Hilltop Thoughts 2/29/2020 (Revisited 1/2/2022)

I remember the feeling before going out on the this walk, there was so much energy built up within me, there was so much chatter, and I knew rebirth was occurring.  

In this life we experience events of trauma and immense suffering scattered throughout the short time-line that we’ve been given but it’s not so much the situations or circumstances that we’ve been dealt that boil our blood and melt our hearts but rather the constructed stories that we build around them; it is the aversion, the judgement, the grasping, this is the false reality that truly makes us suffer; constructing a symphony of torture is only compounding our problems or situation. Many think that if we accept our darkest thoughts that they will consume them and this is not the case; it is never in the acceptance phase that impulsive and negative decisions are made but rather in the resistance phase; it is in the moments when we feel these things should not be happening or that they are wrong – and in fact that may very well be. I shall echo this: “Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. And if they will not adapt to me, I will adapt to them.” There is freedom within the acceptance of our darkest thoughts, nevertheless as I and many enlightened teachers have said: we are not our thoughts.  

          The life of a child, of the untainted youth, in most cases, live fearlessly and compassionately; but as we grow old we experience pain and suffering of great feats, our perception of life then gets skewed due to our conditioning, we tend to misplace our childhood innocence and curiosity, we then grasp to “hope” which is merely a false means of comfort to better days; but with the seemingly optimistic connotations attached to it, truly “hope” is just to generate another form of longing-torture; it is merely another desire in the form of wanting or hoping for a different outcome thus only generating more unnecessary suffering because of the possible undesirable outcome or situation. We imprison ourselves, we feed our egos, and again, this is our choice. Whether we choose consciousness and put a stop to it is only within our own power. This ‘stop’ that I speak of is in an observational validation of the thought process, knowing that, yes, it flows, and at times floods rapidly, but we mustn’t build a dam around it. A fixation is an obstruction to the thought process, it is a blockage, it is a dam – our thoughts are meant to run freely akin to us.

          Thoughts are impulsive and stem to our primitive minds with the means of survival. What this means is, now that there is a newly evolved sense of consciousness, as well as a sense of comfort amongst society (by that I mean humans moving away from hunters and gatherers and even agriculture) our minds now fights with one and other and even each other out of boredom; our ego taunts our consciousness because it always desires more, it becomes frantic, it wants to hunt, it wants to survive, but it is no longer familiar with its surroundings so it cowers in fear and creates resistance towards progress and to consciousness itself – it clings to its primitive nature yet it’s conflicted with the natural components of death due to the attachment to the comforts of life that are manifested by the ego’s confusion to consciousness. It’s as if us leaving our primitive state (despite it being incredibly interconnected with nature) poised us to confusion as our mind expanded – and it is more so in the conflict of confusion rather than the acknowledgement and acceptance of the mystery that we seem to misunderstand all while too trying to grasp all. Just like life is a paradox, our ego is as well (along with its many layers), and even aspects of articulating consciousness are paradoxical.

We must find something challenging and self-validating, with constant development and progression, a connection to ourselves and to others, in order to consciously remain at peace with being insane because there is no sanity in humanity. The human condition itself is an all-knowing disease; it stems from fear and arrogance in order to protect itself, and just like any mental illness begins with the assumption to know; the ability to not know is the most abundant wisdom one can obtain (or not obtain). These states of consciousness are again paradoxical and one with life; they make no sense yet they make perfectly blissful sense; there is no explanation, only observation – the reader may not comprehend this but there is nothing to comprehend.  Just as bodily illness arises due to lack of care, adequate vitamins, sunlight, diet, etc., one will then get ill with a self-induced progressive force; whether it be a disease, virus, or a bacteria, the body must be ready for it; it must be ready to heal, and this is innate to the body but it first must be taken care of and respected. We must take proper care of our body and mind so when a self-inflicted battle arises we can see right through it and overcome it by making peace with it and too acquiring loving and productive action.

