Minimalist

'Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.' - Confucius

One day, a friend says, 'I'm good with numbers and I care deeply about money, so when I grow up, accounting will be my occupation.' However, I don't think it crossed his mind whether he likes the enterprise. In fact, I don't think he has ever spent enough time with himself to truly know want he would like, and who and what he is.

We may, in a simple fashion, fold back the curtains we call our lives and reveal that one's life and body and mind or self, are all facets of the same suchness. Our lives are indistinguishable from ourselves, and in turn, our inner beings and outward actions are one in the same.

When you begin to think and see yourself and the world in this manner, once you begin to adhere to minimalism, the thread will unravel, curtains fall, subjectivity slumber, and monetary concern perish. It is difficult, for this duality and sense of value in the world was hammered into you from birth, therefore, once you are well and ready for this kind of conversation, it's already too late.

The truth and understanding are lost. You are, at this point, a perceived dualism, with the belief you are neither the light nor shadow, stillness nor movement. With the belief that, you are an independent puppeteer, who makes the movement or stillness, who accepts or denies the light, and creates or overlooks the shadows.

To begin the journey of minimalism you need to rid yourself of mythos, and thereafter, once you find yourself on the stage, the empty stage, you are to remove the only thing left, which is the illusion of the self; the 'I', the ego, the soul, and free thing which makes other things, like action and thought, happen. Hence, you are uncontrollably moved to the illusion of free will, this too, must go. If these things are present, there is no space for conversation and no journey free of baggage.

Now, it is not that you are on the journey, rather, you are able to begin to notice that one is the journey. The journey is not happening to you, you are happening, not even to it -- you are just happening. You are not gaining minimalism, you are becoming minimalism. Your nature is the changing thing, not your actions. You are not adding anything, you are subtracting to precisely the amount that is required for the ideal.

Since thought leads to action and this is a simultaneous experience, it is all you. You are your thoughts, you are your actions. You are your mind, brain, body, and action, you don't own or create these things, so then, how can we say you are the thing which is on this journey or that you are the thing gaining the experience? We can not. You are the journey and experience. It is happening within you, and since there really is no 'within you' at all, there is only you, we realise that you are it -- you are the experience.

Minimalism does not mean to throw away all you own, either within the confines of your own skull or outside of it, rather, it means to adhere to the philosophy, 'less is more'. In greater detail, the truth that, for it to be, means it has the perfect amount of suchness and it needs not a thing more.

It does not mean to deliberately go out into the world and say, 'Let us throw away all we own today, so we may beg on the streets tomorrow.'

Do not force yourself down to the simple, rather, become the simple state. The state of which you were born. It's a matter of removing the baggage you have collected over your life, most of which, not even collected by you, but collected for you by others. And probably, you have spent a considerable amount of time collecting baggage for others, and more time still, thinking about what baggage they may have for you.

You spend more time thinking about what others think of you, and they are doing the same, meaning, therefore, you are very nearly thinking for each other and never thinking for yourselves. You are concerned about the concerns others have for you. With this kind of affair, how could you possibly begin to question, or understand, the nature of minimalism?