ON TRUTH

When Jesus was up before Pontius Pilate on charges of sedition -- capital charges, by the way -- the subject of Truth came up.
Pilate, a very well educated and intelligent man, was intrigued;
"What is truth?" he asked.
I think he really wanted to know.
Jesus just held his gaze and remained silent.

That always struck me as odd.
For a man who, for three years, had such a lot to say,
This was his big moment.......
The scribes were paused, quills raised in quivering anticipation
To catch every nuance of every quotable note;
This was the moment;
This was holy scripture in the making!

[Had it happened today, the cameras would have been rolling, and the TV stations would have been taking live feeds to a breathlessly watching world.]

Jesus said.....

[nothing].

Was the Christ being insolent?
Had he had a gutful?
After a night of pure emotional and physical hell,
Had he dropped the ball?

No.
He was answering The Question -- What is Truth?
In the most profound way possible.
Truth is not something that can be put into words.
The truth of anything can only be found
In pro-found silence.....
In whatever thoughts, feelings, a-hah's and whatever else comes up,
Shared or alone.
Whatever you are aware of over there in your space,
That is your truth.
What I'm aware of going on over here in my space
Is my truth.
All that is going on in and around both spaces
Is Part of The Truth.

Osho said
"If you can get it, get it.
If you can't get it, I'm sorry."

Be patient.
Be aware.
You will get it.
I cannot tell you when,
But you will get it
In experience,
Willingly or not.
Don't look for it  with language.
Language, like its parent, the thinking mind, is limited and limiting.
Anything definitive and finite
Cannot contain the indefinable and infinite.
There are things in heaven and earth
For which language and intellectual discourse simply will not suffice.
Love and Truth are one of them.

If you want to know the truth....
Shut up
And listen.
Be aware,
Be available.
Have your experience.
In the deeper silence
Truth speaks.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

"Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand."  --  Matt: 12: 25.

Man and his Mind

Conspire

To divide.......

From

Against.

Man divided from his heart and soul,

Man divided from his spirit,

Man divided from Nature,

Man divided from other men,

Man divided from his godness,

Man divided from himself.

Only one more di-vision is required --

A Discrimination ---

Man divided from his mind.

Anything divided will destroy itself,

And anything that dwells within it.

Get out while you can.

We all need a mind,

(Like we need some kind of sewage disposal)

But we don't need to live there.

Out of mind

We are One.....

One with mind,

One with heart, soul and spirit,

One with the nature of all things,

One with our fellow man

One with god

One with self.

PEACE

Peace is what remains
After all striving for it
Has subsided.
Peace is What-Is.
Always.

The opposites of Peace
Are vain clutchings
For Survival,
Which should never have come into doubt.
But it did --
Just to make the trip more interesting.

Peace will not be won in conflict.
Striving for peace
Is like trying to quell the surf
With your bare knuckles:
Fighting for peace is like trying to clean off garbage
By throwing more crap at it.


Being at Peace
And being its opposites
Are habits.

Anything in-habited
Can be abandoned.
Anything learned
Can be un-learned.
Anything put into place
Can be re-placed.
Turmoil is optional.


Here's what-is.....
Even in turmoil
There is a place where
We are at peace with it
And Peace goes with us.
Under our cloaks of turmoil
We are the Awareness
That is experiencing the turmoil
And saying "Wow! Look at that!"
Become aware of the presence
Of that unconcerned Awareness.

From Peace we arose;
To Peace we return,
Enriched by the experience.
So,
Have your turmoils,
Enjoy your upsets.
You can return to Peace any time,
As often as you wish:
The Peace you seek
Is within.
Always.
It never left you.
You just got spooked
And forgot.

Peace be with you,
For Peace is with you;
Be at Peace.

JOY

If sadness is a big part of your life right now,
I want to share something with you
About Happiness and Joy.

Do you remember Happiness?
Of course you do.
We cannot miss something we don't remember;
We cannot grieve for something we don't know.

