Nothing to Prove, everything to Play For

There is a strange tension at the heart of being human.

On the deepest level, I am not the person I have spent my life trying to develop, protect, and understand. My natural self is awareness itself: the open space in which sensations, thoughts, emotions, relationships, achievements, and failures appear.

Everything I can experience arises within this awareness. My body appears within it. My history appears within it. Even the thought I am this particular person is something that can be noticed and appears within it.

Awareness itself does not need to improve. It does not become more complete through success or less complete through failure. It is already here before I accomplish anything.

It's timeless and it is fully alive. And it doesn't exclude, that I am also here as a human being with conflicting desires, aspirations, and potentially overwhelming emotions.

I have a body, a personality, relationships, abilities, fears, desires, and a limited amount of time. I can learn, create, fail, practise, love, and grow. Recognising awareness as my natural self does not make this human life irrelevant. It allows me to enter it more completely, while at the same time not mistaking it for "That's all there is".

So there is nothing to prove

But there is everything to play for

The Acorn Is Not an Incomplete Tree

Imagine an oak tree in its different stages of development:

At first, it exists as an acorn. Later, a small shoot breaks through the soil. Then there is a young tree with only a few leaves, followed by a stronger tree that still cannot produce fruit. Eventually, it becomes a fully grown oak that creates thousands of acorns of its own.

It is easy to interpret these stages as a hierarchy.

The large tree appears more successful than the acorn. It is stronger, more visible, and capable of doing things the younger stages cannot do. But the acorn is not a failed oak tree. A sapling is not an inferior version of the mature tree.

Each stage expresses something that the others cannot.

The acorn contains concentrated potential. The first shoot embodies vulnerability and courage. The mature tree offers strength, shelter, and fruit. Every form has its own "aspirations", intelligence, limitations, and beauty.

Development is real, but superiority is an interpretation.

The same is true in our lives.

One area may be mature and fruitful, while another has only just broken through the soil. I may have developed deep emotional awareness while still being inexperienced in business. I may feel grounded in my spiritual understanding while remaining unskilled in intimate relationships. I may possess enormous potential that has not yet found its form.

The task is not to pretend that every stage has the same abilities and everything should be treated as the same. A sapling cannot provide the shade of a mature tree. Honesty requires seeing that clearly.

But honesty does not require contempt or fooling yourself in because everything is what it is. I should be content with where I'm at and not aspire at all.

That would be spiritual bypassing of a natural instinct within us. A tree has a very strong impulse to grow and to withstand harsh conditions and not give up when it's a little bit difficult to reach the light. He has an inbuilt, natural positive aggression that makes him grow. the Latin word aggredere - similar to the English word aggression - means "to step towards" or "to approach."

And we humans have that too, but modern society can lead towards condemning anything that "smells" like aggression as toxic or destructive.

meaning I can recognise where I am without turning my current stage into a judgment about my worth. I can acknowledge what is undeveloped while also seeing the precise qualities that exist only here: the openness of the beginner, the intensity of discovery, and the humility of not yet knowing, while at the same time honoring the positively aggressive impulse in me that wants to grow, that wants to overcome, and like the acorn has to die in order to give rise to the sapling.

Whatever stage I am in deserves to be met where it is and honor what it's natural impulse wants to bring forward.

Taking the Appearance Seriously

When I understand that everything appears within awareness, I could begin to dismiss ordinary life.

It is only a thought.

It is only an emotion.

It is only an appearance.

In one sense, this is true. But it can also become a sophisticated way of avoiding and bypassing life.

A fear may be an appearance within awareness, but the fear is still asking to be felt. A conflict may occur within consciousness, but the relationship still deserves attention and to be approached with full respect. My goals may not determine what I fundamentally am, but they still reveal something about what wants to be expressed through me. I can pour my soul and heart and many of my values into an aspiring goal that aims to bring me to a greater vision.

To recognise something as an appearance does not mean treating it as meaningless.

When a frightened child enters a room, I do not need to believe that the child’s fear describes the whole of reality. But I still take the child seriously. I kneel down, look at what is happening, and meet the child at the level where it are, because for it, its emotional state is their "true" reality, no matter if the base for it is just a made-up ghost in the dark.

I can relate to my inner and outer life in the same way.

I do not have to make every thought ultimately true. I do not have to build my identity around every emotion. But I can listen closely enough to discover what each experience is carrying, what it wants to tell me, tries to make me see.

Awareness provides the boundless space - impersonal and formless yet closer than close, so intimately peaceful and fully alive. nothing can disrupt it. It's our original home.

The world allows to create meaning and another flavor of intimacy that is more playful and dynamic, deeply personal and individual. A world of polarity, of joy and pain where suffering is only occurring when we forget our original home while being in this world.

Hence the saying: "Being in the world but not of it."

Entering the Movie

Watching a film involves a remarkable capacity. Part of me knows that I am sitting in a room looking at projected images. The characters are actors. The buildings may be sets. The events are not happening in front of me.

