What is life?
Any attempt to define the indefinable and limit the limitless is going to be futile
What is life about?
Personal power? Happiness? Honesty? Success? Enlightenment?
Sure. There's a lot of those things around.
It's also about Impotence. Suffering. Ignorance. Failure and Lostness. There's a lot of that around, too.
I've found my life to be about a bit of everything --
This and That
And neither This nor That....
All of This and That and more.....
And none of it really. There is something else.....
Life is what happens while you're living the unsolvable mystery,
Embracing the un-knowable,
Playing with agendas, timetables, plans, goals and expectations
In a medium that has none of the above.
Life could be a living, radiant, flowing present-ness, but it cannot be confined to that either.
So I make this declaration for myself --
My life is a surrender to not-knowing how it's going to turn out next, and a commitment to embrace as much as I can in the moment, and to journey wherever the flow may take me.
So be it.
Now you make your declaration, for yourself --
What is Life about?
Monday, March 15, 2010
SURRENDER
Outside of one limited condition
There are no "correct" answers.
Inside every condition
There are no absolute, universal truths.
Outside of ego, there is nothing worth fighting for.
Until I have learned right to the deepest core of my being
How to stop opposing and fighting entirely,
There will be no salvation.
It feels like I have a long way to go,
But I know. too. that the switcheroo is this close.
I have to find patience:
The switch is an act of grace, and will not be rushed.
For now, I'm surrendering to my resistances.
If you want something -- create it.
If you've got something that you don't want -- get that you created it
And welcome it home.
What you want is in there somewhere.
There are no "correct" answers.
Inside every condition
There are no absolute, universal truths.
Outside of ego, there is nothing worth fighting for.
Until I have learned right to the deepest core of my being
How to stop opposing and fighting entirely,
There will be no salvation.
It feels like I have a long way to go,
But I know. too. that the switcheroo is this close.
I have to find patience:
The switch is an act of grace, and will not be rushed.
For now, I'm surrendering to my resistances.
If you want something -- create it.
If you've got something that you don't want -- get that you created it
And welcome it home.
What you want is in there somewhere.
THE PARADOX OF POWER
We take the power trip
To discover how power-less we are:
When we surrender to our powerlessness
We discover Power and the nature of it.
It has been available all the while,
Hiding inside Surrender.
Let Go. How powerful we are!
To discover how power-less we are:
When we surrender to our powerlessness
We discover Power and the nature of it.
It has been available all the while,
Hiding inside Surrender.
Let Go. How powerful we are!
CONTROL & SURPRISE
As much as we might like to think so, Control is not at the core of human experience. Surely there have been enough catastrophic events -- natural and man-made -- for us to have realised long ago that, when the chips are really down, we are utterly powerless.
But old habits die hard. We have tried everything under the sun to manipulate, dominate and control people and circumstances so that things will go the way we want. Where we have felt powerless to directly influence things, we tried bribery. Since time immemorial our ancestors have been trying rituals of appeasement to get on the right side of the "gods" who supposedly did have their hands on the joystick. Even our Western and some Eastern ideas of God are petitioned and prayed to in the assumptions that a) they have control; and b) they care. It is my jaundiced view that neither are true.
There is a world-wide industry of technologies to exercise physical, emotional, mental and cosmic control over the world we live in. Then a tsunami hits, we look skywards and bleat "Why?" What do we expect? A booming voice proclaiming "Just trying to make a point!"?
The way of control has turned out NOT to be the way to a deeper realisation of our common humanity. At this plane of existence, we have no more control over life than a surfer has over the ocean. We never did have, nor will we ever have in the future. We can ride the waves of fortune and happenstance, and even have exhilarating fun while we're doing it, but ultimately the ocean has the last word. Always.
One purpose of this trip is to get that we don't have control and relinquish our need for it, so that we can move on to experience the most exquisite of all joys -- Surprise. And the sooner we get off the Control pottie, the better.
Control is the Promise and the Way of Logic -- the playground of the ego-mind. -- the Not-Me that "I" thinks is Me. Control is OK for incremental change, for winning something and for the illusion of Success.. But the exercise of Power and Control (even to create a "better" world) always leads to more conflict, repression, resentment and opposition. The journey of Power is a journey into the experience of Powerlessness.
Control is the way of Change:
Surrendering is the way of Transformation.
(By surrendering, I mean engaging creatively with What-Is, just as it is.)
In control we try to renovate and extend Me;
In surrender we step away from Me, and trust we'll fall beyond logic and reason into a new kind of reality.
But what now will sustain us? All the old sources and props are disappearing. -- our religious convictions, our beliefs, our values and principles, careers, ambitions, achievements, enlightenments, relationships -- even our bodies, minds and hearts are slowly deserting us.
What now will sustain us?
Am I breathing now?
Am I fed now?
Is there anything missing in this very moment?
Ah! So now is not a problem. Why then are we concerned? What are we afraid of? There is more -- but this a More that feels like Less.
What is this "something else" that we sense is always there, underlying the darks nights of life's deeper trials,
Through the grief of loss and the assault of infirmity?
It waits patiently, just out of sight.
Seductively humming a harmony so ancient and powerful
We will surrender everything to behold its glory.
That doesn't make it any less scary, though.
But old habits die hard. We have tried everything under the sun to manipulate, dominate and control people and circumstances so that things will go the way we want. Where we have felt powerless to directly influence things, we tried bribery. Since time immemorial our ancestors have been trying rituals of appeasement to get on the right side of the "gods" who supposedly did have their hands on the joystick. Even our Western and some Eastern ideas of God are petitioned and prayed to in the assumptions that a) they have control; and b) they care. It is my jaundiced view that neither are true.
There is a world-wide industry of technologies to exercise physical, emotional, mental and cosmic control over the world we live in. Then a tsunami hits, we look skywards and bleat "Why?" What do we expect? A booming voice proclaiming "Just trying to make a point!"?
The way of control has turned out NOT to be the way to a deeper realisation of our common humanity. At this plane of existence, we have no more control over life than a surfer has over the ocean. We never did have, nor will we ever have in the future. We can ride the waves of fortune and happenstance, and even have exhilarating fun while we're doing it, but ultimately the ocean has the last word. Always.
One purpose of this trip is to get that we don't have control and relinquish our need for it, so that we can move on to experience the most exquisite of all joys -- Surprise. And the sooner we get off the Control pottie, the better.
Control is the Promise and the Way of Logic -- the playground of the ego-mind. -- the Not-Me that "I" thinks is Me. Control is OK for incremental change, for winning something and for the illusion of Success.. But the exercise of Power and Control (even to create a "better" world) always leads to more conflict, repression, resentment and opposition. The journey of Power is a journey into the experience of Powerlessness.
Control is the way of Change:
Surrendering is the way of Transformation.
(By surrendering, I mean engaging creatively with What-Is, just as it is.)
In control we try to renovate and extend Me;
In surrender we step away from Me, and trust we'll fall beyond logic and reason into a new kind of reality.
But what now will sustain us? All the old sources and props are disappearing. -- our religious convictions, our beliefs, our values and principles, careers, ambitions, achievements, enlightenments, relationships -- even our bodies, minds and hearts are slowly deserting us.
What now will sustain us?
Am I breathing now?
Am I fed now?
Is there anything missing in this very moment?
Ah! So now is not a problem. Why then are we concerned? What are we afraid of? There is more -- but this a More that feels like Less.
What is this "something else" that we sense is always there, underlying the darks nights of life's deeper trials,
Through the grief of loss and the assault of infirmity?
It waits patiently, just out of sight.
Seductively humming a harmony so ancient and powerful
We will surrender everything to behold its glory.
That doesn't make it any less scary, though.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
THERE IS MORE....
A baby has to learn to strengthen, control and co-ordinate its body before it can fully express itself in the wider world. In a similar way, the first phase of our growth into consciousness seems to be a strengthening of one's awareness of "I', "me" and "my-ness", and expanding that into an Ego. But it's only meant to be a phase.....there is more.......
Setting goals for Personal Success and Strategies for Winning at Life seemed to work for a while, but at the price of something far more precious. But that wasn't obvious, until the life I constructed collapsed like a house of cards, not just once, but 3 times!.(I'm a slow learner!) Out of that wreckage emerged new dreams of becoming a better person. of accessing enlightened power, and of living forever in the Here and Now. But the motive was still Me. I wanted to be child-like, but stayed childish. Stirring somewhere deep inside me was still the old, familiar rumbling ...... there is more......
There comes a point where further growth toward transformation and realisation depends on a 180-degree switcheroo. The act of entering the challenge of living fully becomes a conscious letting-go:
Living becomes, instead, a surrender into Being -- a surrender where Be-ing becomes Be-coming.
Self Involvement becomes Self-Awareness.
And still there is more.........
Some of the reflections I see in the world around me show that the more powerful and masterful I become, the more acutely I feel both the incomprehensibility and uncontrollable chaos of it, along with its beauty and wonder. As I venture out of the safety of my ego-shell, my world of human interaction is becoming
something of a busy freeway. Beyond my personal space, the wider world of human interaction seems to be more violent, more dis-eased and more isolating. I'm sure this is a skewed vision, perhaps from watching too many news bulletins. But it does seem an odd counterbalance at a time when man is becoming more enlightened, more in touch, and more immediately conscious
And when more and more ordinary people are finding selflessly un-spectacular ways to better the lives of those around them and make a difference
It's a challenge, isn't it, to find an even deeper self,
To shed more and more layers of fantasy about how enlightenment and progress ought to look and feel like,
To shed the very Ego that we created to get us to this point,
Until we can look honestly, and accept totally,
How it is,
And who we really are.
The final (?) phase
Is letting go of Self-Awareness
Completely
And becoming lost in just Be-ing.
That's when I'll know I am dying..
Setting goals for Personal Success and Strategies for Winning at Life seemed to work for a while, but at the price of something far more precious. But that wasn't obvious, until the life I constructed collapsed like a house of cards, not just once, but 3 times!.(I'm a slow learner!) Out of that wreckage emerged new dreams of becoming a better person. of accessing enlightened power, and of living forever in the Here and Now. But the motive was still Me. I wanted to be child-like, but stayed childish. Stirring somewhere deep inside me was still the old, familiar rumbling ...... there is more......
There comes a point where further growth toward transformation and realisation depends on a 180-degree switcheroo. The act of entering the challenge of living fully becomes a conscious letting-go:
- Of any need to control
- Of every obsession with self and self-invovlement.
Living becomes, instead, a surrender into Being -- a surrender where Be-ing becomes Be-coming.
Self Involvement becomes Self-Awareness.
And still there is more.........
Some of the reflections I see in the world around me show that the more powerful and masterful I become, the more acutely I feel both the incomprehensibility and uncontrollable chaos of it, along with its beauty and wonder. As I venture out of the safety of my ego-shell, my world of human interaction is becoming
something of a busy freeway. Beyond my personal space, the wider world of human interaction seems to be more violent, more dis-eased and more isolating. I'm sure this is a skewed vision, perhaps from watching too many news bulletins. But it does seem an odd counterbalance at a time when man is becoming more enlightened, more in touch, and more immediately conscious
And when more and more ordinary people are finding selflessly un-spectacular ways to better the lives of those around them and make a difference
It's a challenge, isn't it, to find an even deeper self,
To shed more and more layers of fantasy about how enlightenment and progress ought to look and feel like,
To shed the very Ego that we created to get us to this point,
Until we can look honestly, and accept totally,
How it is,
And who we really are.
The final (?) phase
Is letting go of Self-Awareness
Completely
And becoming lost in just Be-ing.
That's when I'll know I am dying..
I AM .......WE BE--COME
I am the Experiencer
Of my experience.
And you are the Experiencer
Of your experience.
I am that which is blissed out
By whatever I am experiencing right now....
And you are that which is blissed out by your experience......
The two are one. You and I -- two aspects of the same One Awareness.
I am that part of me that knows
That this experience both you and I are having
Is what It came to have
Through both of us.
