You Are Inherently Free: Awakening To the Fiction Of Self

You are free to be who you want to be. You do not have to follow the character description and script that has been written. The script that has been reinforced by family, friends, school, work, beliefs about who you are, preferences, aversions, learned neuroses, attitudes...every day in every way. Tear it up and throw it out. Release yourself from the bounds of a fixed and known 'self'. It's all a fiction.

The desire to define a self comes from fear. Fear of non-existence. If I say I am an artist, or a writer, a daughter, sister, lover, friend; these are all labels assigned that are readily accepted without question. We are not what we do or whatever socially constructed roles we fit into. It's all human-invented.  These are all what you are not. New-Age labels; being an Aquarius or a Libra, a number 5, a tiger or dragon in Chinese astrology - all are further descriptions of what you are not.

Escape isn't achieved through taking a spiritual path either. The so-called 'spiritual path' is a furphy. There is no path and there is no one to walk it. You are that which you seek. You are already enlightened. Of course enlightenment is another invented concept that does not exist. It's dualistic and based on the assumption that there is a someone to reach a something.

Where is this 'self', this 'I'? Try to point to him or her. Go on. Where is the finger aimed? Chest,  head? Then that's what's been pointed at: a chest or a head. Where does the 'I' reside? In the brain? The heart? The big toe? There is no little box inside the body that houses the 'I'. So there is a thought that says it's all 'me': the body, the brain.  How can that be? What is it that makes that particular body/brain organism a 'you', and this one here a 'me'? Where is the 'I' that is housed in each of these beings? Surely it must be the same 'I'? Just suppose it is for a moment, the same 'I'.  How could this be? What is it that is common in both humans? In all humans and all other species?

Consciousness. 

 This is prior to thought and emotion. The mind behind the mind. The objective essential awareness. This is the absolute. The non-dual existence that is consciousness. Objective seeing. It is all there is. Everything else has been assigned to each living human organism. Thoughts are not owned. The thought 'I' is just that: a thought. The 'I', the so-called 'personality', can not be located. 

So what does this mean? How does this effect your life?  If there is no self, then everything must be an invention right?  Constructed identify would indicate that all meaning is subjectively given. It is changeable and fluid. No fixed self, no fixed meaning. Academics would call this a post-modernist agenda. Yet this too is an invention.  Post-modernism is a form of literary criticism that posits all meaning as being polyvalent and fluid, so therefore there is no fixed meaning. It emerged from others: post-structuralism/deconstruction, structuralism/semiotics,  formalism etc etc...  The various ways of analysing a text - different movements of thought by people who set themselves up as experts and believe that what they posit as truth is the only truth. These are people who do not know who/what they are. Lost in the dream. Making sense of things employing literary strategies is a metaphor for the way we all try to make sense of the vagaries and vicissitudes of our lives, by deconstructing and inventing meaning for everything. 

There is no meaning. The universe is empty. The house is haunted. 

 It's not something people want to know about: this bottomless nothingness, the void, the empty hole where no one exists and nothing has any meaning. My advice would be to ignore everything I am saying. Just get on with your life. Save yourself from the inevitable fall if you pursue this. The panicked grasping onto the slippery sides of the dark hole down which the conceptualised ego falls.  To get to the place of truly seeing that you are essentially free and that the relative world is a well-constructed story in which you are merely a character, that has been written in to the movie of your life, in which you have the leading role, is an agonised letting go into meaningless nothingness. 

But really nothing changes - you still live your life. The only difference is you see that there is no separate 'you'.  You still love your spouse and children, still go to work and play. Still feel and think and do. All that is different is that seeing happens: seeing that it's all fiction and that meaning is made. It is felt it in your cells: this non-separation, this flow with all that exists.

When I paint a picture, there is no painter. There is hand-brush-paint-canvas-stroke-seeing-concentrating-touch-sight-movement : flow. That is all there is. Digging a garden there is no gardener. There are hands, shovel, breathing, feeling warmth of the sun, soil, weeds, sweat, aching muscles: sight, sound, touch, movement... 

Consciousness is what lies behind, underneath, above and beyond the invention of ego-self. It is the flow, the essential eternal (eternal meaning 'no time', not endless time), being-ness. It is felt at a cellular level - this engine of survival is merged with everything - no separateness - it is all one. 

You ARE essentially free. Yet the paradox is that there is no one to be free. The 'you' of which I speak is that which exists and always has existed, that which all members of all species share: consciousness. It is all you are and all you have always been. And always will be. 

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                                                                      - Mountain Daughter

Talking to No One About Nothing

In order to awaken, to be so-called 'enlightened', there are two questions that are useful to ask: What am I? and What am I not? To get to the answer of the former, it is necessary to unpack the answer to the latter. Who says? No one really... just thoughts gathering like clouds across a perfect, unchanging sky...

What you are not is everything you think you are. Everything aside from direct experience, is a story. 

So what is left? What is underneath or behind the story? What is it that sees, hears, tastes, feels sensation?  Without the editing, the back-story, the emotions linked to thoughts, thoughts linked to emotions, sadness about the 'past', anxiety about the 'future'.  

