Patricia Bralley: Seeing for My Self

Cashing in the Chips

2012-01-26T14:24:00.003-05:00

Grandma , a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

After Evie got the news about her PET scan, for about the next twenty-four hours I kept envisioning a cashing in of all the chips. I kept seeing this poker table in my head and hands pushing all the chips forward. We had finally arrived at that all or nothing bet.

All the chips were in, pushed into the center of the table which seemed awfully like the edge of all creation.
That image and the ensuing free fall into nothingness kept looping through my mind until I heard a quiet voice ask in wonderment: What is it that you throw it all into?
Immediately I realized the obvious: It was the Void and it was God.

Once you've put everything
on the table
once all of your currency is gone
and your pockets are full of air
all you've got left to gamble with
is yourself.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top
of the highest stakes table.
Place yourself as the bet.
Look God in the eyes
and finally
for once in your life
lose.
Adyashanti

So that is what I did and that is just what happened.

I have a friend who’s fond of saying that there are really only two prayers in the world:
Help me, help me, help me! and Thank you, thank you, thank you!
It seems to me there might also be a third and it’s called surrender:
You look into the Void of Unknowing and toss yourself into it.
It wasn’t even a “take me, take, take me!” It was just a reverential toss, like you’d drop a flower.
And there wasn’t any great swell of emotion, but rather the cradling gentleness and love inherent in deep trust.
And then… there were about three weeks that felt like wandering lost in darkness of the Void.
During this period I recalled Adya’s advice to not resist the freefall or try to orient yourself. And, for once, I found I could simply wait and trust that the way forward would eventually become clear.

I wondered if Evie understood this “cashing in” and decided that most probably she’d say that something deep inside, some tight constriction had been broken. She’d felt a jump into living in a new manner where some of the old rules no longer would apply. But, I don’t think she’d speak of Void or even God. Perhaps she’d mention sacredness and energy or maybe even archetypes. People noticed she was strong. She mentioned she was scared. But, she did not hesitate to act.

Leigh Fortson, having traversed three rounds of going deeper and deeper into the healing of her own cancer, puts it this way:
I find it hard to call it a "will to live," because I think will is different from what I tapped into and what I think people tap into when they heal themselves. Will is the energy that you use to carry out what you learn to do, but the initial thrust was a combination of surrender to something that you don't understand, that you can't control, that you can't comprehend-which goes outside of the arena of will.
It's like, "Okay, there's a power in me, in all of us. There's something in me that I am asking to tap into, that I will surrender to, that I will give myself to in every way that I can."
…It's a combination of will and surrender and dedication and self love.

When I read stories about healing the impossible, be it via diet, or energy, or Shamanic journey I always find that the person gave themselves to the process entirely.
Entirely! Do you realize how very seldom we actually do that in life? Hardly ever. We always hedge our bets and hold something back. In fact, we call that being smart.
This plays right into the discussion I posted recently about the placebo effect – how there is now a theory that placebos work by simply giving ourselves permission to heal; that we are biologically programmed to hold back some of our healing resources for a later date and more dire straits and placebos relax that rule… well, finally- no more holding back.

There was nothing I could do. So I cashed in all my chips.
Only to discover, there was nothing I need do because deepest desires are not personal.
By that I mean that when you really feel the gut wrench of true desire -that desire transcends the personal.
I want to live is built into our cells. It arises from the species. It arises from Creation itself.
Once you know that, then you simply play your part (or work your butt off) as an agent of Let Thy will be done.

This is the first thing I have learned about true healing: Give yourself entirely.
Give yourself so fully that you see firsthand just how the personal becomes impersonal and infinite. And then, you work from there.
Or, as the Bhagavad Gita says:
Established in being, perform action.

Travels in a Stone Canoe

2012-01-22T11:13:00.003-05:00

This new journey, if it was to be anything beyond mere spiritual windmill tilting, was to be a journey of respect, a journey honoring sacred metaphors, of others and ourselves…Steve and I had invested meaning in the feather and the claw, and they returned that meaning to us a thousand fold. We chose to see them as sacred, and they became sacred… by accepting them as metaphors of our own we found ourselves infused with their metaphorical power. They gave us a kind of directional fix in that seemingly directionless world we were entering.
Harvey Arden, Travels in a Stone Canoe

Metaphors and the Seemingly Directionless – in other words, how do we understand the spiritual and physical? How to we even speak of it, let alone understand and act?
What Really exists and how do we change?

On January 4^th, 2012 we expected that the oncologist wouldn’t call for at least a few days. Instead, he phoned Evie within hours. Her PET scan was lighting up. All the ominous nodes that were seen three months ago were still there, plus a new one: 10/10 as a hot spot, 3 cm in diameter.

First, there had been the diagnosis over 2 years ago: Hodgkin’s lymphoma, “the good cancer that is easy to cure.”
Then, there was the early relapse after the chemo. … not so easy after all, they called it “aggressive.”
Now, there is the apparent relapse after high dose chemo and a stem cell transplant. The doctors want to do a biopsy, re-state the diagnosis, and prepare for a second transplant.
In essence, they suggest we confirm that cancer has returned and they offer the very slim chance that a second transplant, more dangerous than the first, and reducing an asymptomatic Eve into a someone resembling a concentration camp survivor, will actually provide a cure.

Eve has politely declined the offer.
Within a day she had quit her job, she and Michael had decided to sell their house and move up to the mountains where they can build a healing center.
She told me, “Something physical inside broke,” and I knew exactly what she meant.
These turning points feel physical. It can be a breaking, a letting go, a wrenching loose, or simply a dissolving – but you feel it.
It’s the end of clutching onto beliefs that simply do not serve – not if you want to live. And mostly, it occurs so deeply that just exactly what is going can be hard to say.
None the less, something physical inside brakes as you finally throw yourself into the unknown, out beyond the rules you knew.

To the nonbeliever, which we all are when it comes to systems we don’t “believe” in, the belief systems of others tend to be quaint, bizarre, even silly. The more we’re stuck on the truth of our own metaphors, the more the metaphors of others seem false… and yet…If this was quackery, it was apparently successful quackery. Does it matter how we’re healed as long as we are healed?
Harvey Arden, Travels in a Stone Canoe

At each critical junction of Eve’s journey with cancer, we have tried to read all the science. Curiously, we are suited to this task. Eve, her dad (my brother), and I all have PHDs in biology. We have followed the traditional Hodgkin’s treatments, and we have supplemented with the best complementary therapies we could find including nutrition, qigong, and meditation. And again, curiously, we are well suited to this as her dad is founder of a lab to do this.
At each turn we’ve felt we’ve taken the best path and followed that.
And still – there is that PET scan lighting up.

So, we’ve had to fashion yet another best plan. And it now looks like this:

1) Therapeutic Nutrition: The Gerson Diet – with modifications Evie feels make sense to her. My dad became fixated with this during the 1970s – not that he had cancer or even knew anyone. He just got interested and really studied it, eventually meeting Charlotte Gerson herself. Jaquie Davison’s book Cancer Winner describing the power of the diet to heal and has stayed in with me for over thirty years. I tried the diet myself back then and became convinced that while it supplies nutrition and physical substance, its actual power lay in the prana or Qi that it supplies.

2) Medical Qigong: Early on we found the story of a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor relapsing three times and finally curing himself with Qigong. We also found the work of Guo Lin, a Chinese woman who used her family's Qigong to cure herself and many others. So, what the diet stirs in Qi – here we add trained professional support. Our practice of Taoist guided movements also works upon this level.

3) Archetypal or Shamanic healing: I made up this term. It stems from what’s growing within my own practice of Taoist meditation. Working with Eve the past 18 months, spontaneously I started channeling . I’m sorry now I never wrote up our experience with a rather Samurai-like character who helped release the stems cells Evie need for her transplant. I’m not sure whether one would categorize this energy as subtler than the level of Qi – it is certainly more personified and thus seems to suggest a different yet complementary approach.

4) Meditation: We have been practicing a Taoist breath meditation for some time. Eve also learned TM over Christmas. We also decided to try the Holosyn binaural beat assuming that a physical way of entraining coherence into the brain may help at times when too many others things in mind and body seem to swamp the system.

So, there’s the plan. It still feels like we’ve assembled a lot of band instruments and they are strewn around the floor, yet to be picked up and played in anything resembling a concert or even a simple tune.

But, I feel compelled to understand healing – physical, practical, healing of the tissues.
Curiously, this seems to require understanding metaphysical: the nature of reality and what is true.

“Something physically broke inside” and with that thought, that metaphor, Evie jumped into a new way of being. It feels like something breaks, but actually what breaks is merely a construct of consciousness, something that we’ve held inside and can only express in words and metaphors.

And while such beliefs or metaphors can hurt us, they can also heal.

I was beginning to see the value of such notions... It’s a real power, a palpable power, such notions, such metaphors, aren’t soft headed mysticism. They’re entirely practical even essential…all conceptual worlds- yes, even America… are in the final analysis metaphors.

Travels in a Stone Canoe.

Placebo

2012-01-01T08:10:00.006-05:00

Dogs can respond to placebos when administered by their owners. Nicholas Humphrey interviewed by Richard Dawkins for “The Enemies of Reason” (part 2)

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist whom I find rather irritating, arrogant and anti-spiritual.

So, I was curious when I read:
Richard's eyes grew wider and wider as I gave a defense of alternative medicine, saying of course it works, and it works for a reason, because it gives people a safety signal.
It gives them the belief that they are in a secure environment in which they can now release their healing resources, they can afford to let down their guard.
Richard put the lengthy unedited out-takes from the interview on his Website. It's a very strange bit of film because the camera's wandering all over the place. Richard and I are throwing ideas around.
Nicholas Humphrey

So, I went to the video and I heard amazing things:

Eighty percent of the effect of Prozac has been shown to be placebo. (part 2)

Curiously while the healing is placebo, the side effect of suicide in teenagers is actually attributed to the pharmacology.

And they introduced me to a new term, Darwinian Medicine:
until less than 100 years ago, there was hardly anything a doctor could do that would be effective in any physiological medicinal way—and still the doctor's ministrations often "worked".

That's to say, under the influence of what we would today call placebo …

The reason this works is that it reassures people—subconsciously —that the costs of self-cure will be affordable and that it's safe to let down their guard. It’s an evolutionary situation… how we use our immune system… we don’t want to get better before [it’s] time, if in fact it’s not safe to do so.

Not yet safe to get better!
Humphrey is speaking about how evolutionarily an organism never wants to spend all its energy at once. We always need to hold a bit in reserve for the next disaster.
But, I think of cancer patients, real survivors, not recovering until their entire life patterns have been altered. The body didn’t heal until the psychological stress, the life rules of their environment, have been altered also.

This is a deep healing indeed. And Humphrey has expanded his investigation into broader implications which make me wonder about our specie’s current push to awaken much quicker than in the past:
If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history.

And all of this speculation that resonates and excites a Yes! comes from two hardcore scientists:
How far do you think the so called alternative practitioners believe the mumbo jumbo…?
Dawkins

In many cases they are self-deceiving. Well it’s not even self-deceiving. They have seen in their own experiences that these treatments work… They have to invent a rationale and then all sorts of nonsense may come… some spiritual and magical explanation…

Supposing you were Jesus and that lame men got up and walked when you told them to.
You’d be rather impressed with yourself.
But, I am sure it was placebo effect.
Humphrey (part 3)

And I am not so sure we understand all the layers at which placebo operates. Dawkins and Humphrey also admit that there may be new laws of physics awaiting discovery. Dawkins says he’s even suggested to the true believers that they aim at a Nobel Prize.
I like that notion an awful lot.
In fact, it harkens back to why I learned meditation in the first place. I wasn’t interested in ending my suffering or world peace or getting better grades. I wanted to see if the rumors were indeed true – did Jesus really walk on the water?
Because, if that were true it would change science for millenia.
It would change everything.
Or so I thought when I was nineteen.

Which puts me in mind of yet another personally irritating man, the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing last October about the discovery of a faster than light particle:

It cannot be. Yet, this is not a couple of guys in a garage peddling cold fusion. This is no crank wheeling a perpetual-motion machine into the patent office.
These are the best researchers in the world using the finest measuring instruments, having subjected their data to the highest levels of scrutiny, including six months of cross-checking by 160 scientists from 11 countries.
But there must be some error. Because otherwise everything changes.
We shall need a new physics.
A new cosmology.
New understandings of past and future, of cause and effect.
Then shortly and surely, new theologies.

A Reason?

2011-12-31T10:46:00.007-05:00

Whatever you say, you see. So when you say nothing, you see everything.
Matt Kahn

Come January 1^st Emory University becomes a smoke free environment. Smokers won’t even be allowed to stand outside of buildings to have a cigarette. Last fall when employees were renewing benefits selections, we had to sign a certificate that we didn’t smoke. Next year smokers will have to pay an extra $50 per month in insurance premium.
Why all the changes?
Because everybody knows that smoking causes cancer!
Or to be more precise, smoking greatly increases the risk of cancer-
everyone also knows a smoker than seems to escape Scott free.
Hummm.
By profession I am a molecular geneticist. That’s a discipline that is kind of renown for being the ultimate in reductionism, the ultimate advocate for biological cause and effect.
At least that was the stance as recently as 10 years ago.
But, all that reductionism, in a perfect yin-yang flip, led right into the arms of systems theory, an appreciation of the web of life wherein everything affects everything else.

At work I study a protein, encoded by a gene that when knocked out (mutated) causes the bacteria to stop synthesizing four different antibiotics.
However, we still don’t know how this disruption of antibiotic production actually occurs.
That’s because we’ve learned that when that one gene is knockout, several hundred genes change their behavior dramatically.
There is this whole web of interactions, actions and reactions.
I think of this as biology coming finally to the Buddhist emptiness teachings which speak of Creation as only dependencies arising.

Today, I got an email from a friend who commented, re a Woody Woodpecker cartoon I had sent her (go figure):
In compassionate friends [a group for parents who have lost a child] there are two camps – one believes, as I do, that there is some rhyme and reason to events – a plan in which Charlie’s death makes sense. Nothing is random.
And another group believes the Divine sets things in motion but is not intimately involved in the day to day such that there is an element of randomness in the car accident or the cancer – God with a capital G does not have a hand in it other than that he created the initial creation….
Even though I believe there are no coincidences and things do not happen randomly – I also sometimes entertain the thought that I could be completely wrong on this and it could all be pretty random. I don’t like that thought.

Theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, says that Einstein talked about two Gods.
There is God, the interventionist, who listens to and answers our prayers. Einstein didn’t buy this. However, he did believe in a God of order, harmony and elegance.
But does that mean that nothing is random?

Actually, what does it mean to say, Nothing is random?
Does that translate into, There is a reason for everything?
And is the appeal of Reason actually the hope that, One day I can understand?
...And if that is the real belief here, does that bring true relief and freedom?

I came across this video the other day in which Matt Kahn asks you to repeat a phrase so that you can feel your response to simply saying the words.
I think that’s a very nice experiment to try.

Courage

2011-12-30T10:14:00.005-05:00

Bravery is something you can experience on the spur of the moment, faced with danger. To have Courage, you must think about the dangers in advance, then weight the risks, and then do what you have to do…

Young Arthur to his mentor Merlin in The Saxon Shore

At the back of my copy of Eckhart Tolle’s A new Earth there is a list that I composed shortly after my partner informed me she was leaving.

It is a list of discoveries that appalled me at the time even as they liberated:

1. If she’s not here, I’ll have to…

2. Hair cuts

3. Car maintenance

4. Telephone, the answering machine

5. Banking, budgeting, pay the bills

6. Cook the meals

7. I cleaned the refrigerator once in 20 years! My God! It makes me cry!

8. ** As I do the responsible duties for myself I feel more competent and alert. I don’t feel I am aging or as old.

9. Why do I keep thinking about a new car?

10. **I discover she didn’t just “hold me up” – she “held me back.”

Life’s disasters invite us into the courage that is actually our birthright, and for me this was and is a spiritual adventure. Often when life is good and comfortable we’re really not advancing all that much.

Sometimes we are cradled and held up, while simultaneously we don’t even notice that we’re holding back.

A new year is coming. What will it bring?

On my list there is perhaps Cancer, Joblessness, Awakening… these are the unknowns.

Who knows how they will play out and what I will be asked to face and feel.

And every single person gets to have this new year – if they are lucky enough to be alive.

Merlin and Arthur were explicitly concerned with leadership and war. That may seem something of a non-sequitur here, but then, the entire story of Bhagavad Gita occurs on a battlefield. So it isn’t too surprising that the principles of war have a bearing upon what Maharishi called “the battlefield of life.”

Men must want to fight, they must be inspired, willing to follow their leader to the death. That willingness to die… for another man’s purposes only results from great and inspiring leadership…

The Saxon Shore

And what is the essence of great leadership? … funnily enough it’s love.

His men would follow him anywhere, and they don’t care that he has a wooden leg.

No they don’t, because it’s not important. They follow what they love in him.

And that’s about all any of us can do – follow the love we find inside.

For myself, trying to find my way forward from that stark list of inadequacies in the back of A New Earth, I found courage and a willingness to die in my great desire to awaken.

Now, desire may not sound so much like love.

But my deep desire was a passion and passion is just the frothy waves of the silent ocean of love.

To become that ocean is to awaken.

And to embody that ocean into life requires that “one stand in one’s own shoes.”

That’s how Adya says his teacher described it.

And that was what I told myself whenever I got scared.

And I love that it is doesn’t matter if you have a wooden leg. (Who doesn’t?)

Merlin and Arthur are describing the leader that lies within us all, our true Self,

which is always and already there.

And if you don’t believe me, then take it from the archetype...

and have a Happy New Year:

Expectation

2011-12-29T15:55:00.008-05:00

Asemic Shadows 3, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

Yes - the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
(Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy

It was Sunday morning early and I was driving the familiar road to be there at the Farmer’s Market right when they unlocked the doors.
That’s how I beat the crowds.
And as usual when driving I checked out – into my head and all those thoughts and the music floating up from the CD player.
And as usual there came a moment when I came up out of my head for air and a look around at the world.

I didn’t recognize a thing!
And for just a second I panicked because I felt totally lost.

And then, I noticed something surprisingly subtle (for me).
I noticed that I had expected to see the previous intersection.
And I saw that I’d become lost because of that simple albeit unconscious expectation.

Expectation.
It will rob you blind.

How many times on BATGAP has someone telling their story of awakening simply said,
“It’s not at all what I expected.”
How many times has Adya told how he’s never met anyone who wasn’t totally surprised?
It’s never what you expected.
So why not give that up?

Strange to no longer desire one's desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
Rilke, The First Elegy

Said a bit differently

2011-12-23T08:30:00.004-05:00

I am really enjoying Michael Barnett’s teaching. It’s what he calls “resonance based.”

Here he addresses the impotence of words and the importance of the meditative space.
It ties in nicely, from a different angle and different expression, with what I getting at in Dumb Saints.
Barnett’s moving meditations appear very similar to what my Taoist practice looks like.
That’s probably why I find such resonance.

I’m coming to appreciate three kinds of approaches:

awareness based teaching (Advaita)
emptiness teachings (Buddhism)
resonance teachings (Taoism, energy movement)

Dumb Saints

2011-12-23T07:28:00.004-05:00

Asemic Shadows 2, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
Jack Kerouac

Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s writing, “That’s not poetry, it’s typing.”
I came across it recently as I sought to flesh out a comment Adyashanti once made:
Saint Teresa called that a dumb saint.

As I recall, Adya meant dumb in the sense of stupid – not seeing deeply enough into one’s awakening.
Dumb, of course, can also mean not speaking.
I’ve a friend, most loved and respected, Harvard educated, and she has insisted for some time now that she’s become quite tired of thinking. She doesn’t want to explain what is unfolding within her consciousness.
She simply wants to live it.

I really like to understand.
Though Adya also says:
There’s nothing to understand.

But, there is! And while … wow… I was going to say “And while Awakening is not dependent upon the mind understanding – awakening is not an experience of mind – suddenly, it hit me:
Understanding can take you deeper.
A new understanding can allow the mind to let go.

These days often I am torn. I want to write down the explanation, a description of what has transpired.
But about five minutes into the effort I feel how writing contracts, solidifies individuality, and brings back separation.
I let the effort go. That’s what feels correct. That’s when I understand the wisdom in my friend’s admonishing.

Then, this morning I came across Kerouac. He reminds me of my Taoist practice where we simply follow the flow of energy.
My friend and I began that over 15 years ago and soon discovered that it led to speaking in tongues.
We laughed at this unexpected “Pentacostal Buddhism” and let the energy blow the knots out.
Perhaps that’s not all that different from what Jack' describing:

No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life

As the mind let goes of preconceptions,
it’s not at all what I had expected.
I have to risk becoming dumb.

Realizations

2011-12-18T12:34:00.002-05:00

Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?

Satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for enlightenment that literally means "understanding".
In the Zen Buddhist tradition, satori refers to a flash of sudden awareness…and is considered a "first step" or embarkation toward nirvana…
The traditional way of achieving satori is through the use of koans.
Wikipedia

Koans seem a formal way to inquire into the nature of one’s experience.

I find it’s also useful to simply sit and notice. Maybe” useful” isn’t quite the right word.
It sounds too much like a strategy. I have these questions my mind seems to fixate upon.

And so, I was looking at my experience the other day and suddenly was hit by what felt like a stunning realization, a totally new understanding that let some rather inchoate knot dissolve and drop away:

I cannot answer the question as to whether or not I am enlightened.

Now, I was already aware that this is a correct conclusion.

Is it not frequently said, there is no “I’ to be enlightened.
And thus, “I” can never become enlightened.
What amazed me, was that I once again I had arrived at the correct conclusion in a rather backward manner. So, I was also chuckling at my ridiculousness as I was blown away by the impossibility of ever knowing, or rather, the depth of Not Knowing.
What I had deeply seen was, “There is no such thing as enlightenment.”
Or perhaps the thought at the very moment of epiphany was:
“Enlightenment does not exist.”

The exact phrasing doesn’t matter. My point is that for a moment I had had a deep realization.
And this one realization came during a week in which realizations came one after another too fast to be recorded. I found this rather frustrating.
Wow, a beautiful insight - and it’s lost because I didn’t write it down.
But that “supposed” loss is as it should be. Loss is actually a letting go.
What is once seen in blazing clarity becomes a dead belief a moment later.
So let it go. Holding on kills it anyway. So let it go.

