Adam Kadmon’s writing can also be found on his political theory and psychology blog, Capillaries: Theory at the Front.
Take as much time as you need to find kindness in every given moment. It will always be the perfect amount of time.
Which would be a greater way to reduce suffering: to never have been born or to forget so completely, so utterly, that your birth ever occurred that it immediately becomes entirely inconsequential? If all great change begins from a forgetting, then only when the fundamental wound of birth is no longer of any consequence to our current reality will we feel truly liberated.
The mind and heart filled with shame cannot learn. They can only repeat, reenact, and remember.
I am firmly convinced that the repeatedly identified tendency of people in Eurocentric Western capitalist societies to turn common everyday tragedy into an excuse to hate themselves originated in the specific conditions that have led to feeling enormous hostility to even being alive and vulnerable. We hate ourselves because at some place and at some time, we have had the catastrophic experience of being deeply hated by those we desperately loved and needed to love us back. And deep in our dark hearts, we knew they did not. The myth of self-hatred weaves a tale from the irreparable loss and confusion of being hated just for being.
In these conditions, the mind is turned upon itself and used as a weapon by the larger political order. Every time you feel self-loathing and hatred towards your being, the trigger is being pulled by that which oppresses you most intimately. The mind is a Manchurian Candidate. The mind has been bent not toward the arch of justice but toward the scythe of oppression.
Only after facing utter annihilation (both by choice and by habit) did I finally wash up upon the shores of presence and liberation. Allowing oneself to be utterly destroyed and unbound at the root of your enigmatic being finally cracks the shell of that which is completely indestructible.
My love is ferocious and ruthless. But it is also kind and compassionate. Not unlike the love of the universe for us all. Where do you think I learned it from?
Dive deep enough into the abyss and you will find it is full of shimmering radiant light without end.
It is only the false self, the anxious caretaker in your heart, that struggles to sleep. The true self, that impenetrable diamond in your hara, sleeps soundly and peacefully.
People getting exactly what they want, how they want it, when they want it, is an absolute catastrophe for the human species.
Trying to control something or someone is always at its heart about trying to change something about that particular phenomenon. The most vicious violence can come with a smile and the gentle caress of helping you with your heaviest burdens.
You can’t be curious about something you hate.
What do you have to be afraid of, really?
Awareness abiding. Awareness abiding. Keep breathing. Stay present. Everything changes. Awareness abiding.
No one to save. No one to forgive. Everyone is already whole, saved, and free.
There is no solution to anxiety. If we believe there is, we fall prey to the very deceptions that anxiety thrives on from survival and that originated in its very beginning. Zizek once said that anxiety is the only feeling that doesn’t deceive, the only one that does not contain some kind of hidden enjoyment. But I think Zizek has missed that that anxiety might be the most deceptively enjoyable feeling of them all. It gives one of the allure of power and control over the whole universe all within the confines of your own mind without any need to directly act upon the world. It is a cowardly god. Anxiety is the craving for control at it’s heart, an addiction to the feeling of control. But down in its belly, it is still just the echo of a catastrophe that cannot and must not be remembered. Anxiety steps in where the body has been broken. It fills in the gap inside the fault where body and soul were cleaved apart. But there is no control and there is no solution despite anxiety’s persuasive arguments. There is only the backward step into the ground of unknowing where you fall through the floor of anxiety’s logic into the place of no place and the self of no self. The only control is the constant, ever-ongoing process of letting go of any semblance that you are some quiet, desperate god in this world that can shape events with just your mind. Not unlike a children playing with their toys.
My worry and I walked through the forest today holding hands. I held it close and stroked it’s hair while it wept. It told me it feels powerless and is full of rage at how little power it really has. It is desperate it will be seen in its fragility. My gods, how I feel such compassion for it. For it is me and I am it. But when we walk in this forest and cry quietly or scream the vanquished scream that died out along with our hope in some forgotten nightmare, I know that there is something beyond the tightness in my chest and the fears of oblivion in my belly. There is a voice that tells me, “in this place there is room for you and all your terror and despair – and then some.” The bigger I become in the forest, the smaller the nightmares of my worry begin to feel. Let go of the constrictions of the self and you become much greater than your doubts. The only real way to find peace is to merge the particular with the universal, the impermanent with the infinite.
There is only one body in this room – the body of the Buddha. There is only one breath in this room – the breath of the Buddha. There is only one heart in this room – the heart of the Buddha. There is only one mind in this room – the mind of the Buddha. There is only one sight in this room – the sight of the Buddha. There is only one awareness in this room – the awareness of the Buddha. Such hubris we have when we claim to be the sole owner of our experience! By what right do we claim that this heart and this mind are just my own?
When I am grazed by your eyes, I see the aching wound at the heart of your being. You are an animal with your leg caught in a trap, a desperate atrocious thing of desire and pain. Just like me…just like me. The self is just the glass house we build around the aching wound, hoping that someone will see the vortex of suffering but not do anything that could crack the fragile planes. We want to be seen but not to be broken. But in some forgotten nook hidden away in our hearts, we want to be shattered. Just utterly obliterated. But we want to be shattered in just the right way. We all yearn to be absolutely destroyed by love.
We are Orphans of the Real. And through this orphaning, we shall become Avatars of the Ultra-Real.
In the beginning was the word, and that word for me was fear. And worlds and worlds and worlds were built upon that word. Will you allow yourself to feel the Great Fear? To know it as intimately as you have known any lover or yourself? The only way to challenge the cosmology of the word is to encounter its origin completely, even at the risk of your own destruction. And to annihilate the god that is this self that build its world upon the word.
