TO BE, AND NOT TO BE

Being present in every moment

invites us

To fall into the abyss of What-Is;

To let go of all need to control or withhold

To let go of "What I know",

To let go of every urge to do something about it

And just BE -----

And perhaps come to know in Life

The unutterable Acceptance and Peace

That is the Gift of Death.

Isn't it ironical? I took my first Inward Adventure because I was intensely fed up to the back teeth with life as I was experiencing it at the time. I desperately wanted a radical makeover. Well, the joke was on me; I was to discover that it was my resistance to that experience and those feelings that was keeping me stuck The redemption I was looking for lay within the very conditions I feared to go through. Anxiety and dread are radical aliveness with a negative judgment imposed on them. There's nothing like feeling like death to realise your radical aliveness.

Radical aliveness is not something to do; it is a way of be-ing that honours equally all the opposites of life.

This is in sharp contrast to the teachings and disciplines that quest after a feeling of empowerment by learning to re-program and assert control over the mind -- thinking positively and imagineering your self and the world as you insist they should be. While such approaches have a lot to recommend them -- they can bolster self-esteem and improve feelings of well-being, and for some remarkable people they can lead ultimately to the door of transformation. The difficulty I have with the technologies of enlightenment is that, like all in-the-mind stuff, they can be mastered by only very few people, and in the end they obstruct our passage through the door: they have to be discarded -- eventually.

I have found also that life lived at higher altitudes of consciousness varies immensely from how it works down here on the plains, and it has become my assumed challenge to find ways of transmuting the more aescetic insights of my loftier moments into practical gutter-wisdom for folks who, like me, find their experience of being human sometimes less than uplifting.

Understanding and wisdom attained at higher levels are not ideal tools to make life work at lower levels. At least not without a lot of translation. That does not make such wisdom either wrong or irrelevant. It's just that at lower levels, every attempt to make life work, to make things fit and to get it right are undermined by our latent fear of impermanence (death), by the seeing of our weaknesses as Wrongness, and by the seeming fact that, in different contexts, things work differently. When every voice in our head clamours for power and deliverance from our suffering, it's a big ask to get comfy with the idea that suffering is OK because it isn't real; that we are God, playing at experiencing powerlessness. My immediate reaction was "Bugger that! Why would anybody choose to go through the bad dream I'm having right now?" It's a good question. When we can get past the feeling of desperation that prompts it and turns it into a protest, and stand in it for as long as it takes as a genuine enquiry -- "Why would I choose to put myself through this?" -- there are some very revealing insights awaiting.

Applying higher truths to the everyday grind can lend life an expanded sense of security and may even make our efforts more productive, but at the same time it also feeds our escalating need for control. We are tempted to use the truths as tools to fix something that feels "broken". Since these "truths" have usually arisen out of someone else's experience and not our own, they become limiting beliefs that may actually block any genuine enquiry into our situation and block our accesss to our own experiences and realisations. This approach treats life at the moment as "wrong"; we think we need access to laws that show us how to cure the dis-ease and do it "right". This might explain why the period of euphoria after a "got-it" may be followed by a backlash of emotionally challenging events that we interpret as apparent "failure".

Not that there is anything wrong with that euphoria; it's just that, despite how invigorating it feels, nothing much is changed. Not yet. There is more yet. When the consequent emotional slump challenges our self-trust, we are faced with the opportunity for transformation, but what usually happens is that the old feelings of "everything coming undone again" return and hijack the transforming process. At this point, those who are on a positive affirmations regimen recoil from the opportunity to enter the scary unknown. Instead, they go at their disciplines with even more energy. People attracted to positive thinking and affirmations get all their buttons pushed whenever they don't feel powerful enough for the situation, which can be quite often because there is never "enough" for the ego. On the other hand, those who have birthed a capacity to stand bravely in their own light will readily enter the door of un-certainty and un-knowing yet again, quietly confident, and maybe even a little excited that another layer of old skin is being peeled away. These people have discovered that the doors to transformation are only scary because that part of our lower-level consciousness that is concerned with getting results is no longer directing the experience -- a position it does not give up lightly.