Creation is the Universe -- "I"-ing -- Eyeing......through all eyes at once
We are a Process, you and I,
A state of Be-ing, Be-coming...
Indivisible and indistinguishable from the greater collective process
Of human-being Becoming.
If we are not profoundly and deeply shaken out of our prior assumptions about what we are
We may remain forever travelling the same path,
Arguing the same arguments,
In a phony framework of what we think is happening,
And who we assume it is happening to.
We are now being challenged to a new, more universal awareness
In which all of our fears, limits, lacks and prejudices,
Concepts, beliefs and opinions
Are appreciated and accepted
For what they are
Without contraction.
In this challenge we are united with all conscious beings
In a collective human experience that is, at once, terrifying and miraculous.
We are swept up in the forces that drive the collective momentum of evolution in all its cycles --
Creative and destructive.
Then we truly come to know, to feel, and to embrace.
The collective forces of human evolution are transmuted and transformed
When they pass through the conscious experience
Of truly aware people.
Just as our bodies transmute lettuce and muesli into skin cells, muscle, blood and sinew.
So our being -- yours and mine -- is called to transmute the individual and collective suffering of mankind
Through the harmony of an open heart and the flowering of an awakening soul
Into heaven on earth, here and now.
Of my experience.
And you are the Experiencer
Of your experience.
I am that which is blissed out
By whatever I am experiencing right now....
And you are that which is blissed out by your experience......
The two are one. You and I -- two aspects of the same One Awareness.
I am that part of me that knows
That this experience both you and I are having
Is what It came to have
Through both of us.
Creation is the Universe -- "I"-ing -- Eyeing......through all eyes at once
We are a Process, you and I,
A state of Be-ing, Be-coming...
Indivisible and indistinguishable from the greater collective process
Of human-being Becoming.
If we are not profoundly and deeply shaken out of our prior assumptions about what we are
We may remain forever travelling the same path,
Arguing the same arguments,
In a phony framework of what we think is happening,
And who we assume it is happening to.
We are now being challenged to a new, more universal awareness
In which all of our fears, limits, lacks and prejudices,
Concepts, beliefs and opinions
Are appreciated and accepted
For what they are
Without contraction.
In this challenge we are united with all conscious beings
In a collective human experience that is, at once, terrifying and miraculous.
We are swept up in the forces that drive the collective momentum of evolution in all its cycles --
Creative and destructive.
Then we truly come to know, to feel, and to embrace.
The collective forces of human evolution are transmuted and transformed
When they pass through the conscious experience
Of truly aware people.
Just as our bodies transmute lettuce and muesli into skin cells, muscle, blood and sinew.
So our being -- yours and mine -- is called to transmute the individual and collective suffering of mankind
Through the harmony of an open heart and the flowering of an awakening soul
Into heaven on earth, here and now.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
FROM FEAR TO FAITH
The opposite of Fear
is Faith.
Faith is a choosing and a resolution all at once.
Faith is a total commitment -- a jump into the river, fear and all.
Faith has nothing whatever to do with either Belief or Disbelief.
Beliefs and Disbeliefs are rocks -- stepping stones in the river of life to help us bridge over what is unknown. But there comes a time when we MUST, in faith, jump into the unknown. There is no question about that. If we haven't got around to it before the day we die, dying will take care if it. Once we're in the river, the rocks of Belief and Disbelief, become sangs to get caught up on.
In faith, nothing can be held back or taken back. If we have moved totally, how can we go back? If you find that you can go back on something, you did not leap in faith. You are still connected to "back there".
Faith is absolute. We cannot be half-pregnant.
Faith is like being born again. When we surrender to it, we are totally in. Nobody can pull us back.
It is Fear which prevents us from leaping into faith. Fear underlies all our stuckness.
And Fear can propel us into faith. Fear can slam us into the wall so hard that it loses its grip on us.
Fear is a gateway to Transformation
Fear is an indecision:of energies: half of you wants to go, and half of you wants to stay. Half has heard the call of the Unknown; and half clings to the Familiar. We are caught in the middle of the pull of equally opposing forces. Because the familiar is known, there is less fear in it.
Where Fear is, however, lies the way to transformation.
Are you at a crisis of intersection? In which direction lies the greater fear?
Good. Go there.
What do you tell yourself you have to fear?
The half that fears -- the half that clings to the familiar, belongs to a dying past.
The half that is excited belongs to the living Now, ready to experience the uncharted. In anything new you become ecstatic. The so-called "fear of the unknown" is actually Excitement, with a negative label attached.
Fear divides me, producing irresolution and confusion. One leg pointing toward the unknown, the other stuck in the past. I cannot move in this position. As the opposing forces course back and forth through me, I shudder and shake, numb with indecision.
Irresolute and stuck.
Anxious and undecided.
Life keeps flowing on around me, and I remain
Marooned on an iceberg of cold terror.
Icebergs melt.
In fear, my life is contradictory. I do something with one hand, and immediately undo it with another..
Irresolute and scared.
At a Sufi monastery in Bokhara, I am told, each monk wears a two-sided sign.
On one side is written:-
Until then, I am always contradicting myself. On one hand I am doing something good, and on the other hand there is a mole in my camp, doing something to undermine that in me which has gone on ahead. "I" feels divided and irresolute. One part of me wants to venture into the unknown, the rest wants to cling to old habits and ways of doing things. Part of me wants to become a butterfly; part wants to remain a caterpillar. I get stuck, like a learner driver unable to decide between the accelerator or the brake.pedals.
One thing I know: there is no room any longer for half-heartedness -- not that there ever was, really. But stuck with one foot on a departing bus and the other glued to the bus stop, I end up in the gutter. Hell is a place where people end up when they get stuck. Heaven is a place of freedom and responsibility -- still fearful and excited perhaps, but moving always into the unknown...
In faith
Not tethered to anything, either Back There or Up Ahead.......
Not clinging to anything ---
Not even clinging to love, to god, to enlightenment, to enjoyment, to meditation, to prayer ---
Clinging to anything is....clinging..... and we are stuck again!
Let go. Remain free and moving in faith and trust.
The further I move into the Unknown, the closer I get to my Self.
A river has no goal, no idea of destination or timetable.
It does not even know of the existence of the ocean,
The river simply moves, unconcerned.
It does not stop at each bend and ask directions where to go,
It does not become fearful when the way turns south instead of continuing west;
The river trusts the flow.
and reaches the all-encompassing ocean.
And the ocean does not yearn to be the goal of anything. It is content to be what it is in the scheme of things.
Having fallen into a river, I can attest............
You will get there faster if you let go;
And the more you strive to reach, the more you will get stuck on the rocks and snags
Because you are afraid of them,
And in your fear, you fail to notice
That the river goes around the rocks, not through them.
Between the rising headwater spring and the arrival at the ocean
There is one thing you can do about the river of life --
Love it. Enjoy the journey.
It is the fear of "missing" something that gripes us;
It is the fear of not-reaching that cripples and snags us;
It is the fear of going somewhere "wrong" that paralyses us.
Faith in the flow holds fear in its embrace
is Faith.
Faith is a choosing and a resolution all at once.
Faith is a total commitment -- a jump into the river, fear and all.
Faith has nothing whatever to do with either Belief or Disbelief.
Beliefs and Disbeliefs are rocks -- stepping stones in the river of life to help us bridge over what is unknown. But there comes a time when we MUST, in faith, jump into the unknown. There is no question about that. If we haven't got around to it before the day we die, dying will take care if it. Once we're in the river, the rocks of Belief and Disbelief, become sangs to get caught up on.
In faith, nothing can be held back or taken back. If we have moved totally, how can we go back? If you find that you can go back on something, you did not leap in faith. You are still connected to "back there".
Faith is absolute. We cannot be half-pregnant.
Faith is like being born again. When we surrender to it, we are totally in. Nobody can pull us back.
It is Fear which prevents us from leaping into faith. Fear underlies all our stuckness.
And Fear can propel us into faith. Fear can slam us into the wall so hard that it loses its grip on us.
Fear is a gateway to Transformation
Fear is an indecision:of energies: half of you wants to go, and half of you wants to stay. Half has heard the call of the Unknown; and half clings to the Familiar. We are caught in the middle of the pull of equally opposing forces. Because the familiar is known, there is less fear in it.
Where Fear is, however, lies the way to transformation.
Are you at a crisis of intersection? In which direction lies the greater fear?
Good. Go there.
What do you tell yourself you have to fear?
The half that fears -- the half that clings to the familiar, belongs to a dying past.
The half that is excited belongs to the living Now, ready to experience the uncharted. In anything new you become ecstatic. The so-called "fear of the unknown" is actually Excitement, with a negative label attached.
Fear divides me, producing irresolution and confusion. One leg pointing toward the unknown, the other stuck in the past. I cannot move in this position. As the opposing forces course back and forth through me, I shudder and shake, numb with indecision.
Irresolute and stuck.
Anxious and undecided.
Life keeps flowing on around me, and I remain
Marooned on an iceberg of cold terror.
Icebergs melt.
In fear, my life is contradictory. I do something with one hand, and immediately undo it with another..
Irresolute and scared.
At a Sufi monastery in Bokhara, I am told, each monk wears a two-sided sign.
On one side is written:-
I am negative.
Please, don't take me seriously
If I say something wrong,
I am not really saying it to you.
Because I am negative,
I am filled with hatred, anger and depression.
And if I do something wrong
That is because of my negativity,
Not because you are wrong.
On the other side of the sign is written:-
I am positive, loving and affectionate.
Please don't take me seriously.
If I say you are beautiful,
I am not saying anything about you --
I am feeling high.
Whatever I am feeling, please don't take me seriously. I don't (except sometimes)
My first lesson in counselling was this -- if someone vomits, he is not throwing anything up on me;
He is simply expectorating something that is disturbing him.
We become master-full when we can say --
I am neither negative nor positive;
I am both negative and positive.
I am one. I am all of it.
I am whole
Until then, I am always contradicting myself. On one hand I am doing something good, and on the other hand there is a mole in my camp, doing something to undermine that in me which has gone on ahead. "I" feels divided and irresolute. One part of me wants to venture into the unknown, the rest wants to cling to old habits and ways of doing things. Part of me wants to become a butterfly; part wants to remain a caterpillar. I get stuck, like a learner driver unable to decide between the accelerator or the brake.pedals.
One thing I know: there is no room any longer for half-heartedness -- not that there ever was, really. But stuck with one foot on a departing bus and the other glued to the bus stop, I end up in the gutter. Hell is a place where people end up when they get stuck. Heaven is a place of freedom and responsibility -- still fearful and excited perhaps, but moving always into the unknown...
In faith
Not tethered to anything, either Back There or Up Ahead.......
Not clinging to anything ---
Not even clinging to love, to god, to enlightenment, to enjoyment, to meditation, to prayer ---
Clinging to anything is....clinging..... and we are stuck again!
Let go. Remain free and moving in faith and trust.
The further I move into the Unknown, the closer I get to my Self.
A river has no goal, no idea of destination or timetable.
It does not even know of the existence of the ocean,
The river simply moves, unconcerned.
It does not stop at each bend and ask directions where to go,
It does not become fearful when the way turns south instead of continuing west;
The river trusts the flow.
and reaches the all-encompassing ocean.
And the ocean does not yearn to be the goal of anything. It is content to be what it is in the scheme of things.
Having fallen into a river, I can attest............
You will get there faster if you let go;
And the more you strive to reach, the more you will get stuck on the rocks and snags
Because you are afraid of them,
And in your fear, you fail to notice
That the river goes around the rocks, not through them.
Between the rising headwater spring and the arrival at the ocean
There is one thing you can do about the river of life --
Love it. Enjoy the journey.
It is the fear of "missing" something that gripes us;
It is the fear of not-reaching that cripples and snags us;
It is the fear of going somewhere "wrong" that paralyses us.
Faith in the flow holds fear in its embrace
I'M RIGHT!!
Suddenly, I noticed myself caught on being right. I stopped. Just withdrew the energy. The monologue died in its tracks.
