The Art of Breaking Character

1 ::  Breaking character is an open game. There are better and worse ways to play the game. There are more and less distorted ways to dance, dress, sing, organise, socialise, moralize, cooperate, fornicate. But this does not exclude the need for – and the joy of – creativity in pursuing the divine.

2 :: All religions and spiritual traditions teach the art of breaking character. The character is always severely limited. No actor becomes more of himself by submgering himself in a role, if for no other reason than that his lines are fixed, and the events of his life pre-determined by the scriptwriter. ::

3 :: The totality of the self: “the self contains all things,” as a mentor once said to me. Any shape life can knock your mind into, it can knock mine into as well. Every human mind is infinitely malleable, for good and for ill. The extent to which we deny this is the extent of our repression. ::

4 :: If in doubt on the spiritual path: feel.

5 :: “The most important skill on the spiritual path is the capacity to stay with experience” – Artem Boytsov

6 :: Most religions and spiritual traditions offer grand solutions to our deepest concerns. But many of these claims feel otherwordly, utopian, unrealistic and altogether incommensurable with our day to day concerns, fears, hopes and dreams. The art of breaking character offers a wider lens on the spiritual path that includes every expansion of our personality we may wish to seek out – getting over our fear of public speaking, learning to improvise on the piano, cultivating the courage to approach someone we find attractive, trusting the body’s ability to process emotions without our conscious control. It is of paramount importance that we learn to see that all thought-based limitations share a common feature: they are illusions kept in place by our continual belief in them and our (often unconscious) refusal to feel the trapped emotions associated with those limiting beliefs. ::

7 :: 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. ::

8 :: The religious impulse is simply to reconnect to our source. We cannot help but long for this. It drives the scientist’s curiosity as much as the priest’s religiosity. We are all asking the same question in different language: and the answer to all of them is One. ::

9 :: Every action is a refracted yearning towards God. Only when there is no refraction is the yearning pure. ::

10 :: Spiritual awakening – aka. conscious evolution, the journey back to wholeness, the path of enlightenment – involves vast trauma processing that includes such mundane things as releasing shame about being a messy eater, and re-learning to be unabashedly silly as a child. In the end, no stone will be left unturned. ::

1 :: “There is absolutely nothing fundamentally to be afraid of” – said Alan Watts. All fear of what is not present is therefore imagined. We do not need to carry round fear in our system. Our body will generate the physical sensations of fear if there is a real danger. But we are paranoid people, and we seek an exaggerated degree of control, and so we imagine an array of fears that are not present, based on misinterpretations of past threats, and hold this fear in our system so that we can remain ‘safe’. In fact we are wearing ourselves down with stress and anxiety because we cannot let go of the sense that we must preemptively guard against threats that do not exist. ::

2 :: Until we begin to heal some of the unconscious shame inside of us, it will remain very hard to tell the extent to which what we call our “personality” – the “real me”- is a coping mechanism to compensate for and keep at bay feelings of unworthiness.

3 :: To love another being involves a pure non-judgemental witnessing which, seeing no distinction between observer and observed, seeks to be of service to the well-being of the observed as if the two were really one (because they really are). ::

4 :: All judgement is self-judgement. We judge ourselves through others. When I judge another, I am experiencing unconscious shame at the sight of something I have not accepted in myself. ::

5 :: Nothing is inherently shameful. Evil is wrong in that it is unwise, not that it is shameful. Shameful implies the lowering of the individual’s value, the reduction in their humanity, the corruption of their worthiness and deservedness of love. This is always a lie. ::

6 :: I think I am afraid of [insert fearful scenario here]. Really I am afraid of how I feel when [insert fearful scenario here].

7 :: Jung was right when he said “Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation”. Repressed anger bleeds out in all sorts of strange ways. This is the real meaning of micro-aggression: the perpetually untidy room, the carelessness with which we may drop our belongings onto the floor or table, the self-destructive tendency to abuse the body with drugs, alcohol, poor quality food and little sleep. And the list goes on: the perpetually short temper; the argumentativeness; the subtle moments of rudeness, shortness, abruptness; sarcasm or snide comments; withholding affection, kindness, gentleness or eye contact; forgetting commitments.

