Daniel Jeffries's Blog, page 4

What is Your Problem Now – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part 5

What is your problem now?  This is one of my favorite questions from The Power of Now and it’s the key to minimizing your pain and suffering in life.  So how can a simple phrase change how much you hurt?  Let’s take a closer look to see.

How you read that first sentence makes all the difference in the world and it offers insight into your level of spiritual development.  Perhaps you hear the angry echoes of a lover or your parents in those words? They might have thrown those words at you like a dagger, meaning what do you got to complain about now? What kind of drama are you stirring up? Why can’t you leave me alone?  However this is not what Tolle means here.  What he is offering is a quick way to release a great deal of suffering with a simple shift of perception that we are all capable of at any moment.  Let’s take a look at how this questions works to free you.

Much of our pain comes from clinging to the past or casting our minds into the future.  By doing this over and over again relentlessly, we compound our suffering exponentially.  This question offers a path out of that compounded suffering.  It is like a light in the forest.  It allows us to focus only on the problem at hand and not color it with thousands of other problems that do not really exist.  Let’s say that I suffer a set back of some kind.  Perhaps I lose some money or a deal doesn’t go through or a loved one dies or a lover leaves us.  This represents true pain, that I must feel completely, in order to release that suffering.  I must feel the loss of my loved one or the betrayal of the lover that left me.  I must feel it totally and completely, with my heart wide open to the anguish.  In this way, I am able to release it swiftly, letting go of these painful emotions as if in a sudden storm that hits and it gone, followed by the peace of a red sun in morning.  The storm passes and I am free again.  Instead what we generally do is suppress the emotions.  We push them down, deny them, fight them.  We don’t give ourselves over to body wrenching sobs.  We don’t give ourselves space to grieve.  Instead, we crush the pain and maintain a false facade of invincibility or we transmute that pain into anger and strike out at those around us with words or actions. Our mind then goes to work to make it worse.  It calls up past failures and wrongs against us and replays them over and over.  Or it casts into the future and imagines world collapse and global catastrophe or the imminent death of friends and family or ourselves.  These too play like mental movies, over and over.  Sometimes we project into the future and image a much better place for ourselves and feel happy for a flickering moment, only to have that moment ripped away from us because we become filled with longing for that imagined better place and so despise the present moment.  And yet, the present moment is all that we have.  The current problem we face is the only problem we need concern ourselves with.  Take something simple: being stuck in traffic. We all hate getting stuck in traffic, but our minds often make this simple problem much much worse.  As we fight the traffic, racing and revving our engines, cursing at other people for their stupidity, we throw our thoughts back into our day.  We think about all the idiots who wronged us or who made our day hard for no reason.  We replay that day over and over and it adds to our pain, magnifying it, growing it, feeding on itself.  Yet if we are able to ask that simple question “what is my problem now” we are able to answer with only one thing: traffic.  We are guided back to the present moment and we let go of the past, releasing it.  The day is over.  We are not fighting with our friend or lover now, or dealing with a difficult customer, we are here, dealing with traffic.  The thousand slings and arrows we’ve suffered that day are gone.  It is only by thinking about them that we cling to them, holding onto them and making our suffering in the present moment much worse.  Instead if we concentrate only on the problem at hand, the rest of our suffering drops away suddenly and we can see clearly again, our minds and body at ease, making it simpler to deal with traffic.  We just slow down when the road dictates and speed up when we can.  We no longer fight the traffic, we are one with it, as we are with all things, reacting as needed without rage and frustration.  We have transcended our pain.

To understand why our minds do this we must begin to understand the nature of our minds.  Today most people’s minds are broken.  They have no off switch.  They chatter at us so much that we become convinced that we are our thoughts.  We identify with them.  We think we are them.  And yet this is a crucial error on our parts.  There was a time when people’s minds did not blather at them constantly.  They turned off.  They went quiet or dormant for a time.  Today, it would be hard to find almost any person on the planet who does not suffer from a mind that does not shut up even for a second.  It’s gotten so out of hand that when I first talk to people about creating gaps in that constant stream of thoughts they see it is almost unimaginable.  It seems impossible and yet it is not.  You see the mind is a kind of broken tool.  It is like an out of control lawnmower chewing up anything in its path while you desperately chase after it.  The mind is a problem solving machine.  Like any tool it must be used and then set aside until it is truly needed again.  And yet the mind is like a drill that sees everything as a screw.  It is convinced that it can solve all manner of problems before they happen, preventing us pain and suffering and in doing so it causes us more.  The mind is so good at solving problems that it has gotten good at solving the biggest problem of all: not having any problems.  When they are no problems, there is no purpose for the mind.  It can go silent.  But silence to the mind is equal to death.  Perhaps you think that you will not be able to function with your mind idled, but I assure you, you will function even better.  When your mind is turned off, the traffic around you becomes inconsequential.  It is no longer the punishment of a cruel God or the workings of an oppressive societal scheme to keep you down by grinding up your will.  It becomes simply a series of slow downs and speed ups, done with lightness and ease.

We can understand the now and the process of staying present by observing our pets.  Animals intrinsically understand the answer to the question of “what is my problem now?”  They know it is only the problem at hand and not the phantoms of the past or the future.  Animals are not concerned with the problems of the past.  They are here now, always.  They do not worry about the future.  While people often look down at animals they should really be looking up to them because they are much closer to the state we call enlightenment than we are.  We can get there through dedication and persistence but animals already live there and they are waiting for us to catch up.

I learned much about present moment awareness from my cat Seven, who passed away last weekend.  She had cancer and we treated her for more than a year and a half effectively.  She remained the blithe, worry free spirit that she had always been and we were happy to have her around a little longer.  Like a trickster God, she constantly got into everything.  If a water cup was left uncovered her paws were in it.  If my desktop was left unlocked she was walking on the keys typing gibberish and sending a crazy email to a friend.  And yet her devilishness and tricks served as a constant reminder to enjoy the present moment and let go of my rage and constant circular thinking.  They were a persistent prodding to wake up and see clearly, to be here now and feel the joy that can only come in the now.  Admittedly, I was often unable to see what she was here to teach me but she was quite patient as all perfect beings are.  She never missed a chance to remind me again, calmly waiting for me to wake up.  She also taught me about the ways that we can transcend fear and move forward in life with a ease and lightness.  She was an absolutely fearless animal, reckless even, throwing her body through the air in the kitchen, across a yawning gap between island and counter just to eat a plant that my wife left in the window.  After falling out of the second story window, the very next day she was in the same window, chasing the wind.  She was this way, because her physical form was not important to her.  She did not cling to it.  Our physical form is a like a old pair of clothing that we shed when we die.  It is a sleeve, a temporary vessel that falls apart.

On Sunday she was gone just as fast as she lived.  The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, as Lao Tzu said, echoed famously in the movie Bladerunner.  She suddenly collapsed, vomiting and peeing the bed simultaneously, something she had never done.  We brought her to the hospital and they raised her core temperature and gave her a blood transfusion.  She came home to us, but it was not long before she went into collapse again and this time I could feel her slipping away as I stroked her fur and looked into her dilated eyes.  When we brought her to the doctor it did not seem likely that she would make it and so we had to put her to sleep which is an incredibly painful experience for a Buddha, because we experience all suffering and sadness with a raw intensity that can only be described as searing.  How you feel as your pets are passing, will tell you how close your are to waking up in time.  To the sleeping person the passing of a pet is not deeply felt.  The pets are simple things to them.  Sleeping people are entangled in their minds, dreaming fantasies of bigger, complex things that they imagine will make them happy when the key to their happiness is simple and right in front of them.  True joy comes not from complex creations of the mind.  True joy cannot be purchased or manipulated.  The simplest things, right in front of you, are the essence of all life: a walk with a loved one; the happiness in your pet’s eyes when they see a treat; breathing; swimming; dancing.  To the enlightened person an animal is such an obvious manifestation of the divine that it is almost blinding.  I can tell you that Seven was a physical manifestation of my power animal, a guardian spirit that chose a physical form to assist me on this plane.  In the Hindu tradition she might be considered an avatar.  In ancient Greece they would have called her a tutelary spirit.  But I have always liked the term spirit animal or power animal.  In the Shamanic tradition, Native American Shamans were spiritual guides who sought direct, unfiltered communication with God and the divine.  They did not experience God through words on a page, but by directly reaching out to the heavens in the same way that I work with the divine.  I need no filter.  God is open to anyone who wishes to see.  The Shamans were the first to see and understand power animals.  And I have no doubt that she was such a spirit.  Now in a way a power animal is a poor representation of what these spirits actually are but for us to perceive them they must take on familiar forms our limited minds can understand.  Spirits are not really bound by such concepts as whether they really exist, being in one place at one time, being alive or dead.  They do not need a physical form and yet sometimes that is the most useful form for them and so they take it on, despite its limitations.  The physical form is often a poor conduit for the divine.  We are like dial-up internet connections.  The great spirit is a massive pipe of raw power and information and we can only pull down a fraction of it.  We just don’t have the bandwidth to understand what true spiritual forms look like.  We cannot conceive  them properly.  They are like a child’s sketch to our limited perceptions.  They are all these things and none of them at the same time.  Seven is both gone and with me.  Like Ben Kenobi she is more powerful now then you can possibly imagine.  This may seem like a contradiction to my lesson on reincarnation, but if you look closely you’ll see that it is not.  Her spirit is still there, helping me and yet she is completely gone, melted back into the void.  Her spirit is like an echo, still with me and yet not so.  She does not need a physical form nor is she concerned with duality.  She is both transcended with her personality intact and completely dissolved into the essential energy of the void, at the same time.  This is something that the mind cannot conceive of and yet is true at the fundamental level.  She is both folded into the eternal melting pot, and she is here, still assisting me.  Her personality is like an echo in the universe, remaining so that she might continue to guide me and yet she is totally gone.  If you could see this about your own animals would you still cast them aside so carelessly?  When you can learn from the simplest things, you are well on your way to awakening.