We showed up in Happiness and Equanimity
But we got shaken up coming through the upheavals and anxieties
Of being born
And adjusting to a bigger womb.
We ditched Happiness and Equanimity
In a misguided attempt to survive.
But they still exist.
They never left you.
You may even have experienced glimpses of them since in your life
As Joy -- Happiness re-discovered.
All you need do
Is go back to where you left them last,
Pick up on them,
Bring them into the present situation,
And apply them liberally, like a salve, to whatever is ailing you.
Maybe easier said than done,
But possible.
If I can do it, anyone can.

Know this --
Joy is as close
As the end of your nose;
It always has been.
Find a way to see.

The beauty of rediscovering Joy is --
This time
For the first time
You'll get to know it.

WHO ARE YOU?

Who are you?

Whenever someone asks me that,

I'm still tempted to hand them a business card,
Or tell him what I do for a living,

Or tell him about my kids and family

Or what it's like to be a husband, writer, musician, actor......

We think of ourselves in terms of the roles we play

As we meet and interact with the world we've created for ourselves.

But are we not much more than that?

Who are we?

Whenever we meet one another for the first time,

Or someone we know after a major crisis....

There is always an un-asked question –

Who are you?

And we start sorting through our files

Of things about this person that we recognise

From past experience.

The process is automatic;

We don't think about it much,

It just happens.

The truth is

That what we see in another person

Also exists in us.

If it didn't exist in us, we could not recognise it.

You see, there is so much more about ourselves

Than we often realise.

And other people often awaken us to the bits of us

That we may have forgotten about.

Some bits of ourselves – we like:

Other bits, we don't like so much.

Whatever we think we are,

There is a lot more to like about our selves

Than we realise.

But we don't look very often, do we?

We have an internal critic who's always very quick to point out our faults:

It's a habit we've got into.

And we counter that

By looking for others to do the job of liking us instead.

I think that's a bit unfair.

If I walked up to you and said –

“Hello. Look, I don't like ME at all,

But I expect you to at least pretend to like me,

So that I can feel better about myself.

And if you don't do that,

I will DISlike you until the cows come home.”

If I did that, you would do well

To walk away from me as fast as you can.

But aren't we actually doing a lot of that?

We just don't declare or admit that's what we're doing.

We can't get rid of what we think about ourself

And I have found

It is futile to try......

But we can expand our self-knowing,

And find more about ourselves to be comfortable with.

Then, maybe, we can start getting some balance into the picture,
And maybe even get a bit more comfortable

With bits of ourself that we're not so happy with.

Once the sport of kings, bishops and social satirists,
Disapproval has become something of a pandemic obsession --
We're all at it,
Practising it on anything and everything within sight.
And we've become better at it than noticing something to approve of.
Most people I ask "How are you?" 
Answer "Not bad," with a hint of surprise and relief!
How sad.

I have found

That I've never been very successful at changing anything

By disliking it..

In fact, things and people I dislike,

Seem to keep on coming back

Just to get up my nose.

The same is true of things we dislike about our self.

There is always something about what we dislike

That is worthwhile....

Always.

And it's up to each of us to find it.

Because .....
There is one inescapable truth

About what we think we are,

And it is this ----

Wherever we go.....

We always take Whover we are,

And Whatever we are

With us.

We don't have any choice about that.

Whether we go to the hairdressers

Or to Bali

We always take our Self with us.

All of it,

Lock, stock and barrel.

Paradoxically, the smaller our vision of ourself,

The heavier the baggage:

The larger our vision of What We Are,

The lighter we become
Because what we are is not exclusive;
It is something shared. 
We have a lot in common,
You and I,
Just seen from slightly different perspectives.

Whether our baggage is light or heavy

Is up to us.

[Listen to "You Always Take the Weather With You" – Crowded House]

"I AM" IS... WHO?

IN MY WORLD

I, Barrie Barkla, am 

That which is aware

Of whatever "I" is aware of

Right here and now.

In my world, 

You are a mirror....

Whatever I see in you,

I am.

It all comes back to "Me".

Then I become aware again

Of that which is aware 

Of all this.

IN YOUR WORLD

You, [Your name] are

That which is aware

Of whatever "you" is aware of --

Whatever you are thinking and feeling --

Right here and now.

I am a mirror....

Whatever you see in me,

You are.

It all comes back to you.

Remind yourself to look

At that which is aware

Of all this here now.

Look.

There is nothing there,

But there is..... [something].....