External tools like mind control techniques can, and do trigger elevated levels of creative involvement and an intensity that can become quite addictive. But my experience with them proved to be transient -- for a while they worked (except sometimes), and then they stopped working (except sometimes). Under stress I found myself using the techniques to avoid entering doorways of possibility that I labelled as "Wrong" and "Not good for me". In doing so I was missing very real possibilities for transformation. Only relatively recently have I discovered that scary options confronting me can, if entered aware-fully, always lead me to a much deeper relationship with myself, and afterwards with others who come to me for counselling. I've even taken to reassuring some callers that, if they're scared, it my be a good sign that they're on the right track through whatever condition they're in at the moment.

While I was absorbed in my "self-improvement" expedition I experienced an eerie unrealness. I did not know why at the time, but in hindsight it has occurred to me that forcefully denying more than half of my experience (the so-called "negative" half) was at odds with what I already knew about energy -- that energy flows from negative to positive. It is the differential, the imbalance between two opposing poles, which creates the flow of power. While suppressing my negative side I was throwing a resistance into the circuit, living a half-truth, pretending, creating separation, superficiality, defensiveness and rigidity.

Here are some questions worth standing in. There are no wrong answers.

• Why am I so afraid to go deeper through the door of the unknown?
• What is it that frightens me so?
• Why is it so hard to trust with the heart that life is working when it doesn't feel like it?

Deeper knowing can not be learnt out of a book. There are many things that can trigger the process of delving deeper, including an inspiring quote from a book, a moving moment of music, and particularly the presence and influence of a more fully realised "other". But Deeper Knowing is only born out of the aliveness and availability to the experiences that follow the triggering. Which experiences? Well, start with the ones in your face right now; the ones that keep coming up because you're avoiding something in them. Deeper knowing is a result when availability and willingness to go through an experience become more important than a set of exercises and rules for getting out of it. If Calvary taught us anything worthwhile, surely it was this -- the only way to transcend death is to go through it, knowing that" death" is not a fact, just an idea that has never proved to be very useful to anyone except our ego. To the ego, death is a threat. But ego is not who we are, unless we say so. And if we do say so, then death is VERY real. Our egos are going to die.

What happens as I write or counsel is that my conscious mind is responding to and affirming ideas that enlighten me in some way. I stand in them at least for a while and pay particular attention to what happens next. The immediate value for me in doing this is that these new ideas have the power to alter the quality of my attention and the the way I see things by shifting my point of view. New perspectives help me to respond to old, familiar dilemmas in new ways, and open up to another possibility of life. But the sense of well-being and new potency that I feel are only temporary. Euphoria is not designed to be anything more than a temporary state; our bodies and minds could not stand the strain of a permanent tenure. But in our desperation to feel better at all costs, we settle for euphoria when what we're really after is Peace. Euphoria, whether engineered by mind technologies or drugs, burns us out. Peace is something altogether different.

Sooner or later (usually sooner) an experience comes along out of the euphoria that seems to knock me right back to Square One where anything I thought I knew is suddenly irrelevant. These seeming setbacks are actually the Next Step, prompted by the new ideas I am standing in. They offer an opportunity to convert the new ideas into real-life experience. Then, having got the experience, I find I have to let go of the ideas, let go of the theories before they turn into yet another bunch of limiting beliefs about life. Just keep the experience. That's why we came to this life -- for the experience. What experience? The one you're having! You can give up the search. The path to your enlightenment is right in front of you. Duuu-uuuh!

When a crisis come along, we always have a choice: we can either attempt to modify this reality, or surrender to it. If we choose to surrender, there is no further choice, no control, no certainty. That's what is so scary about it. BUT when I engage creatively with Uncertainty, the gifts of Uncertainty -- trust, humility, and the inner strength needed for the challenge -- arise from within.

This process of radical transformation is not new to any of us; we have all experienced it before -- at Birth. We ran out of room where we were and unconsciously triggered a sequence of events in which we encountered a profound change of environment following a difficult period of severe, unexplainable psychological and physical stress. During this whole hellish process we felt overwhelmed and had no way of finding what, if anything, was guiding the experience. We had no pre-existing words or concepts to identify or explain what was happening. After an eternity of exquisite peace, it felt like we were being totally annihilated.........

