Confession of a Morbid Obsession

  Death. Not just any death, but MY death.

It seems like it’s always on my mind.

It’s as if there is a grim reaper constantly lurking over my left shoulder, like Don Juan suggested. I mean let’s face it, it’s something that will happen to every living being in existence.

I’ve heard it said before that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I disagree.

I would say that there is only one single certainty in this life, and that is death.

What haunts me the most is wondering where I will go when I die. Somewhere? Anywhere? Nowhere?

Probably NOWHERE. But where is that exactly?

It doesn’t make sense to me, this dying. How is it possible to be HERE one moment and then to just disappear the next? What happens to who I am? Will I have some sort of a consciousness? Will I retain any memory at all of this life that I live now? Will I see my Dad again?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions and I don’t think that anyone in the world does. This frustrates me. How can I be expected to go on smiling every day like everything is okay all the while pretending that death is not around the corner. The fact is that this body that I inhabit will one day STOP living. STOP breathing. What then? Is that the end? Will I ever know life again as I know it now?

It’s hard not to let a day pass without thinking about my mortality. In fact I don’t think that I’ve ever been able to do that. I constantly wonder about the details of my death. How will I go? How long do I have? Will it be painful?

If I could pick the way that I would die I would choose to pass in my sleep. Or, to make things a little more interesting and unusual, perhaps I would pick freezing to death. I don’t think that it would be too painful, more so uncomfortable. I’d kind of slowly disappear into nothing – or something, depending on how you look at it…

A part of me feels like things will work out, that it (whatever it is) will all make sense one day and that I’ll be okay in the end, but without knowing for certain I can’t help but to fear, doubt and worry.

I want to be as certain as I am that I will die one day, as I am about where ‘I’ will go when I’m dead.

Is that possible?

Can I Unwind the Bind of My Mad Motor Mind?

  My mind is like a machine.

Most of the time it does its own thing.

It’s very routine based and prefers to follow a specific pattern of thinking.

I can see why people often compare the mind to a record player that is stuck playing a scratched up record.

I do, after all, tend to think the same thoughts over and over again.

It’s not that I enjoy doing this, per se. It’s actually quite annoying and I wish that I could stop and turn my mind off, but I can’t.

Can I?

I am well aware that there are all sorts of books and practices out there that say you can train your mind to quiet down.

Many of these practices claim that you can actually switch out the old record for one that is more productive. But even if you do switch out the old record and replace it with something more ‘positive’, so to speak, the fact remains that there is still a record playing. And whether it’s a positive record or a negative record doesn’t really change the fact that there is bound to be a scratch in the thing sooner or later.

Which results in thinking the same thoughts over and over again.

Which results in thinking the same thoughts over and over again.

These thoughts can range from the mundane tasks of life to more universally important issues.

Most of the time, if not all of the time, I find myself listening to the mundane tasks of life – things that are really not all that important in the larger scheme of things.

For example, I often find myself stuck listening to repetitive thoughts about the list of things that I need to do.

Here is an example of a record that I listen to frequently:

“First I’ll do the dishes, then I’ll take a shower, then I’ll get dressed, then I’ll go to the store, I’ll come home and put the groceries away, then perhaps I’ll go get a cup of coffee, by the time I get back home I’ll make dinner, do some more dishes, oh and I should really clean the bathroom, then I would really like to make some banana bread…”

The thought of making banana bread gets to me to thinking about my banana bread recipe, which I am trying to perfect. “Should I try it with ¼ cup canola oil this time or do I want to make it how I made it last time? Let’s see…if I add ¼ cup canola oil I’ll have to subtract some liquid somewhere else, otherwise it will need to bake longer. Hmm…maybe I can reduce the amount of banana in the recipe by just a tad.”

Next thing you know and I’m obsessing over how to make my recipe even better and before I know it an hour has passed and I haven’t really done anything incredibly productive or useful to the universe at large.

