Look Within You

In this post I would like to stress the importance of practically doing this work by yourself without falling into the temptation that simply reading or listening these ideas your life is going to change. What will transform the way you hold reality resides within you and any external sources represent only a pointer pointing to what you already are.

Picture Credit: Tess Kaechelen

"Take full responsibility of your life by

realizing that you are the creator of it."

Consciousness' work has entered overwhelmingly and unexpectedly in my life. It is something that turned out to be so radical and life changing that I cannot help contemplating about these topics both for getting myself even deeper in the understanding of reality and to convey at best these ideas to you that are investing your time in reading my posts.

Today I was at the gym to work-out a bit and I was thinking what could be the best way to make you realize that reality has no objective qualities at all and that everything in life is ultimately relative and subjective. How can I open the possibility for people to question that the weights am I lifting are ultimately an illusion or better a creation of my mind and that they do not represent at all an objective fact? How can I make people understand that if a 25 Kg weight fall into my foot a lot of assumptions and beliefs of what just happened make me react in a way that seems objectively understandable? How can I convey the message that literally everything, you as a human included, represents a creation that can be constructed and deconstructed at will and that therefore does not represent an objective reality? How can I make them taking seriously the possibility that what seems so objective, as the wall in front of you, ultimately is Nothingness on which many assumptions and beliefs have been created and superimposed to make it look as something so concrete and solid?

This level of consciousness takes understandably a lot of time to be acquired especially due to the cultural assumptions in which we are completely immerse since our childhood. But this work represents something so radical that I decided to spend my time to allow people getting in contact with something higher and more profound than what reality is usually considered to be.

Grasping directly who you are will make you realize that only your creations can be hurt, destroyed, criticized, blamed, judged. Not you. Realizing to be Nothing means to be untouchable and only what it has been created, that is, what you think to be or what you identify with, will be subjected to all possible scenarios that life offers. Knowing to be Nothing means to be in charge of what you create in life and to take full responsibility for your human behavior and conduct in your daily life.

There is nothing, nothing at all that is objectively true in reality and that cannot be seen from a different angle. The objective way of holding reality makes you a victim, a perfect target of your own beliefs and assumptions about you and the world. Holding reality as objective bounds you to suffering and keeps you in a position of impotence in dealing life. It has to become clear that everything you see, think or assume is your own creation and if this creation is dysfunctional to your being a human it can be tossed out.

How can you make such a profound shift where you can experimentally test by yourself that you are the only author of your life?

Claiming that objects are actually nothing at all and that their existence depends on you giving them an objective reality sounds crazy. Isn't it? And it will logically always makes no sense as long as you hold yourself to be a material physical being that is living in an objective world independent from you. As long as you think to be a physical subject, anything you interact with will be considered a physical material object that exists separate from you, like the wall in front of you.

The shift in perspective that will allow you to realize that all reality is constantly created by you, Nothingness or Consciousness, cannot be grasped if you keep believing yourself to be a physical body or a mind because automatically the reality in which you live will be seen through the lenses of materialism. The belief that you are a human being is an idea that you have learnt from others. Your parents could have told you to be a penguin and for you that would have been you reality. A child is in constant need of surviving and it will trust anything you say without questioning. But if you are reading this post chances are that you are not anymore a kid and living life in a position of survival is not what you want.

In this moment most of you are living a Truman show (check my post "You Life Is A Truman Show"): you have swallowed for years whatever has been taught to you about your existential nature and you have lived life accordingly. You have been told to be a human that was born and that one day will die. It has been said to you that you live in a world made out of objects where other conscious people are present. It has been told to you that God exist or that does not exist. It has been told to you to be an Italian, a Swiss or a German. It has been taught to you to respect science as an authority in the matter of describing the Universe and to regard religions as the ones holding metaphysical truths. I could make an endless list of what you are taking for granted about you and reality.

Do not blame yourself too much, this is how we have been taught to act and hold reality and without other alternatives available we could have not done differently. However now is your job to realized that materialism is the real craziness of this world because this model does not correspond at all to your direct experience. You are so immerse in what you have learnt from others and that only appears to be confirmed by your senses that you cannot see the obvious.

You have given to others the power of shaping your reality. You have been blindly giving trust to your parents, family, culture, friends for years as if they had the absolute certitude of what they were communicating to you. These people probably have committed the same mistake trusting the environment in which they were exposed and so on back to Adam and Eve. What if the message that has been communicated was either wrong from the very beginning or got distorted as often happens playing "Chinese whispers".

How do you know that what has been told you to be is true? How can you rely on others to know who you are? Does not this approach make no sense at all? If others, and generally speaking, any external sources cannot be truly trusted, should not be more sensible to take the time to verify what you have believed so far?

Does not sound sensible to conclude that if your true nature turns out to be X, all reality is likely to be made out of X as well? So, if you discover to be a bunch of atoms bound together to form your body, that is what you will project in the world looking at others and at reality as an agglomerate of atoms. If you think to be energy than you will hold reality to be an immense ball of energy. Do you understand the importance of being sure of who you are?

What you think to be defines what you can offer in your daily life. What you believe to be is what shapes your life. What you assume to be is what influences your choices. What you have agreed to be affects how you relate to others. What you are is what sets your limits, obstacles and fears. I therefore believe, that before holding as an objective true something that concerns such a delicate topic, it is worth to double check. Just in case. Nothing personal.

Who else can verify who you actually are if not yourself? It is not an accident that spiritual teachers or people simply interested in consciousness work invite you to look within yourself to solve this intriguing question. Where else would you look? The answer is within. And understanding who you are allows you to grasp what others people are, what an object is, what reality is, what the entire Universe is and from this level of consciousness you will walk through life with a different attitude.

By looking within, you will discover that what you thought to be the subject of perception is in reality another object that can be observed and recognized as you currently easily do with a tree, a rock, another person. You will realize to be that which is aware of everything, that which never leaves your experiences because it represents what your experiences are made out of. That is the real and only subject and from this point we can move forward to realize that this subject is the only things existing and therefore there are no proves at all showing that reality is made out of objects (a topic for future posts).

Although looking elsewhere than within you, such as in a book or on Wikipedia, can be useful to collect any imaginable information regarding the world, existential answers cannot be given by anyone else than you. If you want to walk through this journey you will have to do it by yourself because the matter we are dealing with cannot be represented in a chart doing some statistical calculations. Neither science nor religion will never be able to show you what reality is made out of and who is the ultimate responsible for the Universe to exist. Discover who you are and all the pieces will come together.

Doing the practice of just sitting half an hour or dedicating some time to tackle these questions is not a waste of time. It is something that will make you save a lot of time in the future. After my PhD I voluntary took some years off from anything that could steal time from this work because I have realized the importance of this journey. It is hard, definitely. Social pressure, lack of money, not making progress, the culture we live, people that are not interested in this work might tempt you to give up. And the easiest way out would be to simply go back to live life as before, unconsciously.

I will never regret this choice even for the best salary ever. Unconsciousness hits you hard no matter how many money you have. Unconsciousness costs a lot to you and to society. Money, parties or success will not make you face your limits, your fears, your beliefs. They just hide them but sooner or later the bill that will be presented at you will be pricey at the expenses of your own happiness.

I want you to get full responsibility of your life and the only way to do so is by looking within you. Who are you? Who is aware of the world? Who is aware of your emotions, thoughts, sensations, mind chatting? The body? Mind? Atoms? Energy?

Who?

Thanks for reading.