Feeling confused in life?  Stop believing the baseless claims of social media charlatans and start looking within – becoming lost in order to be found: in thru the outdoor.

My father and I did not see eye to eye since I can remember. We had a strained relationship throughout most of his life, especially toward the tail-end as he lay dying of cancer. As my father was a fan of the “cheap seats,” I grew up listening to Harry Chapin. As a close and trusted friend whom my father highly respected, who both knew and understood my father and I thoroughly over a long period of time, said of him: “Sadly, he was a man who never did his ‘work’ in life.” And as Cats in the Cradle so presciently warns us, we are going to end up just like our parents – unless we each do our “work” in life, breaking free from our familiar past, the ancestral chains of yesteryear, thus reshaping our present and future.

The aforementioned statement begets the question, what does it mean for you to do your “work” in life? It starts with owning your stuff, dealing with your childhood trauma(s), your shadow side – learning not to project your deeper inadequacies and desires upon the screen of others. It means being filled with inner contentedness, feeling cozy when you are with yourself, being comfortable in your own skin, removing your mask, no longer riding your story horse.  It is being aware of your purpose and meaning in life, and how you see yourself in relation to the world. It requires working through all the troubling and perplexing parts of your psyche, including the harm accrued, the result of past lives’ karmic balance.

There are no shortcuts or silver-bullet pills you can take to remedy this inherited dilemma. It is a part of being human, living out a delusion of grand virtual reality drama on a spinning hot rock through space, a spec in the cosmos; one of four billion possible identified (as of today) planets that can sustain life. Even the classic pessimist Schopenhauer could not find a philosophy to explain away this conundrum. As the altruistic maxim goes: Pay now or pay later, but you will pay someday. You cannot escape your fate, good and bad inclusive.  It is all designed to make you stronger – prepare you for your future; and, in fact, planned out by you preceding the transmogrification of your soul into an earth being. Struggle and adversity, joy and happiness, are all inextricably intertwined, innate parts to the dance of duality of life. 

Those who resist fate are dragged through this blink of a dreamlike existence we call life by the feet, screaming and kicking like a red-headed stepchild. Free-will is an illusion. All decisions we think of as freedom of the will are simply bifurcations of various possible branches of the tree of life.  Regardless if we do think our thoughts or not – for who could really say where they come from, for, as clouds, they just appear, and disappear – in the end, all roads lead to the same destination (even if takes lifetimes): you become what you were always meant to be: your Venus de Milo. No matter what you think you are attracting or manifesting in your life, it is all happenstance – pre-planned and programmed to play out as your life. In spirit form, before you were born, in some planetary boardroom, you orchestrated it all.

Life is simple – the path is clear, it is humans who make a mess of it. We are in an epoch of the western hemisphere of the brain: the age of reason. But the quest of the heart, the way of the silent peaceful warrior is under way. With only fourteen inches separating the heart and the brain, so few can bridge the gap. We make the foolish mistake in thinking our intellect can get us out of the inevitable collision course of self and ego. It cannot. It can only be reconciled through a profound journey deep within the recesses of suffering and despair, the darkest corners of our psyche, where we are forced to experience the opposite, our karmic balance, thus allowing for compassion, understanding and ultimately, healing.

On social media you will find no lack of fast food drive-through gurus who are all but willing to sell you their canned and packaged regurgitated certificate of the month from the soup du jour institute of modern day snake-oil.  Without really knowing anything significant or substantial about you, lacking all deep listening skills, having no idea of your past or present disposition, or the inherent qualities of your character, they quickly pitch you expeditious answers to all your problems in just three big breaths over a tropical cocktail at a local networking event. We only know what we know (or think we do), but these ass-clowns would try telling you the cut of beef, whilst they have their head up the cows ass – all the while living in an artificial perverted deluded Alice-in-LSD-Wonderland fantasy faux world. This self-promotion to “coach” is just their latest a la mode ‘quick money’ scheme. Stay tuned – more to come.  

