On the Human Nature

"Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false."
                                                                                 - Dalai Lama

"On the highway of life, the secret of smooth riding is to avoid the potholes."
                                                                                  -Anagami

A long time ago I had a friend that was really bad with money.
He couldn’t hold a job for more than six months, was always involved in some get rich overnight scam, never paid his bills in time and always got in trouble with the banks.

One month, as usual, he was late in paying his rent and was facing eviction.
He asked me to lend him 300 $dollars until next day and somehow I couldn’t say no.
Well, guess what? I never saw my money back.

My question was not why he didn’t pay back his debt – that was his nature.
He did the same thing with every person he came in contact with – but why all the people got suckered in to give him money? Why somebody like me who thinks of myself as a pretty rational man, did not see it coming?

At about the same time I started dating a very nice girl.
Her best friend had a very nasty gossiping habit and I was quite shocked when my girlfriend started telling her very intimate tidbits of our personal life. I told her:
- Don’t do that! She is a gossiper and she will take that information and spread it around.
- No, she wouldn’t do that. She is my best friend. She replayed.

Well, guess what? She did just that.
So what is the moral of all this?
It looks like all of us have some sort of a soft spot, a built-in gullibility I would say.

We all like to believe that we are pretty special and that we deserved to be treated differently.
We believe that we can change the people around us, especially the people we like.

We get emotionally involved with those people and it becomes very difficult to see when we are suckered in.
At the same time, if we are not emotionally involved, it is much easier for us to see the true nature of other people.

The truth is that people cannot change their nature. A liar will be always a liar, even if he tells the truth when it is to his advantage.
A cheater is a cheater an ass hole is an ass hole as well as a nice person is a nice person.

If we could step outside of the emotional involvement and look at the true nature of our friends, relatives coworkers or other people involved in our lives we would avoid a lot of bad surprises.

Only if that would as easy to do as it is to say it…

Zen Tales: The Swan and the Swine

Once upon a time in the little community of Hogtown, in the bayou country, lived a little swan and her family of pigs.

I know what you are thinking "How come a family of pigs can have a swan daughter?" but let me tell you, it is more common than you think.

The pigs were quite wealthy and offered their swan daughter the best education money can buy.
The little swan was not only pretty but also very gifted and soon grew up into the most beautiful young lady in town. (Although some of the older pigs thought of her independence and free spirit as unbecoming of a young sow.)

After finishing college she thought of starting a career but her handsome hog boyfriend proposed to her and in the excitement of the moment she accepted. (She also wanted to make her pig parents proud and happy by marrying the most eligible bachelor in town.)

But married life did not turn the way she had predicted.
Away from the protective shield of her parents, she found herself being totally unprepared for the porcine life.

She tried very hard to play the role of a perfect swine but she was failing miserably.
She even went to the best pig specialists looking for help.

They pluck her feathers, broke her wings and cover her in sticky mud, but all their efforts to change her did not help.
On the surface she kind of looked more swiney, but inside she felt more and more inadequate.
She looked at the swine around her all happy whirling in the mud and dreamed she could be like that even for one day.

Her husband seemed to be very understanding of her shortcomings and try to cover up their family problems buy putting up the front of a perfect marriage.

The plans of her adolescence turned to dust.
She gave up all her dreams and she gave up all her hope.
All she was capable of is to survive and carry her pain.

With broken wings, crawling through the swamp she keeps on living, until one fateful day when she met an ancient turtle.
This old hermit basking in the sun atop of a mossy rock had on his face the most content smile she had ever seen.
Somehow it looked like he did not care about the filthy mud he was living in.
Somehow it did not affect him.

She approaches the old man and asked him.
- Why do I have to suffer all my life like this?
Why can’t I be just like the other swine, thick and slow, stupid and coarse?
Oh, why is God so cruel to me, why did he have to put this curse on me?
Or has he made a mistake?

- Oh no, my dear. Said the old man. God doesn’t make mistakes.
We do.
You are a swan and not a swine.
Your life is what you get if you choose to crawl when you are meant to fly.

The Fall of Idols

We are all God.
That is until we develop an Ego and we start thinking we are Gods.
And that ignorant belief throws us in a lot of trouble because your Ego is not God and it cannot control the universe and therefore it cannot control your life.

Sooner or later, like a blind man walking a tightrope, you gonna take a wrong step and your castle build out of cards will come tumbling down.
Then you start asking questions like:
- Why is this happening to me? Maybe there is a God and for some unknown reason he really doesn't like me and is trying to ruin my life.
Or something like that.

