All Comments By Syd

I like how the author says, “To embrace life I must shake hands with death.”  The author goes on to say he needs practice.  From my experience death feels like nothingness, no purpose and it creates this crushing negative self-consciousness.  Death is mean.  It mocks life and it creates this alienation from life.  In my human body death is felt as darkness and the chasm of inner darkness can be like a black hole draining life out of me.  And when death is felt as depression or despair, where there is no choices, the only choice is to welcome death.  It is a choice to merge with nothingness.  This death can be a way of saying no to life and refusing to going on being tormented. 

Because my cells do not produce sufficient energy for my muscles, creating lots of exhaustion and fatigue, death is a moment to moment experience for me.   My daily death is felt as nothing in the world to identify with, nothing true or valuable in which I can believe in.  The meaninglessness can bring about insecurity and powerlessness.  There are even points of terrifying attraction to the darkness because how I felt repulsed with my daily death.  However, lately I have begun to trust this darkness and death.  I am beginning to learn to accept my powerlessness/nothingness and of all things there is a self here.  There is a self in the void, in the darkness and in the death. 

This self within death, for me, is the heart of faith.  It is a realistic faith and is its own value without reference to anyone.  It is a point I trust, even when I cannot deal with the lifelessness anymore.  This faith ask no questions, consents to the meanness of death and learns to accept my having no choices.  I am disappointed in this dying because it has weaned me from my feelings and weaned me from my beliefs.  And yet faith being all there is left is like the sun.  It does not matter if I believe or not because faith becomes this inner Essence and this supportive Presence where death becomes life.                  

Silence use to be a raw experience for me and it communicated clearly that my thought process was complex and convoluted. I would become high-strung and my nervous system would tune to a high pitch. I hated silence because I could not repress my unconsciousness impulses. As a child I considered silence dangerous, which made my
thoughts good and safe. Because the world was threatening and unpredictable it ultimately became meaningless. It was meaningless because I thought I had to reject attachment to everything. Then when my mental connections started going haywire because of my cell disease, it felt like I had to move into silence as a way of stopping my rejection of everything.

For five years I have done my daily quiet meditation, feeling at times this glowing hateful silence and other times I could allow my thoughts to arise and disappear into stillness and peacefulness. Silence has awaken me to a deeper self beyond my thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions and even my own body. This silence is this constant clarification I have had too much attachment to my thoughts. This silence is penetrating and offers this brilliant clarity, yet I also have felt stripped into nothingness. The nothingness communicated what my parents felt about me, nothing of value. So at times my silence has been perverse and dark, empty and intense, yet for some unknown reason I have found faith in this silence.

This faith tells me I no longer need to convince myself certain things are true. It is like silence can hold life and death, good and evil, love and indifference together as a verifying gift from silence. I enjoy the stillness and peace. There are also those times when I feel to overly empty and without nourishing sustenance my whole body becomes filled with horror and uncertainty. Silence to me, therefore, is like walking off the edge of the world and it takes more faith than I can produce at times. Silence is Divine awareness and sometimes can be true craziness for me, and other times my faith emerges with this unshakable confidence with this deep awareness of Presence.

I appreciate Dr. Lerner communicating, “Curing is what a physician seeks to offer you. Healing, however, comes from within us. It's what *we* bring to the table. Healing can be described as a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual process of coming home.” This coming home to me has had many dark nights. It feels like coming home to my soul rather than my egoic mind. This coming home has involved lots of metanio (change of heart).

In my soul healing, forty years, there has been lots of metanio where everything has been turned around. I started my first ten years with the sewer running out of my mouth, then ten years later snakes were curling in my stomach, another ten years of depression and alienation from myself and others, and then another ten years feeling like a bum on the street. It came to the point I thought I had no ability to function and I was doomed. I gradually let go of my tormented consciousness by releasing myself from my depression and despair, feeling inadequate and defective, even letting go of my fear that I was unimportant and undesirable. This brought me home to where I felt this deep peace, self-respect and this enormous dignity. For some unknown reason, though, I had to leave this peaceful home.

 A few years later my cells stop producing energy for my muscles and I had to leave work. I had no questions asking “why me.” I just felt confused and unanchored to anything permanent within myself. Because I had no purpose from work it felt like my house burned to the ground. Then a few years later I came to a crossroad, which started placing my experiences behind me. Gradually I moved into a new home, only this house is completely empty and is a house with no doors. It feels like faith and serenity is all I have to counteract the terror and the despair.

Just lately I have felt this need to be quiet. It feels like in this place of stillness is this realization of my own value is without reference to anything or anyone. This appears to be real faith and trust. This place of quiet and stillness appears to express I am entering into non-attachment. Non-attachment is this quality where I do not cling to anything, inner or outer. Everything still touches me, yet I am beginning to feel transformed by my empty house.