Why try to record exactly what the steps were to the insight?
A eureka moment cannot actually be shared. Each person must solve the koan for herself.
And the letting go allows a deeper dropping… right into the sound of one hand.

There will be many realizations. In fact, I hope to awaken from as many different angles as possible.

This is true and so is the exact opposite. Enjoy, and then
Let them all go…

Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind.
One said to the other, "The flag is moving."
The other replied, "The wind is moving."
Huineng overheard this. He said, "Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving."

As long as mind is moving I expect there will be realization after realization.

Let’s not mistake realization for Realization, or beyond that Liberation.

Post script

I didn’t finish this post at first sitting. My Christmas To-Do List and Timetable called, and I was already behind the curve. So having written the above, I trotted off to grab a quick breakfast, throw on some clothes, and about 15 minutes later discovered that I was blow drying my hair and absent mindedly singing into the bathroom mirror new words to an old holiday refrain:

Let it go,
Let it go,
Let it go.

I started laughing. God I love the subconscious mind! It’s both wise and filled with playfulness.
I mean, the old familiar words fit amazingly well to this whole process of awakening:

It doesn’t show signs of stopping
And I’ve got some corn for popping
And since there’s no place to go…
Let it go, let it go, let it go.

And Happy Holidays!

One Step Over the liNE

2011-12-16T14:12:00.003-05:00

white stripe , a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

My friend’s cat has been quite ill and my friend has started wondering:
Is she getting better? or
Is she dying?
Where is the line, the demarcation?

Long ago, my father taught me the phrase “asymptotically approaching.”
He was a chemist by training and shared many such wonderfully polysyllabic phrases.
I miss Pop. He crossed that Line over 15 years ago.
And yet, how is that possible?
If there is a finish line, and each step that you take gets you half way there… then even though you keep getting closer, you’re always only half way there.
In short, you can only “asymptotically approach.”

This reminds me of the biggest regret I have from my days of teaching biology.
It happened when I was in graduate school.
I taught an introductory lab course that was filled with non-biology majors, college freshman to juniors. The brightest student in there was a young kid from a local high school who was just sitting in.
One evening he hung around till everyone was gone to ask me a question:
Where was the line between inanimate and animate?

What a wonderful question!
In fact, I had taken it as my own for several years and really studied it. The answer is incredibly illusive.
While anyone can see a rock is inanimate and a parakeet is obviously animate,
there is actually no clear line of demarcation.
Animate: inanimate. What is a virus?
Life: nonliving? Crystals grow, reducing entropy and thus do not decay.
Alive: dead. When do we pull the plug on vegetative states?
If the extremes are so clear cut, why is an actual demarcation point impossible to find?

Curiously, back into 1960’s there was a Letter to the Editor published in the flagship science journal, Nature.The writer wanted to point out that since there could be no demarcation between animate and inanimate, it followed there could also be no clear demarcation for the arising of consciousness.
For if there were, we could simply make that the criterion for life and thus solve that question recognized as unanswerable.

Alive: dead.
Getting better: dying.
Consciousness present: consciousness absent.

Make no mistake – this issue is totally about consciousness.
It’s about the inseparable, unity of Creation, dependently arising, and how It also appears dualistically.

Oh! And why do I regret the boy asking me this question?
Because when he asked I was tired. It came at the end of a long day and I didn’t have the energy and the enthusiasm that young man deserved. I feel sorrow for that lapse.
But, I’m also betting he just looked elsewhere for his answer.
Scientist, you see, are seekers through and through.

Turkey Consciousness

2011-11-25T06:52:00.005-05:00

This beautiful film is one of the most eloquent testimonies to the mystery of consciousness I have ever seen.
Don't know if posting a link will work here. But, I'll give it a try.
A belated Thanskgiving Turkey:

Watch My Life as a Turkey on PBS. See more from NATURE.

A History of the Sky

2011-11-24T10:49:00.003-05:00

Everything that happens in a person is like clouds… A thought is like a cloud, an emotion is like a cloud, a feeling is like a cloud… but what a person really is, is the sky. They are the space which everything passes through.

But this is poetry. No one should believe me. This is something to discover, simply by being with yourself… everything passes through, except for you.

It’s so easy to watch.

If you look at the sky –the sky never moves… lightening or thunder or sunshine. But the space in which it happens doesn’t move at all.

It’s sort of a poetic way to try to talk about What’s this? What’s that?

Benjamin Smythe

So, I invite you to watch the poetry.

With thanks to my friend at the Cassandra Pages for the head’s up.

In Passing

2011-11-23T16:27:00.002-05:00

All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.*
Lynn Margulis

Taking Vedic Studies with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1975 forever changed the way I think.
What Maharishi suggested, but somehow didn’t say flat out – or at least not in a manner that I could hear – was that since the Absolute is the Source of all relative creation, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, mathematics, astrophysics, and all the arts… they are just the mechanics of Consciousness expressed in different words.

It was maybe a year later that understanding dawned and I abbreviated the concept in my head as “patterns of consciousness.”
The laws of Nature and laws of Consciousness follow the same pattern.
I have sought and admired these patterns ever since.

Lynn Margulis was a scientist who argued similarly, not from any Vedantic rationale, but from keen observation, good science, and a brilliant and tenacious mind.
Yesterday, she died.
And I am saddened by her passing.

Among other things she helped James Lovelock articulate the Gaia Principle.
Perhaps the best tribute I can offer is to let her words about Gaia correct any misconception you may have regarding Gaia:

Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems.
Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect.
To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science… And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.
If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! …
Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.

And long after Lynn Margulis is gone, biology students will be learning principles she discovered.

*And again to not lose context and to demonstrate the remarkable flexibility of her mind, the larger quote:
You can reduce the study of nervous systems to physics and chemistry but you're missing the microbiological step. It's as if you documented the changing surface of the Earth at urban sites using Landsat images, without knowing anything about the people.
Think of the nerve as coming from what had formerly been a bacterium, trying but unable to rotate and swim. Thought involves motility and communication, the connection between remnant spirochetes. All I ask is that we compare human consciousness with spirochete ecology.

Hurts More, Bothers You Less

2011-11-19T08:19:00.000-05:00

I came across this Ken Wilber clip that rang a bell. He doesn’t get to the heart of the matter for over 2.5 minutes, but then he addresses how it actually feels to integrate both absolute and relative views into life experience.

It can HURT! And while Wilber takes this to the level of bodhisattvas and Christ, the increased sensitivity begins well before that.

For the past few weeks I’ve been repeatedly doubled up with belly grief and love beyond all reasonable proportion.

And, I never see it coming.

For example, as I clean up the breakfast dishes the radio announces: the first hard freeze arrives tonight. Take your plants inside because those left out won’t make it. In the morning the impatiens will be gone.

I look out my window, see my own impatiens, a bit yellowed but still in bloom, and I double over in sobs.

My god, tomorrow the flowers will be gone!

My god, Bralley get a grip!

Adyashanti told us once that there will come a point where, “What isn’t true will become so painful you have to drop it.” That’s another way to say it.

I’ve discovered that even when all evidence supports a belief, That person lies, That person cheats… the thought becomes intolerable, too painful to maintain. I am forced to let it go.

People are so much more than their history and behavior.

I seem to be repeatedly invited to drop beliefs and see more deeply.

And it’s not just the world around me. The beliefs I hold about myself, the way I block love and Infinity from flowing freely through my Life when not exploding in my belly, just kind of hang there, like damp towels caught on little hooks.

Dirty laundry doesn’t seem all that dangerous, but this sudden immolation has a pain that is really quite remarkable.

But, it seems to bother less. Intensity does pass. Such intensity seems only possible because of and due to Presence. And it feels “correct” to really feel.

The Lotus Sutra

2011-11-11T15:57:00.001-05:00

OH!!!!

This is the Lotus Sutra, memorized, recited, and chanted by Nikko Hansen. Nikko usually chants this Sutra twice a day. He has been chanting for over 25 years. The Lotus Sutra is widely considered to be the most sacred teaching of the Buddha.

Re-Imagining Identity

2011-11-03T13:03:00.003-04:00

Oh, my God! Exactly! is how my nephew, Augustin, subjected his GOOGLE+ email.
Since I refuse to sign up for Google+, I cannot answer any of his emails, and since there was actually no personal message from Aug beyond the subject line, I clicked the link.
So it was I came to the WIRED Magazine article:
You Are Not Your Name and Photo: A Call to Re-Imagine Identity

This sounded surprisingly spiritual to me.
I recalled my own blog effort, Your are not the Body.
It also played in to my increasing awareness of a generation gap and attempts to better understand what is going on, or going past me.

It was through Aug that I first learned about Burning Man.
Here too things appear to be about one thing on the surface, yet I expect this next generation’s deepest yearnings churn below in very interesting ways.
Professionally, Augie is also into netware design (apparently “bleeding edge” – rather than “leading edge”).
The Wired Magazine article is illustrated with an etching of Shakespeare and highlights a recent speech given at a web design conference by a 23 year old wiz regarding identity as it is used and created online.

Understanding and managing identity online is for all of us.
What’s more, there is increasingly little to no gap between our online and offline selves.
It’s not that online identity should reflect real identity; it is real identity.
Tim Carmody, Wired Magazine

Whoa! Online identity is our REAL identity.
What a curious new way to play out the whole illusion game!
Here I am toggling between realization of “no self” and being someone who cares to the point of tears over the smallest leaf… “Who am I?”
No one, Someone, Both?
So, I read on.

We’re all authors of our data; the question is whether we want everything we’ve written bundled together in a giant book with our name and portrait at the front and testimonials from our friends — as Facebook just introduced …
Or do we want something looser, more fragmented, less monumental, less final.
We could be like the Shakespeare of the First Folio, dead and memorialized; or the living, collaborating, experimental poet, playwright, actor and businessman.
He’s something of a mystery to us, but infinitely more vital than the capital-A Author too often used to intimidate schoolchildren.
Tim Carmody, Wired Magazine

Yes, a mystery, The Mystery is always more vital, living, experimental, collaborative.
It arises out of Nothingness and dissolves back into Nothingness and in between we pour our hearts into living breathing moments, that for the life of me, I cannot grasp or truly understand.
Seems to me this younger generation is coming to this Mystery uniquely in their own way.
Walking through the parking garage this morning I noticed a bumper sticker:
Design Can Save the World

That struck me as very curious. To me, until that very moment, “Design” smacked of vacuous world, of high fashion, the strutting model on the ramp and in the lights, twirl and fake and costumed.
This bumper sticker pointed to a new world of interpretations.
My eyes then landed on a second sticker affixed to the truck’s back window:
Design. Build. Transform.

Reminds me of the world created on Burning Man playa.
What a contrast to the slogan of my youth:
Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.

And yet perhaps they are aiming at the same goal… find yourself, save the world.
I have this working hypothesis consisting of two parts really.
1) If the world is to survive the present global crisis, we as a species must Wake Up, must become more conscious. And,
2) In response to this need of the time Awakening will become more available and occur more quickly for this next generation.
So, I watch and try to understand the twenty some-things.

I’m fascinated to see specific efforts put into design and the wording that is used.
Re-imagining identity.
I take these as examples, as evidence of how my hypothesis may hold, how the changes may unfold.
If one is to “re-imagine” does this not imply that identity was originally IMAGINED?
Doesn’t this invitation inadvertently imply that one’s casual identity may be a misperception, may not actually be REAL (online or off)? …
Are you getting a feel for this unspoken truth as you use and design the internet?

…the only way we come to our true identity is by seeing what we are not.
We have to see that we’re not the image we hold in our minds of ourselves, or the thoughts we have about ourselves–good, bad or indifferent–that we’re not all the various ways we identify ourselves…
a big part of spirituality is actually getting consciousness out of its trance state with the roles we play or have played…
Just a very simple questioning of is it true?
Anything I take myself to be, any role I’m playing, is it actually what I am?
It’s identifying the difference between a role and true identity.
Adyashanti, Vision Magazine interview

And perhaps, rather paradoxically, as this next generation designs, builds, and transforms they will also discover their true identity which is indeed:
The Mystery…
infinitely more vital than the capital-A.

I hope so.

FaceBook reports that you have one identity.
Who you are online is who you are offline.
Chris Poole, web2.0 summit

Witnessing from the Heart

2011-10-03T10:34:00.005-04:00

Gel 1, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

…the spaciousness of Awareness is a different aspect of awareness. There is also the agape.
Adyashanti

I want to try to get down some description of this year’s retreat with Adyashanti. He changed the format a bit from previous years. For one thing he led a guided meditation each day. One meditation I particularly liked tuned us into “the different aspects of Awareness.”

This started with the head – waking up on the level of mind as it is sometimes called, leads to experiencing a great spaciousness - and experience of one aspect of awareness. By contrast, when that wakefulness drops down to be centered in the heart, things feel very different. Before I left for the retreat I was just tumbling to what might be involved. In “witnessing from the head” (or what seems to be what's usually refrred to as witnessing) there is a radical duality of witness and the rest of the world.

In witnessing from the heart, that distance is simply too painful to endure. The heart insists upon closing the gap – a gap cuased by judgments, denials – all the human pettinesses seem to become intolerable and start burning up within this fire of heart ripped wide open… or so it was beginning to appear to me.
As Adya led us into awareness from the heart the experience was much gentler.
I thank Evelyn Rodriquez for these quotes from Adya which give you something of the flavor:

There's a type of awareness that's very connected to the heart. There's an awareness most people are used to that is connected to the mind--it's a sterile, alert awareness. If someone asked us, 'Are we listening?' We'd say, 'Yes I am listening.' But it's a listening from the neck up."

Yes, there is an awareness that’s from the neck up and that’s where most awakening occurs. I like this comment from a reader at Being Ordinary as it speaks of “having a gap instead of a head.” Yes! Here lie the roots of Douglas Harding whole Headlessness techniques.

The ‘Big kaboum’ is recent, 10 weeks now so I like to say that I’m doing my baby steps in a fully awakened life. I had a couple days of doubts after coming down from the Bliss state during which time I could barely function and was literally not in my body anymore. Very hard to describe obviously. I haven’t really gotten back fully into my body in some ways, and I guess that state is common to all of us that have awakened.
The feeling of just having a gap instead of a head.
Tristan’s comment at Being Ordinary

So there is awakening on the level of the mind. And maybe, particularly so these days, with the emphasis on mentally based practice of self inquiry as opposed to let’s a practice sensually focusing on the sound of a mantra. And perhaps Adya is hinting at this too as he points out:
An expert has a hard time opening the heart... To be open is a state of innocence.

But, once awake, awakening can go deeper.
... the heart is opening up as it were and really interacting with what's in your environment or what's going on inside.
It's through the heart that we perceive Oneness.

I like the word Agape. It's a selfless infinite love. It's just a love for what is. It's unconditional.
An unconditional love is also un-caused. There's no reason for it. The reason there is no reason... is because it's an aspect of your being. It's a pre-existing aspect of your being. It's just there. It's the love that's just loving. There's no reason why it's loving. It's just loving. It's an aspect of the truth of what you are.
Love is always there. It pre-exists anything that may happen. Anyone you may meet. A lot of times we don't experience this because we're protecting... some idea or image of ourselves. Or we're emotionally protecting or layering."

Opening of the heart is necessary if we are going to come to the fullest of ourselves.

The deepest forgiveness is realizing there's nothing to forgive.
True forgiveness is not something you create or manufacture - you discover it.

The reason for this is our nature is agape. It's an aspect of our being. If we cut off an aspect from our being--if we withhold it from someone or something or some event--then you're literally severing a part of yourself. It's a way of putting ourselves in a virtual prison. We're withholding our own nature. We're hiding it from ourselves.
For most people this is so unconscious they don't really know what they're doing....

and that's about all I can say for now.

Drop That

2011-09-15T12:30:00.004-04:00

Canvas F, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.
Tibetan Saying

I mentioned yesterday that "I am suspicious" - that what I experience may be what Maharishi called Cosmic consciousness and God consciousness. I wanted to just leave a note on how that suspicion arose. I also want to emphasize, this is just a suspicion. Something to consider, a possibility to inquire into. So, here’s how the suspicion arose.

My friend, whom I call my little spiritual irritant because just about anything she says seems to have this way of irritating me, sent me a quote. We have been at this for two years now, and I am finally looking at these little irritations as marvelous invitations to explore where some misconception has velcroed onto spaciousness.

So, my friend sent me this quote. She actually thought I’d like it:
I am pleased enough with the surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple… the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there?
What else do we need?
Edward Albee

Well, I really took issue with the phrase, What else is there?
What else is there? … there’s the infinity of pure being!
The absolute never changing seemed to get ignored with this concentration on the surfaces of the ever changing, and I found that really irritating.
So, I offered back quotes of Andrew Wyeth:
Most people come to my work through the realism and then discover the abstractness.
A sea shell lying on the sand is frozen in time, eternal.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

She smiled at the thought of irritating me and explained:
I find those details to BE the essence of the abstract, at every moment, in each precious sensation or experience or whatever.

I didn’t find that explanation helpful to my irritation. But, I read it over several times, slowly, trying to get what she was saying…
details are the essence of the abstract…
the essence of the abstract… is the details

Bam, it hit me. That is a statement from the point of view of Unity, Oneness.
The understanding immediately brought back a saying we’d previously argued over:
The world is illusion.
Brahman alone is real.
The world is Brahman.

My friend speaks from the perspective of that last line: The world is Brahman.
And I am sitting there trying to get her to agree that Brahman alone is real.
I was arguing from the perspective of duality – of Cosmic consciousness and God consciousness.
My next thought was, “Wow! Why do that? Drop that!”
Shortly after that, I realized I was taking my position because that is what I know. It's no theory.
I stagger through this world of illusion day after day, taxing my body, trying to ignore this “radical duality” between Brahman and the world.

Then there was a quiet "hummmm". And the suspicion arose. Is that’s what’s going on here?
This might be what's called Cosmic consciousness and God consciousness.
That was rather surprising.
And, upon this suspicion another thought rose.
Perhaps, I should consider Unity. To that point I'd no idea what Unity might feel like on an experiential level. What if I looked...
It’s almost as if by simply allowing “perhaps the time is ripe,” actually permitted experience to shift.
Now, as I re-read this, I can only think, "Thick as a brick!" How'd I miss this? And so simple! Drop one belief and everything shifts on its own...

So, this Sunday I leave for a week’s retreat with Adyashanti. Last year I asked him about being stuck in the witness and he told me I’d have to discover for myself how to “witness from your heart.” I had NO IDEA what that meant. He said it was something like that Catholic image of ripping open the flaming heart of Jesus. I knew the image, but it was no help.

However, from the moment of the thought, “Drop that!” something shifted. First, the witnessing became quite intense. An abstract infinity seemed intent upon pouring down into my head. It obviously needed to work its way throughout my body. And that wasn’t happening. I ended up missing a fair amount of work and sleeping 12 hours a day as my body tried to adjust. The strain seemed to throw me into vertigous migraines.

Something also seemed to happen with my heart. I began to see deeply into the simplest moments: a freshman wandering the halls looking at science posters, an old woman walking up the street … noticing could reduce me to tears by the beauty that was revealed. I began to notice how things are one, as direct experience.

Last weekend, I went to a workshop with my Taoist Teacher. My silent request was for the energy imbalances of my physical body be soothed. Energy work is a Taoist forte and they didn’t let me down. In essence, my heart was ripped open in a meditation. I discovered that sacred flaming heart… words do not suffice, and the classic image is right on. With that opening the infinity stuck around my head descended into heart and from there belly. There's physical comfort now.

So, that’s the note. I’m not sure that any of this matters. But, oddly, just as I was convinced there’s no point in this blog, several people wrote and said “thank you.” So, oh well. Here’s a note. And maybe this is the best way to end for now:
Anyone who has “seen the nature” is unlikely to claim to be an enlightened person, even when a master has confirmed the experience; he or she simply knows what a glimpse of enlightenment entails. Indeed, anyone claiming to be enlightened is probably acting erroneously from an inflated ego, which a teacher has been unable to contain. Simple humility alone will normally prevent any such claim.
Sheng-yen, Illuminating Silence: the practice of Chinese Zen

I know times change. But, this rings true to me. I like it very much.

Staying True to Your Own Experience: One Step

2011-09-14T12:22:00.002-04:00

Carousel Monet, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

The psychological ‘I-concept’ has no nature of its own, is no ‘thing’, and could not possibly create genuine ‘bondage’. There cannot be any such thing as bondage at all, but only the idea of such. There is no liberation, for there is no thing from which to be freed. If the whole conceptual structure is seen as what it is, it must necessarily collapse, and the bondage-enlightenment nonsense with it. That is called Awakening, awakening to the natural state which is that of every sentient being.
Wei Wu Wei

I have been spinning round and round for some time now trying to answer the question, “Am I awake?” And I haven’t been able to decide.
This seems ridiculous to me, as I had assumed it must be very self evident.
But, for months and months now there’s been this internal debate running in a circle.
Just when I think, “ Yes. I’m awake.” … doubt creeps in…. “No. Look at that.”

However, there has been this kind of slow slide, until at some point a couple weeks ago I had the thought, “I have the suspicion that this is Cosmic Consciousness and God Consciousness.” (see definitions below if needed)

It was a strange thought to me.
First, it seemed rather disappointing. “This is it!?” Not what I’d expected!
Secondly, it seemed strange that I could now have a strong suspicion, and yet still really resist making any claim. Declaring anything just felt/feels all wrong., not ture.

Still, over time it seemed at least the suspicion has a solidity that seems genuine. It has an integrity that isn’t going to slip away.
So, I was going over all this in my head to a friend with whom I argue over expressions of awakening. My friend is clear: She is awake and she is liberated, "free".
Then, in my head there was the thought, “I have a suspicion that this may be CC or GC. But still, I cannot say that I am free.”

I cannot say that I am free.
I heard those words and came to a full stop. I thought them very strange.

I cannot say that I am free.
It was utterly nonsensical to me. Why?

What does it mean to be free?
I had no idea!
I realized that desiring to “be free” wouldn’t even cross my mind if my friend hadn’t dropped the phrase in there. That was part of the strangeness. What was that desire about?

