bananas

if you put too much energy into creating a new identity for yourself as one who is waking up, spiritual, more aware, loving, compassionate… you’ll miss many opportunities to see things that, once acknowledged and understood, can free you from the suffering you currently experience.

if you merely choose a new label for yourself – no matter how "different" from your old labels – and hold on to it firmly as you’ve held on to previous self-definitions, you’ll be preventing yourself from seeing your situation in its entirety and in complete honesty.

you'll bend yourself and your life's circumstances around the label, pass everything through an interpretation machine to make sure your label remains intact.

what you’ll end up achieving is that you’ll continue, for a time, to believe in the label, which gives you a temporary sense of pleasure and self-worth. but this “success” comes at the expense of not having learned anything real about yourself.

you’ll have succeeded in continuing to pretend you’re something you’re not (no label will ever correctly encompass what you are and the many manifestations of your nature).

don't expect a label to give you truth; don’t waste too much energy trying to understand – and classify within your belief structure – the terms “enlightenment,” “nirvana,” or “happiness.”

don't expect the word banana to give you the nutritional benefits of a banana;

eat one.

the behavior we choose to perpetuate

we think we have a personality. we think we can do certain things, and can't do others: some things we do fall within the realm of our personality and if we do them, we're being ourselves, being sincere. some things don't, so if we do them we're being fake, pretending.

the truth is we're always pretending. or, we're never pretending, because behavior is irrelevant to what we are, is not the determinant of what we are. the truth of what we are is there, existing perfectly in every moment, independently of our body type, hair color, verbal or body language, the way we talk, the music we listen to, the way we tie our shoes.

as long as we hold on to the idea that our behavior determines who we are, there will be a great internal battle, a constant tension. there will be an exhausting fight to control our thoughts and actions, to make sure we adhere to the "person" we want to be.

sadly, this fight will never come to a conclusion because there can be no victor. there can be no victor because what we are is not a "person" but a "presence." if the person we want to be fights against the person we are, attention is taken away from our simple nature of impersonal presence.

the roles we've played

throughout our lives, we've tried to fit ourselves into the structure of a high-schooler, a sports player, an artist, an intellectual, a scientist, a mother, a father. some of us did better than others but deep down we all knew we were faking it, that we were only pretending to be these things. perhaps we felt we were the only ones pretending.

this sense of pretending is proof that we've always been aware of what we really are. the inability to completely be any of these fluctuating roles is based on the fact that we already completely are something else, and we've always known that.