Spiders

I was sitting at my place. There was a spider. I wondered if it were alive or not, sitting on his web.
So I blew on it. It moved. It was alive. Then it dawned on me: it reacted. It would have been just a different reaction if it would have sat there motionless, dead. Death and life are no different, there is no real distinction between the two. And I am like the spider.

Today I was driving. The road went trough the woods. I was thinking abut justice and guilt. There is actually no right and no wrong, no one is ever guilty because no one is. This does not mean and end to laws, jails, the police, holy wars and so on. All these things can exist even withouth selves. This means that there is no basis for theories about good and evil, and no need for feelings of guilt and of shame. This does not mean that those feelings cannot arise anymore and condition life. They can. They did and they can arise again. But that does not change the fact that they are empty. There is no need for building and keeping a moral code and for practicing what you preach. Or, as happens more often, for preaching what you practice.

So yes, you are free to preach online about balls and fearless approaches and you are free to hide behind a newspaper in the bus instead of approaching. Can you do anything about that anyway? Could the spider not move when stimulated? Of course this does not mean you need to drop all self-improvement efforts, but only that "self improvement" is a misnomer in the first place. There will still be thoughts about improving your abs, jogging, goign to the gym. And that's ok. You can still feel like you are taking control of your life. But that's simply a feeling. Like all other feelings.

From approach anxiety to anxiety

Picture a general, straightforward solution to approach anxiety. That is what I was looking for.
This post is to describe what I found instead.

Ok, she is not rejecting you. What is she rejecting? Your approach, right?
Just those ten seconds you have been talking to her. And that's not "you", that's just your approach. That approach. Those ten seconds.

So what about the ten seconds before that? Or after that? How many ten-second timespans are there in a typical life? None of those ten seconds is "you". What is "you" then?

So what I found out is there is really no answer to this question, because it's a question based on a false assumption. Have you stopped doing drugs yet? Please tell me: yes or no.
Why did you chose to become a monk? and so on. The assumption was that I existed, and I don't.

More details to come...