Gary Hipworth's Blog

Nature’s Body + Society’s Mind = The Idiot Ego

Alternatively:

A giraffe is a horse designed by a committee

I’ll believe it when I see it
I’ll see it when I believe it
I’ll see it when I see it

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Shakespeare 

Sounds like everyone’s ego and everyone’s private story.

“Life is the art of the impossible”

One day I awoke to find myself without a thought in my head.

It was brilliant!

I had been trying not to think about the future because I wanted to find out who I was and whether the ego was real in me or an illusion.

Why did I go on this quest?

My younger brother Ray died at 33 from a violent attack. I was 36 at the time and thought I was a smart, successful person.

After this awful event I realised that I knew bugger all about nothing! If you or I can die in a second and not see it coming, then life has no meaning or purpose.

It then also dawned on me that not only was life meaningless, but for a human being who knew that their death was certain one day, it was also bloody impossible!

Tragically for humans we have to live with the knowledge that we will die for sure one day, but our genes are programmed to live forever.

Why go to any trouble to improve myself? Why collect stuff and try and become famous or be given an award? Why try to make a difference?

Why indeed go on at all?

We are all terminally ill from the day we are born. But when I look at how people are living, caught up in their daily activities, working their arses off to buy a new home, getting stressed out over a million small trivial matters, learning and memorising the details of how their rates notice is calculated, I know that they are ignorant people and in denial of where this road is inevitably taking them.

Lucky bastards!

Now I could see why religion was so important to many people as it gave then some comfort that there might be a way around their real life dilemma. A belief in a God that looks after you and grants you eternal life if you are a good boy is a pretty good deal.

Not for me though. I was too smart for that one. I was educated. I knew about probabilities. I knew about fairy stories. I knew about the facts. You poor unhappy wise bastard Gary!

So I realised I only had 2 choices; stay alive and live daily with the dread of eventual death, some nice bits of pleasure along the way too and maybe a long slow painful old age or kill myself now.

But wait a minute. I don’t know who I am. What if this story in my head is also just made up? Who is the storyteller? Who would be killing himself if he took this option?

If we are all ‘terminally ill’ from the day we are born, then we know for certain that our bodies will perish and return to dust. But who or better still, WHAT is it that dies? If I can find out what the ‘I’ is before I die, then this might possibly liberate me and allow me to live to the full NOW and stop worrying about what comes after death, if anything.

I had never asked myself the most fundamental question of my life and none of my teachers, parents or friends has ever suggested to me that this might be a good place to start if I really want to know how to live and find out for myself if I was living the truth or living a lie.

There’s my number one lesson right there. Don’t trust another person to give you the truth because they are living in a dream state of denial of death. And their words only have value for descriptive purposes but can never in themselves contain the Truth that one may wish to convey.

From now on I could only trust Life itself as my teacher to show me what was true and what was false about my existence.

This was a very lonely place to be. Even my own grown up children would not understand any of this, or my wife or my friends. They were too much part of the ‘normal’ world and conditioned to think that everything was as it should be.

I had to make this inner journey alone. I was scared witless as I had no clues about what might be coming. This did not deter me. I preferred death to living a futile existence.

I had to know if there was anything worth living for, beyond the silly ego and its ‘trivial pursuits’.

Now if words only have value for descriptive purposes but can never in themselves contain the Truth that one may wish to convey, words or knowledge cannot give me the answer to my true identity.

What other tools does Life have then?

In my search I came across the process of self-observation.  It is also called Two-way Looking (Douglas Harding) or Choiceless Awareness (J. Krishnamurti), or in Buddhism, Mindfulness or Self-remembering (Gurdjieff).  

Self-observation is actually very simple. You watch yourself. You watch everything going on around you and inside you as if you were a detached observer. In this state, you are not personalising what is going on. Just look without the controller or judge in you wanting to rush in and fix things.

The beauty of self-observation is that it is nature’s tool, not man’s. It has existed as a survival faculty in the animal world for millions of years and is outside man’s conditioned mind. It is the perfect tool for finding out who I really am.

And the fantastic news is that anyone can do it, at any moment.

I experienced a stopping of the thought process. (Language is a problem when trying to explain this stopping of thought as “I” did not experience it. There was only experiencing without the experiencer).

When thinking stopped, there was no thinker! What then existed was silence, which was creation and boundless energy and serenity. 

The mystery of who I am was solved!

