Nothing wrong with 2016, just your identity.

I've seen countless people by now declaring that 2016 was a terrible year. 

No, it wasn't. It's just that the trend in the world to belong to more and more rigid identities has become stronger this year than I can remember maybe in my lifetime.

Politically we have chosen our sides in such a strong way that we hardly talk to each other. People who voted in different ways in Brexit or the U.S election are hardly in speaking terms, they cannot understand each other and they don't want to. They all think that the people on the opposite side are basically child eating monsters. The same thing can be told all around the world including Finland between people who want to take in more immigrants and people who want to reduce it or people who think that Russia is the source of all evil in the world and Putin is the Satan himself and people who don't want Finland to lose it's neutrality and become part of the global power struggle (those people are called "Trolls" by the way). There is also a very strong fanaticism running the mock on the left about political correctness and identity politics where the goal has been to categorise people by their victimhood status and make every issue in the world to revolve around gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity that has managed to turn the political and scientific scene into a place where any inconvenient discovery, opinion or even a simple objective inquiry can cause an outrage and get people fired. All of this is the works of the ego trying to belong into world views that explain everything and don't leave any room for discovery and our western culture is turning more and more into a one that rather caters for all the different identities than to open space for new ideas in order for nobody to feel their identities threatened while being blind to the fact that identities cannot be protected because they are false to begin with. We have somehow lost the touch with something that within us sees everyone and everything as not separate or opposite to us but complimentary and valuable, something that can add something to our perspective. The mass consciousness wants everyone to be categorised and it's effort is to lose individuality and freedom of thinking and make world safe by making everyone fit into definitions and believe in their little prisons, shouting out "Look at my sexual orientation! Look at my skin colour! I'm this and nobody can question what I declare about myself". We have built such strong ideologies that the world might seem just a horrifying, scary place when suddenly it doesn't function according to our expectations and ideologies. Instead of questioning their own ideologies and identities people are now rioting and panicking because the world isn't what they thought it ought to be and casting blame on whoever happens to be on the other side.

Everything has polarised to such an extent that our identities as part of those ideological movements don't have any room to step back and look at ourselves critically and our agendas become so holy that the means justify the ends. We are ready to distort reality and cherry pick whatever facts support our identity. We live in a world that is vastly complex and so interconnected that our brains are simply not made to comprehend it in this age of infinite information so we try to find a way to escape our insecurity and feeling of helplessness into different camps from where we have a simple enemy who is to blame for all the wrong in the world and we don't need to talk to such a person if we have already pre-determined their agendas and motivations. We address our idea of the person who we have demonised instead of actually trying to find any common ground.

All of this is the works of identity and reality starts where identity ends. In fact only beyond identity there is reality because our identity works a medium between us and reality and it offers us a very narrow and emotionally charged view.

Beyond identity nobody is a victim, nobody is a perpetrator, nobody's experience is more valid or important than anyone else's, nobody is even special, opinions are not so important and nothing determines you ultimately and living life through identity is a constant battle because the world is not ultimately going to cater to your identity. Reality is eventually gonna come crashing into your house of cards. You will always feel insecure in you identity and you will make more and more enemies and find more cause to feel upset. It is like a hot potato you will keep holding onto and shouting "who is burning my hands?!" with no intention of letting go of the potato.

There was intrinsically nothing wrong in the year 2016. If it was a shitty year it's because your identity said so and you suffered from your identity feeling threatened, not because of what happened.

I feel that sometimes we as a collective psyche have to go through a little shaking and things intensifying and it's self inflicted because strong identities are bound to bring conflicts. It brings us ultimately to such extremes and turbulences that we will have to learn what is the root cause of all this misery. I can tell you, it's identity.
We have no chance for making external peace if we keep on protecting that which creates our inner unrest, which manifest around us as polarisation, misunderstanding and violence. It's a good wake-up call for many people to take a look outside of this battle for power over the survival of our identities and recognise that when you change your reference point from identity to presence and neutrality even the wild year of 2016 looks like a play of energy. The acceptance that comes with that realisation is the hope and the chance for some actual change.

