Getting High On Rocks

Climbing to me is much more than just a mindless adrenaline rush, it's a way of life. My name is Hayden Kennedy and I have been lucky enough to find climbing. Climbing is my passion and every day that I am climbing I am completely psyched. To go through life without meaning is a wasted life. That meaning can be climbing, skiing, chess, reading, anything that gives you potent and happy life. When I am climbing all that is in my mind is the next foot hold or the next hand movement. That focus is what really attracts me to climbing. I love the feeling of being in the present and it is hard to have that feeling all the time. This past summer I was in Yosemite, California climbing for a month. Every day and all day was just climbing. My mind was only thinking about climbing and not what I was wearing or how I looked. Sometimes we tend to get caught up in the small things in life and they tear us to pieces. When I am climbing I have no prejudices towards anything or anyone, I am simply just moving up rock.

When it is all said and done there is nothing better than cut up hands, pumped arms and getting high on rocks.

It's a Lonely World

You can not even start to confront the truth until you realize that anything is a possibility. And which of us truly believes anything and everything is possible? The world as most of us know it is only a fraction of reality. In essence our own world, with that little voice in our heads and a flood of conceptions if not preconceptions of the way things are. And no one else is in your world. On the contrary, everyone is caught in the same personal struggle, their own mind, with no idea of what to do with their lives. I take this from personal experience, and maybe I'm wrong.



Do you take the the red pill and confront that fact that there is more to life than what you perceive on a regular basis? Or do you take the blue pill and choose life's distractions and simply get by? If you choose red, life is a war to find freedom. If you choose blue you deny the fact that life is an illusion, but the dream continues.

Warriors face extinction.

The Evolution of Consciousness

Adyashanti speaking to the spiritual path, how we fear losing our identity, and how as we reach a point of crisis consciousness has the opportunity to spread. Here is the first stage of the interview. If you find it interesting the full interview can be seen here.

No Expectations

Expectations. As life trudges along the mind gets a better and better sense of "the way things are." We know what it feels like to eat, what it feels like to get up after "too little rest," what a twelve inch powder is like etc. Sure it is our memory and maybe unavoidable in that sense, but what would it feel like to taste ice cream for the first time again? Or see the sun for the first time? It seems like as soon as we pop out the womb we are getting ideas in our head about the "way things are." And thus a reality forms in which we find pleasure in somethings, and pain in others.



Everyday becomes the same. We do the same things because they give us pleasure (or because "we have to") and they give us more or less the same experience. Have you ever fallen in love with a CD or a song and so you listen to all the time and eventually it stops making it feel the way you used to? You expect it to make you feel like it did the first time you heard it; low and behold when you hear those lines "and all you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be!" you don't feel the same way. Instead of cherishing that moment for what it is, I compare it to the last time I had that experience. Instead of becoming totally immersed in an experience, we tend to only enjoy it in regards to how much better or worse it was than the last time we experienced it. Another example is when you friend tells how great a movie is, you finally go see it and then it turns out what you thought it was going to be like was eons better than it actually was. With no expectations, no preconceptions, every experience would be new and thus exciting. With no expectations we are sure to be dazzled. And every experience would be taken not as better or worse, but just as an experience with infinite more power than no experience at all.

Real Talk

Simply put.

You are alive.
Most likely in complete health.
Living in a country where everything you need to survive and more can easily be obtained.
And blessed to have a future.

There are humans on this earth who can only relate to one or even none of these 4 statements. Think about that when you start to wallow in self-pity.

Comfort and Stagnation

Life these days can be pretty comfortable, never have to walk to far: we have cars, don't have to do much in order to eat: open the fridge, and most of the time we do not feel like our lives are about to get ended. The physical struggle is gone. And now a days we do not even have to worry about mental pain, or spiritual anguish if you will. You get home after a stressful day, you can just turn on the TV and in turn shut down your brain. If you are over 21 you can crack open a beer, mix a drink and the pain slips away. On a side note...





In the 60's the CIA conducted a broad based experiment in the pursuit of mind control known as MK-Ultra. They tested drugs such as LSD and many other common illicit substances but they settled on Television as the best way to control the masses. (this is just according to one source)




The point is, affluent society provides tons of ways to distract ourselves from pain in our lives. From my observation humans tend to operate out of necessity in regard to discomfort. There is no reason to risk your life in the hunt if there is ample food. You are not just going to run on an injured leg, unless you are being chased by a mountain lion.


e.g. Some years ago I experienced a lot of emotional or spiritual angst, at first I was able to just roll a fatty and drift away from my problems. However the pain in my life came to a point when this was no longer a sufficient remedy and I slipped into clinically diagnosed depression. As I have seen happen to a few people, including myself, I began to question the point of my existence; a questioning that did not occur before the pain of life became to much to bear. In a matter of months my mentality on life underwent a shift as I found new purpose.

Books:
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Fire from Within In by Carlos Castaneda

Self Importance, and Why I Want to Lose IT

This is one that has been getting at me lately and for a while I did not even realize it. Hell, I think it is always getting at me and I almost never realize it.

It really is painful, maybe the only reason we feel pain besides, in someway shape or form running our body's into something harder than us. Nearly every person thinks of themselves as important in some way, I guess it is a normal (don't argue the definition, i don't even know what it means...) course of matters, it is easy to become the epicenter of our own little universe and put ourselves up on a pedestal. Sure there is depression when one may feel worthless, but this is just a converse example: we only feel worthless because we picture ourselves on a pedestal, which doesn't exist, so we aren't on it.

Where I first heard the importance of losing self-importance

My yoga teacher told me to have no expectations. The feeling of self-importance seems to be an ego driven expectation of how others should treat us and what we should be capable of. Which of course leads to a perpetual let down; The feeling of anger because one does not get the treatement he/she deserves; Sorrow because others don't care for us as they "should." And on and on, I am certain I do not grasp all of the ways my ungodly importance affects my life.

Well I guess I am done talking about things I don't understand, and I am going to resume worrying about how I am going to build my self-image tomorrow, feel bad because no one returns my calls, and mope about the standard of living I wish I had. Why ME? Why ME of all people!!