My ego or sense of self is an illusion. I see this as a fact as I see that glass of water on the table. What am I then, when the mind is quiet? I am nothing. No thing, no permanent entity of any kind. I am an unknowable energy process and this is the ultimate source of my being as it is also the ultimate source of your being and every other living creature. In this state we are truly equal beings. It is only the thought process that gives us the illusion that we are separate, individual beings.

When my brain saw through the illusion of the ego by scientific, direct self-observation, my consciousness changed. It went quiet.

I had been using everyone and everything to build and reinforce through memory, a false existence. This illusionary existence requires self-centredness, beliefs, meaning, purpose, values, dramas, daily trivia, gossip, suffering, numerous fears, enemies, repeated self-talk, constant thinking and personal stories to keep it ‘alive’.

I knew at this moment that I could never be content ever again with my heavily conditioned and false beliefs about life.

I also understood that death was nothing to fear because there is nothing spiritual or physical that lives on. The illusion of me being a permanent entity had died already, or better still, has dissolved into nothingness. 

In other words, if I can’t find anything permanent or fixed about me right at this moment of looking, then how can there be anyone that lives on after I have died? It therefore must only be a belief that would ‘like’ to live on and that is just wishful thinking albeit an understandable one for a creature that has been placed in an impossible evolutionary situation.

This dominant egocentric way of life that we call ‘human nature’ can only continue to exist if masses of people believe in their own egos as being real. When a critical mass of people stop believing in egos or individual selves, then human relationships and human consciousness will undergo a radical change the like we have never experienced before.

Will this ever happen? Who knows? However, when more people understand the massive benefits in ‘killing off their egos’ such as eliminating fear of death and psychological suffering and being one with nature, and quite possibly the survival of the human race, there may well be a rush of humanity to the exit doors of this dream world. 

Although there is one small downside. You will have to let go of your most precious possession…you!

Or to put it more precisely, your mistaken, unconsciously acquired beliefs about who you are that are causing you so much suffering and pain and keeping the medical profession and the drug companies and the fatty food industries and the media circus in business and the whole rat race spiralling out of control.  

However, I can only be responsible for life in me, although we influence each other in strange and mysterious ways. 

I am now much better at dealing with the facts of life, moment to moment and in context with the whole situation that I am involved with, the interrelationships and connections. Thought is only used to create new things or solve problems, but it is no longer in the driver’s seat.

Well that sounds like I’m perfect. Far from it. I’ve got so much idiot conditioning in me that I have to watch it like a hawk and sometimes I say something or do something that is stupid and silly and crass.

The beauty of my life today though is I know I have the next moment and this is always new and fresh. My eternal challenge is to stay awake sufficiently to also be new and fresh and creative with my actions as well.
    
I love nature. She is my teacher and my guru. I get in step with her and have no wish to control her or work out her motivations as she is much too smart for this little vegemite.

I chose to live because life has intrinsic meaning for its own sake, not because I need human meaning to make sense of life, which is absolutely incomprehensible.

Nature’s Truth set me free. All I had to do was stop believing in fairy tales and accept the facts of self-observation.

The human condition is so weird and bizarre and ridiculously impossible. Man has invented ideas about life to protect him from the facts of his own mortality but these ideas cause him to suffer and be anxious for the whole of his life. We then invent mental illness diagnostic labels and medications to help anxious, frightened, nervous, or psychotic people cope with their inner demons that are caused by man.

We are mortal creatures. When we stop denying our mortality and see the futility of having beliefs about anything, we will be at peace.

I know because I have experienced this inner peace for about 15 years now.

Who am I?

I don’t have the foggiest clue.

That’s why I am at peace.

Evolution’s winners in the game of life tend to be those individuals/ species that adapt the best to change and the world is experiencing rapid change right at this time due in the main to our own past successes.

An individual that is at peace, cooperative, generous, creative and international in their world view would be very adaptive in these chaotic times.

This is exactly the kind of human we need.

But he or she is a threat to the status quo and our deep desire for no change.

Who will survive to inherit the future?

Nature will.

End of story.

Methods
Movies
Madness
Mind
Memories
Mistakes
Massages
Merchandise
Media
Medicine
Machines
Meditation
Megabucks
Melodies
Memoirs
Merry-go-rounds
Mescalin
Mermaids
Metaphysics
Militia
Milk
Missionaries
Money
Mosquitoes
Maps
Myths
Muscat
Mousse
Mortgages
Morals
Monuments
Molecules
Mobiles
Me

 

Is freedom about human rights?