The key I have found in my empty homes is learning to live by faith or trust. This offers a recognition of support and serenity, where I feel no need for effort or striving. There is this unshakable confidence to allow myself to rest. The spiritual healing of my soul is learning to be still and quiet. It offers this rest, which allows everything to arise and disappear in a state of stillness and peace.

Wow, this "not resisting resistance" truly is serenity. The sirens during meditation reminds me of my internal chaos and my needing to escape my crushing negative consciousness. In fact I have only been meditating four years because meditation would make my nervous system tuned to a high pitch. When I tired to meditate my repressed unconscious impulses would erupt into my mind and in my body. I would become burning hot, sweating, and then the sewer ran out of my mouth. I instantaneously became fatigued, terribly confused, and racked with self-doubt. Everything became so complex and exhausting.

Meditation would cause me to suddenly block all my feelings and it felt like life was being drained out of me. So I gave up on meditation many times, even from having any meaningful desires, because I did not want to hurt anymore. The chasm of inner darkness would open up inside, like a black hole draining life out of me. Meditation just became a source of torment and it felt like it was mocking me. However, I have gradually became aware I was looking for ways to do away with my tormented consciousness.

Because of physical circumstances where my cells no longer produce energy for my muscles I started meditating to learn to accept the good and the bad. It felt like there was nowhere to hide and I was forced to acknowledge disquieting parts about myself. Being sensitive to my subconscious was like a message in a bottle washing up on the shore of my consciousness. Nothingness and emptiness was the message. This place made me feel edgy, a certain death and walking off the edge of the world.

Something from within, faith and courage, began counteracting this terror and despair. Just this last year I felt this need to leap into this nothingness and to let it be who I am. And it is just lately I notice a potential here, where death and life meet together. Another way to express this is it feels like my internal silence is bowing to the external silence and these two silences are connecting. It feels like a point of death and I am surrendering to this silence and it is everything.

From this nothingness I feel like my boundaries are falling apart. The connection is my contradictions are held together in the silence. I will also say this makes my faith feel like it has no reference to anything or anyone. Faith is silence. Silence is its own value, the silence that surrounds everything and everything emanates from there. The emptiness is paradoxically creating itself, like my identity is learning to be centered in Essence. The nothingness and my empty bottle is meeting as a still point and it feels like just a place to begin.

When I read this writing "Kindness Includes Everything" I thought of a three year old child saying loud and clear, "I am and I am not." There seems to be a living spite at this age, even a malice that begins to loses contact with this inner Essence. And for me personally, because I felt deeply cut off from the Ground of Being in my early years, it now feels like I am seeking this constant support and reinforcement from the Supreme Being. It is as if my beliefs are seeking an agenda and to sustain me in a particular identity. However, because of physical circumstances, I have had to drop my beliefs and even trying to convince myself certain beliefs are true. Faith is becoming the actual support and presence. It is like the direct experience of Essence.

Breaking this boundary between what "I am and what I am not" is kindness. This kindness appears to be seeing through this boundary and recognizing the invention within my own mind. Breaking this boundary feels like simply resting in and learning to be one with my true identity. The real clarity is I no longer work at it. I feel like I am learning to surrender into being nothing and paradoxically this is everything. The down fall to this nothingness is it feels like walking off the edge of the world, my end or my death. Faith is all there is to counteract the terror and despair and at the same time it is the starting point where everything begins within this Void.

This place to just begin is kindness and maybe this is simplicity itself. It is where there is no artificial manipulation. It is just this place where my response to life and other people is completely sincere, direct, and heartfelt. It feels like this kindness is unselfconscious because it is one with the world. Maybe kindness can awaken this innocence, this largeness of heart, where there is no boundaries. And it seems faith, this unshakable confidence, is all that can go here where I am not bound by my beliefs, doubts, and learned procedures. It feels like kindness is truly a clarification of all my boundaries and even seeing through boundaries. This is Essence and is felt with everyone here and truly is the significance of your presence.

Making money is the means by which we become self-sufficient. This quest for success takes risks and when the risks reap financial rewards it creates pshchic rewards. There is enjoyment and high feeling when we prevail in challenging situations. There is also the enjoyment of work and work offers the arena to assert ourselves, and hence to maintain the sense of self. Making deals and taking risk is not only making money, it is a way of literally making more of ourselves.

Money is the yardstick which we measure ourselves and the success in life. Above all, money is the only thing we can depend on to feel self-sufficient. It is a source of security. Money seems certain. It is the sure means to get our way. Money is like ego inflation and once it is set in motion it is difficult to stop. So what is important about money is our ego and the other side of this coin is our pride.

The balancing between money and the ego, achieving something truly great for others, is getting past the ego. Getting past the ego can actualize an objective value, achieve real peace, or help others in concrete ways. The essence of greatness is the ability to find ways to alleviate the burdens of others and making life better for everyone. Peace and prosperity creates a common immediate circle to the world. This circle is not without ego, but the ego is in service of something outside. It influence others to obtain goals which is valuable to everyone.