All the data from poverty and health to the amount of wars shows us that 2016 was actually a pretty good year and it takes different kind of eyes to start to see the beauty again in the world after intense collective focus on the negative but it starts with individual honesty. You can make your world beautiful or ugly.

Ps. Don't follow news

Thank you 2016 and welcome 2017.

The biggest obstructors of happiness and freedom: Victimhood and Entitlement

I've been following the tendencies of humanity and recently I've grown more worried about certain tendencies that have manifested in an almost panicky levels of political correctness and intellectual fascism amongst seemingly educated and intelligent people. It's a kind of brainwashing where we have gotten so deep into a giving an unbelievable amount of reverence to narratives of victimhood. Basically we live in a time where victimhood has become a currency, the more devastating victim status you have the more attention you can withdraw from this federal reserve of collective guilt.

As we know a little child is really dependant on parents attention and affection because biologically speaking that attention correlates with survival. So we learn already as children that attention is a kind of currency to ensure survival. Money and any other actual exchange comes later on in life. We tend to learn to use whatever means to have attention and we get addicted to it.

If we come back to the present day we can see why we might be drawn to try to extract some sympathy from people around us because there is still this underlying feeling of value from it and there seems to be a huge market for this kind of pathological behaviour in the society at the moment.

I find it troublesome with all these different groups who in the name of equality and justice seek to attract people in and start feeding their identities with all the different stories of they are victims and how they are being cheated out of their rights by whatever evil conspiracy they believe in, whether it's patriarchy, the illuminati, the white people, the zionists, the bankers, political elite or whoever their "enemy" is. Many of these movements, I'm sure, have been started with a genuine intention of making the world a little more friendly and even playing field but now what we have been seeing over few last years is that the amount of victim narratives has increased exponentially and people have divided more and more into different camps all crying for more attention for their given (or chosen) identities.

The thing about buying into victimhood is that you always need a perpetrator and right there you have created a very rigid and narrow view of whoever happens to be your perpetrator. You have also basically married your perpetrator because now they have something you need (your freedom) but because you have also created a very rigid and narrow identity of yourself you are unable to receive whatever you need to heal because that would mean the end of your identity as a victim. You don't really want the situation to end. You need your perpetrator and you attract them as well. You will find evidence of wrongdoing and oppression in people who might not even know they are playing your game. You will give all of your power away and then cry for attention and sympathy and it will almost feel like love or care but it's not. You see, when you are a victim you are a burden to people around you. They will give their attention to you maybe because they feel some collective guilt, they feel bad for you and they think that maybe in some way it is their fault that you are in such misery. They will also feel a certain grudge towards you because you have forced them to give you attention and sympathy, you are feeding on their energy and sucking people dry. You are not providing anything into the world but you are actually spreading your misery.

But to tell the truth there is no need for any of this misery, it's not even real and this attention that a victim is seeking is actually just their own acknowledgement and self love they have been missing and looking from the outside.

Another topic I wanted to talk about is entitlement because it's very much related to victimhood.

When someone comes to you to tell you that you are a victim in the society for your skin colour, religion, political views, gender, sexual orientation or whatever they will want to talk to you about rights. Rights are an interesting thing because it sounds so good to be fighting for your rights or especially someone else's rights because that makes you extra righteous, right? But to be blunt I would say that idea of rights can become a kind of cancer. It can become very poisonous for your freedom to fight for your rights.

I know it sound very contradictory but let me explain:

When you buy into the victim narrative and you start fighting for your rights you have narrowed yourself into such a tiny box that there is no space for actual freedom there. You have defined yourself into oblivion. You have reduced yourself almost into a caricature, a mere small bundle of thoughts and ideas and they are all built around what you are missing and lacking. You feel incomplete. You have a very clear sense what your characteristics are that make you a victim and you are angry at the world for your suffering that derives from the way you have limited your existence. When you limit yourself into that kind of small space you will start shouting after your rights because you have given all the power away. You keep on holding onto your identity by claiming that you should have your rights, people should respect your rights. You and your rights have almost become synonymous, it's almost the same thing. It's where you have put your attention and it has created misery because your identity is synonymous with lack.