For example, the right to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from violence, freedom to elect your government.

I would call these freedoms various forms of external freedom, and they are certainly to be valued but for me this is not the best kind of freedom.

What about the freedom of choice?

I can choose between various alternatives or I can choose not to choose anything. But if I look more closely at how I make my choices I discover that I have weighed up all the pros and cons of the different alternatives and this information has come from my memory bank and past experience. I rarely make a choice based on having no knowledge or past experience of my options as this would seem to be too risky and at best foolhardy. For me once again this kind of freedom is an improvement because it comes from within me but it is still tied to my previous conditioning, that is, to the past. I am like a goat on a lead, but tied to a memory tree.

What about my attitude?

It is not what happens to you that counts. It is how you react to what happens to you, especially when you have unfortunate surprises. But even this kind of freedom is still a reaction.

The prefix re in react gives the game away. Re literally means to return to a previous state, go back, do it again etc. Surely this is only repeating the past and you are once again like a goat tethered to a short lead.

Is there a state of freedom that has no attachment to anything, that is free of all illusions, free of time and space, free of language and words?

If there was such a state then this would be real freedom.

But my thinking, noisy mind would have to be quiet for this state to be.

This silent consciousness was our birthright before social conditioning and the ‘me’ was invented by man for improved group communication and physical survival.

Doesn’t seem like a fair trade to me.

But then who said life was fair?

Please Life give me back my free innocent consciousness!

Sorry my dear friend, it was never your consciousness in the first place.

That’s why it was free.

You are the problem.

Let go of yourself…and there is no how.

I would be just finding my true vocation
To help others…
- Take more risks
- Make more mistakes
- Question everything
- Discover natural silence
- Focus on their greatness and delegate the rest
- Build a strong, all-round support team
- Floss more and brush less
- Walk more and exercise less
- Be more inconsistent and unpredictable
- Yield more but never give up
- Eat less creatures
- Love more creatures
- Make more friends
- Take more risks
- Love more people
- Laugh and play more
- Observe more and think less
- Trust their instincts and distrust formulae
- Live in the moment
- Embrace their mortality
- Act more and react less
- Create more and destroy less
- Be who they are
- And prepay their funeral
To help myself…
- All of the above
- Make more money so I can do more
On the other hand
Everything is perfect right now
I’ve done my absolute best
Let existence take care of the rest

 

I am aware that everything I am about to write or say or feel
Has been programmed into my brain by my culture
When I was helpless and dependent on my carers
But they too were programmed by their carers
And so on right back to the human being
Who invented the first word
I am a prisoner of language
And so I am a prisoner of thinking
That is only two-dimensional
And one thing at a time
And incomplete
And of the past 
Whereas reality is moment-to-moment
And holistic
And complete
What can I do?
I am aware
I am awareness
This is enough….

The world is full of unhappy people
The root of unhappiness is your cultural programming 
The uprooting of unhappiness is to understand your programming
Find out who it is that is unhappy
By passive, detached, moment by moment awareness of your daily reactions

Don’t you think it very odd that leading scientists with the most advanced technology are investigating whether it is possible to time travel into the future or whether there might be other planets that support life and are brilliant at describing the nature of black holes but the emotional and psychological black holes inside of millions of human beings are not a high priority?

God forgive us if we do find a way to travel to other distant parts of the universe and meet up with other life forms and we go there without solving the black hole inside ourselves first. 

So what are our priorities?

Don’t we want to be happy?

Apparently not enough people do want to be happy because I don’t see this item on our government’s list of policies, never mind right at the top! 

But let’s not leave it to the Pollies.

Is it at the top of your list, i.e. to be happy?

Why not?

Have we become so conditioned to being on an emotional roller coaster that we have accepted this state of affairs as just part of human nature?

If we are unhappy because of our social programming, then who is responsible for this programming?

Aren’t we all responsible?

Have you examined your programming, i.e. your core beliefs about life, to see if they are real or imaginary? 

Apparently the scientists have proven that nothing can escape the incredible gravitational pull of a black hole.

For many people emotional black holes are much the same.

Except for one major difference…

Emotional black holes are man-made.

Check out your core beliefs and see if they are true to reality.

You may be in for a ‘culture shock’!