MASTER CLASS: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS -- An Explorere's Points to Ponder

• There are answers, and there is no "THE Answer". And that isn't true either. But The Answer would probably look like blank space and sound like silence, except there'd be no-one there to see or hear it. So, while there may be "The Answer", you and I are never going to know it. It is only the arrogance of Ego that claims to know "The Answer".
• The world is uncomfortable about sitting in questions -- it wants Answers. But Answers only pose more Questions. Perhaps creation is trying to tell us something.
• Every Answer is an answer to an infinite number of Questions ... eg. If the answer is 3, the question might be 1+1+1 =.....; or 8-5 =.....; or "How many wise men trekked to Bethlehem?"; ...... you get what I mean. Now think of some questions to which "Me" is your answer. If you stick with this exercise for long enough you will discover that you are the answer to an infinite array of questions. And none of the questions are wrong! And every one of those questions is your question, and so is the answer --"Me". They are yours. Own them
• You, and your present experience, are the Answer to questions you may have forgotten you once asked. Stand in this possibility -- This experience I'm having is the Answer: what might the question have been?" Note everything that occurs to you: accept everything, no matter how absurd it may seem.
• Some questions to a present Answer may have been asked 30 seconds ago, or 30 years ago. The Universe notes every question you ask, and delivers answers when you're ready for them. It's up to each of us to remember what the questions were. The good news is, we cannot get it wrong.
• Consider this possibility -- we have been hooked into assuming that questions come first, followed by answers. What if the reverse is also true? What if Answers came first, and Questions arise from a pre-exisitng Answer. What if every event, thought, utterance, feeling, idea and experience you have is the answer to an un-uttered question? Guess what that question might be? Whatever it is, you'll always be right, because you already know the answer.
• This is an answer: what was the question? Track backwards from the answer to possible questions. The more questions an Answer leads back to, the more useful is the Answer. The fewer questions an Answer leads to, the more important are the Questions. When a bunch of Answers leads back to only one question, you've hit the jackpot... (eg. My Answers one day were  "confusion", "a chest pain", "equanimity" and "deeply caring". The Question to all of them turned out to be "Who am I?")
• Here's a meditation -- create a Context -- eg. "Yes-ness" (but make up one for yourself that is relevant to you now). Now walk backwards from your context towards possible questions that it answers. Notice carefully the questions you find yourself afraid to ask.

Here's another meditation --  Assume each of these answers, and find  questions for yourself that are answered by each one.........

• In my middle
• In the middle of sex
• In the middle of relationship
• In the middle of abundance
• In the middle of scarcity
• In the middle of knowing
• In the middle of uncertainty
• In the middle of feeling
• In the middle of freedom
• In the middle of restriction
• In the middle of experience
• In the middle of all that is

Note any questions that come up more than once, as the source of more than one of the above answers.

When we let go of the false assumption that all questions come before all answers, and get that an Answer can pre-exist all questions about it (ie. Answer first; questions later), the riddle of Creation suddenly becomes clear. God had a thought, and the thought was a question (Who am I?") Then came the Big Bang. But, and this is my point, God - the Answer - preceded the Question (Who am I?) And, by the way, the Answer to that question has never changed.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0

We all have a box called Mind.

Most of us crawl inside that box and live there,

But it's not compulsory;

We can choose to live outside the box,

In a quality of being we'll call "Context".

Questions that come from inside the box

Come from the stuff of the mind,

And are limited by the size and content of the mind and its stuff.

Available answers will be, likewise, severely limited.

Questions that arise outside the box,

From Context,

Are potentially infinite,

Being shaped only by the nature of the Context.

Available answers will likewise be expansive.

Whenever a question arises,

Look first at where it's coming from --

From Ego/Mind,

Or from Conscious Awareness.

Questions from the mind

Shrink and shrivel truth into "knowledge".

Questions from Context

Expand and enrich experience into "knowing".

Questions from Mind

Have answers which solidify into "the truth" and limit experience;

Questions from Context

Produce answers which dissolve boundaries and expand possibilities.

There is no room for God in any box,

For God is Love

And Love is Free.

PLAYING IT SAFE

There's not much joy in playing "safe".
You have to venture outside if you want to make progress.

Protecting your soul
Is committing it to prison;
Locking it away where no-one can get at it,
Prevents you from seeing and being your self.
And all to no avail --
Who-you-are is indestructible.

EVIL

Evil is "live" in reverse.

Evil is the shadow of darkness.
Anything that blocks out the light,
Anything that supports limitation and ignorance,
And keeps you in the dark
Is "evil".

PAIN & SUFFERING

You want to be compensated for "pain and suffering"?
(Look at what those bad bastards did to me!!)
What are you telling yourself
That enables you to justify somebody else paying for your suffering?
Do you think you're entitled to live your life without suffering?
Who told you that?

Do you want to be saved from your discomforts?
Come on, be honest, at least with yourself.
Now,
What are you telling yourself about pain and discomfort?
Who told you that?
And who have you appointed to do the job of saving you?
Oh, yes; you have appointed somebody to notice your suffering

And feel bad about it.
(And even if that person has died, you don't let up.)

Have you discussed the responsibility for saving you with them?
Have they agreed to take you on?
If they have, you're in deep do-do's.
Even Jesus Christ said "Heal yourselves!"


Look around you,
Nobody gets a free lunch.
Grow up.

Pain and suffering are the price of growing
And the stuff of Wisdom --
For everybody.
Who told you you're somehow "a special exemption"?
There is no "savings plan" for suffering:
You don't need "saving" --

If you want to be "safe" from suffering,
The trick is not to suffer over your suffering.
Got it?

RELATIONSHIP

It doesn't matter how much you love someone:
Who are you when you're with them?

TRUTH

The real truth about ourselves
Often comes from the unlikeliest of sources.

A message about ourself
Is not augmented or diminished
By the supposed qualifications of the messenger.
Truth is truth, however it is delivered.

GROWTH

Our potential for growth is proportional
To the amount of truth we can take about ourself
Without running for cover.

RESPONSIBILITY & FREEDOM

Responsibility and Freedom are inseparable.
Anything that appears to relieve us of our responsibility
Takes away our freedom;
Had you not noticed?
Look at it.....

We can choose whether to live in a context of Freedom,
Or a condition of Slavery:
That's just a matter of how we see it,
And we each have Responsibility in the matter.

You can choose whether or not to willingly accept personal responsibility,
You may try to delegate it to others,
But whichever way, Responsibility remains yours,
And will sheet itself home to you, sooner or later.

Without responsibility, there can be no freedom.
That is a terrible price to pay
For trying to dodge the inescapable.

BECOMING GOD -- AGAIN

A newborn baby simply ..... is.
And that right there is a full-time occupation.
The babe does not bother to think it is
Or speculate on what it means to be;
It simply is,
God-like.
No wonder we gaze into a baby's eyes
And see potential unlimited.

The instant God contemplates its Is-ness,
It lowers its frequency from pure thought into electrums of light and matter
And no-thing becomes some-thing.


I began life as no-thing,
Then worked really hard to become some-thing,
And now find myself being drawn back toward no-thing.
Fewer thoughts,
Less thinking,
Less matter-ing,
Discovering the blissful Ah-ness of "Is-ness",
Empty-full.

Like a red rose absorbs all the colours of the spectrum except red
And reflects that redness back to us,
So we as human beings absorb what we will,
And reflect back onto others what we choose not to absorb.

And we see the reflections off others and the world around us
Through coloured spectacles of our own making,
Seeing them in shapes and hues that are selectively ours.
We do not see what-is;
We see only fuzzy deflections, further filtered by the way we choose to see them,
Not as they fully are.

Our godness absorbs everything
And reflects nothing;
It discards the coloured spectacles
And sees nothing;
For god is
No-thing.

In our ego/humanity
We carry glasses and mirrors for protection,
To see and be seen,
Because we are afraid
To be no-thing.
But that is what we came from,
What we are at our deepest core,
And to what we will return.
What is there to fear?

While we remain human
And subject to fear,
The antidote to being frightened
Is Trust.
Try letting What-Is become preferable to what-isn't,
And becoming as transparent to that as you can.

Without resistance,
Things don't hurt any more.

LIVING THE MYSTERY

You can make your life a question to be answered
And/or a problem to be solved.
I wish you luck;
I tried both, without success.
What is working for me?
Life as a mystery to be lived.

