the universe thinks you’re ready for it.

    I have not always handled it well. Often I have turned to less-than-ideal means of coping. I have absolutely developed some egoic attachment to the idea that I have somehow been upgraded by the cosmos. These create new issues, and become part of the new emotional work I have to do.

    On the whole, however, the experience has been incredibly positive, since it has given me what feels like extraordinary insight into my own suffering — and, as a result, the suffering of many others. We are all very different, and yet our minds function according to universal principles embedded deeply into the fabric of reality. Perhaps this is the purpose of the kundalini awakening — to give certain people a kickstart in deep healing so that they may play a larger role in helping others do the same.

    I was already writing about the nature of consciousness, beauty, morality, spiritual awakening, and other deep matters before the awakening — but when I finally got seriously in touch with the well of feelings I had unknowingly been running from most of my life, I was able to connect so many more dots.

    And so I began The Art of Breaking Character as a book, a website, a spiritual coaching business, and a wider intellectual project — an attempt to tie everything together under a single framework. I see breaking character as the essential task of all healing, awakening, and liberating endeavours — including religion, spirituality, and psychotherapy — and the many ways in which it can be approached imply it can be considered an art.

    I would not recommend trying to activate your kundalini. I did not choose for this to happen. I can only deal the hand I have been given. And the hand I have been given means I feel I have no choice but to heal deeply and continuously, and spread what I learn in whichever ways I can.

    You do not need your kundalini active to heal deeply. And given that many people who have kundalini awakenings experience symptoms of psychosis because of the speed with which the process can unfold, it is not something that should be considered desirable for most.

    The kundalini makes it much easier to heal, but it can also be incredibly isolating. Who do you talk to about this? How do you live a normal life when every second of every day there is a chunk of trauma stuck in your system asking you to stop what you’re doing and feel it? Emotional suppression suddenly becomes a much more conscious and tactical game. Processing hatred whilst walking down the street will scare people. Processing grief when you’re staying with your parents will give them cause for great concern. Talking to others about the shame you feel will likely trigger their own shame — which they usually know very little about.

    Very few people will understand that you are fine now (for the most part), but you are faced with processing every moment of unprocessed feeling from your past, bit by bit— which, it turns out, even for supposedly mentally healthy and traditionally “sane” or “trauma-free” people, is a lot.

    It is somatic therapy on steroids, and very few people know how to offer the kind of support and guidance you need. So writing about it helps. 🙂

    Anyway — there you have it. Some context for this website, for my writing, and for me. There’s a lot more I could say — but where would be the mystery in that?

    If you enjoyed this post, and want to stay updated when I post new writings, which I aim to do regularly, consider subscribing.

    If you are interested in learning more about or supporting my work in any way, please see the page About The Art of Breaking Character, at the bottom of which are detailed some types of help and support I am looking for in my mission to bring the path of healing/wholeness/awakening to as many people as possible.

    If you would like to explore the possibility of working with me 1-on-1, I offer reasonably priced, flexible spiritual coaching. Find out more about this here.

    Thanks for being here.

    Love

    R

    @photosivetaken

  • Aphorisms #14: Shame & Judgement

    1 :: All shame is a kind of lie. It tells us we are insufficient – for being too loud, too dumb, too dirty, too nerdy, too fat, too crazy… We are nothing of the kind. We are distorted – yes. We are in pain – yes. But our value and our worth were never in question.

    2 :: It is easy to root out shame because there is so much of it to find. “What music would I be embarrassed to be found listening to? What people would I feel ashamed to be associated with? What would I feel humiliated to tell others is my job, or favourite hobby?”. In essence, the question is: “what do I think undermines my worth as a human being?”

    These are all portals to the release of shame and judgement – and thus portals to a wider and deeper love of self and other.

    3 :: Psychology is largely clueless as to the healing of shame because shame is rooted ultimately in a philosophical fault in the individual’s belief system, not a psychological one. Namely: worthiness/lovability/deservedness – is not conditional. It is a fabrication of the mind that must be unfabricated to restore wholeness to the psyche.

    4 :: Shame keeps people quiet. It is antithetical to boldness. And we could do with a bit more boldness right about now. So we could do with learning to heal a little shame.

