3 - Rolling back the distractions

The Elephant in the Room

This is an elephant

This is a room

This is an elephant in a room


Many people I know have tried some of the things that I mentioned in the last post with results below their expectations. I can't claim to know what it is in their proper situations they need to do, but I do know that we have TON of distractions in this world. My first guess, if people are doing the steps they should, is that these distractions are choking off your revelation pipeline.  Let's talk about the main ones. I guarantee you that you have at least some distractions that I list below. Don't feel bad, because it is part of life. This is the elephant in the room. Just realize that you need to find ways to overcome them if you want the revelation pipeline to work better. 
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Distraction: Materialism

Things aren't bad. Things are things. Our focus on things isn't bad. Our focus on certain things instead of better things is. 
Things are not the universe. In fact, the universe is made up more of what is unseen than what is seen. It is (tips to my favorite psychologist, JBP) made up more of what matters, not just of matter.
So don't make things your universe. Yes, they are around you all the time. Yes you go to them whenever you have needs. Yes, you may have more of them than anything else in your life, and you certainly have more of them than most of the world has had in their lives.
Don't make them your universe. Don't make them your focus. You aren't opening up the channel to what's above if you are always watching what is below. You will need to figure out what works for you but if you want a head start, the oriental traditions have generally been good at rejecting materialism. Essentialist methods may also be in order.
Just remember that things are things and there is a lot more out there if you can turn your mind towards it.

Distraction: Society

There have been, once or twice, societies that have as close to full communion with the heavens as you could hope for. I don't mean just prophets and revelation. I mean full communion; being in the presence of angels and God continuously. 
I don't know of a single society that is up to that level today. That means that if you are trying to get closer to God, your society is farther away from that state. You need to be able to give up those things in society that are holding you back.
I'm not saying you need to reject society. Almost certainly don't do that. There are a lot of treasures there that helped them move forward, and even preserved and helped you up to this point. But they aren't where you are going. So find the things that may hold you back and let them go.
Materialism is a large part of most societies. We already talked about that one.
Social media is probably the next biggest distractor. If you are always looking for what your friends think, you are looking to the side and not up. Stop looking to the side and start looking up. My church has proposed taking a social media break. You can regularly take a week or two with no social media and cleanse your system from all of that. It can really help.
Other things that distract are parties, status-seeking, gossip, keeping-up-ism, and judging yourself by others' judgement. These things all either distract us or make us look the wrong way. We need to look up.

Distraction: Stress

Yeah, this is a tough one. You can't just make stress go away. Well, you can but it takes a lot of training and the right mindset. Unfortunately, stress, especially chronic stress, keeps our mind in a, for lack of a better word, stressed state, and that can destroy our concentration and focus. Mediation can help to some extent as well as other resources like taking breaks, counseling, etc. Sometimes, mostly in cases of acute stress, we can even redirect all that energy into our meditative thought and use it to harness the power of revelation. There is a great TED talk on how stress isn't bad, but feeling bad about stress is. We may each have different ways available to us to overcome it, so if you realize that you have a lot of stress in your life, find out what works for you.

Distraction: Monkey-mind

Monkey-mind is us not having focus - jumping from one idea to the other and not holding on. In materialist cultures, this is a big problem because there are so many things vying for our attention. It doesn't allow us to focus and concentrate like we need to. To overcome monkey-mind, have focus time every day. Start out the morning by meditating or reading a book or doing a task that requires concentration. In most meditation practices, you are looking for the gaps between the thoughts. This allows us to have control over them instead of them having control over us. When we can do that, we can redirect our minds to higher sources.

Distraction: Metal-mind

Metal-mind is likely as pervasive as monkey-mind, but much more subtle. Metal-mind is us believing we already know things that we actually don't. When we pray, sometimes we have fore-gone assumptions and conclusions as to what is supposed to happen. This is a manifestation of metal-mind. It is like we have caged our spirit inside our own false beliefs. Very difficult to get out of.
Exercising the mind to think can help us sometimes, but many times the very way we think is our own metal-mind at work.
It is usually more effective to jolt your systems by exposing yourself to radical new ideas. Going to see a new culture, meeting people from far distances, reading materials from groups you don't understand, or going  to places that you aren't normally comfortable in (but places where you can stay physically safe of course!) can help to break past old ideas.

Note on Metal-mind: Yes and No vs. Yes and Know

Zen buddhists sometimes talk about getting out of duality, out of yes and no. They are talking about getting out of metal-mind. If you rejected something in the past, but now accept it based simply on argument, you haven't gotten out of metal mind, you are still in your old cage, just facing a different direction. To get out, you need to realize everything that you don't know. You have to be wrong a lot. Not wrong because your logic is wrong, wrong because you didn't understand or know everything. Do you see what we are trying to do? We are using moments when you are wrong to introduce a new way of looking at the world, and that allows us to get out of our cage.

Distraction: Dishonesty, or Violation of our Moral Code

If you do things that are not aligned with what you know to be right, it hurts your spirit, and that hurts your mechanisms for receiving revelation. These actions move you away from the true and the good and so if you are seeking the true and the good, you have to give up every false belief, and every false action. As Eno said, what is your true self when you move past all the layers? You need to find that.
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Exercises to do!

Check that out! We have six main distractions that get us! Here is what you can do, and if you do this, I promise your daily walk and talk with your higher power will improve:
  1. Do the practices from my last blog post to get revelation. Walk the path of faith.
  2. Take each of these distractions and write out how they are manifest in your life. 
    1. Try not to start out by describing how they distract you. Instead, just write out how they are. for example, for materialism, write out all the things you do in a day that involves objects (food, toys, digital, activities) or for society, write out all the people you interact with and also what your activity is on social media.
  3. Analyze where you may be getting distracted from revelation from your list. Target one or two main problems in each category.
    1. If you find overlapping distractions, for instance, if you find that social media both pulls you toward what others think of you AND gives you monkey-mind, then you can combine it into one problem, but elevate the importance of that problem higher on your list.
  4. Make a plan to cut those top distractions out of your life or mitigate their effect on you.
  5. Comment below on what you plan to do and how it worked
I'm really excited for you right now! It is so fun to look at your life and realize how much power you have over it. Once you find the right step to take, it feels like a door opens and you become so much happier and feel more connected as you let divine guidance enter in to the place you have prepared for it.

Super Secret Teaching on Eno's Wisdom!

I got a super secret that I didn't tell you: there is actually a lot more to Eno's Koan than I mentioned. There was a monk called Mumon that would teach about this koan and give further instruction to his students. I added some of his prose below because I think it will really encourage you as you overcome the last distraction and find your true self!


You describe it in vain, you picture it to no avail,
Praising it is useless, cease to worry about it at all.
It is your true self, it has nowhere to hide,
Even if the universe is annihilated, it is not destroyed.








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