Category: General

Today is Lunar New Year eve. Since I am a Chinese, “lunar new year” has a meaning to me. But it doesn’t bear any meaning to any other race. It is queer how being a chinese, the celebration becomes real. If I am born into a chinese family and do not look at all like any other chinese, and being adopted by another race, “lunar new year” doesn’t make any sense to me. Funny isn’t it?

Am I really really a “chinese” or is it simply a meaning the world gave me? I would not be called a chinese if I am adopted to a different family race. What has label got to do with my true beingness? But one thing is for sure – each label locks me into a separation from others. Each label is a meaning the world gave me and in return I give it to the world.

My name is a label, my gender is a label, my positioning in the family is also another label. Race, religion, citizen, marital status, career status, are each label that make specialness out of me. Even the “my”, “I” or “me” is the basic label that defines me different from anyone else. For that I am separated from each and everyone else. I am unique in that sense. But that uniquenesss is far from the truth.

At the bottom of all these forms are the same essence that you and me are carrying – experiences. Not the experiences of storylines and dramas, which are still in the level of form, but experiences of feelings and perceptions – joy, pain, upset, happiness, anguish, peace, jealousy, judgment, sadness and whatever that is. They are not new at all to you and me. My jealousy feeling is no different from your jealousy feeling. My anger is no different from your anger except probably in intensity.

My friend’s five year old child told her what it is like when she experience jealousy – it is not something new to the child, and there is no necessity to teach or explain what jealousy is – we are all ancient beings, going round and round in all these emotions.

So what is so different  from you and me? Do I have more happiness than you? Probably yes, for each emotion is dependent on how I give meaning to each form, in other words, my attachment to the experience. One dollar could mean differently to anyone. To a beggar, a one dollar experience is different from a rich guy. A trickle of water in a desert has a different meaning from a trickle of water from the tap. The meaning we put into each form is all our experiences of feelings.

Do I have more jealousy than you? Probably too, depending on my views of what I am experiencing. Thus all my own experiences has nothing to do with the world except the game of my own views and interpretations. Yes, I can be threatened by the world, but how I go through the experience is all I am.

My journey and your journey to earth is like entering a massive amusement park. In it there are lots of toys for me to experience. How I experience those stuff is different from how you experience it. The intensity of my feelings derived from each experience is dependent on the meaning I give to it. But yet I am narrowed down to three types of feelings – pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. That is all it is.

Stripped from all the facades of form and label, we are simply that. Why am I so serious with life? Aren’t we doing time on earth, or anywhere else for that matter, so long as this being call “I” is blinded by labels? Let me share with you here the first lesson from A Course in Miracle:

Lesson 1
Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything.

Love, or more accurately, infatuation, is a queer thing. When I said “I love you” I am to mean I am having a pleasant feeling towards a certain character(s) you are exhibiting at that point of time. In truth, I am not loving the “you” per se except the character(s) that I am fond of. If a certain character I wanted is not present when I desired it, then I “don’t love you”. Strangely I am addicted to my needs rather than “loving you”. Am I unconsciously betraying you by my own needs? Or am I betraying myself for not seeing this reality?

Each time when you fulfilled my quota for that pleasant feeling, I can love you, temporarily. I can be infatuated for days from that feeling, but yet I know it will be temporal. For that I keep hoping from you that you can give me what I need – my addiction. I will go all out to make you recreate that character. I will buy you flowers, I will try to accommodate your needs, I will try many other ways of pleasing you – all for the sake of fulfilling my addictive desire. I may or may not notice my own unwholesome actions geared towards manipulating you. But one thing is for sure, if I no longer able to get what I want, the relationship may or may not continue. Even if it continues, it is not because of my love for you, but a payoff that I am not willing to depart. It could be my face, my status, my insecurity and a thousand more other reasons.

I seldom look into myself why I am using you to get what I want. It never occurred to me that when I resolved my addiction, I will end my need to manipulate you for my own gain, which is so unpredictable and random. Probably I would have accepted you 100% for who you are instead of what I think you should be.

That reminded me back of the story of a princess pricked by a thorn on her first day out at the garden. Unable to accept the pain, the princess angrily request the king to pave the whole entire garden with leather so that she need not experience similar discomfort in the future. That worries the king as covering the whole entire garden is not only impractical but also expensive. For that he summons a wise man to resolve his woe. After pondering for a moment, the wise man replied with a smile. Give each sole a piece of leather for the princess to wear!

Similarly, solving my own inner issue will be more productive than to keep seeking outside for my own addiction. Am I ready to start on this journey? I would not know. What I would know is that so long as I don’t see what I am doing is to my own unhappiness, I will never find another effective way of solving it.

Whither love, whither love? I suspect you may be doing the same to me, probably in a different way. Imagined if both of us are doing the same thing at each other and we are not conscious about it – what on earth is our relationship for, except to feed our addictions?

It is by acknowledging error to myself is truth restored. So long as I don’t see error in my own fabrication, truth is not against me – I am against truth. To take full responsibility of all my experiences is the beginning of unraveling fabrication. Since I am the one who created those fabrication, it has to be me to see through the fabrication. I may not be aware that fabrication is created, but yet that is untrue as all intentions are my own choice, made from past experiences.

In truth that is all about the spiritual journey – the journey of undoing all the lies that I have done upon myself. This is the most important journey compared to any other journeys, as others are simply a recycle of repetitive event, made to be seen as new.

Redemption is not a salvation from sin. Neither is it a wrong that I have to rectify. Redemption is simply an admission or recognition of error that I am now seeing. There is no one to turn to to redeem, except myself. There is no one to confess, except myself. Each recognition redeems me back to truth. No one, except myself can walk through my own door. Neither can I help you to walk through your door. I can point but you have to do the walk.

Only when I come to peace with my own tidings can I come to peace with the world as the world is my true reflection. So long as I see the world as separated from me, I will be seemingly separated from Truth. I am my own self, totally immersed in the game of hide and seek, where I am the seeker and also the hider. Where there is no hider there is no necessity for a seeker. The game is constantly in vain, where there is no loser or winner, except an illusion.

Forgiving others is forgiving myself. Forgiveness is not about something wrong put into right. Forgiveness arises from right understanding seeing all errors as my own. For that I can’t forgive you for there is no reason to – not that I do not want to forgive you but that it is an error of my part to see you as wrong. Forgiveness is about seeing falseness as falseness and for that Truth comes into being.

I can still play the game of false forgiveness, seeing wrongness in you that I am in the position to forgive you. But what has my forgiving you got to do with your own forgiveness except to create falseness in you, not to mention in myself too.

J said, “If a blind person leads a blind person, both of them will fall into a hole.”
– Gospel of Thomas

My journey is of utmost important – I have to be “selfishly selfless” to see my own shortcomings – not from the space of wrong or right but from the space of understanding – recognizing the error that I have overlooked. It is to turn what needs to be overturned. To disclose what has been closed. To understand what has been misunderstood. Only when I see myself thoroughly inside out, being totally truthful to myself, am I able  see the fabrications that blocks me from the Truth.

That is all is needed from myself, for myself.