What is there to be free from?
I had no idea! Absolutely clueless…
I looked around my backyard, at the trees, the sky, the dancing of the leaves. I looked inside myself… I looked outside my body…

I could not find anything to be free from…
And that was when I realized why I would never say, “I’m free.”
There’s nothing to be free from.
There is only One. There is not Two.
It all rests within myself. Inside, Outside: there is only One.
And Momma, there is no “free from.”
The issue cannot even come up. And that's why is made no sense.

Oh! Well, that sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it.
But, I never saw it coming.
I was stunned by my own innocence. (I've heard all the phrases ad nauseum)

But, all I saw was what I couldn’t say.
And I had to laugh. It all felt a bit back-asswards.
But, how else would a Bralley do it? I am a bull and not a ballerina.

Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more... Adopted [as a belief], rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance.
Wei Wu Wei

I'd like to post this here by way of a thank you to the friends who take the time to talk. We may not agree. But, if we use the words of wisdom as a stimulus, the results can be a spontaneous and innocent inquiry.
And a moment’s realization... still not making any claims. And I am sure my friend understands, completely.
******
End Note. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi described three levels of enlightenment or knowledge of the Self:
Cosmic consciousness so named because it is all inclusive—it simultaneously includes transcendental consciousness along with waking, dreaming, and sleeping. Adyashanti has described this as “radical duality” as the witness so strongly sees the world as illusion and the Self as Reality.

God consciousness is cosmic consciousness coexisting with the development of refined sensory perception such that perception and feelings reach their most sublime level. On a practical level, people feel an incredible expansion of the heart. In practice, the heart is crying “No!” to the duality described above.

Unity consciousness occurs as one experiences Being, the substance of transcendental consciousness, or pure awareness, as the basis of and permeating all aspects of life: everything is perceived as nothing but expressions of Being. Even though the diversity of life is still appreciated, what dominates is the experience that all aspects of life, are nothing but the self-interacting dynamics of pure consciousness.

2011-09-12T13:12:00.003-04:00

Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you.
Sheng-yen

I’m going off to practice for awhile.
This seems a nice thought to share upon parting.
Oddly, perhaps, Sheng-yen was a Zen Master cultivated amidst the classic rigors… and then he leaves us with these words: Be soft in your practice.
Perhaps softness allows better for the living of paradox.
Perhaps softness allows better for simple stopping, the simple dropping.

Memes and the Tortoise and the Hare

2011-09-02T15:41:00.005-04:00

Petri Plate 4, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

A meme is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures…It was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976).
Wikipedia

Here are some points I have been thinking about:
1)   Spiritual Paths seem to change with time. Advaita now has neo-advaita. This causes arguments.
Some say you can become enlightened in about 30 minutes and “I’m done.” Some say it can take a life time and always opens up to greater depths. This argument is getting very nasty in some places. (Curiously, what doesn’t change is the presence of fundamentalism: rigidity and the willingness to destroy in the name of Truth.)
2)   We used to think that enlightenment changed the personality into that of a saint. Now, there’s clearly a distinction. It’s been put this way for clarity: Saints are those who display the ideals human behavior. Sages are those who have realized the true nature of the Self. This dichotomy began with Eastern teachers’ sex and money scandals. The behavioral license seems to have been cut loose path direct path emphasis of no-self. There’s no one to be a jerk. Jerkiness just happens, while no-me is free.
3)   Spiritual paths aka “how we spiritually evolve” are memes. Thus, we can expect “the teachings” to follow the laws of genetics: to change and mutate into new and fitter forms with time.
4)   The ability to evolve itself evolves. Thus, if you wanted to graph the speed of evolution, at some point you’d expect it to go parabolic.

Point Four comes strictly from concerns of molecular geneticists (of which or whom I’m one).
The ability to evolve, or “evolvability”, seemed really obvious to me the first time I heard the phrase. It’s not just that everything else in Creation evolves, so why not the ability to evolve… but there seemed to be the whole specific history of genetics revealing that Life (genes) invent new mechanisms to evolve at every major evolutionary transition.

So, when I hear that many people are awakening by directly inquiring into no-self, I cannot dismiss the possibility that awakening can be quicker now than in the past.
If spiritual paths are meant to evolve our consciousness,
If a shift in consciousness is the only means a person has to escape suffering,
If a shift in consciousness is the only hope our species has for survival,
If the ability to evolve evolves –
HEY! I should be hoping and expecting enlightenment to take less time.

That said, scientists NEVER think things are that simple. Turns out, they have only recently completed an experiment that demonstrates evolvability. I find the details illuminating:

A long-term evolution experiment on E. coli has been running for more than 50,000 generations. Two beneficial mutations arose in some strains prior to the passage of the first 500 generations. The researchers dubbed the strains that carried these mutations at 500 generations the eventual winners (EW) and those lacking the mutations the eventual losers (EL).

Surprise #1: The fitness of EW and EL was compared. Both strains EW and EL had significantly higher fitness than the ancestral strain. But early on, the EL appeared fitter than the EW. The EW strains were at such a disadvantage that if these strains had not accumulated additional mutations, they would have gone extinct in just 350 more generations.

Surprise #2: But, over time the EW acquired more beneficial mutations than the EL. These “later date” mutations enabled the EW to overcome their fitness disadvantage. In other words, the EW during their period of lesser fitness actually possessed a greater evolvability than the EL. You could see this difference in evolvability intially. That's not so surpising. The influence of genes isn't always obvious on the surface.

This saga of the bacteria reminds me of the tortoise and the hare.
The hare could get there quickly, but he had an arrogance that laid the ground for his ultimate defeat.
The tortoise in his own slow careful manner got there in the end.

These bacteria also make me wonder if perhaps the same thing isn’t happening with the memes of our spiritual teachings?
Direct path is great! Bam, you’re there: No-self. “I’m done.”
But, maybe, that leads to something of a dead-end evolutionarily (aka, eventual losers).
Meanwhile, some poor schlep of an Advaitan tortoise actually sits and meditates for 10 years, 20 years.
When he awakens, sometimes there may be no-self and sometimes there is an ego that could stand a little therapy and responsibility for that is taken.
And so change continues. Insights go deeper. Curiosity is maintained.
Maybe this is the EW, the deeply embodied enlightenment because the ability to evolve, evolvability is alive and well. (for a different way of saying this, BATGAP has a really nice interview with Adyashanti regarding keeping a teaching fresh)

Does the world need more sages or more saints?
Does spiritual bypassing ever really work?
Does throwing a bomb for peace bring an end to war?

The other day I offered this quote, perhaps it’s again a good way to end:
Practice begins with enlightenment.
Suzuki Roshi

It's Not Your Life

2011-09-02T09:05:00.003-04:00

Grandma , a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

It's Not Your Life
It's not your life you said
And I remember exactly where we were
Not the time of year
Or even the weather
But the place on the levee
With the river on the right
As we walked back
And the rusty pump
Down the bank
Among the rocks
And the kingfisher
Cackling in the cottonwoods

And you were fierce
The way you said it
Not detached and indifferent
Like the night before in Forestville
But frustrated almost
Wanting me to get it
Urging me to catch up
So we can play together
On the same court

And I felt so ashamed
For complaining
For having the selfishness
To claim this series of events
As my own
To doubt the authorship
Of this particular short story
And the meanness
To question
The hand I was dealt
When it was not even mine
And I knew it

But mainly I was ashamed
For showing you my ugliness
For letting you see
My limbs bleeding with the pain
Of not getting it

But we played big stick with Honey
And walked on
Back to the car
Between the vineyards
Watching the evening settle over Healdsburg
And slowly my life became a memory
A series of shots
Like this one
With no place left to ask the question
Then whose life is it

For it's not that it's not my life
Over the hills and down the river
Houses friends and harpsichords
Whose life could it be
But mine
No we're not disputing that…

What we're saying
Back at the car now
Honey climbing in
Doors closing
Click of seat belts
Engine starting
The sudden contentment
Of nothing left to talk about
Is that
This simple crunch
Of tires on gravel
This hum of happiness
This wet dog smell
Is life
Delivered
But unaddressed
Tony Kendrew

I wanted to post this poem so I wouldn’t lose it. It seemed so perfect that I couldn’t bring myself to read another word. So, I can’t say I know Kendrew’s work. But, I discovered him through Pamela Wilson’s site.

If you don’t recognize what Kendrew is talking about, count yourself lucky.
If you do, count yourself as blessed.

All It Can Do Is Collapse

2011-08-29T13:22:00.004-04:00

I just find for myself that when a structure lacks integrity, all it can do is collapse in on itself, and that's more how I see what's going on.
Lynn Barron

She was speaking about social and political events, but I took her words quite personally. And I looked to find more of what she might say to me, to me personally.
Why, because I feel this collapse occurringand I am having trouble putting the experience to words.

Last week, a friend sent some words and I started this whole quibbling in my mind.
I argued logically, until I discovered I was arguing for my own Un-enlightenment.
I thought of Adya asking us to watch, “How is it you un-enlighten yourself.” And I could see it in my actions, in what I had just written:

In trying to define things like “where you are,” you end up describing experiences on a checklist. My experience is that experiences come and go. What might seem like awakening or Unity might not be there tomorrow.

I can not say just what it was, but this observation, these words, felt somehow deeply wrong.
Part of the “wrongness” was its insistence upon “I am still not there.” While I cannot say, "I am there," strangely it felt wrong to conclude the opposite. It didn't feel honest. The argument lacked integrity.
…when a structure lacks integrity, all it can do is collapse in on itself

Thoughts can be like that. No integrity. Something in the belly finds this quite revolting.
Some gentleness within the heart finds it almost unbareable.
… all it can do is collapse in on itself.

That’s not so bad. But, it’s also not so easy. You have to give it space and time and silence.

So, I watched Lynn Barron meditate and noticed that she gently rocked in the subtlest of circles.
I know that energy. It rocks me every day. Gentle energy trying to transform the blockages or simply stirring up a migraine. I know longer clearly differentiate.
But there she was rocking in the silence
and when she came out of meditation, this is what she said:

Now there are these four lights in the heart that are to be lit,
and one of them is called the light of submission.
And so when you sit in this way you place yourself in submission.
To be receptive to the bounties and blessings that come from Allah into your heart.

Yes, submission, that’s another way of saying sweet collapse. It’s not so much what I must do, but rather, can I be quiet enough to let Nature takes its course. Hands off. Mind off. Will off.

[The next] practice is called accompaniment and you do this practice with someone who knows the way because you're trying to go into your deep heart.
And so there is another light that is to be lit, and it's called the light of faith.
…faith is acceptance by the heart of the truth of God's revelation.
Now, this revelation has been streaming forth in consciousness since the beginning
but for some reason your heart hasn't really been able to accept it as the truth
and so you have a lot of doubt and uncertainty.
So this is another light that is to be lit in the heart.

I was crying with these words, as I knew their truth.
Despite all the experiences I’ve had, years and years and years and still, I cannot accept.
What more do I want?

The third light that's to be lit in the heart
is the light of gnosis
and this is the witnessing of the real.

I understand witnessing. There is so much of that. I understand Real and unreal. I feel like I do not have to worry so much about this light.

And the fourth is the light of unification.

Bam! With that word my heart broke.
Unity, I just don’t get. Even though I’m beginning to suspect, I walk around positively dizzy with the physical denial. I walk around within the ocean waiting for it to swallow me up, or perhaps desperately thrashing in the water like some fish upon the land trying to remain separate.

Last year about this time, Adya told me that I needed to learn to “witness from the heart”… and that I’d have to discover how to do this for myself. He couldn’t tell me how. But, he added, think of those picture of the flaming heart of Christ – the heart with those hands ripping it wide open.

…one of the intentions of doing practices
is to bring light into the chest
so that this particular quality of knowledge of God can come directly to you
so you won't have a teacher telling you what it is any longer.
You will actually know what it is because you will be having the experience of it
in your heart in a way that is very unique to you
and that you will understand in your own way
so that you can continue to travel deeply…

it's the interior teacher that's now guiding you.
I have one story that might help you when you get to that place.
And it's from the 14th century Egypt, and it's from a desert father.
A monk came to see Abba and said
Abba, I observe fast. I pray. I maintain stillness.
I try to keep my thoughts pure.
What more can I do?
The old man stood up, invoked,
and his fingers became like ten burning lamps of fire.
If you wish, he said, you can become all flame.

So, there you go, kind of full circle in a year. When better to finally collapse.

Lynn Barron shared one more thing:
When you're going into the deep heart, you'll reach a point
where a great deal of fear comes upon you
And I'm going to read something from Rûmî that may help.
Rûmî asks what is there to be afraid of:

Don't be afraid of nonbeing.
If you want to be afraid,
fear the existence you have now.
Your hopes for the future,
your memories of the past,
what you call yourself
are nothing.
So nothing is being taken from nothing, and
a nothing is being absorbed by a Nothing.

Writing Poems

2011-08-11T13:49:00.006-04:00

Omega garden, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

Say it again
Say it again I didn’t hear.
I could not understand.

And so, once again the sun rose
through the trees
illuminating translucent leaves
and the most delicate of tendrils, just so.

Just so I might hear.

Yesterday, while having breakfast on my back deck and mostly sitting quietly, this poem came to me. I just noticed hearing it as I was looking at the woods.
I liked it a lot and jotted it down.
It helped me notice there's such patience and love within Nature's mechanics; patience and love as aspects of that ineffable being, the Light, that shines through your eyes and mine sometimes so brightly.

Today, I came across these words.
Once again, such perfect timing:

At one time I was composing poems.
Poems used to flow out of me and, in this flow, I just added Nisargadatta.
I was reveling in composing poems until my Guru cautioned me, "You are enjoying composing these poems too much; give them up!"
What was he driving at?

His objective was for me to merge in the Absolute state instead of reveling in my beingness…
When this beingness goes, the Absolute will not know "I Am".
Appearance and disappearance, birth and death, these are the qualities of beingness;
they are not your qualities.
Consciousness and the Absolute: the final talks of Nisargadatta

... ok, I was going to stop here, but let me take this a bit farther as I seem to have many friends thinking about death these days.
Nisargadatta also has this to say:

the knowledge "I Am" must go back to its own source.

Now, consciousness has identified with a form.
Later, it understands that it is not that form and goes further.
In a few cases it may reach the space, and very often, there it stops.
In a very few cases, it reaches its real source, beyond all conditioning.
It is difficult to give up that inclination of identifying the body as the self.
I am not talking to an individual, I am talking to the consciousness.
It is consciousness which must seek its source.
Out of that no-being state comes the beingness.
It comes as quietly as twilight, with just a feel of "I Am" and then suddenly the space is there.

In the space, movement starts with the air, the fire, the water, and the earth.
All these five elements are you only.
Out of your consciousness all this has happened.
There is no individual.
There is only you, the total functioning is you, the consciousness is you.
You are the consciousness, all the titles of the Gods are your names, but by clinging to the body you hand yourself over to time and death—you are imposing it on yourself.
I am the total universe.

Many of these words link up to experience for me.
When things shifted back in 1975, I found the space.
I saw how air, fire, water and earth arise as movement starts.
"No individual" is becoming more and more apparent.
And yet, overall, mostly I live in "and there it stops."

Still, I do know from experience of a place beyond all conditionings, all words, all mentation.
And as Nisargadatta says, "the consciousness is you" and "consciousness must seek it's source."
Otherwise, we impose time and death and suffering upon ourselves.

Enlightening the Shadow

2011-08-07T07:48:00.004-04:00

Practice begins with enlightenment.
Suzuki Roshi

Until one has tasted the essence of what we are, none of it’s going to make sense.
Jon Bernie

So, having tasted. Now what? (And, if you’re here, surely you’ve had an inkling.)
Or, perhaps it’s more than merely a simple taste. Perhaps you’ve swallowed the whole meal. Now what?

Wayne Liquorman gave some nice definitions in his interview at BATGAP.
Saints embody the highest ideals of human behavior.
Sages have realized their true self.
Traditionally, we seem to have blurred this distinction. We want our sages to be saints.
Now those who have awakened are telling us, “Not so.”
And sometimes I think, well then why bother.

In his Ordinary People interview Jon Bernie got me thinking about the shadow although he never mentioned it by name.
Posted just below Jon is an interview with Scott Kiloby and Scott speaks directly to the point. He speaks of deeply realizing “no-self” and still, something had to shift.
In speaking with other teachers on non-duality Scott noticed they, like he, were actually feeling quite conflicted. Turns out, “no-self” can create a shadow just as easily as a “separate me.”
That’s one angle to my point here. But, I have another much more personal.

Sometime ago a friend asked me, “What happens if you never decide if you are awake?” I still can’t answer that to my satisfaction. But, I think it leaves things unfulfilled. I have had so many tastes, and still something needs to be resolved.
I really liked how Scott talks about walking the middle way: sometimes no-self, sometimes me. In fact, every time I open my mouth to speak, I will be a me.
Can I be comfortable with that?

I recommend listening to Scott.

Trade What You See, Not What You Think

2011-07-28T12:24:00.005-04:00

Besides blabbering here like some spiritual idiot, part of my time these days is spent trying to learn how to swing trade stocks.
I love this exercise. I am constantly amazed that trading presents spiritual principle after principle.

So, I have just completed my third trade.
And once again, I am trying to learn from my mistakes.
Stopped out within the first 3 minutes of today’s trading even when the pre-market quotes showed the stock was trading up, I was out my $50, just like that.

It was a bit of a stunner. I'd convinced myself the stock was going up, when right there in front of me, I can now see quite plainly that I should have stayed out. The stock's chart did not have the pattern that I search for and want to trade... a chart pattern I originally chose because of its inherent simplicity and easy recognition.

I can see that now, but I couldn't see that yestareday. Instead I was driven by what I thought: murmuring emotions, hopes, desires confused my eyes. There was all that going on beneath the thoughts I loudly heard.
I wrote out a detailed plan prior to the trade and appeared to be following the rules all the rules for trading wisely. And still, I failed to see my blindness
I made an amateur mistake!! I broke a premier principle, I had heard many times and whole heartedly advocate:
Trade what you see, not what you think.
And, I am blown away by how simply the mind overthrows the senses! Subtle mind even over throws loudly thinking, reading with your lips moving, following a check list mind.

Trade what you see, not what you think.
Can I do that?
It’s simply a material version of Fierce Freedom yelling the spiritual directive at me: Don’t think! Look!
But, can we do that?

What I love about trading – worth the $50 I just lost – is to see the incredible subtlety of just how difficult it is to quiet the mind and simply go with what you see… because we do think. We have to think. So, even when you have been told the principle of freedom and it makes sense and you agree… still to actually do it!
That is something else.

So here is a cartoon, in celebration of dear, dear (and costly) imbecility, aka “being human.” They're talking about trading, but don't let that fool you. As seekers we do this all the time.

Different Perspectives

2011-07-25T11:53:00.004-04:00

i am curious how you might explain further the idea that knowing the name of my cat captures the essence of our different viewpoints.
Fierce Freedom

I thought I’d address my friends comment here, just to do it justice.
Let me begin by a story that supposedly Jeff Foster tells:
He was out walking with his mother when she said, “Oh, what a beautiful tree.” In reply he launched into a long explanation of “There is no tree!”
A year later, he realized his response had been somewhat ridiculous. Of course, there was a tree to be enjoyed while on a walk.

Having realized there is no-self, how long and how loudly do you want to keep beating that drum?
I think you and I differ on this point.
To me too much drum beating or “fierce freedom” risks inherent contradiction and outright fundamentalism just as surely as a right-to-lifer shooting a doctor does.

And how does my asking for the name of your cat address our different perspectives?
It too centers of the emphasis we place upon the experience of no-self.
I have no idea what logic initially led me to make that statement regarding the name of your cat. Memory is gone.
But, while struggling to recall my thinking, this image filled my mind:

Your viewpoint was represented by the line. Mine was somehow held by that little dot.
It was a curious situation to be asked for a stream of logic and only come up with an image. But, with time I realized that our perspectives lay rooted in the differences between the two.

Now, I can say this:
When I hear, “There were three cats: roach, spider, cricket,” I notice that my heart goes, Ahhh. I draw closer and pay attention. And when I discover, “Roach died,” again I feel my heart.
In knowing something as simple as a name a whole story springs up and with that story comes love.
I don’t want to miss that, even at the risk of being lost or hurt by what unfolds.

Now, I grant you “roach” has nothing whatsoever actually to do with ultimate truth.
And perhaps its only due to my conditioning it has an effect upon me. But, rather than jump, “Oh God, a story! Stories can’t be true.” I am happy to enjoy the wave of love.
Knowing that the tree is an illusion, why not go on and enjoy it?

You could say that this is my perspective. And it struck me that in all of our discussion of the profound experience you had surrounding the death of roach, you never named her (or him - I still don’t know that detail). And it struck me as very curious that you felt no need for naming.

It was always, “The cat died.”
It sounds almost like Joe Friday wanting “just the facts ma’am.” And Joe will get the job done.
He just proceeds from a different perspective – that of the intellect, that serially logical gray line.
The intellect inquires into the nature of the self and discovers there is no-self to be found.
It realizes the danger and allure inherent in a flowery story. It is only logical to reduce the risk of slipping back into a self, back into illusion - so shave the story back “to just the facts.”

But, “The cat died,” is just as much a story as “Roach died.”
In one case intellect, and likely ego, does a cutting back? In the second case heart, and likely ego, surrenders into love.

To me our perspectives appear either predominantly intellect or heart centered. The heart would like a name, simply for the warmth. The intellect feels no need or even prefers the nameless.

That said, I would also emphasize that it’s probably much more accurate to say, one steps forward from the left foot while the other begins with the right. You obviously are learning deeply about love. And I can use my head. Heart and mind do work together, just as surely as left and right foot do… but still, there seems to be a preference of footing.

So, to end this in the spirit of merging heart and intellect, I’d like to share this video.
I never knew that the idea of love was brought to the west by the Sufis. And I love the concluding line:
this is the shoreless sea;
here swimming ends
always in drowning

The “Transparency of Things”

2011-07-24T07:19:00.005-04:00

Every time I open my eyes I invite the world to take shape. And every time the world takes shape I am invited to open my eyes…
And every time it is seen, it dies…
And every time I take it in I too die and in dying am known as this
Rupert Spira

Last time I was talking about what happens after death.
To this my friend, Becky, commented “dying is happening each moment.”
Here, Rupert Spira beautifully elaborates that point.

