Self – Future Yogis

The word Selfie has become deeply ingrained in our vocabulary, take a picture of ‘me at the Acropolis’, at the pub falling over, me with my new lover, standing next to someone famous, looking depressed, every scenario that we could possibly imagine.
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We live in strange times, a time when humanity is trying to climb out of its cocoon and take off like a butterfly; meanwhile at the same time we have a global community of people wanting to define themselves forever in frozen moments in ridiculous poses. Generations immersed in self obsession beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
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Growing Up
Liking oneself is valuable. The inverted ego is painful, people grovelling around thinking they are worthless, not good enough, it’s part of the guilt-mind-control program of the religious tyrants, persecute everyone’s thoughts and then offer salvation. Humans are made of stardust, gods in the making, have the ability to love, to wander the stars endlessly weaving through the corridors of the heavens. So what does it matter if someone hurts your feelings and you get offended? Really, we need to grow up? Unless a person can divert the arrows of hatred and selfishness of others, dissolve it into nothingness, dis-empower it, there’s little hope for incarnations to come, that is if the great Gods give them another chance…. seriously now (tongue in cheek).
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As long as there is self hatred it is difficult to cross over. Cross over what? The river that stands between humanity and forever-ness. On the human side of the river lies a civilisation in conflict, hatred; enchantment with bling, chasing shiny things and before one knows it life is over, the spirit being is ripped out of the body and as the great Sages say, death is like a rose bush being pulled through ones being…then back out into deep space to do a life review and then pop back into another body somewhere for more or less of the same. The great Buddha man Gautama said something like, “get off the wheel”. Humanity is imprisoned and loves it, it’s like shoes that are too tight, people keep wearing them because they look good but it’s a painful experience….and anyhow they look great in a Selfie.
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The Self and Selflessness
For eons, not just on this planet but right throughout the Cosmos, man and other beings have sought the meaning of life, to understand the Source of Creation, the goal, to put to rest the questions that haunt him/her/it. From that quest there have been many philosophies created, some have imprisoned species and other tenets have helped them to dig deep, in many cases they have just put their minds at rest and have allowed them to go about their business and do ‘other stuff’. With their philosophical questions answered, they can be at ease and not worry any longer. Ahhhh the tragedy of delusion, civilisations imprisoned by thought, not just here but throughout the galaxies.
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Bharat, people usually know it as the greater Indian subcontinent, historically has had many glorious beings wander its sands, earth and skies. In the age of darkness there are many charlatans, the self obsessed pretending to be wise men. But leaving them aside, there have wondrous beings who stepped in and out of bodies there and delivered wisdom appropriate to the times they moved in and also dropped seed thoughts to grow in future generations. These great beings arrived to remind man of his hidden nature. In some traditions it is known as the Self, or in today’s language I will coin the phrase ‘the Non-Selfie’.
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The Imaginary Me
Modern man (and also that of any time period or sector of space) has difficulty in comprehending selflessness. He/her/it often considers that it means annihilation, death of who it believes itself to be. On that note I will give limited-thought-man a little slack and say yes it’s true it is the death of who he/she/it believes itself to be. There is a major difference between who one thinks one is and who one really is. Who a person believes oneself to be has come about by receiving information and building up a picture and eventually the person says “that’s me”, it is reinforced by the world around and when someone disagrees or says something negative, a person holds tighter, screams and shouts to protect its imaginary self.
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The Beauty of Nothingness
The sage Jiddu Krishnamurthi once said, “you must become nothing”. A lot of people have disregarded or would bypass this snippet of wisdom. It is running in the opposite direction to everyone else, everybody is building themselves up to BE something. It is also easily misconstrued by students of spirituality who have half-knowledge, once hearing this, the sledgehammer method has been known kick in and there is often an attempt to destroy oneself and become blank, eradicate the personality, there is an attempt to run from life, t0 transcend. Human life is a glorious thing, the rising sun, the echoes of the valleys, the touch of a tender being who loves us, the rain on the tin roof, singing out loud on a sunny day, being IN experience is an important thing, life is precious. Experiencing is important, the idea of running is counterproductive, the problem is CLINGING to experience.
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What humanity suffers from is what I will call ‘loop syndrome’. As many would know, an audio loop is a sample of music that just keeps going around and around. Humans have an experience and want to repeat it. And mind you this is what happens with drug addiction, do it once, like it, give me more, like it a lot, give me a bigger packet and so on. This happens with MOST experiences. In an harmonious life, a being has an experience, extracts the juice, the joy and wisdom and moves on. With humans, what happens ‘under the bonnet’ is the thought particles get stuck and the awareness part of oneself keeps running back to have another hit of the same, like a faulty vinyl record or a CD glitch.
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SELF
The nature of the Self is closely related to selflessness, it is a beautiful contradiction. Self is closer to SPACE than object and this is why so many people are what would be referred to as ‘going the wrong way’, there is often no consideration that what a person places in the SPACE is the obstacle. On the other hand selfishness temporarily asserts itself as a powerful being, it separates itself out and places its own agendas above all others, at the expense of others. Desire and need is normal, it rises for a moment, does its stuff and falls back into the abyss of space; this is the nature of the world of form and thought, there is a constant refreshing. The NOT SELF, is a series of thoughts that join together and say “hey that’s me”, “I’m old, I’m clever, I’m beautiful, I’m fat”… the bundle of stories the NOT SELF gathers together throughout its lifetime creates the identity that it believes itself to be. It defends itself at all costs
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FREEDOM
Freedom comes about by gently dismantling and discarding the story of who we are. The continuous self obsession of ‘Selfie mentality’ covers the canvas of life with layer upon layer of information that reinforce the sense of I. And this doesn’t mean that I think ‘freezing moments in time’ in photographs are a bad thing, but understanding self obsession and how it stands in the way of super-consciousness is critical. Personally I don’t really see what people call EGO, I just see it as thought taking up space; a process of meditation is very helpful in learning to detach from thought and abandoning the known.
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There is a way through all this chaos on the world stage and it is in understanding Nothingness, the great Emptiness. EVERYTHING on the screen of life regardless of what world or galactic civilisation one is in, emerges out of Emptiness/Nothingness and then recedes when its life-cycle is over, this may be a brief moment or billions of years. This Nothingness is ALIVE, it holds all potentials and is at the core of our being and this is where freedom lies.