And we survived, and grew. Why is it that we forget this last part?

LOVE

Love is seen as the great remedy. Who can argue with that? But love is seen as something we can -- and must -- do. Love as a verb becomes a tool to attack "the problem" -- our pain, our uncertainty, our loneliness, our doubt, our questioning, our perceived shortcomings. Apply Love, take 2 aspirins, lie down, breathe deeply and see how you feel in the morning -- isn't that how it's supposed to work? Hmmmm-mmm!

Love is the remedy but not as a verb; Love is a noun. Love IS. Love is what makes it possible for me to find wholeness even as I go through a disintegrating experience. To try to make love happen splits it apart, creating a "love" and a "not-love". Perhaps that is why, when we try to "be more loving" (ie. "doing" love), we end up righteous, arrogant, distanced, disappointed, frustrated, angry and numbed when things don't turn out the way we think they should. When we try to split joy and peace from pain and struggle, we sacrifice a huge chunk of our aliveness. Life is the dynamic ebb and flow of This AND That. Peace AND Pain.

I am aware of a hidden addiction to achieve healing and transformation on my own terms. I strike it a lot in counselling, both in myself and in those who call. That won't work. The Divine cannot be encompassed by our restrictions. The Divine act of Grace is bestowed only when we are empty, uncertain, and unable to proceed further on our own terms. The key is Surrender -- letting go of every expectation and resistance, and being alive and available to What-Is, just as it is.

All our genuine realisations are true and valid at the level of consciousness at which they are received. But those channeled at higher levels rarely translate directly to ordinary levels of consciousness. Applying these gems of wisdom in daily living is another matter altogether. In fact, the very attempt to live high ideals like unconditional love, intuitive wisdom and compassion is a tempting invitation to feelings of falling short, provoking frustration, disappointment, shame and selfishness. From a loftier perspective, for example, human suffering, struggle and negativity are labelled as "not real", and they're not. They are figments of an ego. Yet for us basic humans with egos, those things ARE our experience, and that makes them very real. For some, disease and suffering are tragedies to be met with prayer, acts of love, and attitudinal change. Noble stuff. But such an approach still splits spirit from body, body from mind,, and mind from soul. Splits of any kind are going to produce isolation and pain. Our challenge is to integrate, as best we can in any moment, higher teachings and ideals with the demands of daily doing, and the gaps between them, and to be present for, and tell the truth about that ongoing experience.

I got most of my early tastes of mystic wisdom from books and gurus, and you probably did, too. The only hesitation I have about that is that I tended to adopt those revelations as fundamental gospel truths at the expense of learning through my own experience of Not-Knowing. It took a while for me to realise that few writers actually practice or live their teachings from day to day, and in the meantime the trouble I was having meant that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. It wasn't until I encountered men like Colin Hayes, Baghwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho) and Sailor Bob, that I found real, earthy people who understood the dynamic tension we all have to face between our divinity and our humanity, and had the magical ability to laugh about it and let us see the funny side of it, too.

In the end, the power of any channeled wisdom lies in how thoroughly we can live it, in how useful and supportive those teachings are in moments when we find it impossible or unnecessary to adhere to them. The real potential for transformation always lies more with the student that with the teaching. It is the purpose of teachings to support the student, not the other way around.

But what usually happens is that, like me when I started to write this, we turn to teachings when we feel low, disconnected, unclear or needing inspiration -- in order to get out of our low mood. We use inspiration to restore some sense of place, orientation, equilibrium, control or clarity. They help us console ourselves and feel better. But by avoiding the disconnection and confusion, by modifying our experience of the present moment to something more comfortable, by doing anything rather than the really simple/hard thing -- just BE -- the growth of our awareness is minimal.

Whenever I am tempted to follow "A Way", the question arises -- What am I running ""A Way" from? Colin Hayes said often -- "If you want freedom, figure it out for yourself." By all means, look to whatever is available for a kick-start. You can use this blog if it is working for you. But once the motor is running, throw the crank handle away. I'm going to, just as soon as I write the next sentence.......

It is only when we can set aside all teachings, stop discipling for a belief system, and simply BE in the moment, that we find that space where we are free to be undone and be re-born.

OK. Throw this away now

and have your experience............