It’s Freedom In – Not Freedom From

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 am Surrender

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.

Dissolving: Ego and Personality

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.

On Being Alone in the Library: my inheritance

My Inheritance
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospel in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
along letters more enduring than those carved in stone…
Czeslaw Milosz, “Readings” from Bells in Winter.

The other morning as I perused the newest issue of “The Whole Dog Journal,” which I considered safe and grounding reading, suddenly the words were staring up at me: “anticipatory grief.”

Well, I guess that’s what I get for slipping into hospice literature even if it is directed towards dogs. But, it’s also kind of nice to know that there is a label for the waves of grief that have been submerging me.

Last week my siblings and I took turns selecting the items that now constitute “our inheritance”: my father’s Mettlach steins; my mother’s paintings- the watercolors and the oils; furniture we grew up with, containing secret drawers: the butler’s chest that road the ox cart in Virginia before the Revolution; the table the Kearfott cousins, Yankee and rebel, sat ‘round peacefully one evening during the Civil War. We delighted in discovering my father’s penciled comments on 3 X 5 cards slipped inside the steins forty years ago. I jumped on finding that Mom had stashed a packet of Poppie’s ashes inside his first and favorite stein. His 3 X 5 commentary, “… the finest example of inlay work that I have ever seen,” became a bit ironic.

The grief has been coming in waves.

By Saturday, I was in such a state I simply drove to the library, the goal two-fold: to sit there by myself and not to be alone. I couldn’t think of any other activity that allowed me just to be.
The grief has been exhausting, coming in intense waves with very little story, subsuming my body as an almost purely physical force of light and energy.

Is grief different every time?
Last time round I learned that grief can be the darkest bitter chocolate variety of love, and something not to miss.
And grief has always seemed a heart breaker. I learned that my senior year of college.
But, this time round the descriptions don’t seem to hold. I find there’s nothing left to break, no boundary, no container, nothing there inside, no resistance anywhere.
And grieving simply means, “there’s grief.”

But, the process’s intensity has been shifting my consciousness, which is why I want to make this note.
To begin let me be clear, I wouldn’t call my situation anything like a “tragedy.”
On the contrary, Life unfolding naturally pretty much decrees that a child survive the parent.
None-the-less, I do like these words of Eckhart Tolle by way of explanation:

There are many accounts of people who experienced that emerging new dimension of consciousness as a result of tragic loss at some point in their lives. Some lost all of their possessions, others their children or spouse, their social position, reputation, or physical abilities…

We may call this a limit-situation. Whatever they had identified with, whatever gave them their sense of self, had been taken away. Then suddenly and inexplicably, the anguish … gave way to a sacred sense of Presense, a deep peace and serenity and complete freedom...

Or in my case, immense Silence, an ocean of consciousness in which the surface waves dance out the human drama – all the stories, all the pain and joys, the ticking of the days and years and lifetimes. In these waves the “me” resides, continues even as identity withdraws to the silent ocean depths. From this vantage point I see both the surface and the depths.
I am here and I am also “up there.”
And in the next moment it becomes quite clear for an instant, “I do not exist.”

This seems a gentle surprise and I’ll look again.
Sure, enough, there is no “I” which is curious, given that I still have thoughts.
And then, more curiosity kicks in and the moment’s gone.
What had been so obvious is soon too paradoxical to hold on to as direct experience – it becomes a memory.
I let it go and just sit. Observing the surface, observing the room, observing the swimmer in the oceans waves as “me and my life,”
alone in the library enjoying the light streaming through the windows.
Enjoy the waves, enjoying the depths.

When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since the ego is identification with form…
When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter…

Not everybody who experiences great loss also experiences this awakening...
Some immediately create a strong mental image or thought form in which they see themselves as a victim, whether it be of circumstances, other people, an unjust fate, or God.
This thought form… immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have collapsed through the loss.