The mind of Man is capable of understanding
Only that which lies below himself on the evolutionary scale.
Well, you may say, since Man is at the top of that tree,
He's capable of understanding everything.
Hmmmm.........
"What if," I ask, "the Evolutionary Scale (man-made, by the way)
Is upside down? Or missing bits Man doesn't know about,
Especially in levels "higher" than himself?
What it there are higher forms of life that, right now,
Are having a good laugh at the arrogance and stupidity
That automatically puts Man himself at the top of a man-devised tree"

I'm reminded of the map or globe of the Earth.
Very familiar.
It was created over time by a bunch of people from the northern hemisphere,
That puts them at the "top",
And antipodean outposts like Australia at the "bottom".
It's an assumption that works OK,
Until you jump out into space,
Where it becomes totally insignificant and, frankly, irrelevant.
I feel similarly about the "evolutionary scale".
I think we're appallingly insular, ignorant and closed-minded
About the universe and our place in it.
I think we're so far up ourselves,
The view is very limited, to say the least.
For example, we go looking "out there" for intelligent life
With a very limited conception of what "intelligent life" might look like.
We assume if its doesn't look at least vaguely human, it can't be clever.
We can't even begin yet to fathom the mysterious intelligence
Of elephants, dolphins, whales or fruit flies,
But we blithely assume that we're somehow better than they are!!
Better at what?
If we can't get a better sense of perspective so close to home,
How on earth can we define or recognise "life"
In the infinite reaches of the cosmos?

We don't know. That's it. ......Period.
And we'll never know anything until we get
That we don't know anything much.

In order to rise above the dogs' breakfast of what we think we know
Into some real Knowing,
We need the courage to live life
With a total YES,
Without asking "Why?".

Behind every one of our beliefs
Lie Doubts.
Behind faith
Lie Suspicions.
Behind every answer
Lie more Questions.
Behind our certainty,
Lies Ignorance
Behind the mystery of What-Is
Lies Wisdom
Accessed through fully experienced experience.
Wisdom, not as a static state,
But as an ongoing process of becoming.

Trust.
Through your doubts, suspicions, questions and false certainties,
Through the Mystery,
Lies True Knowing
Which arises from giving a deep "So be it"
To the paradoxes, contradictions and uncertainties of mystery.

In Mystery is the beginning of Mastery.

SEEKING AND FINDING

It has been said --
"Seek and ye shall find."
Very true,
And not the whole truth.

It is also true that
"Seek and ye shall get the experience of seeking;
Find and ye shall get the experience of finding."

Sometimes, our seeking gets in the way of actually finding.

Here's another truth --

What you're looking for is right in front of your nose."

Questioners often keep swatting answers aside

Because they don't look like what they're looking for.

They never ask "What has this to do with what I'm looking for?"

Coming from an assumption that there is a connection.

And there is..... always,
Otherwise what you see in front of you
Would not be there.

When seeking has not satisfied,

How do we Find?

Ask a question,

And open all your senses,

Not for The Answer,

But for all answers.

Reject nothing,

No matter how contradictory some experiences may seem.

Logic and Reason say "It is either this OR that."

The whole of life says "It is both this AND that",

Including the valid existence of both Logic and Intuition.

Seek, in order TO find

The "more" that always lies just beyond the horizon

Of what you think you know just now.

I say to you --

You already know a lot more than you think you do,

And the rest is available to you.

All you have to do is ask

And stand committed to the question.

REPUTATION & SELF

Reputation is the estimation in which a person or thing is held.

Here's a proposition to stand in.......

The only reasons why your reputation with others would matter
Is because
a) You need something from them that you won't give to yourself; and
b) Your own reputation with yourself needs repair.


What else is there
But Self
Expressing and experiencing itself?

Nothing else.

ENLIGHTENMENT

When I was a child
I used to be afraid of the dark....
Monsters lurked in the dark.
I realise now, of course, they were all in my misused imagination,
As they are for all of us,
No matter how old we get in years.
My monsters weren't real.

Now, I know that you are different --
Your monsters are real.
I mean that sincerely -- they are real -- to you.
No matter how real your monsters are, however,
They don't exist anywhere else but in your mind.
That's why only you can see them as you do.

Even when power-mongers like politicians and bishops
Successfully create monsters they can get some agreement on --
Like "terrorism", "boat people", "judgement day", "satan", "weapons of mass destruction",
And anyone who isn't one of "us" --
Our individual experience of an agreed "monster"
Is uniquely different.
And if you were sitting in front of me right now,
I could prove that to you, in your experience, inside 30 seconds.
In any audience of 5,000 people,
There are 5,000 uniquely different experiences happening
Of the same event.

A monster is an Idea
That needs darkness to survive.
Politicians and bishops are successful
To the degree with which they are able
To manipulate the truth
And keep us in the dark.
Haven't you noticed how manically secretive they are
About all of what they actually do, and how they do it?
They're desperate to control the form and amount of inform-ation we can get our hands on.

That's why I'm such a big fan of Awareness,
And of enlightening
Myself and my world.
An enlightened person is a "loose canon";
He cannot be controlled.

In the light,
Monsters just ........... evaporate,
And their master-minds are out of a job.

LONELINESS

Loneliness and Aloneness are not the same;
I'm often aware of Alone-ness ,
But that's a state of being,
Rather than a particular feeling.
I'm currently standing in the possibility that....

We are, first and last, alone:

Everything else is just distraction.

Aloneness is a state of being I'm quite happy with.
Loneliness is something else.

I wrote what follows on New Year's Day, 1990 --
The last time I recall feeling "lonely".
Maybe there's something I got then that dis-appeared it ......

Behind the tear-filled eyes of Loneliness

 I feel a blaze of light;

Man in his inwardness -- 

The image of God, the fullness of Good

That can't get out

And find its Otherness.

That was before I went to live the life of a hermit for 8 months in the karri forests of the continent's southwest,

Where I sometimes felt afraid,

But never felt lonely.

It was there, away from the distractions of relationship,
That I discovered the richness and fullness

Of the "otherness" that has always surrounded and supported me.

Aloneness is a partial truth,

Arising from a misspelling,
And a misconception of "All-one-ness".

Loneliness, I've concluded, is a feeling we get

When we shut down

And lose touch 

With all that we are.

PURPOSE

Is there a Purpose to all of this?

Yes...... and No.

The only purpose of the Mind
Is to keep itself and its contents intact,
To survive itself and all of its programmes and attachments,
And be right about them.
To keep itself,
Your mind will even kill you, if necessary (eg. cancer)

The only purpose of Being
Is to become more than it knows itself to be right now,
And complete itself.

Beyond that --

No.....

There is no purpose to any of this.

But there is the sheer entertainment of making one or more purposes up for yourself
And learning whatever they teach you.

And aren't you already doing that?

THE BULWARKS OF SOCIETY

How does society protect itself from threats of annoyance and injury,
Emanating from without or within?...............

• COMPULSION
• PURPOSE & CONTROL
• GUILT

That's it.
That's how we sell out and suck up --
Go along to get along.

I didn't say it was wrong,
And I don't say it's right either......


Symptoms of the Presence of Social Compulsion:

A false feeling Security
Shame and guilt, both as  concepts and as feelings.
Authority figures
A Duty consciousness
Words like "should", "must" and "ought" popping up in conversation.
An absence of natural joy and spontaneity,
A feeling of enslavement -- loss of natural freedom
Feeling unloved
Pretending and deceit.
A feeling of separation


Symptoms of Socially Sanctioned Purpose and Control:

A false feeling of Security .
A pervading Dread. There always seems to be someone or something that we're encouraged to be afraid of, along with something to buy, or someone to vote for, to fix it for us.
A longing for a Saviour (anyone from Julia Gillard to Jenny Craig)
A consciousness of Scarcity and Lack.
A belief that there's something to gain, and in "winning" and "earning" as the only legitimate ways to live a fulfilled life.
Anything that makes it socially acceptable to remain a victim for longer than 5 minutes.
A marked absence of natural spontaneity and joy
Ulterior motives.
Dependent relationships.
Power games of domination, manipulation and control.
Emotional, financial and social  enslavement.
All forms of bullying, especially legally sanctioned overlording (including everything from the treatment of asylum seekers, to the male mating ritual posturings of  parliamentary question time).
Pretence and deceit (glorified in political spin).
Emotional hooking.
Addiction (to anything)
Political correctness
Polite niceness (as distinct from open Kindness)
Soul-less propriety and correctness.
Over-regulation  and govern-ment.
Any niceties. regulations and "rights" that encourage people to avoid
self-responsibility for their choices, decisions and actions
Social supports based on acceptable criteria of "un-ableness".

