There Are No Limits

The second principle of the Kahili Shamanic Tradition is about as bold as it gets.

There are no limits.

This might seem too silly to even consider, but if you go deep enough, it looks pretty darned true- and boy is it every practical to think that way. So much so that everyone else can seem incredibly fenced in. Honestly, this idea is the ultimate liberator- ever since I decided to accept it, I have never felt so free.

The funny part is, it's not an illusion of freedom that superstitious people cling to in order to enviably, but self-deceivingly, make them self feel good in a naive way. Nope. I'm talking honest to got, real freedom here, available right now.

The key to that is that it's not that we tell ourselves we're free and then justify it sort of a little bit and call it a day. It's that we actually already are free. Not metaphorically. Not in mind only but not in body. Not for the afterlife, later, before, or in parallel. Right here, right now. Free. Pronto.

(Not free as in beer, free as in liberated. Only we can decide if we want to give away free beer, but liberated, we already are.)

We are so free that we can tell ourselves a little story that we are not. And we have. So to actually experience free, all you have to do (and it's simple, but not necessarily easy) is to figure out ways we could be free even when it seems like we're not.

So here's all the ways we're not free in.

We have bodies. Those bodies start small and end up wizardly-looking.

We live in a society, that society has rules, customs, beliefs and expectations. They change, but slowly. We get in trouble if we don't know them, or ignore them without being clever.

We have friends. Those friends are closer and we can chose them more, but they are still their own people, and we have to accommodate them in order to keep our relationships alive and flourishing.

Most societies use money and other mediums of exchange, and have unequally distributed access to wealth and power, with limited paths to cooperate, earn money, and survive.

We are dependant on others for even our most basic of needs. It's automatic, but if you go to the bathroom, someone set up something up to carry away what you left there.

We depend on faraway people in faraway countries to make things and influence our thoughts and keep us happy.

We need hugs to stay warm.

But there's nothing keeping us from breaking each and every one of those rules, or at least bend them. We can mess with our age in both directions with dim lighting and makeup (there's a whole industry for that called "bars"). We can live more anonymously, or go into a different city with different rules. We can let friendships slide and make new ones. We can play "freegan" and persuade other people to give us stuff for free. We can adapt to powerful people, hang around them, and become powerful. We can be creative or work with the universe to create previously unheard of new paths towards stuff we want. Or we can go live out in the woods and let the plants take care of our droppings. Or, we can find an excuse to cut our life short (I have heard if your time is up you can just lay down and die, or hang around a bit just for the scenery).

Sure, we can do all of these things. I have done some of them, and it has been terribly inconvenient, but sometimes it worked just fine. What I did find out that for the stuff that was important enough to me, I found away around it by designing my lifestyle around it. I never wore a suit to work. Now people in my field are telling the suited people to dress like me. Young me thinks that's very funny. Current me thinks there's absolutely nothing wrong with wearing suits to work, suits just symbolized something I didn't like at the time, and I had no reason to change the habit. But okay it's still cool that people are telling the suit people to dress like me, in what they must think are basically rags, in order to be more businesslike and professional. Ah the times do change.

Point being. There are always a few things we can afford to be picky about, and most likely, we'll get away with total choice in those. Then there will be a whole lot of things that we might or might not like so much but in the end when push comes to shove maybe we don't really care about them either way, we were just entertaining ourselves by creating more contrast. It's quite likely that those we will never get much influence over because the emotional charge is too small to have any noticable effect. But who cares? Starve the attention completely off of stuff you don't care either way about and you can't really change given your priorities, and you can just stop worrying about them, and you're free of those, too.

Yeah, you noticed correctly that in order to solve feelings of not beeing free, I used a combination of actual, physical power moves (like insisting on not wearing suits, tooth and nail) and purely perceptual changes with no noticeable power in the world at all, although your lack of complaining might be noticeable. So pick your battles. Well, it's not really battles. But pick stuff that's important to you, if you like, and pick stuff that's not so important to you, if you like, and focus on the former, and enjoy the great freedom that comes with really not caring either way about stuff, and I mean consciously deciding to exercise your god given liberty to ignore the crap out of stuff that you know isn't really relevant to who you are, period. Whew. You have never been so free by doing so little. If you only stop doing all that crap you really don't need to be doing, and really have no business doing, boy all that energy is freed up! It feels wonderful. I recommend it.