Seven’s passing has shown me the power of opening up and of letting go.  When she died, I opened myself completely to this suffering.  I let it rip through me.  I felt it totally and completely.  I did not shrink from it.  I feel the absence of her, the fear that my guardian had died and that I was in unprotected and alone.  I feel the massive hole she left in my life and my wife’s.  And through feeling this I am already transcending it.  Because I have given myself over to fits of crying and to exploring the complex grieving emotions of emptiness, guilt, fear and sadness, the storm is lifting. Already when I think of her she brings a smile to my face more and more, rather than tears. Every day that increases without my having to force myself to think happy thoughts, a technique that gets people nowhere in the long run.  Also, slowly, slowly I am learning not to cling to her physical form, which is now gone, nothing but ash.  That form is no longer needed and it has passed away to the place beyond the wind.  She is both here and gone.  She is Shrodinger’s Cat, a quantum animal.  This is because I have embraced my pain as necessary and essential.  I have not run from it.  Our lives are really about experiencing everything around us fully.  It is through this experience that our pain is quickly transmuted.  It is only by clinging to this pain that I can distort my life, holding on to something that is no longer here and can never return.  What is my problem now?  I must deal with the passing of my spirit animal’s physical form.  I must feel her loss.  And then I must let go and forgive.  I must trust and focus back on the process of life, feeling her presence and allowing her to continue to do her work in the now.  It is then that my mind can go back to rest and I can once again directly connect to the divine with the carefree passion for everything that she taught me.  For now though, I must grieve and in my grief I am set free.

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Energy Cannot Be Created or Destroyed – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part 4

I went with a friend to a local spa called Float that has sensory deprivation tanks. These tanks screen out all sound and visual stimulation and that’s when amazing starts to happen. You float on salt water inside them, drifting gently with your thoughts but as time stretches out, you begin to lose track of time.  You could be floating out there in space for twenty minutes or twenty hours and it would feel the same.  Some people are able to calm their minds after fifteen or twenty minutes. Some people hallucinate wildly, their minds making up for the lack of stimulation. My experience was a bit different. I’ve practiced meditation for a long time and so I used it as a chance to clear my mind for as long as I could. At this point in my life, it’s hard to clear my mind completely for more than a few seconds to a few minutes. I am but a partial Buddha in the current now.  After meditation, especially extended meditation, my mind is largely calm and quiet the rest of the day. Thoughts seem to float in as if from a deeper place. These are not panic or fantasy based thoughts, they are simple and declarative. All is in harmony then and I am at one with my true self, the immortal self that transcends all things.

Now sometimes when I cleanse my mind of the constant chatter that is all our disease, new thoughts can come through. These are eternal thoughts that come from beyond the mind. They are not mine. They are open for anyone to see, as long as they can open their eyes and wake up in time. In this session, I ignored the hallucinations. I know them to be nothing but a retinal circus, an illusion, a kind of game, something interesting for the mind to do. And yet they provide a context to what I am going to say next, the enhance understanding in some ways and distort it in others.  What I did see was souls moving into the clear light of the void and I recognized that energy cannot be created or destroyed. If you pause with that for a moment you realize that if energy cannot be created or destroyed than what we have is a closed system. God is a closed system, a fixed energy. That energy is infinite and yet infinity is a fixed thing to God.  Sometimes out of that energy come passing forms, such as you or me, planets or stars, microbes or spirits. All these forms pass away and are transmuted into something else. For something new to live, something else must die. In the microcosmic sense picture your skin cells falling away. Now that energy is freed to become other things. The same thing happens when you when you die.  God is in essence a unified field, where all things are infinitely and intricately connected.  This is the plane of existence that Einstein thought he could get to with his mind. And yet it cannot be perceived by the mind.  The mind is a blocker, an hindrance to seeing it.  Perhaps at a more advanced stage in our evolution we may better work out the “math” of God, how that unified field works, but as of this moment in the eternal now, we cannot see the form that makes us.  It’s important to understand that all of that unified energy is in perfect use at any one time within the system and that the system is thus perfect, though it does not feel that way to us from our limited vantage point at times.  That is because we are but a point on the sphere.  We cannot see the whole sphere as God designed us with limitations so we might learn something.  For each person that lesson will be different so I cannot tell you what that is, but I can tell you it is all revolving around the question of “who am I?”

In the tank, I also saw my own form passing way and felt myself tearing away from my body and I was not afraid.  I saw that I can cast aside this form of Dan Jeffries at any time and it will be okay.  I also saw the spirit of my beloved cat come down like a surge of light to wake me from my trance, before the gentle music started in the tank to let me know my time was up.  She let me know that she does not have much time.  Now spirits are notoriously bad with time since they don’t experience it, so that could mean today or two months from now or two years.  You shall not know the day nor the hour.  You may ask how her spirit could come to me, if she is still here, as she has not yet passed away despite her advancing disease.  That is because spirits are not bound by petty things like being in one place at one time.  They can easily be in multiple places at the same time.  They transcend time and place and as such are not subject to your current limitations.  She let me know one other thing: come home.  I drove home with a brilliant ease and calm, knowing nothing could happen to me.  I was one with the road and all things around me.  I could feel the energy of the other entities around me reacting and responding and I moved easily through them like a kung-fu master rips through challengers.  I spent the night with my dying animal and my wife.  We took care of her and comforted her.  Life is not much more complicated that this.  Remember energy cannot be created or destroyed.  And as such, my cat too must pass, so that something new can be born in her wake.

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Being a Superconductor: Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part III

It turns out that when things get really, really cold, strange and wonderful things start to happen.  Take superconductors, which allow electricity to pass through them with zero resistance, opening up all kinds of incredible possibilities for powering our world with only a fraction of the current power we use.  I saw an astonishing demonstration of superconductors on Nova the other day.  They used a standard copper wire and pumped a mere four watts of electricity through it to light a string of incandescent bulbs.  As you might imagine it produced a pretty weak light, tiny and barely visible.  That’s because when the electricity flows through the copper wire, it encounters resistance, bouncing along and smacking into the electrons and various impurities in the wire.  Yet when they attached the light bulbs to a superconducting wire the same four watts produce a brilliant light.  In the same way, we are either copper wires or superconductors when we look to understand the true nature of life and the universe.  Our thoughts and emotions are the distortion mechanism.  When we try to understand the world around us and the nature of God and the universe, we are the resistance.  The impurities of our ego, our fears and rage and sadness, distort the clear light of understanding and so we produce a weak light.  We are angry, violent, depressed, selfish, unable to empathize with the people suffering all around us. Yet, if we can clear our lives of clutter and meaningless things, we can be more like the superconductor, letting more and more of the clear light through, unchanged, undistorted, fully realized.

Eckhart Tolle, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, tells us that if you have a religious belief structure, you don’t need to go outside of it to understand the true nature of God.  The real message is there for you, it’s just that it’s been obscured and corroded with meaningless matter that accretes around that divine message over time.  It’s like rust building up on metal.  Eventually you can no longer see the metal, just as you can no longer see the true message of the divine through the maze of mistaken interpretations layered on that original message by unenlightened personalities.  The message can not get through.  Eventually that corrosion destroys the original metal and the religion passes away into history, because it can no longer help people even at a basic level.  By that point, it’s a good thing, because the religion has become something that hurts more than it helps.  To get at that true meaning you have to become like the superconductor, finding and destroying all resistance in yourself.  It’s no coincidence that the words Eckhart Tolle heard just before he became enlightened were “resist nothing.”  When you provide no resistance, the clear light of the void shines through you and out into the world.  But when you use your mind to distort and interpret and label everything, the message begins to break down.  Eventually you are like a person lost in a fun house, with nothing but your own disfigured image reflected back at you infinitely.