The transparency of things is a phrase that haunts me. It speaks directly to the beauty found within this process of arising and dissolving.
If I were to utilize the Bubble Diagram that I also mentioned last time, I would place my finger at the bottom, the finest, deepest level of the mind. To me transparency is possible only at that juncture where that initial impulse of thought arises from pure Isness.
There is a transparency that shines through material creation, as if all the world were stones that have been wetted down with water so that they sparkle in the sun. And while it makes no sense to me to speak of being able to see Being, there is the sense that this indeed somehow happens. To call this the transparency of things seems very appropriate and beautiful to me.

In other interviews (part 1, part 2), Spira explains the ancient teaching nama rupa satchitananda which he breaks down into name, form, Isness, knowing, peace.
While Rupert translates ananda as peace, I have also heard it translated as “bliss.” But, you get the flavor. With Transparency comes joy and beauty, something to thrill the heart.
Right there too is nama rupa, name and form.
I think that is why I feel the urge to know the name of Becky’s cat. It’s not just that some cat or the cat died, but rather one particular, unique and never again, little cat… by the name of…?

Some Speculation

2011-07-23T06:36:00.005-04:00

P. Bralley with Bubble Diagram, ca '73.

it's unavoidable that the body will die.
brain function ceased.
no more thoughts.
no more perceptions…
there is no you.
when the body dies, there's not going to be a special essence that wafts heavenward.
there is no you.
Fierce Freedom

I have a friend. At least I think she’s out there somewhere, though we’ve never met in person. Her voice and thoughts get communicated to me through the computer in a manner that leads to me to believe that someone out there exists.
However, I can also say the same thing regarding the behavior of the computer and my father. After he died, he seemed to be communicating that way too. … and at the time that really rattled me, but that’s a ghost story for another time.

I mention my friend now, because from time to time she’ll say things that stick in my head. She’s been helpful and challenging in this. The quote above is from her.
She’s an ardent “no self” advocate.

I appreciate that. But, I entitled this whole blog, “Seeing for My Self.” By that I meant, my effort in this spiritual quest has been to try to understand my own experiences. This has included past-life flashbacks, devas, guides, animal spirits, and as mentioned above, Pop’s ghost. I could put all of these experiences in quotes (because they embarrass the scientific part of me) – but I won’t. I just want to present a short list of the kind of "data” that has challenged my mind.

Given these experiences I took a fairly strong exception to my friend’s statement about nothing drifting heavenward after death. But, it seems rather speculative to argue as if I were certain about what happens after death. So, I just let the thoughts sit there.

Then, yesterday, I came across the thoughts of Rupert Spira regarding death. He makes some very interesting points from a deeply non-dual, no-self perspective:

...there is no mind, body or world, as such, so we cannot meaningfully speak of their possible survival. The mind, body and world are simply the names that thought gives to the current thought, sensation and perception…
However, this does not mean that when a sensation/perception (the body) disappears, it will not be ‘followed by’ a thought.
In that sense there is nothing to suggest that the mind does not survive the death of the body.
Thoughts keep coming after the ‘body’ has disappeared.

Whoa! I hadn’t seent that coming.
I think of Maharishi saying, “Thoughts seem to come from somewhere deep inside” - his point being most people really couldn't say from where.
I think of Adyashanti and Byron Katie emphasizing that we don’t think our thoughts. Thoughts just come. They think us.

Rupert explains his point this way:
Thoughts keep coming after the ‘body’ has disappeared.
In fact, that is exactly what happens at night. When we ‘fall asleep’ the body, that is, the current sensation or perception vanishes, but dream thoughts and images appear. This is the experience of mind without a body.
In fact, mind is always experienced without a body.
The body is just one of the possible ‘shapes’ of the mind.

One of the hardest concepts for my scientific mind to grasp was the idea that the body does not generate consciousness. Rather, Pure Consciousness, Awareness, the Self precipitates into solid form. That form may be an animate form with a brain that expresses consciousness. It may also be inanimate: a mountain with an awesome presence. Or it may be animate sans nervous system: an ancient redwood which again seems wise and conscious. In essence, only Consciousness can become conscious.
It is not really what I learned in biology, that unconscious matter evolves to become conscious, VOILA! No. Sometimes though, Consciousness can become conscious - like when brains evolved. But, Consciousness was there all along, even in the rock.

I am also reminded of the Bubble Diagram.
Maharishi used to explain how thoughts arise within the mind. He said, the mind is like an ocean with waves upon the surface. At the bottom of the ocean a tiny bubble forms and begins to rise. As it arises, the bubble expands until it bursts upong the surface. So thoughts begin the from depths of Pure Consciousness and rise within the mind, through unconscious levels, up into the thinking level of conscious awareness where they are finally experienced.
He also said those quiet, silent depths were the level at which celestial beings existed, but he didn't want to dwell on angels.

I’m thinking that it is at these deeper levels that thoughts continue without a body.
That can be after death. Or it may be picked up while we are alive.
But, in either case, a “me” is never really the author, the instigator, of the thought or of the “thought form.”
It’s non-dual. No-self. And still, and yet, a thought appears.

What is also interesting to notice is the thoughts and feelings of the waking state tend to become the environment of the dream state.
In other words, what was on the ‘inside’ during the waking state becomes the ‘outside,’ in which the dream seems to take place…
There is nothing to suggest that this pattern will not continue after the ‘death’ of the waking body, which as we have already seen, is simply the disappearance of a bodily sensation, but not necessarily the cessation of mind.
Rupert Spira

Actually, why wouldn't the arsing of thoughts continue.
To argue otherwise seems to say Pure Consciousness depends upon a me...
Just some thoughts, I thought I’d share. And I get to use this old picture that I recently found at Mom’s house: me with the bubble diagram, during my teaching days when Madras shirts were the rage.

This Interested Me... (aka no title today)

2011-07-16T08:47:00.003-04:00

Buddha At the Gas Pump had an interesting interview with a fellow by the name of Jan Esman. Rather than address the points in it, I went to Jan’s website and clipped a bit of his teaching. I feel like things for me are taking a new direction and this may be a good way to kind of shift the discussion gradually.

I hope you have the time to listen to Jan’s story. If not, maybe you can read on:

Pure is-ness is prior to I AM. In pure is-ness, there is no "I" that "IS", hence no I AM.
I AM is a gross state that does resemble the absolute state of pure being, but it has a subtle ignorance at its core…
Self-remembrance [meaning inquiry or resting as awareness?] leads to the I AM state, and no further.
Once fairly established in the I AM-ness, your awareness can fold back in on itself and short circuit, so to speak.
But the step from I AM to pure being is best taken by grace and Shakti.
It is so easy to get stuck in I AM and think you have reached the goal…

In I AM ness you are a witness to everything exterior including all levels of the mind and ego, except I-ness. But the final wipe out of ignorance has not taken place, there is still an I that believes it IS and it claims to be the Self, but it is not.
In basic Self-realization, this sense goes away also and there is just serene void.
Self-realization is prior to soul.
Soul-realization is realizing one's I AM-ness…

Last year I asked Adya about being stuck in the witness. He said he couldn’t tell me how to do it, but I had to learn to witness from the heart and not the mind. I had no idea even what “witnessing from the heart” might mean. A heart does not observe, a heart dives in and unifies. Although, yes, a heart can look upon with love. And, something seemed to soften. The gap began to close, or so I recollect. Still, despite a feeling of emptiness, I still remain with ego.
I also seem to have lost the interest or ability even to practice self inquiry, resting as awareness, seeing into no-self: all the things I have been doing. No more doing! I have flung myself off some cliff.
I want to just drop the thinking and trying, and simply do.
I want to drop deep and let the energies I've cultivated through my Taoist practice and working with Evie (helping her with her cancer)... I want to just drop into That. Even, I would say, even something, the sweetness, beyond all Those.

Access to I AM is not access to the Self.
It is access to "a higher self", but not The Self.
You can use I AM as a doorway, but it is easy to get stuck there…
I AM is thick as a brick, so to speak. It is really a kind of voidish, subtle self without form.
Personality can observe. When I AM and personality get mixed, you have ego.
I AM wants to be something, so mind offers its dubious services. This is the birthplace of personality.

Access to “a higher self” that is still not what I’d call The Self seems to be the essence of my Taoist teaching. I have considered this a shortcoming, and yet I have enjoyed and benefited immensely from the practice. In fact, I’d even say, “It has been necessary.”

Access to Self rather than I AM is best achieved by "riding" on a surge of Shakti since Shakti is the Self. This usually requires shaktipat (kundalini-awakening). If you, however, can experience awareness as pure being-energy and let awareness become fully aware of itself, then you can momentarily snap out of I AM-ness and into pure being, or is-ness.

I am wondering if spontaneous qigong and channeling are another means to “riding on a surge of Shakti.” It seems to be the way I am naturally progressing.

Try the shakti-breathing… Here it is:
1.Breathe in to the count of three. Sense energy rising up the spine to the brain.
2.Hold your breath to the count of three. Sense energy radiating from the brain in all directions.
3.Breathe out to the count of three. Sense energy radiating from the brain in all directions. (or from the entire body).
Repeat.
It is important to find a nice and relaxed tempo so you can keep at it uninterrupted for 45 minutes. If bliss comes or shakti fills your body with love, just surrender to it and merge.

This doesn’t seem that far removed from what I was recently telling my friend Mary to try, though it was something I just made up as I saw the truth in it.
Mary can rest in a solid quiet meditation. But its very solidness has becomes a restricted solidity that she’d like to grow/go beyond.
“To go higher you must go deeper,” my Taoist teacher says.
I saw a rock dropped into a glass of water. As the rock settles, notice how the water rises, maybe even overflows. Mary needs to do this.
How?
Breath out, exhale through the eyes.
Feel the breath, the energy and light resting in the belly on the inhalation and then direct that out through the eyes, exhale.
I told her about Annie – consciousness streams out through our eyes. Practice that consciously.

How did I know this? I was channeling and could see and feel it and even facilitate the flow by moving my hand along her torso. My Taoist practice seems to be providing access to a gentle Shaktipat ability.
It’s not the “direct path” of the neo-advaitist, but it seems to be “my path.”

P.S. In the BatGap interview, near the very end, Jan says:
Kundalini is not a restricted energy within the body-mind, astral system, where ever... it is a condensation of the Self, like a contraction. And as such, it contains the essence of your ignornace.

These words hit me like the beauty of a poem. I understand yet for a moment cannot explain. There were only tears. True Self becomes our ignorance, even as it moves to set us free. My God, the beauty!

Eye to Eye

2011-07-08T15:42:00.006-04:00

Bennie, my other little dog

I take many photos of my face… I do not know why I do this.
I am not particularly fascinated with it, and I cannot say there is anything at all I hope to find there…
Whenever I see myself in the mirror, or in a photo, it is in some way like looking at a newly made map of a continent surveyed and explored for the very first time.
Excitement and possibility.
Unknown and dangerous.
There are no memories or experiences of the thing.
Takuin, Self Portrait

I like Takuin. I like him a lot. He is so obviously awake.
It feels soft and good to visit his site and the Asian flavored beauty there.
But, when I read these words, I felt such a wave of dismay.

Geez, I look into the mirror and I have memories. Or at least a head full of thoughts and is that not experience?
So, I exhale in dismay. I am nowhere near awake!
I am flooded by the very kinds of impulses Takuin encourages one to drop.

I read his words again in some desperate attempt to understand, only to find more failure:
When I look into a mirror or at a photograph I am fascinated.
I can be stopped cold by fascination: “My god, is that what I look like?”

It seems the deepest mystery.
“I am that.”
It is totally astounding…
“There are no memories or experience of the thing.”

Suddenly, I understand!
Takuin just chose different words like:
newly surveyed, explored for the first time, unknown, excitement.
Now, I see they fit. Their poetry was just slightly at a different angle.

I have been wrestling with the question , “Am I awake?”
But, looking in the mirror and being presented with my supposed face, simply undercuts so much confusion.
I KNOW that I am not my body. Who I am is Mystery beyond words.
Otherwise, the mirror could never be so strange.

It is so obvious.
I had a little dog once, Annie. She loved to climb the kitchen stairs so that she could peek through the banister and meet my partner or me directly eye to eye.
Eye to eye.
Even a little dog recognizes that she and I, that consciousness, pours most clearly through the eyes. Forget this body stuff.
And if a little dog knows this, surely I can get it too.

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
Dogen

But, you see, we can look into a mirror with a couple different levels to the focus.
Sometimes I look and focus on my face, the reflection of the Light.
Sometimes I look and instead notice a greasy smudge or scar upon the glass. The moment my attention goes to the imperfection, I lose all notice of my reflection. And I get lost in the mirror's dirt.
But, that doesn’t mean for a moment that the image, the reflection, has disappeared.

Eye to eye, there is only Light.
And of course we are awake.

But, there will be times the focus falls upon the flaws.
That is an interesting phenomenon, that little subtlety of focus. Even with the routine of looking in a mirror sometimes we look and notice the glass instead, if only for a moment.

The Fourth of July

2011-07-04T11:11:00.005-04:00

Martha Raber, Patty Bralley, Mary Raber ca. 1964

You’re not much of a farmer if you don’t have tomatoes by the Fourth of July.
Pop

My father spent his boyhood summers on his cousins’ farm in North Carolina working the tobacco fields. For an only child being raised in a boarding house by a widowed mother, summer was a time for being “all boy”, having brothers, and listening to rain falling on a tin roof deep into the night.
Yes, this gentle, sweet man made wonderful attempts to appear tuff. So, from time to time he'd come out with these kind of pontifications like this one on tomatoes.
It was a challenge to me and my city gardens well into my fifties. Finally one spring, I resorted to the planting of a new hybrid that already possessed small fruit.
Voila: tomatoes by the Fourth of July!
Except, I felt I’d cheated.

Growing up, the Fourth of July was a day celebrating freedom and family, in essence what I’d now call: fullness. By the Fourth of July summer seemed the only existence. School was long forgotten and a lifetime in the future.
We lived at the swimming pool on burgers, Seven-Up, and fries. Our bodies were brown and strong.
There were colorful swim meets every Saturday that we always seemed to lose, but somehow that didn’t matter in the least. It was enough to try our hardest.
Today, this optimism seems remarkable and somewhat inexplicable.
But, I suspect an explanation rest somehow in love. It was enough to simply be together in the elements of sun and water, family and friends. I was in college before I realized that not everyone enjoyed this norm.
I never really recognized my blessings.

There’s a buzz to summer, a drone below and subtler than all the hoopla and fireworks.
Cicadas hum in the still, damp mornings before the heat silences subtlety.
Cicadas buzz this cyclic sine wave, crescendo passing from treetop to treetop like some cosmic OM .
There’s more here than meets the eye. Something is occurring that you might not notice.
Within the hot, white fullness of the Yang, there is that one black dot, the turning point of Yin.

It is this turning point that I notice now.
It’s this turning point that’s become the Fourth of July’s significance to me.
The dogwoods that bloomed in April now show one little tuff of red leaf. They weren’t there on the thirtieth. But, today they are.
The tulip poplar dropped its first yellow leaf on my house deck last night.
Amidst the watermelon and fireworks, road trips, swimming pools and grills, the tide has already turned…
even as the day is full and warm and wondrous.

What season are you in?
It’s sweet to notice both the surface and the subtleties.

Starlings Over the Moor

2011-06-15T13:16:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, before everything broke loose* I was watching this video.
It’s kind of old news, but yesterday I met it with new wonder, as I’ve been thinking about the phrase “connecting the dots.”
By that I mean, how do we put together the story of our life?
How do we connect the dots?
There’s actually a multitude of ways as independent life events simply arise and then dissolve.

I feel like my family is struggling on how to connect the dots. I know I am.
We’re being invited, herded, even forced into breaking old connections (that is to say, beliefs) and realizing new ways of being.

And then to see that nature just stirs wide swaths of this “connect the dots” energy through the air for the sheer joy of physical expression… it’s very beautiful and mysterious to me.

*(Evie “failed” her PET scan and once again they must do a biopsy involving a hard and painful surgery to get behind her breast bone.)

Oh, Now Here We Go

2011-06-04T07:03:00.000-04:00

I’m having a bit of trouble explaining what’s unfolding as Mary, Evie and I meet to meditate twice a week. The shorthand I use in my head is to simply say something shamanic is unfolding. It seems to involve channeling for me.

One concern I had with this is that it felt like a very dualistic activity… and here I’ve been trying to cultivate nondual awareness. Oh well, so go the best laid plans.

Here is a quick post just to share my own surprise. It’s Janet Sussman being interviewed on Buddha at the Gas Pump. Back when it was first posted I wasn’t so enamored by it all. Janet seemed rather full of herself and they got off on talking about higher beings and other planets… CLICK. I turned it off.

But this morning, I decided to revisit. Taoism has a lot of shamanic practice and yet speaks of awakened and enlightened masters. So, I find I’m become a little more opened minded regarding paths. And it occurred to me maybe that what’s Janet’s describing.

Two things I want to share:
First, at about the 1hr 45 min mark there’s a nice discussion about the opening of the heart and vulnerability. Mind opens to true Self and then the heart can open… or sometimes the reverse can happen.

Second, at about 1 hr 55 min, Janet says she is a musician, plays piano, and would like to sing. She then proceeded, to my great surprise, to take a bow and cut loose with the exact behavior that has started flowing through me as Evie, Mary, and I meditate. She calls it singing. I call it shamanism. Look closely at her facial features. This looks like channeling to me. But, if non-dual awareness does it, what is there to channel? It’s just another part of the flow of Life.

And as Janet says, it heals.

Waking Up Out of the Teaching

2011-05-29T08:57:00.013-04:00

P Bralley and young friend, ca 1952.

You know, it’s all jazz.
Leonard Bernstein explaining Beethoven’s Seventh to Bobby McFerrin

I illustrated my last post with a self-portrait.
Let me share here the source and reality of that photo. I was standing by my sandbox.
But, which image best illustrates or "explains" the gist of me?
It feels to me like they both make wonderful commentary.
So, which is better? Which preferred?
It all depends upon the point I’m trying to make.
Historical roots are addressed by the sandbox view;
Spiritual aspirations by the self-portrait… perhaps.

This appreciation for different points of view seems to be occurring in regards to teachings and paths.
Several threads of experience have become intertwined and have brought about a shift for me:
First, I found I could no longer make the effort of self-inquiry. I am no good at that. And even resting as awareness, something that felt quite easy suddenly became too great an effort to even think about.
Secondly, when I meditate with Eve and Mary often I start channeling. Initially, we went with this because it falls within the realm of our Taoist practice, but more importantly, it’s shown itself to be very helpful to Evie as she deals with the physical challenges of chemotherapy and stem cell transplant.
Finally, I got tired of all the chattering debates at sites like Buddha at the Gas Pump: the neo-advaitist, “No Ego!” versus advaitist, “Don't be so sure!"

And maybe there's a fourth experience here: I (?) let go. Well, something wore out or surrendered without my even attempting to do anything. Something stopped in a rather non-event. I noticed a little feeling: "exhausted" or "defeated" drifted through body and psyche. But all that was rather subtle. Rather, daily activity tracked along the above events, and the words I was pondering were Scott Kiloby's:

The thought of myself and the thought of a cliff are equally both thoughts. There’s nothing about the self that makes it really not exist… the cliff doesn’t either…
We make the big deal about no-self and then we think the tree exists.
They’re all just thoughts.
“An unreal concept can’t disassemble itself,” but an unreal concept can drop a rock on its foot. The whole no-self thing becomes a mental concept, “I don’t exist.”…
People say it as they want it to be true or they sense that it is true.
But the word, that insight is an after the fact kind of a thing… It’s not like, “Oh, there’s nobody here.” And now I have to live as if there’s nobody here.
That’s a person trying to be a no-self.
Scott Kiloby talking with Jeff Foster

… at least I think that’s where this rough transcription comes from. The comment that an unreal concept can drop a rock is probably my own commentary. The quote is probably Rupert Spira. Anyway, I found these scribbled words on my dining table when I finally cleaned the papers off.

On the other side of the page, there are these words:
Scott: I could really believe I stumbled upon some truth in my concepts, but really they’re just words floating by.
Jeff: It’s like two birds singing. Two birds singing and that’s it.

Around this time I read an essay by Scott entitled, Waking Up (Out of the Teaching).
It felt really right to me:

The possibility of waking up out of the dream of being a separate self, through the use of a spiritual teaching, is amazing…What is more amazing [for me] is the possibility of waking up from one’s own teaching, lineage, tradition, or message.
It’s like waking up from the idea of “I know how it REALLY is” into an openness that wants to explore the diverse landscape of life —to explore how it is within each view.
So that becomes my new language —openness.

It’s funny. As I copy and paste this excerpt I realize that Scott uses the word “openness.”
I didn’t remember that and it's a seldom used word (for me) that I've been thinking about.
My tendency is to define "open" in terms of being tolerant and willing to listen.
But, recently I realized that's how I feel these days physically. The inside of my body and mind feels Open as in “wide open spaces.”
Open can be a Nothingness that is far too rich to be considered nothing.
And it does no good to really think about this.
It’s something that is rediscovered in each moment, always new and unexpected.
No preconceptions. Just look.
Where are you standing if you’re not holding onto any teaching?

… there will be truth in any word you come up with… at least for that one moment.
Cause, it's all improvisation
when you're open.

Self Portrait

2011-05-05T16:21:00.005-04:00

Self Portrait, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

The image is an impression of the truth, a glimpse of the truth permitted to us in our blindness.
Andrei Tarkovsky

Today’s my birthday.
Today, I become sixty-one.
And as it turns out, I recently created the self portrait that you see above.
I didn’t set out to do something so self-centered. I was simply typing at the computer when I noticed the sunshine falling on a canvas in the corner. One thing led into another – kind of like all the rest of life - and when I was done, I was quite pleased.

Now, I have this image of the little girl.
So much has changed, gone from memory so completely, I have to wonder, “Is that me?”
"Who was there when I was only two?
"Can I recognize myself?" ... even as
I am invited into what has not changed in all these sixty years.

The body is so very changed, and yet, around the eyes I see feelings I still feel:
Wonder.
Longing.
Something sacred and a mystery.
And one step back, prior to the feelings, now, I see that too.
I come to what is always and already “me.”