In other words, the ego quickly finds a new form…
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield…
Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.
You are open to life.
Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the ego.
…If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, chapter 2

So, I sat there in the library with a volume of poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
After a while I took up a pen, retrieved a scrap of paper from a trash bin, and jotted down more bad poetry.

On being alone in the library:
How is it possible
when every volume speaks-
“A Book of Luminous Things,”
Czeslaw Milosz
Billy Collins
Louis L’Amour
Susan Sontag

“Sailing Alone Around the Room”
in the cacophony of Silence
drowned in the sunlight
numbed by life’s passing
shadows of heat waves play on the desk top.

How is it possible?
Shadows of heat waves-
“The Incredible Lightness of Being”
being alone in the Library.

In the morning I will insist to my sister-in-law
I must proceed more slowly
That it is indeed proper
that we move our finger gently
over letters more enduring than those carved in stone

as we accept
our heritance.

Hopes and Dreams

girls 60 celebrate
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

On Friday, four friends and I head to the South Carolina beach for a long weekend.
Ostensibly, we’re celebrating the 50th birthday of the youngest of our crew.
Here’s a snap from an earlier 60th celebration. (You get the idea.)

One of us reads the New Yorker regularly and so could describe this cartoon:
There’s a fellow sitting in his doctor’s office.
The doctor says, “Well, I can fix your back so it won’t hurt anymore. But, I can’t guarantee that you’ll have anything left to talk about.”

Ah, point well taken.
Luckily, we have a tradition that for years has helped shaped our discussions.
Once comfortably fed and settled in, one by one each is asked to describe her hopes and dreams for the coming year. And each must field all the questions. Not a corner is left to hide. Your turn can last a long time. Kleenex can be involved.

I used to love this exercise. To be heard, to be understood. To be loved.
But, I find it’s getting harder and harder to participate.
I have no idea of what to say. And even worse, the next day I can only hold my head and moan, “My god, why did I say that!”

As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it.
You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else.
All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.
Eckhart Tolle

For a life-long, self-identified “seeker” – doing seeking – working on transforming and evolving… this is devastating news. And I’m really beginning to realize that it’s true.
Still, I keep on trying.
I’m like some guy crawling cross the dessert on his belly. I keep trying the next spiritual transformation.
I know I can’t make that final shift in consciousness for which my heart so deeply longs. But dang, I keep on trying.
Futility. Stupidity. Ego.
What is this, if not Hope?

Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future,
and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the NOW
and therefore your unhappiness.
Forget about your life situation for awhile and pay attention to your life.
Your life situation exists in time. Your life is NOW.
Your life situation is Mind-Stuff. Your life is REAL.
Eckhart Tolle

More and more, I realize I am compelled by a primitive, irresistible force within me.
Maybe, that is actually Grace. But, I struggle too much to use that word voluntarily.

And so I get so grouchy, thinking about us sitting round the table or before the fire.
I get all irritated and frustrated, and cannot think it through with any clarity.
Hopes and dreams! Oh, pah!
Fruitless, pointless, mocking. I do not want to do this! And I’m going to tell them!…

All inner resistance is experienced as negativity in one form or another.
All negativity is resistance…
Negativity ranges from irritation or impatience to fierce anger, from a depressed mood or sullen resentment to suicidal despair…

Ah, gotcha once again. And Tolle proceeds to say:

Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change.
It would threaten your identity…
You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life.
This is a common phenomenon.
It is also insane.

Yes. I know it’s true.
Have you noticed? It’s very interesting.
I can feel how getting all stirred up, even down right suffering, has this hidden edge of pleasure.
Anger allows me feel my power.
Drama helps me get my point across.
Suffering brings me sympathy.

But, if I don’t call a spade a spade at least within my own head – where can I start being truly honest.
And I do value honesty. And truth.

So, so much for Hope.
Let’s move on to Dreams.