First there were echoes of my self-justifications ebbing away. Then, nothing but a dense silence.
Then I heard another voice, a quieter one, urging the very opposite position to what I had been feeling so
right about. just a moment or two before. This voice was familiar, too. Then I remembered. Once or twice in the past I have been just as vehement about the opposite point of view.
"Does this make me a hypocrite?" I wondered.
"No -- human. When you're on a position, you also occupy the opposite position, but you conveniently forget or ignore that. Don't feel bad; we all do it. We don't have any choice about that. It's the Law of Opposites. Can you just let that be part of your experience of being human?"
I looked at that for a moment. Then, in some surprise I realised, "Yes, I can."
In that moment, both positions disappeared. Vanished. Gone. Involuntarily, I took a deep breath and let it go, and something let go of me. Supporting Something, and being right about it is so exhausting!
Nothing... happened. Isn't that amazing? Nothing is something that can actually happen to us.
I experienced something similar when my mother died. In one moment, there was something happening; in the next moment -- Nothing happened.
And it was an awesome benediction. Space...... Peace......
Then it came time to pick up my stuff and resume the journey...........
But now, the burden is a little lighter.
First there were echoes of my self-justifications ebbing away. Then, nothing but a dense silence.
Then I heard another voice, a quieter one, urging the very opposite position to what I had been feeling so
right about. just a moment or two before. This voice was familiar, too. Then I remembered. Once or twice in the past I have been just as vehement about the opposite point of view.
"Does this make me a hypocrite?" I wondered.
"No -- human. When you're on a position, you also occupy the opposite position, but you conveniently forget or ignore that. Don't feel bad; we all do it. We don't have any choice about that. It's the Law of Opposites. Can you just let that be part of your experience of being human?"
I looked at that for a moment. Then, in some surprise I realised, "Yes, I can."
In that moment, both positions disappeared. Vanished. Gone. Involuntarily, I took a deep breath and let it go, and something let go of me. Supporting Something, and being right about it is so exhausting!
Nothing... happened. Isn't that amazing? Nothing is something that can actually happen to us.
I experienced something similar when my mother died. In one moment, there was something happening; in the next moment -- Nothing happened.
And it was an awesome benediction. Space...... Peace......
Then it came time to pick up my stuff and resume the journey...........
But now, the burden is a little lighter.
Friday, March 12, 2010
HONESTY
I have a real thing about Honesty. Yes, I'm positional about it. Dishonesty, for me, is a deal breaker.
And so it appears to be for most of the ladies on dating sites.
And so it appears to be for most of the ladies on dating sites.
Whose dishonesty, though, are we most afraid of ?
Whose dishonesty is causing us to distrust others?
Whose dishonesty is likely to cause us the most harm?
Whose dishonesty is causing us to distrust others?
Whose dishonesty is likely to cause us the most harm?
Hmmmm?
NONSENSE & POSSIBILITY
Possibility lives in just about every nook and cranny around us. One of the most prolific and untapped storehouses for Possibility that I've found lies behind fences signed "Beware -- Nonsense Inside".
One man's Nonsense is another man's Possibility. Possibility usually comes in disguise, and often looking like arrant crap.
If you are positional about Good Sense and Non-Sense, you may be missing a lot of potential. When you reject Nonsense, you reject Possibility. And when you reject Possibility, it will go somewhere else.
One man's Nonsense is another man's Possibility. Possibility usually comes in disguise, and often looking like arrant crap.
If you are positional about Good Sense and Non-Sense, you may be missing a lot of potential. When you reject Nonsense, you reject Possibility. And when you reject Possibility, it will go somewhere else.
LEAP -- FROM CONTENT TO CONTEXT
QUESTIONS
Firstly, if it is OK with you, I'd like us to stand in some questions to create a space in which you and I can work together. OK?............
What is missing from your life at the moment?
Are you sure you haven't got it? Maybe you just left it lying somewhere.
No? OK, so you haven't got it. If you had a friend with this "Missing" problem, what are your thoughts on maybe-why your friend hasn't got it? [Spend some time with this question, and note down each and every "answer" that pops. Allow time for the surface stuff to get out of the way so that stuff buried deeper can get out into the light, too. Censor nothing. And remember, you're not talking about yourself; you are talking about a friend you know very well who is also missing something in his/her life]
Does your friend really want it? Don't be too quick to answer this one either; there are several layers to be penetrated. Some people want something with a part of their being, and resist it with another. Also, some people, out of habit, get so hooked on "wanting" that the wanting is more important than getting what is wanted.. So sit with this question of "wanting"for a while.
What kind of beliefs do you think your friend might have to have in order to want what he/she wants, and not get it? This is a doozy of a question, designed to unearth both the beliefs behind what is wanted, and the beliefs that lie behind any perception we have that we don't get what we want in life.
OK. Now let's come back to you and your "missing"...... Are you occupying a Position on what you want (ie. an opinion or a belief that you feel you have to be "right" about)? You're not getting what you want; what does that mean to you? What do you think the "not-getting it" tells you about this situation? What do do you think it says to you about you? Which of your principles is being violated? Make a statement of these Positions you are on.
Here's a simple example of what I mean -- What's missing in my life? My wife is not interested in sex any more since the baby was born. What positions am I on? 1) I have a right to sex. 2) Sex is necessary for a good marriage. 3) She should get therapy.
Good. Now, since we live in a realm of Opposites, every position has an oppositon. What is the OPPOSITE position of each of these positions you are on. Put that into words.
To continue with my example, the Op-positions might be something like -- 1) A wife has a right to refuse sex. 2) Sex is only a part of marriage. It's not essential. 3) There's nothing wrong with me. what about you?
Wonderful. Now...... Who in your life has in the past, or is now occupying the Opposite Positions for you?
Only you can answer these. In my example, I might answer -- 1) my mother with my father, my first girlfriend, my wife before we were married, 2) my pastor at Church, my mother 3)my wife, my pastor, my mother-in-law, my mother
Good. Stay with me here, we're getting close.......
If you get what you want, what Positions (ie, opinions or beliefs you want to be right about).... what Positions that you are holding to are going to be proved "right"? What is the Principle involved that is going to be proved Right? What Oppositions are going to be proved "wrong"?
If she gives in and gives me sex, I get to be right that I have a right to it and that it is good for a marriage. She, and everyone else who opposed me on this are therefore Wrong. I might ease up on the belief that she needs therapy -- but only until she says ""No" the next time.
Here's how this game of Position/Opposition works. All this conflict occurs because we forget the Law of Opposites. Everything on this plane has its polar opposites. Everything I take a position on has its opposite in me, but I lie about that -- to myself and to others. When I am in denial about anything, that which I refuse to acknowledge will show up in my face, in events and in other people. Other people wear the costumes and masks that I refuse to take responsibility for, inviting me to own the reflection and open my self up to the disowned halves of myself. It's all done with projections and mirrors. Isn't that miraculous? And isn't that so kind of others to reflect myself back to me? Now that is love!
Good. Now you have a bit of a handle on how this Positions thing works, especially around the Game of "Missing". And "What's Missing in My Life" is a game. The Purpose of the game is: 1) to get you what you want; 2) to perpetuate the game until you do get it; and 3) eventually to discover that the game is not working and just how pointless is all the suffering the game imposes. When you get that ... game over.
OK. Just two more questions, and we're done with this preparation ----
CONTEXT
Around and through everything that is there is a space, a space that holds it all together for each of us. This space can take on all manner of intangible qualities. The miraculous thing is that the quality of the space any one thing is held in depends entirely on the beholder. For example, let's say you and I are having a conversation together in the street when a black cat crosses our path. Now lets say you had a pet black cat that you loved as a child, but I was brought up under a superstition that black cats are very bad luck. You and I are going to perceive the same "black cat" in two very different ways because of the differing contexts we have around "black cats". Context determines HOW we will see and relate to an event, thing or person, and every repetition of that circumstance will invoke the same context, regardless of other circumstances.
This quality of space that I have labelled "Context" has many other names, like Condition, Unconditional Love, Wholeness, Nature, Creation, Good, God, the Life Force, The Word, to name but a few. However we choose to spell it, the space I am talking about is that energy, that directed nothingness, that state of being from which all thoughts, light particles, electrons and gross matter were created, and in which they are now held. Context is the cosmic glue that holds all the contents together. Context has the power to organise creation, and each of us has the power to influence how it works in our world. We have the power to colour that glue to be whatever hues we want it to be. Whether we know it or not, we are doing it all the time. In our waking moments, at least, we are never not-doing it. And we don't know that.. And we wonder why our lives turn out that dunnish grey you get when you mix every colour in the paint box together.
For want of words to describe the indescribable, let us call the stuff of our lives -- our body, mind, feelings, environment, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, longings, expectations, -- let's call all that the Content of our life. The space that permeates and surrounds the Content of our life can be likened to the space that permeates and surrounds a vase giving it a shape and definition we recognise as "vase-ness". We will call this space, Context.
Just as it is the the "not-vase" space that creates and defines the vase -- just as it is the "not-black" space on this screen that creates and defines the black letters and words -- so the Context of our lives creates and defines the Content...... I'll say that again --
At this point it starts to become clear, I hope, that efforts to change the Content of our lives are ultimately futile if we pay no regard to, or are completely ignorant of the Context. Without a consciously created Context, life feels like we are spitting in the wind. Contexts of every kind attract events, people and experiences that support and reinforce the context. All contexts are self-proving.
Without a consciously created Context, we get to live in a quasi-Context -- a default Condition. Victim-ness, for example, is Condition (a default context) -- and a very, very popular one. God knows why, because it attracts unto itself events and experiences that allow the Victim to experience all the powerlessness and frustrations that are the consequences of giving up responsibility for one's own well-being. Any Context that is not deliberately chosen is a Condition. But every Condition still acts like a Context, creating and defining experiences that align with it's (negative) characteristics.
The raw thought-energy from which our tangible, perceptible universe was created permeates everything that is. It holds all the atoms and molecules, neutrons and electrons, planets, suns, constellations and galaxies, moving them majestically in a cosmic dance, suspended in an infinite firmament. Without Context, nothing could exist.
Whether we live in Context or Condition, that space not only defines and creates what we experience, but is actually also its life-force. Neither Context nor Condition are separate from the Content; they are its essence -- it's life-giving energy. And the emotional quality of the Context or Condition governs the quality of the energy. A Context of, say, Delightedness carries a very different energy from a Condition of Anxiousness.
Context (Condition) is a state, not of doing, not of having, but of Be-ing.
Context (Condition) is not something you get (like a reward or punishment) nor is it something you catch (like the flu) -- it is something that you choose to Be. You come from it. When you decide to transform your life, you have to change the state of Be-ing that you emanate from.
So, who are you?
Firstly, if it is OK with you, I'd like us to stand in some questions to create a space in which you and I can work together. OK?............
What is missing from your life at the moment?
Are you sure you haven't got it? Maybe you just left it lying somewhere.
No? OK, so you haven't got it. If you had a friend with this "Missing" problem, what are your thoughts on maybe-why your friend hasn't got it? [Spend some time with this question, and note down each and every "answer" that pops. Allow time for the surface stuff to get out of the way so that stuff buried deeper can get out into the light, too. Censor nothing. And remember, you're not talking about yourself; you are talking about a friend you know very well who is also missing something in his/her life]
Does your friend really want it? Don't be too quick to answer this one either; there are several layers to be penetrated. Some people want something with a part of their being, and resist it with another. Also, some people, out of habit, get so hooked on "wanting" that the wanting is more important than getting what is wanted.. So sit with this question of "wanting"for a while.
What kind of beliefs do you think your friend might have to have in order to want what he/she wants, and not get it? This is a doozy of a question, designed to unearth both the beliefs behind what is wanted, and the beliefs that lie behind any perception we have that we don't get what we want in life.