Wakefulness shines through a body.
Something streams through the child’s face and even now I know myself as the little girl you could say and yet, not the little girl that’s in the picture.
What shines through and is recognized is not within the details, not about the physical shape, specific feelings, or all the here and there’s and thens of sixty years.
But, even though It cannot be captured in one word or picture’s thousand, it doesn’t mean It goes unnoticed.
I study the self portrait and discover something shining through.

The idea of infinity cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible.
Andrei Tarkovsky

Yes. Infinity becomes palpable.
Sometimes the “me” is apprehended, recognized. And then we get to understand birthdays in a whole new way.

That which is unborn is that which we were before we were born, are during this life, and will be after death. Until there is a conscious realization of our unborn nature, our experience of life will forever be dominated by the egoic drive to survive.
Adyashanti

Which I guess brings me to the Song of the Day as the perfect ending:

Asemic Love

2011-05-01T08:16:00.003-04:00

P. Bralley, Asemic Shadows #1

Love, someone said, is an abstract concept…
It takes the experience of a lifetime to make it concrete.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

I have taken up my art again, after a long hiatus.
I sent some asemic images off and they have been accepted for publication.
That made me happy.

Wikipedia posts this comment regarding asemic writing:
China, ca. 800 CE, two men pushed cursive brush calligraphy to the point of illegibility. "Crazy" Zhang Xu (one of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup) used to get excited after drinking wine, and write exuberant but illegible cursive.

This was news to me, but I have always made a link between my doodled images and trying to capture… “something”… about that which is beyond specific words.
But as I say to do my morning’s yoga and listen to a Kilologue, Matt Kahn, took the explanation in a new and deeper direction.

He spoke of love.
Love is actually the absence of meaning
which is why it feels so amazing…
When we’re experiencing the deepest moment of love… in that moment there is the absence of meaning. And of course we try to capture meaning… we make it into something that has to be chased, coerced, captured…
To the conventional mind living a life without meaning is quite frightening because the mind has been taught to associate meaning with value… But, if we look into ourselves the absence of meaning doesn’t mean the absence of value. In fact, any meaning in particular will actually define the value and therefore limit it. So, the absence of meaning is actually the existence of unlimited value.
And that, to me, is why love is amazing.

Oh! That’s it!
That’s what’s going on in this asemic expression.
Love is just another word for Silence, of Emptiness as Fullness.
That’s what I’m playing at.

I think back to a long time ago.
I was about nineteen. My sister and I were riding in the car. She was telling me about being married for a year.
She said:
When I married Hank, I couldn’t tell you why I loved him. I just did.
Now, I can give you a whole list of reasons.

Cat’s Cradle

2011-04-22T16:55:00.001-04:00

Intellectual understanding cannot awaken you.
But, an intellectual misunderstanding can keep you from awakening.
P Bralley –or at least that seems my experience.

Was emailing a friend today, discussing a Scott Kiloby quote when I realized the above.
It is a belief.
One thing led to another through the day until I came upon the following:

Bokonon said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made, the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job Bokonon had done.

"Nice going, Bokonon. Nobody but you could have done it, I certainly couldn't have.
“I feel very unimportant compared to You.
“The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up “and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor!"

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
"What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
“I loved everything I saw!
“Good night. Amen."

Hypertext to Wikipedia:
Bokononism is a religion invented by Kurt Vonnegut as a fictional religion practiced by many of the characters in his novel Cat's Cradle.
It is based on the concept of foma, which are defined as harmless untruths.
The primary tenet of Bokononism is to "Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy."

The foundation of Bokononism is that all religion, including Bokononism and all its texts, is formed entirely of lies; however, one who believes and adheres to these lies will at least have peace of mind, and perhaps live a good life.

Bokonon, a character in the novel, is the founder of the religion. He was born Lionel Boyd Johnson and attended the London School of Economics and Political Science, only for his education to be cut short by World War I.

"Bokonon" was the way the natives of San Lorenzo, the fictional Caribbean island-nation where the shipwrecked Johnson started his religion, pronounced his family name in their unique dialect of English…
Bokononism, encompasses concepts unique to the novel, with San Lorenzan names such as:
• karass - a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will. The group can be thought of as the fingers that support a Cat's Cradle.
• granfalloon - a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers"; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so really share little more than a name.
• wrang-wrang - Someone who steers a Bokononist away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the wrang-wrang's own life, to an absurdity.
• stuppa - a fogbound child (i.e. an idiot)
• duffle - the destiny of thousands of people placed on one stuppa
• Busy, busy, busy - words Bokononists whisper upon witnessing an example of how interconnected everything is
• boko-maru - the supreme act of worship of the Bokononists, which is an intimate act consisting of prolonged physical contact between the naked soles of the feet of two persons.
• Now I will destroy the whole world. - What a Bokononist says before committing suicide.

I never read Cat’s Cradle.
But this description somehow reminds me of nonduality and all the internet yah-dah, yah-dah.

Hypertext “an absurdity” (see wrang-wrang above):
Reductio ad absurdum (Latin: "reduction to the absurd") a form of argument in which a proposition is disproven by following its implications logically to an absurd consequence…

The ontological argument for the existence of God, as it was originally stated by Anselm of Canterbury, is an example of reductio ad absurdum…
OK the Archbishop of Canterbury got it wrong. I’m not too surprised.
Another example: a statement attributed to physicist Niels Bohr:
"The opposite of every great idea is another great idea."

Carl Sagan used a reductio ad absurdum argument to counter this claim.
If this statement is true, then it would qualify as a great idea.
But, if the statement itself is a great idea, its opposite
("It is not true that the opposite of every great idea is another great idea")
must also be a great idea.

The original statement is disproven because it leads to an absurd conclusion:
An idea can be great regardless of whether it is true or false.
And somewhere in my head a bell rang.

Hypertext me back.
FaceBook earlier in the day:

I cannot deny awareness, yet I cannot find it to exist in its own form either.
Though I need not come to any description, if I had to, it would be that the nature of reality and everything that appears is aware non-existence,
or non-existent awareness:
this description both confirms and denies reality which leaves the 'not-knowing'.
The eternal paradox is that there seems to be something, yet we cannot find anything.

True freedom, as such, is beyond needing either this, or that.
To be free from needing all kinds of ultimate truths, is the freedom that sets us free.
Being free, who cares about truth?

In my experience awareness cannot be found at all, because it doesn't exist as anything, not even as itself.
Only when I refer to a particular experience, does the experience pop up, but never am I actually recognizing awareness, just creating more subtle experiences.
Yet all of it seems to confirm empty, non-existent awareness to be aware and existing.
Bentinho Massaro (who I actually am fond of… but perhaps not today)

And 56 people of the karass click the thumbs up.
And 44 others click into the comments as if anything they could possibly say adds to the discussion!

Or, am I simply being “Crabby Patty” yet again?
Hey, my other post was going to be “Rage, Grief, Terror.”
This may be an improvement.
What a lucky mud I am!

Just Watch

2011-04-10T07:12:00.001-04:00

I am beginning to love this guy.
And I've nothing more to say.

Or perhaps I could add - I am wrestling a bit with finding "Self" if everything is simply an appearance.
Like when I dismissed the Klein Bottle experience - just an experience.
But, I get the part of falling backwards: how that's true meditation and that happens in activity...
which brings me back to somehow we are already awake.
KNOW THAT! thoroughly.

Face It

2011-04-05T14:46:00.006-04:00

5th grade skit, a photo by Seeking Tao on Flickr.

I sit here in this chair, and I am alone in the universe,
and I alone am the universe; outside of every system ever conceived.
How could this have ever occurred? …
Why do I look at the baby in the stroller across the room and only see myself? Not as a literal projection, but as something that is not separate from this organism.
I am not really sure why, or that it even matters.
I am keen to find out, however.
Takuin Minamoto, Emptiness and Levels of Consciousness

I think it started with FaceBook.

Carin, a childhood friend I’ve not seen in 40 years, posted a picture of David, just one of the people we went to high school with - David a year older, Class of 1967.
Now, there he was, 2011, smiling in a pink shirt, blond hair spiking just a bit.
God, he looked great!
And I thought, "David?" The name was so familiar, but I could hardly remember. What had he been like? - a nice guy, student council type.
And as I clicked to find out more there was one other photo: He and another handsome fellow, both in tuxes, silk vests, and boutonniere.
Underneath, a woman had commented, “I thought he was married to Philip.”

My god!
People in Decatur Illinois talking about gay marriage as if it were the most normal thing in the world?
I was deeply moved, because I know what that path was like from the clueless closet of MacArthur High School to 2011.
And now, I can count four of us as having made it. Who else? Who else shared that path?

That night I had a dream.
I was at David’s house, the lawn set out with white clothed tables awaiting the reception. As the guests arrived I was amazed to see all these old high school acquaintances.
Face after face.
It was delightful and heart rending. It was wonderful to see those who’d largely just meant pain.

Then I saw him, Carin’s father.
He was old. Not at all the robust beer drinking, cigarette puffing joker of my youth, but an old man with watery eyes. His name was Bill, but my folks had always called him Henry.
I went to him and we shared the softest kiss.
Then I stood back waiting for my hug. But, he was not about to reach out.
Puzzlement. Then he said, “If I were to hug you, I’d never let you go.”

With those words such love exploded. With a jolt I was awake.
Lying there in my bed I discovered I was crying.
I lay there for a moment trying to orient myself.
It was then I noticed there was this small burning pinhole of light right in the middle of my heart.
What a strange way for one’s heart to break.

I thought of Carin. I would write her in the morning and tell her, “I dreamed of your dad last night.”
A couple months ago via FaceBook she had told me, “He has his good days and his bad now.”
I thought of Carin’s mother, how when Pop died my mom had told me she had gotten a phone call: “Rusty, it’s Fuzzy.”
At first, that was all they’d needed to say. And I could hear exactly how Carin’s mom had sounded.
“Rusty, it’s Fuzzy.” …stop, beyond all words, just stop.

So, I’ve learned a strange thing from these FaceBook encounters, from these reunions with old friends and even with the ones I’d thought hadn’t really mattered.
They all mattered. Every single one.

They all matter because I have discovered that they no longer exist as separate entities.
Retreating into memory and mind they have become a part of me.
They constitute my Life.

I love them as myself.
I am so surprised to understand that.
I wish I’d known that all along.

What does it mean to believe in a perception?
It means that you are unconsciously assuming that the world you are perceiving is real....
it means you are assuming that whatever is perceived, is really there as something in and of itself; as having an independent nature; a solid existence...

When we realize this ...we stop solidifying our experience as being a single entity in a world full of other individual objects and people...
Whether you have your eyes open and believe you perceive 'external stimuli' or whether you have your eyes closed and experience your thoughts, emotions, or even meditational states ...
All is just that same perception of awareness. Just like the movie screen will always be the movie screen and the projection will always be the projection, regardless of what is shown.
Bentinho Massaro

Being Who You Are is Freedom

2011-04-02T07:11:00.003-04:00

Ben is growing on me. His directness shatters so much that I often cannot stand to listen. But, that glass I hear breaking are my beliefs. And he also makes me feel a burst of happiness and leaves me with a grin.

Part 2 of the Download: Beliefs

2011-04-01T13:09:00.002-04:00

Most of us feel pretty ordinary, and if we have this conscious or unconscious belief that enlightenment is rare—that it's for only very extraordinary people—it totally contradicts our experience because we're not extraordinary... And so this idea, it is one of the, if not the most powerful impediment to awakening.
We have images of the awake being, and they are all sort of halo-enshrouded... And if they are doing anything in life they're always teaching, and they always have disciples....
It's very hard for our minds to get that enlightenment can look like your grandmother, or the grocer.
Enlightenment doesn't need to look in any way extraordinary.
Adyshanti, an interview

Early on I got from Adya that beliefs impede enlightenment.
I was stunned to consider that maybe my belief that enlightenment is rare was my major stumbling block.
So, I worked on letting that go.
Ha! I replaced it with another belief, “This is possible.”
Well... that’s a useful start.

Adya also stated that in the end we have to give up ALL beliefs, and the spiritual ones will be the hardest.
So, I have been watching my reaction this past year or more to the Neo-Advaita teaching which I interpreted as something along the lines, “You can be awake and still be a ‘jerk.’”

I really resist believing that!
If awakening doesn’t turn you into some reasonable version of a saint, or at least diminish your obnoxious traits – What’s the point?
I have little tolerance for the behaviour of the so called enlightened that erupt into the scandal.
I have little tolerance for my getting frustrated with my mother.
Surely we should be able to do better than that!

Or, so I believed.
And I wanted to believe.
What’s interesting to me now is discovering that that belief made me deaf to a really useful teaching:
Awareness is Already and Always there -
even when I am a jerk.

Adya has another teaching that I immediately liked:
Ask yourself, “How am I unenlightening myself?”

Well, I realized that the belief, “I’ll be enlightened when I’m always patient with my mother,” immediately becomes,
“Oh, look! I’m not enlightened.”
Or, “I had it and then I lost it.”
Right there the deed is done.
“I had it and then I lost it.”
Believe that! And you’ve just done it – unenlightened yourself by believing in a belief.
And what specifically was that belief? “Enlightenment means I’ll behave a certain way.”

Well, that’s no better than saying enlightenment is based upon behaviour.
And, I hope we can all agree that enlightenment depends upon consciousness: pure, eternal, awareness rather than any specific, fleeting, temporal behaviour.
Hey, even Jesus could throw a hissy fit – ask the money changers in the temple. He was sincerely angry.

Perhaps a better way to explain the difference that this makes is to share a few clips from Bentinho's online Journal:
Tue Sep 29, 2009 3:42 pm
Today was a funny day and interesting as well. I have felt some intense emotions and thoughts, something that I have not had to this degree in a while. It was mainly disappointment, followed by sadness, self-pity and anger (towards some colleague of mine). I was quite touched by it and while doing my work that morning all kinds of stories went through my mind continuously. I occasionally believed in them as well. I naturally recognized awareness too, but that did not stop the stories. And I dangled somewhere in between freedom and believing in these stories.
So it was quite a challenging situation in the sense of being not distracted by my intense emotions and stories. It went quite well just as it went and I did not force anything. I just let it run and be for most of the time.
After some hours I just could no longer belief in my thoughts, instead I naturally felt light and free from suffering.

I was shocked when I first read these words. I felt something burning inside.
For a moment it crossed my mind that “Bentinho’s not so enlightened” and then slowly came this great relief:
1) Finally, a teacher who is willing to share the moment to moment of what’s it like. Totally honest. And not much different from me.
2) There are times when things are intense. But, it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong!
It doesn’t mean that you are any less or more enlightened. Awareness is already and always there.

Notice that! Let the difficult emotions pull you deeper into your grounding in awareness.
Let the thoughts and feeling becomes pure energy and burn the dross away.

It’s Freedom In – Not Freedom From

2011-04-01T12:34:00.001-04:00

I’m trying to catch up in my posting. I’m giving up trying to make the “days” here match day to day with what happened in Life.
I’m just going to post as quickly as I can.
So, here goes. Something I wrote down last weekend:

If you are not in the state of either acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm, look closely and you will find that you are creating suffering…
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth. I read this and it’s haunted me…

I don’t know how to even say it.
But, a thought crossed my mind and immediately I knew, “That’s it!”
So, I tried to repeat the words that had just floated by and they no longer quite made sense, like when you wake up from a dream and realized it’s actually illogical.
I tried again and failed.
And just like that the insight was gone.

But, let me try once more just to give you an idea:
Instead of evaluating my experience and thinking ‘that’s not enlightened’ all I have to really understand is that that experience (whatever it may be) is enlightened.

In some way it was for me a new take on the concept, “We are all already awake.”
We just don’t know it.
Suddenly, it seemed “Well just accept it!”
Don’t question, just relax, right now, right here “Just Like This” you are awake.

I found I didn’t want to accept that.
Wouldn’t that just be replacing one belief with another?
I’m not interested in deluding myself with the concept, “I am enlightened.”
Surely, something has to happen. Something has to “POP!”
Doesn’t it?

I hear my friend almost shouting in my head, “Look! There is no you!”
But, there is another way around.
And that’s to recognize that awareness (being awake) is indeed already there.
Awareness, always and already there - that is an accessible experience for me.
That’s what I find when I look inside to “see.”
There’s always something indefinable, yet there: “always and already.”
And Awareness is as good a word as any to describe it.

Years ago I heard Adya say this and all my mind could hear was the alliteration: “always and already.” I got all caught up in trying just to say it, as if a mind can be tongue tied and thus unable to get what the words actually mean.
But recently, as Bentinho Massaro used the phrase it suddenly made such sense.
It makes Awareness quite accessible and obvious.

It is always and already there prior to all experiences.
And so, of course… we are already awake.
Notice that!

I drive to work noticing. I walk the halls noticing.
And when I forget to notice because my head is filled with molecular genetic details, when I put the work aside, I notice that awareness had been there even then… like the love that never dies even when we are too busy to notice, feel, or say, “I love you.”

But still, it could be clearer. I am not all that awake.
I like Tolle’s criteria: acceptance, enjoyment, enthusiasm.
Anything less and I’m creating suffering for either myself or others.

I also like the discussion between Scott Kiloby and Bentinho regarding how people often think that enlightenment is being free from difficulties. They experience a moment of freedom from their troubles and think, “This is it.” And then they collapse back into challenges.

They say the collapsing back ceases when you realize it’s not “Freedom From” (all the ups and downs) but rather, “Freedom In.”
So, check out this audio file. Especially from ~38 minutes onward.
Go to the Kilologue Page, scroll down to the interview with Bentinho Massaro.

Awakening simply means to notice that a natural, unconditioned awakeness is always equally present. The repeated recognition of that, is the 'getting used to it' and the personality gradually starts to reflect a greater peace, openness, clarity, love, selflessness.
Bentinho Massaro

I Looked for My Self

2011-03-31T10:28:00.001-04:00

Often when we hear the masters speak about emptiness, stillness, awareness, pure space, openness, etc. our minds can create a copy of it, a concept….
Bentinho Massaro, Insights into Awareness- a collection of articles

I wrote what follows a few weeks ago. By the end of it I was so disgusted I never posted.
Now I realize it was kind of a nice letting go, a nice STOP.
I gave up trying to see that an “I” does not ultimately exist.
Giving up proved to be a nice stepping stone.
So, let me post that old inquiry now. Failure is good and it went like this:

The Looking
A friend keeps urging me to “just look and see.”
I’ve been meaning to ask exactly what she means by those words, realizing you must be pretty knot headed if you’ve reached the point of needing “look” and “see” explained.
Dick and Jane could do it.
Spot, the dog, could probably even do it.

And, it’s not as if I haven’t tried.
It’s just that is hasn’t led to any huge revelation.
Recently, I copied her instructions down leaving room for me to try and “Look & See” at each step of her description. Below her words are in bold.

i looked for my self, within the direct experience of the present moment.

OK, Present Moment.
Who’s sitting here? Body, mind, thoughts, fingers – none of that is me.
That’s the vehicle I drive.

I am what is here all along, all along, birth to death.
I am who feels the typing, the wind, the anxiety…
Who?
What?
“What” is far more accurate. That is obvious.
“What am I?”

There is a gap, a huge, huge gap, between me and everything else.
I am on one side. All That is on the other.

The gap seems to warrant attention, more so than the now ancillary “me”
It’s as if the banks of the river (me and that other) are not the essence of the river (the gap).
The banks are not what you really need to notice, not when the River seems more real and water is the river’s essence.

And the Gap?
What is the Gap?
The gap is nothing, yet the word is totally misleading.
This nothing almost pulsates with so many unspeakable qualities.

The gap is what holds everything: both “me” and All That Other.
I never really noticed that!

Attending to the gap is like dropping water on a dry sponge.
Instantly there is expansion, twisting, a spreading out in all dimensions.
The Gap is all pervading.
The Gap comes out my eyes, except it’s no longer shaped liked Gap.

In some Klein Bottle twist of Nothing - Gap is Everything:
“I” as individual am Gap.
“All That” out there is Gap solidified.
Gap is Nothingness become alive.

Maharishi told us once, “Never try to bridge the Gap.”
Now, I think you have to fall into It.
Let It swallow you.

And still, I am a “me.”
‘Cause I drive around inside this body, mind, thoughts, feelings.
A “Me” walks through this oceanic Gapness, curled back upon and through itself becoming something out of nothing, just as much Me as the sparrow over there.

… Or, maybe I’ve read too many books and all I’ve come to is a concept, not direct experience.

i looked for the looker.

And I found the “non-orientable” Klein Bottle of Creation
which is the Looker (me) and the Looking.

But see, this is what my friend said:
and what was found?
nothing!
there's nothing there. it isn't A nothing, that is somehow experienced.
it is instead that there is no findable me.
everything else is right here.

I’m not sure that it matters.
But, I do like the picture of the Klein Bottle that I labeled.

Shamanic Happenings

2011-03-26T11:43:00.005-04:00

Wisp, Karen Cleveland

Wisp is a forest that requests a reconsideration of the human relationship to nature and… threads the supernatural through the everyday.

Karen Cleveland

Last night I went to see my friend, Karen’s, exhibition for her MFA. It astounded me. She had created a forest that she then invited you to enter. You could hear the wind, as well as tree frogs. Within a stump you discovered a gently throbbing light. You bumped onto branches and webs of lace. You stood before a tree, the bark bursting into a dozen pieces, even as it defined an internal space of emptiness. It was stitched together with threads of gold and red and buffalo gut.

But what moved me most was the painting of Leaf Gather.
Here was the benevolent cousin to a beast I had met just the previous night.
I had pulled him out of Evie as we did “energetic bodywork.”
He was a seven foot tall roaring, red-eyed, fanged embodiment of her disease: a tangle of grief and fear and rage, as well as chemicals and cancer.
I hadn’t expected to pull him out. But there he was.
I was stunned to then see his sweet cousin in Karen’s painting.
But, there he was.

Leaf Gather, Karen Cleveland

No one told me when I started my Taoist practice that it was actually shamanic.
They only spoke of energy.
Well, surprise. Energy can take on consciousness and form.
Think of humans. Think of devas. Think of the internal beasts that haunt us.

For awhile, back in the 70’s after I had my first shift in consciousness, I could see what I called angels. There was a “devotion angel” floating near the ceiling of the cathedral I attended. There was a “birth angel” cradling my sister-in-law as she gave birth to Evie’s brother.

