This chapter contains what I said about it in the chapter ‘The Complete Theory’ and a more extended form from an older book, the book on which what I wrote about it in ‘The Complete Theory’ is based.
Now don’t say to me: “Bwèèhh, náááá, nòòòòh-h-h. ehhwwbbbffeeh, bubblybubbly, prrrr, pfff, ehh, awellehh, awellehh…” and so on, considering about what I wrote sofar, because next are stories of others, which say more or less the same. And important others. Very old teachings and teachers that say the same. I’ll just mention the most important ones:
● Older teachings ●
▶ Lao Tse (or Lao Tzu, or Lao Zi), who said in his Tao Te Tsjing (or Daodejing): “Wu wei”, as a way of how to live, which is often translated as: “not doing”, but which is better translated as “not doing with aforethought”*. You see: not with aforethought. Which is not doing with thinking (in or with your mind or brain) before you act, before you actually do what you were thinking of. So don’t do that, that is pre-fabricated acting. It’s not spontaneous, not from inner impulse. So,
Real life is spontaneous life
not pre-fabricated life. According to Lao Tse.
* A translation by a German professor who I can’t identify anymore (after about 50 years.)
▶ Nirvana, (Buddhism). ‘Nirvana’ is known as a realm with (inner) peace. The word Nirvana itself means ‘Being Free from Longings’. And now you know why.
Longings trigger your mind, trigger your mind to re-create old stuff, old rubbish, trigger your mind to create fake life, sculpted from old rubbish. Longings trigger stress. Longings are a burden, they create your prison. So, why should you escape from your longings: to be free of them, to get into Nirvana, in the realm of peace. (By the way, if being free of longings brings peace into your life, longings themselves bring you the opposite…)
▶ The Cristians use the word Paradise to point out the same situation Buddha pointed out with ‘Nirvana’. Because ‘Paradise’ is also a realm with peace. So ‘Paradise’ also means a situation without longings. It can’t be otherwise. Because you can’t be in peace and have longings at the same time, like Buddha taught. Or at least being free from longings, not attached on them. Which is something different – you have longings, but you are not attached to them (anymore) – but it works out the same, in terms of inner peace. For the other side, the ‘after’life*, they call this situation ‘Heaven’. (Note: not all the situations on the other side are peaceful, are ‘Heaven’. Surely not if you were tricked by some demonic influences – learn from NDE’s.)
* By the way, there is no ‘after’life. There is just one life, which lasts forever** in different situations and different kind of matter or non-matter. Life just goes on the way you choose.
** ‘Life lasts forever’ means you don’t have to hurry anymore :))
Just imagine yourself being in a situation without longings. A situation wether you have satisfied all your longings, (for as long as it lasts), or a situation wherein you don’t feel the need to satisfy them anymore, wherein you are free of them. Then you probably get a glimpse of what I mean, a glimpse of being without longings, a glimpse of the inner peace which is connected to the situation without longings = Nirvana = Paradise.
A lot of Near Death Experiencers came back with experiences like Nirvana, Paradise or Heaven like I mentioned here, but just a few of them mentioned the lack of longings as the cause. And if they did, they ‘just’ mentioned the feel they had, not how it worked. (Most NDE-ers lack analyzing their situation over there.) I try to explain how it works in this booklet. (The difference between having longings, which make you hooked on old rubbish, opposed to being free from longings, leading to Nirvana, Paradise, Heaven, leading to inner peace.) (I don’t know if Lao Tse did give a name to the state you reach behaving like Wu wei. Or is it being in ‘Tao’? I dunno.)
▶ And then there is ‘Pandora’s box’, which is a metaphor for the mind. Once you open it, all kinds of rubbish, trash and diseases* comes out. And it’s said, (not by all teachings), that also the hope comes out of Pandora’s box. And when you consider that: the hope is a product of the mind, it’s some kind of fantasy, a fantasy about a better future, a better life. It’s a longing for a better future, a better life, a longing for something which doesn’t exist**. So hope is not real either. (I read that once, in a book called ‘Karma Cola’, and I felt so relieved that I could drop this heavy hope at last. A teacher in that book said that if you want to live in the Now, you should drop all you remorses as well as your hopes. Which is fantasizing, longing, about something in the future. It’s not in the now.)
* Watch this: diseases or dis-eases.
** At least it doesn’t exist at this moment, in the Now. And while striving to get it, this thing you hope for, you overlook (real) life, which is happening now, Here.