The bottom line making money is empowering, and I hate to say this, but God is boring. The Psalm says, "Be still and know I am God" and to me this feels like resignation and giving up. When I am still my attention shifts away from any real needs. Ironically, I lose interest, little energy or little relating, and I drift off and others drift away. So this transcending the ego may take a high state of integration and transforming everything, but I have not adjusted to this black-hole where there is no achievement or no accomplishment. This stillness is closer to despair and depression than the glory of God.

I realize I want my ego gratified and I realize there is no making any sales pitch convincing to God to do otherwise. I just want to get out of this neutral gear and shift into overdrive of self-promotion. There is something within my ego that wants to advertise myself relentlessly and even make myself better than I am. However, this arrogant and cocky high impression never works, just as money never works to measure myself with God. I, therefore, feel bored and my experience of God is like gathering a cloud, which may produce great power or merely dissipate in the next breeze. Something is missing and I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I feel the lack none the less.

I can only say because I am not making money and I am on disability I am bored with life. Everything feels like nothingness. There is nothing to believe in, nothing true or nothing valuable. The darkness is rather perverse. There is also an underlying depths and a transformation within this nothingness that offers clarity. Yet to my ego mind I cannot understand it, so I feel boredom. Maybe there is a spiritual injunction "to be in the world but not of it" only I have not grasped this inner Essence that is beyond my ego mind. 

Sleep tight, you express “standing in the gap.”  This is a very good understanding of what I was writing.  Much of the time this “gap” feels like an existential void, meaninglessness.  Then there are those moments the “gap” creates a deeper and more essential self.  When I can be this inner-observer it seems to be a higher state, and yet this dark force within does not want me to be aware of anything higher.  The best I can tell is learning to accept the conditions I am working with, relaxing, and allowing the energies of life to flow within this darkness.  This creates a serenity within the “gap” seems to allow me to not feel separate from others.
 
There seems to be no particular image or idea of myself here.  There is just this delightful contact with you and you with me, which you express.  What is true here cannot be separated, a creative flow and cannot be otherwise.  So maybe we are learning the “gap” is the source of everything, the core of our true identity, creating and sustaining us.  It is simply resting in this dynamic force that melts down our barriers and boundaries.  This sense of separateness is dissolving, a bright light, and if I may say is your love. 
 
I hope I am not reading too much in what you are saying and truly appreciate your love itself which dissolves the sense of separation.  I could write more, yet I do not want my feelings and impulses to be unseemly and unflattering.  I just believe we are communicating in a direct way, reflecting our inner essence, and allowing it to be.  And while this is all seriousness there is also this sense that none of it is serious at all   Just a spontaneous response, an opening, and a meaning beyond what I intended to create. 
 
May inner peace be with you!                

 “The truth of who you are cannot be thought” is a high level of consciousness. This takes the ability to transcend my self-consciousness and create an opening.  It is a place of listening to my inner voice while remaining open to my impressions of the environment.  This place is a complete letting go and filters raw material through the unconscious.  It is touching these unconscious impulses.  The quality can be inspiration and something which comes spontaneously, even beyond conscious control. 
 
This light of awareness, a spontaneous response where I renew ad redeem the self by transcending the ego, is soul-making.  This also creates this hole in my soul, like a gap between the inner-observer and my ego personality.   When I can rest here there is real freedom, yet I constantly struggle with my reactive and automatic forces within me.  It creates hidden conflict and contradictions.  My human nature abhors this empty space.  It makes me experience this trap of being powerless and then I project my thoughts on life.
 
This being powerless is a belief and I am now learning to rest in realistic faith.  Also, to be honest, there are still my doubts and certainties here.  This faith comes and goes like a ghost and my faith cannot be summoned at will.  This space can be unsettling, difficult to identify or resolve.  It seems courage needs to be brought into consciousness so this endless stream of positive and negative thoughts/feelings can be accepted.  Courage draws on the Essential and is imbedded in the real, the vital and the solid.
 
Courage is no thoughts and is like acquiring a taste for nonidentification.  It is encounter with death, and is wake up call to something deeper.  It is where Essence is felt and experienced.  The moment becomes and doubts, beliefs and learn procedures go.  The moment becomes faith, the Essential, and gives this inner freedom to be spontaneous to whatever emerges in the moment.  My being spontaneous is a measure of my faith, no thoughts, and is an opening --- just a place to begin.                       

 Realness is a rich conscious life and being real can also be unsettling for me.  When I am emotionally honest and real I feel like I antagonize people and I embarrass them.  I want to communicate the whole of me, the bad along with the good, doubts along with certainties, yet not all people want to be aware of human incongruities.  I feel like others wish I was not so candid about myself.  I may feel if it is the authentic thing to do, to reveal myself with directness and be genuine, even at the expense of pain, but others do not like this message.  It can distance me from people because my willingness to talk about flaws and irrationalities that appears to be painful and disturbing for people.        
 