Years ago, this weekend’s Birthday Girl told me that I had the densest pain body of anyone she knew.
Speaking of such people Eckhardt Tolle says:

…your desire to awaken, to finally get out of this misery is much greater than a normal person's desire to awaken. …[for] when your dream turns into a nightmare, then you really want to awaken from that…

My desire to awaken is certainly more than normal.
But, I’d not say life is anywhere near nightmare status these days. There is just that primitive force at work deep inside me. And, I’d like to think that that is Grace.
But the fact remains that I am definitely in resistance to this whole “Hopes and Dreams” format. I do not want to look.

So, three dear friends get to spend six hours in the car with me come Friday. I hope I’ll be on better behavior.
And I’m going down there “unrehearsed.”
Luckily, we have promised not to discuss anything real juicy on the drive down.
We’re pledged to wait until we’re all together.

And I figured we will need a good two days simply to be debriefed on Marv, the man of Linda’s dreams – or not. We will have to see.
And maybe, I’ll print this out and read it as a manifesto. (It will not stop their probing, nor get me off the hook. But, it may divert attention.)

Meanwhile, I plan to take my camera and tripod. That should keep me focused on something like the Now.
That’s my plan… not my hope… not my dream.
It’s a plan.

Form and the Formless

Feather in water
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

I am having a quiet day at work. It seems no one else bothered to show up or even call.
My experiment is in the centrifuge and I have a moment free to polish up what I’d planned for my next entry here.
Some notes are in a spiral notebook which I’ve pulled out of my bag to reference.

It’s just this notebook I picked up before I went to the Garrison Retreat. It seemed to have some empty pages. I didn’t know, or care, what else was in there.

So, I was flipping through the pages just now when my eyes happened upon what follows.
I’m interjecting it here since it comes so closely on the heels of Eddie's passing.
Also, I spent last weekend with my Taoist teacher, Wong Loh Sin See, and these words fit with that experience also.

The Teacher and I hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for six months, yet he opened the workshop with these words, “Patty, life and death, what is the difference?”
The question took me by surprise, but after some reflection, I replied, “A form is either here or gone.”
He asked me to say more, and our whole exchange seemed an exercise to re-enforcing a moment I’d experienced with Eddie.
As I'd sat with him, I noticed that the Silence within me was also within Eddie. And, I knew that Silence would continue even after Eddie’s form was gone.

Apparently, The Teacher wanted me to see this once again.
And apparently, The Teacher also wanted to show me that there is a formless Consciousness “out there” that personally listens in upon my thoughts and musings. (He does that every workshop.)

So, this passage in the notebook has caught my eye.
I don’t remember ever writing any of this down.
It begins with a quote. My guess is that this is Eckhart Tolle speaking:

Death means a form is dissolving.
It dissolves and then what’s left is formless Consciousness…

When you observe how your breath moves out,
the end of that breath is also a little death,
and there is a moment of stillness…

Any ending is helpful in that way.
Because any ending is the end of a form
and it is always some kind of death.

When you accept it fully, it is an opening
into the formless…
And you want to hold onto the form,
(a recipe for unhappiness)
not realizing that the very reason why this [moment] is meaningful
is that it takes you beyond form.

So the more you welcome all the endings in your life,
“Good-bye! Ah, a form is going,”
the more formlessness there is in life.

The egoic entity works the opposite way.
It hates this. It thinks, “Oh, no! I want to keep this.”
But, it’s going, going, going. Everything.
If you are old enough and can see the death of this physical form approaching
that can be very beautiful too…
Let it push you into being present.

Just that.

I can remember that the last few years of my father’s life
he grew quieter and quieter at family functions.
I see him seated there at the head of our table.
Watching, smiling, sometimes somewhere else, and then back to offer a brief comment,
he was no longer the central presence, no longer “The Rock,” as we had called him.

I got a call from Peggy last night. She was in New York having just spent a one-day Thanksgiving upstate visiting her mother.
I could feel the tears brimming in her eyes as she described,
“Ninety-one. Her health is good. They do all these things… but, she’s turned inside.”
I said, “The actress no longer speaks to the back of the room.”
“No.”
Nor does she pay her children all that much attention.
But, she has discovered Nature.
Now, she’ll stop to look closely at a bud and comment to her daughter, “I never knew!”

