Weather is the strongest influencer

As I sit here in Tucson, it’s been raining for a while. Although the sun is peeking out through the clouds in the distance on the East, it is still cloudy here. It is also wet, humid and cool. For those of us who live in Tucson, this kind of weather is a huge relief-from a temperature standpoint. Especially if you are like me, and walk everywhere, you will really appreciate rain, clouds and cool weather, not to mention the sudden explosion of greenery, flowers and being able to see creatures that come out to enjoy the rain.

My favorite creature in the word is the lizard, not because it is particularly pretty-looking or happy, but because it really makes the most of the desert. It has a lifestyle that is to be envied. All day long, it simply hangs out, waiting for an opportunity to score a meal. When the time comes, it ventures out, finds something, eats and then, well, goes right back to hanging out.

What makes the lizard so smart is that it knows exactly what to do depending on the weather. It isn’t confused about whether or not it’s a good time to be outside. You don’t see lizards in the desert wasting time roasting in the hot sun when they could be in the shade, nor do you see them walking when they could be still. Sure, they do like heat, being cold-blooded, but that’s about it. They are not trying to “work”-they are just living in tune.

Living in tune is supremely difficult

The lizard lives life in tune because its perception is limited to the physical. It doesn’t have to care about energy, spirituality and such. It’s doing exactly what it needs to do, and no more. But as a human being, you cannot live like the lizard. You have a body that senses not just the physical weather of the world, but also its energy weather. And living in tune with the energy weather of the world is a huge challenge for most people. Let me give you a simple example.

Let’s say a day comes, sometime in September, that you wake up in the morning and just don’t want to get out of bed. Like many people, perhaps you woke up because your alarm went off (a horrible thing to do to your body, btw). Perhaps you have a window next to your bed and you can see outside. It seems to be a nice, warm (but not hot) sunny day. Blue sky, brilliant sunshine, a light breeze-sounds really fantastic, doesn’t it?

But something else is going on. Your body doesn’t want to go to work. It hesitates, resists. Your psyche starts to panic, because you don’t want to force yourself, but there’s work to do! The office is calling, there are people in the house who want you, not to mention all the stuff you recently read about how not to procrastinate is running around in your brain. You are conflicted, unable to decide what to do. It sucks and you want an answer. So you decide to ask someone you know, maybe a friend or a colleague. And they give you useless answers. Either it’s “you said you were going to work hard this time”, or “you should listen to your body” or something in the middle, maybe “can you work from home?”

All these “answers” are wrong, because the truth is simple: you don’t have to decide your whole day based on how you feel right this moment.

“You cannot plan your future based on how you feel now.”

Learn to wait, in silence

If there’s one thing that would fix every problem on this Earth, it is waiting. People no longer believe that waiting is necessary, or even important. Corporate America has convinced people that to wait is to lose. It’s all about seizing the moment, grabbing life by the horns and making the most of every opportunity. Blink and it’s gone, snooze you lose—narratives telling you to stop waiting and act are everywhere. And they make you anxious, because you believe in living in sync with the world.

You need to change your perspective and start living in sync with the Earth, the universe, indeed all of creation.

“If you want to live happily and have a good life, live in sync with creation, not the world.”

Unfortunately, this will require a lot of understanding. This is because no amount of knowledge can help you live in tune with creation itself. I know there are a million books out there on Yoga, spirituality, Ayurveda, Tai Chi, Feng Shui, etc. However, none of them will help you. In fact, they will lead you astray because knowledge is nothing but a different form of ignorance. Knowledge will help you remember a particular narrative that works in a particular setting, but you cannot live by memory. Every moment, the collection actions of humanity (and other things), works to change the energy of the world we live in. Each moment, therefore, calls for a different stance, so to speak, in order to stay balanced.

It’s like walking on a bridge made of rope. It isn’t going to collapse, but it does move, and moves differently based on how many people are walking on it, how fast, how much wind there is, etc. Sometimes you have to stay still, sometimes you have hold on for dear life, and other times you may have to crawl on all fours to stay stable. Occasionally, things are calm and you can walk confidently across. This is exactly what our world is like nowadays. It is usually turbulent and sometimes calm.

Do you think you even have the time to sit around reading a book on how to cross a bridge made of rope, when you’re already on it? No, of course not. This is why I discourage people from reading. You will not gain an iota of understanding by simply reading a book about knowledge.

Yes, I am fully aware that I am saying this in a blog, but understanding is different than knowledge and here I am offering only understanding. Plus, I don’t want you to keep reading this blog forever. I want you to be convinced, at some point, that your best bet lies in sitting still most of the time and allowing understanding to flow into you naturally, on a moment-by-moment basis. In other words, I want you to be convinced that you have all the intelligence you need within you and that intelligence is the only thing you need to live in tune.