OK. Now let's come back to you and your "missing"...... Are you occupying a Position on what you want (ie. an opinion or a belief that you feel you have to be "right" about)? You're not getting what you want; what does that mean to you? What do you think the "not-getting it" tells you about this situation? What do do you think it says to you about you? Which of your principles is being violated? Make a statement of these Positions you are on.
Here's a simple example of what I mean -- What's missing in my life? My wife is not interested in sex any more since the baby was born. What positions am I on? 1) I have a right to sex. 2) Sex is necessary for a good marriage. 3) She should get therapy.
Good. Now, since we live in a realm of Opposites, every position has an oppositon. What is the OPPOSITE position of each of these positions you are on. Put that into words.
To continue with my example, the Op-positions might be something like -- 1) A wife has a right to refuse sex. 2) Sex is only a part of marriage. It's not essential. 3) There's nothing wrong with me. what about you?
Wonderful. Now...... Who in your life has in the past, or is now occupying the Opposite Positions for you?
Only you can answer these. In my example, I might answer -- 1) my mother with my father, my first girlfriend, my wife before we were married, 2) my pastor at Church, my mother 3)my wife, my pastor, my mother-in-law, my mother
Good. Stay with me here, we're getting close.......
If you get what you want, what Positions (ie, opinions or beliefs you want to be right about).... what Positions that you are holding to are going to be proved "right"? What is the Principle involved that is going to be proved Right? What Oppositions are going to be proved "wrong"?
If she gives in and gives me sex, I get to be right that I have a right to it and that it is good for a marriage. She, and everyone else who opposed me on this are therefore Wrong. I might ease up on the belief that she needs therapy -- but only until she says ""No" the next time.
Here's how this game of Position/Opposition works. All this conflict occurs because we forget the Law of Opposites. Everything on this plane has its polar opposites. Everything I take a position on has its opposite in me, but I lie about that -- to myself and to others. When I am in denial about anything, that which I refuse to acknowledge will show up in my face, in events and in other people. Other people wear the costumes and masks that I refuse to take responsibility for, inviting me to own the reflection and open my self up to the disowned halves of myself. It's all done with projections and mirrors. Isn't that miraculous? And isn't that so kind of others to reflect myself back to me? Now that is love!
Good. Now you have a bit of a handle on how this Positions thing works, especially around the Game of "Missing". And "What's Missing in My Life" is a game. The Purpose of the game is: 1) to get you what you want; 2) to perpetuate the game until you do get it; and 3) eventually to discover that the game is not working and just how pointless is all the suffering the game imposes. When you get that ... game over.
OK. Just two more questions, and we're done with this preparation ----
- Am I willing to come from a possibility that "Missing"is just a game, and that the Game is stopping me from getting what I truly want?
- Am I willing to live my life in this possibility?
There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. The answers to look for are the ones that come in the form of experiences and realisations -- "Got-Its".
CONTEXT
Around and through everything that is there is a space, a space that holds it all together for each of us. This space can take on all manner of intangible qualities. The miraculous thing is that the quality of the space any one thing is held in depends entirely on the beholder. For example, let's say you and I are having a conversation together in the street when a black cat crosses our path. Now lets say you had a pet black cat that you loved as a child, but I was brought up under a superstition that black cats are very bad luck. You and I are going to perceive the same "black cat" in two very different ways because of the differing contexts we have around "black cats". Context determines HOW we will see and relate to an event, thing or person, and every repetition of that circumstance will invoke the same context, regardless of other circumstances.
This quality of space that I have labelled "Context" has many other names, like Condition, Unconditional Love, Wholeness, Nature, Creation, Good, God, the Life Force, The Word, to name but a few. However we choose to spell it, the space I am talking about is that energy, that directed nothingness, that state of being from which all thoughts, light particles, electrons and gross matter were created, and in which they are now held. Context is the cosmic glue that holds all the contents together. Context has the power to organise creation, and each of us has the power to influence how it works in our world. We have the power to colour that glue to be whatever hues we want it to be. Whether we know it or not, we are doing it all the time. In our waking moments, at least, we are never not-doing it. And we don't know that.. And we wonder why our lives turn out that dunnish grey you get when you mix every colour in the paint box together.
For want of words to describe the indescribable, let us call the stuff of our lives -- our body, mind, feelings, environment, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, longings, expectations, -- let's call all that the Content of our life. The space that permeates and surrounds the Content of our life can be likened to the space that permeates and surrounds a vase giving it a shape and definition we recognise as "vase-ness". We will call this space, Context.
Just as it is the the "not-vase" space that creates and defines the vase -- just as it is the "not-black" space on this screen that creates and defines the black letters and words -- so the Context of our lives creates and defines the Content...... I'll say that again --
The Context in which we choose to live our life creates and defines the Content of our life.
At this point it starts to become clear, I hope, that efforts to change the Content of our lives are ultimately futile if we pay no regard to, or are completely ignorant of the Context. Without a consciously created Context, life feels like we are spitting in the wind. Contexts of every kind attract events, people and experiences that support and reinforce the context. All contexts are self-proving.
Without a consciously created Context, we get to live in a quasi-Context -- a default Condition. Victim-ness, for example, is Condition (a default context) -- and a very, very popular one. God knows why, because it attracts unto itself events and experiences that allow the Victim to experience all the powerlessness and frustrations that are the consequences of giving up responsibility for one's own well-being. Any Context that is not deliberately chosen is a Condition. But every Condition still acts like a Context, creating and defining experiences that align with it's (negative) characteristics.
The raw thought-energy from which our tangible, perceptible universe was created permeates everything that is. It holds all the atoms and molecules, neutrons and electrons, planets, suns, constellations and galaxies, moving them majestically in a cosmic dance, suspended in an infinite firmament. Without Context, nothing could exist.
Whether we live in Context or Condition, that space not only defines and creates what we experience, but is actually also its life-force. Neither Context nor Condition are separate from the Content; they are its essence -- it's life-giving energy. And the emotional quality of the Context or Condition governs the quality of the energy. A Context of, say, Delightedness carries a very different energy from a Condition of Anxiousness.
Context (Condition) is a state, not of doing, not of having, but of Be-ing.
Context (Condition) is not something you get (like a reward or punishment) nor is it something you catch (like the flu) -- it is something that you choose to Be. You come from it. When you decide to transform your life, you have to change the state of Be-ing that you emanate from.
So, who are you?
- You are the state of being (Context or Condition) that you create for yourself.
- You are not your physical and psychological makeup. You are the spiritual space that defines how your physical and psychological being is evolving..
- You are not what you think and feel. You are your relationship to what you are experiencing, thinking and feeling right now
- You are the effect of the Contexts and Conditions that you have created for yourself.
If you're getting a bit depressed about this, remember that anything you have created, you can also dis-create, and re-create as something more appropriate to the kind of life you want to have. Conditions can be dis-created by simply creating a conscious Context in its stead and jumping into that. It can be that simple. It may take some time for the circumstances to change, but if you have made the leap from Content to Context, transformation will happen.
Every good communicator knows instinctively that, when people come to hear or read him, each one comes in his/her own self-generated cocoon of thoughts, feelings and preoccupations, probably none of which have anything to do with what he wants to communicate. So, to be effective, he will FIRST create an appropriate Context, and then invite his audience to step into it. At the end of the communication, if he is truly wise, he will gently take each audient back to his/her individual condition, so that that may be transformed by what has just transpired between them. At the outset of this article I created a Context by asking you to engage actively with a series of questions that invited you to step into my space for a while. There are many other ways to create Contexts and, if you want to know more about it, may I humbly recommend my books "Communicating For a World That Works", and "Another Way"?
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
The simplest and most effective way I know to create a Context is to put it it the form of a Question -- a Question that invites experiences, rather than pat answers. For example, if you want to live in a Context of Enoughness, create a question like -- "What does it feel like, and what do I need to learn, to experience Enoughness?". There are no "yes"or "no"answers to such a question. There are no worthwhile rational answers to it. It invites challenges and experiences. That, after all is what life is all about.
All questions provoke answers that are limited by the size and quality of the space from which the question arises. Questions from the Mind (Content) get answers from the same Mind. There is no growth: in fact, there is a contraction that accompanies definition, separation and limitation. On the other hand, questions that arise from Context, provoke and inspire answers in total experience that come from the Universal Context of all absolutes, the same context that is the life-force of all creation. We can access that because it is what we are a part of.
Questions that come from Context are unlimited and expansive, and so are the "answers". Questions of Context open up new possibilities. The experiences they engender may be fraught with paradoxes and contradictions with which your mind will want to wrestle and demand rational answers. Pay no attention to your mind. Treat all paradoxes, contradictions and mysteries as invitations to let go of your hidebound assumptions of what is real and unreal, possible and impossible. We do not know what is possible!! Inside our tiny minds we have no idea of what is possible!! Possibility is the child of non-sense. The non-sensicalities of paradox and contradiction invite us to expand in ways that Mind simply cannot do. That's why minds cannot wrap themselves around Mystery, so they kill it by trying to "explain" it.
When a question arises in your awareness, look at where it is coming from. Does it come from Mind-Content, or Context?
How do you tell the difference? Questions from the mind demand an immediate and definitive answer, and tend to baulk at any delay for introspection and real experience. Minds want to "get it sorted" -- a.s.a.p. Minds hate unanswered questions. Minds are terrified of "not-knowing". Minds LOVE something more to be right about.
Questions from Context are happy to stand in a space of "not-knowing", and to wait for life to deliver the lessons which will give rise to the Wisdom you are really looking for anyway. Questions from Context feel expansive, and they enrich your experience. Notions of "right " and "wrong" just don't enter into it.
Questions from Mind have one Right Answer -- The Answer -- and an infinite number of Wrong ones.. Questions from Context have no Right or Wrong answers. they expand your perception of life in every dimension at once.
Look, it is more than just possible that the most you are ever going to get from life is what you put out for. If you come from Mind's stuff or Content, then what you ask for is going to be limited. If you come from Context, then both what you put out for and what you get will be unlimited by any expectations.
You will get in experience the Power of Possibility.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
NOW HERE THIS!
The faster we go, the behinder we get.
Fixed on some goal, we always run the risk of going faster and faster astray.
There's another level of reality available here ----
When we come to here/now, we immediately reach. There is nowhere (now/here) to get to, no space or time to be travelled. There is no path to be found. There are no corners to see around, no horizon to be crossed.
Make "Now/Here" your mantra.
When will we get enlightened? Now.
Where can we get salvation? Here
When is the day of Judgment? Now
Where is Heaven? Here/Now
Where is Hell? Here/Now
Always Here. Always Now. Where space and time are one.
So don't fret. If you miss this here/now,
Here is another,
and another,
and another
and.........
Forever.
Fixed on some goal, we always run the risk of going faster and faster astray.
There's another level of reality available here ----
When we come to here/now, we immediately reach. There is nowhere (now/here) to get to, no space or time to be travelled. There is no path to be found. There are no corners to see around, no horizon to be crossed.
Make "Now/Here" your mantra.
When will we get enlightened? Now.
Where can we get salvation? Here
When is the day of Judgment? Now
Where is Heaven? Here/Now
Where is Hell? Here/Now
Always Here. Always Now. Where space and time are one.
So don't fret. If you miss this here/now,
Here is another,
and another,
and another
and.........
Forever.
SEEK, AND YE SHALL MISS IT
Sit quietly for a moment or three. Let your gaze relax until you can comfortably look at your nose.
Don't get entangled in thinking about it. Just relax.
Suddenly it is there. You can see the tip of your nose. No sweat.
Now uncross you eyes, get up and move around the room. Notice that, wherever you move, it is always there in front of you.
Go right, go left, go right, go wrong...... awake or asleep....
It is there. Always. So there is no question about finding it. Why, then would you have to search for it? You cannot miss it.
Can you?
Yes. We all miss it, when we are busy searching for it. We peer past it, focusing on other things, looking for something that is as obvious as .... well ... the nose on our face.
When we tire of seeking and our eyes relax
We see at last what has been there all along -- as close as the tip of our nose.
The world disappears - and we are here, where we have always been ---
This close.
