CONTENMENT, WILLINGNESS & GRATITUDE

I read this morning --
"It is impossible to settle into the present
Without first cultivating Contentment."

Contentment and Willingness
Are the parents of Gratitude --
That heartful YES to life
As she presents herself.

Deliberately choose to embrace what-is-so,
Contentedly,

As an expression of
"This is the kind of person I choose
To be."

MIRACLE

 A miracle is not so much an event
As it is a moment of overwhelming experience.

A miracle is a moment
When we get a profoundly extrasensory flash of recognition
Of the divinity of Existence.
We witness a wider reality
That momentarily washes away all our petty concerns.

Miracles happen every moment;
We just fail to see them.
Somewhere in the process of growing up
We  got distracted from being what we are
In order to experiment with acting some sort of role.
We misplaced our in-sightful innocence
In which everything was miraculous.

But that I-know-sense is still there --
Waiting
For us to come back
And real-ise..........

SOFTEN THE ADDICTIONS

The agitations of the mind are addictive.
When static is buzzing,
Upsetting your equanimity,
Notice the addiction to peturbation;
Soften around it
And see for yourself what lies behind the noise.

INNER PERFECTION

There is an inner perfection
The same for every one.
When the pysche stops dancing, churning and burning,
Its journey done --
There it is,
Where it has been all day long;
Searched for,
Striven for,
Longed for.
Perfection never leaves;
It remains,
Forgetten and unnoticed.

Simply re-member
And notice
This here/now is perfect,
Just as it is.
Surrender to that.

LOOKING/LISTENING/FEELING/SMELLING/TASTING/SENSING AROUND

I cannot see my face --
Not directly;
I can see only reflections of it,
And I see them all around me.
Others are mere created reflecions of "I" and "me" --
How else could I recognise "them"
Other-wise?

Neither can I see the face of God --
Not directly.
I look, and No-thing presents Itself.
But I am surrounded by reflections of That
Godness

Lose yourself
As lovers lose themselves.
Give yourself over
To that Greater Un-known
That is greater than I and Me,
And be that also.

Everything around me exists only as a perception in my mind.
That is
All it is.
What is that thought-thing?

OPPOSITES ARE-TRACKED

Opposites are not separate
But irrevocably inter-connected.
Like the two faces of one coin,
One side cannot survive without the other.
We dance along the strands of that interconnection,
Pretending to be one
But not the other.......
Yet changing sides when it suits us,
Deluding
And deluded.

What makes us vulnerable is not our duality,
Our unexplainable inconsistencies
But our delusions about them.

Each one of us is a complex of dualities,
A mystery of competing contradictions.
Illogicalities and paradoxes,
Challenging us to take a step back
And look from another, wider perspective.

Don't be hostage to surprise;
Don't be troubled.
If you expect life to be fully rational
You are bound for frustration.
Simply notice what-is
One-der within it
And enjoy the play of light-ness.

REAL-ATIONSHIP

This much I know....
We become what we love,

AND

We become what we resist.

So much for our duality.

But I can't just write it off at that.
I'm tantalised by the inner-dwelling relationship
Between what we love
And what we resist.
From that interdwelling interaction
A richness of experience arises,
Mysteriously un-reasonable, often contradictory,
And ineffably human.

POINTING

People become obsessed
With rules, traditions and texts
Only
When they have lost their sense
Of what and where those things point to.

Ivan M. Grainger

AUTHENTICITY

We do not react and interact with the world as it is:
We interact with a world reconstructed by our selves.
What is "real" to us is not actual.
Our realities are seriously flawed.
Until we get authentic about that,
And begin exploring and owning up to our delusions
We cannot be authentic in the actual world.

Our reconstruction of reality is twofold ---

Firstly by our perceptions;
What we see and hear is filtered and reshaped
By what we've conditioned ourselves to expect,
Rather than by the actuality of what-is happening.

Secondly by the interdiction of our guiding operating principles;
We don't react directly with what is happening
But with what we say to ourselves about what is happening in our world.

This is where "others" come in;
They reflect our misshapen perceptions back to us.
Isn't that nice of them?
Whatever others say about you
Says more about their percpetions
Than it says about you.
Likewise, whatever you say about another --
You give yourself away
(In more ways than one.....)
Now we begin to get a different perspective on what The Christ meant when he said -- "Judge not, lest ye be judged."


Authenticity begins with getting authentic about our arms-length, emotional insulating from cold, hard reality.

WHAT WE ARE

Ego thinks...
We are individual beings.
That is a limited perception;
We are much more.
We are individual points of experiencing and perceiving
Within one infinite being.