We become what we put into the world. Sometimes when the ego gets truly out of control it begins to warp the divine message so that no light gets through at all and the entire message is lost.  This is why a Taliban soldier could shoot that young girl Malala in the head and feel that he was doing God’s work.  His rage and suffering warped God’s message into something that demanded the death of a little girl and provided every logical explanation as to why.  This is the extreme version of what happens when our egos interrupt the divine flow, but we live in a world where even minor impurities of the mind have gotten out of control and do just as much damage, every single second of every day.  Our minds get in our way.

The mind is both a beautiful and a terrible thing.  It serves only two purposes.  It solves problems and it creates problems when it runs out of problems to solve.  It literally has no other purpose and yet you’ve probably come to think of your mind as absolutely essential to everything you do.  There was a time when people lived without their minds chattering at them all the time.  There were gaps in their thoughts.  The incessant radio broadcast in our head turned off from time to time.  An Englishman once described the Indians who would come to his way-station in the woods.  When the various officials they were coming to see were not available, they would sit calmly, staring ahead, whereas the English would fidget, pace, and demand to know when the people would return.  These restless minds have come to dominate the Earth.  It’s now nearly impossible to imagine your mind shutting off.  You’ve lived with it constantly chattering at you for as long as you remember.  You think this is normal.  You’ve come to associate your thoughts with who you really are, and yet this is not the case.  Your mind is like that copper wire, constantly getting in your way, creating resistance without you knowing it.  When you live in a world of noise you come to believe that the noise is the only thing that matters.   By clearing our minds, by finding time away from the noise, slowly and with persistence and dedication to the sacred arts, like yoga, or meditation or simply staying present in all you do, even standing in a crowded subway or washing your hands, you are able to create gaps in those thoughts and it is through those gaps that the divine flows through.  Eventually, if we are disciplined in our pursuit of understanding we can become a superconductor, with the divine flowing through unimpeded and radiating out into the world for all to enjoy.

There was a time when people lived closer the divine on a day to day basis.  We no longer live in that world.  We no longer live in a world of simplicity.  Things are complicated, coming at us from every direction constantly, forcing us to react.  There were a number of cultures, now largely or completely destroyed, that felt the power of the divine every day in their lives.  Unfortunately, the power of the ego is so strong, that it only takes a few minds out of control to rampage over the Earth and wipe out everything that gets in their way.  The personalities of these simpler cultures were such that they did not often have advanced weapons or organized armies.  Attack and defense are constructs of the mind.  They saw no need for either.  Unfortunately that meant that when the crazy people came to attack them, hearing only the constant chattering of their minds, instead of the words of God, these people had no defense.  And now, because of evolution, most of those more innocent minds are lost.  Today, nearly every person alive on this planet is a product of those minds gone out of control and so we have to work much harder to be that superconductor, much harder to see and understand, to turn off our minds, relax and float downstream.

And yet, the past was not always idealyic.   The mind enabled us to have more safety and security in some ways.  The vicissitudes of the seasons and the natural world often left people with nothing to eat and that lead to suffering.  If you follow the buffalo and a hard winter kills the buffalo, people starve.  So a new type of person emerged, one that could fight and kill, and stock and defend, control and force.  I don’t advocate a return to olden times where we all wear leather clothes and climb the kudzu vines that wrap the Sears tower.  We can never go backwards.  The past is gone.  Today we are moving to a new consciousness, one where we can develop technologically, and yet our minds will be more in balance with our spirits.  This is a new world.  There are pitfalls.  We may not get there.  It’s quite possible for us to destroy ourselves and never reach the new world.  But we can get there and we can do that by creating small gaps in the constant steam of our thoughts.  Over time as these gaps become larger and larger and we can begin to see through the illusion of our own desires and fears.  And that’s when our mind becomes a compliment to our spirit.  It works with us to clear aside problems that impede our energy, rather than working to crush and destroy anyone who gets in our way.  When each of us tends our own garden, slowly the world is set to rights and harmony begins to spread, garden by garden.  It starts with you.  It can only start with you.  And it starts with a single act.  Step outside of yourself and you will begin to see yourself better and better.  Eventually, you will become a Buddha too, someone who can teach the world and guide others to your light, but only if you let it flow through you without resistance.

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The Nature of Reincarnation – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part II

When you’re reincarnated you don’t come back.  At first that may seem paradoxical but it’s not.  Reincarnation exists but the popular perception of it is flawed.

The problem is how you think about “you.”  Who are you?  Are you your job, your children, your relationship, your thoughts, you ideas, your feelings, your khakis?  The part of you that’s real is none of these things and that’s the only part that comes back.

So what part of you is real?  What comes back?  You can see this real self by learning to observe the observer.  See yourself seeing the world.  Watch as your mind criticizes, attacks and defends, is filled with fantastic fantasies and fears.  You might see a stranger walking and picture yourself attacked or heroically defending yourself.  This is all the illusion.  All that you are passes away to nothing, never to come again.  In a way that’s terrifying.  In another way it’s wonderful.  You are unique.  You, the part of you that loves one sports team and hates another, the one who found your true love or didn’t, will never exist again.   Your thoughts are nothing but the music of the universe.  But there is something indestructible inside you and that is the thing that survives.  People have called that the spirit but the word is now corrupted, covered in layers of rust that obscure its true meaning.  The corrosion is people confusing what is actually part of the spirit and what is not.  I’m sorry to say, that the part of you that hates your neighbor and doesn’t like brussel sprouts doesn’t make the cut.

To understand this we just have to understand what makes up Dan.  I’m nothing more than a passing form, a current configuration of energy in a kind of semi-frozen state.  I exist as a passing fancy of the universe.  I’m born, I grow old and die, picking up beliefs and ways of viewing the world as I go.  I look a certain way.  I hold certain ideas sacred and others useless.  People and institutions all around me shape me and my thoughts.  I’m a collection of concepts and circumstance.  I’d love to believe that Dan is important enough to warrant continuing past whatever untimely demise awaits me and everyone else but it doesn’t.  To some people, that’s heresy.  They cling so fiercely to the idea that they continue on that they’ll go so far as to kill others who don’t share that desperate belief structure.  That’s what makes a religious extremist.  He is so warped by his belief systems that he perceives his beliefs as if they are actual reality. As if God, a perfectly supreme being, all powerful and complete would require his subjects to murder others who don’t have a beard or listen to music.  A truly supreme being needs nothing from his creations.  It’s got bigger things to worry about.

But what about us non-extremists, those people not bound by such fierce demons of delusion that we still have a chance to look closely and see reality as it really is?  Unfortunately, most of us won’t this time around.  Like virtual extremists we can’t get over ourselves.  That’s understandable, as you are all you’ve ever known so how can there by no you? But no you there will be.

Like most entities in my current configuration as a human, I’m prone to egoic delusions.  I like to think of myself as pretty important from time to time.  It’s easy to see how I might want to exist indefinitely when faced with the reality of my impending doom.  When I can’t face this reality, like most mortal creatures, I tend to throw myself into a sensual lifestyle as a way to escape these realities.  You may throw yourself into your work, or extreme sports, or helping others. But pleasure comes from the outside.  It is dependent on other things, other people or desires.  It can be given and taken away and so I suffer.  You can recognize the true things in yourself by asking: does it bring joy from within?   If it doesn’t it is false, a passing illusion, fun and not to be scorned or hated, but simply calmly refused.  When you stoke desire it burns brighter and brighter.  You can never get enough pleasure to slake your thirst.  Yet when you do true things, things meant for you to learn in this lifetime, you can feel the difference.  Joy is not pleasure, sometimes it hurts, but it always leaves you feeling whole, whereas pleasure leaves you empty and wanting more soon after.

Are you empty or whole?

The ancients when faced with this hard truth came up with concepts like heaven and hell.  It’s helpful and comforting that the bad guys don’t get away with it, the good guys get rewarded even though they got shit on throughout life and that at the end of all this I get a nice long vacation of eternal rest and hanging out on clouds playing music.  Or if I were perhaps born in a different configuration, in a different time, say Asia around the time of the Buddha, I might conceive of a concept that when I get things wrong, I just come back as another version of me, with some core essence of my personality there somewhere, so I can work out some cosmic level problems.  It doesn’t work like that either.