The naturalness you seek has always been available to you. Don't get a shock -- but -- this very moment, you are in it.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up......
Your gaze has been clouded. You have been daydreaming
Models, expectations, musts, opinions, beliefs, distinctions ---
All distortions that prevent you from seeing what is right at the end of your nose.
Naturalness does not need to be a goal, it is already your nature. You may miss it, but you cannot go out of it, no matter how far you wander. You carry your nature within you.
There's no need to rummage through the past, or gaze longingly into the future. Simply be here now. Let go of whatever you have acquired, and find what you have always been.
Relax
Give up the search. Wake up.
Do nothing else. In doing you lost it. In doing you will lose it again. Doing is so easy. Doing makes it so difficult. There is nothing to be done.
Give up acting naturally. Be natural.
Now you can look with clear eyes at whatever is here in front of you.
Naturally
Don't get entangled in thinking about it. Just relax.
Suddenly it is there. You can see the tip of your nose. No sweat.
Now uncross you eyes, get up and move around the room. Notice that, wherever you move, it is always there in front of you.
Go right, go left, go right, go wrong...... awake or asleep....
It is there. Always. So there is no question about finding it. Why, then would you have to search for it? You cannot miss it.
Can you?
Yes. We all miss it, when we are busy searching for it. We peer past it, focusing on other things, looking for something that is as obvious as .... well ... the nose on our face.
When we tire of seeking and our eyes relax
We see at last what has been there all along -- as close as the tip of our nose.
The world disappears - and we are here, where we have always been ---
This close.
The naturalness you seek has always been available to you. Don't get a shock -- but -- this very moment, you are in it.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up......
Your gaze has been clouded. You have been daydreaming
Models, expectations, musts, opinions, beliefs, distinctions ---
All distortions that prevent you from seeing what is right at the end of your nose.
Naturalness does not need to be a goal, it is already your nature. You may miss it, but you cannot go out of it, no matter how far you wander. You carry your nature within you.
There's no need to rummage through the past, or gaze longingly into the future. Simply be here now. Let go of whatever you have acquired, and find what you have always been.
Relax
Give up the search. Wake up.
Do nothing else. In doing you lost it. In doing you will lose it again. Doing is so easy. Doing makes it so difficult. There is nothing to be done.
Give up acting naturally. Be natural.
Now you can look with clear eyes at whatever is here in front of you.
Naturally
IT IS SO
The Whole embraces saints and sinners, right and wrong, roses and thorns,
And only Wholeness knows why.
It cannot be figured out in the mind, or explained.
It is just so.
And it doesn't mean anything that it is just so. Minds hate that!
But when we allow it all to be, everything comes into balance and then, without understanding, we know why.
When we become both our positive and our negative self-image, there are no more philosophies, no more theories, no more explanations, no more questions, no more answers, no more beliefs, no more opinions.
All that is left is Truth -- all of that which is so.
And only Wholeness knows why.
It cannot be figured out in the mind, or explained.
It is just so.
And it doesn't mean anything that it is just so. Minds hate that!
But when we allow it all to be, everything comes into balance and then, without understanding, we know why.
When we become both our positive and our negative self-image, there are no more philosophies, no more theories, no more explanations, no more questions, no more answers, no more beliefs, no more opinions.
All that is left is Truth -- all of that which is so.
DESIRE
Desire is dreaming with energy.
Drop desire? Why would anyone want to do that?
That's just as well. Desire cannot be dropped. The very desire to drop desire -- is a desire. A new kind of greed takes over.
Let desire be. When we wake up, desire will drop itself like dry leaves falling from a tree in autumn.
Prayers to God are Desires.
Meditation, on the other hand,
Undesired and unsought,
is nothing.
Silence. Peace. A state of being devoid of desire.
If that is what you Desire, you might as well enjoy the desire for its own sake. That is the meditation.
Your mind will object, but then Mind -- with all its ideas -- has no idea what Peace is. Mind thinks that is stagnation, and squirms. Frustration is disagreeable, but when Mind is around, real disaster is imminent if we get what it wants. Mind thinks it should get the credit.
Blessed are they who don't get gratified with everything they want.
Blessed are they who learn to get comfortable with Desire, for in so being they are already satisfied.
Drop desire? Why would anyone want to do that?
That's just as well. Desire cannot be dropped. The very desire to drop desire -- is a desire. A new kind of greed takes over.
Let desire be. When we wake up, desire will drop itself like dry leaves falling from a tree in autumn.
Prayers to God are Desires.
Meditation, on the other hand,
Undesired and unsought,
is nothing.
Silence. Peace. A state of being devoid of desire.
If that is what you Desire, you might as well enjoy the desire for its own sake. That is the meditation.
Your mind will object, but then Mind -- with all its ideas -- has no idea what Peace is. Mind thinks that is stagnation, and squirms. Frustration is disagreeable, but when Mind is around, real disaster is imminent if we get what it wants. Mind thinks it should get the credit.
Blessed are they who don't get gratified with everything they want.
Blessed are they who learn to get comfortable with Desire, for in so being they are already satisfied.
SILENCE
Silence is The Answer of all answers
And the final answer when all questions have been asked.
Be still.
Be silent
And know the I-Am.
And the final answer when all questions have been asked.
Be still.
Be silent
And know the I-Am.
Monday, March 08, 2010
THE OCEAN IS WAVING
Watch the surf roll in at the edge of the ocean. There is this wave, and that wave, and another wave, each wave distinct from the next, and each utterly unique. Each wave. too. is unmistakably a wave, it is not the ocean, and it is still the ocean. The wave cannot exist without being the ocean. The ocean is "waving".
The ocean consents and creates the wave; it pulsates in each wave.
The wave is separate as Form, but not separate as Existence.
And when the wave finally washes ashore, it returns to being itself.
By being both separate and not-separate, neither the wave nor the ocean lose anything....
Each gains the being of the other. Whole.
But we are always afraid of losing something of ourself if we become the Whole of it. We fear that if we lose our self, then we will be no more. We are I-dentifying our self with the wave and forgetting about the ocean.
Here it is -- if I lose my self, I become the Whole. All is me, and mine
So what have we got to lose? Nothing to lose -- we may still get the discomforts of limitation, guilt, fear and everything else that goes with being a wave, but we won't suffer about it any more. And we have everything to gain as well -- joy, freedom, love and all the other polar opposites of misery. We get all the wisdom of existence. Everything we thought we'd lost was only misplaced. When we consent to being all of it, everything gets back into balance.
When we lose the illusion of separation, we lose nothing and gain everything.
The ocean consents and creates the wave; it pulsates in each wave.
The wave is separate as Form, but not separate as Existence.
And when the wave finally washes ashore, it returns to being itself.
By being both separate and not-separate, neither the wave nor the ocean lose anything....
Each gains the being of the other. Whole.
But we are always afraid of losing something of ourself if we become the Whole of it. We fear that if we lose our self, then we will be no more. We are I-dentifying our self with the wave and forgetting about the ocean.
Here it is -- if I lose my self, I become the Whole. All is me, and mine
So what have we got to lose? Nothing to lose -- we may still get the discomforts of limitation, guilt, fear and everything else that goes with being a wave, but we won't suffer about it any more. And we have everything to gain as well -- joy, freedom, love and all the other polar opposites of misery. We get all the wisdom of existence. Everything we thought we'd lost was only misplaced. When we consent to being all of it, everything gets back into balance.
When we lose the illusion of separation, we lose nothing and gain everything.
QUESTIONS TO STAND IN
Here are a couple of questions to stand in, long enough to get answers in experience.......
- What is the difference between Knowledge.... and Knowing?
- What is the difference between Intelligence...... and Wisdom?
The key word is "experience". Anything else is opinion.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
ROMANTIC LOVE
Disclaimer: I make no claim to be an expert on relationships - far from it. Regard me more as a wounded healer. I've made enough mistakes consciously, though, to have learnt something along the way. With your permission, I offer the results of those experiences to you now. Regard them as a journal about a work in progress. Use what appeals to you. Put the rest in your "Maybe" basket..........
Relationship seems to be the last great unknown frontier of human endeavour. God knows why -- it's hardly for want of being explored. Everyone, including the family dog, has been over it time and time again, yet still it remains a mysterious minefield.. Maybe because we're exploring it blindfolded. Perhaps partly because the landscape keeps changing. Perhaps, also, we're missing something, something that is staring us in the face, but we can't see it.
I don't have any answers; I'm just as lost as you. Maybe there are no answers that fit every situation. But I have made some discoveries that may serve as general guidelines, and that don't seem to be in any of the textbooks written by people who claim to know. If I can share them with you now, maybe ... just maybe ... we might be able to figure out a way through.
Firstly, an observation -- there is no such "thing" as Relationship. We cannot see it, touch it, feel it or smell it. We can see plenty of evidence of its existence, but we cannot see IT and, so far, no-one has been able to point it out to me. It remains a no-thing. Similarly, there is no such "thing" as "relationshit", but I can sure recognise evidence of it from a long way off.
We do make some very basic mistakes, either in ignorance or through poor judgment. The first one that comes to my mind is that we think that, in order to be in relationship, either one of both partners have to give up something -- "In order to be with you, I (have to) give up something of myself." That's a recipe for dissatisfaction and hidden resentment if ever there was!
Another mistake we make is, when things get a bit bumpy, we try to "make" the relationship work (some people even justify that by saying it's "for the sake of the kids") . That doesn't ever really work, because we're going to work on the Consequence instead of the Cause. Relationship is a product, or consequence, of the interaction of who two people are. If we were to more authentically be who we are, and were more willing to express our self in a higher state of integrity than we're doing at the moment, then we could simply get out of the way and ALLOW a relationship to work. We could even do that now in our present state of being if we weren't so hung up on models of how it ought to work, but then we'd have to give up being "right" about a lot of the positions we're on, and our egos aren't going to like that!
We are too busy enjoying our suffering to see the bleeding obvious -- "I could be enjoying this if only I didn't feel this way about it!" And relationships offer golden opportunities for suffering on the scale of Grand Opera. But how we feel about anything is entirely and individually up to each of us.
In relationshit, we don't relate -- we project. We pin masks and costumes on the other, costumes from our own wardrobe that we won't wear. We assign qualities we think we don't have (good or bad) to the other person, whether that person actually has them or not. And we also attribute our feelings in relationshit to the other person -- "You make me feel ......... (insert here a line from your favourite love song)". We shift our stuff, and the responsibility for it, onto the other. Is it any wonder we feel burdened? Is it any wonder, too, that Intimacy goes out the window? There's absolutely no hope whatsoever of shared "into-me-see" when either of us is focussed on the other person's space! Helloo-ooo!?
Another mistake -- we look in relationship for a Saviour -- someone whose job it is to take way a feeling that we don't like and cannot be with, and/or to supply us with a feeling we've grown addicted to, because we don't acknowledge that "I am the sole source of everything I feel". We didn't ever tell the other person we were looking for a Saviour, of course, and it wasn't even in the fine print of the Marriage Contract, probably because we didn't realise it. We look to relationship to alter our experience, when the purpose of all living is to HAVE our experience. We look to others for answers, when our here/now experience IS the answer we're seeking. We've just forgotten what the question was.....
I don't think anybody can have a successful relationship in integrity states of Uncertainty, Opposition or Disloyalty. [If you want to know more about those states, do read Ron Smothermon's book "Winning Through Enlightenment", or my book "Another Way".]
Most of us don't even know that possibility exists. Dysfunctional relationships slop around in default conditions that happened either by habit or by accident. So we fall eventually out of relationship into a condition of relationshit.
Here is an exercise-cum-meditation that you might find enlightening. Put on some quiet, pleasant music, and sit yourself comfortably in front of a good-sized mirror. Look at your head and shoulders and face. Take some time to settle with that. Then, when the traffic of thoughts has quietened down a bit, look into you own eyes and ask your self "Who do I want?" When an answer pops, follow up with, "Then who do I want?............... Then who do I want?......" Gently keep repeating the question -- until you get it. Get what? You'll know -- when you get it.
THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE
We live in a spectrum of two natures -- one is Human and the other is Divine. We are both. But in daily living we experience varying levels of the two modes of awareness, levels that fluctuate from moment to moment. We are never either fully secular, or fully divine; we slide around.
In the context of Love, the purely Divine perception is very simple -- Love is All, and All is Love. There is nothing that is not an expression of Love. Hatred and Indifference are just as much expressions of Divine Love as are Affection and Empathy. End of discussion.
In this article I'm addressing mostly the Human end of the Love scale -- the end where Love ceases to be a single awareness and becomes a multiplicity of experiences that can feel as different as heaven and hell. This is the end of the scale where we experience conditions that we label as "Not-Love", "romantic love", "altruism", "sympathy", "empathy", "indifference" .. and so on. In this condition, there are also a lot of things we mistake for "love" that, in the human sense, are not love at all. Let's go exploring................
Romanticism seeks to restore a lost sense of the Divine side of our nature. Romantic love opens up bits of our inner life, our "better nature". Romance inspires the power of our imagination to create beauty, poetry, music, myth, dream and vision. So far, so good
Romance also triggers a longing we probably did not know we harboured -- our longing for the opposite-gender side of our nature. Every man is looking for his female-ness - his anima; every female is looking for her animus. We meet someone who sends our hormones into a spin and we think we have found what we were looking for. Sometimes we may have, but we stuff that up by thinking that what we've found is coming from the other person. No. The other person just triggered a release of our own yummy stuff.
It is our longing for our better and our opposite gender natures that unites us in a state of romantic love.
Somewhere down the line, however, things come unstuck because we have misused the romantic ideal and confused it with "Love". Rather than relating authentically with the real flesh-and-blood human being in front of us, we mis-place our version of love over onto our partner. Rather than take personal responsibility for connecting with our Divinity, we pursue it in another, and expect the other to fulfill for us an idealised image of our own opposite-gender soul. ("You make me feel........., and I expect you to keep on doing that through better and worse, through richer and poorer, 'til death do us part.") That is an impossible burden to place on any other person, but we blindly do it to each other. Such romanticism carries within it the seeds of its own inevitable destruction. In a state of sudden euphoria, we mistake where our feelings are coming from -- ("You make me feel....") and put the relationship under a strain it cannot sustain. This simple mistake means that we jointly end up destroying the very human relationship that we experienced, for a moment at least, as Divine. We get dis-illusioned, confused and hurt, and we blame the other for not perpetuating what was only ever our fantasy in the first place.
Romantic love is a hallmark of adolescence, a necessary stage in our psychological evolution. It is our path for a while. But we are supposed to grow through it and out of it, and come out of the experiences much the wiser. But many of us, including myself, got trapped inside, going around in circles of repeated experiences, vainly looking for an exit. I'd love a dollar for every 3am call I've taken from someone who is still agonisingly trapped in their adolescent notions of "true love". "True love" is a natural desire for fulfillment, completion and happiness that gets misdirected onto other human beings.
Real love,however, has a different texture to it. Among its attributes are a deep and genuine desire for the whole well-being and happiness of your beloved, just as he/she is -- un-renovated. Real human Love is not a grand drama of passion at the expense of the other person.
Like most of our early lives, we got it all backwards. Let's take "Did you miss me?" What is that about? If I'm asked that and my answer is "Yes, I missed you like crazy", I know there's some unfinished work for me to do around a belief in inadequacy, but she gets an ego goose. If my answer is "No, I didn't miss you", I'm fine but she gets offended. We have a definition of Love that says "If you really loved me you'd be unhappy unless I'm around", and we feel somewhat betrayed when they're not suffering in our absence. That's not Love! It might be a lot of other things, mostly unhealthy, but Love is not one of them.
Romantic love is fun to play with, but as a seriously entertained way of life it is an "unwholly" muddle of Divine and Human loves. Our Divine love includes an urge toward the inner world, and our human soul's reaching for its divine origins. Our Human love is the divine's hankering for real flesh-and-blood human-being experiences. Like Michaelangelo's great fresco, the Divine and the Human reach out to each other in Love. Both loves are valid and co-operate to give us the richness of experience that is the condition of being human. But culturally we've got them muddled and we have nearly lost them both.
The great flaw in Romantic Love happens when we seek one love over the other..... when we try to attain the Divine without the human; or we wallow in the human without regard to the divine There is no single Love. There is a unifying context called Love-ness that includes ALL kinds of love in complete balance. But there is no One Love -- not in a dual universe. No matter how flat you squash a coin, there are still at least two sides to it. One Love is a romantic fiction.
What about the concept of Soul Mates? It's a concept with beliefs wrapped around it. If that's how you want to see it, god bless you. If it enriches your feelings for each other, go for it. But it is still only a concept with beliefs.
Now I'm going to stir up the hornets nest. People in (romantic) love are not actually in love with each other. They are in love with a feeling they get -- for the moment -- when they are in each other's company. Unwittingly they are using each other as conduits to access the intense, passionate experiences they would otherwise not give themselves permission to have, This, whether we admit it or not, is what romantic love is, using another to create passion and drama for its own sake. I didn't say that was wrong, but there are possible consequences you might like to know about in advance. If you don't want to know, skip to the next paragraph. When we pursue passion and drama for its own sake, we risk becoming junkies for it. When our partner no longer serves as a ready connection, we either shut down, or go looking for our "fix" of passion and drama somewhere else (usually, but not necessarily with another partner).
When we are genuinely in love with another person, it is a spontaneous act of being. Love is a recognition of the other person that causes us to acknowledge our own wholeness, to affirm, value and honour her/him in toto. and to desire nothing more than happiness and well-being for both of us.
There are two marriages we should consider making. The first is an inner re-union with our own Soul. We do that by going both inward and outward, observing, engaging with and experiencing all that is there. The second marriage is a connection with all other beings. This connection does not have to be manufactured, it already exists. Just acknowledge and declare it to be so. In declaring our connection, we become connected. It is that easy! Then everything "else" is embraced, just as it is. When these two marriages are consummated, romantic love takes it's appropriate place in the scheme of things -- as a rite of passage in growing up.
Romance, as a game, does not disappear. It is enjoyed for its own sake as a way of honouring and celebrating each other. Romance also helps us avoid the trap of Withholding in relationship.
THIS ONE ISN'T IT
When you woke up and rolled over in bed this morning, who did you see? Someone who still embodies the qualities you saw in him/her when you first "fell" in love and chose to "be with", or did you see someone else? Well, whoever you saw, that was your creation, not your partner's.
Somewhere in the attic of our mind, there is a silver box containing images of our ideal job, ideal home, ideal family... and ... ideal partner. When we first get into relationship, everything is usually fine and dandy and the other fills our waking days. But as we get used to each other and some of the gloss begins to wear thin, we surreptitiously duck up to the attic every now and then and compare what we think we've got with the perfect image in the silver box. The differences begin to show. "Uh! Well, this one isn't quite what I wanted" So we start to withhold some of the joy and spontaneity we've been bringing to the table, keeping something on ice in case, one day, Mr. or Mrs. Right should suddenly turn up out of the blue. Then, maybe, we keep some more of ourself in reserve in case this partner dies or quits on us one day in the possible future.
Any withholding in any situation, for whatever reason -- good or bad -- saps the life out of everyone and everything involved. When we withhold, we shut the doors on aliveness itself. We then hang around for some crisis, some calamity, or even death itself to unite us with our silver-boxed ideal, with our fantasy-dream of opposite-gender perfection. Even in other partners. we still find only tormentingly partial reflections of the divine vision we hope for. Forlornly we give up on this relationship and dream of meeting our Ideal Love on the other side of this grave we're stuck in now.
But what if there is only Nothingness after death? Or, what if we've died already, and THIS is heaven(or hell) What if this life here and now is IT, and we're missing it while we're searching for something else?
DEATH AND TRANSFORMATION IN ROMANCE
What on earth does Death have to do with Love? Quite a lot as it happens.
Death seems to be the object of so much of our longing. We make the despair component of earthly human experience bearable by holding to a plaintive hope of perfection, beauty and happiness in a world to come.
But what if the absence of what we don't like takes with it what we do want (ie. it's polar opposites) Then we're left with Nothing. You cannot lose the negative and keep the positive. Like the proverbial coin, they go together. Ooops!
Or what if this perfect and beautiful realm lies latent within us here and now, lying hidden inside what we say "No" to?
What if -- we have lived lifetime after lifetime for eons, failing to get the message that all the great spiritual leaders have been saying through the centuries of recorded history -- that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand". Not tomorrow, not next Friday just after lunch, but right here, right now, waiting for us to stop looking for it and notice it.. The Kingdom of Heaven -- we're standing in it., with our eyes shut, our ears plugged up with our iPods, and saying "This ain't it!"
It's not Death we're afraid of; it's not Death we're looking for. We are after -- and afraid of -- what we've been told that Death will give us -- liberation, and transformation. Well, I'm not at all sure that Death will deliver either liberation or transformation. It's my limited experience that Death delivers Nothing. I watched my father, a lifelong devout Christian, face death, and what he saw as he drew nigh to the threshold was a long way from the bliss he'd been promised. For the first time in my life I saw terror on his face.
What I am sure of, because I have already experienced a measure of it, is that Liberation and Transformation are available in this life, here and now. No need to wait for anything. If that is so, though, why don't we all go for it? Our egos get in the way because, to our egos, Transformation is a death threat.
We get addicted or inured to the search -- even to a point where the search becomes more important than what we're searching for. You can let your ego put off and resist the inevitable. You can fight anything and everything that challenges you to give up your ego's ideas, opinions, concepts and beliefs -- all to perpetuate The Search. While you are searching, you are not finding. If you truly want to find, give up searching. Searching is an impediment to Finding.
You can wait, if you like, until the last few hours/minutes/seconds of your life to discover that what you've been looking for has been right in front of your nose all along. Or you can get it now, and then get on with enjoying your humanity for a change.
Imagine now that your life in this body is ebbing away. You are being drawn towards the white light beyond that door. Question:----- Do you think in that moment any of your long-held opinions, beliefs or ideas will matter a tuppenny damn? I've been there. They won't. Only one question will occupy your mind -- "Do they know I love them?"
What has all this to do with Romantic Love? Romantic love is a bit of a death-wish: it guarantees suffering. And how we love suffering! Imagine a romantic storyline that goes --
Romantic love also gives us a bunch of inspired feelings, akin to transformation. That's why it feels so "right". The huge appeal of Romantic Love is:--
In our psyche,, suffering is deeply connected to the quest for Growth and Understanding. Death is also seen to be the possible birth of self-awareness. But these are lies. Despite what I was taught every Easter, suffering is no guarantee of transformation, nor is death any guarantee of anything more than a fading flash of self-awareness. Death, the end of duality, is the demise self-awareness and the end of transformation. It's too late then. But we don't know that yet. We long to fill the vaguely perceived "missing" in our lives -- that unlived spiritual dimension. We go looking for it in suffering, particularly in the powerful suffering of romantic love. If we weren't so intent upon the pain of our romantic suffering, we'd realise that we've never felt so alive, and that we're having the time of our lives!
The "death" we seek though Romance is Redemption and Transformation. Despite, or maybe because of, our egos, we are inexorably drawn towards Transformation. So is the whole of existence. That is our deepest "death wish", except that our Divine nature knows that there is no death -- to anything except the ego.
Religion gets into the act, too. Church and State combined have managed to wangle their way into birth, marriage and death, but nowhere is religion more tightly wrapped than around the riddle of Death.
Our religion itself is Romance. Most of the stuff I was taught in Sunday School about Jesus Christ was pure romance -- just look at the pictures they draw! When we were children we imagined "heaven" to be out there amongst the stars. But when we slipped into,puberty, we shifted the location of heaven from the firmament onto other people -- the ones with whom we fell in love -- and we brought some of the stars along to pepper up our love poems.