Symptoms of Socially Sanctioned Guilt:

A false feeling of Security.
A fundamental assumption of intrinsic un-worthiness (original sin), and the necessity to a) avoid damnation; and b) earn salvation.
The adversarial court system (Innocence is NOT the opposite of guilt)
All religion (as distinct from spirituality). Some are worse than others. In the main, the more powerful the church hierarchy, the greater use of guilt to keep the common laity under control).
An absence of natural joy and spontaneity.
Shame.
Hypocrisy.
Public floggings (eg. so-called "current affairs" programmes)
Myths about "heaven", "hell", "purgatory", "Armageddon", and "the Judgment Day".
A pandemic famine of empathy and feeling-for.
An epidemic of depressive feelings of separation, fear, and ostracism.
Moral and ethical dictates.
Appeals to "conscience" -- an appalling misnomer in the context of Guilt. There's no such thing as a "guilty conscience"! There is a feeling of "guilty un-conscience".


As I said earlier -- these things are what they are: neither right nor wrong.
But they ought to be seen for what they are,
And that is up to me in my life,
And you in yours.
If you want freedom,
Think for yourself.
(Kings and bishops hate that!)

GETTING OUT OF HOUDINI'S BOX

In mind
We find ourself locked in Houdini's box,
With the key left on the outside.

Inside this chained and padlocked Mind-Box
We occupy points-of-view that we have to justify, pump up and be right about --
Ideas, beliefs, concepts, principles and values --
All the positional things we'd sacrifice our happiness for;
Things we'd rather die for than give up,
Ideas that readily help us feel right,
But rarely make us happy.

The good news is
We can change our points of view
(We actually do it a lot more than we'll ever admit).
BUT,
And this is my main point.......

We cannot see our point of view while we're on it

Because that is where we are viewing from.

In order to see a limiting position,

We have, first, to get that we're on it

Then get off it.

This realisation is central to all my counselling and communicating,

And it is the hardest thing to achieve

Because nobody in their righteous mind wants either to admit they're on a position,

Or to get off anything they feel right about.

Left to our mind's devices,

We'd all rather be right than happy!

I deliberately set about moving people around,

I aim to change your viewing-point, so that --

a) You can see that you have been standing on a point-of-view; and

b) You can get a glimpse of what it looks like; and

c) You can get a different perspective on what you're looking at.

I aim to get you out of the box,

Even if only for the briefest of moments.

You can do it, consciously and willingly.

Here's how --

• Acknowledge you are caught inside the box
• Appreciate that the box does have an outside
• Own that there's something right now that you feel right about, that there's something you're defending.
• If you want to know what position you're on right now, it will be the opposite to those positional people you're resisting, the ones who keep showing up in your face to mess up your day.
• Look at it, as objectively as you can. Don't think about it; just see it. The seeing is the movement.
• Get the joke. If you can see the funny side of it, you're out! (and you will go back in again -- but that's OK. You know how to get out whenever you want to.)

Only from outside of the box,

When we jump off our point-of-view for a moment,

We see that we have available to us

Other, optional Points TO View.

Once we are outside the box

We can go anywhere,

And everywhere.

Now that's freedom.

Warning: Your mind isn't going to solve this problem; your mind is the problem.

There's a non-sense Zen riddle that goes something like this ---

A goose was once raised in a large bottle.

There came a time when the goose grew too large for the bottle.

Question: How do we get the goose out of the bottle

Without damaging either the goose or the bottle?

Answer: The goose is out. 

(It was never in the bottle in the first place. I was mistaken about that.)

GIVING & RECEIVING

Never underestimate the beauty of giving
The gift of Receiving.
When you openly and gratefully receive something,
You are giving to the Giver.
Graciously receiving the bounty offered by another
Blesses and enhances both the giver and the receiver,
And opens us to the flow of all creation.

This is a flowing universe,
Ebbing and surging,
Expanding and contracting,
Creating and destroying,
Exploding and imploding,
Rising and falling,
Giving and receiving...........

The whole of nature receives from the earth, and its universal environment
All that it needs to be what it is --
Food, air, sunshine, a place to hang out.....
And nature, in turn, gives of itself
Freely and unconditionally.
No money changes hands;
No limits or conditions are imposed
By anyone or anything, except man.
Everything is free.
Everything.
Abundantly.
Each tree gives its shelter, each flower gives its perfume and colour
Unconditionally and without prejudice or favour.
(A tree doesn't look at a passer-by and say to itself "I'm not going to give my shelter to HIM!")
And, just in case you hadn't noticed,
This natural system works,
And worked for a long time before we showed up.

Whatever we human beings decide to be, we are supported;
Mother Theresa or Adolph Hitler --
Everyone is totally and unconditionally allowed and supported
By an abundant universe that celebrates diversity.
Whatever we decide to be,
Existence sets up the creation, makes space for us,
And gives us everything we need
To become what we think we are.
In return --
We have to give of what we've created.
Give, we must.
We have no choice but to give of what we are.
If we don't give willingly,
Life has a way of ensuring the flow of energy returns to Source,
With or without our consent.
This is the law of reciprocation, cause and effect, sequence and consequence;
There is no choice about it.
But we do have the option, the space, and the responsibility to Choose --
Choosing what-is to be as it is,
Choosing to participate or resist the flow,
Choosing what we decide to be and experience,
Which in turn influences what we will receive
From our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual environment.
We also choose what and how we willingly pay forward of what we are.
It is a law of life.

RADIATING, SERVING AND SHARING


Our giving can take the form of Radiating, Serving or Sharing.

Radiating is the aura that involuntarily emanates from the deepest core of our being.
Sometimes our radiance is in harmony with the images we have of ourself
And the facades we put on like make-up every morning
As we prepare to "face" the world.
More often, however, the radiance and the ego-generated images are out of kilter,
Generating confusion, misunderstanding, hesitation and distrust.
A person who ignores his/her own radiance and relies on the manufactured image,
Is almost certain to miss the radiance of others,
And be fooled by their appearances.

Service.
There's a lot of altruism wrapped around the concept of Service,
So what I'm about to say is bound to get up some nostrils.
Service is touted as the most noble of all endeavours, and as a highway to heaven.
Well, I beg to disagree. In my book
Service sucks.
It is (usually) just another phoney façade.
My father taught me Service and Sacrifice
(Notice how often those two are grouped together);
My mother taught me Sharing.
My father got a carefully cautious, polite wrap in his eulogy;
My mother touched lives, and her passing mattered.

My objection to service lies not in the altruistic act itself,
But in the motivation for it --
The place the server comes from in the act of serving.
It seems that people who Serve are in it for some reward,
They want something in return.....
A sale, a ticket to heaven, a convert, friendship, support.
When they don't get what they want in return,
Resentment surfaces,
A resentment that always existed, hidden within the holy cloak of Service.
Their serving is synthetic;
It is all give, with little take
And it is either coated with sticky adhesive (like flypaper), or loaded with barbed hooks (like an Italian mother).
Service has no internal warmth.
It is an act of pure selfishness.

Sharing opens up an ebbing and flowing of our deepest self.
Sharing has deep multi-way value.
As you look more closely into the act of sharing,
It becomes impossible to differentiate between "givers" and "receivers";
It is one process.

Sharing involves personal commitment and communion.
There is no resentment, no contraction, no conditioning;
Everybody wins and grows.

The difference between serving and sharing is one of attitude,
How you see it,
Where you come from while you're doing the altruistic thing.
The results differ, too.
Serving can be likened to sowing genetically modified seed --
The crop may be edible,
But you can't grow another crop from its seeds,
And God knows what other side effects lurk inside.
Sharing is creative and natural;
It is our nature.

Open sharing is genuine,
Both selfish and un-selfish.
To Share you must first know and love yourself;
You cannot share what you don't have.
If needs be, hold off on sharing until you can do it willingly,
And give only what you can afford to not-have.
When you give away something you cannot afford,
You are "sacrificing" --
The shittiest control game on the planet.

I use a number of analogies for Sharing -----
Consider a honey-bee.
The bee takes proffered nectar and, in so doing, spreads life-generating pollen.
Neither the bee nor the flower think about this,
Or negotiate a deal;
It just happens -- naturally
While the bee is being a bee, and the flower is being itself (pun intended)
I use the analogy of a raincloud
Which becomes so heavy with moisture
That it gives naturally of its life-giving water
So that it may be en-lightened.
To use another analogy that works for me --
A fruit tree in season becomes so burdened with its fruit that it is bowed down.
It is grateful when someone comes to pick its fruit
So that its limbs can rise again to the sunshine
And bear more fruit.