“The ONLY thing you need to live in tune, is intelligence, not knowledge or skill. And this intelligence is already within you.”

The negative impact of schooling

When I was young, I never enjoyed school. It wasn’t just the fact that I was different from everyone else and didn’t care about things they did (like video games). It was also because I found information to be totally useless to my life. All day long I would be taught things like equations and how a biogas plant works, etc., but it didn’t answer any of the questions I had. And the biggest question in my head was simply, “What is all this?” I wasn’t referring to schooling, but the whole of creation in general. I didn’t know what this whole place was.

See, people simply accept their reality, whatever it may be. Most people have absolutely no questions about the sun, or even about things like cars, money, etc. But I wasn’t satisfied by the answers people gave me, which in India usually just was “God created all this”. I sure as hell knew God hadn’t created all this, because there was no God to be found anywhere. How could some random entity no one had seen be responsible for all this? It made no sense. People tried to explain to me by taking me to temples and such, showing me an effigy of some God or another and saying “look He does this and that”. And I did not believe a single word they said, because it was obvious that not only were people lying, but lying out of fear, not out of devotion or obedience or anything of that sort. They were just afraid someone was going to strike them down if they didn’t comply.

And because I didn’t understand the first question in my mind, I was unable to progress in school and accept any of the other questions and answers. This does not mean I didn’t do well in school. Simply memorizing and repeating nonsense didn’t take much-I used to memorize my entire textbook by reading a couple of times. So I did well in school, scoring top marks, especially in science and languages, because they were just stories. I took them as stories and didn’t give a damn as to whether they were true or meant anything. And this of course, continued all the way until I had my wonderful enlightenment experience in New Mexico, at which point I was totally sure, that all information was just nonsense. After that I stopped even caring about information, despite working as a software architect at Indiana University at the time.

I had always simply let things happen, never worrying, planning or doing anything about anything. But most of you have, unfortunately, absorbed too much education and therefore want to know, in narrative form, what you have to do. You need knowledge and to use that knowledge to make plans, decisions, and then to carry out your plans to the T. Otherwise, you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything. I know the feeling—I still don’t think I’ve accomplished anything—but in my case, my experience of non-doership is everything. What I mean is, I have always felt that someone or something else has been doing everything, while I simply experience the actions or results. I have never felt that I did anything, at all.

“Education has convinced most of you that you are personally in charge of your actions. This is totally false.”

Living in tune means letting go

I am sure you have heard those words before, but because you don’t have an actual experience of what it means, you don’t know how to do it. And to be frank with you, you cannot do it. It must be done for you, which is why I am here. Letting go doesn’t mean that you consciously sit back and passively watch as the fire consumes your house, for example. It’s not inaction, but correct action. And what is correct? That which is necessary, no more, no less. But how do you know what is necessary? You don’t, because it is not based on knowledge at all. It is based on understanding, which means that your whole body knows due to its very existence, what it is it should do on a moment-by-moment basis. Let me give you an example.

Did anyone have to teach you how to run? No. You just started running one day. The same thing is happening with animals, isn’t it? Newborn deer starting outrunning wolves on the day they are born. No one has to teach them to run, or that a wolf is dangerous! Yes, this is part of evolutionary memory. Over millennia, there are things inside you that are programmed in certain ways to help you respond appropriately.

But this is true of everything. You have all the “programming” you need to succeed in life, right from the day you were born. You didn’t need knowledge to grow, to eat, to acquire knowledge and understanding, to respond to the weather as well as other people. Everything was already there, but the world convinced you that you needed training, knowledge, etc. Am I saying that you don’t need schooling for anything? Yes, in fact, I am. You don’t need training or knowledge for anything, not even for technical stuff like programming or wordly stuff like trading in the stock market. All you need is understanding, time, patience and practice.

“You don’t need training or knowledge. All you need is understanding, time, patience and practice.”

If you have those four, you can accomplish just about anything in life. Unfortunately, you seek knowledge, not understanding, so most of life eludes you. You cannot respond naturally to the weather because your body is now filled with information about how much vitamin D you need, whether there is a severe heat warning on, whether your hair can withstand the moisture and if you have Gore-Tex in your shoes or not. Once information starts to mess with your system, you cannot see properly, feel properly, understanding properly and act appropriately. This is the end result of all your schooling, training, education and nowadays, influence by social media and the like.

You don’t have to let go. I have to kick this garbage out of you. Once all this conditioning has worn off, you’ll finally feel like yourself again, instead of not knowing what to do and feeling like a stranger in your own body. Then, when the weather goes south, like it did yesterday, you’ll know to shut down your work, lie down and relax until the energy is stable in the world again. That’s how you make the world a better place.