Description

Why Your Plans Never Work. This is AI generated podcast from my notes below. pretty fancy!

• Experiential constancy. What if the baseline of your experience of life is already set? There is an experience that we have that stays relatively constant because the stimulus required to get there changes as you evolve. If you're unaware, you can go through a lot of bad stuff and you have a particular experience: relatively happy, relatively sad, relatively angry, and so on. As you evolve, you notice more of the junk in life and correct many mistakes. In doing so, you become more sensitive to your stimulus around you. Even though you're cleaning up your world, so to speak, you retain the same experience and equilibrium, a pre-set equilibrium that stays the same as you do the work to change your surroundings. So changing your surroundings won't make you happy, because the more you change it, the more sensitive you get. The smaller amount of what you do not want gives you a bigger reaction because you are more sensitive and in tune, and it keeps you in the same baseline experience. So instead of trying to change the world and change yourself, work on just being happy, exactly as you are. Work on being peaceful, exactly as everything is. Be content right now. There's nothing else to do. You can try to make a difference so you can be content another time. Wherever you go, there you are. It won't work. All you have is now. Might as well do it now. Might as well be content now. What if life did not get better than it is right now, ever? What if this is it? Would you find contentment now? If None of those pursuits matter or can end state can be changed by changing the external stimulus, then contentment now is the Highest goal and the highest state.
• As an example, let's say you live a selfish life and you have some sort of epiphany that your selfish desires won't make you happy, and so you switch it up and decide that loving service delivers contentment and it is a much better life. You decide, however, now that you are concerned for others and you desire service for others instead of taking for others for your selfish gain. You start to become aware of everyone else's needs and the suffering outside of yourself.
• This new awareness creates a new level of suffering because you've actually cared for these people that are suffering. It can't change. We realized you can't change other people's experiences, even if you give them what they say they want. It's a bit of a trap, thinking that satiating your desire will create less desire. You realize that feeding desire when it wants it only creates more desire. This is true if your desire is for selfish gain or if your desire is to serve someone else's desires. It becomes clear that to be content, you must free yourself from desire in general. How do you do that? By accepting that all of life, as it is and as it's coming to you, is perfect and that you want nothing else. You want only what you have. You want only who you are. You want only what others have and are.
• Only wanting what is, as it is now, is only possible if you can see past the small character that so many of us think we are: our small ego, this tiny, constrained bit of awareness that is within a tiny mind. That's called a personality that we optimistically is inside a body. If we think we are that and we think others are that, we will never be free from desire. The reason for this is that the whole Ego's Mantra is: "Seek but do not find." It wants you to keep searching because it has to create separation boundaries between them and us, boundaries between me and God, boundaries between what I have and what I want. There have to be boundaries, or else the made-up separations would start to fall apart. Once that starts falling apart, the made-up separation of a separate special self would also eventually fall apart. Even though we suffer because of it, we cherish our separate special self because we think it's us. To lose it would be like dying, like annihilation, and even though we suffer, we think it's better to suffer than to be annihilated.
• So how do I get out? The only way is to increase my awareness. I have to expand my view past the blinders that I put up to keep me within a tiny separate personality in a tiny brain, all supposedly in a tiny body. When I expand my vision, I realize that I can look upon this tiny personality and tiny body in order to be able to observe something from the outside. It presupposes that there's something outside to be able to do the observing. I would not be able to watch myself do painful things unless there was something outside that self that is doing the watching. This watcher is a bigger part of myself. What is it? Is it consciousness? Is it my soul? Are they ethereal or astral bodies? I'm not sure what it is, but I know it's bigger than this little personality. I know it's a bit comforting because the personality seems to be set at a certain level of happiness, but that bigger self is free from that. This self that is able to watch and be indifferent to anything that happens is free already and is content already. This bigger self cannot gain or lose. This self that watches cannot be hurt. This self that watches cannot be born and cannot die. This self that watches is already in the state that I want to end up being. It is already content, as the ego is set in its experience and can't move. It can't really get more content than it already is, no matter what it desires. The self that watches is almost so set, it is set in contentment, it is set in peace. So my goal is not to achieve desires or help other people or be anything or achieve anything or help anything, any of that. My goal, if I want to be content is to relate more with the self that watches than the self that is constrained. The more I relate to the self that watches and the less I relate to the ego, the small personality, the more content I will be.