Let me start all over again from the beginning.
We are all God, not Gods.
We are born from the De like waves are born from the ocean.
We all have the same Divine nature. Actually, to be more precise everything there is, has the divine nature.

What differentiates us as persons start after we are born.
After our conception, we start a process of indoctrination by our power figures, which I call our IDOLS, into believing that we are something different than God. That we are human beings, a name, a race, a religion or country.
We are taught and learn to identify and therefore to separate ourselves from anybody and anything else. Thus we become strangers to our own divinity.

Furthermore our teachers, our Idols teach us how to lie, steal, hate, judge others, kill, deceive and betray and all that wonderful things that "humans" think, say and do all in the name of protecting US from THEM.
Of course, no Idol will ever take responsibility for this corruption of the Divine in us, for teaching us the evil way, but somehow we all learn and know it by the time we hit adulthood or the time we leave our family nest and start acting out our independent life.

It is at this time and point in our life when our disaster scenario programming starts unfolding.
Yes, we all follow the same path of self-destruction with some variants of time, place and circumstances.
It is inevitable. It is our destiny.
The biggest problem is not that we fail but that we keep following our programming again and again, repeating the same mistakes until we die without ever realizing what's going on.

So let me start again from the beginning.
We are all born God.
Everything else following our procreation is an experience of God in this material world.
Everything else you believe you are is just a role you have been programmed by your Idols to play, which in turn have been programmed by their Idols, which in turn have been programmed by their Idols since the beginning of human civilization.

In this process of self-programming, the chaos and error introduced by Ego each generation is perpetuating and amplifying constantly.
Translation: Our dysfunctionality as individuals and society is increasing with each generation and it will end in self-destruction and a spiritual renaissance revolution shortly after.

This revolution will be brought by the fall of Idols.
The personal realization that your Idols, your mother, father, teacher, priest, politicians and scientists, prophets and laymen and last but not list YOU are ignorant assholes. That there are no Idols outside your erroneous perception that everybody is just like everybody else.

I know it is scary to think that our Idols are nothing more than ordinary people doing their best or worst depending on how you see it, but their shit doesn't smell like roses and they are as ignorant and clueless as anybody else no matter how many diplomas, how much fame money or powers they have.

But that is the inevitable outcome the inevitable end of our Ego experience, the liberation act from our Idols and the return to the original truth.
We are all God.
Everything else is just an illusion, the experience of our human manifestation.

The Age of Entanglement

Deep down at subconscious level, we are all connected.
There are very few people that understand that and even fewer people that have made that connection at the conscious level.

There are numerous accounts of the past in which this connection has been made.
Finding out who you are, the true original nature of “I“ was enough to awaken you at a higher level of conscious connectivity.

The sudden realization of the true nature of reality would trigger a chain reaction in which the illusion of the material world would collapse and the individual would be freed from the prison of reason reestablishing the natural supremacy of the Spirit over the Ego.

The Zen literature is full of accounts of people, Zen students, that have attained enlightenment, spiritual awakening or Satori, by simply breaking through the illusion of separation and understanding the nonduality nature of oneness.
It looks like that type of awakening is not possible any longer in our times.

I’ve never encountered or heard about another alive human being enlightened at the present time with the exception of few momentary spontaneous enlightenment, the most notorious and documented being the so-called “near-death experience” which I like to call more appropriately “near life experience”
But even these spontaneous enlightenment experiences were not powerful enough to create a permanent conscience change and reverted after a short time to the Ego-consciousness prior to the event, leaving behind only the memories of the awakening.

That means that even for the people that have broken through the illusion of the material world and have made a total connection with the spiritual world at the conscious level, the awakening wouldn't last very long before reverting to the Ego reality set of mind.
This situation is the result of a very strong Ego dominance over our thinking that has exponentially grown in intensity in our time.

Zen Buddhism developed in Japan in the 8th century in a medieval society. 
Since then the world has become increasingly more interconnected and interdependent.
New modes of transportation and communication have made our world shrink. It took years to circumvent the world, and about as long for the news to propagate.
Now going around the globe has become a matter of hours and the news is transmitted at the speed of light to any corner of the globe. In the last decades, the information revolution has connected us 24/7.
We are practically going to bed with our phones and waking up with our phone in the hand. On top of that, the complexity of our social and economic life has also increased. We are in a situation that our brain is overused and have no free time left in the day. Paradoxically all this development has not brought us together but contrary has made us more isolated from each other and tied us stronger to the Ego material world.

