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?

SPIRITUALITY & RELIGION

Religion  was useful to me --
It reminded me of myself as Spirit,
And there is more......

Religion is a successful attempt
To limit and control
An experience of awakening and freeing.

Spirituality opens
And possibilizes;
Religion closes
And limits.

The love of Godness is not a limited resource
To be withheld at whim
Or doled out by some priest.
The love of godness
Is what we already are,
Thinking that we need some system to hang onto.

FAITH & CERTAINTY

Absolute certainty is not an expression of faith --
It is a symptom of a lack of faith.
My father lived his entire life projecting an aura of iron-willed certainty -- about everything.
A few days before I last saw him, he had a near-death experience.
It shattered him.
I watched him dying in utter bewilderment and fear,
Drowning in his hitherto unacknowledged doubts.
It was terrible to behold.

The dictum "You can't take it with you"
Applies to righteous certainty.
The mind cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.

The ultimate certainty,
The portal to heaven,
Is the Certainty of Not-Knowing.

MY HOLY TRINITY

A young friend of mine was ruminating introspectively for a moment yesterday, when she sighed "Life is so complicated."
That stuck in my mental craw. She looked at me with a little surprise. "What?" she inquired.
Looking at it, I replied, "Only when we make it so. It's actually also stunningly simple, once a few basic truths are realised."

Since I've written a whole book on basic things about life that we were never taught, I wondered this morning as I was waiting for my dirty washing to go through the laundrette -- "Can I get the simple basics down to three?" Here's what I came up with.... at least for this morning........

1. The human mind is dual: the universe isn't.
2. Nothing matters
3. There's no free lunch

 THE HUMAN MIND IS DUAL: THE UNIVERSE ISN'T.


Everything gets classified into opposing polarities of good/bad, better/worse, right/wrong... and we try to disown what we think may be "bad" for us. That's  where the trouble starts. Every saint has a sinner-inner, and vice versa. If we could get comfy with that in our selves, and stayed aware of it in others, we would be far grander and less vulnerable to nasty surprises than our protective "rightness" would have us to believe.

Everything has its opposites, and the trick is to find the point of balance., moment to moment.

NOTHING MATTERS

That;s how this all got started. Nothing wondered about itself, frequencies got lowered,  matter showed up and started organising itself into all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff.

If we could get that, outside of mind, nothing matters any more than anything else, we'd be a lot happier.

THERE'S NO FREE LUNCH

The law of Consequences. Everything we say and do has consequences. Everything we DON"T say or do has consequences. And if we get to thinking that we can manipulate the consequences, we're in for a big surprise.

But we'll go to our graves blaming "others".

And then we'll wake up.

THIS -- AS A DREAM

This place is a dream

only a sleeper considers it real

then death comes like a dawn

and you wake up laughing

at what you thought 

was your grief.

Mevlana Jelaludin Rumi

(1207 - 1273)

Trans: Coleman Banks

Life is a dream.

When I woke up to this awesome reality a few years ago

And the laughter subsided enough,

I thought I'd made the most astounding discovery since breathing.

Then I find today that this guy (Rumi) knew it 8 centuries ago!

Obviously the word has been slow getting out:

Mankind could have saved himself a few wars

And a truckload of suffering about suffering.
I guess the problem is that,
We can't simply read that "Life is a dream"
And file it away with yesterday's news;
Each and every one of us has to get it for himself.
That requires a certain level of commitment and surrender to possibility
That puts us still in an uncomfortable minority.

The experience of "getting it" is very much akin to the experience of waking up.

It's the surprise of the thing that catches you unawares.

When it happened to me
Nothing around me changed;

Nothing within me changed,

And yet nothing has been the same since that moment.

I real-ised I'd been poking around

In a half-seeing, energy depleting, anxious trance.

Perhaps just as surprising was to discover --

Thanks to Papaji --

That part of my inner awareness

That had always been wakeful enough

To know

And wait

For me to "get it."

All I had to do was wake up

And get out of the way with all I think I know

And allow real Knowing
From that nonjudgmental Awareness
To get through to me.

That process of getting out of my own way

Continues........

The dreaming continues,

But
With awareness;

That's the difference.

I am the dreamer, not the dream.

I am not my Self....

I am the watcher 

And the experiencer

Of my Self in full flight.

What a blessed relief!

And joy, too,

Except when I forget
And get caught asleep in the dream
Again

Sometimes
Until I re-member........

WHAT WE BECOME

Thanks to Ivan M. Grainger

A sapling seeks sunlight,

Reaching out for that golden touch.

Over time

The tree takes the form

Of its own seeking.

And

We become what we've been looking for.

If you think otherwise,

I have a question for you --

"How has your "otherwise" been working for you?"

No?

Then you may be kidding yourself.....

We have become what we've been putting out (for).

Ouch?