          Some minds require knowledge or intellectual stimulation more so than others because their perception of the world is so broad that it can become overwhelming. Therefore, the mind must be stimulated with learning; people of all types are meant for self-education but there are a handful that are consciously in tune with their creative genius towards life and have artistic spiritual gods within that are hungry to get out. Every time I write, it is a purging of spirituality – it is this intuitiveness that works beyond my ego from a nondual perspective beyond good and evil – it is a God observing the flawed patterns that inorganically arise through the great sufferings of life – but she too knows that it’s not the sufferings generated by humankind but more so the conditioning stemming from the expectations, the stories, the fears, the judgements, and the aversions; the great Mother knows this and will play dark jokes upon their counterparts with the lesson to laugh at life and never take it too seriously. It is the ones who take art up as a mastery that emotions run ramped with notions of being, in many moments, we are overly in tune to human emotions and hypersensitive to the world around us. There’s peace within knowledge and peace within doing absolutely nothing – these two are to be naturally balanced – the comfort of doing nothing is to be appreciated without shame or guilt and is to be reinforced with productive practice. Truth is paradoxical but practicing radiant presence, this nondual state of reality, it’s very much logical and innate but words cannot truly describe the grounding and natural state of being that it brings – it’s felt within the bones, within our very last decomposing component. It is within being comfortable with being uncomfortable and in no way is this masochistic – it is simply the Kindness of all kindnesses; it is the Absolute Presence of Time and in this there is true freedom and no time at all.

          When I consciously choose to torture myself with creative thoughts projected by my ego’s fears I stifle my creative genius; internal conflict occurs and symptoms become blatant (heavy chest, clenched jaw/throat etc.). I’ve experienced them before despite me thinking that they feel new; it’s the same pain, the same trauma, the same confusion, the same fears, just recycled over and over. I’ve made it through the tunnel again and again but the fear of “what if” comes into play to repeatedly feed the fears of the ego – though I’m aware but there is something within that likes to bring a 3-act play to the reality of our life. The pain body is simply one great fixation recycled over and over again, and though it feeds off of different experiences, it all stems from the same traumas. This only occurs because the fixations we construct dam up the natural stream of thoughts – an event in our life strikes the match of past experiences, good or bad, and our attachment to them, this causes conflict and in many times our fixations will arise in projections upon others, or with symbolic meaning, or just a blatant distraction from what truly ails us – which is nothing! Nothing ever could possibly hurt or inflict any sort of pain other than the stories that we tell ourselves about our suffering – the only thing that truly ails is the attempt to escape what it is naturally trying be observed, felt, and expelled. In these moments even our dreams are seemingly warped.

Vocalize any fear you have and tears will fall, and in most cases, this is the root; pull it out and heal. It’ll always grow back, like a weed, but again, the only difference between a flower and weed is judgement. The dam will eventually break but the sooner the better. Life is short and time is not to be wasted. If there is one thing about thoughts, it is that they are naturally meant to flow through your mind-stream and gently back into the Universe; this is the shared flow of all emotions, both good and bad, but again, the Universe is not a judge nor is Presence. “Good” and “Bad”: this is simply the ego’s terms in order to have a better understanding for what will never be understood; Consciousness innately flows beyond fixed morals. And though fixations are natural (as far as human conditioning is concerned), the ability to feed them is not; it is simply a blockade to presence. It may be natural to our shared conditioned nature but look at the unnecessary suffering around us that is all stemming to this seemingly negative connotation of having depressed, fearful, anxious, or any sort of none-neutral states of thought, and are merely absent of just being; all emotions are conclusively temporal should we choose to accept this. If presence was welcomed, the natural states would flow like the seasons. Happiness is a temporal state of being along with every other emotion we experience; one can even disrupt happiness by longing for it. We rob the present moment because we fear it ending; we interrupt it when it’s pleasurable because we don’t want the pleasure to end. Our conditioning promotes constant and unnecessary suffering – we suffer because we choose to fail to abide by what is natural to us and we do this all out of fear and desire to control what is controllable: Life. We substitute this powerlessness by addictive forms of thinking and habits; both negative and positive. Examples: Positive – meditation, exercise, inquiry, creativity; Negative – mind-numbing stimulants, a lack of awareness to the body, ignorance, repetitive laziness.   

