Trinket games

Throughout our lives we migrate from one set of beliefs, attitudes, and habits to another. In this sense, we weren't the same person at 16 that we are at 40.

We see this as a natural process of maturation, and most of us stick to this program without realizing we've adopted an underlying, unquestioned premise that's blocking us from true growth.

Real growth comes from discarding the lifeless shell of the invented, conceptual self and meeting life experience unshielded and unadorned, exactly as you are.

As long as we insist on pretending that what we are is a collection of thoughts, we'll remained locked in an endless game of trying to get conceptual trinkets to deliver existential salvation.

All the while, the truth was right here. It's the one thing - the only thing - that hasn't ever changed: the simple, awake awareness that knows itself as experience itself.