If you are like me, there might be something along these lines going on in the back of your mind:

I am exploring the understanding of how we experience life in order to make my life better.

I am reflecting on the illusion of money in order to make earning it more simple and straightforward.

I am reading about how other people are a creation of my consciousness in order to be more connected to my family, friends and colleagues.

I am bringing the understanding of the illusory nature of experience into my office in order that our business becomes more successful.

I am hoping that letting go of any meaning around whether I get clients or not will help me get more clients.

It is perfectly understandable that we do this.

All our lives we believe we have to be better, happier, more productive, higher earning, more educated, more successful, more popular, more impactful.

So naturally we start using our understanding of the power of thought, consciousness and mind in order to make things better – whether that is a relationship, our bank balance, our business, our health, our neighbourhood…

We listen out for a feeling that tells us we are on the right track. We use insight to wow a customer. We use that sense of connection to be a better parent or get on better with our colleagues.

However, if we are being true to the understanding, then we know that this ‘right track’, this customer, this friend, this role of parent, those colleagues are only ever our personal experience of thought brought alive through consciousness.

We believe that something said or done is right, wrong, better, worse, perfect, terrible, helpful, unhelpful simply according to the movement of thought flowing through us. There is nothing objective or stable or true about it.

So the only effect of the ‘in order to’ is to send us straight back into the illusion. We end up using our understanding of the illusion to get more lost in it, believing there is some reality to it, that one way is better than another, that there is an insightful right way to speak to someone or to do things and a busy-minded wrong way.

If the only truth is that we are formless energy in an ever changing thought created consciousness then there cannot ever be a right and wrong, better or worse, helpful or unhelpful, more insightful or less insightful.

There is only ever experience delivered through thought.

It sends us round in circles if we try to use clarity as to the illusory nature of life to be better at the illusion.

It only makes sense to use our understanding of the illusory nature of life to understand the illusory nature of life.

Full stop.

I am exploring the understanding of how we experience life. Full stop.

I am reflecting on the illusion of money. Full stop.

I am reading about how other people are a creation of my consciousness. Full stop.

The full stop breaks the circle. It stops us going back into the illusion.

Now what? What does this mean? Does anything come after the full stop?

Yes indeed. And that is the crazy, magnificent, mind-blowing beauty of the whole thing. With the full stop, several things happen:

1. We truly don’t fear any experience

The ‘in order to’ contains within it the need for something to go a certain way, it contains judgement, risk, fear, preference, control… Again, totally understandable, but utterly inconsistent with the truth that all experience is created from thought in the moment.

If we really saw that all experience was created from thought in the moment then we would not try to change that experience. We would be the truth of what we are: awareness in human form experiencing.

All of it – every thought, every feeling, every experience is simply how it is. There is nothing to change.

As we realise that no experience is better than any other, we become who we really are: a being let loose in the most exciting playground in the universe. We realise there is nothing we need to do there is just the sheer fascination of the experience.

2. The ‘must be done’

In the freedom of seeing through the ‘in order to’ we see the ‘what must be done’. This is only ever the obvious thing to do. It is free of reasons why. It is free of ‘shoulds’ and ‘ought to’s’ and ‘trying’. It is as free from the illusion of thought that we can get while living in a thought created reality.

It is, essentially, what we cannot stop ourselves from doing.

I am breathing because I can’t stop myself from breathing. I am not breathing in order to stay alive or to be healthier. I am just breathing.

At 4pm I will be picking up my kids from school because I literally cannot stop myself from picking them up. I am not picking them up so that I can be a better parent or because I want them to like me. I am picking them up because I can’t stop myself from doing that.

I am writing this blog post because I can’t stop myself from writing this blog. (Believe me I have a million other things that I ‘should’ be doing). I am not writing it because I love writing it. I am not writing for any response because I know any response is my experience of thought in the moment. I am writing it because I can’t not write it.

“But I only have one life.” you might say “I want to go to Asia and own a Tesla and live in a nice house and stay healthy. To do this I need to earn money or exercise. Sometimes I will have to do what I don’t want to do in order to have all this.”

And immediately we are plunged back in the illusion of a thought created reality. When we are out of the illusion we realise we are just doing what we are doing because that is what we are doing.

The same is true for all of it. Buying a Tesla, going to Asia, cleaning the house, paying the bills, writing the novel, climbing Everest, going to work, standing in front of a column of tanks, refusing to give up a seat on the bus for a white person.

We will be doing it because we can’t stop ourselves from doing it. We are doing what must, from the inner most, simplest, most obvious place, be done.

The other side of the full stop.

And this takes us to the other side of the full stop.

We cannot escape our human form other than through death. Yet we know, while still alive, without question that we are more than this human form. We are so so much more than our fears and worries and insecurities. We are so much more even than our talents, our best relationships, our skills.

Trying to use our knowledge of the spiritual to get better at being a human keeps us firmly stuck in the illusory limits of the human. It takes away the relief of the full stop and adds a whole series of infinite made up reasons about made up people in made up situations needing made up things.

The full stop puts paid to all that. We pause. We mark a space. We take a breath and look at the marvel of what comes next.

Because the other side of the full stop is where it all happens.

The other side of the full stop is where clarity about why we do what we do begins. We know that we are here in human form. We know that experience has to be through the form or otherwise it would not take place. It has to be through our ears, eyes, taste buds, skin.

And instead of using this human form to get stuck in the personal, the individual, the prosaic. We use it to transcend it. This is the gift of human personal life when we use it to see the infinite and universal. This is the sheer beauty of what happens when we do not fear experience, of when we drop the ‘in order to’.

The form is vital. A human, a pair of running shoes and a track. A pen, piece of paper and a hand. A stage, a voice, four words. A board room, a team, a suggestion. A rocket and an astronaut. A car, a mum, two kids at 4pm…

And something is created through that form that transports us momentarily out of the form. Through the individual we move out of the  illusion of the individual. Through the everyday, obvious simple ‘must be done’ we move into the infinite, unknowable, indescribable truth of who we are.