• There's nothing to do to achieve this shift in intention. That's all it is. Do I intend to be an ego that isn't seeking and achieving, or do I intend to be aware that I am the self that watches? That shift changes my world instantly. That shift freezes all. That shift is salvation. That shift transforms me into an eternal with no boundaries, no wants, nothing that has to be achieved, no goals that will add, or failures that will take away. How do I do it? The first step that you have to do to start to shift your intention and awareness is just to start to watch. Watch yourself choose being the ego that suffers. Watch yourself choose being the goals that are achieved and you get momentary relation, or are lost and you get suffering, frustration, anger, all the lower frequency experiences. The more you watch yourself the more you can see when you start to choose, separation versus choosing one missing connection. The ego needs separation to keep the distinctions between this and that me and them the distinctions and the boundaries are necessary and a scarce world with one thing is valuable, and one thing is not those distinctions and separations is the root of my suffering because the goal mark is continually removed and it's designed but even if I get there it's instantly moved to another goal, so I will always seek but never find. I've watched myself, and it will soon be comical that you do this to yourself over and over, even though it becomes quite obvious that it will only end in suffering and frustration and anger and fear. It is even sad once you see the game you've been playing, because the promise the ego has been giving you your entire remembered life is a lie.
• Instead, watch and release the impulse as it comes that the new goal will make you happy and complete and content. Remind yourself that it will not. There's nothing wrong with pursuing goals. The body has nothing much else to do. Just remember that if you're attached to the result of the goal, you will be disappointed and you will suffer. If you are attached to something not happening or attached to something happening, you will suffer and you will not achieve contentment. If you pursue goals and need nothing different to happen, then things could be fun.
• Make life a game. Play it like you would play with a kid where you want the kid to win. Play the game so that you understand the strategy and get the intricacies and learn how it works. I don't need an outcome. In fact, you can play the game like I often do with my kids and my wife, so that you hope the other person will win. That way the other person will have some joy and happiness because they think they achieved something that they lacked, while you know that no achievement will ever bring you contentment. You can just enjoy playing a game with another supposedly separate person. There is much joy in that. It cannot be taken away.
• Put your effort and your attention in the things that cannot be taken away. That you cannot lose, that you cannot gain. Anything that could be gained or lost will eventually be gained or lost in a repeated cycle that can never be stopped. Anything that cannot be lost, or cannot be gained, you can never lose, will always be yours so intricately that it is actually you, not a possession. The reality, in the end, is that you are the contentment that you seek. The quote "Know thyself" is this age-old pursuit to find who you have always been. It's easier than we think. It's like looking for water standing in a clear river and looking for sand lost in the desert, or the way of looking for the ocean. The only thing that separates us is our definition and separate ideas. Our judgments that this is this and that is that keep us separate. That's all it is. I made up ideas and I made up judgments. The wave is not separate from the ocean unless I call it a wave and the thing below it an ocean. Now suddenly there are two things, but this is not reality.
• How do I be happy? How do I be content? I must give up all my pursuits. I must give up even my pursuit of being me, or at least the separate me that is a personality, that has a name, that was born and will die. But again, give up what you never were, and that is not much of a loss. Who are you? You are closer to the one who watches. At least it's a way out of this trap, the ego trap, the separate world trap. This is classical enlightenment, but it is not the end. But it is simple, so why wouldn't we not do it? I'm not sure. It seems that they want the experience and fun time feeling like we were suffering and in danger and scarce.

Just like we watch movies with drama, they will not watch a movie with no drama, no suspense. Joseph Campbell's hero's journey is this classic arche that human's love, starting in obscurity I'm moving to some kind of failure and being thrust into an adventure when I didn't want to, and finding the hero within, and then achieving some kind of crazy other failure and relying on some kind of outside source mentor that helps them become who they never thought they could be, and then coming back, getting some side of success then get into even deeper trouble when everyone thinks all is lost, and at the very end they step into their full power and save the day. This is the hero's journey, and we love it. We love the drama, we love the pain. We want the arc from obscurity to newfound power to supposed failure, to retribution and success. When we're done, we like to start over somewhere else. This is the ego. It's what it loves to do. So, don't be mad at the ego for doing what it does.

Just shift your awareness to your bigger self and watch the ego do what it does. Just like a good movie, you might even start to enjoy the show. The only reason you wouldn't is if you think you are that ego or that body. But the ego is stuck. That part of you that has a name will not get to the end it thinks it's going to. It will always fail. It has to, to stay alive. Good news though, that's not you. You are the watcher. Once you see there's nothing to do and all there is to watch, all of life can be a game. Be content now. Play the game and make the risks. Why not? It's fun. Add a little drama. You can't lose.