The Train

On the rail car, which is where we live for a time, it hardly matters who else is on board, and what else they're talking about, since they're stuck in there with you anyway. You can't ask them how to get off that particular car - since you don't particularly like those people anyway - because they're still stuck there with you >>on the car!<<, nor can you ask them where the train started or where it is going, because they didn't get on by any act of will, and they won't arrive any sooner than you, so how could they know the destination? etc., etc.

On the rail car, for the many rail car riders - there is much to complain about, and very little to be joyous about. For them, it's one non-stop complaint about each other, about themselves, about the immediate surroundings and about the imagination in everybody's head regarding why they're even there at all, and it all comes out in talk. Talk is the favorite pastime of rail riders.

Either they are talking to themselves, mumbling, or to each other, bitching - and it all amounts to a monstrous waste of time. Time, which could be spent, discovering how to get off the train, as distinct from settling in, and giving up, and living the life of a rail rider.

Those who are still on the train, want to be there - and don't you believe otherwise. They want to be there, they look for reasons to be there, and they spend the majority of their free time, entertaining themselves by talking about the finer points of being a citizen-in-good-standing of that particular rail car - that is, justifying their existence to themselves.

That's what life is like on the train. Getting off the train, is about something else. It would be like, somehow, disappearing all of a sudden, and reappearing somewhere else - that "somewhere" being known only to the one who'd achieved it.

There is a prevailing idea amongst the rail car riders, that those who've gotten off the train, left instructions in the car regarding how to get off. But, they're quite wrong. Because (and you must take this simply and quickly to see it), if such was true, and you found their notes, then ask yourself: "what are you doing still sitting there quietly in your seat, after all these many decades?" The ordinary, typical, and wrong answer is, "Well, I'm still looking for the notes, with a vim and vigor of Tony Robbins, by golly!", or "Well, I've already found some notes, some valuable notes, and I'm still reading them, daily - before, during and after my sitting and sensing exercises - so, I'm surely very, very close to getting off, by golly!"

Etc., etc., etc. You can hear your own story being told to you right now - just listen.

The reason for this list - for those who "want to be here" (not the ones who are immediately, and publically antithetical to it) - is to get a glimpse, however fleeting, of the possibility of directly burrowing their way out of the car, in one heroic effort, to see the outside for what it is. It's not our purpose to define the effort, nor describe the outside - that's up to each one here (those who "want to be here").

It's >>easy<< to spend one's entire life-in-thought critiquing the meager efforts of oneself, and everybody else. Afterall, "How could they possibly know something I don't know?!?" But that is the wrong question - asked over and over and over again by you, tens of thousands of times so far in your short life. A better question is this (for the few here who "want to be here"): "How is it that I can know something no one else knows?"

It's from that place of knowing - knowing what knowing is - that springs all the great notes on escaping the rail car, and those notes are NOT placed in the hands of the rail car riders. They're not even mentioned to the rail car riders. They are for those outside the rail car (who "want to be there.")