    5 :: The belief that you do not deserve love hinders the entrance of love: a self-fulfilling prophecy. The deep re-cognition that it is your God-given right will let help release the shame, and let the love back in.

    6 :: We fear unconditionally loving ourselves (and therefore others) because we have learned (and become attached to) shame-based defense mechansims that keep us believing it is necessary for our survival to judge ourselves and place conditions around our own worth. Once we have taken a bite out of the forbidden fruit and determined that our worth must be conditional – on our covering our private parts with fig leaves, or becoming charming, hyper-successful, beautiful, etc. – we have signed up to a fragile game indeed. It is a self-reinforcing cycle that is broken only when it is realised that the snake is trying to eat its own tail and that all conditions placed on self-love are fabricated and illusions that are waiting be seen through.

    We can thank these illusions – and the parts of our mind that kept them in place – for helping us survive childhood with some self-esteem still intact. And then we can let them go.

    7 :: Once you understand shame you see it everywhere. We are obsessed with our worth (proving it, maintaining it, defending it from perceived attack, etc.) – because it evades us so relentlessly. And no one has yet taught us how to recover it.

    8 :: Growing up, we are unknowingly filled up with shame by our environment. If we were being cynical we could say that this was a kind of psychological warfare imposed on us by people in power – parents, the church, school teachers – who wish to control us by implanting us with a physusilly painful internal mechanism that keeps us from acting in ways they have deemed improper, shameful.

    If we were being a little more parsimonious we might consider that this is a necessary part of the arc of the human life – a closing, and then a reopening – a reflowering. The only issue is no one ever taught us that shame was just the first half of the story. This ‘myth of insufficiency’ awaits a proper ending.

    9 ::The deepest insight about shame: there is no such thing as worthiness, no such thing as deserving love. The statement “I am worthy of love” is therefore still a kind of illusion. It is as though one is standing holding a mirror, saying “I have fixed this broken mirror”.  The break existed only ever in imagination.

    Put another way, love is not something you deserve. It never was and never will be. It is the foundation of our being, and is only obscured by the belief that we have not yet earned the right to make full contact with it.

    10 :: The ultimate lesson we’re trying to learn to be shame-free and totally self-accepting is that we are unconditionally worthy of love, that we are enough as we are, we always have been and always will be. We just obscure/cover up the unconditional self-love inside of  us with lies that we must meet certain conditions to become worthy of love. This willl take time to see clearly, but it is helped greatly by learning to see that the people who taught you about your own worthiness (of love) – your parents and other family members – did not love themselves unconditionally, and therefore were teaching you based on their own shame, suffering and confusion. This allows you to see them with compassion, and then see that you can unlearn the lessons they taught you and re-establish your sense of self-worth and self-love.

  • Aphorisms #13: Miscellaneous

    1 :: (Cultivating the Witness)

    If we are to ‘become like God’, or rather become That in us which shares identity with God – the Atman – we must see the validity and sacredness for all things as they are. We must not turn our gaze away from that which we hate, fear, or find deeply disgusting or distasteful. It is in turning towards these things and recognising the necessity of their existence unflinchingly that we transmute aversion into divinity.

    2:: (Cultivating the Witness)

    “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone” – Alan Watts

    3 :: (Multiplicity (our “Symphony of Selves”)

    If I know what to do, why don’t I do it? Because the “I” that knows what to do is not the same “I” that doesn’t do it. We are a multiplicity – until our parts befriend each other and become a unity. Then the I becomes one and is free to dissipate into the All.

    4 :: Multiplicity (our “Symphony of Selves”)

    Take deadly seriously that there is living inside your mind a world of smaller islands of consciousness – sub-minds: inner children, inner villains, inner heroes, frozen-off men and women. They are listening all the time. They await from you a message of compassion and reconciliation. This transformed me.

    5 : (Philosophy)

    The greatest gift of philosophy is the opportunity for the evolution of our consciousness, a process that is synonymous with the accumulation of the deep wisdom of which philosophy is the love, and which is known elsewhere, depending on one’s preferred language game, as enlightenment, nirvana, salvation, or liberation.

