Rick's Blog

This explains the current political wars of ideology. The non-engaged majority is simply being drowned out by the engaged minority with a bigger megaphone. This is a sign of the virus adapting to the evolutionary pressures of the modern consciousness environment. Yell louder. Dig your heels in firmer. Utilize fear over rationality. Because fear is what the virus is. That is the adapter that the phage engages to pass its code into a cell, just like fear of the unknown is the key to opening the door that unlocks consciousness to accepting the virus into its set of rules that are the basis for judging reality. This fear is the cause for the adherence to the ideologies of "going back to the safer times and ways of the past" and reluctance to adapt to change going forward. That reluctance to accept reality is what leads to rejection of reason and science, rejection of alternative genders, rejection of women having consent of their own bodies, and to embracing the illogical of the

Begin again. These might be the two most important words in my life, in the history of my life. Each moment of life is a new beginning, a chance to act, to be, to live. Realizing that moment is an experience of beauty for me, and my meditation practice helps me stay there in that present moment. Through my practice, I have come to a deeper understanding of why I hold that phrase and that concept so dearly. I hate myself. On some deep, fundamental, lizard-brain level, my brain, for whatever reason, is simply wired to make the most perfectly irrational conclusion it is possible to make as a sentient being: hatred of the self. I don't know why, I don't particularly care why. It just is. This self-hatred has played out in so many ways in my life: from not caring about school work to starting smoking to my devout religious days to suicidal thoughts. It spoke to tell me that I couldn't handle the schoolwork if I tried which made me not even start and then criticised me afte

The things we fret over - our desires and aversions of the past, present and future - in our minds are not real. This is the simplest and most profound truth. But it is the depth to which they are not real that resonates with me the most. In all of the mind-numbingly vastness of space and reality, through everything we understand of the fabric of space-time and everything material and theoretical that exists within it, where physically is the future? If we could draw a map of the entire universe, could you point to a place on that map to locate the past? No. Why not? Because it doesn't exist. Time is nothing more than the measure of change in reality, and "when" is reality? Now. And now, and now. It is never "then". Nothing in the observable universe - no galaxies, no stars, no black holes, no physical entity that we have ever discovered - ever reflects anything more than what it is at the time of observation. Even the oddity of the double-slit experiment which

I certainly don't mean to suggest that I am enlightened in any way. I honestly don't think I know or have experienced enough to be qualified to determine if I am enlightened or not or to what degree I may be down the path, and given that fact, any consideration that I may be enlightened seems much closer to arrogance than to acknowledgment of truth. But the truth is I don't particularly care, and I think that is also kind of the point. To seek enlightenment is a desire itself. Enlightenment is not the goal; presence is the goal. Enlightenment is just the label we have applied to the experience of nothingness, no different than "rising"-"falling", "in"-"out", "lifting"-"placing"-"stepping". What I do know is that I am fundamentally different than I was six months ago, even three months ago, and different in an irreversible way. Living behind the waterfall is an appropriate analogy, but I resonate more wit

The concept of nothingness and emptiness is also something I view as particularly aligned with the scientific method, and my dedication to (and even affection for) the scientific method provided me what seems to me to be an easier springboard for truly understanding - grokking - the concept and embracing it on a deep level. It is a misconception that we discover the truth in science. The reality is actually the exact opposite: we use the scientific method to discover what is  not  true, and then we move forward with those disproven claims and beliefs excluded from our concept of reality. I use the analogy of a pie. If we are given an apple pie and told there is a single cherry somewhere within it, how do we find the cherry? Do we point to some random area and declare Here it is!? No, we cut a slice out of the pie and investigate it, and when we find it does not contain the cherry, we repeat the process; we discover where the cherry, the truth, is not and exclude that slice from fu

I recently had two insights related to the concept of no wasted time . It is part of my 2018 goals to be more "productive" with my time, which is to say to be aware of the voice and the emotions that make me want to "turn off" and go veg out to tv, YouTube or Facebook instead of doing things that I will feel regret over in the future for having not accomplished. I realized a couple of weeks ago that spending an hour watching my DVR'd shows is not "veg time" or even wasted time; it is an explicit course of action, and not necessarily one whose intent is to ignore other tasks but to take that time to tune out and by passively entertained. The fault, if any, in that decision is not in the ignoring of other, higher value tasks but in the choice to withdraw from presence. The latter is accompanied by the ignoring of other, higher value tasks, but I was not making the choice with the intent of having lack of something but gain of something, and that gain w