Overindulgence can ruin your body. This is a lesson I learned the hard way over the last two days of Christmas. For years, I indulged daily without realizing that, piece by piece, I was slowly killing myself. It wasn't just the risk of becoming diabetic from all the sweets. I was also overweight and out of shape—consequences of losing faith in myself.
Losing faith in oneself is the worst crime of all. Without self-belief, it’s impossible to have faith in anything else. If you don't believe in YOU—the person you can't escape, the one you know best—how can you trust anything external? Internally, self-doubt eats away at you, and externally, you do anything to feed your ego.
Every action you take gets filtered through this shadow, masking the root cause of your problems. You might solve hundreds of minor issues, but you avoid addressing the primary dysfunction. Often, we blame external factors: "My parents did this, the dog did that, the microwave didn’t heat the food enough, the wind blew too hard." Our minds invent endless excuses to avoid confronting our inner selves.
We constantly dwell on the past or worry about the future, rarely living in the present. This avoidance prevents us from appreciating the finer details of our surroundings, no matter their form. A recent situation, still fresh in my memory, serves as a perfect example, though my ego might still cloud my objective analysis.
As I keep reaching for the backwoods trail mix, even though I've eaten enough in the past 48 hours to last ten days, I am constantly reminded that the mind plays tricks. It wants to go back to being the ruler of the domain. It sees a perceived weakness and craves a return to sweets, eating beyond hunger, letting the stomach fill to emperor-like proportions. This urge to overindulge was all about fitting in, about reverting to old habits for the sake of those closest to me.
Everyone became scared when they questioned if my true self would emerge for the whole family to see. They feared that "something" would stir the pot, looking for a fight. But love isn't looking for fights; it's trying to breathe, having been smothered under the skin for so long. Love wants to spread to everything around it. However, no one wanted that—they wanted peace, quiet, ego, and delusion. They are content with living their lives, passing their manifestations onto future generations, training our children to think as we do.
Maybe they don't realize it, but their actions speak louder (like at Christmas dinner). They don’t mind passing on their negativity without cleansing it first. "Yeah, it's unfortunate that our children learn our worst traits." "Yeah, I have a lot of bad traits to carry over." So, you’re aware, yet that's the best you can do? The traits are labeled negative, but that’s it—no further thought, just like the presents we bought, the battles we've fought.
We need to start settling the chaos. We are overstimulated, overloaded with information, and our minds are constantly bursting. We jumble information, failing to form coherent sentences or truths, leaving us with incomprehensible chaos. Every detail of information is important, just as every human is important. That's why we must work together to stop the chaos and transcend it, to conceive the cosmos. We must leave behind singularity and uniqueness and open the doors to the universe. Humans are not the center of the universe, nor the center of life, but within us lies a key, a treasure, and the link between the two.
Do we already have the answers to our own questions but just don't know how to access them? Are we limiting our potential by relying on external expressions instead of our true capabilities? We bury the truth, piling up more baggage, so when we're ready, we have to dig so deep that we want to give up before the search is complete. Is this what we're reducing our existence to? We prefer to believe that our five senses are the only basis for perception and reality. Is this really the most our minds can handle?
Look inside yourself. Now look at all of man's creations. What is the most complex machine of all? Where does the first brick need to be laid for the bridge between the known and the unknown, from chaos to cosmos? Why do we keep leading ourselves further from the truth, further from our inner sanctuary? How will you ever know what is real if you don't know who you are?
Let's all start at our own point, the center, with our arrows tightly drawn. What direction is it pointing? Ignore all the centrifugal forces society has programmed into us. Forget the past relationships and the future that hasn't happened. What is the goal of your daily routine? What's the end result? Why are we following the path of the broken shadow? Is that where you want your arrow pointing, forever?
Can we exist, in love, constantly striving for nothingness? We all start at our own points, feeling as if we're striving toward the same end result. We want to fit in, have a sanctuary, be part of something. Yet, the goal we are trying to achieve is a deep-seated illusion. Consciously, we don't want to wake from it, but unconsciously it is destroying our psyche. We've tricked ourselves, as a species, to follow a man-made path—passed down from our parents, and their parents before them.
It's like the telephone game played by children, where a phrase is whispered from one to the next, and by the end of the line, the message has changed. We are receiving information way down the line, generations upon generations. How much has the original message been altered? Think about how fast a child's phrase changes—it could be in mere seconds. The universe has existed for billions of years, and we've been modifying the message since our inception. Our hands are so deep in the pot that we are afraid to pull them out.
We need to read between the lines and revel in the true beauty of the universe. This can't be taught or written on paper; it has no real explanation. There is no right way, wrong way, easy way, or hard way. The cosmic message remains dormant in all of us. It is your job to find the gateway in your own sanctuary, which will inevitably lead you to that message.
Unraveling your current incarnation and past existences, and leaving this worldly existence, will not happen overnight. It might not even happen in this lifetime. We've been trained to fear, so many have already given up. Time becomes the excuse. You don't have enough time for yourself? For humanity? What do you have time for then? If you aren't occupying your own space, what is? If you aren't the most important person in your own life, then who is?
These questions can be easily avoided, allowing us to fall back into the cycle, continuing with the mold we know isn't working. If, on a microcosmic level, we don't want to turn inward to figure out who we really are because we think we aren't important—just one little pebble in a vast ocean of billions of pebbles—then on a macrocosmic level, we tend not to care about anything in our surroundings. We become misery wrapped in a body, life encased in death, a soul without the proper machine to spread its love.
Our bodies are built to heal themselves, to love themselves, yet we focus on external ways to achieve both. We've lost faith in ourselves, providing the perfect opportunity for others to tell us how to heal, to show us how to love. If you let that happen, you'll always be following someone else's way to heal, someone else's perception of what love truly means.
Love means millions of different things; it depends on who you talk to, when you talk to them, how you talk to them, and myriad other variables. If you just take someone else's answer, you are doing a great injustice, not only to yourself but to your fellow friends, brothers, and sisters. Each interpretation sheds more light upon the message. If the ego is dissolved from someone's interpretation, part of the universal message becomes illuminated.
Now, take millions of messages, strip them of ego and any man-made manifestation, and combine them for the book of love, the language of the divine, the creation of the cosmos. Let us begin this journey, where being alone equates to being surrounded by everything.
Are we bored yet? was written on December 27, 2006 and edited July 27, 2024