    6 : (Philosophy)

    To the extent that we buy into false philosophies, we will keep finding ourselves pulled towards states of discontent. Delusion tends to be unstable, unproductive, and unpleasant, whilst “The truth shall set ye free”, even where it may at first be hard to stomach.

    7 :: (Money and the Rich)

    The problem is the same with the rich and the evil. At a certain point, their being so rich or so evil makes the rest of us lose any sense that they are still a human being in pain, stuck inside a prison of their own making. Both need a genuine and compassionate hand reached out to them.

    8 :: (Money and the Rich)

    Money makes the world go round only because we (the world) let it push us. Why not fight back with something far stronger – like wisdom, or love?

    9 :: (Physical Appearance)

    It is hard not to be concerned with one’s physical appearance (and appearances in general) when we are so unaware that the real source of our value is far beyond the surface at the centre of existence.

    10 :: (Physical Appearance)

    We are anxious about our physical appearance in proportion to the amount of shame we hold attached to the belief that our value is dependent on what we look like. If we did not hold this belief, if we did not harbour this shame, we would feel simple. There is nothing mysterious about it – we just have never been taught that these things can be resolved – and resolved permanently – if only we learn how to get to the root of things and see what it is we have been unconsciously believing, and what feelings we have unknowingly been refusing to feel.

  • Aphorisms #12: Miscellaneous

    1 :: (The fabled ‘surrender to God’): You do not need to know what you are surrendering to – God, the infinite, the Source, Brahman. In fact, you cannot know. No image or concept will scratch at the surface of the reality. The effect (and the magic) is in the surrendering – in the creation of a kind of void internally where the ego once lived. To flat out deny that there is an experience to be had here is the most obvious sign that one has not yet learned the internal magic of surrender that allows the deeper truths of existence burst into view.

    2 :: (“Higher Dimensions”) Why is it valid for the mathematician to postulate higher dimensions by the logic of the symbols on his page, whereas it is invalid for the spiritual seeker to postulate them from direct experience?

    3 :: (Dreams) Every night, the subconscious weaves together stories of symbols that, if we can discern the shape of the relations between them, will enlighten us as to the resolutions needed for our mind to undistort and evolve. That people do not take greater advantage of this is astounding.

    4 :: (Self-Acceptance) Self-acceptance might seem like a vague, or rather simple matter. “I accept myself, I accept myself, I accept myself” – say it enough times in the mirror and the feeling will stick, supposedly. I have tried it and it does not work until I dug deeper and looked at all the specific things I did not yet accept about myself. In practice, self-acceptance is achieved by an accumulation of small acceptances: of our sexuality, our capacity to love, to grieve, to play, to be aggressive, to be hurtful. What we accept, we integrate, and what we integrate becomes a healthy part of us.

    5 :: (The Inner Child): In adulthood we are often drawn towards that which life took from us in our childhood, or rather, that which we deemed it necessary to abandon. The traits and energies in others that we find especially compelling are often calling us to reclaim what was once lost, to reintegrate our lost playfulness, creativity, wonder, unabashed emotionality, capacity for healthy anger, spontaneity, silliness, enthusiasm – but now taken back up into the adult we have become. When we find these things in others, we are tantalised: for we are excited by what we unconsciously perceive as our own latent potential.

    6 :: (Mixed Motives) It is often very difficult to deduce the motivations for our actions until much later. Do I share the extent of my childhood trauma with you because I feel it will shed some light on your path, or because i have an aching unmet longing to have my own story of suffering witnessed? Likely both. Do I flaunt my sexuality because I believe it is good for others to have their triggers revealed to them, or because I have unconsciously learned to rebalance my low self-worth by garnering sexual attention from the eyes of others? Likely both. Am I generous because I care instinctively about others, or because I am afraid of other people thinking I am a bad person and so must force an image of heroism and altruism down their throat at every opportunity? Likely both.

    Our motives become purified as we walk the spiritual path, as we undergo the art of breaking character. But whilst they remain mixed we should be as forgiving and compassionate as possible towards both ourselves and others.

    7 :: (Honesty) Honesty is good not because “God says so” or because it is an inviolable moral principle that we must adhere to simply out of duty – nor because dishonesty is inherently sinful or counterproductive. Honesty is good (=moral = loving = wise) because it is an act of collaboration: “I will be transparent with you because we are on the same team in the fight against unconsciousness.”