You have to physically break away from any social interaction in order to escape the chains of entanglement.
As long as you are a part of the social system, being in this world but not of this world has become an impossibility.

Happiness

There is been a continuous fight among the scientists about the human nature. Part of the problem is that our science doesn't understand nuances. For the scientific mind, things are either black or white and anything that cannot be classified scientifically falls out of the scientific understanding.
But life doesn't obey the laws of science. Life is nuanced, infinite in complexity and constantly evolving.
You cannot understand human complexity as a simple play between nature and nurture. Life cannot understand, life can only be experienced.

We are continuously evolving. From the day we are born we are both biologically and spiritually evolving. Even scientists are starting to agree that what we think and feel are having an impact in changing our brain structure and our body functions.
We are continuously and constantly being bombarded with information. Our lives are becoming increasingly complex. The rhythm and pace of our lives continuously accelerating. The pressure on our physical bodies and our minds continuously increasing. The result of all these changes is that we are becoming increasingly stressed, depressed and generally unhappy.

So it is becoming trendy now that people are looking for ways to distress, to live more healthy and in general to be happier.
But what are the ways, what is the path to happiness?
It seems that in spite of spending more time, effort and money in the pursuit of happiness our lives, our relationships and careers are not much better than before.
Happiness is not practicing yoga or going to the gym every day.
Happiness is not chanting and meditating and burning incents and wearing crystals. Happiness is not having a safe space or passing new laws in Congress.

The problem with happiness is that we have been programmed to believe that happiness is something coming from the outside world, that happiness is something that you can "get".
We constantly see "happy" people on the media. Happy to buy a new car, happy to buy new things, happy to drink beer or happy for a happy meal. The idea being that having or doing something will make you happy.

If you believe that you need something to be happy then you are screwed, because you will never be happy. You will never have enough of what it makes you happy because even if you get it, the moment you got it you will need increasingly more.
It is the basic tenant of the Buddhist philosophy "desire is the root of suffering"
So how can we get this happiness thing?
You don't. You will never get the happiness you dream of.

Happiness is not something you get. Happiness is something you manifest. Go outside, look at the sun, let the warm sink in your body realize you are alive and let yourself be happy.
Look at a tree, be happy. Look at your family be happy.
When you allow yourself to be happy with everything and anything in your life your happiness will start to flow.

Happiness is this joy of simply being alive. Happiness is you being unbound, liberated from the idea that you have to be, or have to have, or have to do anything to be happy.
Stop looking outwards for your happiness, look instead inwards. You can feel your happiness bottled inside, trying to get out, and probably you will be afraid to let it go because you were never told that you could be unconditionally happy.

Start practicing expressing your happiness every day.
Allow yourself to be happy, to express joy to smile for any reason or no reason at all. Practice happiness until it becomes a habit. Be happy until you start annoying the people around you until they start asking "what is your secret, what makes you so happy?"
And you can tell them the truth "nothing!"

The Tao of Relationships

Relationships are becoming increasingly more difficult to have and to preserve.
From the dawn of history, we have tales of bad relationships.
The Greek mythology is full of stories of relationships gone bad.
From family feuds to tragic romantic love affairs to wars between clans and nations, people had always had a hard time getting along.

But all those Greek tragedies were special, rare occasions, not the social norm. Most of the time people had good relationships. They knew how to start a conversation, communicate effectively, handle differences and settle disputes.
I know this first hand because I grew up on a farm were the social dynamics were unchanged for hundreds of years.

There was a time when everybody knew their neighbor by name when children play in the streets without fear of being kidnaped and when romance ended up in marriages that lasted a lifetime.
Those days are gone.

We are living in the Internet era where everyone has thousands of friends and followers but if you need a ride to the airport you have to call a taxi because you don't know anybody that will give you a ride. We are living in the era where internet dating offers thousand of matches to choose from but not a single one that you would choose to go out with.
Our marriages are statistically doomed from the start. Our best hopes are to find somebody that will stick around for more than a couple of month.
We live solitary lives in cities crowded with millions of people.

What happened?
We build societies and the human civilization to serve us the humans, to make us safer, prosperous, healthier and happier.
In time the roles have changed we are no longer the masters of the social and economic system. We are the slaves.
We have become part of the machine part of the system.

Our relationships have changed into social contracts. Love has become business. Anything that doesn't serve the system is discarded everything that benefits the system is promoted.
And we buy into it because it gives us the promise of success.
But people are becoming increasingly unhappy and all the material success and convenience of the modern life cannot replace the feeling of love and belonging we have lost.

