Stop the pursuit of happiness. Life is a challenge, not a buffet.

Life is not here to entertain you or amuse you or please you or give you something. It’s only function is to challenge you. The metric it challenges you on is consciousness.

There’s nothing to get. Nothing to keep. You’re not judged by how much you’ve won, got, made… Or how talented you are. You are judged by how conscious you are at each adversity.

How do you know if you are doing well? By the amount of peace you feel. If you lose your calm, become irritated or vicious or suffer unnecessary by angry or punishing thoughts, you fail. If you are conscious and at peace, feeling joy and sense of aliveness, you pass.

That’s the primary metric that you are judged on. There are secondary ones too if you want to take it up a notch.

Be courageous. Don’t let fear stop you. Explore what you are afraid of. Slay the dragon.

You have to be conscientious. By conscientious I mean industrious and orderly. Be consistent. Let your potential be realized for the good of humankind.

You have to take responsibility for what happens to you. Accept the incompleteness, the emptiness, the suffering of life voluntarily and do your best.

If you still believe life is here for your pleasure, you’ve lost touch with your mortality. You’ve lost touch with how ugly and unforgiving life can be. You’ve failed to realize that, accomplishments, pleasures and everything that you think will make you complete, are like layers of an onion. They feel good for a second but then you need more. Soon You seek something different. And soon you suffer because of what you cling to/ want/ don’t want/can’t get. Why is that? Because we are incomplete mortals. We are not all powerful. We are vulnerable. Life can’t help but be a challenge for us. It’s fundamentally designed that way.

 

Who am I?

I was watching Shelly Kagan’s lectures on Death. It raised questions in my mind about who I really am.

Am I a soul? my brain? My personality?

I can feel 3 kinds of things existing inside me. First, I see my current thoughts and feelings.Then I see my memories. beliefs, attitude etc which are the building blocks of my personality.

There’s something else of course. The witness/ watcher.

Without this entity in me, I wouldn’t even be aware of my current thoughts and feelings.

I guess this is what Eckhart Tolle calls presence and other teachers call consciousness.

My first inclination is to regard this ‘watcher’ in me as the real me.

This part after all, has been the single most consistent thing that exists withing me.

My thoughts are random and often contradict each other. Same characteristics apply to my feelings. My personality on the other hand has changed at least 3 times since I have been alive. Only the watcher is untouched.

But, what differentiates my awareness with your one? We all have this awareness but isn’t it the same for all of us?

If I have a head trauma and lose the continuity of my experience, the watcher is still there.

But, my thoughts, feelings and personality will be drastically different. In that case, is it still me?

I am unable to answer that yet. I seem to feel like my awareness is me as long as there is continuity of experience. If my brain loses all of its memories then that will be the death of me. The watcher that used to identify with me will now serve someone else’s experiences.

But even that explanation sounds wrong. How can my awareness ever be someone else? If all about me is my personality then I could be extracted as data and uploaded to the cloud. But, is all that data (memories, beliefs etc) me? That doesn’t sound right!