Neither the honeybee, the flower, the raincloud nor the fruit tree seek any reward --
They are glad of the enlightenment.
By the same token, a receiver ought not feel obligated,
For in taking what was freely and unconditionally on offer,
The receiver is giving.
No hooks, no obligations, no tit-for-tat, no unfinished business.
If you feel any sense of obligation,
Walk away,
And look at your contribution to that situation.

Service sucks
Sharing is the dignity of being
In action.

MASTER CLASS -- COMMUNICATION

Create what-is

Put it where it is -- in context

Be theatrical about it.

Junk communication serves the act, but not the purpose of communicating.

Real communication informs, makes a difference, inspires and empowers

People might not always get the whole gist of what you say,

But they always get where you're coming from when you say it.

Your words come from only two places --

The silences of your heart,

Or the noise in your head.

Where you come from is what you'll create;

Whatever song is going on in your head,

Is what they'll pick up on.

If you're coming from confusion, they'll get confusion.

If you're coming from "being right", that's what they'll react to, and be right about their reaction.

If you're singing a Victim song, they'll get you're a victim, and react accordingly.

It takes a lot of awareness and determination on the part of the listener,

To NOT take you at your own unconscious self-appraisal.

Straight-line what you have to say.
If there's a choice between straight, or sincere

Be direct, rather than sincere;

Sincerity is a vastly overrated virtue --

The village idiot is capable of being sincere.

Say what you mean, and mean what you say,

When you say it.

And create your listeners/readers as ABLE.

Communicate your feelings:

People see in pictures,

But they remember with feelings.

WHAT TO DO....?

The stranger it feels,
The more you need to do it.

THE GAME OF LIFE

Enlightenment is only a game.
In this game,
We deliberately lose something
So that we can find it again.
In the process, we discover something we'd formerly overlooked.

Enlightenment isn't the only game in town
But it's the only one where, when the game is over,
Everyone has won, and
You get to take the prize home with you.

Game on!

COMMITMENT AND DUTY

The international symbol for Commitment looks a bit like this ---

W

It means to put your arse on the line.

But what is the difference between Commitment and Duty?
And when does Commitment turn into Duty?

• When it stops feeling like a liberating of the life force in me, and starts to feel like I'm getting entrapped in a "should".
• When it feels like a narrowing-down, rather than an opening-up;
• When it becomes fixated on another, rather than giving expression to my deepest Self;
• When it feels like an obligation, rather than a willing engaging with, and a consecrating to, something larger than just the sum of myself and that which I'm committed to.

 This latter kind of commitment, to something larger than just the sum of parts, is the kind of commitment I look for in relationship. A relationship where the two individuals are committed just to each other and/or to "the relationship", can deteriorate into Duty. A relationship that stands committed to something more than just the sum of its parts -- ie. a context -- is far more likely to flourish, and nourish all those within coo-ee of it.

+++++++

Whenever I feel a commitment closing in,
I look for the prejudicial expectations that have crept in,
And replace each "should" with a "could"-----
"I should do this because........" 
Is replace by
"I could do this  because........., or I could do something else, like......"
Possibilities immediately begin to open up
And space is created to re-cognise the connection
Between what I was committing to,
And my heart's deepest desire.

Commitment is a deliberate, liberating, joyful, whole-hearted expression
Of my best self,
Willingly aligned
With becoming what I want.

In fact, you can't live life without committment.
In a way,
Under a camouflage of "duties",
Everyone is committed -- to many things and people,
But few truly acknowledge
"Committed to What exactly?"

What are your Commitments,
As distinct from your duties?

Only you can answer that, for you.
And some profound research may be required,
Because you may have a bunch of commitments
You don't even know about.
If you need some help, try this for starters ---

Create at least five endings to each of the following statement stems:-
(Jot down everything that occurs to you. Censor nothing -- if a thought pops, put it on paper.)

• One of the situations which seems to keep recurring lately is...........
• One of the things I'm really dead against is.............
• One of the emotions that I feel quite often is..........
• I often catch myself having uncomfortable thoughts like...............
• I am beginning to realise that I may have some kind of attraction for ..............

Look at your list now.
All these things you barely knew about.
Those things you're now looking at
You have an emotional investment in.
There is an element of Commitment in each and every one.

Now you see it:
Now they're gone;
The seeing IS the movement.

We cannot live without commitment,
But it's probably wise to unmask the energy investments that rob us of our well-being,
And commit a little more
To qualities that inspire us,
Don't you think?

YOUR SOUL MATE

Girls,
You're wasting your time looking/waiting for Prince Charming,
He is not to be found.
He has to be created.

Blokes,
The only way to find whatever you're looking for
Is to create her.

Over to you............

TAKE THE TRIP

The Trip is the raison d'etre of being alive;
Goals are just excuses.
Bliss lies in the journey, not the goal;
The proper purpose of Goals is simply to get started, to take a particular trip.
Goals are like sennapods,
They keep us moving .

Movement is life,
And life itself is the reason for living.
Becoming is the only purpose for anything.
The moment we stop moving, stop becoming,
We are dead....
Upright and breathing.

God is always beyond...........

A man spent his whole life looking for God.
He journeyed the world,  
Asking everyone he met , along the roads and in the marketplaces,
"I'm looking for God; have you seen him?

One day he got a bite --
"Yes," said a stranger. "He lives in this town. Here is his address," he added, handing the seeker a business card on which was printed in modest Times Roman 12-point-- "God", and a local address.
Eagerly the man raced off and hailed a cab to the address on the card. "I'm going to meet God," he excitedly told the cabbie. "I'm told he lives at this address!" "Yes," said the cabbie.  "That's where He lives alright. Been living there for longer than I can remember."
They drew up to a modest, single-fronted cottage in a side street. Sure enough, the letter box carried a small nameplate -- "God". Nervously, the man opened the front gate and walked up the path to the front porch. For a moment he stood looking at the front door. Finally he reached out to press the doorbell button, when a thought hit him. He froze. For a few moments he was paralysed by indecision. Finally, he lowered his hand, turned slowly away, returned to the street and walked away........

WISDOM

Did you hear the story
Told by Gautam the Buddha
About the blind man who spent his entire life arguing that Light doesn't exist?

What's the adage about "None so blind....."?

All thinking is groping in the darkness,
Like blind men arguing about light.

Seeing is altogether a different matter;
Seeing is experiencing.

No matter how hard or long we think,
Reasoning never leads to the experience of anything other than reasoning.
Without experience,
We become reasonably stupid
Rather than innocently sense-able.

Experiencing leads to in-sight.
With insight, arguments evaporate.

Think for yourself,
Experience for yourself,
Open all your senses,
(There are more than 5, you know)
And be a seer.

TRUST -- THE BEST DEFENCE?

I've done a fair amount of travelling alone,
In two or three of the worst-reputed crime areas on the planet.
And, after a wonderful incident in downtown Sicily, arguably the criminal capital of the world,
I noticed something -----
One of the surest (and easiest) ways to ensure the safety of your bags while you (eg.) go to the toilet
Is to ask a complete stranger to watch them for you.
Trust de-powers Deception.
I can't explain how that happens.
It's a mystery to me.
There seems to be something about innocent trust
That brings out the best in even the worst of us.
Watch a bunch of thugs on a bus
When confronted with the unjudgmental gaze of a little child!

I'm not talking about "trust" as a verb,
Or about trust as something given and/or received:
That's not quite it.
That kind of "trust" is a negotiation
And a product and function of existing dis-trust.
That kind of "trust", being positional and opposed/tied to Distrust,
Will attract an experience of distrust,
We get what we resist.
And there is no shortage of consters and manipulators around
Who are ever ready to oblige anyone who's on the lookout for betrayal.
When looking at chronically co-dependent relationships,
I'm often intrigued by a question --
"Who is the greater manipulator here --
The one manipulating, or the one being manipulated?"

I'm talking about Trust as a way of doing what we do,
An implicit assumption,
An unquestioned expectation,
A way of giving and receiving,
As a way of being;
Trust as a quality of space that we come from -- "trust-ness".

The magic of pure, innocent trust was at the core of one of the most extraordinary films ever made --
"Being There."
Trust transcends just about everything,
Because it plugs directly into the essential innocent nature of everyone and everything.
We are all innocent, inasmuch as we do not know what we know.