The "death" that awaits us at the very centre of religion and romance is the flowering of our inner world, and the promise of paradise. We're looking for
Relationship seems to be the last great unknown frontier of human endeavour. God knows why -- it's hardly for want of being explored. Everyone, including the family dog, has been over it time and time again, yet still it remains a mysterious minefield.. Maybe because we're exploring it blindfolded. Perhaps partly because the landscape keeps changing. Perhaps, also, we're missing something, something that is staring us in the face, but we can't see it.
I don't have any answers; I'm just as lost as you. Maybe there are no answers that fit every situation. But I have made some discoveries that may serve as general guidelines, and that don't seem to be in any of the textbooks written by people who claim to know. If I can share them with you now, maybe ... just maybe ... we might be able to figure out a way through.
Firstly, an observation -- there is no such "thing" as Relationship. We cannot see it, touch it, feel it or smell it. We can see plenty of evidence of its existence, but we cannot see IT and, so far, no-one has been able to point it out to me. It remains a no-thing. Similarly, there is no such "thing" as "relationshit", but I can sure recognise evidence of it from a long way off.
We do make some very basic mistakes, either in ignorance or through poor judgment. The first one that comes to my mind is that we think that, in order to be in relationship, either one of both partners have to give up something -- "In order to be with you, I (have to) give up something of myself." That's a recipe for dissatisfaction and hidden resentment if ever there was!
Another mistake we make is, when things get a bit bumpy, we try to "make" the relationship work (some people even justify that by saying it's "for the sake of the kids") . That doesn't ever really work, because we're going to work on the Consequence instead of the Cause. Relationship is a product, or consequence, of the interaction of who two people are. If we were to more authentically be who we are, and were more willing to express our self in a higher state of integrity than we're doing at the moment, then we could simply get out of the way and ALLOW a relationship to work. We could even do that now in our present state of being if we weren't so hung up on models of how it ought to work, but then we'd have to give up being "right" about a lot of the positions we're on, and our egos aren't going to like that!
We are too busy enjoying our suffering to see the bleeding obvious -- "I could be enjoying this if only I didn't feel this way about it!" And relationships offer golden opportunities for suffering on the scale of Grand Opera. But how we feel about anything is entirely and individually up to each of us.
In relationshit, we don't relate -- we project. We pin masks and costumes on the other, costumes from our own wardrobe that we won't wear. We assign qualities we think we don't have (good or bad) to the other person, whether that person actually has them or not. And we also attribute our feelings in relationshit to the other person -- "You make me feel ......... (insert here a line from your favourite love song)". We shift our stuff, and the responsibility for it, onto the other. Is it any wonder we feel burdened? Is it any wonder, too, that Intimacy goes out the window? There's absolutely no hope whatsoever of shared "into-me-see" when either of us is focussed on the other person's space! Helloo-ooo!?
Another mistake -- we look in relationship for a Saviour -- someone whose job it is to take way a feeling that we don't like and cannot be with, and/or to supply us with a feeling we've grown addicted to, because we don't acknowledge that "I am the sole source of everything I feel". We didn't ever tell the other person we were looking for a Saviour, of course, and it wasn't even in the fine print of the Marriage Contract, probably because we didn't realise it. We look to relationship to alter our experience, when the purpose of all living is to HAVE our experience. We look to others for answers, when our here/now experience IS the answer we're seeking. We've just forgotten what the question was.....
I don't think anybody can have a successful relationship in integrity states of Uncertainty, Opposition or Disloyalty. [If you want to know more about those states, do read Ron Smothermon's book "Winning Through Enlightenment", or my book "Another Way".]
Successful relationships of any kind -- not just romantic ones --
exist in a Purpose and a Context, a way of being
that is larger than the relationship itself.
What that Context is, is for you and your partner to create.
Most of us don't even know that possibility exists. Dysfunctional relationships slop around in default conditions that happened either by habit or by accident. So we fall eventually out of relationship into a condition of relationshit.
Here is an exercise-cum-meditation that you might find enlightening. Put on some quiet, pleasant music, and sit yourself comfortably in front of a good-sized mirror. Look at your head and shoulders and face. Take some time to settle with that. Then, when the traffic of thoughts has quietened down a bit, look into you own eyes and ask your self "Who do I want?" When an answer pops, follow up with, "Then who do I want?............... Then who do I want?......" Gently keep repeating the question -- until you get it. Get what? You'll know -- when you get it.
THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE
We live in a spectrum of two natures -- one is Human and the other is Divine. We are both. But in daily living we experience varying levels of the two modes of awareness, levels that fluctuate from moment to moment. We are never either fully secular, or fully divine; we slide around.
In the context of Love, the purely Divine perception is very simple -- Love is All, and All is Love. There is nothing that is not an expression of Love. Hatred and Indifference are just as much expressions of Divine Love as are Affection and Empathy. End of discussion.
In this article I'm addressing mostly the Human end of the Love scale -- the end where Love ceases to be a single awareness and becomes a multiplicity of experiences that can feel as different as heaven and hell. This is the end of the scale where we experience conditions that we label as "Not-Love", "romantic love", "altruism", "sympathy", "empathy", "indifference" .. and so on. In this condition, there are also a lot of things we mistake for "love" that, in the human sense, are not love at all. Let's go exploring................
Romanticism seeks to restore a lost sense of the Divine side of our nature. Romantic love opens up bits of our inner life, our "better nature". Romance inspires the power of our imagination to create beauty, poetry, music, myth, dream and vision. So far, so good
Romance also triggers a longing we probably did not know we harboured -- our longing for the opposite-gender side of our nature. Every man is looking for his female-ness - his anima; every female is looking for her animus. We meet someone who sends our hormones into a spin and we think we have found what we were looking for. Sometimes we may have, but we stuff that up by thinking that what we've found is coming from the other person. No. The other person just triggered a release of our own yummy stuff.
It is our longing for our better and our opposite gender natures that unites us in a state of romantic love.
Somewhere down the line, however, things come unstuck because we have misused the romantic ideal and confused it with "Love". Rather than relating authentically with the real flesh-and-blood human being in front of us, we mis-place our version of love over onto our partner. Rather than take personal responsibility for connecting with our Divinity, we pursue it in another, and expect the other to fulfill for us an idealised image of our own opposite-gender soul. ("You make me feel........., and I expect you to keep on doing that through better and worse, through richer and poorer, 'til death do us part.") That is an impossible burden to place on any other person, but we blindly do it to each other. Such romanticism carries within it the seeds of its own inevitable destruction. In a state of sudden euphoria, we mistake where our feelings are coming from -- ("You make me feel....") and put the relationship under a strain it cannot sustain. This simple mistake means that we jointly end up destroying the very human relationship that we experienced, for a moment at least, as Divine. We get dis-illusioned, confused and hurt, and we blame the other for not perpetuating what was only ever our fantasy in the first place.
Romantic love is a hallmark of adolescence, a necessary stage in our psychological evolution. It is our path for a while. But we are supposed to grow through it and out of it, and come out of the experiences much the wiser. But many of us, including myself, got trapped inside, going around in circles of repeated experiences, vainly looking for an exit. I'd love a dollar for every 3am call I've taken from someone who is still agonisingly trapped in their adolescent notions of "true love". "True love" is a natural desire for fulfillment, completion and happiness that gets misdirected onto other human beings.
Real love,however, has a different texture to it. Among its attributes are a deep and genuine desire for the whole well-being and happiness of your beloved, just as he/she is -- un-renovated. Real human Love is not a grand drama of passion at the expense of the other person.
Like most of our early lives, we got it all backwards. Let's take "Did you miss me?" What is that about? If I'm asked that and my answer is "Yes, I missed you like crazy", I know there's some unfinished work for me to do around a belief in inadequacy, but she gets an ego goose. If my answer is "No, I didn't miss you", I'm fine but she gets offended. We have a definition of Love that says "If you really loved me you'd be unhappy unless I'm around", and we feel somewhat betrayed when they're not suffering in our absence. That's not Love! It might be a lot of other things, mostly unhealthy, but Love is not one of them.
Romantic love is fun to play with, but as a seriously entertained way of life it is an "unwholly" muddle of Divine and Human loves. Our Divine love includes an urge toward the inner world, and our human soul's reaching for its divine origins. Our Human love is the divine's hankering for real flesh-and-blood human-being experiences. Like Michaelangelo's great fresco, the Divine and the Human reach out to each other in Love. Both loves are valid and co-operate to give us the richness of experience that is the condition of being human. But culturally we've got them muddled and we have nearly lost them both.
The great flaw in Romantic Love happens when we seek one love over the other..... when we try to attain the Divine without the human; or we wallow in the human without regard to the divine There is no single Love. There is a unifying context called Love-ness that includes ALL kinds of love in complete balance. But there is no One Love -- not in a dual universe. No matter how flat you squash a coin, there are still at least two sides to it. One Love is a romantic fiction.
What about the concept of Soul Mates? It's a concept with beliefs wrapped around it. If that's how you want to see it, god bless you. If it enriches your feelings for each other, go for it. But it is still only a concept with beliefs.
Now I'm going to stir up the hornets nest. People in (romantic) love are not actually in love with each other. They are in love with a feeling they get -- for the moment -- when they are in each other's company. Unwittingly they are using each other as conduits to access the intense, passionate experiences they would otherwise not give themselves permission to have, This, whether we admit it or not, is what romantic love is, using another to create passion and drama for its own sake. I didn't say that was wrong, but there are possible consequences you might like to know about in advance. If you don't want to know, skip to the next paragraph. When we pursue passion and drama for its own sake, we risk becoming junkies for it. When our partner no longer serves as a ready connection, we either shut down, or go looking for our "fix" of passion and drama somewhere else (usually, but not necessarily with another partner).
When we are genuinely in love with another person, it is a spontaneous act of being. Love is a recognition of the other person that causes us to acknowledge our own wholeness, to affirm, value and honour her/him in toto. and to desire nothing more than happiness and well-being for both of us.
There are two marriages we should consider making. The first is an inner re-union with our own Soul. We do that by going both inward and outward, observing, engaging with and experiencing all that is there. The second marriage is a connection with all other beings. This connection does not have to be manufactured, it already exists. Just acknowledge and declare it to be so. In declaring our connection, we become connected. It is that easy! Then everything "else" is embraced, just as it is. When these two marriages are consummated, romantic love takes it's appropriate place in the scheme of things -- as a rite of passage in growing up.
Romance, as a game, does not disappear. It is enjoyed for its own sake as a way of honouring and celebrating each other. Romance also helps us avoid the trap of Withholding in relationship.
THIS ONE ISN'T IT
When you woke up and rolled over in bed this morning, who did you see? Someone who still embodies the qualities you saw in him/her when you first "fell" in love and chose to "be with", or did you see someone else? Well, whoever you saw, that was your creation, not your partner's.
Somewhere in the attic of our mind, there is a silver box containing images of our ideal job, ideal home, ideal family... and ... ideal partner. When we first get into relationship, everything is usually fine and dandy and the other fills our waking days. But as we get used to each other and some of the gloss begins to wear thin, we surreptitiously duck up to the attic every now and then and compare what we think we've got with the perfect image in the silver box. The differences begin to show. "Uh! Well, this one isn't quite what I wanted" So we start to withhold some of the joy and spontaneity we've been bringing to the table, keeping something on ice in case, one day, Mr. or Mrs. Right should suddenly turn up out of the blue. Then, maybe, we keep some more of ourself in reserve in case this partner dies or quits on us one day in the possible future.
Any withholding in any situation, for whatever reason -- good or bad -- saps the life out of everyone and everything involved. When we withhold, we shut the doors on aliveness itself. We then hang around for some crisis, some calamity, or even death itself to unite us with our silver-boxed ideal, with our fantasy-dream of opposite-gender perfection. Even in other partners. we still find only tormentingly partial reflections of the divine vision we hope for. Forlornly we give up on this relationship and dream of meeting our Ideal Love on the other side of this grave we're stuck in now.
