Jaguar Prince

To be alone...

What does it mean?

To be alone has nothing to do with being physically isolated. An ascetic who lives on a remote mountain slope in the Himalayas may have more company than an ordinary passer-by in overcrowded Shanghai.

To be alone means to have total integrity. This integrity is compromised when one lives with an ideal, which usually takes the form of a parent figure whom one worships, obeys and tries to imitate. People who don't have a devotional temperament may also live with abstract ideals of purity, goodness and omniscience. All these things are just inventions of the mind which create a division between what one actually is and what one desires to be, between a so-called spiritual nature or higher self and a material nature or lower self. Therefore a person who is burdened with ideas and ideals cannot have integrity. He/she can only have safety and the illusion of being and doing something personally: 'I am the creator of my destiny, which I shape according to a tangible standard of holiness handed down by the masters of yore.'

Integrity means both oneness of being and honesty. A person who strives to be come something is bound to deny the real and is thus profoundly dishonest. In denying the real and striving to become the unreal, there is also violence and repression, which means that the idealist is also a despot, a man of blood and war. There are no holy wars.

Only the man who has cast aside effortlessly all ideals is al-one. Being alone, he has perfect and unshakeable integrity, which also means perfect honesty and perfect lovingkindness towards himself and therefore towards all beings. This aloness is an absence of all measuring tools and yardsticks, of all models and masters, of all things that help one or guide one. It is therefore frightening to the extreme to the ordinary mind. Only the mind which has embraced aloness knows the infinite delight of leaning on absolute nothingness, which is the real meaning of the word "faith".

What one is depends entirely on the Whole, the Cosmic Aliveness, All That Is. There is not a single detail of "your" experience that is foreign to it. From moment to moment and in total discontinuity there arises a localized awareness which includes both the particular body/mind and everything that comes within its field of consciousness. This field of consciousness is totally unique, for nobody sees exactly the same colors and shapes as somebody else, but the paradox is that this awareness has no owner or experienc-er. It is absolutely impersonal.

Impersonal yesterday, today and tomorrow. There never was a time when the ego existed as a separate entity with a name and a story (except as a social convention). Egolessness is not something one discovers at the end of a strenuous career of mortifications, service to others, penance or meditation, for the ego never existed in the first place as an obstacle to be overcome or vanquished. The ego is not the great evildoer, the equivalent of Satan for New Age devotees and followers of Eastern creeds.

The ego is simply oneness fragmented and patterned. Any moment of clarity can bring it to its legitimate proportions of tool of the vast, limitless, unified and unpatterned consciousness that is the ultimate identity of all that is.

May we all discover this clarity in effortlessness.

Lolita Gonzales

LeeBuhrul

you started off so well... what happened?

to be alone means to have integrity?
integrity is compromised by ideals?
An ideal is a parent figure?
ans since when does having an ideal mean surrender to it?

are we generalizing individual issues?

Could you be confusing being alone with being independent? self reliant? With no need for ideals or idols as guides?

Jaguar Prince

You are attached to words.

Eudaimonist

I am not worried about people who have ideals. I am worried about people who think they have arrived at their ideal. It is when people think they have the ideal in their personal grasp that they view other people as deluded, evil, not in possession of The Truth, etc. These are the people who are bound to "deny the real".

Please, let's have more people with ideals who are aware of the distance they are from them!

Jaguar Prince

It is infinitely better to have people who have no ideals at all, which doesn't mean that they are immoral and hedonistic. On the contrary, someone who has no ideals (which means that he* doesn't compare himself with an unreal and abstract figure of goodness) is the most moral and austere person in the world. His mind is perfectly chaste.

People who know the distance which separates them from their ideals suffer and struggle. All this negativity and unholy effort (no effort is holy in the field of religion and morality) must create violence and harshness toward others. All idealists, whether arrivistic or falsely humble, are stupid and violent fools.

The good thing with ideals is that people who try to reach them very, very hard may one day collapse in the struggle and then something new may appear, which is not personal and time-bound.

*no gender implied

Eudaimonist

How is this morality accomplished if there is no ideal -- no target -- at which to aim? Where does this moral character come from?

Not necessarily. They could take the positive attitude that "the glass is half full".

Must? That's a strong word. Please explain.

Crucifiction

This, kids, is why esotericism is bad. Bad, bad, bad.