At the time, I had no conceptual framework for such perceptions and thus adopted what I read in the Findhorn Garden:

By the springtime of our second year at Findhorn, the Landscape Angel told us that our garden was becoming more unitied and whole, and that as this took place, an angelic being, a sort of guardian angel for our area, was forming.
I believe that any unit, whether it be a farm or a community, a couple or a nation, has an overlighting presence that in some way embodies the various levels of energy used within that unit.
The Angel of Findhorn is a composite being, “born” from the substance of our thoughts and ideals, the radiations of the land, and the energies of the higher selves of not only humans working on the land but of all the animals and plants there…
Dorothy Maclean, The Findhorn Garden

This compositeness is shown so well in Karen’s image.
And just as angels can be born, so can beasts.
These dark cousins can arise from the energy of our thoughts and fears of disease, the drugs used to combat and kill, and the energy of cells that run amok.

Now, a strict non-dual stance might argue, “All that is vacuous and empty. See that!”
But, practically and usually, what we first notice is the physical.
And if we’re lucky, we can see a bit more subtly into the level of energy.
So lets start there.

And guess what? It all works out.
After I pulled the beast from Eve, it was really obvious that he/it then filled my body.
I stood and took a bow, asking of my Teacher, Wong Loh Sin See, “Please Teacher help this to leave my body.”
Spontaneously, I started whirling qigong style, roaring with the beast’s roar. And after a minute or so I noticed that the beast had broken into packets, leaves, of energy.
That’s when the words of Scott Kiloby came to mind.
And the rest was just like this:

What’s happening in the body? …
Let the pure raw emotion just fill your body, just fill the space of awareness.
Let it just absolutely overwhelm you, the feeling itself without any label on it so it’s not fear overwhelming you.
It’s the pure energy, the vibration filling up the air, filling up the space of the body. And there’s no desire for it to go away. We’re not even witnessing it…without any label… the emotion has nowhere to go but to simply dissipate or change itself into awareness.
Kilobit, Painful Emotions ~ minutes 3:45 – 7:30 (scroll down page)

Curiously, and of course, this sounds to me simply the reverse of the process of creation that Dorothy Maclean explained.

Listening: Song of the Day

2011-03-25T10:37:00.002-04:00

True listening goes far beyond auditory perception.
It is the arising of alert attention, a space of presence in which the words are being received… That space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking.
And now the other person is no longer “other.”
Eckhart Tolle

When I was a kid, I loved to sing along with the refrain of a popular song:
“One ton amara. Oooh-oooh-oh. One ton amara.”
I had absolutely no idea what I was saying.
But, the tune was sweet. That was enough.
Today, when it came on the radio, I saw it written out on the navigation screen:
Guantanamera

Immediately, I had this epiphany.
“It’s about Gauntanamo!”
And I was rattled just a bit - a song of beauty and now Gautanamo a prison.
Such a juxtaposition! How could that be?

And then, for the first time in my life, I listened to the words that had always been there.
Words from the life of a real man, a poet, soon to die for freedom:

I am a truthful man
from the land of the palm trees
and before dying I want
to share these verses of my soul.

My verses are soft green
my verses are also flaming crimson
my verses are like a wounded deer
seeking refuge in the mountain.

I cultivate a white rose
in June as in January
for the sincere friend
who gives me his honest hand.

And for the cruel one who would tear out
the heart with which I live
I cultivate not nettles nor thistles
I cultivate the white rose.

With the poor people of this earth
I want to share my faith.
The streams of the mountains
pleases me more than the sea.
José Martí

One Moment

2011-03-19T11:04:00.007-04:00

A jay flies one way
a jet another, criss-cross
altitudes apart.
A robin stands silhouetted gull-like
branch becoming beach.
Overhead crows harass a hawk.

One moment in the backyard
Spring.
The beauty almost hurts.

My backyard is actually fenced in. There are some trees, a creek behind, a deck above.
You can hear traffic on the Interstate a couple miles distant.
The block I live on ends at the train tracks.
This is city and suburb inside “The Perimeter” of I-285.
And yet… so much is right here.
Why go anywhere?

Mr. Bluebird started a nest last week, only to abandon his effort.
Bennie and I may have been too noisy.
A couple days ago two jays started a nest way high in a pine.
They gave up too. Close observation suggests that may have been a case of incompetence. They seemed to knock more twigs out in one moment than they could collect in half an hour.

But, I am sure that somewhere nests are being built.
Nature never gives up.
Nature seems to never be impatient.

I Like This

2011-03-19T09:06:00.004-04:00

First you awaken from Life, then you awaken as Life itself.
Adyashanti, The Impact of Awakening

Two Points:
1. Last September I told Adya that it felt to me like I had become stuck in the Witness. What I meant by that was it feels as if I am watching the world on a screen. I am here and across this wide gap of Awareness lies Life.
2. Because of this gap, this witnessing, the phrase “The world is illusion” has great resonance with me. …with me, me me: an individual with paradoxical familiarity with unboundedness.

I asked Adya what to do and he replied that I would have to discover for myself how to “witness from the heart.”
I can’t say I have been very successful with this undertaking.

Last week I came across a beautiful young man, Bentinho Massaro. He has a very simple, direct approach; an approach that often stops my mind in its tracks or reduces me to tears beyond all reason.
In this video, although he does not phrase it in terms of witnessing, he offers a practice for seeing the unity of life which carries this description:

In order to 'loosen' the identification we often have with Awareness being some kind of state, or the sense that it has a location, we can practice by saying to everything: "This is Life", until it is experientially apparent to us, that nothing is not-life, and therefore, everything is of the same essence.

You might also like to download his free ebook.
I am reading it slowly, very slowly, on my backyard deck in these beautiful Spring evenings in Georgia.

Chemo: One Way to Do It

2011-03-01T14:24:00.004-05:00

I learned to really hate IVs. And get annoyed with anything going through it. Especially chemo.
I hate chemo. I really hate chemo.
My Cytoxan was a 24 hour drip. The first 6 hours were fine, after that I felt horrible.
I felt like I was dying inside.
And eventually it was over, I counted the hours…

I got the VP-16. Awful stuff too. Really awful.
I felt so very very dead.
I had to remember that if I felt really shitty I still had to be alive.
And I was.
Every time I puked I remembered I was alive. I was alive, and I was going to beat this little booger…and I hated every minute of it…

When I got home I could barely move.
For days I could barely move. I could drink, but barely eat. I could breathe, but barely walk.
But I felt pain, and I was alive…
I realized, as long as I maintain homeostasis -- I'm not going anywhere.
So I made a checklist in my head:
• Am I breathing
• Is my heart beating
• Do I feel any real pain, or do I just feel like shit
• Am I capable of telling someone I feel like shit
If those are true, I am alive. And I'm fighting. And I knew I was going to make it.
Dave’s Happy Little Hodgkin’s Website

From the first with Evie, I have tried to read up on the literature for a broader view of what to expect and what to do. Sometimes, I found such disturbing information that I’d pass it along to my brother and just wait a bit before telling Eve.
When I Googled “Hodgkins, mobilization, stem cell transplant” I found both literature and Dave.
I didn’t tell anyone about him. It felt better not to know.

This week, Monday through Thursday Eve gets the VP-16.
She told me last night it’d be fine if I shared our experience so far.
It may help someone else some day.
So here we go:

When Evie, Mary and I began meditating together last August our intention was to give Eve the skills she needed to deal with her cancer in a spiritually grounded manner.
Having relapsed from conventional treatment, having supplemented that therapy with the best complementary medicine we could, we found that wasn’t enough.
Eve wanted to dig deeper.

Mary and I wanted to pass on our Taoist teachings which consisted of three parts:
1) Meditation: to cultivate the ability to “allow everything to be as it is.”
2) Guided Movements: a form of spontaneous qigong helps unblock energetic imbalances.
3) Intuitive Reading: a way to develop ones natural ability to gain insight into a situation via intuition.

When we began, we hoped Eve would simply learn to not let her anxious mind run away with her.
A freaking mind only adds an additional layer of stress to the heavy rounds of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant.
None of us imagined Evie would have such a capacity to go so deep so quickly…
Or how shamanic a path we were on.

The World is Brahman, So is Chemo

2011-03-01T14:16:00.004-05:00

The night before Evie was to begin the high dose chemo, the prelude to her stem cell transplant, we met for our usual meditation. We did a couple rounds and then fell into talking about the fear she felt about the chemo.

We’d talked before about having the attitude that these powerful drugs were being used to heal; how we could drop the image of their being toxic poisons. And yes, that was the attitude she had adopted.
But, it’s one thing to try to have a belief in your head.
It’s something else entirely, to see.

So I asked, “Would you like to do a reading on etoposide?”
This drug, also known as VP-16, was what she would start on Monday.
I explained, “Every form in Nature has a corresponding intelligence and consciousness; a deva. You can meet them with an intuitive reading.”

A momentary wave of fear passed through Evie’s eyes.
I felt a similar jump inside my belly.
Did I really want to have a face to face with some drug that can kill you?
We stared at each other for a moment wondering.
Then Evie smiled and nodded. Let’s do it.
So we sat and faced each other, took a bow, and closed our eyes.

I was about to mentally request a reading, when another thought jumped in, “You know the request has already been made. It’s out there. It’s started….” Yah yad, yah yad!
My mind was in a jumble, when suddenly this deep base voice boomed out of the darkness,
“Patty! What are you doing?”

Like a bunny in the headlights, I froze.
In front of me there was a shining, flat, large, metallic slice of something for lack of better words looked like a piece of Swiss cheese: holes and squiggled lines running between the holes. Only there was nothing organic tastey here.
It was planar, crystal, shiney.
It was the deva of etoposide, and apparently I’d pissed it off.
I was a scared.
Then, immediately to the right a small, exact replica asked again, this time in a higher, less intimidating voice, “Patty, what are you doing?”

I was flooded with recrimination and embarrassment.
Who was I to ask Eve, “Do you want to meet the Deva?”
I was ashamed of my arrogance.
And then another and another, smaller, higher voices took up a cacophony of,
“Patty, what are you doing?”
I lower my head, almost in tears, offering the only explanation I could give.
“I only want to help Evie.”

Immeditaely, all the shining dancing voices of etoposide erupted in tinkles of laughter,
“That’s all we want too!”

Something in my heart broke open. I felt a wash of complete letting go of the fear and worry I'd been carrying in my heart for days.
And as tears streamed down my face,
I saw that there was absolutely no differentiation between my love and desire and etoposide’s.
This was not a poison. It had been conceived and created simply from the desire to help.
I put my hands together and gave thanks for the reading.

Eve and I then shared our experiences.

Eve described that as she’d taken her beginning bow, she felt a drop of water roll down her nose.
That single drop fell silently onto a sheet of glass-like water sending out a ripple.
There was peace and beauty and she basked in that.
Then, the water began to churn into a steam.
There was a roar. A steam locomotive drove across the water. Power and commotion erupted:
Sometimes, it takes a most powerful force to do the work that needs doing.
This is etoposide.

As we talked, I realized that the different sizes of the voices I had heard were the etoposide crystals, identical in structure but of many sizes.
What shocked me about Eve’s water image was that she’d obviously picked it from my mind.
The day before I’d written a blog post about Brahman.
In working on that I’d found a Wikipedia picture with the caption,
“Impact of a drop of water in water: a common analogy for Brahman and the Ātman.”

Wikipedia explains further that,
“Brahman is the universal Spirit ... the origin and support of the phenomenal universe.”
What I had been blogging about was the non-dual teaching: “The world is Brahman.”
And this was the essence of what I'd seen with all the etoposide voices:
There is a seamless identity between my love and desire for Evie and the Universe’s.

Next day, I went online to dig up that Wiki image for Eve. So here it is.
I also checked out the Wiki entry for etoposide.
Well, guess what looks like a slice of Swiss cheese :

Etoposide molecular structure.

Tom’s Diner

2011-02-25T15:37:00.004-05:00

A friend and I have been discussing this teaching:
The World is an illusion
Brahman alone is real.
The World is Brahman.

Well, maybe we’ve been arguing.
I’ve done a couple drafts in an effort to state my position with more clarity.
How silly. What does it matter?
I’m not sure either of us listens very well, even when we try.
I also realize the absurdity of someone not living in enlightened Unity arguing as to what it’s really like!
Good Lord! Silly girl, be still.

Anyway, here is how my friend would restate the teaching:
Living is all there is.
Separation from living is an illusion.
There is nothing to find.

Or to restate the situation as she sees it in yet another iteration, she might go along with:
There is a totality of Life which is always present, in the endless forms in which it appears.
Within this totality of Life, there is never a self.
There is no me and there is no you.

Well, I have been chewing on this for days.
Finally, I have focused in on something I do have experience with and the exact point where I apparently disagree.
I am uncomfortable with:
Living is all there is.

I say this because I have experienced an emptiness, a silence, something beyond all words that seems to be beyond all Life (by this we mean the whole Shebang) and yet gives rise to all Creation.

My friend dislikes the old texts, but I think this passage makes the point:
That supreme Brahman is infinite, and this conditioned Brahman is infinite.
The infinite proceeds from infinite.
If you subtract the infinite from the infinite, the infinite remains alone.
Mundaka Upanishad

Life is not all there is. Because when it drops off, the Infinite remains.

Nisargadatta points to these two infinities by saying:
When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that’s wisdom.
When I look outside and see that I am everything, that’s love.
Between these two my life turns.

Or to illustrate with song, there is the Suzanne Vega acapella bombshell calledTom’s Diner.
Acapella: “something missing,” and that emptiness, silence (analogous to supreme Brahman) makes all the difference in the world to the Song (analogous to Life = conditioned Brahman).

The space (i.e., the emptiness) feels more like what I am. And the “things” that come and go “within” that space never feel like they are separate from that space.
This is why saying that things happen “within” space or “within” consciousness don't feel accurate. No concept feels accurate.
All concepts appear to come and go in whatever I am.
And what I am is more like simple being itself…
It’s just this, this great space, this silent being, and things coming and going in that, inseparably.
Scott Kiloby, A Day in the Life.
(If you’d like to read a nice description of a typical day from a much clearer consciousness than mine.)

An Inquiry

2011-02-09T15:55:00.003-05:00

half bath inverted
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

In a couple of weeks, I am going to see my Taoist Teacher, Wong Loh Sin See.
It’s been a year since I was last with the Teacher, so I was soaking in my morning tub thinking about what I hoped to gain from the coming workshop.
Just after I had satisfactorily clarified my intentions, I heard the Teacher’s voice:
“Patty, what is enlightenment?”

I thought a moment before replying, realizing he had touched a nerve.
“I could give you a definition, an explanation in words.
“But, I don’t know that I know …
what enlightenment feels like to be lived or embodied.”

At least, that was how I was going to finish my sentence.
Instead, I heard what I had just said:

“I don’t know that I know”

This revelation stopped me cold.
Stunned into silence:
I know!

It’s just life as I live it every day.
That’s how it feels.
It’s that simple.

By then, I had melted into tears.
And immediately the mind and commentary kicked in.
“Insights like this are supposed to be met with laughter not tears.”
And I was OK with the “incorrect response,”
as I zipped right on to the next thought, “Now! Can you just let it be?”

… No...
Embodiment can always go deeper.
Going deeper, becoming clearer, gentler, softer – those had been my intentions for the workshop.
What will being clearer be like?

That’s what I don’t know.
That's the mystery and delight of the next moment.

We were both enlightened in the most profound and deep way; we were both fulfilled.
And yet there was [something] that had not risen to the surface to be met.
And that's what had to be seen…
I had to be willing to discover how I was and what deals I had made with myself to overlook this.
And so, it's endless. And vigilance is necessary until the last breath…
Gangaji, Awakening is Endless

By Way of Introduction

2011-02-04T12:29:00.004-05:00

..for a lot of people we’re beginning to see their taking on illness as an apprenticeship, almost a shamanic apprenticeship to know themselves, to know the mind… there is the “gift of the wound” and although I wouldn’t wish illness upon anyone, I would wish the ability to take illness as a teaching on everyone.
Stephen Levine, (click Couch Talk Preview)

I wrote the following squib, “I Am Surrender,” a month ago.
But, after I got it all polished I had the thought, “Now is not the time.”
So I put it away and forgot.
Yesterday, when Evie told me how her day had gone, I recalled the story of the “average but sincere student of Vipassana.”
Then, I knew, “Now is the time.”

I am Surrender

2011-02-04T12:24:00.002-05:00

Blue Buddha, Red Ball
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

One night not long after my twenty-nineth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of the train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence…

Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void…
Eckart Tolle, The Power of Now, describing his awakening.

Evie couldn’t sleep the other night. Pumped full of steroids and chemo there was good reason for her body to be freaking.
From the beginning of her struggle against cancer I have wondered about the mindset we bring to this disease.
On the one hand there is the “the fight” that needs waging and even the governmentally sanctioned, “War on Cancer.”
On the other hand, there is the tenet “That which we resist persists.”

I feel like we’ve been walking a line between these two extremes.
Yes, resources must be gathered: logistics, plans, hard decisions made. A strong fighting spirit can do this well. Yet, even from the get-go we’ve been amazed by how useful knowledge and helpful connections have arrived with stunning synchronicity.
We can’t take credit for this grace.

Nevertheless, in organic disease things happen physically. Solid matter has to move and shift. Drugs are lowering the boom. There are reasons for Eve’s body to be freaking.
The question is, does putting your shoulder against the boulder and fully engaging the task at hand have to be a war?
Must Evie herself go to war; or can she leave that battle to her body?
How can Eve’s spirit support her body?
Curiously, by recognizing that ultimately, there is no war. There is nothing to resist.

Recently, I read the story of a women who went into a medical crisis.
During pre-eclampsia she developed the HELLP syndrome: hemolysis of red blood cells, elevated liver enzymes (her liver ruptured), platelet count drops.
She describes it with these words:

In excruciating pain and knowing that both the baby and I might not survive… there was nothing else to do, but to be present.
I told the nurse, "Acceptance of what is, whether it is what we want or not, is critical."
She said, "You don't understand, you're dying." I assured her I understood fully and asked her to be as still as she could.
She asked if I wanted last rites.

Metta practice was directed to everyone helping and to all suffering beings. Then came the ultimate challenge. I had to, in order for us to live, open up to death itself, for even the most microscopic form of resistance would kill us both. I was emptied of all fears, past and future. And in so doing, I was set free to choose to stay in this manifestation or to not…
Signed, An average, but sincere student of Vipassana since my first retreat at the Tao Center in Winona, MN. (see personal experiences)

Once at a retreat with Adya, a woman got up to say that she had realized that surrendering was not something you could do or practice.
I sure agreed with that. How many times have I tried and failed to “just let go,” or to even simply “STOP”?
Then, the woman said something that amazed me.
She said she had discovered that, “I am surrender.”
And Adya, not at all surprised, said, “Yes! That is another name for who you really are.”

These days, I guess that also means that Surrender is simply another name for God.
Let your Surrender cradle your body.
And Evie is learning this in her apprenticeship.
She felt it last night as we sat in our circle.

Stem Cell Evie

2011-02-01T18:55:00.004-05:00

Stem Cell Evie
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

When I was in Benares, I went to see a jnani no one had heard of, named Swami Brahmananda. He was called "the Staff of God". He was about 90 years old and had three disciples who had been with him for about 50 years. I was invited to sit by him. I think I was the first Westerner to get permission to stay with him. So I sat with him for a few days, listening to him say nothing. He was mostly silent.

On the third day that I was there, he announced to his disciples that his body was in pain, that it was arthritic, but that he still had work to finish on this plane. He said he was going to leave his body the next day at 3 pm and take on the body of a younger person. He said that someone would slip on the street and crack his head. "I will take up that body," he said. I listened as I usually do, and we couldn't wait for the morrow to come. Nobody cared that he was going to die. We wanted to see if he could do what he said.

At 3 pm the next day, he was sitting in the lotus posture, he stiffened, and he did die! I felt for a pulse but there was none. I pinched him. Nothing happened. His body was an empty shell. We fooled around with his body for about a half hour to see if we could bring him back to life. Nothing.
We heard a commotion outside. Sure enough, a young man had slipped on the street — it was raining — and hit his head. A crowd had gathered and a doctor was there. He was pronounced dead. All of a sudden, the young man got up and ran into the forest. No one ever heard of him again…
Anything is possible.
Never believe that something is impossible.
It limits you.
Even if you haven't experienced it yourself, have faith that within you lie infinite possibilities.
Robert Adams, The Mountain Path article, 1993.

You don’t have to believe Adams’ story, though I find that I can’t dismiss it out of hand.
I share it now to put into context the point worth making: don’t let beliefs limit you.
Anything is possible… which brings to mind a word I love: “totipotency”.

Do you realize we all begin as “totipotent” cells?
Yes!
That’s how a biologist would say “anything is possible.”
And from totipotency we descend into the merely “pluripotent” – stem cells that can become any tissue in the body.

I also like Adams’ story because it is such a “control-alt-delete” moment.
That is exactly where Evie finds herself today as she embarks upon her stem cell transplant.

From the moment I heard about the transplant specific words and an image came together in my mind.
I heard “Stem Cell Evie” and I saw her photo: age 6 or 7, young and strong and whole.

So I dug the photo out of the box it’d been stored in for years and propped it up on my dresser.
I wanted to see her every day in all her pluripotency.
I wanted to reinforce a simple fact: Eve possesses every gene she needs to be perfectly healthy.
It’s just that some genes have become encumbered or entangled in their programming.

One of the first discoveries we made as we started reading up on Hodgkin’s lymphoma was totally surprising to me. Hodgkin’s isn’t so much a case of some critical gene or genes having mutated and become permanently dysfunctional. Rather, a few cancerous cells are being nourished and supported by a host of non-cancerous cells that are producing inflammatory products.

What this means is that the disease can be eradicated if those support cells simply shift their physiology: some genes need to be turned off and others need to be turned on.
This is very doable. Why? Because genes get turned on and off all the time.
Biologists like to speak of the “program of development” we all go through as we mature.
We don’t go through life using all of our genes all the time.
There is a constant up and down regulation.
Some genes are off most of the time. Some are on most of the time.
Some are off, then turned on. Some are on, then shut off.
You can even adjust the volume, so to speak – way turned up or just barely on.

