What follows is an edited version of a notebook that I filled in 2020 with random thoughts and quotes I didn’t want to forget, along my journey in search of happiness and truth.

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All will be well.

 

Existential weight and longing for the absolute.

 

Priorities first.

 

“The emptiness of phenomena guarantees that from the ultimate standpoint, there are no phenomena to be empty.”

-The fundamental wisdom of the middle way

 

I want to get away from here.

Too many people I know and don’t want to meet.

Too many memories.

Too many chains.

 

Even if I reached just one person,

it will be worth it.

 

What is experience?

Why does a conventional point of view exist at all? Why does reality, that-ness, give rise to experience?

Don’t try to understand experience “from the outside”, we are experience, and its existence in undisputable, experience is the only thing we know for sure exists, it must be part of reality, right? This “experience-ness” must be a quality of reality. Maybe reality itself is an underlying form of experience.

 

My head is so crowded.. and sometimes, when everything fights for my attention at once, I feel overwhelmed and a bit lost..

 

Naming things makes us feel like we know them, it gives us a false sense of certainty, of familiarity.

 

“It is only in the context of ultimate nonexistence that actual existence makes any sense at all.”

 

Inspire the longing.

 

Meditation is the only way to find out what happens to consciousness in the absence of objects of consciousness. Is there an experiencer or are thoughts just impersonally experienced?

 

“To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.”

-Claude Monet

 

“You know, we’re just lucky. I mean, they’re not our ideas. We’re just lucky if we catch them.”

-David Lynch

 

What do you want to do before you die?

 

I find it a bit presumptuous to think that you’ve got life and existence so perfectly figured out that you feel totally fine with imposing it on someone else.

 

What is it that sparks the leap from questioning your life to questioning your existence?

 

I thought I enjoyed reading.

It was the pleasure that came with searching for something true, though it was clouded by the frustration of not finding it, yet. 

Now it feels like I’m reading to learn how to spread that something I found.

And reading is a newfound joy. 

 

“‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.”

“‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever.”

“Amateurs think that if they were inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professionals know that if they relied on inspiration, they’d be amateurs.”

-Philip Pullman

 

Maybe the spark in the understanding of emptiness is the transition from lack of identity to lack of distinction.

 

What happened?

My parents filled their house with books, which could single handedly lead you to nonduality, and yet I don’t see the fruits of these teachings in their life… they never taught me the wisdom they hold…

What happened?

Did life get in the way?

Did day-to-day thoughts and worries did? 

Was it a lack or misplacing of will..?

 

You can only look for absolute happiness in absolute reality…

 

It’s not easy learning how to live, because experience is not always enough.

It’s stories, then, that teach us we’re not alone, different or inadequate; that what we feel is universal.

And books are the most intimate stories, those you can dive in only if you let them inside, first; those you must gift your time and imagination to, until you feel like you’ve lived them.

 

You can help others for the wrong reasons.

 

In order to find truth, you must learn how to love solitude.

 

Breath is the most tangible evidence for one’s own interdependence with the world.

 

What’s your intention?

What aspirations will you turn into reality?

 

Does God love you?

You should ask: do you love yourself?

 

What I’m looking forward to the most this year is to start adding value to the world, and finally giving back what I’ve been receiving and learning for the last few years.

 

Sometimes beauty is the simple pleasure of employing your own faculties towards what they evolved to do. 

 

What can I do but share this experience, and hope it can be helpful to people who are suffering the way I did?

 

“Emptiness does not mean nonexistent as opposed to existent. It means signless, empty of concepts.

We cry and laugh according to signs, because we have not yet seen the essence. The essence is the very nature of everything that is, and it is the reality of ourselves. 

When we look deeply at the impermanent and non-self nature of all things, we open the door to reality, or nirvana.

Intellectually, you may agree that things are impermanent, but you might behave as if reality were permanent. We have to train ourselves to maintain the insight of impermanence in every minute of our lives. When we come in touch with anything, we should be able to see the nature of impermanence in it.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh, “Awakening of the Heart”

 

What am I supposed to think?

 

It won’t be easy convincing people they don’t exist.

 

“You won’t understand anything about imagination until you realize it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.”