And still, I allow myself to enter fully into the story.

I feel tension when the character is in danger. I feel grief when someone dies. I feel relief when something is resolved. The film affects me because it represents something real enough for my body and imagination to respond and that's why I love to watch a movie, because I do want to feel all these emotions that make me feel alive, but I don't want to get caught up in them, because then I enter the world of suffering.

Knowing that it is a film does not ruin the experience.

It makes immersion safe.

Life can be approached in a similar way.

At the deepest level, everything is moving within awareness. My identity, my ambitions, and my struggles are part of the unfolding appearance. But while I am here, I want to enter the story completely.

I want to love as though love is all that matters. I want to create as though the work it is the most important thing in the world to me. I want to meet challenges as though something essential is being asked of me they had called Howard for the finest character traits and activated my full potential.

Not because my fundamental existence depends on the outcome. But because wholehearted participation is more enlivening than standing outside the experience and commenting on it or being only half-hearted in it.

The game becomes meaningful and fun when I agree to play and immerse myself fully into it and give it my all.

When It Counts

I remember this from cycling. During training, repetition could sometimes become dull. I was riding, improving, and building capacity, but part of me felt that it did not fully count yet.

Then came a competition. Suddenly, everything became immediate. My body, attention, and will gathered around one clear demand. There was no space for half-hearted effort. I had to use what I had developed.

That sense of now it counts awakened something in me.

It was enjoyable to perform well and to be near the front. But looking back, the deepest pleasure was not the result. It was the experience of being fully activated. The situation called more out of me than ordinary effort did. Something appeared that I could not access through detached participation. My whole system organised itself around the challenge. This is one reason meaningful difficulties can make us feel intensely alive.

They ask for our presence.

That's why extreme climbers like Alex Honnold seek the free climbing experience, because when you do that, every fiber of your body is fully alive. The potentiality of death heightens the sense of aliveness - there is no room to get lost in thought or suffering.

that doesn't conclude that one always has to put oneself in life-threatening danger, but it reveals that aliveness is most prevalent where we are all in, as if our life would depend on it.

When nothing seems to matter, we remain divided. We hesitate, conserve creative energy, and keep parts of ourselves outside the experience. When something counts, attention becomes unified and directed, and if we don't get caught up in the fear of failure or embarrassment, we can feel fully alive

We show up fully - nothing is held back anymore.

Practising Until the Self Disappears

Kung fu taught me another side of this. I practised a simple forms repeatedly until the movements became familiar to the body. At first, every detail required conscious control. I had to remember the sequence, coordinate the posture, and correct the movement.

Through repetition, the form gradually became second nature.

Then, during a competition, something changed. I was no longer thinking about each movement. There was no inner commentator managing the performance. The form simply moved through me - the form and I were not two separate things, but just one continuous appearance within awareness.

The separate sense of I am doing this became quiet - there was no more sense of a separate "I". This is the paradox of mastery: discipline eventually creates effortlessness.

A beginner must think about every stage. A skilled practitioner has repeated the process so often that conscious interference is no longer necessary. Like preparing a familiar cup of tea, the action seems to happen by itself.

This is not passivity. It is integrated intelligence - skill has moved from an idea into the body.

In these moments, competence and surrender fuse into the same thing. I am fully engaged, yet there is no rigid controller at the centre. The challenge is real, the response is precise, and the action flows without psychological struggle.

A Full-Hearted Game

This is how I want to live!

I want to embody as a Gnosis that my deepest nature is the awareness in which life unfolds. It's even beyond embodiment and Gnosis. It's simply the baseline of existence that I am. In the most simple way, nothing special. Probably the way many of us felt when they were young kids, and this was our natural state we were in most of the time.

In a way, it is a reawakend beingness of that childlike innocence - transcending time and space to an eternal, boundless yet very natural NOW.

Nothing that happens can add to or subtract from that fundamental wholeness.

At the same time, I want to develop the human being through which this awareness is expressed.

I want to practise until skill becomes natural and effortless. I want to meet challenges that summon capacities I have not yet discovered. I want to honour the stage I am in without using acceptance as an excuse to remain there.

The acorn does not need to feel ashamed that it is not yet a tree. But it also does not resist the movement that breaks it open.

Life is not asking me to become worthy. It is asking me to participate. To enter the experience with my whole body and mind, knowing that my ultimate nature is never at risk.

That knowledge does not produce indifference. It creates Freedom!

I can play as if my life depends on it, while knowing deeply that what I truly am does not.

I can care intensely without being destroyed by the outcome therefore, give up completely. I can pursue mastery without turning achievement into identity. I can give everything without believing that failure would make me less complete.

That is the game:

To take every stage seriously without making it absolute.

To practise with devotion until effort becomes flow.

To play enthusiastically - not because I have something to prove, but because life becomes fun and deeply meaningful when I give myself wholeheartedly into it.