Stem cells represent the original setting of the genes. By going for a transplant we’re admitting that the programming has gotten all screwed up. There’s been such fiddling with the controls that it’s easier now to simply hit control-alt-delete and start at the begining.

So, I have set out two pictures of my “Stem Cell Evie.”
It’s my way of seeing and affirming, “Yes. The genes are all there and working fine.”
It’s my way of re-enforcing the resetting of Eve’s genetic program.
I see these photos and am flooded with love and that too flows to those genes.

This is biology and this is prayer.

And this is the Song of the Day.

Still Life of the Mind: #1

2011-01-28T14:28:00.001-05:00

Red Cube
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

The past couple of years I have noticed more and more that what I practice or experience in meditation, I could also be lived and work with during daily activity.

For example: Most people with a regular meditation practice eventually learn not to worry so much about the constant stream of thoughts that can fill a meditation. What you find is that, if you just don’t worry about thoughts, they can be left behind. They continue quietly on the surface of the mind and don’t interfere in the least with a deeper sense of rest and silence that fills the body-mind.

Now, can you maintain that in activity?
If you can, I think that’s called witnessing.
You can be aware of Unboundedness even while the mind chatters.

Still Life: #2

2011-01-28T14:23:00.003-05:00

Eskimo
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

You are the Source of your obstacles, the fact that you cling to them and aren't willing to let it go.

Do you talk about Silence or LIVE AS Silence ?
What is the use of rambling on and on and throwing out quotes that are at most just seen as possibilities?
Be Still and let the rambling fall away into Reality.
Guru Swami G

What happens when I let the impulse to chatter, explain, and label drop?
What happens when I no longer go in search of spiritual descriptions of my experience?
I find I don’t know what to do with my time. I sit quietly – kind of freaking, “There’s nothing to do!”
I’ve lost my hobby.
Or perhaps, I’ve located my obsession.

What happens when I drop that thought too, that freaking?
My body relaxes and begins to breathe.

Of course, I am still doing the same thing: chattering, labeling, observing, only it is quieter.
I can’t stand the thought of simply sitting and doing nothing when it’s not time to sit, do nothing and meditate.
Atlanta was iced in for four days and people screamed with cabin fever. See, it’s not just me.

The mind is going to react like a wild stallion. It's not going to still over night. No way.
So again one has to be in it for the long haul. You haven't been two days on earth and one has to have patience with the unruly mind.
Eventually it will get tired of its game and burn itself out or slow down until it loses steam and ends.
Guru SwamiG

… It’s been a hard month here in Lake Wobegon. Seems to be a lot of burning out.
My body has not cooperated in the least, throwing up continued fits of migraine and vertigo.
Atlanta was snowed in, as my plumbing broke, and the computer got screwed up.
I’ve missed at least a week of work.
Finally, yesterday my mind had had. It and pitched a classic fit.
I worked myself up into a full blown bout of suffering right up until the moment I decided, “Let it go. None of it is true.”

I’ve gotten much better at letting go since last fall’s retreat with Adya.
On retreat I saw so clearly that the mind is totally separate from “me.”
There was deep Silence (me) and then a space and then this mind spewing out these ideas which torqued a physical reaction from my body and led the mind to other thoughts.

During retreat, since the mind was kind of hanging out there separate from “me” – I found I could just let them go. Thinking no longer seemed obsessive or compulsive. I didn’t even need to stop them from arising. A simple recognition of just how tenuously they actually connected to “me” was enough to break their hold.

Guru SwamiG is the teacher of Sarojini, a woman who appears to have had a significant awakening through kundalini. However, recently Sarojini fell into an even deeper realization.
It is from Guru SwamiG that she and I picked up the phrase, “the mind needs to still.”

I’ve been looking at those words the past few days.
“The mind needs to still.” Is this the essence of embodying an awakening?
If the mind is truly still, the ego has no way to cause trouble.

I also find it interesting that Sarojini went deeper when something broke open in her heart.
Then the teaching became “continue to let the mind still.”

Actually, January also had a “high.” (Actually, I thought of it more as an opening. But to keep with the theme of highs and lows I use the former word.)
There was a huge opening of the head. It seemed as if my physical head was replaced by a vortex of energy and light that opened to the universe.
Energy poured into my body. When Eve and Mary and I met for our weekly meditation, I asked if I could just let that energy flow into them. I felt like I was about to burst and a good siphoning off would be a great relief.
They loved it. They felt great peace and comfort. And I was rather struck by how they enjoyed something that was making me a bit uncomfortable.

It reminded me of Retreat when Adya told me my head had awakened and was “shoowsh” “huge” and that now I needed to bring that down into the heart.
(Thus, my ears perked up with Sarojini’s heart experience.)

Then the vertigo and migraines hit. A system overload? Maybe.
Perhaps whatever comes up must also come down.
But these words seem more to the point.

What is truly interesting is that the human condition contains within it an unconscious need to struggle. Why? Because by remaining in a state of constant struggle we maintain the boundaries that create the sense of a separate self… And even more shocking is the discovery that not only do we need to struggle in order to remain separate, but we want to remain separate – even though it causes so much suffering, fear and confusion… by remaining separate we maintain the sense of being someone different, special, and unique.

Again, the reason that you struggle is in order to maintain a sense of a separate self, a self which is ultimately nothing more than a defense mechanism against the revelation that no separate self actually exists… With nothing to oppose, the false sense of self evaporates into nothingness, into the Unknown, and you suddenly feel very lost with no familiar ground to stand on. Your identity is cut loose from all that is familiar and known, and you find yourself floating in a vast expanse with nothing to grab hold of. This groundless expanse is a foretaste of liberation, but few choose to remain in this unknown territory…

Faced with a freedom that is absolute, a freedom that leaves no room for separation from the whole, most people will compulsively contract back into a condition of struggle where they can maintain a familiar sense of self.
Adyashanti, The Impact of Awakening

I think the operative word here is “compulsively contract back.”
You contract without even thinking. Or rather, the mind goes wild and smothers you with stories to be believed and clutched and suffered over. Or, you run from the house with “cabin fever.”

Ha! I also seem to recall some words about emptiness and awfulness in my last blog…
Maybe I was just itching for a way to crawl back into the struggle.

And that’s the news from here in Lake Wobegon: where all of the seekers are slow and conditioned, and aren’t really all that good looking, and all of the children seem to have runny noses.

Before and After

2011-01-20T15:36:00.003-05:00

Chipmunk small death
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Before awakening, life may feel empty and without meaning, after awakening it is realized that life is empty and meaningless.
Genpo Merzel

I read this the other day and the words have stuck with me.
They sound awful! Awful!
Who would want that? I don’t.
... and yet they seem to describe my life.

It isn’t really that bad – but, I am filled with a physical and mental discomfort that just kind of hangs there like Christmas tree ornaments in a vast emptiness.
These are the ornaments of my individuality. They keep me functional.
They keep me dissatisfied.
Awakening has to reveal more happiness than this!

I’m not sure just what to make of Genpo Merzel’s Big Mind teachings. I have my doubts.
But I liked this:
The primary realization in Zen is that we are already perfect, complete and whole, one with the universe... Sometimes people who have realized their perfection don’t continue to refine themselves in a deep way with continuous practice.
In psychotherapy we are seen as flawed... so we work on functioning as a healthy self, following a model that is still designed by the unawakened and dualistic mind.
With awakening we see that all flaws are clouds that merely obscure our pure and undefiled nature. Awakening does not ignore flaws but makes it easier and even joyful to work on our self.

Those ornaments hanging in the void seem to be how my mind perceives the flaws still knotted into my psychology and ego.
That said, I seem to have absolutely nothing worth commenting upon or sharing here.

It was with this uncomfortable-ness that I sat down to breakfast this morning and opened Adyashanti’s The Impact of Awakening. I wanted to start simply at the beginning. I wanted to revisit words I had forgotten.
Actually, I wanted to feel deeply enough for tears to arise once more.

Adyashanti teaches that awakening is a never-ending process of opening and deepening, in which we’re often faced with difficult old patterns and stuck places…
Steven Bodian, the preface

Do not seek after what you yearn for, seek the source of the yearning itself.
Chapter One…

The impulse to be free is an evolutionary spark within consciousness which originates from beyond the ego. It is an impulse towards the divine… It is an impulse originating from the Truth itself. This impulse to evolve is often co-opted by the ego, which creates the illusion of a spiritual seeker… This impulse, this spark of evolution, becomes almost instantly corrupted by a wanting which gives birth to the seeker…

You stay in the impulse by seeing it as an impulse and not interpreting it as coming from a lack. A sense of lack is the ego’s interpretation of the impulse which instantly gives rise to the separate, lost seeker. The impulse is an inner pressure to evolve… it comes from your already present divinity…. from a freedom that is already starting to break into consciousness…

The great good news is that you don’t have to be worthy of enlightenment. Nobody’s worthy of it. Despite unworthiness, it is given… That’s the Love. Worthiness doesn’t count. Nothing can ostracize you from the Truth of your Self.

You have to allow yourself to be humbled… when you become humble enough to come back to being nothing and to discovering your perfect nothingness, you discover everything. When that is discovered, it’s important to be true to that and to not shrink away by saying, “Not me, no. It couldn’t be me.”

… be with an enlightened teacher and listen… Just let the words in, without thinking about them or trying to understand them. Then they can penetrate to a place that is beyond the mind… they go beyond the beyond the ego to Silence, to the Heart.

Enough said.
Thank you.

Whatever Happened to Witnessing

2010-12-31T11:08:00.003-05:00

black stone
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

With the egoic sense of self, the more we know, the less innocent we feel.
But, to our true nature, the more we know, the more innocent we feel.
I call this feeling innocence… because it has a sense of being very unguarded…

In innocence, there is no idea about what’s going on…When I say it doesn’t know what’s going on, I mean it’s not relating to experience through thought… it may seem a nice place to visit, but it’s a terrifying place to hang out because it takes all the tools of the egoic state of consciousness and renders them useless… the mind is actually not very comfortable staying there because it is non-operational while it’s there.

We see that we are not who we thought we were, and the world is not what we thought it was. Everything is new and open… For example, if you are sitting in your chair and you have a certain sensation arise in your body that your mind would immediately label fear, the innocence wouldn’t know that…

Innocence just looks with curiosity and asks, “What is it?” And it draws the sensation very close. It discovers what that sensation is through the experience rather than through the idea.
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

I found these words this morning, after the fact, after deciding that I wanted to give an update on my complaint to Adya, last fall, that I felt as if I had become stuck as the witness.
So, here’s an update and how it relates to the fear and intense emotions I mentioned in my last blog.
The other day, I was at work when I abruptly stopped because I felt very strange and wondered what was happening. I just stood in the middle of the lab kind of looking this way and that totally perplexed and very ill at ease.
After a bit, I realized that in the past when I complained of witnessing, it was because my eyes looking out at the world saw (felt) that nothing was “Real.”
I didn’t (don’t) particularly enjoy this sense of unreality, of watching, of witnessing from some distant, privileged state of REALness.

The strangeness that now stopped me in my tracks was the noticing that my body and all its contents, that sense of center, were no more real than that “unreal” world I had experienced during witnessing.
I looked down at my torso. I looked out into the room. The two now seemed a seamless continuity of the Unreal.
I looked back at my torso and probed inside for my thoughts and feeling; again, there was seamless continuity - no difference between the inside and the outside of my body.
Suddenly, there was nothing of true substance, truly real.
This was not good news!
In fact, my discomfort seemed the central perception. I was Very uncomfortable, bubblings and turmoil in the body, something intensely physical was happening, but what?

Mind did not want to look too closely.
It felt as if I moved a muscle of mentality, of individual will, intention, or analysis the total strangeness of the situation would explode into total Chaos.
A thought came, “Do not do a thing.”
So, I allowed mind, emotions to simply hang there. My body I directed back to the small work-tasks at hand.
Eventually, another thought arose, “Jesus, the witness just collapsed!”
I let that thought go also.

Oddly, I discovered foretastes of this discomfort and process while viewing some “post literate asemic art.”
Now, the art seems the perfect illustration and I have to wonder about their power as mandalas.
I hope you take a click. The glyphs and dreamwork by John Ryan and Tony Burhouse and earlier December posts seemed to explode within my body. I had to leave immediately.
About a month ago, “The Systematic-Reductive-Dismantling” of Peter Ciccariello felt marvelously compelling: That’s it and I wanted to share.

Which brings me back around to the intensity of feelings I’ve been experiencing and Sarojini’s comment about barriers and collapse of a separate self, or witness:
…without any barriers in place (namely, the sense of a separate self) …these [emotional] energies are free to go from 0 to 100 in a matter of seconds.

Before that experience of the collapse of the witness, I decided that my emotional situation of late is more like a baby’s. Babies are happy until the instant they are not happy. Then they cry – 100%, all out. And then, it passes and it’s gone. There’s a clean slate. This is the innocence of babies’ emotions – no barriers. At first, I labeled this as learning “impulse control.” We call it “maturing” or “growing up.” That’s when I also realized you could also call it conditioning and that it coincides with acquiring a sense of self.

There is no need for an emotional barrier or the feeling of separation… The only reason you ever thought that you needed protection was because of a very innocent misunderstanding… when you were given a concept of yourself in very early childhood, you also received a kit with which to build walls that would protect this concept…This is very innocent. It happens without your knowing that it’s happening. It continues until you realize that inherent in this holding of “me” as a self-image in the mind and body is the belief that you need protection… When you drop your protection, the truth comes in and takes away the self-image.
Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

And you can also freakout a bit.
If you’d like to hear this collapse of self from another perspective, there’s a new interview with Sarojini on Buddha at the Gas Pump. She describes the severing of a cord connecting awareness and the body. (See discussion beginning around minute 17:45.)

Happy New Year! New You. No You.

Dissolving: Ego and Personality

2010-12-29T12:10:00.006-05:00

Sleeping Buddha
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

You will feel emotion like you have never felt before. There is now a quiet, steady center that is constantly present; however, when an emotion comes along, its energetic depth will surprise you. You will realize that without any barriers in place (namely, the sense of a separate self) that these energies are free to go from 0 to 100 in a matter of seconds.
Sarojini

I spent a good deal of Christmas Day gripped by fear and grief. Oddly, they weren’t at all in my mind. I can’t say why there was fear or why there was grief. Though there had been fleeting thoughts. The emotions seemed totally and intensely physical.
So, in a sense, I was fine. I curled up in bed and read. Outside, a winter storm arrived delivering a white Christmas.

Everything was fine, and still – my gosh!
Since Christmas, I’ve been experiencing intense fear. It grips my belly like broken glass. It stabs and breaks my heart. It electrifies my body.
It seems like there are no barriers anymore and the emotions just rip through.
What barriers were there to drop? I didn’t even notice. I’ll accept Sarojini’s explanation, “a sense of a separate self.”

Last night driving home from work once again I approached (ha! at the intersection of La Vista and Druid Hills, oh what a metaphorical stage)… I approached the question, “Who am I?”
As a response, in the midst of evening traffic and emotional blowout complete with streaming tears the words, “I cannot say!” seemed a desperate, desperate reply.
The inability to say, really bothered me – “me” which seems to have disappeared despite my driving the car, putting in an eight hour workday, and pitching emotional fits.

Even this morning, finding words is just too frustrating and physically painful.
So, I found some nice quotes I want to share.
Yesterday, I went back to the beginning with my books. The operative word was emptiness – there is a lot of that these days. So, I picked up Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti:

If my identity can take a break and I don’t disappear, “What am I then?” or rather, “What am I when I do disappear?”…

It has been said many times that the only people who don’t know who they are, are the ones who are awake. Everyone else knows… they are their script…
There is a state in which the mind says, “I have no idea who I am,” because it can’t find the right script. Awakening is the realization that happens after the mind says, “I give up. I just have no idea who I am.”
Emptiness Dancing p.11

Have I given up? I DON’T KNOW that either! There’s an awful lot of thrashing around that seems to counteract the claim. … which makes me laugh out loud.
I’ve been doing a lot of that these days too, bursting out in laughter.

I also have been wondering about the distinction between ego and personality.
People say that after awakening you still have a personality. How’s that differ from having an ego? Here is Eckhart Tolle’s take:

Ego is complete identification with your thinking and your emotions. When you are unconscious, personality and ego are one thing. As you awaken, you become more aware of your patterns, which may to some extent still operate…

As you awaken spiritually, the awareness that is nothing to do with your personality increases, and the power of the personality, with its conditioned patterns, decreases. Gradually, the personality is no longer opaque; it is transparent to the light of awareness, or consciousness. It loses its solidity. This is why you find that in people who are awake, or people who are awakening, there is more of a lightness to them…

Strictly speaking, before awakening, to a large extent, you don’t have a relationship with your personality; you are your personality.
If you can have a relationship with your personality – which is the ego, with its way of reacting and thinking, and emotions – who is having a relationship with the personality?

What that means is you are witnessing it. There is a witnessing consciousness there, and if there is a witnessing consciousness, then you can have a relationship with your personality.
What that really means is, you can be there as a witnessing presence when your ego is doing something silly. And you can laugh at yourself…

Thus endeth the lesson regarding ego, personality and laughter.
There is one more just for now, and that’s regarding fear, the heart, and emptiness. This comes from a fellow by the name Davidya:

In the first awakening, the mental idea of being a separate self, often called the ego, falls away. In the second cycle, the ‘crust’ on the heart falls away and it blossoms. In the second waking, the core identity falls away.
The core identity is the driver of the emotions/energy that in turn drives and sustains the ego-mind’s concepts and shadow story, it’s beliefs about the world. Because one arises from the other, they have a similar modus operandi and similar way of falling away. For example, the ego falls away when we become Self, but much of it’s supporting structure of related constructs often remains, trying to resurrect itself. I’ve referred to this as “ego shrapnel”. Adyashanti talks about minds attempts to return…

This increasing openness to what is, coupled with clearing of the old stories and dramas means the clouds start to really clear. What has been deeply sub-conscious, the core identity begins to be sensed, then seen. This is a purely fear based grip, holding the sense of separateness. Holding us from Oneness. As the core identity is seen and allowed, it falls away. Then the peripheral grips are seen and cleared, much as the ego shrapnel before, but more subtle and loud. (laughs) These are things like a deep need to know or to control or be seen or complete. While quiet, they often have had a profound impact on our life. They are often our core motivators to act, think, and feel. The clearing feels like one is being emptied out but what remains is fullness.

“Emptied out” –that’s what it feels like. All those emotions are just in this heatless burning away. It feels real correct to absolutely do nothing. Don’t try to find a word. Words are too inaccurate. Words can only distort. To insist, to do anything to impinge about what is happening only hurts. Physically, intensely hurts.

What is the Grass: Part One

2010-12-22T12:47:00.008-05:00

blue leaf's revelation
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones…
Walt Whitman, A Child said, What is the Grass.

A friend has been encouraging me to inquire into the nature of my true self.
I am having difficulty with this task that she says is not that hard:
simply look and see.
But, it feels like racing a truck down a railroad track – bone jarring.
However, my friend will not let up and has no patience for a whiner.

So the other morning in the tub I was reflecting once again upon the question, “Who am I?”
I noticed that once again my immediate response was, “I don’t know.”
But then, as always, I wondered if perhaps that’s just a knee jerk.
Are those words really mine?
Or are they just the reflex of a spiritually indoctrinated mind.

So, I asked again, “Who am I?”
This time, new words came and they made all the difference in the world.
I heard quite clearly, “I cannot say.”

When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom.
When I look outside and see that I am everything, that is love.
Nisargadatta

Ah, he couldn’t seem to settle either.
And, I wonder if it’s even necessary to decide; “I am this” or “I am that.”
I will be Whatever I Am with or without an answer chatting in my brain.
… though, I probably will suffer if I haven’t really seen…
if I really do not know.

Sometimes, I am amazed by an emptiness.
Emptiness started within me and spread to encompass what is outside. I’m surprised to discover that it feels very different from nothingness.
Sometimes I feel as if I am no-one. Who am I? - nobody.
Nothingness feels more akin to no-self, emptiness more like an empty glass.

Sometimes there is Silence and that certainly seems like something: an ocean that can drown you. Silence stunningly loud arises out of nowhere with the slightest provocation. A fly pings into the lamp shade and suddenly: The Ocean of Unbounded Silence is Here.
My friend says Silence is no-self. I can see the logic, but, I cannot say, “I’m That.”
Nor do I appear to be the Nothingness, the Emptiness, the Silence. I can be a nobody. And what's amazing is it changes nothing! Life does not require that I be here. Body, mind, talking, work activity carry on just fine. (Which is not to say it isn't a bit freaky.)

Sometimes, I notice what has always been: simple awareness, the screen of consciousness which allows a mind to be conscious of all the this and thats.
Yes. That is who I am, from the moment I was born: that non-changing consciousness, pure awakeness, a awakfulness that remains even in deep sleep.
I cannot call this no-self; I have to call it Self.

I seem a What more than a Who.
And sometimes I lose direct experience.
And sometimes, I do not care if I cannot say.

Somehow in the midst of all this reverie, I came across Walt Whitman.
He seems quite comfortable with not answering the “WHO” directly.
He pours his Self into Creation and ends his poem about the grass with these stunning words:

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

What is the Grass: Part Two

2010-12-22T12:14:00.002-05:00

Awakening is instantaneous. Clarity takes place in space-time.
Attributed to Jean Klein

I had lunch last Sunday with two old friends from my TM teaching days. I’d not seen either in almost thirty years, though I have been chatting with one fellow this past year via email.
But, this was the first time we’d sat together sharing warm food and physical presence.

It was not just a coming home to my youth, but also to my spiritual roots; a thirty year check-in regarding what we had learned? And, what had become of our hopes?
Mark has taken Buddhist vows. Graham is a yoga instructor. And still we seek.

I asked them to look within and tell me the answer to; “Who are you?”
We all experienced the simple awareness that is the screen for all the play of Life.
However, no one would claim awakening or enlightenment (the word we’d set our hearts on).

Each had a reason for denial: Mark still freaked about money. Graham, dear Graham so gentle and smooth, spoke of insomnia.
And I got totally confused.

Yes, it seems I have found my true Self… but there is also sometimes a “no-self.”
Self is a fullness that experiences.
So, what is this experience of “no-self?

