we need to take seriously is our propensity to take everything seriously. I know. Another Alan Watts look-alike essay, but really. There is nothing we need to take seriously and no matter who says it, or how many times it is said—it seems to continue needing to be said.

It’s pure magic. The mandate not to take anything seriously, in case you missed it, immediately annihilates itself. And it is just this sort of self-annihilating tautology that leads us straight to an experience of the absolute. This is why the Zen scriptures largely consist of little jokes, or koan, that are intended to create similarly self-annihilating thoughts.

This tautology happens to be a little gem because, a moment before it disappears, it delivers some directly applicable wisdom that we can drop straight into and begin to live from.

When we stop taking things seriously, life opens up. Instead of constantly making decisions hell-bent upon maintaining whatever it is we are trying to maintain, we can begin to make decisions with motive drivers like play, curiosity, inspiration, and creativity. If nothing is serious, then why make decisions based on less? The man, dancing in the rain, has found the way, and knows he has found it. If he is old, he won’t ever come down and settle for less. If he is young, he might listen to his fellows who remind him of the heaviness of his circumstances.

Non-seriousness instantly reinvents the personality at a core level and turns life into the indomitable adventure that it is! Even in weighty situations, or seemingly-weighty situations, when we think we are so in-it (but really, we aren’t), non-seriousness can act as a guide-star, pointing us in a healthier direction. Seriousness turns an identical sequence of fortunes and misfortunes from a rip roaring adventure into a hellish string of uncontrollable events which must be contended with and which will, in the long run, really bring you down.

Now for a quick commercial break about: Freewill—it is relative. It is an indistinguishable interplay between the self and the field. When crossing the road, one can wait for the stream of cars to break, allowing the flow of external events to determine one’s own decision to cross. It is, however, also possible to walk out into the stream of traffic, likely causing screeching brakes and risking severe harm to the body, thus disrupting the external flow of events via decision and action. Although, it cannot be overlooked that both scenarios involve decision and action, even if it is to stand still. This is the best analogy I’ve been able to come up with for freewill.

Back to our regular programming. Because of free will, seriousness causes all sorts of problems which, by all accounts could be considered serious, and this centers around the issue of duality, and a non-dual view of the world. If you wish to eliminate all the bad guys, what does that make you? Consider Germany in the 1930’s and ’40’s as the most classic example.

What else should be taken seriously? The King of England is to be taken seriously. The Emperor. The Dictator. The Military. Death. Your career. National Security. The threat of terrorism. The War on Drugs. The Pandemic. If you take your career seriously, you may do hideous, monstrous things to win and succeed at it, especially if you live in 1940’s Germany. If you take national security seriously you might pass onerous laws or fight unjust wars against small shepherd families in a distant land you’ve never been to or cared about. If you take the war on drugs seriously, the prisons become overcrowded and the teens rebel by taking more and heavier drugs than ever before.

I could go on and on.

What is the point of you being here? Reading this?

Hmmm… you were born onto a giant lava bubble floating in infinite space forever. You breathe, eat, and take a shit like everyone and everything else that lives here. None of this means anything, yet it is casually, incredibly epic…effortlessly cool…And yet, as children, we are traumatized onto this quest for individual achievement wherein we need to do things we don’t like in order to do things we do like (huh?), or worse, to “distinguish ourselves” in this dear, short lifetime, and “make something of ourselves” beyond the flesh, bone, sex organs and ocular array, cellular regeneration, DNA coding, vascular system, heart-beating-supercomputer-emotional-tactile-audio-visual-mental sacred supersensing vehicle of holy experience– GOD! Does anyone else wanna go surfing?!!.. Imagine, if you will, the fine-motor multisensory experience of riding a wave? What is that?

What part of the cold, vast cosmos came up with that experience? I mean, why are you here, really? To file taxes? In an ultimate sense, you can, and because of the law of Infinity, there is nothing wrong with spending your entire lifetime, lifetimes upon lifetimes, filing taxes on an annual basis, there will still be an entirely un-depleted store of eternity left for you to do other things whenever you’re done having that experience. That’s the tricky thing about Infinity, and why it gives rise to nonduality. Why not be a paper-pusher? No real reason. But also why?

See, it really all comes down to motive. Why are you doing what you’re doing? If there is an infinity out there to experience, what are you doing in here, having this repetitive experience of filing and entering? Copywriting? Editing? Mouth-swabbing? What are you doing it for? Who are you doing it for?

What would you do if you knew you didn’t have any limitations?

What I always think when some asshole asks me this is “Oh yeah, buddy? Can you put your hand through a 1ft. concrete wall? Or what? Am I trippin’? Bruce Lee couldn’t do that.” And here’s the thing. Bruce Lee could do a lotta sh*t that I have no f*cking confidence in my ability to do at the moment of writing this. But that’s just the thing; no confidence in my own ability.

What I would proffer, and I think Bruce would chime in with an approving note if he were here, is the idea that our limitations are just that: ideas. Or, perhaps more accurately, lack of ideas. Either way, you pick. When I master a pose in yoga (I’m a baby yogi, it’s cute), some strength is built in the body, supporting muscles are toned, etc. But what I am most surprised about every time is that were the real change occurs: within my own mind. My ability to pull-off one asana is entirely dependent upon my faith in my own musculoskeletal system to pull it off which is entirely based on my past success or, to be more accurate, my idea I have in my head of my past success.

Now, we can extend a bit further into second-hand information and consider mothers who rip off car doors to save their children from burning vehicles, or a friend of mine, Brian Denton, who flipped over an entire car to save someone. Or even further, into third-hand, we can contemplate why there are hand prints sunken deep into the living rock on the walls of caves high up in the Himalayas of Tibet.

Anyway, point is, if you want more, do more. Be more. Do more to be more. Be more to do more. And, unless you are genuinely, at all levels, happy and satisfied, or dare I say fulfilled and actualized, doing what you’re doing. You may want to consider the numinous and make a leap of faith into doing more, experiencing more, getting more out of life. But! You don’t have to. Seriously (not seriously?) sincerely, you don’t have to change course at all and anybody who is judging you can go eat a stick. On the other hand, you may encounter someone who tunes into you and lights up a little spark of an ember that was there but you either forgot about, or tried to put out some long-forgotten yesterday, and you feel it catch. That is not judgement, my friend, that is fire. And you are tinder. That is the holy fire of God catching and I would encourage, so sweetly, gently and wholeheartedly, you to seek out those who fan your flame. Remember, dear soul, it’s all for you.

Your life is for you. Others lives are for them (both are equally important to remember). Your life is for you and no one else gets to have a say about your journey, or the steps you take.

Journey well, my friend. ॐ