As It Is

“In the interest of vanity, greed, and avoiding the discomfort of being a contrarian, the emperor and all of his subjects willfully ignore the obvious: the emperor has been scammed, and his new clothes are non-existent. The emperor is naked. All ignore this truth except one boy, who, in his naivete, declares the obvious: the emperor has no clothes. The emperor has no clothes. What I mean by that is that life is plainly obvious. It is exactly as it is. It is not dressed up. It does not conform to my wishes. This is so radically different from what we are sold in the form of spirituality, religion, and philosophy as to be shocking.

Most keep declaring that the emperor’s new clothes are beautiful, elegant, and dashing despite the fact that this deceit is absolutely ridiculous. There are a few who, by luck, I think, discover how unbearably painful and miserable it is to lie to ourselves so much of the time. So we start being honest. That honesty is not something that gets rid of delusion or cancels it out. It merely is the recognition of delusion as it is. It is the recognition that delusion is all that is. And in that is the recognition of our inherent, unalienable freedom.” ~ Joey Lott

“One definition of “religious” is scrupulousness: paying very close attention. Some of us are religious in our attention to the unreal; we try again and again, religiously, to be honest about our unreality. We confess, like sinners, our chronic attachment to unreal (conceptual) living. Or we pluck, religiously, the essence of various Buddhist and other nondual teachings from their outdated and superstitious contexts and hose them off like ducks from an oil spill, wash off all the dogmas, all the dogmatists, all the magical thinking—even all the Buddhas! And we find this essence to be ordinary.

Or we pay attention, religiously, to the bodymind’s habitual tendency to contract into its fear-greed mode, that coiled position that ferments this outrageous, self-flavored, hallucinatory world of suffering. We notice that, to the degree we are unaware of this self-created quicksand, this clinging-grasping fear-greed habit, we live in darkness as unconscious slaves, automatons, and lunatics. And when aware of it, we live in light, even though nothing whatsoever is changed.

It appears that we are free in (and as) this light, and that means we are free to cling and grasp with abandon. This view may be opposed by vested “authorities,” careerists, self-appointed leaders, shepherds on the progressive path. But some of us can no longer stomach these half-baked vendors, these parasites. Happily, light is the best...emetic. We are cleansed of them. We are free of them.

Progressive paths are paths of confusion. "Practicing" one’s way toward an ideal state is, to use the well-worn simile, like trudging down railroad tracks seeking the horizon-point where the two tracks merge into one. Progressive path spirituality is, in fact, secular in a negative sense. It has been called "spiritual materialism." It is transactional and can be a psychological and economic system with serfs and lords, or, as Lin Chi might put it, guests and hosts (“Be the host, not the guest!”  he shouts). 

Paths are horizontal digressions in this vertical (timeless) reality. We know, we trust, instinctively that this is true and that we have nowhere to go and nothing to do.”

~ John Veen, Losing my grip: Conscious Awakespletives

Photos ~ Joey Lott, John Veen