You come back, it’s just that some of you goes into the grass, some to the sea, parts of you to animals or people, your energy moving around to help create a thousand new forms not like you at all, but equally unique.  Eventually when all your little bits do happen to mostly form another person, it wont really matter because that person will be nothing like you at all.

To see this principal in action you just have to go down into the fundamental structure of the universe.  The further you go, the less differentiation you have until you have none.  You don’t have to go very far until you get to a spot in matter where everything is made out of the same stuff.  At our vantage point on the universe we see lots of things that appear different, flesh and steel, light and dark, but its all made out of one universal building block: atoms.  Below that is more of the same, more universal building blocks like quarks.  Think of atoms as the Lego bricks of the universe.  I can make anything with those blocks.  I can make a Dan or I can make a Wendy.  I can make a turtle or a stormy sea or a frog or light.  I can make mist or mountains.  I can make the sun and the moon and the stars spinning in the heavens.  I can make anything.  But ask yourself this, if you take the moon and break it down into its Lego atoms and use those atoms to build part of a tree somewhere else can I truly say that the nature of the moon survived?  No.  The same is true when we die.  For tens of thousands of years we’ve perceived ourselves as continuing beyond this life and we weren’t wrong, it’s just that we made the egoic wish fulfilling mistake of thinking we were important enough or that we were so crucial to the functioning of the universe in our current form that we can’t ever be thrown away.  In fact we are nothing more than a temporary iteration, a random configuration of energy that came together for a short time and will fall apart. The American Indians were closer to understanding it than the maniacal European minds that wiped them out over 300 years.  They perceived of God as universal effluvium, inhabiting us all, animating all life, setting everything in motion.  That spirit is what survives, but that spirit does not remember being Dan anymore than it remembers being a turtle or the footsteps in the mist.

Over time it became useful for people to institutionalize the ideas of heaven and hell or reincarnation as a way to keep people in line.  Do bad things and you come back again and again.  Do bad things and burn in Hell.  The truth is nature and the universe has a much simpler method: recycling.  Nothing is lost.  Nothing is wasted.  If your random people generator gets an Adolf Hitler, you just grind it up and turn it into puppies and a storm at sea where it can’t hurt any more people.  You delete all copies and start over.  That is what the universe does.  It doesn’t care about you at all and yet you are one of its most important creations.  It’s just that you’re only important right now.  You were important enough to be conceived of and created but that’s as far as it goes.  As long as you are alive and thinking and doing, you fulfill a purpose and when you die you fill a different one.  The universe retains nothing of the passing form except the essential nature of matter that built that form, like a sculptor smashing a statue back into clay.  In the same way when you return you will be so different as to be unrecognizable to your current self.

This hurts a little.  Let’s face it.  I’m pretty attached to myself and I’m betting you’re pretty attached to yourself too.  The truth is we are not that important.  And that’s ok.  Your current incarnation, the way you see yourself, the clothes you wear, the people you love and hate, the things you obsess over and those secret, crazy thoughts you have are all passing fancies of the universe.  They exist one time and then they’re gone, never to return again.  While you remain the same underlying substance, like water turning to ice, you are so different from one life to the next as to be something that even if it is you, might as well be someone else.  Now we know from quantum physics that energy can’t be created or destroyed.  The consequences of that are that we live in a closed system.  It is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from infinite.  So when we pass away that energy doesn’t disappear, it simply changes into something else.  The energy moves from one state to another, like liquid evaporating into gas.  But does the gas know it was a liquid?  Or is it just liquid now with no remembrance of things past?

You do come back, it’s just that the you, you perceive as you doesn’t make the cut.

The post The Nature of Reincarnation – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part II appeared first on Me Uploads.

Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha: The Nature of Reincarnation

When you’re reincarnated you don’t come back.  At first that may seem paradoxical but it’s not.  Reincarnation exists but the popular perception of it is flawed.

The problem is how you think about “you.”  Who are you?  Are you your job, your children, your relationship, your thoughts, you ideas, your feelings, your khakis?  The part of you that’s real is none of these things and that’s the only part that comes back.

So what part of you is real?  What comes back?  You can see this real self by learning to observe the observer.  See yourself seeing the world.  Watch as your mind criticizes, attacks and defends, is filled with fantastic fantasies and fears.  You might see a stranger walking and picture yourself attacked or heroically defending yourself.  This is all the illusion.  All that you are passes away to nothing, never to come again.  In a way that’s terrifying.  In another way it’s wonderful.  You are unique.  You, the part of you that loves one sports team and hates another, the one who found your true love or didn’t, will never exist again.   Your thoughts are nothing but the music of the universe.  But there is something indestructible inside you and that is the thing that survives.  People have called that the spirit but the word is now corrupted, covered in layers of rust that obscure its true meaning.  The corrosion is people confusing what is actually part of the spirit and what is not.  I’m sorry to say, that the part of you that hates your neighbor and doesn’t like brussel sprouts doesn’t make the cut.

To understand this we just have to understand what makes up Dan.  I’m nothing more than a passing form, a current configuration of energy in a kind of semi-frozen state.  I exist as a passing fancy of the universe.  I’m born, I grow old and die, picking up beliefs and ways of viewing the world as I go.  I look a certain way.  I hold certain ideas sacred and others useless.  People and institutions all around me shape me and my thoughts.  I’m a collection of concepts and circumstance.  I’d love to believe that Dan is important enough to warrant continuing past whatever untimely demise awaits me and everyone else but it doesn’t.  To some people, that’s heresy.  They cling so fiercely to the idea that they continue on that they’ll go so far as to kill others who don’t share that desperate belief structure.  That’s what makes a religious extremist.  He is so warped by his belief systems that he perceives his beliefs as if they are actual reality. As if God, a perfectly supreme being, all powerful and complete would require his subjects to murder others who don’t have a beard or listen to music.  A truly supreme being needs nothing from his creations.  It’s got bigger things to worry about.

But what about us non-extremists, those people not bound by such fierce demons of delusion that we still have a chance to look closely and see reality as it really is?  Unfortunately, most of us won’t this time around.  Like virtual extremists we can’t get over ourselves.  That’s understandable, as you are all you’ve ever known so how can there by no you? But no you there will be.

Like most entities in my current configuration as a human, I’m prone to egoic delusions.  I like to think of myself as pretty important from time to time.  It’s easy to see how I might want to exist indefinitely when faced with the reality of my impending doom.  When I can’t face this reality, like most mortal creatures, I tend to throw myself into a sensual lifestyle as a way to escape these realities.  You may throw yourself into your work, or extreme sports, or helping others. But pleasure comes from the outside.  It is dependent on other things, other people or desires.  It can be given and taken away and so I suffer.  You can recognize the true things in yourself by asking: does it bring joy from within?   If it doesn’t it is false, a passing illusion, fun and not to be scorned or hated, but simply calmly refused.  When you stoke desire it burns brighter and brighter.  You can never get enough pleasure to slake your thirst.  Yet when you do true things, things meant for you to learn in this lifetime, you can feel the difference.  Joy is not pleasure, sometimes it hurts, but it always leaves you feeling whole, whereas pleasure leaves you empty and wanting more soon after.

Are you empty or whole?

The ancients when faced with this hard truth came up with concepts like heaven and hell.  It’s helpful and comforting that the bad guys don’t get away with it, the good guys get rewarded even though they got shit on throughout life and that at the end of all this I get a nice long vacation of eternal rest and hanging out on clouds playing music.  Or if I were perhaps born in a different configuration, in a different time, say Asia around the time of the Buddha, I might conceive of a concept that when I get things wrong, I just come back as another version of me, with some core essence of my personality there somewhere, so I can work out some cosmic level problems.  It doesn’t work like that either.

You come back, it’s just that some of you goes into the grass, some to the sea, parts of you to animals or people, your energy moving around to help create a thousand new forms not like you at all, but equally unique.  Eventually when all your little bits do happen to mostly form another person, it wont really matter because that person will be nothing like you at all.