My being real can also move me into self-absorption rather than principles.  When I get caught into feeling something is missing in my life I want to find the source of my unease.  It can cause me to compare myself to others and I will believe others possess qualities I do not have.  Other people had better childhoods, better parents, or just better luck.  People seem more alive and more whole, better careers, more productive lives, better marriages.  The problem is being real can make me over identify with my inner deficiency and my wound. 
 
Gradually over the years I have learned my ego needs this constant support and reinforcement.  It needs to compare me to those other people.  For example, when I am feeling confused and unanchored to anything permanent within it creates this constant self-questioning and start comparing myself to others.  My ego needs this particular identity and then I go off in the impossible task of doing the best it knows how, looking at those people.  This creates this fixation that makes me extremely self-conscious and it profoundly cuts me off from any source of identity.  So from this I have learned I cannot do anything to be myself or to be real. 
 
Realness is now learning to rest and to become aware of Being itself is my true identity.  The more I try to resolve a particular image or even become a particular image the more I lose contact with who I am.  Realness is the immediate richness of Being.  It is not separate from anything and is learning to genuinely rest, which creates this creative flow.  It cannot be otherwise.  So to me being real is creating an opening to my hidden depths and simply resting in being true to this identity. 
 
This awareness has both devil and the angel, and I can be sensitive to both.  It is now transcending this ego self, a complete letting go, by being true to what IS.  The ISNESS is Being real.  It is a leap of faith and learning to allow nothing to “stick” in my consciousness.  This is edgy, like a walk into nothingness, yet faith is the support and everything emanates from there.  So to me, being real is realistic faith and is its own value without reference to anything or anyone.    
 
I need to say, being real is recognizing the miracle of your existence and is the significance of your presence.    

 When I was a child I felt I had no value and I felt considered as nobody.  I withdrew trying to find my identity in my imagination and in my feelings.  I also needed to understand my unsafe environment and at the same time defend myself against it.  Because I felt not welcomed into the world, out of place, and unwanted I felt this overwhelming sense of this essential flaw.  It was so deep I felt it could not be healed, causing me to wet the bed for thirty-nine years.  (War creates bed wetting).  This stinking self-awareness created lots of hostility and negative feelings toward myself.  I withdrew more in search for myself and I felt this hopelessness was the current which I had to constantly swim against.  At age fifty my emotional turbulence and emotional stress finally broke my body down to where my cells could no longer work properly.
 
Dragging my body around in exhaustion and no purpose once again felt like stepping into nothingness.  It felt like I was walking off the edge of the world.  This nothingness within my memory kept communicating, “Yea, nothing in the world with which I can identify with, nothing true or valuable in which I can believe in.  There is nothing left to which I can attach myself.  This is my end, my death.”  In this nothingness I also realized the story I had been telling myself for a long time was my own fabrication.  
 
Most of my previous years I worked with determination against my fear of nothingness and now it felt like I had only created this delusional mind of making my fears fulfilled and more consuming.  My cells were not processing energy, especially in my heart.  My brain felt crazy and the madman would attack, making my mental connections go haywire.  From Alcoholics Anonymous, though, I new I had to let go of my mind being filled with terror.  The best I could tell was I had to make a leap of faith from the known and the unknown.  This leap of faith seemed like all I had to counter act the terror and the despair.
 
My nine years of letting go of my “nothingness” is now beginning to reveal itself as everything.  My identity seems to be learning to center in Essence.  There is more Divine awareness here rather than my projects and preoccupations of my ego personality.  I still have a sense of my personal and individual awareness, yet it seems less important.  There is even this new realization of my own value is without reference to anyone or anything.  There is a sense this is realistic faith and becoming more of a direct experience of my identity as Essence. 
 
So to me learning to “be nobody” has been learning to drop my particular image and ideas of myself.  I cannot do anything to be myself.  It seems, in fact, the more my ego activity slows down and rests the more I aware of Being itself is my origin of my true identity.  Maybe I felt separate from everything and my nothingness became my own self-fulfilling prophecy, and this is only because I was using my ego mind to profoundly cut me off from the ground of Being.  From this I am now learning to allow everything to arise and disappear into a state of profound stillness.  There is even a certain peace here, like self-possession and self-surrender can let go so profoundly this creates mystical overtones.

This seems like a strange language, yet Essence is felt  like the sun here and it does not seem to matter if I believe or not.  Being is a felt and experienced, just as you are all communicating.  
 

 When I have experienced loses the meaninglessness and grief would compel me to come up with ways to cope with what I had lost.  When I lost my ability to work I have tried a few things to give myself a purpose, yet to have them jerked out from under me.  From this, all I could understand was daily life is hell.  Hell is place where there is no choices, deep despair and depression, alienation and feeling trapped, everything is futile and dying, torment and this inner light is going out, deep hopelessness.  I just felt alienated from myself and others and it goes from bad to worse because no one has the ability to understand.  What is simply missing is a purpose in life. 
 