    8 :: (Selfishness) We must attack the problem of selfishness directly: not with judgement, but with wisdom. Selfishness is damaging to both the individual and the collective. It works for no one in the long run. It has only a sheen of rationality, and only from a certain distance. The zoom in, or the zoom out, both reveal the incoherence of it.

    9 :: (Resistance to Breaking Character) My Dad is uninterested in enlightenment because (in part) he imagines total acceptance of experience to be a complete flattening of experience – a kind of perpetual numbing, a spiritual tranquilizer. My dad does not understand paradox – and has not yet felt the incontrastable bliss of God, “the love that has no opposite”.

    10 :: (Untangling Emotional Constellations) Emotions interact with each other in ways far more complicated than we would have ever predicted. We feel shame about our anger. We feel grief about how much aggression we received. We feel afraid of our anger, and we are angry at those who we consider to have made us feel afraid and ashamed. And perhaps strangest of all, we feel fear of our own fear, giving rise to the fabled anxiety. And so: the easiest, safest and smoothest way to begin breaking character and releasing the weight of the past from our present may simply be to create the safest space possible (eg. trip sitter, favourite calming music, in the bath, on the bed, under the covers, whatever it takes…) and say words to the effect of “yes, I am ready to release control of my experience, whatever past needs to resolve itself in me presently please do so. I welcome the release.”

  • Aphorisms #11: Language

    1 :: “To put it into words is to destroy it.” J. Krishnamurti. 

    2 :: The world as it is prior to description, as it is in itself, is without distinctions or demarcations. A tree is not a tree – it just is.

    3 :: All truths expressed in language are approximations. Everything I say is partially wrong.

    4 :: The sword of language cuts both ways: to harm and to heal. It is how we use it that matters. The most powerful sword is the one that has the greatest potential to both harm and to heal – this is the essence of the confusion around religious and spiritual language.

    5 :: Language is a series of signposts. But when these signposts are arranged in the form we call poetry, a mysterious window is formed, allowing more of the light from the signified (=what the signposts are pointing to) to shine forth.

    6 :: The world is wordless. Consciousness is wordless. The world as it is in itself has no categories, no boundaries, no demarcations of any kind. We tie ourselves in knots when we forget this.

    7 :: Metaphor is the highest form of language. It knows how to “carry across” what would otherwise remain an interminable distance between the description and the described.

    8 :: There is, technically speaking, no such thing as literal truth because all language dissects the undissectable, compartmentalises the ultimately unified.

    9 :: Nothing is decontextualised without becoming less coherent (=making less sense), hence why all language that tries to contain the truth rather than simply point to it inevitably corrupts (even whilst enhancing) our understanding of what is being pointed at (this is why I write mostly in aphorisms now).

    10 :: You cannot describe any object exhaustively without describing the whole universe – exhaustively. Everything really is connected. And if everything is connected, that means there is only really One ‘thing’ in existence.

  • Aphorisms #10: Miscellaneous

    1 ::Take deadly seriously that there is living inside your mind a world of smaller islands of consciousness – sub-minds: inner children, inner villains, inner heroes, frozen-off men and women. They are listening all the time. They await from you a message of compassion and reconciliation. This transformed me. ::

    2 :: “I need a man who…”; “I need a woman who…”.

    These statements are simply false. I may desire to have a certain man or woman in my life – but this is really because they help me find parts of myself I have not yet found by a direct turn inwards. In turn, I may reveal aspects of them to themselves too. A neat exchange – but we never needed each other – we just chose to find ourselves through each other. ::

    3 :: When we criticise ourselves for our shortcomings, our foibles, our people-pleasing, attention-seeking, cowardice, disorderliness, we are shaming a child inside of us who is confused and acting out. ::

    4 :: The scientist is on some level aware that there is treasure to be found by digging deeper into the present moment. This is the experience we would call, depending on the context, love, beauty, flow, awe, wonder, or total immersion in one’s work. But the scientist remains convinced that this treasure is the exclusive product of the fleshy ball of grey and white matter between his ears inside his skull, and can thus be discounted and demystified as evidence of the magic of the brain, rather than of the magic of the direct and uncorrupted experience of the present moment. ::