To see this principal in action you just have to go down into the fundamental structure of the universe.  The further you go, the less differentiation you have until you have none.  You don’t have to go very far until you get to a spot in matter where everything is made out of the same stuff.  At our vantage point on the universe we see lots of things that appear different, flesh and steel, light and dark, but its all made out of one universal building block: atoms.  Below that is more of the same, more universal building blocks like quarks.  Think of atoms as the Lego bricks of the universe.  I can make anything with those blocks.  I can make a Dan or I can make a Wendy.  I can make a turtle or a stormy sea or a frog or light.  I can make mist or mountains.  I can make the sun and the moon and the stars spinning in the heavens.  I can make anything.  But ask yourself this, if you take the moon and break it down into its Lego atoms and use those atoms to build part of a tree somewhere else can I truly say that the nature of the moon survived?  No.  The same is true when we die.  For tens of thousands of years we’ve perceived ourselves as continuing beyond this life and we weren’t wrong, it’s just that we made the egoic wish fulfilling mistake of thinking we were important enough or that we were so crucial to the functioning of the universe in our current form that we can’t ever be thrown away.  In fact we are nothing more than a temporary iteration, a random configuration of energy that came together for a short time and will fall apart. The American Indians were closer to understanding it than the maniacal European minds that wiped them out over 300 years.  They perceived of God as universal effluvium, inhabiting us all, animating all life, setting everything in motion.  That spirit is what survives, but that spirit does not remember being Dan anymore than it remembers being a turtle or the footsteps in the mist.

Over time it became useful for people to institutionalize the ideas of heaven and hell or reincarnation as a way to keep people in line.  Do bad things and you come back again and again.  Do bad things and burn in Hell.  The truth is nature and the universe has a much simpler method: recycling.  Nothing is lost.  Nothing is wasted.  If your random people generator gets an Adolf Hitler, you just grind it up and turn it into puppies and a storm at sea where it can’t hurt any more people.  You delete all copies and start over.  That is what the universe does.  It doesn’t care about you at all and yet you are one of its most important creations.  It’s just that you’re only important right now.  You were important enough to be conceived of and created but that’s as far as it goes.  As long as you are alive and thinking and doing, you fulfill a purpose and when you die you fill a different one.  The universe retains nothing of the passing form except the essential nature of matter that built that form, like a sculptor smashing a statue back into clay.  In the same way when you return you will be so different as to be unrecognizable to your current self.

This hurts a little.  Let’s face it.  I’m pretty attached to myself and I’m betting you’re pretty attached to yourself too.  The truth is we are not that important.  And that’s ok.  Your current incarnation, the way you see yourself, the clothes you wear, the people you love and hate, the things you obsess over and those secret, crazy thoughts you have are all passing fancies of the universe.  They exist one time and then they’re gone, never to return again.  While you remain the same underlying substance, like water turning to ice, you are so different from one life to the next as to be something that even if it is you, might as well be someone else.  Now we know from quantum physics that energy can’t be created or destroyed.  The consequences of that are that we live in a closed system.  It is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from infinite.  So when we pass away that energy doesn’t disappear, it simply changes into something else.  The energy moves from one state to another, like liquid evaporating into gas.  But does the gas know it was a liquid?  Or is it just liquid now with no remembrance of things past?

You do come back, it’s just that the you, you perceive as you doesn’t make the cut.

The post Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha: The Nature of Reincarnation appeared first on Me Uploads.

So You Want to Know What God Is? – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part I

So maybe you’ve wondered what God is actually like?  Perhaps you’ve grown up with stories handed down from generation to generation about the nature of God?  I say God is not hard to find, It’s right in front of you, all the time.  You just have to look anywhere really.  Look at your hands or look to the sunrise and you’ll see the same thing: the body of God.  God is not a man or a woman.  That is just our tiny minds projecting our own forms onto the formless.  I call God IT, because It is beyond things like man and woman.

I decided not long ago that I would write a book on how everything works.  And by everything I mean the big issues of life.  Why am I here?  What is God?  Why do we die?  I don’t pretend to have the definitive answer to any one question but I can promise you that I have studied and observed and questioned everything I have ever been told or seen in my life and it’s lead me to a unique relationship with the divine.  I leave it up to my readers to decide if the insights gleaned on my inward journey to the divine are worth sharing.  Ultimately that is the only test of an idea, does it stand the test of time and resonate with many people?

What can we see when we look for God?  If you’re a religious person you don’t need to look far. The answer is in your books, you just have to look deeper, to look past the official opinions of the so called religious authorities and others who would seek to filter or control your access to God.  What I can tell you is that you don’t need to go to a special building to talk to God or let him know that he is a superhuman badass who we owe are respect and allegiance to because he can crush us like little bugs.  This is a primitive understanding of God and with any luck this perception of the All Mighty will be dying out soon.  God does not need you to tell him how cool he is all the time.  He already knows it.  Think about it for a second and recognize what you’ve always known: no all powerful being would need to require the worship and subjugation of his creations.  It simply allows its creations to make their own mistakes and reap the consequences.  It sets simple laws in motion, the laws of cause and effect. This is what the Buddhists might call Karma, though that word has been poisoned by inessential ideas.

What tends to happen with religions is that more often than not they alienate people from the true nature of God.  They act as filters to God, as gatekeepers to what God wants you to think and do.  This is an unnatural and unhealthy relationship.  God needs no intermediary.  IT doesn’t need interpretation.   A kind of corrosion sets in over time.  The original message of most religions is quite simple and beautiful.  Do not hurt others.  Love others and yourself.  But over time people layer their own opinions over the original message much as corrosion sets in, obscuring the original metal.   These layered interpretations must be set aside as quickly as possible if you want to truly understand how God works and what Its plan is for you.

Religions are nothing more than our best collective expression of our understanding of God at single point in time in our evolution.  In others words its the best we could come up with at the time.  God is like this: He’s a man in the sky and he throws lighting bolts.  You don’t believe that right? That’s because it is ridiculous just as our current limited understanding of God will look ridiculous to people one hundred thousand years from now.  That’s a long time.  The planet works in millions of years.  That’s a drop in the bucket.   This is how the Norse perceived God and the American Indians.  Over time our concepts evolve as we understand more things about the nature of the world around us.  Our understanding of God must evolve as well.  There were times when we believed in fairies and elves, as if they were real things but we don’t believe that any more expect when we are children.  We evolved and the religions based on simple understandings of the spirit passed with those notions.  The same will happen to our modern day religions at one point, whether their followers today believe that our not.  You just have to have the right perspective to see it.  I could be proved wrong.  Perhaps one of today’s religions will last for ten thousand or even twenty thousand years, but any gambling man just has to look at even a little bit of history to bet against that.  And that is not a bad thing.  At each stage in our evolution God shows us a bit more of ourselves and itself.  It gave us technology and the ability to look out into deep space and into the very small.  In the past people thought diseases were caused by bad spirits.  Now we know that diseases are random things carried by viruses and germs.  Our intelligence grows with each passing generation and provided that if we can manage to not kill ourselves though global war or whatever horrors we develop in the future like Quark bombs then we will continue to understand more and more until eventually we make a leap in understanding and everything changes.  We see a world that our ancestors would never understand.  Why then should we cling to old Gods?  Let them pass away like all things.  Let God show Its next form.  Let us take the gift of knowledge the true monks, the spiritual masters understand, not the priests and bishops.  They know God is everything you see all around you.  There is nothing outside of God.  God has no beginning and no end.  It is every atom in the universe.  You could say that God’s body is the universe and that there is nothing outside of God.

When I say that hopefully our archaic modes of thinking will be passing from the Earth, I’m a patient man.  I look at the world in thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.  That gives me a slightly different perspective.  What can that length of time tell us about ourselves?  It tells us that we are finite and that all things around you are not permanent but transient, including religions.  If the big religions of today are not here in two thousand years that is “soon” for a universe that measures itself billions and hundreds of billions.  In others words that’s a good long run.  Nothing to be ashamed of.  People like to think that their religions as endless, but that’s never been true and will never be true.  Many religions have come and gone.  “Well none as long as mine,” says the Christian.  Well, yes, actually, the Egyptian religion was around for two thousand more years than you and it’s safe to say that many of their people were pretty sure it was the ultimate expression of his divine will and yet that religion passed from the Earth as all must.  You see the gurus have never been confused about God in any religion. The know the same things and they can be summed up in just a few phrases that I’ll share with you now:

God is endless.

God is all things.

There is nothing outside of God.

I am God and you are God, or fragments there of, like fragments of a hologram.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever will be.

Time does not exist.

All is one.

 

The post So You Want to Know What God Is? – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part I appeared first on Me Uploads.

So You Want to Know What God Is

So maybe you’ve wondered what God is actually like?  Perhaps you’ve grown up with stories handed down from generation to generation about the nature of God?  I say God is not hard to find, It’s right in front of you, all the time.  You just have to look anywhere really.  Look at your hands or look to the sunrise and you’ll see the same thing: the body of God.  God is not a man or a woman.  That is just our tiny minds projecting our own forms onto the formless.  I call God IT, because It is beyond things like man and woman.

