Please note that Paul's early material from which the "Slaps" were taken has been edited and is now available in his book "Escape To Everywhere" (February 2015) available directly from Paul at: https://www.createspace.com/5116702  


Thoughts are like corn kernels, and you’re the popcorn maker. There is heat and they begin to pop, and you become aware of them.



For a while the thoughts are just what’s happening, like trains going by. Then you inject all this buttery goo, making it about YOU. That’s when things get sticky.
Feelings and thoughts do not bring you any meaning. You are injecting them with meaning. How do you do that? By making it MY thought and MY feeling.

You open up the thought or the feeling as though it BROUGHT you the meaning, though the meaning is already in the files.

Let’s say I have a belief that I’m lazy. The thought comes, “I haven’t done anything today.” It could just pass. But I think it’s about ME. Then all these meanings download from my files. I follow it on the screen and it takes me into a story into the mystical place in which Paul is really bad, where Paul hasn’t done anything in his whole life and has no value whatsoever. It’s a trip into WHAT’S NOT HAPPENING.

People who go to Hawaii come back with a tan. But I go on this train trip to what’s not happening. Plenty of dilemmas out in the future and the past; so I return with anxiety, recrimination, and shame. The trip’s about ME and I have a great interest in it. Why? Because I’m identified with it all.

The freedom comes when you lose interest in the dilemmas.

How do you lose interest? By entertaining the simple message, “I’m not that.” You simply witness what is.

Something shows up, and after that something else. A thought or feeling comes into awareness, does its little acrobatic act, then the circus packs up and leaves.
Then you’re conscious of the next event, and the next. It’s a very smooth clean way of living, yes? Very fluid.

In a while, if you don’t get engaged in the contents, you may become engaged in the CONTEXT — in the consciousness of what’s WITNESSING everything showing up — the station — instead of getting on the trains of thoughts and trains of feelings coming by, for them to carry you away.

The activity of trains is not to stay at the station; they go. They pick up passengers and they take them somewhere. But you are the central station, the awareness, through which the trains constantly come in and go out.
When you’re identified as a long-lasting independent separate entity it makes you a passenger at that station. Your drive is to get on a train in the hope that it’s going to take you somewhere. You have hopes and expectations and conditional desires that society has built into you, with the hope of arriving somewhere by doing or having. Having two kids and a picket fence and so on.


These trains will come and we get on them and we call them the journey of life. Sometimes the trains are locals to a heaven, and the next stop is to a hell, and it goes on like that.

Now in a sense all of these thoughts and all of these feelings and all the experiences you have everyday have been anchored into being by one act and one act only: Consciousness OF. You have been conscious of every experience that makes up your life. Without consciousness there could not have been any experience that might have been noted.

So here we are at the station, which is consciousness — the sphere where experience is happening. Consciousness through this interface seemingly comes in contact with our world. By becoming conscious of thoughts there forms a sort of mental experience. It takes your attention and puts it into a realm of mind that no one else can go to; YOUR own realm of mind. Your own little What’s Not Happening.

Rarely is your what’s not happening matching someone else’s what’s not happening. That’s why communication here is very, very difficult, since people are talking about what’s not happening. Their condition last week, or what they hope will happen. Their whole state of being isn’t being; it’s a state of was-ing and will-ing.
The only true stated communication is being now.

Every train is witnessed by consciousness. Each one came through the station. Trains to Philadelphia, trains to Boston, trains, trains, trains. It doesn’t matter their destinations, they’re all witnessed by the station. The station is the one stable thing for all the trains.

So you’re like a station. You’re the interface for this world, for this experience.

Every train with all its feelings and thoughts is noted — but only as it’s going through. Once it’s gone through its not the station’s business anymore, which is constantly awake to what’s happening. It’s also awake to the mental experience of what’s not happening. But it doesn’t get on any train that goes through the station. It cannot give up its station-hood to become a passenger on the train.

It witnesses all the acts of you as a long-lasting independent separate entity which is just a mental process called selfing, getting on trains and getting off trains, having great expectations and great disappointments, and so on and so forth. All of the activity of selfing is being witnessed by the station. The station would no longer be the station if it got on the train. It would become a passenger.
Our state as the station, of being a witness, has been forgotten. This consciousness has forgotten its own nature and has become identified with the projection of a mental process. The mental process that I like to call selfing because it’s a verb, not a noun. It’s not real. It only seems real by its sense of being continual.

The sense of being a noun is that of being a passenger. The passenger is going to be totally affected by what train he gets on, or what train someone else gets on. I should not have gotten on that train, etc. on and on and on and on. Selfing, selfing, selfing.

You will give the trains all the meaning they have. You do not know what comes with you when you get on that train. A lot of old ideas, a lot of beliefs; you are a catacomb of conditioning called the idea of being a self. And that gets downloaded on every little trip you take as a passenger.

I can try to figure out which trains are the good ones, practice deciphering the hieroglyphics on the side of the trains so I can ascertain which ones might take me to heaven or to hell. That activity is hellish, so obsessed with trying to figure things out. There’s no lightness in that, it’s really heavy.

Maybe I go looking for the Schedule of All Schedules! Maybe a really old one from a cave in the Himalayas that will tell me about all the trains, when they come in and where they go. Even so I’ll still be a passenger, without a sense of the true quality of my nature, which is consciousness, the station. Of witnessing.

I’ll judge the train, that it’s to blame that I didn’t get where I wanted to go. Everyone said it would get me where I’m going! Something must be deeply wrong with the train — or else with me.





If you feel the sense of separation and you have a belief that there is an eternal light, you’re going to write a story that you must have done something not to be in that eternal light. You’re going to feel deeply shameful and guilty about your condition here, and your life will be a giant dance, an attempt not to feel the unbearability of being the maker of all this. If it all pertains to you you’re going to feel responsibility for everything you see around you.

Being at the station is like a long pause. The pause to me is like an eternal moment. There is no time in a pause.

So entertain a pause. You can live in that pause. That’s the station. It is a recognition of what’s obvious, here in the moment. Your mind, when introduced to what’s obvious, has the ability to be convinced by its own recognition that this place is totally crazy and contrived, that it’s a dream. An active realization takes place. Because it’s so easy to see what’s not happening for what it is – what’s not happening!

The simple recognition that your mental experience is truly not happening on the level you think it is, that’s your release. Your relief.

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To see the complete list of Short Slaps: http://paulheddermanslaps.blogspot.com/