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Since I last wrote, I have been questioning the possibility that the ‘I’ might still be hanging in there in a split way. The questioning went on for many hours, and several things came from it. The first is that it was mostly a waste of time, in that I could not come up with any answer by thinking about it. At least there was this concrete conclusion, and I was reminded of a quote from Osho: ‘You can’t figure this one out with your mind.’ Yes, I saw that this was a profound truth that no truth would ever result out of my thinking.

The other thing I noticed is that I was going back and forth between, ‘Am I the crazy one?’ or ‘Is he the crazy one?’. I looked back over all my ‘evidence’ of the other’s behavior, and then felt firm with my conclusion: ‘He is indeed crazy’. When I arrived at this point, I saw that to be able to state such a thing, meant that I had to see myself higher than him, meaning: ‘I wasn’t crazy.’

Next, I tried to be open to the possibility that ‘I was crazy’ and reviewed all happenings again and saw the converse that I had to have the assumption that he was higher than me, meaning: ‘He wasn’t crazy’. I saw that these kinds of points of view came directly out of the ‘ego’, on the one hand to feel confirmed in one’s own viewpoint and on the other hand to believe another’s viewpoint.

After this I thought there are two more scenarios, we both could be crazy or neither of us could be crazy. However, this basis made it very difficult to make a determination, because as equals then the possibility to compare things or judge them was mostly eliminated.

After, I saw that all the happenings that I reviewed with these different possibilities as the basis, then radically altered how ‘the reality’ might be. I was extremely confused after this, not being able to arrive to any conclusion this way and saw then that the process itself was faulty at the core. I realized it was crazy behavior to believe anything real could come out of this. To hold an underlying belief as truth and then filter scenarios through that belief, the resulting picture would always change to support the underlying assumption.

What I believed was true! Isn’t this what is meant to be crazy? So running through all these scenarios, what became obvious, as ‘truth’, was that ‘no truth’ could be arrived at this way - it was all mind fluff. What I was seeing was the result that would always come out of the process of viewing one’s happenings through any assumption: A static picture of reality that could be radically altered, simply by changing the underlying assumption.

The other thing that came out of this intense questioning to find out what was the ‘truth’ was that the process itself of entertaining one’s thinking, and continuing to believe that any ‘certainty’ could ever come out of this process, was the basic problem. Then I saw that as long as I was still trying to get answers in this way, then it was clear I hadn’t surrendered. I saw that one would be ready to surrender when one is completely convinced that nothing useful will ever come out of this process.

To come to this point is a long way to go because we honestly feel we are getting so much out of it. So then we have to confront each thing we feel we are getting out of it, one by one, as they come up in our lives, question them and when we are tired of them let them go. This is obviously an emptying process and a dropping of values, which we previously held so dear. Eventually we arrive to the core problem and face it and see it for what it is. When one has worn out all possibilities that anything of value will ever result from clinging on one’s self-image, then it’s exactly at this point, that one will be ready to let it go.

Betsy
July 17, 2024