There is no one who can be enlightened because the husk is empty. The self is a deeply ensconced work of fiction that has been imposed since birth. All that we hold to be true is story. 'I' is just a thought.  Opinions about what is happening arise from the reinforced subjectivity of a false self - like a character in a play whose personality has been invented and whose lines have been written to fit that conceptualised persona.

Description of now 1:

Through the windows I can see muted sunlight and the blandness of a suburban street. I see my fingers tapping on the keyboard and hear a sanitised pop song coming from a radio in another room. Two of the annoying dogs in the house start barking. Their owner is in the bathroom readying herself to go out. A noxious chemical smell wafts through the house. My right knee aches from a past injury and I'm feeling hungry.

Description of now 2:

There is light.  There is a smell. There are movements, sensations and sounds.

Which of these descriptions is true?

For those who see, sustaining that seeing is the constant challenge of the ego self. Even 'ego' is a human-invented concept. Everything is. What gets us scurrying back into the illusion of self is when things go 'bad'. When everything is fine in our life, it is easier to sustain the seeing of no-self. Seeing that all there is is direct experience. That all there is is conscious awareness manifesting in bodies. Anything else is subjective posturing - thoughts being attached to a self. Opinions, feelings, fears, anxieties, aversions, desires, preferences: subjective positions that describe circumstances.

Thinking is a function of the organ known as the brain, just as filtering is a function of the kidneys. Thinking is necessary for the survival of the organism. There is no one to own the thoughts. They are just happening. There is no one reading this. Reading is happening. There is no one thinking 'what the heck is she talking about?' Questioning is happening. It is one of the mechanical tools the brain uses to navigate the world. The brain is an engine of survival. We are animals who seek to survive, just like all other animals. But unlike other species, humans complicate things with the idea of self and all the ownership and attendant drama that comes with that.

There's no escaping your subjectivity. All that can be done is that you see it for what it is. You'll still make meaning out of everything and see the world as it relates to you. The only difference is that you see that it is all invented; that who you have previously thought you are, is a construct. 

Words are clumsy and inept, and can only be directed towards the intellect. Seeing does not happen with the brain. It is beyond and behind intellectual understanding.  

Everyone is walking around in a state of somewhere else - believing the dramas of their life. Thinking about everything but what is happening right now.When the thoughts are seen for what they are; that they are not owned by anyone, what is also seen is what remains: and that is simply awareness.  That feeling when you wake in the morning, and for a second you don't know who you are and where you are or any of the circumstances of your life or what you will be doing today. That second of absence, absence of the story - when 'you' comes back, it's quite a hard fall back into 'reality'. So what remains during that second or two of absence?  The void, the emptiness of non-existence, death of the 'self' is felt as freedom by the returning 'ego'. It is in fact all we are, covered over as it is; all we are is that. Pure, conscious awareness. 

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                                                                                                  -Mountain Daughter

A Passionate Life

“You've got this life and while you've got it, you'd better kiss like you only have one moment, try to hold someone's hand like you will never get another chance to, look into people's eyes like they're the last you'll ever see, watch someone sleeping like there's no time left, jump if you feel like jumping, run if you feel like running, play music in your head when there is none, and eat cake like it's the only one left in the world!” 
C. JoyBell C.

The fictional character attached to 'me' that has been created since birth,  has always wished to live a life less ordinary. There has long been twisting, gasping and crying in the struggle to wrench free of the straitjacket of imposed subjectivity. She didn't know that she was already free and always had been. Now that seeing happens, by no-one looking at nothing, any meaning that this being once held to, has evaporated into the vast sky of naked, pure awareness. Like the bride stripped bare of her gown, the naked flesh merges with the other floating atoms in the dark, haunted room where there was once light playing on perceived loved objects that illustrated her story.  The text of that life is a palimpsest - offering moment to moment re-writes and erasures, in a game of 'Let's Play at Being Whomever We Want'. Like a child at Christmas who keeps quiet about knowing there is no Santa,  the presents are still accepted and enjoyed.  The gift of playing at life.

One of these gifts is passion. A life of passion is an embracing of possibility. It is a rejection of the ordinary, the mundane. I have no wish to sacrifice spontaneous passion on the altar of safety and the comfort of routine. Passion for the man I love, for what happens when paint is applied to a surface: the creation of something freshly born.  Passion for the natural world of trees and plants, earth and sky, birds, rivers and rocks. Passion is an urgent need to do whatever it is that moves you - whether it is planting a garden, writing a poem, running a marathon, or cooking a meal -  it is the juice of life. There is no doer, but much of excitement and joy can be happening. And yes, those feelings are still felt and value judgements are still made. Seeing the fiction of self does not mean that this being should live out her days in a darkened room with no one to love with ardour, nor creative pursuits to colour her world.

Passion in a relationship arises from appreciation, intense seeing of another,  and the desire to connect with their being-ness beyond the constraints and perceived limitations of 'personality.'  The domesticated human couple celebrating the inherent wild nature, circling each other with sparkling eyes. Kissing and touching as if it might be the last time. Immune to the invention called 'time', lost in the eternity of each enthusiastic moment.  Celebrating the connection between you; the sexual energy inspired by that person and the way you entwine as awake beings - united in the seeing in an un-seeing 
world.