But, we all know, somewhere deep inside.
We know about the formless and the form, and the play between the two.

It’s just that
Being awake requires such a light touch.
Being awake requires letting the treasured dissolve away.

Is this how Buddha is suppose to look?

White Faced Buddha
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

The idea of enlightenment is tied up with our images of wise men and wise women. We have all sorts of preconceptions about how such wise beings are supposed to look, supposed to talk, and supposed to act… Based on our particular preconceived notions, we may try to sort out who among us is enlightened to greater or lesser degrees. We would like to match what we see with whatever standard we have created. But in doing so, not only may we apply inadequate standards but we may also be fooled…
Judith Lief

And too, we hold ourselves up to these imagined standards, which can sometimes cause confusion.
We might even talk ourselves out of awakening.

You may or may not have noticed, that I feel a bit disappointed in my Taoist practice for the lack of emphasis it puts upon enlightenment.

This de-emphasis has even confused me, for Taoism does have a strong tradition of seeking enlightenment and becoming one with the Tao.
In fact, I loved the Taoist term for such a person. They are called “real human beings.”

So, on the path that I have walked, there have been these “tenors” to the different teachings.
In TM, we were all dead set, busting a gut on becoming enlightened.
Maharishi assured us it was possible, though he was also handing out no guarantees as to a timeframe.
Next, came Taoism and the de-emphasis. I know my initial interest with Adyashanti lay in his invitation to “all seekers of peace and freedom to take the possibility of liberation seriously.” So, you might call that something of a backlash.
Well, now, I have been listening to Adya for almost two years and I’m beginning to believe that we have little if any control upon our own awakening.
To paraphrase both Adya and Eckhart Tolle, our practice and meditation only point us in the correct direction, so if per chance Grace should strike and our ego lets go for a moment, perhaps we’ll stay awake.

So, on I plod each day now. (Will She strike today?)
And in my plodding, not so long ago, I came across Numinous Nonsense.

That’s a great name, Numinous Nonsense.
It’s also a website written by Vince Horn.
Here, I found the most cogent discussion of the spiritual seeker’s relationship to enlightenment I have ever seen.

The discussion is introduced with this quote from Buddhist teacher, Judith Lief.
So, I invite you to go there (here) to enjoy the whole discussion.
I think the topic is important.
It impinges upon “spiritual materialism” – that No-No I have often been accused of. (I can also end on prepositions.)
It also addresses best attempts to avoid this trap while still staying true to the quest.

And as long as I am on the subject, I will takes this opportunity to mention that Vince also runs a site called Buddhist Geeks which offers podcasts on interesting subjects.
I found the recent discussions on dream practice with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche very interesting.

I ordered Rinpoche’s book. Perhaps, in there I will find an explanation of my uncomfortable waking from sleep experiences. Or, an explanation of that dream I mentioned about flying.

So, that’s it for now. Don’t just sit there.
Click somewhere and learn something.
Maybe we can all have a bit of fun as we plod forward, waiting for Grace, free from spiritual materialism to whatever extent we can be. (Can you believe the term has made it into Wikipedia! How very funny and a bit strange.)

Haunted by Nothing

Blue leaf of heaven
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

What is the essence of this room? The furniture, the pictures, and so on are in the room, but they are not the room. The floor, walls, and ceiling define the boundary of the room, but they are not the room either. So what is the essence of the room? Space of course, empty space. There would be no “room” without it.
Since space is “nothing,” we can say that what is not there is more important than what is there. So become aware of the space that is all a round you… Pay attention to “nothing.”
Eckhart Tolle

Thursdays I usually join a few of my Taoists friends for an evening of meditation.
Recently events took an unexpected turn as Allan suggested we might enjoy seeing Elaine channel her higher-self.
“What?” was my initial reply.
Confused discussion followed until we just had Elaine do her thing.
What we saw was a woman go into a light trance, change her countenance, and then proceed to talk to us, dispensing a kind wisdom.
Afterwards I asked Allan to explain, for I suddenly realized we might not all be agreeing on the definition of “the higher Self.”