Now, for the final category. There's stuff you have absolutely no control over, not even influence, not even an inkling. You are born. On some level you know, of course, if you're going to live or not live so long or come out dead, which is fairly common, but you likely didn't make a super conscious deliberate decision about it like you do when you decide to read a sign or pick up a book. It's you who did it and decided it, but it's on a completely different level, a whole new ballgame. It's you, but it's not really you, who made the decision.

Now we're getting into high self territory. That stuff is definitely for you to decide, so in that sense, you're free. Come to earth. Don't. Swear, and never return. Incarnate as a rock on Uranus. If this sounds weird, it's because your higher self has all kinds of experiences that, by your human consciousness standards, are very weird. Now if you insist, sit on a rock, expand your mind (just imagine how some representation of your mind envelopes the universe, or at least your higher self- blue fog works great for me), sit with that for a while, and you will get a very reasonable feeling and explanation for why stuff is happening, and a sense that, yes, of course, you made this choice to incarnate as a human, and accept these physical limitations, in order to play the physical game, because when you expand your mind in that way, then you know what your higher self knows. And your body might get a bit numb, and you will realized that while you are thinking those lofty thoughts, you're not experiencing life as a human any more, you are living as a supernatural being, because in that moment, you are. And then you remember pizza, or wonder what time it is, and snap back into your human affairs, rub your limbs, and find that whole God identification stuff you were practicing to be different and strange, even though it was very easy while you were doing it.

And you might, maybe, just wonder, if contemplating God are thinking about pizza are really that different in terms of how sacred they are. Coming from a family with an Italian background, I can tell you that good pizza has divinity as one of the ingredients.

Point being. Of course you chose this human life, this body, these circumstances, these challenges, and you can have a temporary experience to convince yourself if you don't believe me. You can even stay in that temporary experience and there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not better than playing physicalness in a very full way. Why did you chose these awful circumstances? Because they're good! Imagine the coolest shoes you ever wore. Now if they lasted for more than a year or two, were they comfortable at the beginning? No? Well, there you go. As soon as you start thinking long term, a little discomfort at first doesn't really matter as long as the whole deal has a positive effect. Life challenges are like that. You're sitting there, still united with your higher self, planning your next incarnation, and removed from physical experience you're like, oh experiencing a little cold there early in my life, that's fine, a little poverty here, a little grief there, I discover Huna and just heal myself and it's good and I have all those meaningful experiences along the way.

Then you incarnate, and all those challenges you set up turn out to be just a tiny bit more vivid than you might have anticipated, because that inner earth simulation systems, now if you believe something that is going to cause pain, that's going to hurt. It's so real!

But then, sure enough, you gradually get over it and discover some kind of lofty stuff that makes you feel better, and you end up all right, most of the time, and even if you don't, it might be fine anyway, at the latest when you bug out and reunite again with yourself with a whole new bag full of experiences.

Now the point of using Huna is to have fun while you're here, and feel great while you're here (and there's really not much that feels better than genuinely helping others, in my experience). So, to sume everything up about the high self areas, they are just going to happen no matter what because you set them in motion before you were born. And everything will be fine with those areas, you can't lose, and you don't have to worry about doing something wrong for your high self, your high self has got it covered. You're golden, spiritually.

But it is good to be not so resistant, and to play with energies, and have a vision, and put out preferences, and give your own life direction and meaning and make it better and stronger, because it's just so much better than being dragged through it kicking and screaming.

So are there limits to this existence? Yeah, you set them up, but you can cut them short, if you were to really, insist. You can also visit limitless space any time to relax (it's called meditation- sit comfortable and focus gently on something gentle, like your breath or the bright parts of your visual input). But, at the end of the day, they are all make believe, and they are there to serve you, so you can have specific experience, not the other way around. And you can almost always change them, adapt them, bend them, and become adept at playing with them, and this is a large part of what being a shaman is all about. Set your own rules. Mold your world. There are no limits.