Amazing Post by Ariel, a True Truth Seeker
Ariel is a guy I met at a few of the Ideagasms meet up. Ariel is just a student, not a teacher yet I admire him as much as any street-credited teacher. I'd like to share one of his posts because it really reflects almost exactly where I am coming from in my quest to seek truth within myself. Labels: Outside Articles, Spirituality
Some of it may seem unfamiliar to you, but just keep in mind it is spoken in the language of love, masculinity, and ego-death (ego-death is to stop identifying with your pride/guilt/shame/over compensation, etc etc)
This past weekend I've been up in Chicago shooting a gymnastic competition. The last 3 days have been ~13 hour days shooting something like 4600 gymnasts. It's been quite awesome actually. It's ridiculously cold up here! ...definitely not like Georgia. I LOVE the warm weather we have. There's constantly snow up here on the ground and when you breathe in through your mouth, it's like you're inhaling smoke because the air immediately chills the inside of your throat. Instead you gotta breathe through your nose, but it freezes your nosehairs.
heh, okay, so I've been playing with states of very intense love and peace lately. I've been falling in love with EVERYBODY. It's like Steph's post about how there's only one woman, but to me, there's only one being. In the eyes of everyone, I see consciousness, light, love, God, ME.
When I realized what was happening, I had a satori as to how to love everyone.
1) Fall MADLY in love with yourSELF.
2) Realize that everyone else IS you and that we are all one. Then, automatically, you fall in love with everyone else because they literally ARE you.
So, I just look people in the eye, like I'm looking straight into their soul, and I connect with them on this really deep level and radiate love out to them, to me.
Most people seem to really open up to this, both guys and girls.
For example, the other night we stopped by a drugstore to hit up the ATM. There was this really hot girl walking by so I made some comment about the SOUP she was carrying and she instantly blushed, giggled, and started falling in love with me. It was like the most natural thing in the world and I literally have no idea what I said. Even the words I said were totally irrelevant. It's pure energy.
She came by a few more times and we started talking a bit. It turns out she's an acrobat in town for some auto show. What kind of acrobat? An aerial acrobat. Yeah, I'd like to see an Ariel acrobat in action. 
I noticed her accent and asked her where she was from and she said she was from Bulgaria so I asked her if she spoke russian, which she did, so I said something to her in russian.
I don't really remember what happened, but she was ahead of us in line and stayed after she paid and finished up so that she could keep talking to me. We spoke a little more and then I finished the conversation and headed out.
As we were leaving, my fellow photographer friends were like, "You know, you can invite her back to my room." The thing is though, that thought never even crossed my mind.
I was thinking about this today and had some eye-opening realizations.
I have this incredible amount of love towards people, but it's not a sexual type of love. While Steph sees the one yin woman in every woman, I literally see ME in every person... and you don't want to go around fucking yourself. 
So yeah, even though to me I seems like a duality to break people up in terms of yin/yang, I do see the "problems" with not going with the polarity and want to start bringing more sexual energy into my heart energy.
Everything seems so beautiful. EVERYTHING! It could be a girl celebrating, a girl crying, an old man hobbling down the sidewalk, heck, even a fire extinguisher or the trash sitting at the bottom of the urinal. I'm literally falling in love with EVERYTHING!
The little girls I was shooting, they all do the same exact routines. They compete in floor, beams, bars, and vault, but we only shoot the first three. When they do floor exercises, they all use the same exact music. So you literally sit there and hear the same song over and over and over again all day long.
Now, I get tired of music fairly quickly, even my own music, and I'm not one to like to listen to ANYTHING that I'm even remotely tired of. Things are different now. It's like nothing angers me and nothing aggravates me.
I simply sit back into this state of intense peace and while the content of what's going on in the world might start to get mundane or repetitive, there's this underlying feeling of unshakable peace that is rock solid. It's really cool.
I hadn't drank in a while now and this weekend kicked back a couple beers with my buddies. It was really cool because I noticed something very amazing going on. I would drink very consciously in that I would watch the body start to get drunk, yet the consciousness that I am was totally unaffected. It made the difference between consciousness and the body as clear as night and day.
One of the photographers here, he must calibrate at the level of anger or something... he's one of the most pissed off guys I've ever met. I respect him as a photographer, but fuck, he constantly talks about killing people, murder, blood and death, how much things suck, etc.
I would sit back and talk to this guy from a state of compassion and utter amazement. It's like his perspective of the world is so radically beyond mine that he comes up with things that are completely outside the realm of my possibility... stuff like being a jerk on purpose to make people's lives miserable just because. It was like watching a fascinating show in the discovery channel... the human ego in action. It was interesting to watch this guy go without getting sucked into the ego madness. He'd typically look at me with this almost confused look because I wouldn't join him in the fuck-the-world mindset.
One thing I like about him though is that he definitely speaks his truth. Near the end of the trip, we were talking about different things people had said. During one of our lunch breaks, we went to grab a sub and after paying for it, I simply said "Thanks, beautiful" to the girl behind the counter. One of the photographers asked me if I flirt with every girl I meet and I just responded that I love everyone.