    5 :: Real strength is not the absence of any feelings of weakness. Real strength is the flexibility to allow and contain feelings of both strength and weakness, power and powerlessness, joy and grief, fear and longing, shame and love. This is part of the deep meaning of self-acceptance. ::

    6 :: All religions began with types of mystical experience that are available as much to you as they were to them. We might consider that the extent to which a religion obscures this fact is the extent to which it is interested primarily in controlling its followers. ::

    7 :: If in doubt on the spiritual path: feel. Feeling is healing, and healing is breaking character. ::

    8 :: If we could trace the current crises in mental health back to its origins, I am confident we would find implicated the establishment of reductionist materialist science as the mainstream philosophical lens of the West. In that transition, the world became founded on a lie that we are cogs in a blind and meaningless mechanism. It was only a matter of time before we all lost the plot. ::

    9 :: All the world’s problems have a psychological basis. Why don’t the rich share? Why does one nation see an enemy where another sees a friend? Why are more people than ever obese, addicted, depressed, anxious, isolated, disconnected, dissociated, alienated? All stem from a distorted psyche. The clarifying of the psyche of distortion is the only panacea. ::

    10 :: How much vitality would be freed up, how much sanity restored, and how much stress and pressure and pain and delusion dissolved, if trauma processing were made a top priority of our collective efforts at civilisation? :

  • Aphorisms #9: Breaking Character

    1 :: All peak moments in life involve the temporary dissolution of the character: beauty, love, ecstasy, creativity, oneness. ::

    2 :: Beneath the mask of the character is a world of potential that yearns to be born into the light. Denying this for a lifetime deadens us. Opening up to it gradually – lifting the lid on Pandora’s box an inch at a time – we find we are continually revitalised by the integration of parts of us we did not know we contained. ::

    3 :: The human condition is a state of near-perpetual delusion. Those of us who are not forced to do jobs we hate and to live in conditions of poverty, depravity or oppression believe ourselves to be free – and yet we find ourselves spending an extraordinary amount of time wrestling with the past and the future in the internal space in which our thoughts run riot over our ability to rest peacefully in the present. We are anxious, self-conscious people, living inside mental stories we have learnt to believe are the reality of our lives, stories we are so identified with that we imagine them to be our personality. This is the character from which we must break free if we are to discover how much more, and how much happier, we are capable of becoming. ::

    4 :: When most of the spiritual traditions and religions we know of now began, the technologies available for breaking character were very limited – hence they relied on things like group chanting, direct prayer, silent meditation, staring into fires – and so on. In the modern world, we have digital streaming platforms with all the world’s music at our fingertips, we have websites that will interpret the meanings of our dreams, and we have social media platforms that will connect us to healers and teachers from all over the world to help us understand and find release from the unique conditioning of our psyche. Breaking character is more of an art now than it ever has been: we should make use of this, and not insist on ancient methods for timeless concerns. ::

    5 :: The spiritual path – the art of breaking character – is hard. But so is regular life. At least on the spiritual path we are actively increasing our capacity to be with difficulty. It is also precisely what we are designed to do – the exact kind of difficulty we are built for. ::

    6 :: You will be routinely misperceived if you pursue the art of breaking character. This is far better than routinely misperceiving yourself – and everyone around you. ::

    7 :: We will make little progress in the art of breaking character if we are not willing to accept that we have been completely wrong about many things that we considered to be blindingly obvious our entire lives. This is a minimum requirement. ::

    8 :: Once we see a little into our predicament, it dawns on us that life is a lucid dream. We are ensnared in a drama of our own making and which we can only transcend by seeking the resolution to the story of “me”, or seeing with utmost clarity that it is but a story. Ultimately we shall have to do both to be truly free and unconditioned by this dream. ::

    9 :: We do not realise how much love we crucify to construct our personality. We do not know how much there is to reclaim when we learn to break character. ::

    10 :: You will find that if you prioritise the art of breaking character, everything else in your life will begin working out too. It may take a minute, but everything will slowly start whirring into coherence if you make internal sanity a priority. ::

  • Aphorisms #8: Consciousness and the “Existence” of “God”

