The end of suffering is remembering the nature of self, but you must keep remembering because there are too many forces attempting to keep you trapped in the matrix.
I punched my birthday into Google Gemini, and within a few seconds, I learned all that had taken me almost fifty-three years to figure out for myself. The traditional world and the corporate world don’t suit me at all, but exploring philosophy, consciousness, and the nature of reality is my thing.
AI sure does speed things up.
Pam Gregory starts her podcast off with the quote, “You don’t believe in astrology, do you?”
I heard a few scientists lamenting about another, “He would have accomplished so much more if he hadn’t wasted his time with astrology.”
As a scientist, I see no evidence to throw it away. I see it on par with psychology. Psychology can’t replicate half of its experiments, so it’s only half right.
Personally, my experience with horoscopes is about the same, but then I dropped the noise out of my life, got on my personal mission, paid attention to the energy of the day, and went with the flow.
Now, it’s eerily accurate.
Breaking out of the Prison of Society
While watching my YouTube videos, I get interrupted with ads for Loop earplugs promising the end of suffering for when the world is too loud. That’d be me.
Once at a hotel restaurant, I freaked out because there was no one to turn down the volume, so I filled a page in the guest book with my complaint. No one was talking. We were all trapped in our own worlds because the hockey game was so loud. No one was cheering. It didn’t appear anyone was even watching it. The next morning, the guest book was gone. I made sure to never stay there again.
In The Truman Show, Chase Hughes points out that Truman is in a prison for sure, but there are no bars. Instead, there are interruptions. Interruptions keep him trapped. Interruptions include his own fear of drowning, as was how he’d lost his father.
Hughes says, “The people closest to him are keeping him organized inside the lie. It shows up as concern.” Nothing keeps us trapped like concern. We are defenceless against people who appear to be on our side.
Following concern from the people closest to me, I stayed in a prison as well. “A prison guarded by the people that love you creates a ton of confusion,” Hughes says, and confusion buys them time.
The whole point of a prison is to rob you of time.
Hughes points out that a prison doesn’t need walls, but it does need guards, and the best guards don’t realize they are guarding anything. Tradition, normalcy, the status quo – these things are so well-protected that they don’t fall until you are alone.
Alone with your own thoughts, motivations, and feelings about it all.
Take Back Time
With a deep-rooted fear of taking up space, standing up for myself, or asserting my own desires, I was constantly second-guessing my right to be seen as an individual.
If you want to undermine someone’s productivity and performance, undermine their confidence. Wasting time second-guessing everything slowed me down enormously. Frozen between catching myself doing what comes naturally and checking what I was supposed to be doing, attempting to comply with those external forces.
So many mental resources wasted on a performance that didn’t even come close to adequate. Swinging between overworking myself to prove my worth and an inability to act unless provoked by the feeling of not measuring up.
I spent my life worrying about what my body looked like so it would be attractive to the men that I found attractive. Obsessed with appearance. No, thinness. Pinching rolls of fat, and then pounding pavement for hours at a time to burn it off. Worth is all about weight, I thought.
As Lily Allen sings in The Fear, “Everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner.”
Of course, it’s a rollercoaster. You can only live in starvation mode for so long. Next time, your body sees you coming, and doesn’t allow those precious calories to leave so quickly. No, it holds on to them because it doesn’t trust you to respond to the hunger signals it sends.
You can’t turn back time, but I can take back my timeline and rewrite my story.
With the end of suffering, I have no interest in how attractive I am to men. I am interested in being strong enough to carry everything I need and flexible enough to check my own body for ticks. There are things I want from my body now, and none of them are appearance-based.
Build Supportive Routines
It’s for me, finally. Shouldn’t it have always been that way? My body, for me, to do what I want to do. I want to treat it like my partner, not my employee.
Routine can become a cage you built to keep chaos out, to keep uncertainty at bay, and to keep the vastness of possibility and potential in a box that allows us to wrap our heads around it.
Routines should serve you, not the other way around. The end of suffering is to create loose structures that anchor your day, while leaving room for intuition and flow. Let the universe help you by giving it some space to enter.
Especially, make room for rest, recovery, reflection, and all the things you need to do at a slow, unforced pace without a deadline. You can’t force insight. You can’t control inspiration. All you can do is make room for them and allow them to arrive, sit down, and stay a while.
Shifting one’s relationship with daily life from a battleground of control and exhaustion to a practice of flow and self-care. Allowing a daily schedule to be flexible. Accepting that some days you have high energy and other days you need rest and healing.
Because some days the energy is on your side, and on others it brings tension, conflict, and a call to transform.
The end of suffering means transforming daily routines from over-controlling, burnout-inducing work for a strict boss into a gentle container that protects your peace.
Separate your human value from your daily output. Perform tasks because they support your life, not because you need to justify your existence. Not because you are going through the motions, motions you know so well, that your mind is elsewhere.
You are already checked out.
Listen to the Body
What changes if you treat your body as a partner rather than an instrument to be mastered? If the body is exhausted, stopping to rest should be viewed as a victory rather than a defeat.
Do things when they feel right, and not when a clock tells you to, letting yourself be guided by intuition and reconnecting to the signals unique to you.
Accept those signals, instead of fighting them. Society and pressure make us turn to caffeine when we are tired, instead of to the pillow. When you start the fight, the day becomes a battle, and how do you think this war ends?
You are not your body, but you need it to stay in this simulation called life. Don’t win the battle and lose the war. Day after day, week after week, this routine will ruin you.
Emotions are simply messages from the body. Anger asks you to notice unfairness. The end of suffering is not ignoring it or venting it, but investigating it.
Exactly what is unfair, and is this unfairness your ego talking or the universe? What initially feels like unfairness may be an opportunity to cultivate empathy, compassion, or a broader, more complete perspective.
My anger made me notice society’s unfairness, or the other way around. I didn’t want to be a second-class citizen valued only for my ability to create humans, and not liking humans very much, I was angry to be given this purpose.
Anger pointed at individual men who said things to me, then to the general patriarchal structure of family, work, and everywhere I’ve ever been, to realizing that the individual men have their own sources of anger about this situation.
Maybe, with enough anger, we can move away from it, and it will crumble through disuse and neglect.
Awakening to Freedom
Having a completely open slate with no external pressure might sound like the end of suffering, but if you’ve always measured your worth by your output, it will leave you feeling unmoored, perhaps with a feeling of guilt toward your stillness.
You might feel a constant, phantom pressure to do something, create something, or improve yourself, even though there is no deadline, no looming need.
Energy needs somewhere to go. Without a purpose, you may find yourself perfecting a hobby, re-organizing a closet, obsessing over minor details just to give that energy an outlet.
This is a hangover from society. Your true nature craves that stillness and, like my cat, won’t come out of hiding until it senses the calm, the safety of it all.
When it does, and you have all those resources and all that time, congratulations, you can now be the true self that you were born to be. A true self that knows how it wants to use that time, that has a laundry list of things it wants to create, and is so excited to finally get the chance.
You’ll no longer need or want caffeine.
Let go of the expectation that you have to manufacture a perfect, productive life just because you have the time. Enjoy the peace without letting your internal voice tell you that you are wasting time. Give yourself permission to exist without a quota.
Enjoy your peace. You earned it, and you deserve it. No matter what society might say about that.
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