In our western culture we seem to have deeply immersed ourselves into supporting anyone claiming victimhood and demanding rights even to a point that we police the people who ask for credentials for acknowledging these claims or question the behaviours of certain people who have have been determined victims. We don't even always need anyone to declare themselves as victims, we are very willing to do it for them and then claim the position of defender of the weak, thus promoting our own righteousness. We seem to be so afraid to deny anyone of their victimhood that we would rather not take the risk so we just let anyone create any narrative and we blindly accept it so we don't seem intolerant or close minded. This kind of culture is not empowering anyone and it's supporting laziness of spirit and infantilizing people.

We need people who are masters of their own minds and hearts, not victims who need to be taken care of an fought for because they just are not capable of taking care of themselves. We need more people who don't care about what their skin colour or inherited culture, religion or other circumstances are because they are far too busy fulfilling their passions and living their full potential. We need intelligent people who have gone beyond their little human mind and psychological games and don't see the world in terms of divisions and personal stories. They just do what they need to do because that's what they are here to do.

If one is truly happy and living in the core of their being do you think they would give a flying fuck what pronoun someone uses to address them, what the illuminati is up to or if someone has fucking mansplained them? No, a master will never care about such things. World needs more real grown ups who are full of creativity and vision, those are the people who will change the world, not some activists being angry about truly trivial things and chasing wild conspiracies and teaching people how fucked and oppressed they are and telling others to check their privileges and feel guilty.

The trap of figuring people out

Only a deeply insensitive person would ever try to analyse and figure out another person in order to "get" or "understand" them. 

I feel like there is a lot of categorising and judging going on and people coming forward with sentences starting with "I think you are [insert a type of a person]". Now, when I hear someone describing me to me it's an instant turnoff because when we translate it to english it sounds something like this: "I have reduced you into a concept so I can feel more comfortable in my own skin around you". It's very common to analyse ourselves and others in whichever way we have been taught: in social status, color of the skin, sex, psychology, bodytypes of various schools etc.  All of these forms of analysing can be helpful for some practical reasons but let's face it; most of the time we use them as tools to put someone in a box inside our mind in order to avoid just being there like a fool, not knowing who we are dealing with and feeling awkward about it.

Someone trying to figure me out is just insulting. I know that most people who are more extroverted and get their kicks from interactions with other people feel like there is some kind of a code to be cracked when they face a person who is not so much into that. They might feel like they've done something wrong and that the person is angry at them, they might feel like the person is being disrespectful or rude for not saying hello, maybe they feel that the person is being selfish and not caring for others. This might cause them to go on a mission to figure out why is the other not responding to them like they would want, why are they not getting "the connection" but in this pursuit of figuring out the other person usually the introvert gets just more an more put off by this intrusive behaviour. Have you ever tried to make a cat like you.. does any of the stuff you do actually work or is it that when you relax the cat will come to you when it feels ready? Everyone knows that cats are most attracted to people who are allergic and avoid approaching them. They will come right at you because you were the only one who didn't try to manipulate the situation and molest the poor cat in order to get a response,  you were just there.

The whole point in my writing is that I feel like I run constantly into premature deductions and analyses about me because people are afraid to be and let interactions just happen as they do without pushing it to a direction or another. Most people will talk and try to fill the void of no conversation and try to force a "connection" with any noises they can muster out of their mouths. Someone more sensitive, on the other hand, is the less likely to do so because there is a need for something authentic and until there is something authentic it's just better to keep quiet.

Wishing and praying for others? Stop!

I felt like talking a little about one of the big delusions we as humans have that we usually don't seem to be aware of at all. It's praying and wishing for others behalf, whether it's for end of suffering for humanity in general or whenever we see someone in pain we tend to pray or wish the pain to end for them.

