The happy skeleton?

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note*James Swarts talks about ,,the happy skeleton..lovely..quote"You don’t want to think about it but death is here every minute just waiting to obliterate you. And you don’t want this so you cling more and more desperately to the visible, to your mindless routines, your endless fantasies. In Tibet they have a lovely symbol of enlightenment; a dancing happy skeleton"
-added by danny-
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You are a Ghost

Todd: Why is it that the internal chatter voice is attached to Todd when other thoughts and sensory input do not?

Ram: It means the vasanas are binding. Non-binding vasanas don’t require attention.

Todd: In some strange way, it is like there is a feeling of “me” attached to this voice that is bogus and, at its core, is rabidly defended by a desire for separation.

Ram: Good observation, Todd. I admire the forthright way you are going at this. It is the voice of fear and desire. It is bogus because life is beautiful and you are fullness itself.

Todd: Why would I grasp separateness so closely? What does it do for me?

Ram: Generally people like it because it feels good on some level. I had a friend who was pretty fucked up. I loved him dearly and would hector him about getting his shit together. One day I was giving him a lecture and he said, “Well, Jim, it may be shit, but it’s warm and it’s mine.” It makes you feel human. As my father who was a happy man used to say, “Misery loves company.” It’s true. If you’re miserable you can always find a drinking buddy. It’s just great to wallow around in it…very validating. It slowly becomes a hard and fast identity.

Todd: What do boundaries do to make me feel safe? What is this fear of letting go?

James: Existence is a vast unstructured ocean. For human beings… who have free will…there are no directions, nothing to hold on to. Better be a buffalo and just run off the vasanas…no questions asked.

You think you are solid and real but you are actually a ghost, nothing more than a name and a form imposed on the luminous subtrate. And although you don’t consciously know you are nothing, on some level you sense it. You try to get things in this life and when you get them they seem strangely empty. Nonetheless you hang onto them but they always seem to run away. You take a healthy bite of life and it dissolves in your mouth like cotton candy.

You have to love tripping to get enlightened. You have to love that feeling of no control, just going where the drug of life wants to take you because try as you might the gunas are controlling, regulating and governing you. They have to take care of everything and you are just one little cell in the great cosmic body and you are useful to the total and it will make of you what it will. It does not care what you believe, what you think, what you want out of your false sense of emptiness. And no matter how solidly you are able to construct your little life here it is built on the shifting sands of time. No matter how tight you structure your time to keep from thinking about who you are, it is never tight enough. The questions bubble up from the depths.

You don’t want to think about it but death is here every minute just waiting to obliterate you. And you don’t want this so you cling more and more desperately to the visible, to your mindless routines, your endless fantasies. In Tibet they have a lovely symbol of enlightenment; a dancing happy skeleton. You are already nothing…as a separate limited being you are dead as a doornail. You were dead the moment you were born. What to do but be happy! All the worry, all the attempts to be something, to achieve something, to hold onto something are simply pointless. At some point you accept it and start dancing…you are the grateful dead.

Enlightenment is the big picture. You are looking at life from eternity. Aeons pass before your eye and you find it all amusing. You see the billions of little beings scurrying around on the face of an insignificant planet rushing headlong into the jaws of death…read Gita chapter 11…and unlike Arjuna you know it has nothing to do with you. It is an entertaining movie playing on the screen of Consciousness…nothing more.

Enlightenment is too much for most people. So the dream of Maya…that you can lay up treasures on earth…appeals. Sure, it takes a healthy dose of denial…’moth and dust doth corrupt’ doesn’t fit your fantasy…but denial is hardwired. So you keep trying. You let the vasanas take you for a ride. And since you have an intellect you find very good reasons why you are doing what you are doing…to make yourself feel as if you were somebody or something. It’s a lost cause but that’s the way it is.