Have you never noticed that a truly innocent person is almost immune to deception?
It's well-nigh impossible to deceive a very young child!
They know. They've got you sussed. It just doesn't bother them much.

When one unconditionally lives in trust, one tends to attract it.
Trust and innocence create their own energy in an aura;
It becomes almost impossible for others, even criminals, to deceive you.
It is far easier to deceive a deceiver,
To victimise a victim,
To cheat a cheat.....
"I've been used!" is a perception that can only arise from a victim consciousness.
A true Innocent (as distinct from ignorant or naive) is never exploited or cheated,
He just doesn't see it that way.
And if he doesn't see it that way, it isn't so.
But the world disagrees with that and calls it "mad".

Who's going mad, I wonder.
The trusters, or the distrusters?

MEMORIES

Memories are uncompleted past experiences,
Arising as dreams,
Asking for completion.

A bird on the wing leaves no footprint in the sand;
An experience that has been fully experienced
Leaves no footprint in the mind,
Only the wisdom of the fulfilled feeling
In the soul.

How far back can you remember?
Research tells me -- probably to around age 3, if you are a girl,
Or age 4, if you are a boy.
It doesn't matter; my question is,
Whenever it was,
What happened before then that you cannot "remember"?
In your innocence then,
You lived each experience to the fullest of your capacity,
Leaving no residue.
Our store of memories began
In that moment we first hefted unfinished emotional business.

Memories are un-lived moments,
Hanging around for completion.
Once fully experienced, they will let go,
Done with,
Incorporated into the whole.
That moment will come to each and every one of us.
If not before,
At the moment of death,
Even sudden death,
When our life is flashing before our eyes,
Time is suspended
While we complete all that is incomplete.
For the person who has passed on,
There are no loose ends.
Those of us who are left alive
Are invited to square our side of the emotional ledger.
That's why we have rituals around saying "Goodbye".

DOUBTS

To a child,
Being an adult appears to be without doubt.
It's an act, a bluff.
That's why we waste so much energy in our teens
Trying to cover our doubts with Certainty;
We're trying to act "grown-up".
Most of us haven't yet fully matured beyond that point.

Maturity is the measure of how we handle our doubt.

I love my doubts (most of them, anyway);
They remind me of mystery and paradox
And put my "certainties" into a more realistic perspective.
My doubts prompt me to enquire,
And my intelligence grows.
After our mid-teens,
Faith and Belief are un-intelligent,
Except as prompts to examine our doubts.

KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWING

It has been said that "Knowledge is power."
I question that assumption.
The hiccup for me lies in the definitions of the words "knowledge" and "power".
The people most prone to use the motto
Confuse "power" with "control",
And "knowledge" with "knowing".

Power is another word for whatever it is that drives the universe.
I look outward and inward into the universe and see an awesome power,
But not a lot of cosmic manipulation or control going on.
Contrarily, I see Allowing to be the general rule.
It seems to me that, in true power, there is no need for control.
Control becomes an issue for much smaller minds,
A strategy adopted by those who feel power-less.

Knowledge is a pile of what we think we know.
Knowing arises naturally and unbidden from awareful, first-hand experience.
Knowledge is understood in the mind;
Knowing is "got", first in the gut, then radiating and infusing throughout the entire being.
Knowledge is disposable:
Knowing is forever.
Knowledge is limited and limiting:
Knowing is fluid and expansive.

Knowledge is cheap and easy:
Knowing can be costly, risky, and needs courage.
Knowledge can be bought off the shelf almost anywhere:
Knowing is available only from within yourself.

Knowing tests your capacity:
Knowledge occupies your memory.
Knowledge is a measure of your ability
To carry dead corpses around with you...
The older, the more revered.

Knowledge is borrowed and adopted.
It has to be proven.
It is a plastic caricature of Knowing,
Knowledge is an assumed decoration,
Without roots or fragrance.

Knowledge is fixed:
It has no life of its own.
Knowing is a continuous growing -- a living process.
It belongs to your consciousness and its evolution.
There is nothing to be proved.

Knowledge, no matter how great it is,
Makes not one iota of difference to your ignorance.
Knowledge allows ignorance to remain intact;
Knowledge simply covers it up with a camouflage of intellectual-ism;
Behind the borrowed words there is no experience.

Knowing dispels ignorance
Like light dispels darkness.

Scholars are learners:
Wise men are seers.
All wise men remain students:
But few scholars become wise men.
Scholars can deceive many people, especially themselves, that they are wise,
But there is no journey in a scholar's life,
Like a pole dancer, he slides and dances around on tiny podiums
Of what he thinks he knows.
There is no exploration of the Unknown or the Unprovable,
No discovery.

The wise man generalises;
The scholar specialises.
He zooms in and acquires more and more knowledge about less and less
Until he becomes an expert about nothing.

Knowledge is a purseful of counterfeit coins,
Of no value outside of its dead weight in raw material;
They sound impressive when you jingle them,
But won't buy you much of real value.
Only something genuine and real can be real-ised.

The wise man dis-owns everything that is not authentically his own.
He cleanses
And meditates.
He becomes aware of, and values the space and possibilities provided by his ignorance.
He discovers his Innocence,
His Inner-sense,
His I-know-sense.

Anything that is not author-ised by you
Is false.
The knowing of another stalls at the level of Belief,
And cannot become your knowing until tested (not confirmed or denied) by your experience.
You have to seek and search on your own.
You have to risk the unknown paths
In trust that, since others have found their truths and lived to tell the tale,
Yours will be available to you also.
Become as a little child --
Wide-eyed and wondering,
Shamelessly knowing nothing,
And experiencing everything

It can be difficult to disown knowledge,
Because knowledge gives you a measure of respectability in the eyes of your peers.
If you accumulate enough great knowledge, it may earn you some fame, framed certificates and perhaps even fortune.
Thousands get to know you --
Everyone except you,
(And the people who have to live with you.)

Superior knowledge is great for your ego,
You get to strut your stuff;
But ego, being borrowed, can thrive only on things borrowed.
There is no author-enticity.

Scholars, by and large, do not discover new truths.
Rather, they sit around like cud-chewing cows,
Hiccuping up and masticating over second-hand ideas about truth.
The perceived validity of the truth
Is measured by the perceived stature of the person who is mouthing off about it.

I'm reminded of Aesop's fable about the five blind men who went to see an elephant.
As I remember it, one man took hold of a leg, one grasped the trunk, one had an ear, another grabbed the tail, and the last one had hold of a tusk. Each was then asked to describe an elephant.......
Even speaking from our own experience ,
We're all in the same bind --
Claiming to know The Truth about something we have only a limited hold of,
Talking with certainty about things we know nothing about.
Armed only with knowledge, we are like --
The blind discussing Light,
The deaf discussing Music
The noisy discussing Silence.

Reputation, respectability and comfort
Are symptoms of a slow death.
Your only saviours will ever be

• Your own realisation of your own truth,
• Your own knowing of the meaning of life; and
• Your own experience, and the insights (not conclusions) you gain from it.

Experienced experience is wordless;

It is a taste, a nourishment.

It fulfills you.

The word "love" is not love.

Nor is the idea of "love" love.

When you have experienced love,

Both the word and the idea-of become superfluous.

To think about water is one thing --

You could get a PhD on your thesis about H2O,

But you'll never quench your thirst on it.

A thirsty wise man goes to a well, not a library;

He does not review all that he knows about water,

He simply drinks it, and is satisfied.

Thinking is a game,

A pastime to titillate you when you do not know.

When you know, thinking-about is unnecessary.

Believing is a game,

Another pastime to titllate you when you do not know.

You believe when you have not experienced for yourself.

The only trouble is,

Your mind can't tell the difference;

It reacts to a belief as if it's real.

What happens in you when you see a glorious sunset?

I catch a thought - "What a glorious sunset"

And the experience dies instantly. Thinking kills it. I'm out of it.

To get it back, I used to turn to the person next to me --

"Look at that beautiful sunset!"

And immediately kill it for both of us.

Words are a barrier to your experience;

They are a commentary, a judgment, an attempt to prove that you are sensitive, a showing-off.... ego stuff.

Nowadays I just..... shut up.

As far as I can in the moment, I be-with the sunset,

And allow others to be-with their experience of it, too.

I just want to Know the sunset.

Maybe we might talk about it later........

Maybe not.