    1 :: Spiritual traditions teach that an encounter with the divine is available only when the intellect grinds to a halt and a pure unself-conscious witnessing of experience takes place. And yet the scientists, analytic philosophers and materialists of the world continue to think themselves out of such a relationship, insistent that if God existed, He must be accessible via conceptual thought. The irony. ::

    2 :: The metaphysics of reality can be clamped by language of all kinds. In the most sober, unmystical terms, we might say that we are a local mind experiencing itself as distinct and divorced from a deeper, bigger, or greater Mind. Some call this the small self and the Big Self. Others call it man and God. Others still call it the self and the One. It matters not what it is called. The point is to experience it. ::

    3 :: We are prone in the modern day to thinking of belief in God as wishful thinking. Implicit in this is the assumption that ultimate truth cannot be consoling: that such a discovery would inevitably imply bias. The bias works both ways. Automatic disbelief is as erroneous as automatic belief. ::

    4 :: There have been many attempts to prove the existence of God. But it is much saner simply to look with sincerity: “Knock and the door shall open”. ::

    5 :: “The diversity of opinion on the matter of God demonstrates that there is no truth to the matter,” say the skeptics. Or perhaps we all see the same thing through different eyes. Love feels the same in every human chest, and yet what you call inner peace I call the presence of God. ::

    6 :: That God’s nature is love would seem absurd if we did not all automatically orient our lives around that very feeling, except those who have so completely lost the scent for it that they resemble its antithesis: evil. ::

    7 :: The soul longs quietly for an encounter with God. The mind works tirelessly to prevent it. The battle between the two is fought on the battleground of the body. ::

    8 :: There is no use filling our house with fancier and fancier things if it is at risk of collapsing any moment. We cannot build a sturdier house without stronger foundations. We must all learn to accept that reality is One Consciousness. No other foundation will do. ::

    9 :: Science’s concept of physical matter is a theory in the minds of human beings. A theory is an excitation of consciousness. How could a ripple in a lake create the water out of which it is made?* (paraphrasing analytic idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup) ::

    10 :: Nothing creates consciousness, for consciousness is that which creates. ::


  • Aphorisms #7: Trauma

    1 :: ‘The tyranny of the past’*(a term used by Peter Levine): trauma weighs us down with a lifetime of unprocessed feelings. If we wish to be lighter our task is simple, albeit not easy: learn to feel again; shed the past. ::

    2 :: Trauma is often not dramatic. Subtle indoctrination to the young boy that he must be exclusively masculine: this too is traumatic, for the boy inevitably shames himself for being half feminine inside. Now he must spent his life recovering his anima. ::

    3 :: Trauma would be much easier to resolve if we could only see clearly that we are dealing exclusively with illusions. The consistent recognition that the moment is always Now (and that the past lives on only in our bodies and our imagination) can aid this. ::

    4 :: Why is it so hard for a fed, clothed, physically safe human being to sit still for 4 hours?: trauma. The past wants to be reckoned with, to be released from the system. ::

    5 :: Trauma lives in the body. This includes the toes, the fingertips, the face, and the scalp of the head. It is everywhere. We have no idea how constricted we are by the unmet past. ::

    6 :: Healing trauma means closing energetic loops: feeling what was left unfelt, and relinquishing the lies we told ourselves to explain what occurred. ::

    7 :: Spiritual awakening – conscious evolution – involves vast trauma processing that includes such mundane things as releasing shame about being a messy eater. In the end, no stone will be left unturned. ::

    8 :: The heart closes when the trauma-body is triggered. A pure, non-judgemental, detached, surrendered awareness – of the unmet pain, and perhaps also the story associated – returns us back to the present, to peace. The heart may then reopen. ::

    9 :: To begin healing is simple: create or find a space in which you feel as safe as possible to turn inwards. Music can help greatly with this (my go-to is the album Music for Psychedelic Therapy by Jon Hopkins, and I found being in the bath, home alone, to feel like a very safe space to let go). Speak sincerely to your body that you are ready to release. You will be healed. ::

    10 :: The molested becomes the molestor. The oppressed becomes the oppressor. The cycle repeats until a loving intervention occurs and real healing may begin. ::