Tilopa 2.0

We live in a time where many of us freeze-frame ourselves wherever we go. This is me at the Opera House, I’m now standing in front of the Taj Mahal, behind me is 100 mile beach, me eating a gluten free sandwich with Tibetan parsley, me with a coffee cup in the back streets of Kathmandu, me standing next to Jim Morrison’s grave smoking a doobie. So many opportunities for us to place ourselves in sacred spaces and hide the view, we trivialise life and turn the magnificent into something about ‘us’.
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Feeding the Problem
I was walking down a trendy Melbourne street in my normal fashion of not being able to go forward in a straight line for more than two metres when I noticed a young mother with a child of about three or four years old. They were taking a selfie outside a shop, no big deal really, after the ‘shoot’ the mum showed the daughter the pic on her phone and the child smiled with natural excitement. It’s normal to take photos of our kids, nice mementos for future dialogue when kids are older. However it got me thinking.
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Who the Fudge Am I?
When we look at the human dilemma of ‘who am i?’ and all the other questions about the mystery of life, it would be reasonable to start to question how we arrive at conclusions of who we are. For starters, at birth when the stork drops us off at the hospital, natural birth centre or cabbage patch, we arrive and immediately there’s a lot of hoohah about the new kid on the block, it’s a boy, it’s got too much hair, it’s beautiful, it looks like a monkey, it’s a Buddha, it wont stop crying, what do I do with this thing? omg I’ve got a baby. This little person thing gradually gets defined by those around it as it moves along the arrow of time; from the very beginning the flow of external data writes to the subconscious memory bank and the kid learns who and what it is.
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I’m Not Just a Bunch of Banana Sundaes
I like to think a little broader than the skin that holds all the bits in. For example I know the water running through my being has arrived from the outside, the clouds, the rain, glug glug down the hatch, what was once falling from the endless heavens is now in my being. The food that grew in Mother Earth transformed inside my body and is now reflected in the texture of my skin; the sun, the air, the whole of nature has allowed me to be here, wherever here may be, this body-being that I use as a vehicle to move through life’s experiences is not out on its own, it is part of a series of processes of living nature (not rocket science).
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Not Sure Who I Am
Many people in my family have changed their names, this has always amused me; I guess it was only fitting that my parents would give me a name at birth but never use it, they called me something else from day dot, I have never used the name on my birth certificate apart from when I’m startled into an ‘oh that’s me’ when it gets called at the doctors; and then by a weird series of events I ended up with yet another name ‘Tilopa 2.0’ that I use now. For me, I think this name change thing is not by chance, it has been a critical aspect on my journey of understanding the mysteries of life. It got me thinking ‘who the fudge am I? We humans love to name things, the concern with naming is as soon as something is named it is filed away in the memory banks, we humans assume we know lots of things but often we just know the names and very little information about things, it’s not until we enter into something that we really know it, the rest is just a story. We are a panel of experts who know about things that we have never experienced.
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Getting Out of the Way
Transformation comes about by undoing. In education there is a filling up; and I am not knocking the gathering of information or the development of skills, I am a teacher and also love learning new things. The process of experiencing deeper Awareness works in reverse to education, a different set of rules applies; this is why academics and intellectuals have so much trouble with consciousness and out of the ordinary things, they don’t have a column in their database to include ‘other stuff’. And this does not mean that a sharp intellect is a problem, personally I find it useful for analysis and discrimination; in my case a sharp intellect is extremely beneficial for me to compile the extraordinary into something that vaguely makes sense. A bit like a cup full of sea water gives an example of the texture of the ocean, it won’t tell us much else but it hints that the salty water exists.
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A Montage Called Me
As we move through selfie-moments and stream them live in real-time to the social cyber-world, a chorus of onlookers joins in to the story of ‘who we believe ourselves to be’. That sentence may seem a little odd or over the top but when we come back to the core principles of Buddhism or Jnana Yoga or knowledge of Self, (a simple definition of Self =something more expansive than the body and its environs) we know that Emptiness is at our core, as we move through life, in our thoughts we are defining who we are such as ‘i am a doctor, an idiot, a genius, i’m fat, ugly, a nice guy’, all sorts of labels. When we look very very closely and give it a lot of thought, we see there is nothing solid that defines us apart from the body we drag through the 3D space of the world, the ‘me’ is constantly in motion, the molecules are churning, dancing in space. It is space, the ‘field’ of creation that is consistent and also our ‘intention’ that projects into space. A selfie temporarily defines us, when we give them too much focus and stream them endlessly to the world, we are falling deeper into the abyss of mis-identification and move further away from what we are.
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The Age of Not Me
The time we live in is an age of self-obsession and there needs to be a certain amount of awareness that we are ‘not what we imagine ourselves to be’, the image that we are creating and reinforcing plunges us further and further away from our core nature, the Emptiness. This word Emptiness is not what it seems, it is living, it is at the heart of all creative potential, the blank canvas of life, the Silence that the Universe sits on or in and we need to get out of its way.

Tilopa 2.0 on his balcony

Category: Self

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