To me, the Self is pure consciousness, that emptiness of Awareness itself that Tolle describes as the Nothing, or pure Being.
It seemed to me that Allan was defining “higher Self” as a consciousness that still retained individuality and an awareness of X, Y, and Z.
While X, Y, Z might be wisdom that’s usually beyond me, this wisdom still falls short of what I regard as the true Self.
So, the channeling bothered me a bit.
This discrepancy in understanding of the Self is an issue I’ve continually wrestled with regarding my Taoist practice.

Now, I love my practice and am most grateful to have found it.
It has been immensely healing, beneficial, saved my bippy, and also fascinating.
But, Taoism has shamanic roots.
Because of this, there can be some pretty wild aspects to the practice.
We simply call this “moving energy.”

The old Taoists were masters of subtle energy.
They are the ones who discovered acupuncture meridians.
One way my friends and I cultivate the flow of subtle energy is through a practice we call “guided movements.”
Other traditions refer to this as “spontaneous qigong.”
And now, through the marvel of the internet, I discover that YouTube has videos in which traditions that feel Vedantic rather than Taoists display similar phenomena.
Here it’s called shaktipat, spontaneous kyrias and mudras, or more simply, kundalini.

What concerns me is when channeling and spontaneous movements are mistaken for the goal, rather than the means, of spiritual cultivation.
That concern got stirred up on Thursday.

My heart is set upon enlightenment.
My Taoists teachers down play this as a goal.
Instead, they emphasize, becoming “a good human being,” a lofty proposition in and of itself, and arguably more difficult than Awakening.
But, as I said, my heart is set elsewhere.

So, let me cut to the next scene of that Thursday night.
Mary and I are in her car and headed home, the traffic going by in a stream of lights, red and white currents in an ocean of black night..
I’ve already asked what she thought about the channeling and am fingering a box of CDs I had to move out of the way when I climbed into the car.

Mary kind of begs my question and starts in on what she likes about Deepka Chopra’s CDs.
“He’s saying that you can think about the space that fills a room as being like the Self.”
She then makes this huge, unstated comment:
The walls of the room may come and go, as did her son, Charlie.
But, the Self that was Charlie, the Self that abided in the room that we called Charlie – that Self is immortal, even while Charlie is forever gone.

And with these unstated implications something began dropping through me.
Something, indescribable moved. Down, down, down. In and through.
What was this?
I thought I ought to melt into a flood of tears in lieu of adequate speech.
But, I had no tears.
I could only say, “I am so glad you see.”
It seemed so long that a friend had understood… all the way down.
Somewhat else understood the love and longing that I feel for something beyond words.

It was if I have been haunted by the unspoken.
And it’s why some words have jumped out at me as I come across them on the internet.

Like Kate, writing of a woman in her fifties staring over in a new place:
Suddenly, I’m beginning to ‘see’ into the spaces in between things, into the interstices…it’s as if the surfaces of trees and bushes and dirt roads and stones and fences recede, or change in some way… so that the spaces they’d occupied stand out.
Everything for a moment is changed, as if reality has not fallen away but become more real.

Yes, you could put it that way.
The space within the interstices, where reality becomes more real.

Or there were these words in a poem by Pincushion:

Can you hear
The space between spaces
It calls to me…

The space between spaces
Overflows-
My heart cannot contain
It aches –

The space between spaces
Is…
Still
still
still

And that was what washed through me.
The internet’s anonymity almost seems most fitting.
Can you hear the space?
Pinchusion knows you can, as the kundalini dances.

Nothingness Itself longs for it’s Self.
And the route of the returning home is through my body.
Our bodies are the channels,
Words and tears and mudras the rivulets.