Anyways, the angry photog commented later on on how when I said that, it sounded almost out of place and that he couldn't tell if, by the way I was saying it, if I was saying that to a man or a woman.
That was really cool to hear coming from another person considering what I was saying earlier about loving everyone versus loving yin. Big realizations on that one. Plus it was cool to see the ego try to be embarrassed about it, yet having none of that actually come up. Embarrassment seems to only exist when you still care what other people think of you.
Everything seems so amusing now, so perfectly in place. Coming back from the shoot one evening, there were 2 lines waiting for shuttles to go back to the hotel, one for each of the two hotels running shuttles, both using the same bus. Anyways, a bus pulled past the only line that was there at the time and so we walked past the line towards the bus. At that moment, this one painbody yelled out, "Hey! There's a line here!"
I remember looking into this guy's eyes filled with anger and it was just so funny to me, to the point of absurdity. I looked over and saw that in fact, he had an accurate assessment of the situation. There was a line there. However, there was enough room on the bus to fit everyone in line several times over. Even so, it was just watching another ego go and do its thing.
The loving people bit is so transformational. Like, my roommate here in the hotel left to go shoot a cheer event in another state so another photographer came into take his place. Apparently when they create a new key, the invalidate the old ones so my key had been deactivated. Okay cool, no problem. So I go down to the front desk to get a replacement, but because my name wasn't on the register (business trip, not under my name), they wouldn't give me a key. The most they would do is have security escort me up if I could get the manager's approval.
So I speak to the manager and she starts to open up pretty quickly. People seem to really be so friendly and loving. I know they say reality is just perception, but man...
Anyways, while I'm waiting for security I go to sit down in the lobby, across from some other lady. I don't remember what I said to her, or to the few girls who came to sit down next to her, but the next thing I know, I literally have an entire gymnastics team practically jumping on top of me, pounding me with question after question trying to guess my name. It was hilarious... I would just sit back in my chair and look at each one of them one by one while sometimes giving them hints, sometimes changing the direction of the conversation entirely.
So anyways, these two massive guys in suits come by and one of them comes to escort me into my room. We chat for a bit and he turns out to be a pretty awesome guy. Even though he wasn't even allowed to let me into my own room, he did anyways and just walked off. It turns out that by the time we get there, my new roommate (who I'd already met previously and become friends with) was in the room and I could have just knocked and been let in so that whole security mess could have been avoided entirely.
It's a lot of fun though, coming from a place of TOTAL let go. Like, if shit goes down, it's cool. I just go with it and enjoy the ride, because there's always a series of events coming together where, when you go back and look at the big picture after the fact, you see how so many cool things lined up perfectly to make other cool things happen. At this point, I just trust that I'm creating the universe the way I want, even when stuff "seems" to be going "wrong".
One cool thing I really love doing is meeting people who the ego would either really respect, look up to, admire, etc. You know, people like celebrities, famous people, police, presidents, etc.
You know when kids are little, they look up to their parents as if they were Gods? It's a lot like that. The ego seems to naturally put people up on a pedestal, yet every time you meet one of the people who your ego placed on a pedestal, you come to realize each and every time that they're just as human as you are, with their own weakness, vulnerabilities, and imperfections. We're all just human, playing this game called life. There's no one amazingly better or worse than anyone else. We're all essentially equals on the level of beingness.
For example, during this meeting, I've had the opportunity to meet and hang out with photographers who I've heard about online and whose work and expertise I really respect... these people are pro sports shooters who shoot for virtually every professional sport you can think of... NBA, NFL, X-games, MLB, college sports, etc. etc.
No matter how "cool" they seem, they're still very much human. It's a very humbling experience.
One of the photographers I met who shoots pro tennis, golf, and baseball, he and I got to talking. It turns out he's read the Peaceful Warrior, seen the movie, is getting his son to watch the movie, has done the Course in Miracles, is getting into Eckhart Tolle... I'm like yeah buddy! 
It's cool to meet others who are really into this same stuff here.
Lovingness isn't something you do. Like, by the end of the day, this body I have was starting to feel worn out and kinda cranky, so I wasn't particularly in the mood to intentionally do loving things to people like smile. Instead I'd just kinda go within to recharge and rest. So I'd walk around when we got a break and be totally still inside and out and still look at people while energetically radiating out love towards them and they would STILL open up and smile. I would literally have people stop and stare as I walked by, people remembering me day after day even though I hadn't said a single thing to them.
Love is about this field of energy that goes through you. It's this impersonal field of energy that touches everyone and everything around you. Other people may not consciously realize what's going on, yet they seem to get the fact that there's "something" going on here. Seriously... I would show no emotion or expression and the love would still reach them. Very cool.
I'm just rambling on here, but I really wanted to share some of these experiences with you guys. I gotta get some sleep to catch my flight back to Georgia tomorrow (err, today technically). If something else pops up that I want to share, I'll chime in later.
Thanks for reading the yakking. 
If you have access to the forums, the full discussion can be found here, along with his follow ups.
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