To love is to give without asking anything in return.
That goes against the social construct which is to take, to accumulate without giving anything in return or at least to give back as little as possible. That is the formula for success.
That is the way we live our lives.

This is the Ego reality. The world of fragmentation and separation, the world of scarcity and fear.
We have promoted the worst in us the Ego to be the one that takes all the decisions and directs our lives.
We have created a soulless society where love and happiness come in a pill bottle.
We all want love, we are starved for love, we all are beginning to receive it but who is the one to give?

Business is good for business but life is not a business transaction.
The business rules do not apply to life and relationships and if they are applied, the results are always a disaster.
The business model is based on competition on having winners and losers. Love is not a business affair
In love, you can't have a winner and a loser.
In a bad relationship, both parties are losers.

The Age of Righteousness

As we were discussing in my last post, in the Western culture we see time in a linear fashion, we see the society evolving on a never-ending ascending path, like climbing an infinite mountain.
That vision, of a linear timeline, is not shared by all cultures.
Some people see time as a circular trajectory, they see the society evolving in cycles of growth and decay and according to that philosophy, we are now experiencing an age of decadence, the Kali Yuga.

One of the symptoms of a decaying society is the polarisation of spiritual beliefs, part of a larger trend of social fragmentation.
The middle way of thinking has been abandoned in favor of the hard-line extremism.

According to Buddhist teachings, things and actions are not "good" or "bad" - for example, guns and killing are neutral.
You can use a gun to rob a bank or you can use a gun to protect the bank from being robbed. Or the second World War, the Germans use guns and killing to subjugate people and destroy democracy and of course we used guns and killing to liberate the subjugated nations and reinforce democracy.

So all things being equal, the middle path is always the wise path to follow.
That could be summarised in a simple statement:
"Everything in excess is bad" or "Everything in moderation is good"
This middle way path is a path of harmony, of balance rather than this, is "good vs this is bad" path of righteousness.

It is very hard to convince anybody that democracy is no better than dictatorship, that actually a political, social system is only as good or bad as the people that are running the system.
A democracy run by corrupt people is not a good thing at all, and we are starting to see that in our own government at this very moment in history,

A dictatorship run by intelligent concerned people will always be superior to a democracy run by corrupted politicians.
I know, that idea is very unpleasant and unacceptable to us Americans born and raised to worship democracy and freedom but the truth is that China, a communist dictatorship, is kicking our democratic asses, at this very moment, on all fields, economic, educational, healthcare, research and development and basically, military power would be the only thing that we could say we are better  at, but even that is a very relative assumption.

That is just one example but the problem has become an epidemic. The "my way is the right and only way" philosophy is embraced by almost everybody.
You cannot have a decent polite argument anymore, therefore all the paths to progress and reconciliations have been shut close. The only solution left is the frontal confrontation. The only outcome acceptable is the total annihilation of the opponent part.

This polarisation of beliefs will continue covering the lad, will continue to grow, especially with the help of mass media that thrives on chaos and negativity.
The only good thing about this darkness is that will allow a lot of people to finally discern the light of spiritual teachings we have lost or forgot.

The Fascination of Time

There is a common thread in all ancient cultures, the very unusual fascination of the old civilizations for astronomy and time.

From the primitive paleolithic cultures like Stonehenge to the Greek antiquity, from the Mayan civilization to The Egyptian pharaonic empire, we have found very concrete and powerful evidence of their preoccupation and fascination with astronomy and time.
There is no doubt about it the only question is "Why?"

There are some attempts to explain it like "They need it to keep time because they needed to know when to plant their crops and when the rainy season will come" and stuff like that.
But that is a very weak argument not false but incomplete.

If you are familiar with the Vedic scriptures you have probably heard of the "Yugas" or cycles of time.
Yuga in Hinduism is an epoch or era within a four-age cycle.
A complete Yuga starts with the Satya Yuga, via Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga into a Kali Yuga.
Our present time is a Kali Yuga, which started at 3102 BCE with the end of the Kurukshetra War (or Mahabharata war)

Not coincidentally the Greeks divided the time into a similar 4 ages structure: The Golden age, the Silver age, the Bronze age and the Iron age.
According to the ancient wisdom, we are now living in the Kali Yuga or the Iron age which is the last of the periods - the end of time.

Two things.
One: the Yugas are based on the Galactic precession, the Sun circular movement around the galaxy.
How the hell that they know there is a galaxy and the galaxy is rotating. How did they measure it when we, the modern civilization, thought the Earth was the center of the universe till  Giordano Bruno and Galileo? 
What does the galaxy moving have to do with planting the crops or tending the cows, or anything else?
Why did they do it? There has to be an explanation for it.