There is no one there: No one to have a thought, No one to feel the emotion.
That seems to be the answer Inquiry seeks.
And I just don’t see how that could ultimately be as I obviously have a self and not a no-self.

“What is no-self?” I felt quite desperate, knotted up, holding my head.
Mark said, “No small-self.”
Well, DUH! I knew that!
“No-self” extinguishes small-self. It was as if something untwisted in my psyche, as if belief and assumptions exists physically. And then like some rubber band, the twist wants to reassert itself and immediately confusion returns.

I take small-self as something small and illusory… like a tree, or a truck.
Illusory trees and trucks make much sense to me. I experience them as illusory, not really real.
And too, I respect their solidity. I’ve live with this paradox each day for years.
Now more lately, small-self seems like the trucks: merely a ghost, but a ghost that’s still in play.
Personal identity remains. Call out, “Patty!” and I turn around.

The next day, I came across these words:
Feeling myself as somebody experiencing Truth, that changed into I am That.
So there was no longer somebody experiencing Truth…. Before that moment there was still a separation… a going into freedom and then back into experience of personality. Like they were two separate experiences… [after that] it was simultaneous.
Kranti Ananta, interview around minute 50.

These words rang a bell with me. “Somebody experiencing Truth… still a separation.”
Yes! I am waiting for the epiphany in which, “I am That,” tolls out.
Why?
Well, I read it in a book. I heard it in a video. I have this belief that that is what happens.
And then, you are awake.
(I’m smiling. Are you?)

The me-story is like a fan going. You can turn off the switch and it takes a while to slow down. When this slowed down I stopped allowing my energy going into the me-story… Now that’s automatic… The me-story is “swoosh!”… but the triggers can still happen, the body gets like kind of a hit and feels fear, or whatever can be there, and the body knows this is the moment to meet what wants to be free.
Kranti Ananta, interview around minute 55.

Now these words reminded me very much of what Adyashanti said regarding what it’s like to be awake:

A thought can come that can cause an instant of grasping, that can cause a momentary experience of a certain separateness… when it does happen, the gap between it happening and the seeing through it is very small… at a certain point, the gap between the arising of a sticky thought and its disappearance becomes so narrow that the arising and disappearing is almost simultaneous.
Adya interview with Tami Simon

Coincidentally, as I looked for the above quote, I also came across these words which took me by complete surprise. Strangely, I had remembered the above words and apparently forgotten these from the very same interview:

Awakening is not experiencing vast, infinite space, feeling spacious or expanded or blissful or whatever. These feelings may be by-products of awakening…
Awakening … is a change of perspective.
Everything we thought was real is seen to not be real at all; it’s more like a dream that’s happening within the infinite expanse of emptiness.
What is actually real is the infinite expanse of emptiness.

Oh well, there you go. (laughing) That seems really straight forward. This is the story of the illusory trucks.

One final thought. A friend sent me this link to Shinzen Young, with the simple explanation, “Saw this and thought of you.”
At the time, a couple days before my Sunday brunch, I thought it excellent and beautiful, really not much help… except, it kind of grew on me.

Song of the Evening

2010-12-22T12:04:00.001-05:00

And so at times we talk, and I pretend to take your struggles seriously, just as I pretended to take my own seriously… we really shouldn’t forget that we are pretending… we are making up the little dramas of our lives.
We are making up whether we need to hold on or surrender or figure it out or pray to God or be purified or have karma cleansed—it’s all a thought.
Adyashanti, It All Comes back to Nothing

I was just pulling into my driveway last night after work when this came on the radio.
Seems the PERFECT celebration of the me-story! And I just broke into laughter, two hands on the steering wheel singing along: Dup doo bee wahhhh.

You know the me-story?
That’s where you actually believe the drama and the suffering.
Except songs like this reveal that deep down… you know that that’s not really true.

But, then again, why not strut it across the stage?
If you really know, then the song and dance become the Play and Display.

Remembering

2010-12-15T09:53:00.000-05:00

When I walk the streets and see the faces of people, I am seeing the faces of all the friends I have ever had. All of the history I have ever had with one person, is a history I share with all human beings. Every face is beauty of the deepest intimacy…

Every thing about them is held out like a timeline, and it is all known in an instant. I feel that I could walk up to any of them, put my hand on their face, and feel all the love I have ever known for any human, to the core of every being.
Takuin Minamoto

Last Saturday, I went to the funeral of a man I had never met, the husband of a friend I see only infrequently and then mostly we shut our eyes and meditate. I knew Donald was an artist, a sculptor. And I knew he and Brenda had fought his cancer for a long time. But, from the moment I stepped towards the chapel I fell into discovery.
“Oh, Donald was black!” … I hadn’t even known him skin deep.
He was 80, a Guyanese expatriate, father, grandfather, uncle, story teller, life-long friend, teacher, and connoisseur of the stupid.

I read his poetry and was blown open:

What is there at the heart of the land?
What is there at the kernal of the nut
inside the buried bones of all those devils we know
the angels we wished to have known
the lines of muddy canals we didn’t swim in
river-water pelting down from the backdam…

What a man to find now that he is gone!
“Why is it my friends and I seem to share our families only at funerals?”
“Why do we wait until it is too late?” This was the thought that brought the tears.

On the drive home, the words above of Takuin came to mind.
Last week I had been trying to remember, trying to figure out why they seemed so familiar. Now, I began to see.

They say that Awakening is remembering, remembering who we really are.
They say that Unity is seeing oneself in all of Creation.
But, I wonder how does that Unity actually feel? What is the experience? What is it like to actually live that consciousness?

Scott Kiloby says, “Oneness. Is that like spreading butter over a piece of toast?” He rejects this “sameness” and goes on to point out that a whole body has arms and legs - all these little details.
Adya switched the word from Oneness to “intimacy” and something clicked with me.
Yes, that makes more sense.

It is intimacy that Takuin speaks of with such depth.
And I remember now, there are those times when suddenly I see a mere acquaintance with such intimacy. As if with new eyes, instantly and effortlessly, I know them as a child. I see them as adult. I see them deeply and with such seeing love immediately arises.

Remembering that, knowing that such intimacy is possible and that usually I miss it, tore my heart wide open at the funeral of the man I never knew.
My God! WAKE UP! … well…

Turns out, Donald Locke loved the opera.
Acknowledging this love his family played the duet from Act One of Bizet's “Pearl Fishers,” two men singing of their friendship.
The music says it all, without a single word needing interpretation.
We all know this.

Song of the Day, indeed.

2010-12-08T14:22:00.001-05:00

All are mere words, of what use are they to you? You are entangled in the web of verbal definitions and formulations. Go beyond your concepts and ideas; in the silence of desire and thought the truth is found.
Nisargadatta

I regularly drop by Takuin Minamoto’s website for a bit of beauty. He keeps things simple and his words often hit like poetry. They resonate deeply, but I cannot always explain just how.
It is enough simply to be brought to tears.
I have faith the rest will take care of itself.

So this morning early, I spun the dial at Life Beyond the Image and found this entry entitled: Energy, Ghosts, and Life After Death.
It felt germane.

… it is not so odd to feel these sensations as you go about your day, although it is probably infrequent. But they are not ghosts, at least not in the way we think of that term….

When I walk the streets and see the faces of people, I am seeing the faces of all the friends I have ever had. All of the history I have ever had with one person, is a history I share with all human beings. Every face is beauty of the deepest intimacy.

When I see them, I know their entire history. Every thing about them is held out like a timeline, and it is all known in an instant. I feel that I could walk up to any of them, put my hand on their face, and feel all the love I have ever known for any human, to the core of every being. (Of course, we don’t go putting our hands on people’s faces…it is just not that kind of society.)
Takuin Minamoto

There is something so familiar here, something behind or within these words that seems to rip my heart open and send tears down my cheek.
Something in me knows, says “Yes.”
And yet I cannot articulate just what it is I know; what I have forgotten.

I was mulling all this over as I drove to work.
How to pass these words, this sweet little blossom from Takuin, along?
And then on the radio, there came this song,
perfect, perfect antithesis rounding out another whole:

I was laughing. I was humming.

Sometimes We Need a Story

2010-12-02T11:45:00.007-05:00

Jumping into the bathwater
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Medical journals educate physicians with statistical information and are not interested in stories about unexpected remissions and recovery.
Yet stories can change beliefs and beliefs affect us at the cellular level.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, Close to the Bone, chapter 7: sometimes we need a story.

Emotions are not in the head. There’s a cellular consciousness. There’s a wisdom in every cell. Every single cell has receptors on it. The emotional energy comes first, and then peptides are released all over…. Consciousness precedes matter. It’s not like a peptide creates the feeling. The feeling creates the peptide, on some level.
Candace Pert, in Close to the Bone

There is no such thing as false hope.
Michael Lerner, in Close to the Bone

Mary and I met with Evie the evening before she was to start her next go round of chemo. It was our prelude to what Evie had called the atomic bomb of chemo and the stem cell transplant.

The day before I had sent around a story I’d found about a fellow, Bob Ellal, who had undergone two stem cell transplants and been given by his doctor one chance in 20,000 of it working. Well, he’s been cancer free for more than 12 years now. And he has a nice concise list of what to do. We’ve been doing most of this, but it was good to just see it written out so plainly, and he included one point we haven’t articulated real clearly:

Find someone in your life—besides yourself—to live for. This may seem like a strange statement—isn’t it enough to want to survive? You will find that after large doses of chemotherapy and/or radiation you will sometimes be so sick that you will feel like quitting. That’s the time to remember that other people need you to survive.

I liked this particularly.
As it turned out, many of us had gotten a boost from Bob Ellal’s story, and so we were gathering to meditate already feeling some momentum of “being ready.” Still, Evie spoke of how she'd turned inside. She didn't know if it was hiding like retreating to a cave, but she knew it brought a piece.
It seemed to me she was giving her own words for going into her soul, her higher self.
As a closing exercise we decided that Eve would try getting in touch with an animal form or what my Taoist teacher calls “the lower higher self.”
Eve thought for a moment, saying she wasn’t sure what that animal would be. She liked the butterfly. The turtle had come up with the tumor they’d removed, but more recently she was coming across the bear as healing energy.

“Oh,” I said. “You don’t choose the animal. They come to you and take ahold.”
With that we did bows and began.

Afterwards, I asked, “Who came?” She said – the snake.
We had a good laugh over that.
I had really hoped for a mammal of some sort, something strong and furry. Or a power-bird with warrior feathers – that would be just fine.
But a snake? Eewww!

Then, I recalled Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddess in Everywoman, a book I had loved back in the ‘80s. It was there I first learned of women and snakes. When women come into their power they tend to have a lot of dreams about snakes:
The image of the snake is one of the major symbols that you might be drawn to. It may show up in a dream about transformation and transition.

The next day I went on a search to see what exactly Dr. Bolen said about snakes. I discovered she had written a new book, Close to the Bone: Life Threatening Illness as a Journey of the Soul.
I have ordered it from Amazon, but wanted to share some of her words today:

Whenever or however that line from health to illness is crossed, we enter the realm of soul...
We lose an innocence, we know vulnerability, we are no longer who we were before this event, and we will never be the same.

A life threatening illness calls to the soul, taps into spiritual resources, and can be an initiation into the soul realm for the patient and for anyone else who is touched by the mystery that accompanies the possibility of death.

Once we take soul seriously, a whole different premise opens up.
If we have a soul--and this is one of the innate beliefs that human beings do have--then we are spiritual beings on a human path rather than human beings who may or may not be on a spiritual path.

The journey of spiritual beings on a human path holds major questions that have to do with the big picture at each major transition fork in the road.
What did I come to do? …
What did I come to learn?
Who did I come to love?

… and How long do they need me to love them?
These are good questions for all of us.
The answers will be the stories we need.
The answers will reveal how truly blessed we are.

Even The Terrible

2010-11-25T08:21:00.004-05:00

Can you imagine a world without certainty?
The wind rises the wind falls...

Are you afraid?
Somewhere a thousand swans are flying
through the winter's worst storm.
They are white and shining, their black beaks
open a little, the red tongues flash.
Now, and now, and now, and now their heavy wings
rise and fall as they slide across the sky...

It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else...

This the poem of goodbye.
And this is the poem of don't know.
Mary Oliver, Gravel

A couple days ago I read one of those Thanksgiving articles entitled Even the Terrible Seems Beautiful to Me Now. The writer, Mary Schmich, was reflecting upon a statement her elderly mother made a few months before she died.

That phrase has stuck in my mind ever since.
Even the terrible seems beautiful…
I knew it could be true, but I didn’t really get it.

Then, Evie phoned with the news. Her cancer has come back.
The last time she’d called with such news my immediate response had been such anger.
This time I wanted to throw up.

Even the terrible seems beautiful…

I don’t know.
I had trouble sleeping last night. I wish I could really get it.
The terrible… beautiful?

I am suppose to be part of Evie’s support system, the philosophical old aunt…
well, not always.
This morning dear Evie gave that gift to all of us.
She was right there sharing her strength. She sent along this song that made me see.

Hidden inside the terrible – is LOVE.
And that’s what makes it beautiful.
And that’s what makes it Life and wondrous… if only our hearts can stand it.
Now, and now, and now, and now... this is the poem of don't know.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Pain of Not Knowing

2010-11-19T14:14:00.003-05:00

Wraith of the Desert
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

In the Zen monastery, in the zendo, the meditation hall, watches are not allowed. And I’ve noticed that here, during the meditation, some people keep checking the time. Like, gee, I wonder how much longer I’m going to have to sit here? Is he late? Is he torturing me again? Or whatever!

It’s really recommended during meditation periods that you keep your watch somewhere you won’t see it. Otherwise you’re denying yourself the pain of not knowing. And that’s an endless detour. Don’t deny yourself the pain of not knowing! That’s a very powerful and important pain.
It seems quite harmless, of course, “Oh, I’m just looking at my watch. Just want to see what time it is. I want to know, is it ten more minutes, thirty more minutes, one more minute?” But again, that’s a detour around something that can be very powerful.
Because ultimately it’s all about not knowing.
That’s really the secret teaching.
Jon Bernie, The Pain of Not Knowing

These were the words I read aloud last night as we began our meditation. I’d come across them just that afternoon and they’d rung a bell with me.
They took me back to Monday when I was surprisingly disturbed after the sonogram they did to assess the thyroid nodule in my neck.
It was easy for my mind to say I was upset because, “What if it’s cancer?” was rattling around.
However, it wasn’t long before I knew that wasn’t really the issue, but rather a lame excuse.
The real issue was I wanted a few minutes to have a good cry and be with the feeling, “There’s nothing underneath me. I don’t know what will happen.”
But, instead of the luxury of a cry I was at work, sitting at my desk, and expected to repeat yet another biology experiment.

I called a friend. I told her about the sonogram. She immediately said, “Don’t give those thoughts any energy!” She meant the cancer deal.
I told her that although those thoughts were running, it was more just being on my own, living alone, not knowing what would happen… and even that wasn’t what was really bothering me. What I really wanted was a chance to cry.
This she understood and it wasn’t long before we were laughing about the privacy of bathroom stalls in public halls and weirding out co-workers.

That was Monday.
Last night as I left work, I revisited these events amazed to discover my complete ambivalence. I tried to find the words:
It seemed impossible to worry about the sonogram or what might lie ahead.
It seemed impossible to even pick up the thoughts.
It was as if they slipped right through the fingers of my mind. So, I kept I looking for the correct description until the word “peace” occurred.
Yes. That was it. I was at peace, despite nothing having been resolved on the level of facts and information.

Somehow the words of Jon Bernie addressed this transformation.

As it turned out, Mary liked them because she could never know why her son had died so young.
Eve liked them because she is living with the unknowns surrounding her cancer treatment.
She spoke of how with so many unknowns personal control is lost and in the end you are simply left with faith.
I took that to mean you just have to have faith: that there is a God,
that God will do what’s best, that in the end it all works out… Faith.
And I wasn’t so sure she felt that she could find that.

For a moment no one said anything. We all just sat there quietly, and I couldn’t find the words to explain what I wanted to say… which is this:
There’s faith (like that) and there’s also something else.

Jon Bernie's little exercise of noticing, notice how we even want to know the time, is the practice round for allowing yourself to notice the big deals.
“My God, I don’t know how I’ll get through this!”
It’s about giving yourself totally to “I don’t know.”
How does that feel?

If you can be with that terror, or that pain, or whatever feeling that arises and let it run its course you are delvered into God, into Peace.
Faith is not required (though it can be another way to get there).
Bernie is speaking of a more direct path that runs right through your body and delivers you directly.

Song of the Day

2010-11-10T09:42:00.001-05:00

I see her pearly decks, my love,
Set in with twinkling specks, my love,
I see her pearly mast, my love
Far from her seashell past
And gently does she sway
All on her starry way.
Voyage of the Moon

Bennie and I take our morning walk before dawn when the neighborhood is still quiet, though people are beginning to stir.
This morning the sky was particularly clear, the air particularly still. I looked up at the stars finding a rotated Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt – or maybe not. Who knew?
Bennie pulled me along, sniffing here and there, poking into nooks.
I enjoyed letting myself feel just how it was we existed in that air, how we moved in that silence, and the softness that gives a wholeness.

We had made the rounds of the cul de sacs and where headed towards home when I noticed a very bright star low in the east.
It seemed the brightest planet I have ever seen, bright even though the sky had begun to lighten.
Or maybe planets loom larger at that low angel, just as the harvest moon appears so large as it rises.
Doesn’t matter, that star was something. I marveled at its bright light.

And then, in no time, we came upon a dog Bennie simply cannot stand, and I got to focus on desensitizing his conditioning around “other.”
He did better than our last encounter and earned a lot of yummies.
But, we’ll keep working on that.

Later, on the drive to work the radio played this Mary Hopkin song.
Made me recall the dawn.
Made me appreciate being awake... however that may appear.
Made me think of the journey we all are on and how sweet that it can be.

I hope you too have the time to enjoy the song.

What the Holy Books Never Tell You

2010-10-28T14:54:00.004-04:00

… people are not so interested in seeing themselves as they really are…they would rather pine for what they think they should be.
Takuin Minamoto

There seem to be new issues arising each day making each day a somewhat uncomfortable time and leaving last week’s or yesterday’s experience old news.
Meanwhile, I’ve not posted anything. I cringe to do so, but I’ll leave a note, as this is what I wrote last week and it still is getting played out in a variety of ways:

I feel like I am being dragged towards an awful conclusion.
As I keep listening to interviews on Buddha at the Gas Pump, there’s a panic rising in me.
There’s a growing suspicion that what I’m calling “stuck in the witness” is what Maharishi called Cosmic Consciousness, or what others call “awake.”

Now, Adya has said he’s never met anyone who wasn’t totally surprised by what they awaken to. And if you listen to the Buddha interviews, several people say just that. “It’s not what you expect!”
So, perhaps I shouldn’t have been all that surprised this morning when as I listened to Andy Shulman describing his awakening I was hit by the thought, “Shit, this is it?!”

I broke into tears of utter disappointment.
I really thought I’d be a better person.
Despite experiencing what “awakened” individuals describe, I have continued to discount the possibility that I am awake because it is so obvious, “I am still so messed up.”

But something about how Andy spoke made it obvious and I just broke into sobs.
Disappointment broke my heart for about a half minute until I had a second thought, “Oh, this is the wrong response!”
As if to highlight the issue - I can’t even respond to the good news in the correct manner.
Sobbing immediately became belly laughter.

I would love to have a map of the spiritual territory; one that draws the line between the counties of Ignorance and Awakened straight and true and definite.
I’d love to have a pushpin I could slowly, deliberately stick in “Here” – right there one step over the line sweet Jesus.
Yeah, well.
There isn’t such a map, so get on with life.

A few hours later I went online to read what Sarojini might have to say. She has several articles posted and I chose at random.
Imagine my surprise as I discovered these words:

Today I would like to take the time to address some things that you may never have heard about which happens upon or after Awakening / Enlightenment / Liberation. These happenings are usually never mentioned in the holy books, or if they are, they are totally ignored…

1.) Awakening or Enlightenment is the last great disappointment of ego. In that non-instant there is the bewildered declaration of: "Are you kidding me!?" followed by utter perplexity that eventually yields to the deepest laughter ever encountered. Most of the "Awake" (or subsequent books about Awakening) discuss the laughter. However, the laughter doesn't come first; at first you will be baffled and will, more than likely, feel slightly let down for a few short moments. …

2.) No one will notice a thing. Your closest friends and family will, more than likely, not see much of a change. You will not glow. Angels will not surround your home. Buddha will not come knocking at your door to welcome you into "the club". You may actually become more annoying to those closest to you…. your loved ones …could care less about your latest discovery (which, to them, is likely to be just another "aha" among a long journey of "aha's" that you've shared with them umpteen times before)…

3.) You will feel emotion like you have never felt before. There is now a quiet, steady center that is constantly present; however, when an emotion comes along, its energetic depth will surprise you. You will realize that without any barriers in place …that these energies are free to go from 0 to 100 in a matter of seconds. And they will… Do not be surprised and, by all means, do not attempt to block this from happening…

These points kind of blew me away, they fit so perfectly.
And now, I just want to stop thinking about the details: just drop it, drop it, drop it. STOP.
But, I am out here in the world and it’s uncomfortable.

Tuesday, in my meditation group I was trying to explain how totally empty my life feels. I have no goals, no interests. It’s a bit amazing that I don’t see this as depression. Rather, I’m just empty. My friends just kind of stared and appeared a bit worried. Eve reached out and touched my hand.
I worry that I’m wasting precious life and time, but I can’t think of anything to do…
even as I shoot off emails to family about micro-hydropower plans, pond construction and yurts, and panning for gold in North Georgia.
I’m happy about new family projects, but this occurs in emptiness that is inescapable.

Which brings me to about an hour ago, when I found the perfect summary… of what?
What I now believe to be a good description of the terrain. Bring in the pushpin! Finally a place to set it.
I want to share these words because they fit so well.
I want to share this link because I want people to know about this part of the path – and I cannot bear to say any more about myself.

This is a blog entry from Gina Lake (a new face to me) wife of the teacher, Nirmala, and a student of Adyashanti. It’s entitled: What Happens After Awakening.
It is concise and right to the point.
Maybe now, I can simply stop and just allow the thoughts to drop.