No purpose creates this constant nagging feeling of something essential is missing.  This puts me into a place where I have had to come face to face with my denial, between what is true and untrue.  From this all I experienced this enormous “gap” between what I have taken myself to be and the truth of who I am.  I, therefore, assumed God would fill in the “gap” by my learning to accept my powerlessness and draw upon God as a deeper source.  Yet I keep having a certain meaning in my life constantly being jerked away, such as my church community.  I realize my deeper states of reactivity here, clarity by letting go, and then back to states of mild ego identification.  It is like I am caught in a web of illusions and life is meant to defeat me. 
 
I still do not understand why this total blockage of life and it is being drained out of me.  The biggest part I have learned about my life, though, is it is full of contradictions.  And it seems these contradictions make no difference because the present moment is always perfect.  It is like the Essence of life is saying a meaninglessness of dying is perfect, because perfection is in the moment.  For my faith to become realistic I had to let go and genuine security is found where there is no effort or striving.  The experience of daily dying has an inherent rightness to it if I can add or subtract nothing from it.  It is a since of right now is all I need and is being awakened from within.     
 
This faith of letting go of life, transcendence, is difficult to explain.  It feels like more qualities of darkness and depression than hope.  Yet this is my ego’s perspective, so it seems the rightness is recognizing the actual support of Presence available right now.  What is true in this moment cannot be harmed, so the holy moment becomes a letting go.  The moment becomes spontaneous, a moment of inspiration, and this moment is no longer a moment of feeling the need for a purpose.  It IS.    
 
PS:  David Doane I am reading Ram Dass “Still Here” and finding him meaningful, thank you.   

This is a gift in what Eckhart Tolle is expressing; this point when there is the realization suffering is unnecessary.  I have my own personal brand of suffering and the shocking realization is letting it go of this suffering is not simple.  Sometimes I am caught in the grip of obsession over negative thoughts, and my relentless self-reproaches become delusional thinking.   If I become convinced I am utterly and permanently defective there is no ray of hope to intrude.  I go around in my self-enclosed circles and I can feel my identity caught in my woundedness and with my sense of inner deficiency.  I can make a lifestyle out of suffering. 
 
Holding onto my suffering offers this tension, complaints, conflict, blaming, drama, rationalization, projection, justification and all the energy this allows.  It is like if I let go of my suffering who would I be.  Yet I do not want to go back into this delusional thinking where there is no ray of hope and endless suffering.  In my letting go of my story and suffering is the realization my conclusion is shocking.  The conclusion is shocking because there is no accomplishment or achievement.  The conclusion is nothingness.  This nothingness and void feels like walking of the edge of the world, like death itself.   
 
This death is my boring life and this feels like depression, where there is no coming back to life.  Just recently, though, in my “nothingness” and in my years of letting go I began to feel the satisfaction of stillness.  This moment was not a feeling or even inspiration, as there was just this calm, peace and stillness.  My inner void could be quiet.  I also noticed I was not filling my void with suffering or my story.  This emptiness paradoxically created a personal being and it seems like an identity centered in Essence.  Divine awareness appeared to be the guide, rather than my projects and preoccupations of my suffering and personality. 
 
I have discovered this stillness in the Now, as Eckhart has penetrated profoundly.  It is also my discovery of this unanticipated truth.  I say unanticipated because I am shocked the conclusion is “nothingness” like death itself, yet it is everything.  The Now is the hidden element of stillness.  It provides the key to understand the whole.  This Now is like a leap from the known to the unknown, falling into the void and everything emanates from it.  The void is completely empty and is full of potentiality and is everything.
 
                       

I want to thank everyone for your reflections on “Get a Life.”  I like to be real and speak simple truth, as everyone is doing here.  I enjoy everyone being direct and authentic.  There is also a side of me willing to reveal my flaws and irrationalities, since it reflects my essence.  With this said, I am willing to communicate a part of me which has over identified with my suffering and woundedness.  Because of my physical deficiency and even my inner deficiency I have made a lifestyle out of suffering.  To suffer is to feel deficient.
 
I am gradually realizing I am caught in my emotional reactions to my suffering.  I do not stay with my direct awareness to allow my suffering to transform me.  My belief is in my deficiency.  I have constructed an identity out of it.  If my ego is going full force, such as identifying with my feeling my inner lack, I begin to live in my story and I will even make up stores about being inadequate, unimportant and undesirable.  My story results in this constant emotional storminess and reactivity.  The whole of it obscures my ability to perceive my true identity, my value or anything else for that matter.          
 
I am beginning to realize I fixate on suffering, a bittersweet loss, and other melancholy feelings.  Unfortunately, this activity is immature and the fixations always play themselves out as a constant inner commentary on my inadequacies.  I can even get caught up in how others have let me down.  It feels like my fixation on my suffering is causing extreme self-consciousness, and is profoundly cutting me off from my source of truthfulness. 
 