Some things are too precious to blurt about.

INTUITION

Teach not how to be,
For how can I know the path of another?
Impart the language of the body,
Share the language of the soul,
Reveal the nature of the mind,
Radiate the nature of the spirit --
Make all your tuition --
In-tuition.

Let "the facts" take their rightful place as superstitious half-truths.
They, along with all laws, opinions, beliefs, doctrines and -isms
Are the fodder of Tuition.
They are external props we turn to for comfort
When we have sold out on our Intuition.

NORMAL

Greek mythology tells a story of a rather shifty guy called Procrustes (which literally means "He who stretches".)
Procrustes ran a roadside B & B whose house speciality was what he advertised as "a very unique guest bed". Theseus, who happened to be passing through the district one evening, asked Procrustes what was so special about this bed. Procrustes boasted "It's length exactly matches whoever lies in it."
It turned out that Procrustes, like you and me, had a thing about people fitting his opinions of what is ideal, and got his jollies by stretching short people on a rack until they fitted the bed, and lopping bits of legs off people who were too tall. (Needless to say, before the night was out, Theseus gave him the opportunity to get a taste of his own medicine.)

I have a problem with terms like "ideal", "average" and "normal". They strike me as cute, artificial mathematical and psychological niceties that bear no practical relevance whatsoever to the realities of human difference.
An "average, normal" person does not exist.

Principles, laws, moralities, doctrines, and theories started out as the observed averages of someone's experiences in an attempt to find some sort of structure and  order in the chaos of profusion we call Existence. But somewhere along the way, the observations turned into rules, which we now expect each other, other realities and ourselves (except sometimes) to conform to.

The main problem I see with an imperative to Conformity is that
The driving influence of evolution is Non-conformity;
It is the exceptions to the normal, the breakers of moulds, the up-heavers of the earth's crust
That trigger and fuel the processes of growth and renewal.
Without them, life begins to stagnate and die.
Conformity kills.
Somehow each of us is struggling to find a balance in our lives
Between two opposing urges -- Conformity and Origin-ality --
Which both arise from the most primal of all urges,
The will to survive.

As I see the what-is of this,
The Average and the Particular rarely, if ever, fit in every respect --
Not without some stretching and/or pruning.
In a quest for efficiency and control
We reach for conformity,
And get monoculture,
Which, being totally artificial, brings its own set of problems.
Mono-culture is un-natural.
Normality is a comforting fiction.

Procrustes' guests never came back for seconds;
Why do we?

THE DIGNITY OF RESPECT

An aura of Dignity
Is the outer evidence of inherent Respect.
I find true respect to be a state of honour, esteem and trust in the whole nature of Self,
A state of being that is shared unconditionally with other people,
And the nature of all things.

Respect for others begins with respect for one's self,
And ends with the loss of self-trust and self-respect.
When we say we've "lost our respect" for someone else,
We usually mean we feel unsafe in their presence;
We no longer trust the security of our Self.

Most of us lost touch with self-trust and respect
When we sold out to respectability.

In its stead we replaced self-respect with self-justification,
And respect for others
With a veneer of (sincerely felt) obedience, politeness, tolerance, friendship,
A show of support,
And maybe even awe and reverence.
None of those things is, of itself, Respect.
The shell is therefore brittle,
As evidenced by how we react when someone we thought we respected
Does something, as all humans do from time to time, contrary to "character".
We feel let down, affronted and suddenly awfully vulnerable.
When we get upset about it,
It's a good sign that we were kidding ourselves:
What we felt for this person was something far less than genuine respect.

But we'll rarely cop to that;
We'd rather blame the "other' for betraying us,
And feel hurt and right.

LIFE & SURRENDER

Life is a process,
Always complete, and always completing itself.
Life is a constant over-coming,
Over-going beyond itself.
Everything is complete in itself
And
Evolving to be better, more beautiful, more powerful, more.........
Life is Evolution,
Progressively linear and quantumly leaping,
Continually transcending itself.

Anti-life is the opposite of all that --
Against evolution,
Keeping us stuck in righteous dogmas, beliefs and opinions --
In non-experience.
(You can include any and every belief system and religion in the category of Anti-life).

Life seeks to express itself
In an exuberance of Being.
Why on earth do we work so hard to suppress that?
Surrender to life!
Life surrenders to itself.
Rejoin the club!

There are Laws of Life
That supersede any "laws" made by man.
What I call the Ruthless Rules of Reality will be obeyed,
Whether you know about them, or believe them, or not.
It might be an idea to find out what they are,
Don't you think?

Surrender to the way things are;
Surrender to the feelings of your heart and soul;
Surrender to the intelligence of your mind;
Surrender to the intuition of your spirit.

If you cannot surrender to this life,
You will be commanded
By things outside of yourself.
The question arises, then, whether you choose to obey commands,
Or surrender to living.
Who or what has the authority of your life?
These are choices that you get to make,
Consciously or otherwise.

No scripture is as old or as wise as Consciousness,
Perceived by your body, mind, soul and spirit.
No messiah, saviour or priest is as authoritative as your own conscious awareness.
If you will not surrender to your own life,
You put yourself at the beck and call of "others".

Gods surrender;
Cowards obey.

BELIEVING AND KNOWING

Knowing is yours;
Fresh and original.
Believing is borrowed,
Stale and copied.
Believing is a bit like one of those umpteenth-generation copies of a defective video
That people send in your emails.
Any belief is a copy of someone else's limited conclusions
About a long-dead experience.
A belief is as nourishing and tasty as someone's press review of a long-gone-cold restaurant meal.

Believing and disbelieving come cheap.
You don't have to invest yourself,
Investigate for yourself,
Or think or feel for yourself.
Belief is for the lazy --
A way of existing without living;
A way of being right
Without having to put your arse on the line.
Victims love believing --
They know they're gonna be let down,
Another thing to be right about.

The getting of Knowing
Involves effort, risk and courage,
And the willingness to navigate the doldrums of belief-less Not-Knowing.
No-one gets to Knowing without passing through Not-knowing.
And all minds hate not-knowing.

And if you believe any of the above
You haven't been paying attention.

Do beliefs have any useful function?
I think so.
They make temporary connections between points of real experience,
Bridging intervening gulfs of what I don't know.
They make good temporary ladders and scaffolds
On which I can climb to a different viewpoint
Enabling me to see from a different perspective.

But the key word is "temporary".
They should be used and demolished as quickly and as often as possible,
Before they become part of the landscape.

LIVE DANGEROUSLY

The crowd lives tepid, lukewarm lives,
Neither hot nor cold,
Avoiding extremes,
Always carefully manoeuvring safely along a mid-line crisis.

Those who are obsessed with safety and security
Will never be explorers, discoverers, or even first-generation settlers.
By the time they feel safe enough to move anywhere new,
Their destination will be well and truly stale, sterile and out of date.

Knowledge is cold.
Knowing wisdom is hot.
A lukewarm life is neither living nor dying;
A living death and a deathly life
Leading where?
To the grave.
Every one of our securities and safeties leads to a living death.
You want to be a zombie, surviving just long enough to die?
Yes? Well, that's your prerogative.
But when you get to the threshold at the end of your days
You will be asked, as you surrender your consciousness to the gatekeeper -
"Is that all there is?"

Opportunity dances seductively before you!
Dance with it, as if no-one is watching.
However and whatever you're feeling,
Celebrate your ability to feel it!
One who has lived totally, intensely
Comes to know the deathless within him.
The grave may be waiting,
But not death.
He got Death out of the way long ago
So that he could get on with Life.

FEAR

If you're afraid of danger,
You do not yet know your immortal self.
Fear shows up our ignorance,
That's all.

JEALOUSY

Jealousy is a very compulsive, insane, irrational form of Inadequacy
With a sneaky Get-Out-of-Gaol-Free Card thrown in.
The sufferer tries (often very successfully) to make someone else responsible
For making him/her feel Enough and Sufficient to himself.
As a strategy -- "I make myself feel jealous to feel adequate and happy" --
It's doomed to failure.

As a generality,
Men and women have differently flavoured jealousies
That haven't changed since our days as trogolodytes:
For a woman, Jealousy sounds like "I cannot survive without this person."
For a man, Jealousy sounds (and looks) like "This person is My Property".

Jealous people suck.
And bully. And manipulate and control.......
And they are amazingly successful at finding willing victims
Who get their jollies out of being loved that way.