It is a classic example of the blind leading the blind – sheep to slaughter. This newly discovered gaggle of ‘I’m bored and unsuccessful in life and in need of a trendy hot job’ – without anything of real substantial value to offer you – whom have done nothing in life as yet that has earned them the right to chaperone others, continue hawking their unfounded claims online. Unless you have walked the road yourself, it is hard to advise others on how to navigate a complex ever-changing process. It is no different than a neophyte studying medicine and then thinking he is ready to teach surgery. Most too do not possess a professional background in any field, let alone psychology. Coaches “in the know,” do not say – and they certainly do not say so on social media. The ones with full calendars are not out whoring their services.

They will have you believing that you can manifest anything in life, which is just untrue. They are filled with promises they cannot deliver on, leaving unsuspecting victims to find themselves back at square one in a matter of months, or even weeks if the music stops too soon, causing Pandora’s nasty music box of misery to pop open yet once again. In many cases, they do more harm than good, no matter how many fuzzy-bunny feelings you felt during the process. Other than their prodigious over-the-moon promises, how to align yourself in three easy steps and make $20K per month, how you can skip karma in mere minutes, ways to eliminate trauma(s) in hours, how to manifest anything you desire in life in only days, and even how to masturbate yourself to happiness, they are useless quasi-pseudo-healer-buffoons. The only one laughing to the bank is the one alighting your wallet of your hard earned cash.

As I always tell people I meet that make inquiry into life coaching in any form, there is no need to pay someone for the knowledge, it is free. However, paying a qualified professional with all the necessary fundamental qualifications to guide you through the process, reveal your best inner-self and potential,  can prove a prudent decision. All great innovators and leaders of industry understand the need for a coach to help them navigate such complicated processes, to assist in growth development. But paying the latest unemployed graduate of Trump University (with fees far north than their CV warrants), who flaunts being an international best-selling author, a result of intentionally pricing their book in electronic format at .99 cents on Amazon and running sales, is no different than flushing money down the toilet.

Hopefully you have escaped unscathed from the incessant onslaught of advances that this epic litter of heavenly indoctrinated Sloan Rangers, incredibly misguided berserk global titans of misinformation, self-appointed space-cadet captains of utmost misguidance, self-ordained celestial ministers of the halfwit circus, has deemed “hopium” of the masses. Though their cunning methods may be considered slick by the unsuspecting hoodwinked corner Susie Q, using reverse psychology in their posts to bait their prey into the booby trap – or only replying via private message, does not exactly scream professionalism or credibility to me. Ass-hat children’s eunuch ensemble aside, no matter how many times they try selling you a part of the Brooklyn Bridge, it might behoove you to first consider the conductor of the choir.

Until one otherwise discovers the “self” through intensely baffling and hellish self-enquiry, thus negating all other unanswered questions as wholly invalid, breaking through the veil of reality, the illusion of life, our lives are lived out through opposites, the result of viewing the world only in dualistic terms. At such point, no longer does good or bad, positive or negative matter, for they are one side of the same coin, the eternal infinite ying-yang balance of the universe continues its phantasmal dance on the stage of life. However, until wont time, if ever, such self-realization arrives, knowing only of the world and our shared lived experience through egoic means of consciousness, we exist between two extreme poles.

A person could not know happiness without first knowing sadness. We live in a world of comparisons: night and day, sun and moon, up and down, north and south, and so on, ad infinitum.  We cannot know of one feeling or emotion unless we have also experienced and understood its polar opposite. Otherwise we would have no point of comparison to describe how we feel or what an experience genuinely means to us. Without said comparison, there is no memory formed. So therefore, no matter what some card carrying coach-of-the-month club member sells you, there is no bypass valve to acquiring the desired results. One cannot know light until they have first walked through the darkness of the valley of death.