I want to move to a new place and consciously accept my suffering, especially learning to accept this suffering from anxiety.  True enough this makes me feel edgy.  I feel like I am stepping into nothingness, this void, and like I am walking off the edge of the world.   I understand this place is beyond any beliefs and learned procedures.  I realize there is a self that can suffer and transcend s it.  I realize when the moment is felt and suffering is accepted the self is possessed.  Yet I get caught into trying to make my suffering a meaningful force.  
 
The moment or even my getting a life is no concept or belief.  It feels like the direct experience of my identity to suffer, without creating a particular image or idea from it, is living in this contact with Being.  Therefore, Being must partake in my suffering or there could be no self in this flow.  The hopelessness would make me look for ways to escape the crushing negative self-consciousness.  Maybe it is courage that draws upon the Essential and is this inner strength.  I just wish my faith could constantly let go and learn to rest in this void. 
 
I have not learned to rest in suffering and totally accept it without creating an identity out of it.  Yet also there is dynamic unfolding of life in this moment.  There seems to be a confidence to rest that offers this hope without my ego mind being caught in its agendas and projects.  Maybe this inner place can only be touched by stillness and getting a life is this stillness.  Stillness is simply learning to rest within pain and suffering, yet my mind is questioning this.  Nevertheless, this edginess, the void, suffering, depression all seems to need to fall into stillness where this raw material is given a place to rest in Hope. 
 
My writing creates this note like an echo of tears, yet truth also strikes my soul.  She is my hope just as you are all my hope.  This seems to be just a place to begin this journey, to let go as faith.  May the journey begin in truth and in faith, and hopefully it is an opening to this hidden depths.  Your presence is significant!   
 
                      
 

 “Suffering Leads to Grace” is such an inspiration to me.  Suffering and pain constantly reacts in my subconscious and when I am not conscious of my suffering it will create this tormented consciousness.  Everything becomes this torment and everything is this unbearable reminder of my alienation from life.  Much of my unfinished work mocks me, my failure to love mocks me, my family mocks me, and this inability to have a purpose mocks me.  It is all because of my cell disease.  Maybe much of self-accusations have a basis in fact, but my self-absorption and self-indulgences makes the anguish even more real.  I know, to a real extent I responsible for bringing on my anguish on myself, which is why the self-accusations cuts so deeply.  The only way out is to do away with this tormented consciousness and I do this by denial of my truth. 

There have been many times innocent remarks will send my mind into schizophrenia.   I feel terrorized, the madman attacks, and then the insane paranoid delusions set in.  My mental connections go haywire, I start rocking back-an-forth, true craziness and my fears become consuming.  The stranger trying to console me becomes the policeman who has come to arrest me.  Fear becomes a life of its own.  My thoughts are uncontrollable, scaring me when I do not want to be scared.  My mind will race wildly and I become terrified of my fears because I cannot escape them since they originate with me.  My anger just burns. 

When I come out of one of these burning attacks, after both my body and my brain have splintered into a thousand pieces, I deteriorate into a state of emptiness.  I become isolated from my environment, from other people, and from my inner life --- from thinking feeling and doing.  My deep struggle between these various pairs of polar opposites: between identification with others and a rejection of them, between feelings and doing, between love and hate, is all this emptiness.  The ambivalence becomes so intense the evil will exclude the good.  Eventually, my suffering becomes this nothingness: nothing to identify with, nothing true, and nothing valuable in which I can believe in.  My fear becomes fulfilled and within this void feels this terrifying attraction to darkness.

There is a part of me that over identifies with my woundedness, with my sense of inner deficiency, and sometimes I make a lifestyle out of suffering.  It gives me something to do in my agitation and restless mind.  Yet other times I have caught myself in my emotional reactions and my belief in my deficiency, letting this raw material filter through my unconsciousness.  The moment becomes this opening, a moment of inspiration, like a catalyst shocking me into awareness.  This suffering compels me to choose to give it a meaning.  Giving a meaning to my suffering and pain, to give meaning to my experience, even my nothingness, creates me.  It feels like suffering is a positive force and I can sustain my awareness of myself here.  This place is to suffer and give meaning to it is a self that who transcends it.  The moment becomes the self and I fall into my faith, feeling my deep void.

I live in this complex and exhausting life.  Sometimes I refuse to make contact with anyone and even God because it is all an intolerable idea.  The horror and uncertainty of my own body is an enormous stumbling block.  Yet if I do not force everything to a conclusion, force my mind to seek order, my realistic faith can let the moment emerge spontaneously.  Faith becomes a “given” and I feel this inner Essence that cannot be lost or harmed.  Truly it is beyond beliefs, beyond doubts, learned procedures and the moment is not lost.  This place requires my soul, rather soul-making, and is this unselfconsciousness the moment just IS.  The act itself transcends the self-consciousness, and becomes this spontaneous quality of inspiration.  Faith itself becomes self-aware.  There is no place to hide, shocking awareness and the richest part of my consciousness life becomes outside of my control.