People who are comfortably enough with and for themselves
Don't get jealous.
Ever.
And they tend not to get emotionally entangled with people on the lookout
For someone to cling to.

So if you get a twinge of jealousy,
You now know where to look.
If you feel someone suckering onto you,
Walk away.
It's the kindest and most empowering thing you can do
For both of you.

NEGATIVE SELF-IMAGE

Your negative self-image is the bastard brainchild
Of your Inner Critic and your Fear of Not-surviving.

Your negative self-image is almost certainly hidden from you --
Your ego is obsessed with looking good,
And your NSI is nastier than you know;
Your mind will do anything to keep it out of sight,
From others and yourself.
Over the years, you and others may have caught an odd glimpse or two of bits of it,
But I venture to suggest you have no idea what the whole thing looks like.
You are terrified of it,
And you have every right to be.
You created it to help you get along,
But your creation has turned feral on you.
Your Negative Self-Image is the Mole that very effectively arranges to sabotage
Your highest endeavours and aspirations.

Get this......
Your negative self image DESPISES you.
It has no respect or admiration for you whatsoever.
When you sold out and turned your life over to him/her
It lost all regard for you and your wellbeing,
And so did you.

Do you think it might be a good idea
To find out what it is?
Do you have that much courage and commitment?

SELF-ESTEEM

Old habits sometimes die hard.
I still catch myself occasionally concerning myself about what someone else thinks of me.
(Especially my children and grandchildren).
What am I not giving to myself?

If I need someone -- anyone -- "liking" me,
It's a sure sign of the presence of guilt, embarrassment or shame,
And that there is some liking to be done over here in my space.
If I need someone to respect me,
There is some self-respect lacking here in my own backyard.
When I'm not liking or respecting myself,
I'm unconsciously teaching others to not like or respect me, too.
That's how it works.

Despising oneself and expecting others to fill the Affection Deficit
Is, at best, unrealistic, and
At worst,
A shitty Testing Game
Of manipulation and control.

If we don't respect our self,
The rest of the world will end up agreeing with us --
Most of them anyway.
When we do like and respect our selves,
What others think and feel doesn't much matter
To our peace of mind.

A SELF-EXAMINATION -- ANGER

Consider the following questions. Find at least 5 answers for each.

• How am I creating so many situations to get angry at?
• What does anger do for me? What are its positive benefits? (There are some, or we wouldn't do it.)
• What could I possibly be believing that causes all these frustrations?
• What expectations do I have of other people and myself that are not being met?
• What might I be putting out that attracts in others the need to irritate me?
• Why might I believe that, in order to get what I want, it's best to get angry?

Complete the following sentences with at least 5 different endings:

• Looking at what I've just written, I'm beginning to realise.......................
• Looking through the above discoveries, I could reduce my contribution to fuelling my own anger by....................
• If I were less angry, less often...................................

A SELF-EXAMINATION -- BELIEFS AND OTHER LIMITATIONS

The purpose of this meditation
Is to listen to the thoughts and feelings,
And the beliefs and limiting attitudes
That the questions provoke.


Please don't treat this meditation as an inquisition --
Be firm, loving, gentle, and empathetic in your probing........

• Complete this sentence stem at least 10 times --- "To be a better person, I should......................"
• For each ending, ask "Why?" Write down at least 5 responses to each.
• For each sentence ending, now substitute the stem -- " If I really wanted to, I COULD.............."
• Then, for each sentence, gently enquire "Why haven't you?  Again, write down at least 5 responses to each.

Be with those last responses,

And allow whatever happens.

To happen.

Be aware.

Be the uncritical Watcher.

List all the negative messages you got about anything you can remember, from 

• your immediate family,
• your relatives,
• your teachers
• your other authority figures
• your friends
• your church

Observe and allow any feelings and thoughts that arise.

Wherever there is a problem

There is something yet to KNOW,

And a possibility you've overlooked.

List any problems you're having with --

• your Body
• your Finances
• your Work
• your Relationships
• your Love Life

What kind of thoughts are you having that feed into this problem? Be specific.

What do you know about yourself in each of these categories? Write each belief down. Censor nothing. When the Belief List is exhausted, look at each one in turn, and gently ask yourself -- Is this really true, in every case? 

Or are there times and places when the opposite is true? 

What are those times and places?

THE HARDEST THING TO SAY.....

Stand naked in front of a full-length mirror.
Look who you see there in the eye............

I love and accept you exactly as you are.

Repeat until all traces of discomfort or smugness disappear.

NOW AND FUTURE PASSED

THE PAST

The past is a just a grab-bag of imperfect products of experience and soul-memory, re-hashed now.

One thing I've noticed about past history -- for most people it keeps repeating itself.

People who drive down the freeway with their heads glued to the rear-view mirror
Keep crashing into things.

THE FUTURE

The future is nothing more than a bunch of imagined effects and possible consequences of what I create now.

The Past and the Future are constructs of the mind. Psychologists assume (usually safely) that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. It's a fairly safe assumption because the nexus between Past and Future can only be broken by a conscious, deliberate act in the Present moment and most people, outside of a sneeze or an orgasm, are rarely, if ever fully present and available to Now.
The assumption of connection is totally invalidated, however, if there is any kind of conscious intervention or reinvention in the present.
Whether the connection between the so-called Past and Future is intact or broken, answers for the future do not lie in the past; they spring from questions asked here and now. If no creative questions are asked now, now will merely repeat itself ad infinitum.

NOW

Without Now, the past and the future do not exist, even in fantasy.
Now is not only the fulcrum,
The balance-point between the Past and the Future,
The Present is also the father,
The source of both the Past and the Future.
Which came first -- the past or the present?
The present.
Without this present, there is no past, or future.

Now is the greatest "I" has ever been, and will ever be;
Evolution does not slide backwards.

Now is the source and the purpose of all I once was
And the launching pad for what I will be.
Why waste time and energy pondering who you think you might have been in the past
Or what you think you might become in the future
When you don't know who you truly are now?
When you finally get around to knowing what you are now,
There is nothing to justify --
So the past is no longer important
(When your destination is in sight, the map of how you got there is irrelevant).
When you finally get around to knowing what you are now,
The future takes care of itself.

Every Now moment is a permissive virgin;
Learn to live in harmony with this now.

Instead of trying to squeeze yourself into something you think you ought to be,
Get to know who you are now;
(How hard can that be?)
If you want something to remember in your old age,
Make each now moment memorable;
Live it as fully as you can stand..........
And then some.

"What will become of me?" your mind cries in some anguish.
What will you become?
You will become what you already are -- YOU.
Get comfortable with that.
If you're really desperate to change what you become,
Make some choices to expand what you are now.

You're living an adventure.
Do whatever you're drawn to
And cop to the consequences.
Be a "yes" sayer.

This is the tyranny of Now --
Now never ends. Now is forever.
It has never been any other way,
Except in the glovebox of your mind.

HAPPINESS

I have a "What-If" for you.
Your head ain't gonna like it.
But if you can stand in this possibility for a while,
Not because it's The Truth -- it isn't,
(Well, not entirely anyway)
But because you might, as I did, get a shift in perspective about this enigmatic no-thing
Called Happiness.
You might loosen up a bit about how equivocal it seems to be.........
Wouldn't that be something?
Wouldn't getting happy be worth telling your head 
To get knotted somewhere else for 10 minutes
While you take a bath in hot possibility?

PRO-POSITION

Everyone is happy,

All of the time,

Because we are all, according to our will,

Doing exactly what we want to do,

Feeling exactly what we want to feel,

And experiencing exactly what we put out for.

We're just not happy about being so happy and successful!

Why?

Because we haven't realised what's going on.

If you're ill, and suffering about it, there's something you haven't "got" yet.

If you're feeling (angry), it's because you aren't done yet with the experience of being (angry).

If you're feeling impoverished in any way,

It's because there's some emotional juice in it for you.

If you're unhappy, it's because you choose to be this way.

And you are HAPPY in your misery.

You are being whatever you are being

Because that satisfies some need in you right now.

Now, the question is --

"What is that need? Why would someone do what I'm doing to myself?"

If a carpenter hits his thumb with his hammer,

He's not doing it for nothing;

What might the supposed payoff be?

Sympathy? Time off work? Compensation? To get some hold over The Boss?.........

(Fill in your own answers)

As pre-toddlers

We all got scared that our essential needs might not be met.

So we sold out on our natural happiness

And adopted Unhappiness

To manipulate others to look after us.

It wasn't neccessary -- we were mistaken about that, too.

