I wanted to learn, but I did not know how, yet life still kept happening, regardless of whether I wanted to learn or not. Therefore, there was no time to waste! In my excitement and impatience to figure things out, I used to question whether there were such a thing as an essential education—maybe mathematics or law or suffering or wisdom was the answer. I wanted some kind of short-cut to enlightenment, as if knowledge or education could get me there faster.

Then, with my bright ideas, I would be delivered to the land of milk and honey.

There is no way to escape the obsession for a quick fix. We are hopelessly chained to words and ideas, these fuzzy things that require interpretation and meaning and, thus,

Language

Lies

Spider Symbols

Fleas jumping on the page

For that is all these words are: fleas jumping on this page.

Anyone or anything keeping you away from consciousness is propaganda, and it is all propaganda. Consciousness, however, will not save you. It is no solution. In fact, preliminary research proves it makes things much worse!

Oedipus Rex: How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there is no help in truth!

We exist. That’s it. And that is not it—because even existence is a make-believe manufacturing caused by our obsession with acrobatics.

Existence belongs to everyone. Without opening their mouths or sharing it with anyone, Bedouins can stare out into the desert all day long and know they exist and also know everything they need to know.

I wasted my time thinking there was any kind of answer to nothing.

It is all a waste of time.

That is not a pessimistic statement nor is it reality. Time does not care about you, yet it is the only basis for our existence, yet we have absolutely no idea what it is, this most basic fundamental reality that we have invented. Right now it is not 6:45 p.m., Anno Domini 2020. Time is gone.

It is now 7:01 p.m.!

Everything we do revolves around this thing called time, and we have lied to ourselves that we can manage or control time in order to classify and justify our existence.

Time does not care about our numbers.

Wasting time is meaningless, the same as wasting life is meaningless. If you exist, you exist, and life is simply life. That is all.

There is no conspiracy against you personally.

It is only propaganda that makes you paranoid. That sick feeling is embedded into the system, and the system is everywhere, even inside of you so that you, sick inside of yourself, keep yourself purposely away from consciousness, away from that which makes you feel alive instead of sick.

All of the above that I have written is, I believe, objectively reasonable, but at this point I confess I leap into faith, or what Albert Camus would have called philosophical suicide. So be it. I accept it. After all, I am a subjective human being, and I cannot be so arrogant as to believe that my ideas must be your ideas. These are my flawed ideas. They are what I have in my mind that continues to try to understand and create some truce with this existence and this world.

I start with and question the root of anything and everything. If that root is natural, then I feel closer to consciousness. The further it is away from roots or if it is not even acknowledging roots, then I feel it is a lie. Feeling is more powerful than thinking. The root is beyond language, before language: it is simply a seed. We literally exploded out of seed and root into this existence. Naturally, everything is amazing at the same time it is just there. So, although consciousness is not a solution, it is the closest we can get to the sublime, that overwhelming awe that we are here and not here at the same time, the feeling of grace.

We pretend problems because of the propaganda trap, and like the stupid humans we are, we think we can solve problems (because anything we cannot understand must be a problem that needs solving). We cannot help trying to solve it. This is our perpetual problem: We think and, therefore, will always try to figure things out as if there is some type of matrix to untangle.

Recently I had a conversation with my 78 year old mother and asked her which life would have been better, the natural Huehuetenango life she lived barefoot until the age of fourteen, uneducated, but full of natural rebellious energy—or a life here in our modern United States where she would have grown up afraid, manipulated, targeted through some insidious crushing propaganda that tells you everything will be fine? In Guatemala, she knew her unashamed enemies and was righteous for standing up against patriarchal totalitarianism. Here, she would have been told she was fine, that she had nothing to worry about as long as she obeyed the rules and got good grades. Then, maybe, hopefully, she would have learned it was all a lie. My mother Margarita had no answer. I kept asking it in different ways. She stayed silent. She smiled, and in her coy smile, we both knew that her life was her life, at least.

I am a cliché; I believe in love. That does not save me. In fact it makes things worse, exactly as they should be, a struggle. Problems will always be with us. Love was and is the only answer I ever needed to know.

Love is not an easy answer.

Accepting amor means you will never solve the mysteries of the universe, let alone figure out exactly who you are. You will never win. You were not meant to win. The only way you truly feel love is by losing, yet you keep doing it again and again exactly like an insane person, for that is what love requires.

How many times must I forgive?

“Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven,” (Matthew 18:21-22).

Seventy times seven. That is love. Submission. Surrender. Sacrifice. All for others. The logic here is beyond logic, really stupid actually, yet it is the best I got, my natural roots—because there is absolutely no way that I was born to hate.

My roots are in Love.