Regularity & Continuity

Because the self has regularity and continuity, it will try to look at its own inquiry process and comment on its progress. Some people can become conceptually enlightened, in a sense, just by self-inquiry (any spiritual endeavour, actually).

These people can be an absolute headache to work with, because they’ve soaked up far too much knowledge about the subject, and cannot see their knowledge is simply shit sprinkled with glitter and fluffed-up to look spiritual. They simply won’t shut up because they like to shine a light upon themsleves, in which case I tell them to bugger off.

But the self structure is doing what it does. It needs regularity and continuity, and it finds those things in almost any routine behavior, even spiritual things, because having that persistent regularity makes it feel safe. It’s an intellectual defense but expressed behaviourally in the world.

A spiritual person needs to uphold that identity, so they decorate their lives around that theme. But someone who is not spiritual will have their own way of upholding their regularity perhaps by a particular daily routine.

Whether your routine is worrying about money, or the routine of doing self-inquiry, or meditation, the self deosn’t care about the content, or whether its negative or positive. It only cares about its own continuity. It needs to stay alive by all means.

When this continuity suddenly stops, for many people, it is very obvious… but then it kicks back online again. That doesn’t matter. Once you’ve seen through its construct, you’ve broken that coninuity. Your relationship with the thought stream changes from that moment onwards, and the next task will likely reveal itself.