 Seeing the truth about the meaninglessness of existence ideally should not be mutually exclusive with living a colourful life. Life is short and it is up to us to make it sweet. 

                                                                        
Floris Arntzenius - Passion, 1892

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                     - Mountain Daughter

Awakening and Respect for all Life.

I have been involved with animal rights activism and advocacy for about 27 years. The first time I was persuaded from my usual suburban languor to join the battle against normalised injustices, was with Animal Liberation Victoria, in Australia, back in the ‘80s.  There I was: banner waving, chanting, marching and sitting-in on demonstrations against the use of animals in circuses, the barbaric torture and killing of animals for their fur, duck hunting,  animal testing, factory farming, etc etc.. And  yet I wasn’t vegan; not even vegetarian. Young Mountain Daughter was all fired up and railing against the use of animals by humans, but still she ate their disremembered body parts and secretions, wore their skins and used products with animal-derived ingredients.  When the realisation of this alarming contradiction eventually hit me -  and it did, like a proverbial freight train: this disconnect between the fight for the acknowledgement of animal rights and my life-style choices - I was shocked and ashamed - and from that day on, I went about veganising my life. 

This looking outward and shaking a finger at others, yet not turning eyes toward one’s own behaviours, seems to be a common human trait.  I and countless others, have a vision of hope that human-kind will rise above this curious phenomena by way of a raising of consciousness, of awareness achieved through respect.  Respect for one’s self, the planet and all ‘creatures great and small’, with whom we will one day live in pace and harmony. 

Repeated ignorance gets mistaken for knowledge. What is normalised by the majority cannot and should not be assumed to be ethically correct. Just because it has 'always been done' doesn't make it right. Human-invented, subjective decisions about which non-humans deserve respect, love and care, and which need to suffer and die for human use, make no sense. And leaving such decisions un-questioned, perpetuates the injustice and cruelty.  What is needed is a fundamental shift in consciousness, that might lead to an ideal vegan world.

Some time back in the early ‘90s, I found myself wading waist deep in a cold lake, dodging bullets and the shouted abuse of men in camouflage clothing. Along with a couple of hundred others, I carried stunned and gut-shot birds to the first-aid tents. It was a war-zone. One ‘sportsman’, standing only a few feet away, aimed his weapon at my face and pulled the trigger. If he had not have been in an advanced state of inebriation, he would have been holding the gun steady and I wouldn’t be writing this now. I screamed and yelled and physically fought two men who were playing football with a live baby swan. I reported these incidents to the police present but they were more interested in eating barbecued duck.

 Some people counter the ethical vegan stance with the argument that we’ve always eaten animals and used them so it is normal. However, humans have also always committed atrocities against other humans; murder rape, slavery etc.. is that any reason to continue these practices?  A vegan planet would be one on which such things exist only in memory.  We need to evolve.  All animals should be treated with the same amount of respect. It’s not about humans giving rights to animals - it is that animals were born with those rights. Every sentient being has the innate right to live free of enslavement, torture and early death by murder. The idea that humans give animals rights is associated with the word 'compassion', which I personally have a problem with. It is generally an arbitrary gift bestowed upon the vulnerable by the dominant species. The truth is that all animals are born with the right to liberty. What would be ideal is a world-wide disabusing of the un-examined status-quo, where animals are the slaves of humans. And the way to see the wrongs we do to animals is through Awakening.

The individual self is a construct; an illusion that is confined to the dream-state of the human animal. When this is seen, it will also be seen that every sentient being has an innate right to respect that is not contingent upon perceived 'personality' or species. Once humans see the truth of existence: that all living beings are manifestations of the one consciousness, then the unfortunate, anachronistic decision-making about the fate of an individual life based upon species can end. We all suffer, feel fear and pain. There is no separation. Humans have always placed non-humans outside the moral community in order to enslave them. The deeper issue is the normalisation of using other species at all. Any use of animals for human profit involves enslavement and is not of benefit to that species.  This unfortunate paradigm must be seen for what it is, and undone.  It is about Awakening: seeing the truth of existence so then  the world can be seen as it is, so what can be created is a better reality of harmony and peace. 

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                                                        - Mountain Daughter (Jahara)

 

Who is Daughter of the Mountain?

Daughter of the Mountain is me and she is you. She is Wise Woman. The Feminine Nature. The One Who Sees.

 I have walked gently upon the earth for over fifty winters, experienced much and have more yet to experience. I am a trained counsellor, an artist, a lover of nature and silence. An animal rights advocate, vegan, gardener, lover, daughter and sister. These are labels that are merely pointers that try to describe a 'self'. I am an empath and a listener. More labels. Humility comes from seeing through the stories we tell about ourselves and others. What is seen is we are free and always have been.

I will share my experiences and listen to yours - everything from spirituality and ethics, to food, relationships and intimacy and much more as it arises.

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- Mountain Daughter