For a long part of my life I’ve feared sickness and death coming to visit me; I saw my mortality as fragile as chilled class and within this self-perpetuated story, I realized that I was already “playing dead”. My ego-driven attachment to life was devaluing its meaning: to live. Our purpose is simply owed to our own doing, our compassion is simply owed to loving ourselves as much as others, and our death is owed to the life we choose to live. One day, this toned and bronze body will cease to exist – what’s next is beyond the mysteriousness to what this world already has to offer. But, fuck it – who cares… living for the now later produces the how.

I once was voluntarily frozen in time; solid and patiently waiting to thaw out – a cloud of sadness once consumed me as my ego attempted to ruin me. This pain, this grief, these invisible fears, I continued to make them real – and though some are truly unavoidable, the stories that I tell myself about the events that I may or may not experience, become torturous, yet I’m here, and I’m neutral to them – I’d say it’s a numbing sensation or apathy but it’s not because I felt every little thing. I’d imagine that this is where training in Awareness has come into play. I was not living nor was I dying, I was simply just breathing. I was feeling so many states of angst, so much pain, so much uneasiness, and I accepted it; even if my ego thought that it didn’t, I did. I feared it not. I did that and continue to do this quite simply because there is nothing that I can do about it other than to accept the thoughts that construct whatever story that may be, because it is more than natural to observe and release.  

“It’s okay,” said the Universe.

“It’ll all be okay,” cried the Rain.

I was then surrounded by the Great Mother and within my words I again found comfort because I had written them when I knew who I was – therefore this reminded me of what I am and more then capable of: infinite possibilities. “Do your work and I shall know you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.”

Those words and observations were written during a bout of heartache. They were articulated during a rebirth. 1/2/2022, today I read them and barely revise them. Just yesterday I felt a moment of immense grief and pain because I missed my fuzzy little friend Gizmo and Taz along with all of the others who have left – I saw his face in the face of another dog and it was beautiful – I spoke how much I missed him and tears immediately ran from my eyes, my jaw became weak; I accepted it all, all of the pain and sadness, all of the old traumas and the weight of the pain-body – in an instant I saw all of our memories, both good and bad – they were so vivid that it was a time-machine to those exact moments – this is what Presence is: feeling as you do in that very moment – it then becomes absent of Time.  

            The same thing happened weeks prior. I carried a lot angst during the holidays (as many of us tend to do). I missed my Great Aunt Rose and I knew this and when I listened to her voicemails that I’ve saved tears poured – I asked for her and I felt the electricity run throughout my body, it was tingling, it was an energetic hug that was then followed by the rays of the sun and the shelter of the soft clouds. She couldn’t stay for long but it was enough – I then saw her immortality all around me – I saw her in the bare tall trees and beyond it: I saw her in the clouds. I saw and felt my Zizi.

            This is the ‘observe and release’ method – I don’t own it, nor did I create it, but I do embody it. I don’t speak about my personal spiritual experiences often because they’re inarticulate by words – though I do feel that there may be understanding within this entry/essay, whatever you may call it.  

Waiting to die:

This is what heartache feels like,

It’s a frozen block of time

And an absence of the mind –

I’m not living nor am I dying

But my eyes constantly feel like crying;

Solitude has become a prison

And my favorite world,

The one I lived in,

Has been covered in snow and frosted dew –

It’s a dense haze because that’s all I choose to see through;

So, I cling to soulful words to possibly set me free,

I listen to the wind as it whispers “Let it be…”

I’ve been struck by abrupt pain

And vividly remember the pouring rain;

But in a sense,

I’m doing just fine –

With perpetual patience

The sun will again shine. 

          So, I say unto you: Look deeper than what seems grim, and you will forever win and win.

©2022 Michael Angel Loayza Jr.

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