I must be totally honest with you and say one thing to begin — This world bores me, but, an explanation is in order.
I receive no satisfaction from the excessive hype of conspicuous consumerism, profit-margins or portfolios in Bull Markets, but please read on. Product propaganda and branding, branding, branding is designed to convince me that I am lacking, and it tells me that it will alleviate my emptiness and anxiety if I go shopping — this confuses me. Television has no purpose in my life, for it is a tool of fear-mongering fools using incessant drivel and subtle thought-manipulation that would guide me in my life and the choices I would make. This insipid message that would be continually pumped into my brain would tell me how to think, feel and live my life.
I have divorced myself from this world and have no time for its continued conditioning. With the little I have given up, the little that there was to release was no real sacrifice for me to make, and I have been filled with a substance that is much more than even the word love could describe.
It can be said:
Before enlightenment — chop wood, haul water.
After enlightenment — chop water, haul wood.
I hope you have decided to follow me this far, because today I have reached out for something more. I see beauty all around me. I see this beauty in nature, in people, and now, yes, even in shopping malls, bulls and bears. I devote myself to joy and all that is in my life. I take joy in my hammer, compass and square (no, I am not a Free-mason, I am a Free-carpenter). I go shopping without knowing what to buy, for no one has told me what to buy. I acquire things as they come to me without the need to acquire. Things fill no empty spaces within me, for things cannot do this. These spaces are filled with purpose of existence and experience now.
I seek no thrill in any rhetoric, be it other’s or my own. I am content with creation in all its expressions and variation. All things are equally beautiful, and it is from these things that I choose. The world is still a place of excess, but it is now a place of excessive beauty since I have turned my back on things that seem contrary.
I now smile at those I see and smiles shine back at me. I know no one around me, and yet they know me. Stories about me surround me and yet I hear them not. Wonder never ceases to amaze me, and I allow myself to know nothing so that I can continue to wonder.
All this I aspire to.
So…, I must now be totally honest with myself and say one thing to finish — this world no longer bores me, for I have reached into a place (and continue to do so) that is different than what I have known before. I have reached into this place, and each time I bring a little bit of it back into our ordinary world. By doing so, this ordinary world changes for me. There is no explanation for this strange conversion and it is not a matter of enlightenment, satori or nirvana. It is simply that there is a key in all I see, and a secret always waiting to be revealed. It is a peeling away of the layers of an onion.
I will say it again — This world no longer bores me.