I decided not long ago that I would write a book on how everything works.  And by everything I mean the big issues of life.  Why am I here?  What is God?  Why do we die?  I don’t pretend to have the definitive answer to any one question but I can promise you that I have studied and observed and questioned everything I have ever been told or seen in my life and it’s lead me to a unique relationship with the divine.  I leave it up to my readers to decide if the insights gleaned on my inward journey to the divine are worth sharing.  Ultimately that is the only test of an idea, does it stand the test of time and resonate with many people?

What can we see when we look for God?  If you’re a religious person you don’t need to look far. The answer is in your books, you just have to look deeper, to look past the official opinions of the so called religious authorities and others who would seek to filter or control your access to God.  What I can tell you is that you don’t need to go to a special building to talk to God or let him know that he is a superhuman badass who we owe are respect and allegiance to because he can crush us like little bugs.  This is a primitive understanding of God and with any luck this perception of the All Mighty will be dying out soon.  God does not need you to tell him how cool he is all the time.  He already knows it.  Think about it for a second and recognize what you’ve always known: no all powerful being would need to require the worship and subjugation of his creations.  It simply allows its creations to make their own mistakes and reap the consequences.  It sets simple laws in motion, the laws of cause and effect. This is what the Buddhists might call Karma, though that word has been poisoned by inessential ideas.

What tends to happen with religions is that more often than not they alienate people from the true nature of God.  They act as filters to God, as gatekeepers to what God wants you to think and do.  This is an unnatural and unhealthy relationship.  God needs no intermediary.  IT doesn’t need interpretation.   A kind of corrosion sets in over time.  The original message of most religions is quite simple and beautiful.  Do not hurt others.  Love others and yourself.  But over time people layer their own opinions over the original message much as corrosion sets in, obscuring the original metal.   These layered interpretations must be set aside as quickly as possible if you want to truly understand how God works and what Its plan is for you.

Religions are nothing more than our best collective expression of our understanding of God at single point in time in our evolution.  In others words its the best we could come up with at the time.  God is like this: He’s a man in the sky and he throws lighting bolts.  You don’t believe that right? That’s because it is ridiculous just as our current limited understanding of God will look ridiculous to people one hundred thousand years from now.  That’s a long time.  The planet works in millions of years.  That’s a drop in the bucket.   This is how the Norse perceived God and the American Indians.  Over time our concepts evolve as we understand more things about the nature of the world around us.  Our understanding of God must evolve as well.  There were times when we believed in fairies and elves, as if they were real things but we don’t believe that any more expect when we are children.  We evolved and the religions based on simple understandings of the spirit passed with those notions.  The same will happen to our modern day religions at one point, whether their followers today believe that our not.  You just have to have the right perspective to see it.  I could be proved wrong.  Perhaps one of today’s religions will last for ten thousand or even twenty thousand years, but any gambling man just has to look at even a little bit of history to bet against that.  And that is not a bad thing.  At each stage in our evolution God shows us a bit more of ourselves and itself.  It gave us technology and the ability to look out into deep space and into the very small.  In the past people thought diseases were caused by bad spirits.  Now we know that diseases are random things carried by viruses and germs.  Our intelligence grows with each passing generation and provided that if we can manage to not kill ourselves though global war or whatever horrors we develop in the future like Quark bombs then we will continue to understand more and more until eventually we make a leap in understanding and everything changes.  We see a world that our ancestors would never understand.  Why then should we cling to old Gods?  Let them pass away like all things.  Let God show Its next form.  Let us take the gift of knowledge the true monks, the spiritual masters understand, not the priests and bishops.  They know God is everything you see all around you.  There is nothing outside of God.  God has no beginning and no end.  It is every atom in the universe.  You could say that God’s body is the universe and that there is nothing outside of God.

When I say that hopefully our archaic modes of thinking will be passing from the Earth, I’m a patient man.  I look at the world in thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.  That gives me a slightly different perspective.  What can that length of time tell us about ourselves?  It tells us that we are finite and that all things around you are not permanent but transient, including religions.  If the big religions of today are not here in two thousand years that is “soon” for a universe that measures itself billions and hundreds of billions.  In others words that’s a good long run.  Nothing to be ashamed of.  People like to think that their religions as endless, but that’s never been true and will never be true.  Many religions have come and gone.  “Well none as long as mine,” says the Christian.  Well, yes, actually, the Egyptian religion was around for two thousand more years than you and it’s safe to say that many of their people were pretty sure it was the ultimate expression of his divine will and yet that religion passed from the Earth as all must.  You see the gurus have never been confused about God in any religion. The know the same things and they can be summed up in just a few phrases that I’ll share with you now:

God is endless.

God is all things.

There is nothing outside of God.

I am God and you are God, or fragments there of, like fragments of a hologram.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever will be.

Time does not exist.

All is one.

 

The post So You Want to Know What God Is appeared first on Me Uploads.

How I Predicted the Breaking Bad Ending

Sometimes being a writer can ruin stories for you because you can see endings coming a mile away. Unfortunately, I sometimes forget this is not the case for my friends and I totally killed the Breaking Bad ending for a few folks by predicting every beat. Some people think it’s a magical power or that I have secret access to scripts that have not been released. The reality is, as they said in Kung Fu Panda, “there is no secret ingredient.” It comes down to one thing: I spend a lot of time studying writing, particularly structure. A few books helped me with this, namely Anatomy of a Story, by John Truby and Seven Basic Plots by Chris Booker and the TV Tropes website, as well as a bunch of others. As an engineer I also have a natural aptitude for this type of analysis. I like to break down stories into their component parts. As such, I’ve been at this long enough and I can see the trajectories of stories promised by the writer coming from a thousand li away. I know what the story is promising the viewer. There is an unspoken pact that writers deliver knowingly or unknowingly. It’s there, hidden beneath the surface, saying one thing: if you stick with me I will deliver XYZ for your patience. As a writer, I find it fun to predict story twists. Most people apparently don’t. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the ending, but check out our hilarious IM conversation at the end of this article if you have.

I didn’t mean to ruin it. It happened quite innocently. I actually like discussing the twists. I find different things to enjoy in stories now that the normal bits of stories are obvious to me. For instance, Walter White’s conversation with his wife in the finale was a high point for me. I knew they would have a conversation, but I had no idea if the writers were smart enough to know that it had to be a “no more secrets” conversation. WW had to tell the truth finally. It had to be a heart-to-heart moment, something real that stripped away all the lies when there was nothing more to hide. Sometimes writers miss this but the BB writers nailed it. When WW said, “I did it for me. I was good at it. I liked it,” and not “I did it for the family,” I knew this was going to be a transcendent episode. That emotional moment meant the writers really understood their character and they didn’t cheat us, the way Dexter’s writers did, by slapping on a ludicrous moralistic ending that was pointless. (I expected that too, because the writers had given a number of wishy washy signs a few weeks before that indicated they were going to take the easy road, aka the Comic Code style ending, aka the moralistic ending of ‘crime doesn’t pay,’ when the show clearly stated that it did for 8 seasons.)

The more you study stories, the more you can predict any surprise, even if most people can’t see it. Even the best stories will fail to hide their twists from you. If you’re a writer that may scare you. Don’t be afraid. It’s all right. There is so much more to enjoy in storytelling. As you get better and better, the best stories will surprise you the least, because competent writers always deliver the goods. Frankly, it’s only bad writers who can surprise me these days, because they can go totally off the rails and do something that sucks and doesn’t satisfy anyone. In Kung Fu, you learn the horse stance first, but if you keep at it, there are secrets that await you that reveal so much more about the nature of the universe. The masters are just waiting to show you, if only you persist. Those are the techniques that are really worth knowing, the master techniques, the secret techniques, the ones that hit you as killer insight into the nature of God and life.

Anyway, here is our conversation. I still find it funny and I only feel a little bad for my buddy. If you don’t want to know how you favorite story ends, don’t ask me because I’ll tell you with great enthusiasm, not knowing that you had no idea.

FRIEND 3:36 pm

they don’t seem too confident letting Walt be the dominant villain til the end

ME 3:37 pm

he’s not

and he never was

and they are going to make him heroic

he will kill the guys (neo-nazis)

save jessie

and his kid

and he will die

FRIEND 3:39 pm

hmmm

And a few days later:

FRIEND 10:18 am

When the show’s credits rolled I knew I had a crucial decision to make. Is Dan so smart that I should never discuss ongoing shows with him again? Or is Dan too much of an asshole that I should never talk to him again period?”

ME 10:20 AM

LOL

The post How I Predicted the Breaking Bad Ending appeared first on Me Uploads.