Without having first experienced the utter despair and wicked self-realizations buried deep within the annals of the soul, one ultimately cannot walk in light. It is just not possible, though many a modern rib-tickling social media ding-dong putz will try convincing you of other. If they themselves first have not walked through the halls of Dante’s Inferno, they are incapable of helping you guide the tangled and convoluted passage. The path can only be walked by you; the quest to slay your inner dragons has no substitutes. It all starts in the heart; get out of your mind. The mind is shackled to the heart and the heart is tethered to the soul – in which the soul leads you to your ethereal subconscious being, God.

To break free from the confining fetters of self-imposed spiritual exile, to understand that life is but a dream and not to be taken too seriously, to unsaddle the constructed sawhorse of false securities we all ride, to come to the understanding that we have no control over life, that patience and gratitude are paramount, that we only get to know ourselves through others, and by helping others we are helping ourselves, we must exhaustively look within. All the answers you seek are waiting cavernously within you to be discovered. You are the universe as known through the conscious-self. Descartes’ famous statement, cogito, ergo sum, Latin, I think, therefore I am, is only true inversely: I am, therefore I think.

For it is only by tirelessly searching the vast troubled chasm within, plumbing the ever inimitable unique depths of our darkness, that we eventually can find light. That light is our subconscious, God. It can only be gifted to you by the grace of divine intervention – only once you are on your knees begging for God’s mercy. Once we have done our “work,” walked the path of darkness in order to become a glowing blaze of love, understanding and compassion unto others, life becomes fun again – our inner smile returns, we feel an immense sense of meaning and purpose. We get to sit back and, like a river, go with the flow of life. Thinking of the past or future are of no practical use to you – an unfruitful cerebral mind rape – an exercise in futility. And regardless of when thinking on either, you cannot escape being in the present.   

There are no shortcuts, no Monopoly pass-go, or detours to the infliction of the ego – the conscious self. It is only through the inevitable path of darkness that the light of essence, God, deep within the soul, can be realized. It is an enduring painful process of self-discovery, a death of the self as we aptly imagine it, succumbing to the relenting bloody pulp of your knees, begging for the love (or relief) of God to free you from the ghastly and shocking throws of what seems like indeterminable ions of suffering, an epoch of sadness and desolation so low you didn’t know it existed, bringing out parts of you that are legend, scary and yet unspeakable, without sage mentors or wise elders with the obligatory requisite tools, education and structure needed to properly assess the best path moving forward, to achieve the desired outcome.

Until one has reached the level of an ascended master, the likes of Buddha, Jesus, Zoroaster, Krishna and Mohammed, attained self-enlightenment, actualization of the “self,” or Nirvana through Moksha, ceasing the endless cycles of Samsara, we sad souls are stuck hitchhiking a ride on this trivial, speeding through space, insignificant trifling, space-magma-jism-filled scorching hot miniscule pebble are left to our own means and faculties to make sense of the brain-twisting unknowable. Which, it should be duly noted, we as humans are utterly incapable of answering the monumental questions of life (such as existence) we all face as bemusing questions in our lives. Life is meant to be enjoyed; it is a simulation we project through our eyes on a screen as if it is our own reality – as witnessed through the “self,” who is the “I” behind the “I”, the one observing our ego – all along fully convinced it is actual existent matter.

We are born into pure angelic existence but lose sight of who we are as cosmic spiritual souls as we go through the [un]common experience of life. Our challenge is finding our way back to that omnipotent omnipresent light. The purpose of life is finding our purpose and then sharing it with others. This is only achieved a result of facing life’s challenges and obstacles head on, Doing The Dirty Dishes of life – one’s “work,” so as to incur growth, increasing our inner vibration of love and light. Love and happiness are processes to be lived, not inordinate things on a shelf one can purchase – so too is the quest inward. The esoteric path begins in your heart, taking you within the unfathomable reaches of your soul, into the cryptic abstruse abyss of your recondite essence, ending with you discovering you are the source of the universe. Best to ignore the Imbeciles Sans Frontieres – a blissful life patiently awaits your pre-scription.

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