You do not know what It Is;

You know only that It Is.

Now sit in front of a mirror,

And read the above again,

Aloud to yourself;

But this time....

Read "In My World"

From YOUR perspective,

(Put you own name in place of mine).

Then think of someone close to you

And read "In Your World" about that person,

Aloud to yourself.

Then be with yourself.

THE NEW LAW OF THE JUNGLE

There is another Law of the Jungle...
"Survival of the Fittest"
Has become
"Survival of the Conscious".

ARE YOUDONE?

Life is like basking in the sun ......
You aren't done yet.

Let's turn you over
And try the other side.

ZORBA, THE BUDDHA

With grateful thanks to Osho....

Whatever experiences you are having,

Including the experiences of avoiding-experience, not-having-experience and wishing-I-could-have-experience.....

Have them.

Be present and fully available,

And go on having them 

Until there is no more hankering after them

Or wanting to withhold from them.

Get wholeheartedly into it.

Be a Zorba.

"The full catastrophe."

It will pass.

Anything that comes, will pass.

When it is finished

There will be
Silence

And space......

A Zorba becomes a Buddha.

CONDITIONING

We are conditioned,
And conditional.
It goeswith being human.

I often speak of conditioning
And being conditioned
As something that has us in its clutches,
A state of affairs to be escaped from.
It is also true that
Conditioning is a state of being that we often cling to.
Either way, we're in it up to our eyeballs.

But don't believe me;
Check for yourself.
Notice what is so for you.
Pick a single area of your life (eg. relationship, family, finances...)
And notice some of the values and assumptions
That condition your perceiving, thinking and feeling in that area.
It's surprising, isn't it?

Conditioning is a self-imposed exile,
From our Self,
A protective custody --
A prison with a picket fence and roses,
And no matter how ptretty we make it look,
We're trapped,
And we seem to have left the keys to open the prison
On the outside.
The walls begin to crumble, however,
Not when we rebel against everything that has conditioned us,
But when we get that --

1. We are conditioned - inside a prison (no matter how enlightened our egos tell us they are!)
2. There is an outside; and
3. We know it, because we're not always locked away. In certain contexts we sometimes let ourselves out on day release.

It might be useful to note
Under what circumstances we're relatively free and unconditional,
And under what circumstances our buttons get pushed;
Against whom and what do we protect ourselves
By shutting ourselves in
Behind a fence of Conditions ("oughts")?

The presence of Conditioning,
Both as a noun and a verb,
Is evidenced by any idea, thought, family or cultural value, concept or belief that we hold dear.
Conditioning organises both our perceptions and responses
To help us filter and "make sense" of our world.
Conditioning stands between us and raw experience:
It is not our truth.
It is a pale, umpteenth-generation carbon-copy
Of someone else's conclusions
About one-time-long-forgotten experiences;
The conditioning lasts long after the experience that tripped it has expired.

Conditioning prevents us from fully living here and now.
Instead of experiencing what is happening in our faces,
We're experiencing our own conditioning.
Watch any public debate about any sensitive issue,
Whether it be "racism" on Q. and A., or any dispute over a neighbour's fence,
What we see is less an exchange of real experiences of the subject,
And more of an exchange of conditioning,
Combatants hurling hangups at each other.
That's a very dysfunctional way of living and doing.

We didn't get a lot of say about how this sorry state of affairs came to be.
We've been conditioned by others for our entire lives,
From our parents onwards --
The Un-experienced being led by the In-experienced.
But we're invited to acknowledge that, at some point,
Our conditioning has our own tacit approval and support;
We give it energy,
And the conditioning perseveres,
Day after day, year after year, generation after generation....

We don't have our conditioning:
It has us.

We reluct to let go of anything we hold dear
And venture, naked, out into the sunlight, the fresh air, the freedom and the thrill of discovering what is so
In this moment
For ourselves

The first step is not difficult:
When faced with a moment of either certainty or indecision,
Just look at it and ask yourself --
"Is this my experience?
Or is it possible that my vision at the moment is being impaired
By prior conditioning?
Is there something I believe here that I want to hang onto?
If I take a different tack here, how will that feel?
Am I stuck in conditioned comfort?
Am I willing to open up and embrace
Another possibility?