Recordings

What makes you an individual in your own eyes?

Maybe the way you look, the way you talk, what you do, where you see yourself belonging, how you think and what you think about.

And all these things are the result of the way you think and of your insights into reality.

Your brain is mostly the sum of all the theory you learned in your parents' home, in kindergarten, at school, at university and on the internet. A biography of the past.

Well, here you are, you finished school and even passed exams on all this theory.

Have you experienced all of it yourself?

No.

So your brain is full of a kind of theoretical philosophy that you agreed, consciously or not, is the truth, but it isn't. Even for the person who taught you, it isn't their truth. Only for the person who discovered it and experienced it themselves, from within, is it the truth.

So what do you have there in your head?

What you have in your head is everything your parents taught you, and what they were taught by those who taught them... everything the kindergarten teachers “know” and taught you, everything all kinds of schools “taught” you, everything the carefully rewritten history books “taught” you. In short, everything your culture “taught” you.

But how much of it is your truth?

Or in other, perhaps less pleasant words: is anyone home, or is it just a recording? Like that answering machine box from the nineties, playing on a loop.

Do you know why nobody performs miracles anymore today, except in the field of technology? Because everyone assumed that everything they “learned” is the truth. If you think about it deeply, you'll discover that miracles happen only when expectations give way, when we move beyond what is predictable and predefined as “truth.”

So what do you say? Does that make sense to you?

In other words, it is what you didn't “learn.” It is what you don't “know” as “truth,” what you experience yourself as an emotional insight from personal experience (without taking the opinion of this or that expert), and it also actually happens in your life, starting within you and going out from you to everything around you.

That is the truth, and it really is yours.

So your brain is full of so much nonsense that isn't yours at all. Some of it you took for granted in childhood “because that's how it is,” some of it you took “for free” from Dr. Google, and some of it you bought at full price at university, with a night job and maybe waiting tables and a loan too. And none of it is even your truth, but at least you have a degree.

A degree in what, actually (and now I'm thinking about my own degrees and smiling)?

A degree in recordings. And who recorded them for you? You've already got it…

And how superstitious are you?

What about that broken mirror? Not handing over kitchen knives? Sitting away from the corners of the table? Believing that white is good and black is bad? That the word written on the screen or in the book (like right now) is the final word on everything? Do you really think the news broadcast actually brings anything new? That the doctor will heal you of your pains with a miracle pill from super-labs in Switzerland? That God is a man, punishing or merciful, with a long white beard, sitting up there in some sublime real estate, exempt from property tax, somewhere in the heavens?

Now you should be ashamed of yourself.

So, do you feel a little guilty now? Then here's a free opportunity to be ashamed once more, because this was recorded long ago anyway and just plays over and over.

Are you laughing, embarrassed, smiling at all this and at this insight, but still feeling a bit guilty? Then shame on you again, because once again it's that recording in the brain that shapes your personality, running there on a loop because that's all it knows how to do, and you live your “life” by it.

Let's try again: knock knock, is anyone home…?

No answer... You already understand why. You only know what you know, and that is playing recordings.

The important point here is that you are so bored with life, or living on your adrenaline so as not to die of boredom, and maybe you feel this isn't really life and there's some loop here you've “landed” in (but you don't really know what to do about it), and even though you sense that something here is blatantly fake, you keep replaying this worn-out movie of a life, until death…

And the reason you are this way, continuing this recording, is because you can only do what you know to be the truth, but it isn't your truth…

You know, the familiar, automatic “truth” that is “yours,” playing on a loop every weekend and every Sunday morning at work, on the annual summer trip to Barcelona, to the same mall, or sorry, to some slick gallery of paintings you didn't paint, or to the opera in Rome to listen to music you didn't create, and certainly didn't sing from the depths of your own heart, from within you.

You're bored with your steady job and your to-do list, paid one way or another (loop, remember?), you keep complaining timidly, with the unspoken sense that you're supposedly one of the lucky ones. Yet you keep copying and pasting your life, waking up each day to yesterday morning. And do you know why? Because you simply keep doing the only thing you “know” how to do, and that is the only “truth” you have. Everything else, beyond this truth, is speculation for you, fantasies and daydreams.

So how big is your mind? Only as big as your truth…

And what are you actually doing with your hundreds of billions of neurons, whose potential intelligence surpasses any quantum computer in the entire universe? Still playing old recordings, made by others, most of whom you don't even know.

That is what you're doing with it, with your supercomputer.

And what is it like?

Like the pilot of an interstellar spaceship stuck in the eternal traffic jam on the Coastal Highway (sounds familiar, doesn't it?) and convinced he's driving a Fiat, instead of launching to Andromeda in one go. And why is he still stuck in the traffic jam of his life after 35 years, instead of simply pulling the stick and flying? Because his “truth” is the equivalent of a Fiat's operating system, and the spaceship is a fantasy for him at best. And even though he literally wears it all his life, the kingdom of heaven will always remain out of reach, and in his eyes it is like that sublime real estate, exempt from property tax, somewhere in the heavens... Remember the one with the beard?

So what do we have in our heads? A super-organ that has been drowsy and bored for years, running on autopilot made in China or America (what difference does it make), whose whole job is to hold up our forehead so it doesn't, heaven forbid, fall…

It's time for a new story, one you create yourself. Let's change all this; let's write our own story ourselves, ours alone, from within. Let's throw out this recording and take back the power to experience our truth for ourselves and make it our way of life.

It's very easy to be a genius. All you need is to think for yourself.

Ran