PACIFIST OT PASSIVIST?

Antiwar-ists are not pacifists;
Nor are conscientious copouts........
One cannot be an effective Pacifist by being a Passivist.
Equally one cannot be effective as a Pacifist by resisting aggression.
True Pacifism involves meeting yourself where you are
And your circumstances as and where they are,
Recognising the outer reflections of your inner dilemmas
And engaging creatively and openly
With your contributions to all of it.

FINDERS KEEPERS

If you look for it
You will find
You cannot find
Your mind.

When you get that,
You will find
So much more.

(With thanks to Ivan M Granger)

PEACE AND CONTENTMENT

Do you yearn for peace and contentment?
Call off the search.
Strip your self psychically naked.
Drop all pretences and desires for change --
Even the desire for contentment.
Total self-acceptance
Is prerequisite
To stillness.

BLISS

Bliss is being present,
Open
And unreservedly available
To what's happening.

YOU ARE THE ANSWER

You already have the answer
In your here/now experience:
You've just forgotten what the question was.
Let go of your mind-ful of unnecessary things.
Surrender to the inevitable now......
Whittle yourself down
To nothing but the question at your core.
Enter that emptiness
And let it lead you
To ecstasy.
You already are the answer you've been looking for:

CHOSING

We choose the world we live in
And the way we live in that self-created world.
We choose what we give our attention to
And what we ignore.
If something we've created isn't working for us,
Anything we've chosen
Can be un-chosen.

Simple.

Maybe not easy --
The Queen Mary, once under way, takes some effort to change course.
But simple.
So simple, indeed, that it gets overlooked or rejected
By minds that wallow in complication
And avoid effort.

HARD LESSONS

I'm having a bit of a rough time recently,
Learning the difference between Assertiveness and Aggression.
I've had three hobnail-booted women give me a right emotional kicking in the last four days:
Two of them have even ganged up together.
(That's OK. Sooner or later they'll turn on each other.)

I'm finding....
Assertiveness is remaining open and sensitive to the rights of others while I protect my own rights in the matter:
Aggressiveness is when I trample on the rights and sensibilities of everyone around while I protect myself.

I'm standing in the questions --

What does it feel like to be free of (the grip of) anger?
What does it feel like to be at peace?

Interesting what's come up, huh?

REFLECTIONS ON THE ERUPTION OF STRUGGLE IN EGYPT

It is time for transformation,
But the struggles are for Change --
Existing Government and powerful externals like the US
Want to keep the status quo
To survive their own ends.
Extremist elements see a chance to push their own barrows;
Some just want an end to violence and repression,
Even fewer have a vision for honest democracy......

Like each of us,
They're coming from behind the 8-ball.....

From oppositional parenting minds
We learned to survive
By taking a position
And by opposing --

"To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
And, by opposing, end them."

Well, that doesn't work:
Position creates Opposition,
And Opposition staples that-which-is-opposed into permanent position.

Outwardly, effort is necessary,
But inwardly we are invited to yield.
When we finally wake up and realise
That something is dreadfully wrong
We are challenged to yield.
In the end, if we have not already done so,
That which opposes will be forced to yield everything
Unto death.

My suggestion is to yield now
And enjoy all that life offers you.
But we always have the option
Of fighting life all the way to the grave......
Over to you..... Your choice.

EMBARRASSMENT

A "Boo!",
An orgasm,
And the moment we realise
"I've just made a complete dickhead of myself."....
These are the only times we're truly and utterly alive.
Then we muck the moment up
By thinking about it.

Why are we so eager to avoid embarrassment?
It's a lovely emotion.
It brings a flush of colour to your face
And a sparkle to your eyes.
It is a rare moment of being totally human
And alive.
It is a moment of vulnerability
When we could discover how fully loved and protected we are --
If only we'd surrender to it.

WHO WE ARE....

One day.....
That-Which-Is contemplated the nature of it's Is-ness,
That is, It asked itself "What am I?"........

BANG!!!!

It fractured into numberless shards of matter.
Nothing "mattered".

Like a holograph,
Each sliver of matter contained the complete pattern,
The content and image
Of the whole.

As far as I know, humans are one of only three beings
Capable of self-awareness,
(the others being chimpanzees and orang-utans).
And we are probably the ONLY species that is capable (theoretically)
Of recognising our wholeness and divinity.
Certainly we are the only species to reject
The awareness of our godness ,
To lament the imagined loss of, and separation from what we already are
And to go looking for it elsewhere
Outside of our selves.

How sad is that?