And then someone like Buddha or Krishnamurti comes along and points to another way of being.
Because they see that it’s possible?
Say your friend is a genius who understands the deepest and most complex mathematical truths. These truths are so clear to him, so self-evident, that he assumes they are available to everyone, provided they know how and where to look. Alas, he’d be wrong!
Were Buddha and Krishnamurti exceptional beings able to see what 99% of humanity can’t? Not just see but realize, down to the bone?
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s so. Where does that leave us 99%-ers?
Thank god for geniuses! Top marks to the first guys to climb Everest - but have you seen that the path to the summit is practically a continuous queue these days?
However I won’t be going to Nepal any time soon. (Nor will 99.9% of humanity, we have more urgent things to attend to)
What’s most urgent? What needs your full engagement, energy, attention, passion?
What is the thing you find the most valuable in the whole wide world?
Well obviously it is the very thing you actually find the most valuable.
Why do you find it to be the most valuable?
Causes and conditions aka the whole wide world.
Does what matters matter? Is an urgent story anything more than a story? Is life simulation?
The eternal infinity has come forth to produce this story. If it does not matter then nothing does.
And I stand here at the junction of the two (the story and the universe it has produced). How this relationship evolves determines everything.
To say “the eternal infinity has come forth to produce this story” … is it a story? Is it stories all the way down and all the way up? Matryoshka storyworld? Is asking “is there anything that is not a story?” like asking “does a tree _________ if no one is there to see/hear/feel it?”
There is the story, and the existence created by the story - the beginning and the end, the cause and the effect, cannot be clearly separated.
In order for my measurement of the story’s worth to have any meaning, I must know what I am comparing, whether they are separate things, whether I am separate from what is being compared etc.
Are all existents, mental and physical, one grand story? Did the universe dream us into being?
When we put the children to bed, we usually tell them its just mystery co-creating.
But between enlightened folk we say “grsteflk doh!” and do the secret handshake.
Ho Ho Ho!
Hey, that’s my line! I’ve been blabbing on about how reality is a collaboration between mind and stuff (the mystery) for years!
Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! On, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!
Om gate gate, para gate, para sam gate, bodhi svaha.
If the energy here just recycles, the same ‘things’ come and go; a sort of perpetual motion machine, what is ‘freedom’? It would be to be out of that process, wouldn’t it?
What would that entail?
Awareness that one is part of such a process?
Freedom (I’m speculating) would be realizing that I am this perpetual motion machine fueled by the push/pull force of tantalizing desire/tyrannizing fear, marveling at the Rube Goldberg inefficiency of this mechanism, observing as the push/pull engine slows down to a complete stop, deprived of the fuel that is no longer being wasted on its operation.
Why wasted? That’s a judgement, we don’t know ‘why’ we or anything else is here. What ‘function’ life serves if any, we can only speculate. The last gasp as we die can be the baby’s first breath? Perpetual motion, the life over and over and over again?
We don’t need to know “why” we’re here to know we’re behaving in accordance with desire/fear instead of intelligence.
What ‘function’ life serves if any, we can only speculate.
We don’t need to know “what function life serves” to know we’re behaving dysfunctionally.
“They also serve who only stand and wait” 
John Donne
Is the ego-I the devil and the world it has built for itself hell? Not a hell of unrelenting torture, rather of lovely dreams that always, eventually, inevitably get crushed.
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I would say no…just ask any zebra, they’ll tell you it’s all sentimental nonsense. No hell, no heaven…just this. That’s where ‘freedom’ is!