Submitted by Cloud Jumper on
This is the question.
If you answer it, you’re enlightened.
Consider a raindrop that has landed on the top of your window’s pane. Let’s pretend that the rain drop is YOU.
You’re starting a race downward. Many other drops are also landing and trickling down, but you can win if you cleverly route yourself to hit other drops that are just sitting there, and by gaining that extra water, you can then continue down even faster.
You’ve actually done this, right? You have selected a drop to follow on many panes in many rains.
What you did was to project identity. You pretended to be a sentient drop of water, and you created a drama in which many other sentient drops were competing with you in a race. The thrills of the race were easily “seen” by you. Karma was afoot as you came to a stop mid-pane and had to wait for another drop to join you. If other drops got their extra weight before you did — envy arose. And on and on. The human condition was fully on display.
You’re very good at projecting identity. A water drop is easy-peasy. You can project yourself onto anything. And you do this all the time.
Did you notice the word “all” above?
This is the problem that the question’s answer solves. Your “all problem.”
How do you stop projecting — all-ways onto everything? How can your constant pretending and projection be ended?
Your “all problem” is worst than being addicted to heroin — or even sugar!
You are in denial. You need an intervention, but all your friends need one too. You can’t even stop projecting when you’re asleep; you’re assuming everything in the dream is real — more real than raindrops! And any yogi will testify that when there’s no dreaming, you are yet still projecting that that dreamlessness is a state that has the quality “observable.”
Thirteen.
What did your mind do with the word, “thirteen,” above? That word didn’t just sit there. Your mind started suggesting what 13 things are about to be cited. You had to suss. You had to fuss. You had to project possible meaning before meaning was even being used by me, the author, of that word, “thirteen.” And you did this instantly and effortlessly. No pencil and paper needed.
Fourteen.
Oh you think you just let that “fourteen” sit there, eh, and you thought you’d show me that you could control projection and prove yourself to not be an addict. THAT’S WHAT FOURTEEN WAS PRETENDED TO MEAN TO YOU.
You can’t help yourself.
It’s worse than this. Pretending is not mere addiction; it’s nutritive. You need it like you need oxygen. What pretending keeps alive is the most beautiful raindrop possible — the fiction of you. If you stop pretending you exist, you stop being. Your drop becomes “just another drop.”
You would disappear like the lap of a standing person.
You are not pretending about a raindrop. Nope. You are projecting your self to be a mass of 50,000,000,000,000 atoms — a mostly meat conglomerate that is involved with seven billion other flesh-bots. Whoa! Are you a genius or what?
And you pretend you’re this methane factory, and only now after a lifetime of doing this, you end up here at Quora wondering “what the heck?”
Are you tired of you yet?
How to lay “you” down on the floor and step back away.
Listen for silence.
It’s the only thing about which it’s safe to pretend.
It’s the real you, and if you pretend it’s you,
sooner or later, you’ll find out that you’re not pretending.
The good news: your addiction is being used to extinguish the addiction. By merely doing what you can expertly do, you pretend yourself out of pretense.
When finally you toggle
from pretending you are a drop
to knowing you are an ocean,
the question is answered.
Self is ocean.
Thoughts are drops.
Life is a pane.
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