8 :: Grief is a tax on the belief in permanence. ::

9 :: We are afraid of fear because we do not understand it. What we really fear is the overwhelm of emotional entanglement – the conflation of physical sensations with a mental story, thought or belief. When we confuse these two, fear becomes FEAR and then we tend to resist it. This resistance creates a flavour of instability and discomfort we call anxiety. ::

10 :: Emotional entanglement: when neither the physical sensations of an emotion nor the mental story associated with those sensations are witnessed clearly, but instead are conflated, as if trying to watch the television and listen to the radio simultaneously, rendering two otherwise very manageable phenomena as one indecipherable and overwhelming mess. If complete attention can be brought to the physical sensations alone, this can be enough to prevent mental spiralling. If an appropriate degree of surrender can be accessed and maintained, the emotional energy will release itself and be gone forever. This is how we shed triggers. ::

1 :: Morality is truth reflected in action. ::

2 :: Morals are relative. Morality is absolute. ::

3 :: Self-transcendence is the goal of both awakening and morality – hence why awakening feeds morality and morality feeds awakening. ::

4 :: I am not me. You are not you. If we act this out, we act morally. ::

5 :: No one said morality would always be easy. That does not mean it is not real. ::

6 :: As a matter of fact we share a common identity in the Organism of reality. Acting out this truth, we come to feel it more deeply. The more deeply we feel it, the more we act it out. This is how our morality picks up steam. ::

7 :: Morality can exist without judgement. Morality can exist alongside the recognition that evil cannot be truly parsed from the quotidian good (=selflessness). Morality requires only a fledgling capacity to love: to see the unity shared across an apparent divide. ::

8 :: Internally morality must stem from love. Externally it must be founded on wisdom. The connecting of the two will save us all.

9 :: Kindness is kind-ness. We are of the same kind. Acting this out, we give birth to morality. ::

10 :: Immorality reflects a lack of wisdom. It is a flavour of unwisdom. ::

1 :: Craving certainty regarding matters of the spirit is a refusal to surrender to the implacable mysteriousness of existence. It is an attitude of control that enhances the crystallisation of the character, the  small self, the very structure we must release our grip of if we are to find something of lasting value. ::

2 :: The Illusion of Misdirection: that so many people think they are looking for something other than God (=love, bliss, the divine, Allah, Source, etc.). There is nothing else to look for. ::

3 :: 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 a story. Ultimately we shall have to do both to be truly and free and unconditioned by this dream. ::

4 :: The human condition is a whirlwind of self-concern. What makes us happy is the temporary dissolution of the human condition. Love, beauty, friendship, charity, creativity – only when we disappear do we find what we long for. ::

5 :: 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 :: 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. ::

7 :: The mountain has been climbed enough times – Jesus, the Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, Sri Nisgardatta, Neem Karoli Baba. It does not matter if they described it differently. It does not matter that they got their via different paths. It does not matter that they say it is a long and hard climb. We know the mountain exists. We must stop making excuses. ::

8 :: 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 evolve and undistort. That people do not take greater advantage of this is astounding. ::

9 :: Emotional entanglement: when neither the physical sensations of an emotion nor the mental story associated with those sensations are witnessed clearly, but instead are conflated, as if trying to watch the television and listen to the radio simultaneously, rendering two otherwise very manageable phenomena as one indecipherable and overwhelming mess. If complete attention can be brought to the physical sensations alone, this can be enough to prevent mental spiralling. If an appropriate degree of surrender can be accessed and maintained, the emotional energy will release itself and be gone forever. This is how we shed triggers. ::

10 :: The religious impulse is simply to reconnect to our source. We cannot help but long for this. It drives the scientist’s curiosity as much as the priest’s religiosity. We are all asking the same question in different language: and the answer to all of them is One. ::