▶ And then I stumbled upon something Gurdjieff said: “Man must use what he has. Not hope for what is not.” I’m not such a great fan of his, although he seemed to have said: “We are all asleep”. (…) Awake in our dreams, in our illusions, our fantasies, in our old rubbish, I would say. Not awake in real life.
▶ Plato.
Ooohhhhhh, pop up pop up, I think I finally understood this – June 4, 2023 – Plato’s allegory of the cave. Well, my interpretation of it.
Plato talked about two situations of awareness. One was of people who sat in a cave with their backs turned to the entrance, with their backs turned to the light, so they couldn’t see the light and only could see ‘shadows’ in front of them. They thought this shadow world was the reality.
The other situation of awareness was of someone (and maybe others) who turned around, escaped from this cave and experienced the light, which was outside of the cave. And this person found out that this world of the light outside of the cave was the real world, the real reality.
When he went back into the cave to tell the others about his experience, he was proclaimed a nutter. (That’s what I am afraid of too, after I told you that your mind is your prison, your cave. Sigh.)
Plato based his opinion on the difference of the material reality and the spiritual reality, where he thought the spiritual reality was perfect, more or less on this (in and out) cave situation. I don’t agree with his opinion about the spiritual reality. A spiritual experience can be hell also. Anyway.
For me this cave allegory explains the difference between the mind ‘reality’, which is the one in the cave, and the real reality, which is outside of the cave. Which is the difference of seeing of shadows of the past, being caused by the mind, assuming that is reality, and the real reality, a reality of light without ‘shadows’ of the past. (And I think these shadows are a metaphor for thouthtforms.)
Basically you are always looking backwards in your mind, seeing the past, when you are thinking. Then you are just mumbling around in your mind. These ‘shadows’, Plato mentioned, are thoughtforms about the past.
(By the way, thoughtforms are always about the past.) In the Light you can only see things which are real, which are Here, in real reality. And that reality is the one I am writing about. Well, after I wrote about the fake reality. Basically it is the difference between a floating ‘reality’, which isn’t a reality at all – it floats in your mind – and the real reality. Of course Here things can have shadows too, but those are real shadows, not some thoughtforms of the past, projected ‘outside’ of you, into your cave, your mind. In fact you project them inside of you. Anyway.
Sitting with your face turned to these shadows (you project on the back of the cave) all the time – which is (to me) a parallel of living turned to the past in your mind all the time – makes you seeing these shadows, thoughtforms, all the time and that makes you think they are the only reality. But they are shadows, thoughtforms, of the things which have past, of a reality which has past. Those things, those shadows, thoughtforms, are not as real anymore as when they existed in the present, they are just reflections of it. Called “shadows” by Plato and I think they are thoughtforms of things from the past. Seeing those shadows, thoughtforms, and thinking they are reality, is death in my opinion. Because these thoughtforms basically are dead. Thoughtforms are always dead. Don’t mix them up with living life.
Plato’s shadow watchers in the cave must have had a strong reason to look backwards all the time. (Like you also must have, when you do the same.) There must have been something in their past they still explicitly long for which made them look back all the time to get it back. (And who doesn’t know people who act like that. For instance: when a loved one suddenly dies unexpectedly leaving you with an empty space.) And then they turn away from the light, where they couldn’t find it, the missing loved one, anymore*, but that made them turn away from real life. (Just my idea about it.) Besides, real life is probably too painful for them, while this ‘thing’, this loved one, they still explicitly long for isn’t there anymore.
* You can’t find something from the past in the present. You think you have to look backwards all the time, thinking it’s still there, where you can’t find it either, because it isn’t there either. That causes traumatic sadness.
“Oh my God”, I mean “Oh Plato.” 🙂 Again: Plato may not have seen it like this, but it sure fits me. :)) And maybe he is one of those people who had an idea of our unnatural life, of this (self-created) simulation we call life, of our substitute* world, without precisely knowing what the cause of it was, (which I proclaim I do, ahem). (With Lao Tse and so on.). In short: When you live in your mind, you live in shadows, in your shadow-world, formed by your thoughtforms, in a simulation, in a substitute world is my idea about it.)
* Great song by The Who by the way.
(I’m sorry I wrote such a long piece about Plato, but it’s because this is the first time I write something about him.)
▶ And then you have The Tree of Knowledge, which is mentioned in Genesis, in the Torah, the Bible. And it’s said not to pluck fruit from that tree, because it leads to death (without proper explanation – bohoooh.)