On Killing Your Favorite Characters

So, I just killed one of my favorite characters today. It’s done and she’s never coming back. As for me, I can’t write another word in that book right now. I need time to sit back, process it. After eight months of working up to the scene I saw it completely in my mind last night. It came to me in a dream. When I woke at four in the morning, I saw more of it in hot, bright flashes. I couldn’t get back to sleep. For a minute I thought about getting up and writing it all right then and there, but I resisted. I knew this was the time for unconsciousness to do its special work. This was the time to let the retinal circus tell me what I needed to write. All I had to do was listen.

Our best writing comes through us not from us. A friend and I have had a debate about studying writing versus just figuring it out as you go. I’m a voracious self-studier, though I’ve never much enjoyed formal training. I love to read anything I can. Other books. Magazines. The Internet. I especially love to read about writer’s craft. Techniques. Stock scenes. Dialogue tricks like “repetition works, baby, repetition works.” I’m long past these techniques spoiling the magic of fiction for me. Fiction is not magic. It’s alchemy. It’s what you put into it. My friend was afraid that I was being too scientific with my writing. I can tell you now truly that, that’s not the case. I know because I wrote that scene this morning and it was unlike anything I have ever read or heard. Now, that I am outside the torrent of words, I can see elements of this or that technique I’ve learned to ratchet up tension or deliver a hot dart of compressed emotion but what came out is something unique; its own thing. Ignorance of technique doesn’t change those techniques. You can figure them out on your own, but with the wonderful advent of the Internet it seems like a waste to reinvent the wheel to me. And yet studying is not everything. I study so that I have grist for my mill. I pour in everything and let my subconscious grind it up and give me something new and unexpected. The real trick to writing is getting the hell out of your own way.

What most writers don’t understand is that the unconscious works mysteriously. Sometimes the words won’t flow as they did today. I sat down and my fingers danced with the keys. The words and images spilled out of me. It’s a privilege to write a scene like this. You are making a pact with the audience that they will get their revenge. And they will. In fiction, justice is served. But it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes, as writers, we struggle. The best we can do is lay down a quick scene, some cliche filler dialogue. We have to let that happen. This is when studying can really help. It gives you some common frameworks to slap down. Yeah, it will read like a hacked up cross between a few books that you read and the last movie you saw, but that’s not the end of it. You are doing something else when you lay down the broken words. You’re giving a gift to your unconscious. Now, it has something to work with. Rarely can it work with a blank page, which is why professional writers say write every day. You need momentum to carry you forward or else the fear will get you, make you quit. Into that standard, generic framework, something takes root and starts to flower. A new idea hits you suddenly when you’re sitting and listening to a company call or a when you’re talking to a friend. Don’t be fooled. It’s not instantaneous. There’s a lot of processing going on down there in the basement of your mind. Sometimes your story has to hit the biological supercomputing grid that’s in your unconscious and get to work. It’s a quantum thing, a black box. All you can do is put in the fuel and see what comes out. Unfortunately, it’s closed source, so far. You just have to trust it and be ready to catch the ideas when they come. Always carry a notebook or Evernote. Get it down, so you can go back and rewrite that generic scene and turn it into something of your own, that reflects your loves and hates.

I say, if you’re really trying to make an impact in a story, kill off one of your best characters. If you’re reduced to a puddle of tears before, during and after you wrote it, you did it right. Oh you’ll still have to rewrite it. You’ll go back and pick just the right word to drive the knife in your readers. You’ll layer in the imagery and the bits of background. J.K. Rowling was practically inconsolable when she killed Dumbledore. I would be too. As writers, it hurts us even more than it hurts the readers. These characters are the people of our minds. They reflect our spirit. They reflect our own hearts, our own deaths.

When you do this, people might throw down your book and never pick it up again. Other writers may warn you not to do it. Some readers may hate you. It might be too much for them to accept. Good. Don’t worry about those folks. They don’t get what literature is really about, which is making people feel. It’s about making people experience fear and joy and love and hate. It’s a catharsis. Your real fans will pick the book back up, after they’ve had a chance to mourn. They’ll thank you for taking them on a journey that mattered, that meant something, that pointed to purpose in their own life. Don’t cheat them of that. Slay your characters and slay them mercilessly. Fiction and dreams are some of the only places where we can truly play God. Revel in your ultimate power.

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The Secrets of Storm of Swords

Storm of Swords is widely considered George R.R. Martin’s greatest work in the Song of Ice and Fire saga. After just finishing this massive door stopper fantasy I can easily see why. It’s packed with outstanding action, a sweeping scope, stunningly realized surprises and characters that haunted my dreams after staying up late for yet another night reading until two in the morning. It’s not a short read. Prepare to settle in for a month if you actually have other things going on in your life, but you’ll keep coming back to it. Even knowing the plot ahead of time will not prepare you for much of the emotional turmoil you’ll face within its pages. Beware of spoilers ahead.

It’s by no means a perfect book despite fantastic writing and deeply realized characters that transcend story telling to become real people. It’s safe to say that GRRM didn’t heed the late, great Elmore Leonard’s advice to, “try to skip the parts people skip.” With a single book that’s larger than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy combined, it’s inevitable that you’ll find some characters that you just don’t like seeing that much. The novel uses a limited omniscient, multi-viewpoint structure where each chapter is told from a different person’s perspective and inevitably some people aren’t as compelling as others. Yet what’s most surprising is how little of the work I wanted to speed through. Bran Stark’s story continues to bore me as does Sam Tarly’s but I still read 95% of their chapters, only occasionally pulling the read-the-first-line-of-each-paragraph technique to breeze through yet another inner monologue about how Bran wishes he wasn’t crippled and Sam wishes he had courage. Samwell Tarly reminds me a lot of Samwise in Lord of the Rings, but he just doesn’t have the noble courage and fierce loyalty to the power of friendship that makes Sam one of the most beloved fantasy characters of all time. Instead, he remains a cowardly fat kid and while he’s realistic he’s not unique or memorable. Many of his heroics turn on coincidence. He just happens to be at the right place at the right time. The weakness of Bran’s story stems from its long arc that looks as if it will span the entire seven book series. It’s clear that his main purpose is to confront the Others far beyond the wall, a race of magical humanoid monsters who’ve returned after thousands of years. I suspect his arc will mark a dramatic turning point in the last or second to last book, that are yet to be released, but at this point he just doesn’t have much of anything interesting to do. His entire story up until this point is a lot of him dreaming of being a wolf and escaping various brigands, war factions and outlaws while traveling a long, long way and hiding a lot. It reminds me of the worst parts of Lord of the Rings, a lot of endless walking over rocks and through the trees and through some more trees again.

With all that said, there’s so much to like in this novel. Storm of Swords has a reputation for being a negative book but I felt that reputation unfair. The gruesome death of Catelyn Stark and the boy king Rob in the infamous Red Wedding remains one of the most shocking scenes ever set to paper outside of American Psycho, but it’s more than balanced by the second half of the book that brings the long awaited deaths of some of the most notorious and irredeemable monsters of the series like the hideous sociopath King Joffery, the brutal enforcer Ser Gregor Clegane and the dark father Tywin Lannister, the true power behind the throne of Westeros, as well as some minor villains like the torturer known as the Tickler. For me those deaths more than make up for the horror of the Red Wedding and end the book on a strong, high note that sweeps upward.

Frankly, it’s amazing the Red Wedding scene works so well. Luring people to a supposedly safe meeting ground only to kill them is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but GRRM delivers it in an utterly unique way. Often this type of scene shows up at the beginning of books and serves to fuel the protagonist’s righteous revenge as in Braveheart, when the young William Wallace sees his father killed by a similar ruse. By setting the scene in the middle of the third book and delivering it with little to no warning it strikes hard and fast. The fact that we see the death of a viewpoint character who’s been with us through all three novels makes it even worse. Lastly because it’s Rob’s bannermen and supposed friends who orchestrate the murders it’s even more horrific. GRRM knows that story telling is not about throwing out the fundamental building blocks of fiction, but by twisting them he makes them unique. Just as a house always has a foundation, walls and a roof, but there’s no limit to the endless creative floor plans you can create inside that structure, this story continues to use familiar tropes in incredibly fresh ways.