When we see people in pain there is a natural compassion and feeling of pain in ourselves if we are even a bit sensitive. It's quite beautiful thing in itself to have this empathy but even amongst more aware beings it tends to have a more personal element into it. We tend to project ourselves on to other's situations and from that personal space we wish for that other person what we imagine they should be experiencing instead -so right there we have an agenda which distorts our seeing of the situation. From that distortion we keep on hoping for world around us to change into what our limited mind can think of as "better". We are not really helping anyone by wishing upon them what we think they should be experiencing. In fact this kind of thinking is deeply arrogant. We think that we know how it should be and the help and good intentions we offer from that state only serves our ego. We think we are helping but we are just helping ourselves.

More authentically we can pray or wish for someone else's experience to not be in vain, so that it brings some deep understanding and growth through that situation which to the outside looks painful and horrible. We all know that for ourselves sometimes the most intense pains and extreme situations have brought about a greatest release of some perspectives and limitations which kept us in bondage that we probably would have never seen and understood without some painful circumstances. In fact everything in our lives serves our growth and freedom if we let it..  if we can see that then the pain is not necessary anymore and life usually starts having a beauty even if to the outside it doesn't look like what a happy life should. Usually it's the resistance to the pain that keeps us in suffering and someone who tries to help to get rid of it only helps the suffering to go on longer by bringing attention to it and confirming the misery. We should not be so hasty to go about riding in our shiny armours to help people.. at least it shouldn't be our agenda.

The appropriate help can of course be given but it never comes from projections and imagination. It comes as a knowingness from sober seeing, impersonally, spontaneously.

The importance of art

I was just remembering the effect one song had on me when I was a teenager and I recall the situation very precisely:

I was going to shower and I had my music playing on the computer that I had downloaded and hadn't listened to yet. The player was on shuffle and then I hear this one piece of music coming from the other room and I was really confused because I had never heard it before but still it was like it had been my favourite song forever and I had heard it many times. It was like that piece of music just needed to exist and without it there would be something lacking in the whole existence and from my being.

I know all of this sounds silly but at the time that was how I felt and I remember what a powerful effect some music has had on me, like a best friend who truly understands me better than anyone ever could anywhere on a level that's totally beyond explanation, like there could never be anything quite as intimate. It felt sometimes like it could express something that I could have never expressed myself.

At best art can be the biggest difference maker in the universe. It can talk to us in ways that bypasses all mind and personality constructs and touches right where nothing else can. Even if someone is deeply traumatised and closed, art can reach in and melt everything away for a time. It can literally change the course of our lives.

I remember how much I had support from music when I was growing up and having difficult time. I used to listen mostly heavy music and there was just something that gave me a break of everything so I could enjoy the space within where nothing has ever been touched, where there is no burdens or chains.

I'm going to end this time with a statement that I believe strongly to be true:

Humankind would have destroyed themselves and the planet long ago without the existence of art.

Sleepless night of realisation

Last night I couldn't sleep because I had a letter regarding a job offer I received. There was something that was disturbed a bit by it because if I got the job it would have meant a complete change of scenery and circumstances and it would have conflicted what my feeling was for how my life was unfolding. There seemed to be a conflict.

Slowly these kind of "what if.. *fill in the rest*" -thoughts started rising up and they started having a life of their own and something in me believed in these hypothetical constructs and those thoughts started to solidify the idea of personality.. You know, the small "me" living a life and having to deal with all sorts of responsibilities and making decisions which could be wrong and being afraid and imagining how fucked up life could end up as a result.

All of these thoughts started from one job offer that was put in front of me and before I could spell "cat" I had spelled out a whole imaginary life scenario and that bundle of thoughts seemed to mean something at the moment.

Then there was an understanding that I don't actually need to resolve anything. I just have to stop believing in the small "me" that has all these thoughts, fears, aspirations and responsibilities and then all the heaviness just drops because it has nobody to entertain, nobody to audition to. It has never been a matter of resolving any of these situations but just a matter of clear perspective.