First: The Tree of Knowledge is the brain. (I found this on the internet.) And this teaching in the Torah says not to use your brain. Which is the same Lao Tse says with ‘Wu wei’: Don’t act with aforethought, which, thought, can only be done with the brain.
Another reason (why not to pluck fruit from it) is that knowledge, from this tree of knowledge, is always based on the past, it’s from the past, so it’s old, it’s dead. So that’s also why, I think, you were said not to pluck fruit from this tree of knowledge, because trying to get fruit from something which is dead, can only lead to death. (That’s why it’s also said you will die, eating fruit from this tree of knowledge. So I prefer to call this tree of knowledge ‘The Tree of Death’. (And I don’t understand why they didn’t do that in the Torah/Bible in the first place.) Maybe the tree of knowledge was called ‘the tree of knowledge’, because everything in it, knowledge, is from the past. Anyway.
Later on “of good and evil” is added to “the Tree of Knowledge”, but I think that is just a modernism added by the Cristians who wanted to distinguish themselves from the Jews. And thinking about “of good and evil”, it doesn’t add much to the Tree of knowledge.
▶ And then you have Jesus, who said: “Let the children come to me.” Which he surely didn’t say just because he may have liked children. Sure he did, but I think he said that, because children don’t have a past. A past in their minds in which they can get lost, like we do, adults. So kids don’t create old rubbish, based on that past, based on knowledge, in their mind. So children live spontaneously, not curbed, braked by their mind. Children live real lives. (So – pop up, pop up – this is maybe why we don’t remember anything of our previous lives. Our obstructive past would be huge. It would kill us before we were born (again).)
▶ And there is the magical mirror. The magical mirror is part of a lot of fairytales, especially the mystical ones. What’s magical about it is that you can step through it and get into another world, a new world. It works like this:
In a mirror you can only see the past. But not only that. You are Here, in the Now, but it takes time for the light to get from your image via the mirror into your eyes. So there is a time delay. So what you see in the mirror, not only yourself, but all the rest which is further behind you, is always old. Stepping through this old rubbish you see in this mirror brings you in a new world. Now, isn’t that fun? So on this side of the mirror you can only see the old. On the other side of the mirror there is the new, in which you aren’t (yet).
The magical mirror is the border between the known world and the unknown, between the old and the new, between death and life. With your intuition you can step through it. With your intuition you can step through the mirror, through the known, through the past, through the old, through death, into the new, into (real) life.
Maybe the magical mirror is the best way to describe the pitfall (of your longings or whatever). Standing before the mirror you can only see the past, yourself included. And you live in the past on this side of the mirror, including all the old rubbish you created on this side. You live in a pool of old rubbish on this side. A pool of ruin. When you’ve stepped through the mirror, you live in the unknown, being able to experience new things. Being able to experience life. Ehh, don’t take a factual material mirror and don’t take this stepping trough than literally… 🙂
This magical mirror is, as I said, not a physical mirror. It could be a plane which is there, but you can’t see it. I think it’s something imaginative. It was more or less like Jodie Foster experienced in the movie “Contact” when she was ‘out there’. Great movie, by the way.
I once had an impression that one such plane was in front of me and that the ‘reality’ I was in would break in smithereens and vanish totally, if I would put my hand through this plane, or even moved my body a bit. I didn’t dare to do that, sat like a statue, and waited. After a while this impression went away and I dared to move again and go on with the things I was doing. Maybe this event was a preview of what I am talking about here, about a magical mirror, in this booklet. (I have the idea that in life we get previews of things which are going to happen. I think, for instance, that the Titanic is such a preview…)
▶ And there is Joseph Campbell, who said: “Follow your bliss.” And ‘bliss’ is of course your intuition – Lao Tse. There is nothing else that blisses inside of you. 🙂
▶ And there is a story in the Bible about Sodom and Gomorrah, in which God said to Lot and his family not to look backwards, because they would turn into salt pillars, dead that is. What Lot’s wife nevertheless did and she turned into one, a salt pillor, so she became static, dead. Again, looking to the past is killing you.
▶ Something about the Demiurg. This is going to be a detour, but an important one. That’s why I put it on a seperate page. (The Demiurg is some kind of a sub-God, a creator on a lower level than God. In a way this Demiurg creates the same way we create.)
Well, that’s it folks. Have a good life,
Ronald. PS:
Please send this website to anyone you know.