But we developed a belief in Unhappiness
As  valid way of responding to a challenging environment.

Manipulation fairly quickly turned to efforts to dominate and control,

And we've been hard at it ever since

Trying to prove that the best way to get to Happiness

Is to be Unhappy.

We've missed a few startlingly obvious points --

• The strategy is not working. Du-uh-uh-uh!
• We've gotten old enough to take care of our own needs.
• Our personal Happiness is our business, no-one else's
• Happiness is not dependent on any one or any thing, and it will not be manipulated; it can only be accepted and realised out of What-Is.

Happiness begins to peep through the storm clouds when we realise --

• There's no other entity I would rather be than my self,
• There's no other place or time than I would rather be than here and now.

MANIFESTING ABUNDANCE

 A PROCESS

OF FEELING

.1. Contemplate the thought

.2. Embrace it with a feeling

.3. Bring it forth

.4. See yourself not getting it.

.5. Let it go

First there is the Thought about what you want. Harbour it, without need. State your intention. What is the feeling you want to experience? En-joy the thought behind the desire for its own sake. Receive the love of the simple act of contemplating. See it in your mind's eye. Image-ine it.

Next, become aware of the feeling through which the desire arrived. Perhaps that feeling was a kind of longing, perhaps it was more one of frustration. Whatever that feeling was, acknowledge it in gratitude ("Thank you for bringing me this desire"), and then let the feeling go. Then build on the feeling of gratitude; thankfulness for the ability to create what you want here/now in your experience. Allow Gratitude to enfold the idea. Surrender.... surrender...... surrender...... without giving your power away. Loosen up on what you think what you want should look like. Open up to what you really want; express that as a feeling you want to have as a result of getting what you want. Realise that that feeling is known to you (we cannot desire what we don't know) and is already available to you, with or without whatever you're trying to create. Connect with that. Give it to yourself. As a good gardener prepares the ground for the seeds he/she wants to grow, prepare yourself to receive and nourish what it is that you desire.

There. Step .3.  -- Bringing it forth -- is already taken care of. Here it already is. It now exists in your experience -- the only place where it will ever exist for you anyway.

Now, the hard bit. See yourself without what you think you want and sit with that until you're entirely OK with it. It is a law of creating that --

You cannot have that which you're not willing to NOT have.

Ah, the Positive Thinkers don't tell you about that one, do they? They resist the idea as "negative". Maybe that's one reason why they eventually lose what they amass, and find they've missed out on what they really wanted all along.

Do you still feel Scarcity or Lack?

That is what's stopping you;

It's crowding your space.

Wanting anything will leave you ---- wanting.

Your wanting is filling you up,

Leaving no room for anything else.

What you want sees the "House Full" sign

And moves on somewhere else.

Do you still want the Wanting?

No?

Then let go of the wanting.

Let it go; create some space,

And welcome whatever shows up in that space.

If you cannot be entirely OK with not getting what you want, take a step back to the next best option and get happy and calm about your resistance to the idea.

*********

"I Am" is all that there is. So contemplating what you want, or something better, into light, and embracing it with a welcoming feeling brings it forth from the "I Am". It is created. Don't intrude. Let  go of it, support it, set it free. Release that creative desire into the infinite universe and let existence do what it does every moment -- manifest desire. Trust that it is so.

(I'll let you in on a secret -- what you want actually already was so before you became aware of the thought of wanting it -- but I didn't tell you that at the outset because you probably wouldn't have believed it. Even if you don't believe it now, "I Am" doesn't care. What is so, is so, regardless of what we believe. If we don't believe it, it probably won't show up for us, that's all. But it will for others, because it exists)

Everything you have ever wanted, and everything you ever will want, exists and begins in and with you. Allow it to come forth! Get out of your own way!

So Be It.

Amen.

I already have abundance.

Sitting here in my cottage,

Writing this to you,

Looking out at my garden, with the sunlight flashing off the leaves like a universe of stars,

I have abundance.

My awareness is full.

I have eaten, and there is more food in my refrigerator than I can eat without making myself sick. I am sheltered from the wind and the rain, and although I do not have much money in my wallet, it is more than I can spend right here at this moment.

Right here and now,

I have Abundance.
How about you?

To find otherwise, we have to work hard;

We have to start worrying 

About an imagined future -- a phantasy.

How about you?
Contemplate the difference in feeling between Scarcity/Lack and Emptiness.
Scarcity/Lack fills you up with a negative emotional charge, repelling Possibility;
Emptiness has no emotion, otherwise it wouldn't be "empty".
Emptiness is pure Possibility.

NO OBLIGATION

Stephen Crane

A Man said to the Universe,

"Sir, I exist."

"However," replied the universe,

"The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation."

Kinda licks all the icing off your self-importance,

Don't it?

ASSUMPTIONS

As far as I've been able to see,
It's not possible to live any kind of life without allowing assumptions.
The trick is to aware-fully make assumptions,
Rather than allow assumptions to unconsciously make you.

Consciously gauge probabilities
On the basis of which you can go on to form reasonable and emotionally balanced assumptions
And then take appropriate risks.
Taking risks is a basic human need.
Sentient beings who don't take risks -- die:
That process is called evolution.

Risks are healthy; hazards are not.
The hazard of making assumptions
Is in not recognising that you're making them.

How do we know when we're being persuaded to swallow an assumption or three?
We start hearing phrases like --

• Everybody/we all/any idiot knows that.........
• It's self-evident/obvious that.........
• Obviously/undoubtedly/surely...............
• If you don't agree with what I say then you're against us..........

How do I recognise when I've personally been squatting on an assumption that I don't know about?
Life has given me a couple of marker-flags......
Called Failure and Embarrassment.
What great gifts!
They're like flashing neon signs to me that there are some assumptions I've been leaning on
That no longer stand up.

When you have an Assumption that you blithely treat as Fact,
Then you're headed for possibly serious trouble.
Become aware,
And be grateful for times when life reminds you
That you're standing on an assumption as if it were gospel truth.

(Do you want the gospel truth?
Are you sure? This is the cosmic joke.
OK. Here it is.....
There is no such thing as The Truth.
Pop that in your pipe and smoke it.)

I've found it impossible to avoid making assumptions,
So I've surrendered to that
And I now create them quite deliberately.
Assumptions, I've found, can take us to some very interesting places
And can be very creative , and even transforming.
It's important for freedom, however,
To continually examine them,
And discard them
Once we've seen all that what we wanted to see from that place.
Move on.

Can any of us live life without assumptions?
I doubt it.
But, if possible, they should never be the same assumptions
From one day to the next.
How good would it be if,
At the end of each day,
We could deliberately empty the Recycle Bin,
And wake up each new day,
Devoid of yesterday's leftovers --
Absolutely afresh?

I'm going to try that for the next 21 days.

RELATIONSHIPS

If you're expecting one relationship to fully meet all of your human needs,
You're in for disappointment.
No-one was put on this earth to do it all for you.
No-one.
(That's why we weren't just paired up on our own desert island paradise)

Make a list of people you relate with in a significant way.
What do you want from each one? (Be honest.)
If you're not getting what you want from a particular person (yes, that one!) --

• Are you trading off what you want for something else that is also of value to you?
• Are your expectations of what you want closing you off from gifts in disguise?
• How are your Receiving skills? Are they evenly balanced alongside your Giving?
• How are your Giving skills? Do people feel uncomfortable when you give them something?
• Do you feel comfortably deserving of what you want?
• Are you seeking it from the wrong person?

One purpose of relationship is to learn.

Be prepared to pay for the tuition, 

Rather than pay a later penalty for naivety and ignorance.

Never invest more into a relationship

Than you're prepared to happily pay

As the price for the experience.

HOW TO DEVELOP WILL POWER

A father once quipped to his daughter who had been pestering him for something --
"On this occasion, you have persuaded me with the power of your will;
But never underestimate the power of my "won't".

Take an inventory of things you WON'T do or consider, and places you won't go......

• In your career
• In your family life
• In your social life
• In your sexual life
• In your spiritual life
• Physically
• Financially
• Mentally

If you're like most of us,
You'll find you speak "Won't" a lot more often and fluently than "Will".
You may be slightly flabbergasted to discover
The extent to which "Won't" is your native tongue.

Develop a new habit:
Every daydo
Do one small thing
That you don't want to do.
Be fully present, available and responsible while you're doing it,
And acknowledge your self with gratitude when it's done.

"Will"-power gives "Will"-ingness real muscle.