I realize that when put under the proper light the mind is a beautiful thing. But for me it’s more common for it to feel like a frightfully maddening place.

It often seems as if my mind is controlling me. Like my thoughts are thinking me rather than me thinking them.

Maybe they are thinking me? I mean after all, technically I don’t even exist, right?

How can I be thinking thoughts if I don’t even exist?

I deal with this drama every single day. Constantly mulling over one obsession for as long as I can, tearing it apart into pieces, which eventually leads me to the next obsession.

I move from obsession to obsession to obsession, over and over, again and again, on and on…you get the point.

It is truly maddening.

I wish that I could unwind this bind. But maybe this is just the way it has to be.

The mind is, after all, a highly complex computer-like machine that thrives on solving puzzles. And it doesn’t really care what the puzzle is. It can be something as unimportant as whether or not my banana bread will be better with ¼ cup canola oil or something far more useful and advantageous like Einstein’s theory of relativity.

To the mind there is no difference in solving a mundane problem than there is in solving a universal problem.

It just wants to solve whatever ‘problem’ is there.

But it sure would be nice if I could command my mind to think about something more productive than banana bread and dirty dishes.

Perhaps I can?

But what is productive anyway? I mean, it’s all relative right?

Do I Even Exist?

  It might seem like a ridiculous question to ask, but I’m serious. Let me explain…

I was raised in a Christian home. When I was 4 years old my Mom ‘found’ Jesus (or He found her) and from that point on we were church going peeps. Being young and vulnerable I never really questioned what I was being told to believe – or at least not out loud. I had doubts in my mind of course, but I was far too scared to voice them for the fear of burning for all of eternity in a burning hot pit of fire. I always prayed to God, for fear of rotting in Hell if I didn’t, but I couldn’t help but wonder if He/She/It was really there. (Are you there God? It’s me, Growlbert.)

One of the first things that I did when I moved out of the house was buy a Satanic Bible. That’s right I took a dive straight into I the opposite end of the spectrum. But I didn’t stay for long. I was pretty disappointed in what I found there and so my Satan loving phase ended even faster than it began.

That was years ago.

Since that point I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that I believe. I’ve been doing this for years. And I must say that I’ve gotten a little closer…to nothing. That is to say that I don’t feel like I am any closer to having any concrete beliefs, but I have grown more comfortable and sort of okay with the idea of not knowing (anything).

 For a while I tried on different religions and various spiritual practices, but I quickly found that they all sort of fit the same. It’s like putting on what you think looks like a different shirt only to realize that the tag still reads the same – it’s the same brand name just a slightly different cut or color.

The problem for me is the dogma that accompanies any sort of organized religion or spirituality. In my opinion things get weird when dogma enters the scene. It makes me feel trapped. I don’t like being boxed in – at all.

Recently while cruising Amazon.com for books on lucid dreams (an obsession of mine) I came across a book called Awakening to the Dream . It was a sort of coincidence that I stumbled upon it because it’s not even about dreams. After reading a bit of this book online I knew that I wanted to buy it. A week or so later it came in the mail and I read it the same way that I eat apple pie: slowly, savoring every bite.

This book is a simple – yet deeply beautiful – explanation of what’s called Non-Duality  (or Advaita). There are no practices to follow. In fact the whole idea of the book is that there is nothing to do because there is no one to do it. The idea is that there is no ‘you’ or ‘me’ – there just IS. Don’t ask me to explain what that means, because I can’t. All I know is that some part of ‘me’ (even though apparently I don’t exist) seems to understand the concepts presented in this book.

It’s a similar idea to that presented by Dustin Hoffman in I Heart Huckabees when he is talking to Jason Schwartmans character about the ‘blanket truth’ . The blanket is all that exists and while there are many things that pop up in the blanket (hamburgers, orgasms, etc) the reality is that “everything is the same even if it’s different”.

So what this means is that you are me and I am you. Everything is connected. Which means that everything is the same. There is no separation only the illusion of it. If this is true than there can only be ONE. But one what exactly?