Tom's Nature-up-close Photography and Mindfulness Blog

Most people are going through existence just as they were programmed to go through it. Their reactions are reactions that were previously made to happen. Their reactions occur due to coming from what was previously formulated, concocted, and structured. They absorbed what was poured into them during their prior so-called “education.” Real education does not instill “what to think” inside you. Real education, rather, encourages people to investigate and understand “how they think.” Real education invites going beyond the realm of mere thinking. Real education doesn’t mold you; it helps you to be flexible, to intelligently question things, and to be individually dynamic in ways that are “out of the run-of-the-mill box.” Unfortunately, most people do not receive a Real education. Most people receive an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, pseudo-education involving conflict, rigid shaping of the mind, competition, obeying of dominance, conformity, fitting in to a rigid pattern, fear, and acceptance of antiquated values and beliefs. Students leave such so-called educational fields not as dynamic, whole, enlightened human beings, but (rather) as what was molded and designed to, without question, fit into the cogs of the antiquated wheel. They weren’t taught to “perceive”; they were taught to label, categorize, and accept. Those who taught them were equally programmed, shaped, molded, and made to react in certain rigid, stagnant ways. Unfortunately, such people lead rather boring, stale, obtuse, and indifferent lives. They became used to being bored, to sitting there surrounded by “sameness,” to sitting there accepting dull routine and endless, stale repetition. And then they end up in slave-like careers full of dull routine, stale repetition, dark conformity, “sameness,” indifference, crude competition, and boring patterns.

It’s tragic, really. If they didn’t mold you, you might be a danger to the lies, pretenses, and hypocrisy; and that just would not do. But to be unalive among those who are equally unalive is not living. Reeducate yourself — it’s never too late — wake up, transform beyond fragmentation, feel for so-called others, transcend beyond rigid (absorbed) beliefs, reexamine all that you have been indoctrinated to accept, look with truly fresh eyes, and go beyond all the crap that was piled into you (as your foundation).

Too many of us take too many things for granted. Too many of us go through the day being unappreciative and indifferent. Many of us look at everything with jaded, run-of-the-mill eyes that stopped really looking years ago.
Too many of us think that we are alive but, in reality, are not all that alive at all.

If you are truly enlightened, you do not crave or wish for enlightenment at all. Then each and every second is a majestic miracle that is far beyond what words can describe. Words, by the way, are so virtual, manmade, artificial, second-hand, fragmentary, and (in a big way) superficial. If one sees the world through a secondhand, absorbed series of words and learned mental images, one is not really seeing at all. Please go beyond these words and dive into the depths of life. Life is so very precious and beautiful… unless one has become secondhand and robot-like. And here is a little secret that i could whisper to the ear: The true beauty of life has no ending. If you think that it does, you were deceived and miseducated.

A lot of people have never considered this, but the “thinker” is a protrusion, a concoction, of the thinking process, not the other way around. There is no center — no central “thinker” — controlling “thoughts” via dominance from a psychological distance. There is only a mind of order or disorder. When thinking is not in occurrence, there is no thinker. (Actually, in a very fundamental way, there never was a separate, dominating thinker in the first place; a “separate thinker” is just a primitive fabrication of thought/thinking that has no real validity, no real existence.) This is not something to get upset or frightened about, unless you want to live perpetually in a primitive, barbaric framework. Living without the ego can be — and is — a great joy; it can be a blessed life of great benedictions and blessings. The alternative is to live an ordinary, mediocre life of perpetual deception and inner deceit (as so many do), and that is hardly real living at all. You are thoughts as they occur. You are the thoughts (as reactions), not something central having them; when that is fully understood, then there is the possibility of existing beyond them (at times), which is wonderful and high-minded (rather than merely selfish). Profound awareness often transcends beyond thoughts and thinking; such awareness is great intelligence and compassion.

Mostly existing in (and “as”) ideas from moment to moment may be a form of disorder. Ideas are often necessary, but remaining in (and “as”) the realm of ideas (and constantly thinking) may not be living whatsoever. Ideas are virtual, symbolic representations about things; symbolic representations, per se, are not living… they are secondhand, cold, and figurative. True order is a living, dynamic thing. It is not second-hand and composed of mere mental tokens.

Most of us look with the known; we look through (and “as”) a conceptual, secondhand screen of images, concepts, and symbolic labels. This looking may not be seeing much at all. It may be what is entrapped in a very limited realm. There is a real beauty in looking without all that one has been taught. Such seeing is not adulterated. It is pristine and beyond what is crudely limited and fragmented. Innocence is to look warmly without the cold contamination of conflict and limitation that society eagerly instills in so many.