What is Happening?

What is happening?

What is happening?

Well, yes with what you think is YOUR life, but what is really happening around you? You know the cars driving around you. Your friends and loved ones. The trees in the park. The squirrels chasing each other in your back yard. Certainly the most finite answer is that everything is happening all around you. All at once! How overwhelmingly absurd and taxing to think about. There we go. To Think about. So much of what we think is happening doesn’t have too much to do with what IS happening. Well, of course there is some relationship to what you think and what is actually happening, but WHAT IS actually happening has many onion like layers on top of it. Let us look into this.

You see a leaf fall from a tree on a walk to a park. How humbling and honorable for you to even catch that small momentous occasion of gravity and decay happening together in beautiful cohesion. You think to yourself. Look at that leaf. Look how lovely it falls and look how gracefully it caresses the ground below to join the other dead leaves. Later those leaves will be eaten and decomposed by tiny microorganisms and other living things to enrich and give back to the earth and its awe inspiring life cycle. If you can visualize and pull back you can see that you are a person watching this process unfold. Then we can look at how it made you felt. Maybe a sense of awe and wonderment swept over you and for a small portion of time you forgot about your problems and some of the trivial and pesky problems you have created with family members and coworkers. A retreat from the mind laboring on past misunderstandings and festering in its own compulsory cycle of thought. Hypnosis! You were pulled from the hypnosis of head drama and thought stagnation to witness things simply happening.

The falling leaf wasn’t about you. The falling leaf feel on its own accord, acting at just the right time to fall in accordance with a myriad of biological, physical and celestial like factors that could make a rational human being's head spin with trying to over analyze and categorize. The falling leaf did however give you some type of experience. It may have given you pleasure. You want to hold onto that pleasure. To create more of it. The mind wants to grasp onto that feeling and try to reproduce it. Then you do turn it about you. But why? It is the benign separation from the observer and the observed. Dopamine boosts and cortisol levels decrease as you experience what is happening. You may think you are experiencing that experience, but when you THINK, then the experience gets caught in the entanglement of your head since thought is of the past and housed in the center of memory and past experiences that seem to strengthen the illusory sense of self. In the end, most everything is happening without you and without the sense of self ( product of time ).

So you see the leaf fall. Great. Now, the mind wants to find these different HAPPENINGS and seek the reward that comes with it. Then you try to methodically arrange a way to find more of these experiences. Is it for the sake of pleasure? Is it for the sake of trying feel humble or some type of universal connection with the cosmic consciousness? Well quite possibly, maybe. But we are getting caught in the head again. Caught up with the idea of attempting to bend things in the outer world to fit a sense of meaning or belonging.

You may think to yourself. Maybe I was meant to see this leaf for a reason. Maybe this leaf is a small awakening to a deeper sense of awareness and connection. Who is thinking that thought? Were you? Well, thought it always happening in the sphere of your own consciousness. Uninvited. Involuntary. Carl Jung came to realize that people do not have ideas, but ideas have people. This of course relates to thought since ideas are a part of the thought making process. When we think that we think what we think, then we feed the ego that potent chowder that it hungers for in the future.

People are naturally programmed to seek meaning in the world. To achieve. To accomplish. To seek and to reward. If we look at the dopaminergic limbic system of the body, we can see how susceptible we are to going towards the things that make us feel good, whole or secure. The carving out of neurotransmitters based upon the habits we form and the things that give us reward and contentment. This lattice structure influences how we act and see the world. If we observe without resisting, labeling or analyzing, we can see how things unfold in front of us with very little effort. If we are present or in the flow with what is and what is HAPPENING, we can see how much of it we are a part of and how little we need to or can control. If we allow things to happen and for LIFE to happen, we can see that happening is infinite, impermanent and an ever changing reflection of what is. The need for control comes from the ego attempting to make sense and boost its own slimy and self interested agenda. Do you see?

So you see the leaf? Correct. Do you need to try to label the leaf? Do you need to try to figure out what particular color that leaf is? Does it matter that the leaf has a few holes bitten into it most likely by caterpillars? All pertinent questions. These questions are all happening to you. The thoughts are triggered by the sense data that is coming into your rods and cones of your eyes and right into that fatty wrinkly brain of yours. It’s not about trying to control those thoughts. Its not about trying to resist those thoughts. It’s about allowing those thoughts to HAPPEN. Do you see how they NEED to happen? When you interrupt the workings and neurosis of the mind, you are throwing a wrench into the gears of what is. Resistance breeds more resistance. Then a few seconds later you may or may not realize that you are trapped in a type of thought carousel of your own making. This relates to a famous Tony Robbin’s quote,” Stay in your head, You’re Dead.”

So what is happening? Not much and everything all at the same time and the absence of things happening is still happening NOW. It has always been happening in the now. The happenings in the past have already happened obviously. Why would it matter now? Why would it matter that 5 more leaves feel before the leaf you saw fell? It is an interesting thought experiment. If you notice your mind trying to recreate an experience, you are noticing your mind trying to recreate an experience. The separation of the observer and the observed is tantamount in melding with the ultimate experiencing of what is. Experience is a label we give to what we have been through in the past. Experiencing is melding of what is outside the realm of analyzing, categorizing an thinking.

IT is HAPPENING all around you!
Well, what is IT?
Does it matter?
IT is now.
NOW is Happening with or without YOU!

DG