Faith in nothingness is like walking of the edge of the world.  It feels like suffering and emptiness, paradoxically, becomes the guide.  Divine awareness is discovered in death and becomes this value to which I submit.  My daily deaths creates this tension between conflicting sides, my suffering, and I have certain hostility here, so raw I do not feel it can be healed.  Hopelessness is strong and is a big trap, yet at the same time I have to move beyond my self-awareness and to let go of my trap in self-consciousness.  In this moment, the self is possessed both in suffering and in my physical breakdown of my own body.  There is this unshakable equanimity in the moment.  Suffering can truly be one with where I learn both self-possession and self-transcendence together and sometimes this profound center has mystical overtones.  When all is said and done, I wish we all could suffer together and allow this to be a gift to each other.  It is place transparency allows everything to pass through the consciousness, nothing “sticks” in the consciousness, and Essence is possessed.        

Just a side note, my body is soaking wet from the sweats and I feel deep exhaustion.  It is merely just this moment that is the source of everything and it becomes this inner Essence.  There is deep alienation in this place suffering and the gift is where the flat tire no longer needs to be fixed.  Essence is found in the suffering and becomes more than just an idea but a living experience.   Suffering is accepted and it can catalyze into shocking awareness and the moment is Essence.  There is no significant accomplishment here and the moment just IS, a shinning Void, where hopelessness and hope are held together and the stillness creates Divine awareness.

Your presence is deeply significant, a human being who suffers like me, and yet you are all a source of life, this Inner Essence that lets me touch my experiences and leap into the unknown.  Thank you!!!              
 
        

 Sandra, you speak of infants and newborns expressing pure love.  You ask, “Do they know on some level love is what they are?”  It seems to me we are all created and born in the Garden of Eden, where we have the essential qualities of the heart.  We appear to lose these essential qualities of the heart by falling away from our awareness and presence.  It is like we fall away from our inner Essence and into the trance of our personality.  For me personally, my parents nurtured me erratically and I did not feel a dependable source of love and assurance.  When I realized my value was“nothingness” I felt holes in my soul and I even look at my body to see if I had holes.  This sense of having holes and a vacuum from within made my human nature fight, as human nature abhors a vacuum. 
 
We all experience this “nothingness,” the vacuum and this inner void to some degree in childhood.   It feels like the sky is falling to a small child.  This creates anxiety, the fear of separation, and how we respond to this inner anxiety is different for each of us.  There are also patterns that are common to all of us, because fear is insecurity, this inner doubt.  We all experience the fear of abandonment. There seems to be a point fear creates faithlessness and this appears to make us lose our inner Essence.  It is the point where self-possession and self-surrender are taken away, deep painful anxiety.    
 
Pride seems to be the most common response to this anxiety and this inner void.  Pride is denial and it is the ability to endure whatever is happening by tuning out.  It is like our feelings become fatalistic, as we may feel nothing can be done to change things and in any event whatever is the problem, it is not much a problem after all.  Pride can also become vainglory, satisfaction in what I am good at and satisfaction in my virtue. Pride, though, is a fundamental denial of my loss of contact with Essence and is particularly the loss of contact with qualities of real love. 
 
We never really lose our inner Essence if we all could be really present and awake, where our identity and self-worth do not arise.  Our Beingness does not depend on sustaining our identity in activity.  And yet to have no purpose and this place of no accomplishment, God or Essence, creates feelings of this Being is a dirty rat. Faith becomes mean, complex and exhausting, nothing true ore valuable to believe in.  The fall is into self-consciousness and alienation.  The fall can also paradoxically allow us to fall into our deeper self, this inner Essence.  It feels like falling back into faith, this inner Essence where there is union which appears to create enormous dignity and self-respect without the faintest whiff of egocentricity.  It feels like just a place to begin. 
 
Unity is before the Fall and unity comes back to us in the Fall.  The Fall is part of nature’s ways and it seems we all have to find our peacefulness or faith in this natural order of things.  Faith is created in the Fall, as we learn to not be defiant and learning to yield ourselves to it.  Falling back into this Garden of Eden, our inner Essence, is mean because there is no clinging to any ideas.  Faith seems to discover this ability to keep an open mind, falling into a higher state and making all our experiences, even the pain, into something beautiful: faith hope and love. 
 
Maybe one word is too much, even the word God, because my mind ricochets from one psychological state to another from this word.  So it seems faith becomes its own value and literally has no reference to anyone, as our identity IS.                    
 
 
 
                       

My story is filled with lots of self-hatred and self-contempt, feeling inadequate and defective, even this fear of being unimportant and undesirable.  It is place I felt like a constant misfit.  I escaped my inner pain by pretending it is not there.  I gradually broke my denial, this inability to admit I was hurting inside, and I gradually let go of the inner chaos.  I learned to nurture my own, true inner life.  From there my inner landscape became this peace, like I was riding a bicycle on a beautiful day, enjoying everything about the flow of my life experience.  This unfolded into serenity.  I felt like self-possession and self-surrender together.   
 