It’s impossible to think of the book without comparing it to the TV series now. I’m sure that reading the Red Wedding was vastly different for people who read the books years ago, before the show started, but the show’s version of the scene is now impossible to ignore. Both of the works are very similar but they differ in subtle ways. Some things work better in the book. For example, Jaime Lannister’s slow redemption works much better on the printed page for the simple fact that we can see his thoughts. In the early pages Jaime thinks of Brienne of Tarth as “the wench.” Everything he says and thinks about her is a series of insults, but slowly as the story rolls on he begins to call her by her name more and more and the insults begin to get replaced by more caring and concern for her well-being. On the flip side, the Red Wedding worked better for me on the screen. In the books Rob is never a viewpoint character, but we follow him closely in the show. That makes his death all the more devastating. His relationship is also more fully realized on the stage than in the book. In the show, he falls in love with the battlefield surgeon, Talisa Maegyr. She’s a strong woman, not afraid to give him some lip, but at the same time she is strongly loyal to Rob as their love flowers. In the book, he marries Jane Westerling, a petty, immature minor noblewoman who doesn’t like having Rob’s wolf around that makes her almost instantly unlikeable in Catelyn’s and our eyes. On the small screen, a big deal is made of Talisa’s pregnancy and their hopes for the future, a warning sign that drives home the true impact of the scene. One of the strongest differences is that Talisa is brought to the wedding in the show and Jane is not brought in the book. The violence starts when one the party’s assassins stabs her in the stomach repeatedly, killing her and the child in one of the darkest and saddest moments the show had to offer. I sometimes still see the final image of Catelyn Stark’s neck streaming blood in my nightmares.

I knew most of the plot ahead of time, having closely studied this epic fantasy, but it still managed to surprise me at almost every turn. It’s one thing to know the outcome of events and another thing to see them unfold. Many moments in the book moved me at a deep level, particularly the death of Ygritte, Jon’s wildling lover. As she lay dying in the snow I found myself on the verge of tears and I felt Jon’s own internal conflict between his friends, his duties and his loves at that moment more than any other. I also knew the Tyrion strangles Shae, his long time lover and whore. While I knew that Tyrion escaped prison and took a secret tunnel to his father’s tower to find her in his father’s bed I wasn’t sure that would be enough to justify her death fearing it would just be another example of the disposable sex worker. I always liked the way Shae seemed to care for Tyrion in the book and the show, calling him her “giant of Lannister.” The way the book turns us against her is subtle and brilliant. Cersei has Tyrion seized after Joffery’s death believing him responsible for her son’s death. At his trial, she stacks the deck against him, bullying, cajoling and buying witnesses to make up whatever she wants them to say. Many of the dwarf’s enemies gladly stand against him but so do some of his friends who can’t risk the wrath of the Queen Regent. As I’ve said before, Cersei is the true villain of the series and when she strikes out in a rage, she’s a ruthless enemy. Yet it’s clear that Tyrion’s true friends, like Varys, say only what they must to satisfy the queen. This is all done through language and perfect pitch dialogue. We know Varys is holding back, giving the court just enough to make Tyrion look bad and keep his own head on his shoulders, but holding back truly personal details. It’s when Shae takes the stand that everything turns. She betrays everything from their most intimate moments, even telling the court that he forced her to call him her giant of Lannister that makes the crowd at the court roar with laughter. She even repeats it to drive the nail home. It’s safe to say that I absolutely despised this woman after that scene, almost as much as some of the more classical villains like Ser Gregor. When Tyrion finds her in his father’s bed and she has the nerve to call him her giant of Lannister once more, Tyrion strangles her in a deeply satisfying moment while thinking the very same thing that I thought as soon as she said that line, “that was the worst thing she could have said.”

The book also delivers some incredible one-on-one battles, like the Hound’s fight with Beric Dondarrion, a knight who seems immortal, coming back from the dead at least six times. There is also the signature battle between Ser Gregor and the Red Viper of Dorn. Ser Gregor is one of the most terrifying villains ever created. GRRM uses a simple technique to build his legend in the books. We barely see him. Instead, other people talk about him in hushed tones, telling stories of his atrocities that take on the feel of tall tales. Like Moby Dick he towers over the book, a constant threat, despite not showing up until much later. Ser Gregor is Tywin Lannister’s dragon (not a literal dragon but a brutal enforcer for the Big Bad of the story), a vicious, amoral man who likes nothing better than to kill, rape and steal and he takes sadistic pleasure in it. In other words, he’s a complete monster. Again we see the uniqueness of GRRM’s writing not in throwing off conventions completely but in breaking with tradition in new ways. Typically the dragon is killed by the hero or the hero team but not in this instance. Instead the story introduces a new character, the Red Viper of Dorn, a fierce, fast killer, known to use poison on his blades. He’s come to seek justice against Ser Gregor, because the dark knight killed his sister’s children, smashing her son’s head against a rock and then raping her with her son’s brains still on him and then killing her. Of course, the scheming chessmaster Tywin Lannister has no intention of turning over his most valuable weapon to the Red Viper’s justice. Instead, the Red Viper is asked to sit as one of three judges at Tyrion’s trial. Yet when Cersei secures Ser Gregor as her champion in the event that Tyrion asks for a trial by combat, a trick that saved him once in the Vale, the Viper sees an opening and we see the stage set for a fantastic battle when he volunteers as the dwarf’s champion. In other words, it’s got all the makings of a perfect prizefight, with the smaller, faster Red Viper using his speed to jab Ser Gregor with his spear and with the monstrous Gregor using his massive bulk to bludgeon the Viper into submission. Tiny telling details make the characters. Tyrion warns the Viper that Gregor uses a huge, two handed sword but needs only one hand to wield it. It’s perfect details like this that make GRRM a master at character creation. The Red Viper nearly kills the wicked knight, but at the last moment Gregor seizes him and breaks his face and skull, bragging that he’d done the same to his sister, though mortally wounded from the Viper’s poison tipped spear.

Storm of Swords also gives us some of Daenerys Targaryen most epic scenes. She’s come a long way from the uncertain little girl married to a horse lord. She’s a fiercely pragmatic warrior leader, who isn’t afraid to roast people with her dragons or hang them in the streets if necessary. The key is that her justice is balanced. Thus far she’s only delivered brutal deaths to her most pernicious enemies, like the sorceress who sacrificed her baby and the nasty slavers who nail child slaves to stakes along her marching route as a warning to stay away. The scene when she turns the massive slave army of Unsullied against their former masters is incredible both in the books and on screen.

The story reveals some enticing things about Stannis Barratheon. I’ve always thought him a bizarre hero, an uncompromising man who doesn’t make many friends. At first I couldn’t understand why he’d survived when so many others died until I told a friend that the Song of Ice and Fire probably contains every personality type on the planet and he said, “is there a batman in the series?” I thought carefully and finally said “yes, Stannis, a rich, brooding loner, uncompromising and a fierce tactical warrior.” And yet it’s impossible to escape the feeling that he’s not the true hero despite his even hand and longevity in the universe that does not hesitate to cut down the best and brightest along with the worst. That is finally revealed quietly in this book to be the truth. When Stannis takes the wall and saves the black brotherhood the men ask to see his sword, the magical Lightbringer, the name a clue in itself, as this is the name of the devil in Christian mythology. It glows, but afterwards the blind wise man Aemon Targaryen, a Maester who foreswore his family name and the machinations of kings and took the black, asked Sam Tarly if the sword burned the leather it touched or if it smoked? Sam tells him no it didn’t but it did glow. The Maester only nods but offers no explanation. A smart reader knows the answer. Stannis is not the chosen one and that sword may have magic but it’s not Lightbringer.

All and all, this book delivers on so many levels. It surprises, hits you with a huge range of emotions and manages to somehow make even minor characters seem fully realized in just a few pen strokes. I challenge you to read that first introductory scene with the Red Viper and then tell me that you don’t know exactly who he is, what he is like and what he wants, all within the space of a few dozen pages. Some writers go entire books and never develop a character half as well as the minor people who populate Westeros and disappear after only a few chapters. GRRM does this with perfect telling details, chosen carefully and then conveyed to us with the right establishing scene that allows the character to be developed in contrast to already established characters. He uses stories within stories to tell us much about those character’s inner worlds. When we first meet the Red Viper, Tyrion greets him at the edge of the city. The Viper proceeds to insult the dwarf openly and he has no fear in letting him know that he expects justice from his father for Ser Gergor’s crimes, but also tells him a story of how he saw Tyrion as a young man, expecting a monster and a devil from all the stories he’d heard, but instead finding just a dwarf, ugly but no beast. In just a few back and forths we learn the man is practical and unswayed by the weak and ignorant prejudices so common to most people who hate the dwarf and fear him. He is by no means a nice man, but you get the sense that he is clear, sharp and resilient and yet filled with a deep rage and a need for revenge. And we get all this, again, in just a single chapter, a single exchange of dialogue. For me that marks the true genius of GRRM. He is an absolute master of dialogue and it comes across in everything he writes.

This is a book worth its weight though I’m thankful I read it during the Kindle era so I didn’t have to lug it around. Study it closely and you’ll find that it contains hundreds of secrets to spectacular writing. Or just read it and enjoy the ride. Either way, it’s worth the trip.

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