But what if there is only Nothingness after death? Or, what if we've died already, and THIS is heaven(or hell) What if this life here and now is IT, and we're missing it while we're searching for something else?
DEATH AND TRANSFORMATION IN ROMANCE
What on earth does Death have to do with Love? Quite a lot as it happens.
Death seems to be the object of so much of our longing. We make the despair component of earthly human experience bearable by holding to a plaintive hope of perfection, beauty and happiness in a world to come.
But what if the absence of what we don't like takes with it what we do want (ie. it's polar opposites) Then we're left with Nothing. You cannot lose the negative and keep the positive. Like the proverbial coin, they go together. Ooops!
Or what if this perfect and beautiful realm lies latent within us here and now, lying hidden inside what we say "No" to?
What if -- we have lived lifetime after lifetime for eons, failing to get the message that all the great spiritual leaders have been saying through the centuries of recorded history -- that "the kingdom of heaven is at hand". Not tomorrow, not next Friday just after lunch, but right here, right now, waiting for us to stop looking for it and notice it.. The Kingdom of Heaven -- we're standing in it., with our eyes shut, our ears plugged up with our iPods, and saying "This ain't it!"
It's not Death we're afraid of; it's not Death we're looking for. We are after -- and afraid of -- what we've been told that Death will give us -- liberation, and transformation. Well, I'm not at all sure that Death will deliver either liberation or transformation. It's my limited experience that Death delivers Nothing. I watched my father, a lifelong devout Christian, face death, and what he saw as he drew nigh to the threshold was a long way from the bliss he'd been promised. For the first time in my life I saw terror on his face.
What I am sure of, because I have already experienced a measure of it, is that Liberation and Transformation are available in this life, here and now. No need to wait for anything. If that is so, though, why don't we all go for it? Our egos get in the way because, to our egos, Transformation is a death threat.
A man had spent his life looking for God. He knocked on doors, searched cathedrals, temples, soup kitchens asking everyone he met if they had seen God. Finally, one day, an unlikely man came up to him and said "I believe you've been looking for God. I know where He lives. It's not far from here." He gave the man the address. Eagerly, the man went straight around there. Sure enough, a small brass plate on the letterbox carried the legend "God. No junk mail".
The man was beside himself with excitement. For 6 decades he had been searching for God.... He walked through the front gate and up the path to the front door. He reached out to press the doorbell. "The search is over!" hit him like a thunderclap. Slowly he withdrew his hand, turned, and walked away.
We get addicted or inured to the search -- even to a point where the search becomes more important than what we're searching for. You can let your ego put off and resist the inevitable. You can fight anything and everything that challenges you to give up your ego's ideas, opinions, concepts and beliefs -- all to perpetuate The Search. While you are searching, you are not finding. If you truly want to find, give up searching. Searching is an impediment to Finding.
You can wait, if you like, until the last few hours/minutes/seconds of your life to discover that what you've been looking for has been right in front of your nose all along. Or you can get it now, and then get on with enjoying your humanity for a change.
Imagine now that your life in this body is ebbing away. You are being drawn towards the white light beyond that door. Question:----- Do you think in that moment any of your long-held opinions, beliefs or ideas will matter a tuppenny damn? I've been there. They won't. Only one question will occupy your mind -- "Do they know I love them?"
What has all this to do with Romantic Love? Romantic love is a bit of a death-wish: it guarantees suffering. And how we love suffering! Imagine a romantic storyline that goes --
Boy meets girl.
Boy and girl fall in love, get married
And live happily ever after.
Nobody's going to buy that! They've gotta suffer somewhere!
Romantic love also gives us a bunch of inspired feelings, akin to transformation. That's why it feels so "right". The huge appeal of Romantic Love is:--
- the Death of our humanity (which around adolescence really sucks anyway!),
- redemption through suffering,and
- the promise of Transformation.
Death of an old way --------> Redemption -------> Transformation
In our psyche,, suffering is deeply connected to the quest for Growth and Understanding. Death is also seen to be the possible birth of self-awareness. But these are lies. Despite what I was taught every Easter, suffering is no guarantee of transformation, nor is death any guarantee of anything more than a fading flash of self-awareness. Death, the end of duality, is the demise self-awareness and the end of transformation. It's too late then. But we don't know that yet. We long to fill the vaguely perceived "missing" in our lives -- that unlived spiritual dimension. We go looking for it in suffering, particularly in the powerful suffering of romantic love. If we weren't so intent upon the pain of our romantic suffering, we'd realise that we've never felt so alive, and that we're having the time of our lives!
I could be enjoying this if I didn't feel this way about it!
The "death" we seek though Romance is Redemption and Transformation. Despite, or maybe because of, our egos, we are inexorably drawn towards Transformation. So is the whole of existence. That is our deepest "death wish", except that our Divine nature knows that there is no death -- to anything except the ego.
Religion gets into the act, too. Church and State combined have managed to wangle their way into birth, marriage and death, but nowhere is religion more tightly wrapped than around the riddle of Death.
Our religion itself is Romance. Most of the stuff I was taught in Sunday School about Jesus Christ was pure romance -- just look at the pictures they draw! When we were children we imagined "heaven" to be out there amongst the stars. But when we slipped into,puberty, we shifted the location of heaven from the firmament onto other people -- the ones with whom we fell in love -- and we brought some of the stars along to pepper up our love poems.
The "death" that awaits us at the very centre of religion and romance is the flowering of our inner world, and the promise of paradise. We're looking for
- Freedom from fear and guilt
- Responsibility
- Authenticity
- Inter-dependence
- Sovereignty
- Surrender
- Serenity.
Romance promises to supply all of that. But the promise cannot be sustained by romance alone. Something else has to happen as well......
When you next experience a moment of peace and wholeness in the arms of another, try an experiment. Try acknowledging that you, alone, are creating those feelings for you, that you have known them before without the presence of this person, and that you can have them again -- with or without this person. You are grateful, to say the very least, for the the other's presence and enrichment of the moment, but your experience is yours.
When you own your experience and your partner owns his/her experience, you have a clean relationship. What usually happens, however, is that we credit and project our perception of paradise onto the other person. At the same time we take a snapshot of the moment and silver-box it. From then on, every subsequent opportunity for a fresh, unique experience with this person is killed off, firstly by an expectation that the other "do it to me one more time" and, secondly, by us taking a peep into the silver box while it is going on, to see how this time compares with the snapshot. No wonder the intensity fades! We no longer see the other as he/she is. We no longer experience this experience as unique and fresh. We no longer see our Divine inner vision for what it is; We are so far away from the reality of it that we muddle everything up into a mess. The Divine and the Human both become mangled and dishonoured.
When you own your experience and your partner owns his/her experience, you have a clean relationship. What usually happens, however, is that we credit and project our perception of paradise onto the other person. At the same time we take a snapshot of the moment and silver-box it. From then on, every subsequent opportunity for a fresh, unique experience with this person is killed off, firstly by an expectation that the other "do it to me one more time" and, secondly, by us taking a peep into the silver box while it is going on, to see how this time compares with the snapshot. No wonder the intensity fades! We no longer see the other as he/she is. We no longer experience this experience as unique and fresh. We no longer see our Divine inner vision for what it is; We are so far away from the reality of it that we muddle everything up into a mess. The Divine and the Human both become mangled and dishonoured.
Romantic love is like the booster rockets on a space shuttle. The passions of Romance get us off the ground and carry us through the trials and necessary adjustments of the getting-to-know-you phase. But like all human "highs", they are not meant to last. Solely Romantic relationships burn out; they are supposed to. Otherwise we become so exhausted by the sheer intensity of it all -- the ecstasies and the battles, the partings and the reconciliations -- that there is finally nothing left to do but suicide. Could Romeo and Juliet have carried on like they were into old age? Bill Shakespeare knew a lot about romantic love.
Unless we pay conscious attention to it, we will not have generated enough enduring life force, goodwill and genuine affection with which to love and companion someone at the human level. After the honeymoon our souls find us, waiting patiently for the divine nourishment that was promised just before the honeymoon, and not finding that satisfaction. We come up short, but rarely with enough insight to see where we got it wrong.
Romantic love is not the full symphony; it is just the prelude.
There is real LIFE after the honeymoon.
Unless we pay conscious attention to it, we will not have generated enough enduring life force, goodwill and genuine affection with which to love and companion someone at the human level. After the honeymoon our souls find us, waiting patiently for the divine nourishment that was promised just before the honeymoon, and not finding that satisfaction. We come up short, but rarely with enough insight to see where we got it wrong.
Romantic love is not the full symphony; it is just the prelude.
There is real LIFE after the honeymoon.
To be continued .........................
Thursday, March 04, 2010
INSIGHT OR PROJECTION?
We are judgmental creatures, aren't we?
Addictively so. It seems we cannot look at another person, or anything else outside of ourselves without a running commentary of evaluation, and a barrage of snap judgments going on in this looney-bin of our minds.
But how accurate are our evaluations? Is it Insight? Or are we projecting our own stuff onto others? How do we tell the difference?
I think it's fairly straightforward (for a welcome change). Unless what you see is something you have already examined and given a deep and grateful "Yes" to within yourself, you are projecting something of yourself onto the other. If there is any sense of rightness or wrongness about what you see, you are projecting. If there is any feeling of hardening, resisting, or contracting alongside what you are seeing, you are projecting. While you are projecting onto the other, you are not seeing the other as he/she/it actually is. You are deluding yourself and depriving yourself and the other of any further possibility. The overall effect on you is a separating of the seer within you from that which is seen. The projector and the projection are two different things.
When you find yourself projecting, own what you see coming back off the screen. Give yourself enough time and space to open up and welcome all of it back into your self. If there is any resistance to that, acknowledge and welcome the resistance, for that is the truth of that moment. Be grateful for the screen and the process that enable you to see what was hidden within you. Letting go of your snap creations will allow you to return, enlightened, to your natural state of Wholeness -- being all of it.
Insight comes when an unbidden and previously un-thought, un-anticipated realisation arises spontaneously in your heart. Accompanying it is a palpable expansion of the heart, an aura of humility, and a recognition that you are, indeed, looking into a mirror. No matter how unpleasant what you see might be, you feel a one-ness, a "me-too" empathy with what you see, and you are grateful for that expansion. The overall effect on you is unifying. The seer and the seen are one. The image runs both ways -- from film, through projector to mirror and back through projector to film. Both are enriched.
Addictively so. It seems we cannot look at another person, or anything else outside of ourselves without a running commentary of evaluation, and a barrage of snap judgments going on in this looney-bin of our minds.
But how accurate are our evaluations? Is it Insight? Or are we projecting our own stuff onto others? How do we tell the difference?
I think it's fairly straightforward (for a welcome change). Unless what you see is something you have already examined and given a deep and grateful "Yes" to within yourself, you are projecting something of yourself onto the other. If there is any sense of rightness or wrongness about what you see, you are projecting. If there is any feeling of hardening, resisting, or contracting alongside what you are seeing, you are projecting. While you are projecting onto the other, you are not seeing the other as he/she/it actually is. You are deluding yourself and depriving yourself and the other of any further possibility. The overall effect on you is a separating of the seer within you from that which is seen. The projector and the projection are two different things.
When you find yourself projecting, own what you see coming back off the screen. Give yourself enough time and space to open up and welcome all of it back into your self. If there is any resistance to that, acknowledge and welcome the resistance, for that is the truth of that moment. Be grateful for the screen and the process that enable you to see what was hidden within you. Letting go of your snap creations will allow you to return, enlightened, to your natural state of Wholeness -- being all of it.
Insight comes when an unbidden and previously un-thought, un-anticipated realisation arises spontaneously in your heart. Accompanying it is a palpable expansion of the heart, an aura of humility, and a recognition that you are, indeed, looking into a mirror. No matter how unpleasant what you see might be, you feel a one-ness, a "me-too" empathy with what you see, and you are grateful for that expansion. The overall effect on you is unifying. The seer and the seen are one. The image runs both ways -- from film, through projector to mirror and back through projector to film. Both are enriched.
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