The secret commonwealth, p.163

 

Reason can give you a glimpse of Truth,

And it’s invaluable at that.

But in order to experience It,

You must exercise that glimpse.

 

It’s not quite “happiness”…

It’s more like “deep-seated excitement”.

 

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

-Anne Rice

 

After so much time spent looking for it,

It’s hard to trust it, once you’re finally happy.

 

GRATITUDE

I am grateful to have learned that

Whatever is dependently arisen is

Unceasing, unborn,

Unannihilated, not permanent,

Not coming, not going,

Without distinction, without identity,

And free from conceptual construction.

 

“The most personal is the most creative.”

-Martin Scorsese

 

I don’t want to forget how it felt

Being clueless and lost,

Hating myself and losing all hope,

The overwhelming weight of the world

Crushing my paralyzed mind.

The loneliness and fear.

The sense of inadequateness and

The insurmountable otherness.

 

If you let your mind empty itself, you’ll be rewarded with an outpouring of creative joy and a feeling of deep-seated excitement.

 

“Replacement of apparent common sense that is deeply metaphysically committed with an apparently deeply metaphysical but actually commonsense understanding of the phenomenal world.”

-The fundamental wisdom of the middle way, p.123

 

Without distinction.

Without identity.

 

Does consciousness emerge when perceptions fold back upon themselves or do perceptions emerge when consciousness folds back upon itself?

 

“No man ever steps into the same river twice.

For it is not the same river.

And he is not the same man.”

-Eraclitus

 

“To simply read another book about spirituality and then forget it will change little in life “

 

The mind is fragile. It’s a precarious arrangement of reality, caught in the absurd and self-deceiving attempt of self-sustainment, despite the absence of self-identity or distinction from the rest of reality.

 

Patterns, imperfections, extremes, exceptions, notional knowledge, the attempt at leaving a trace, the illusion of having reality under control and the fear of being wrong.

 

Try to just feel the all-encompassing, non-dual, luminous nature of reality.

Dissolve in it.

 

We cry and laugh according to signs,

Overwhelmed and relieved

By emptiness and absurdity.

 

It’s like they never let themselves be who they were… and now they don’t even know it anymore.

 

I feel mental constructs dissolving inside my head.

 

Beyond pride and shame.

Gratitude and acceptance.

 

There’s no inherent distinction between anything. Nothing has any inherent identity.

 

“We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragon flies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams…”

Fluctuating, multicoloured reflections of a clear essence.

 

“It takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is.”

Norm MacDonald, “Based on a true story”

 

Feel. Deeply. 

 

When you think about reality, don’t visualize it from the outside, but try to feel it from the inside. You are it.

 

I want a painterly style. Messy, alive, dynamic. Organic.

 

I want to feel deeply.

I want to feel the human condition.

I want to open myself up. Vulnerable and authentic.

 

I like drawings that move.

 

There is only awareness of experience or identification with experience.

 

I don’t want to live by going through the motions.

 

When I’m with somebody I feel confined in my identity and I’m violently aware of my interiority. Meanwhile when I’m alone I feel expansive freedom and lightheartedness, wherein thoughts, emotions and sense-perceptions exist on the same level, and experience is homogeneous. 

 

These notebooks contain a lot of fuel I can light with the fire of art.

 

I wake up confused.

With my head full of thoughts I can’t decipher.

Thoughts I can’t put an order to.

I always wake up a bit disheartened… a little melancholic…

I’d like to wake up full of enthusiasm.

But I’m not that way.

Where does melancholy come from?

It it the messiness inside my head?

 

Do I crave intimacy?

What could be more intimate than being the same without distinction and knowing it?

I crave someone who knows.

 

We don’t experience reality.

We are the interaction of reality with itself.

 

The only thing we know for sure is that experience exists.

 

If you blame yourself for being sad because “you’ve got every reason to be happy”, and you blame yourself for being happy because you think you don’t deserve it, there’s something wrong…

Observe happiness and sadness. I know it’s hard, but don’t identify with them. Observe your identity, as well, and breathe. Let those experiences happen and dissolve.

 

The anticipation of what’s possible pushes against my mind.

 

I feel my mind morphing to accomodate a new perspective on reality.