Second: All ancient civilizations saw time as a cyclical occurrence not a linear one.
It is funny that even now at this moment 2018 AD we believe in a linear time. We believe that progress and growth just keep on happening forever.

That view is obviously false. Nothing keeps on growing forever sooner or later we will run out of natural resources and space to expand and a collapse of the of the human society is inevitable. ( I know; if we learn to live in harmony with mother Gaya we can attain a sustainable symbiotic existence. The humankind will destroy itself in a global war before we learn to live in harmony with anything.)

But the old wisdom tells us that time is cyclical and all are warning us of the inevitable decay of the human civilization.
According to the Sanscrit texts, we are now living in the Kali Yuga the age of the Kali goddess of destruction.

Kali Yuga: The final age. It is the age of darkness and ignorance.
People become sinners and lack virtue. They become slaves to their passions and are barely as powerful as their earliest ancestors in the Satya Yuga.
Society falls into disuse and people become liars and hypocrites.

Knowledge is lost and scriptures are diminished. Humans eat forbidden and dirty food.
The environment is polluted, water and food become scarce.
Wealth is heavily diminished. Families become non-existent. By the end of Kali Yuga, the average lifespan of humans will be as low as 70 years.

I know what you are thinking "this is the same BS as the Mayan end of time calendar" You are right in the sense that time cannot physically end but "the end of time" is a metaphorical expression, it is a warning that time is running out and we have to wake up before our civilisation will colaps due to our ignorance and greed.

The Chain

How clever an animal the human being is.
So clever he doesn't even know.

We take a baby elephant and tie it to the trunk of a sturdy tree with a heavy chain.
The baby elephant doesn't have the submission in his blood. He is a wild free beast, not a domesticated servant.

He tries to get free.
He tugs at the chain with all his might but the chain is heavy and the tree too strong to unroot.

The baby elephant grows up chained to the trunk of a tree.
After failing to free itself, again and again, he gives up his freedom.
He stops tugging at the chain. He believes that his situation is inescapable.

After years the baby elephant has grown big and strong.
The elephant handler uses him to lift up and carry heavy trees.
The elephant could easily escape his master and run in the jungle to freedom, but he doesn't.

After the work is done the master takes the elephant back to the village.
He ties a chain around the elephant's leg and the elephant stays there obedient.
In its mind, the elephant is still tied to a big tree with a heavy chain.

What holds the elephant from his freedom is not the flimsy chain tied around its ankle but the belief in his head that he cannot escape. The chain is just a clever make-believe, a trick of the master.

How clever an animal the human being is.
So clever he doesn't even know.

I've seen the elephant handlers logging the rainforest for precious wood.
They are poor people, uneducated people, doing what they are taught to do by their masters.
They have no idea of the impact they have on the lives of the elephants they have enslaved, the rainforest they have decimated or the planet we all live on.

The people living on the threshold of poverty in misery and slavery have no idea that they are free.
Free to take control of their destiny, free to pursue a better life, free to build a better future, a better society.
They have been brought up wearing the heavy chains of social rules they masters have put around their ankles.
They don't see that like the elephants they ride they have the real power, not the masters that keep them in slavery.

How clever an animal the human being is.
So clever he doesn't even know.

It is easy for us as Westerners to see what's happening to our brothers and sisters in the poor regions of the world.
Thou, it is hard for us to see how we the Western culture has created this social injustice and build our wealth on the back of the exploited nations.

Who has the money to buy elephant ivory trinkets and decorate our lavish house with furniture made of exotic rare woods?
Well somebody does and that is not the elephant rider or the logger cutting down the rainforest.

Don't be too hasty to judge.
Yes, we are all just doing our jobs, doing what we are told.
We all have our ankles tied with flimsy social chains. We all obey our master handlers.
True some of us have better larger cages and get better food than the others but still, we wear the same mental chains.

Are you living the life you want and deserve to live?
Are you living in the place, the neighborhood, the state or country of your dreams?
Are you pursuing your dreams, working the job of your dreams doing what your inborn talent is?
Are your relationship, healthy and loving as you want them to be?
are you free to do and live as you please?

There is an unspoken feeling every time you try to escape your current situation. We all have been chained, domesticated, beat into submission by social rules and laws.
We are no better than the elephants we have subjugated.

How clever an animal the human being is.
So clever we don't even know.