After this realisation there was a relaxation and lightness that had nothing to do with the personality. All of these thoughts just became irrelevant. Just now I called to ask for the job and it turned out that the position was filled and all of this was unnecessary to begin with. Now I realise that the only purpose for those thoughts and the heaviness of personality to come was to clarify the difference with the true me and the little personality "me".

At the end of the day it's just a good giggle for the being to see the personal traits trying to take hold and then a return to authentic seeing happens and evaporates all of the worries that for a moment seemed so real and the soul just laughs and says "That was a good one, mind, you almost thought you existed. I also played along a bit for fun to see how deep in silly thoughts I could go before the bubble popped and the attention came back to it's true place. Peace is my nature and here I have never, ever left" The distance from personality to peace is no more than a thought away and even that distance is simply imaginary.

After realising that everything is already perfect there truly is no wrong that can be done and no "bad habits" can make any separation that is needed to overcome. There is nothing that needs to be changed to clear out the path to true self. To believe in that is the same as to validify the existence of the personality just in order to play the game of transcendence.

Now I can do all the things that in the personality would be considered bad habits and realise that even they lose the significance as something that need to be changed. Nothing needs to change in the outer existence at all but yet everything is transformed in the clear seeing and they simply don't have the same effect as before. Sure! Sleep late, drink a lot of coffee, don't exercise! It's only an issue for someone but who wants to be someone anyways?

Defining your life for others convenience? What a load of crap!

I've recently paid attention to a tendency in me (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this) to define my life for the convenience of other people.

You know the feeling when you are at a party or a dinner with relatives and someone comes to ask you "so, what do you do?". That's always a tough one because I never really define myself as anything very specific. I have things I enjoy to do but it comes and goes. Then if I don't want to get too existential on their asses I'll answer something that I assume they are really asking like "How can I define you so you won't remain an unsolved and uncomfortable mystery to my obsessive mind" and I answer some random thing that seems easiest depending on how lazy I feel. I now have good answer for most people "I do photography" but especially relatives basically want to know where I get my money so they can assess my life and silently judge me in their heads.

But let's get more on track here..

It seems a typical human being is living solely out of these labels and definitions and they only ask other people what they already assume about them and then they just act like a really bad scientist, gathering evidence and proof for what they already have in mind, profiling for the archives at the back of the mind so whenever they meet that person the case file is pulled out and further investigation can be continued.

We all know that these kinds of conversations feel somehow heavy and maybe even humiliating. Something just feels wrong but it's hard to put the finger on it but it leaves us depleted and uncomfortable.

The reason for this uncomfortable feeling is simply that something in us knows that all of these things are not who we truly are. We tend to just build an image of ourselves to present to others to offer something because most people would be completely at a loss if we don't. We've been silently taught from childhood that it's a bit embarrassing if we don't know what to answer when someone asks us something. Then naturally we learn to hide that embarrassment and just come up with something, to portray ourselves in a light that would build a good case file in this investigators mind.

Have you ever talked to anyone who just listens? They might ask something but it's just something superficial or they might actually be genuinely interested. You have a very light feeling because you feel like they are not interrogating you. They just want to know you and have a connection with you. Afterwards you feel light and nourished because you didn't feel any push on yourself from the other. There was no hidden agenda and you didn't feel like you needed to make yourself into anything.

It's such a clear feeling when there is awareness in it. We all naturally know who feels light and who feels heavy to interact with but the problem is that usually we are already pushing ourselves and defining ourselves all the time that it's really hard to be sensitive to what feels better or worse on the outside. Once there is a sufficient amount of self-respect then it becomes easier and easier to invite in the right kind of people, situations and energy. It all just responds to what's already going on inside. We can use the outside interactions as a kind of checking point in how drawn are we towards people who judge, define and limit us vs. people who are just there and present and who don't have any particular need to define or even know too much about other people's lives.

I want to pose a question for anyone who reads this:

Where are you with this? Are you constantly defining yourself for others people's convenience and seeking their approval?  Are you trying to help them build a case on you and are you worried about the outcome of it?

You don't have to answer me directly but you can of course message me on fb or leave a comment or something.

Peace out!