This last year I lost perspective, lost what I learned from life, and lost my beliefs.  It felt like nothing true in the world, nothing true or valuable in which I could believe in.  There was even a certain attraction to my inner darkness.  Yet because was enduring my darkness, faith seem to be counteracting the terror and despair.  My inner faith verified I needed to drop my story I had been telling myself a long time.  This felt like I was leaping into “nothingness” or walking off the edge of the world.   I felt completely empty, this inner void.  Something from within, though, was making my faith leap into the unknown.  It felt like a sunbather feeling the sun and it did not matter if I believed or not.  This faith allowed an “opening,” which seemed to allow something higher and more essential touch my wounded self.
 
This essential that touched me appears to be the Essence of faith and appears beyond any beliefs and what I have learned.  This faith is the recognition this Essence, like rays from the sun, offering support and presence.  It is like my story is now at the point of faith within the Supreme Being and this Essence offers this unshakable confidence.  And I realize this is not my whole story and maybe this is where the moment unfolds into this living Presence.  It is just a place to begin.           
 

 Annie,
 
What I write in my first paragraph, Annie, is my attempt to validate your feelings.  And please understand I do not have clue what you are feeling, as it is only my attempt to give you a touch of fresh air to what you may be feeling.  My last paragraph is a suggestion to your question “how do I cope with this?”  
 
This taking care of your Dad appears painful, Annie.  I sense you may feel fatigued, apathetic, alienated maybe from yourself and others.  It feels like you cannot allow yourself to feel meaningful moments with your Father.  This may result in the sudden blockage of feelings, as if life had suddenly been drained from you.  Hope may feel like it has suddenly vanished.  The best I can say, in my trying to be sensitive and considerate to what you may feel, is I am so sorry for what may feel like you are standing all alone.   
 
In response to your question I want to suggest you approach your Father’s care with non-attachment.  I realize non-attachment sounds like being uncaring for your Father.  It may seem like being insensitive and you may feel it is being as hard as nails.  Yet non-attachment contains no hint of rejection or hardness, rather it offers a radical acceptance of life as it is.  It is the quality where it allows you to be present and the ability to abide in your deeper self.  This non-attachment does not cling to anything inner or outer.  It offers this freedom to not need to cling to the endless activity of your mind and cling to this deep grief of losing your Dad.  Non-attachment allows the unfolding to happen and I believe you will feel contained within your true self that can endure this pain and hardship.  Non-attachment offers a radical acceptance because it can live within painful truth.      
 
Everything touches and transforms us all and yet your level of transformation is beyond words.  Non-attachment is just this place where you do not base yourself on your thoughts, not on your feelings and not on your perceptions.  It is a place where everything arises and disappears into profound stillness and peace.  It offers a heart felt peace.   I also believe it the greatest gift you can give to your Father and to yourself, non-attachment that allows you to fall into your deeper self and peace is offered with a profound compassion.   
 
Peace Annie and your presence is deeply significant !!!
Syd       

I enjoyed this article and reading other peoples responses.  And for my two cents boredom is on the edge of depression.  Because of my physical limitations where my cells do not produce energy for my muscles and normal walking is exhausting boredom is frequent.  My disease is eight years old and it is only this last year I started digging into my sense of boredom as nothingness.  When I feel my emptiness and the void from within I can sense this temptation to want to cut my arms and legs with a knife. There is something from within me that wants to escape this crushing negative consciousness.  It feels like there was nothing in the world I can identify with, nothing true or valuable in which I can believe in.  There is nothing I could attach myself, which creates this attraction to want pain in my darkness.  My human nature abhors this boring hole.   

Something from within has allowed me to step into this being on edge with my boredom and it felt like I was walking off the edge of the world.  In my edginess I have felt death and the experience of my personality is at its end.  I also felt this need to make a leap of faith from the known to the unknown.  Yet I could not understand making this leap when my boredom revealed itself as my value being nothingness.  Just sitting around, completely empty and bored, I could feel my nothingness and groundlessness express a faithless faith.  From this arose this stillness and peace.  It is then I realized I was the observer and the observed, the experienced and the experiencer.

From what I can tell when the experience becomes one with the experiencer and stillness falls into peace then my boredom and emptiness will be the Essential self.  The true self will reside in non-attachment and then the moment can arise and disappear into profound stillness and peace.  I just need to say, this downward spiral and meaninglessness almost brought about my rejecting attachment to anything.  Yet it is on this edge where faith counteracts the terror and despair.  Stepping into boredom, a walk-less walk, where death is felt as nothing, the true self turns it around into stillness and peace.  This must be an expression of the Divine.    

A boring death maybe is a symbol of my entire psychological orientation and feels like just a place to begin. Sometimes because my cells are not working right my mental connections go haywire and it feels like a consuming craziness.  This place is also down right mean.  From this you may tell my stillness and peace is not very good and it feels like I need to find peace with death without being able to die.  So if anyone has more insight on this stillness/peace and can provide a key to understand the whole I would appreciate it.