I see that now as Nothing haunts me.

(I've included many links here. Please take them as illustrating my point that Qigong and Kundalini can stir energy in similar ways. I am not in any way endorsing any particular teacher or practice. I don't know any of the teachers in the YouTube videos, nor do I know the writers describing spontaneous Qigong and kriyas. However, I do agree with alot of what they say.)

More Billy Collins, Now: Regarding Dick and Jane

Dick and Jane and Spot Look
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

When you can allow this moment to be as it is without needing to label it,
wanting it to be different than what it is,
you open to the vast power that is concealed in the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle, an interview with Mary O’Malley.


Even as a six year old, I was just a bit bored by the plot of these kids’ lives.
Though I did love Spot and the redness of the ball,
and “Look! Look!” fairly spilled with possibilities…
couldn’t we get on with things?
Let the adventure begin, for god’s sake!

Perhaps I shouldn’t blame plot
so much as the pace.
I was running to the future.
I could see it coming and it would be GREAT!
The Future clearly was much better than Now
right here in my hands.

Once, I told Pop I just so wished the next two weeks would go
and then we could have Christmas.
He looked at me with great seriousness.
“Never wish your life away,” and I was appalled.
Apparently, I had made a grievous error.
But, I had simply said I wanted Christmas to be here.
I didn’t want to be Here. I wanted to be There.
How old was I? Nine?

To welcome whatever arises in this moment is the ultimate spiritual practice.
If you practice just this one thing, you won't need to read any more books
or learn any other meditation techniques…
Eckhart Tolle

Oh man. So here is my practice.
This is my life
right now.
And perhaps, has always been.

First Reader

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn…
the boy and girl who begin fiction…

It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting,
“Look!” pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.
Billy Collins

“forgetting how to look, learning how to read”
The words took me by surprise.
They landed hard and tightened in my throat.
They filled my eyes with tears.

The poet sees exactly how we’re robbed,
for the poet must hold on to the goods.
He must retain the ability to truly see,
to stay with the purity of “Look”
even as the label is applied.
The poet remains in Stillness, firmly rooted in the Now,
even as the mind spins out into the future
and the infinite permutations of the clicking alphabet.

It is as if the words are secondary.
It is the energy that comes with the words - or rather the stillness beneath the words - that is the greatest teaching.
Eckhart Tolle, interview with Mary O'Malley

But, they never taught us that.
They helped us to forget what we knew all along.
They helped us to move on into the Fiction and the Noise.

Some Thoughts to Chew On

Balanced rock
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
Epictetus (first century A.D.)

I came across this quote and it captures the exact point I have been debating of late in my mind:
How much of my happiness should I structure by my life “external” as opposed to turning within. I mean, even Eckhart Tolle speaks of the enlightened person, being a singular incarnation, still feeling the lack, the imbalance of complete Yin and Yang.
I.E. we need People in our life!
But, Tolle says the lack will be felt “only on the surface.”

Hummmm. Epictetus includes that caveat, “as little as possible.” I think that’s important and I’ve been overlooking it.

Here, is a poem by Billy Collins. Not the one I was looking for, but it will do just fine.

I Ask You

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.
So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

To me, Collins seems quite able to draw upon his own internal resources for his happiness. But, he also lives with a partner and a dog.

I have been sitting on my back deck these days, thinking of a river in the wilds,
wishing that I might camp at least one more time for a week in a place where the only other human light comes from a mile or so across the water in the night,
a place where loon and moose and otter are my only companions.
But, I am not up to the solo paddle.
There seems no way to get there anymore.

Then, I look up into the tree tops of my backyard and try to notice exactly what is going on up there. Isn’t the essence of the distant river also here?

Billy Collins:
The interesting part of writing for me is finding a point in a poem that allows me to slip into another dimension. Usually, that's moving from a literal plane to a completely hypothetical one. It's the hypothetical, I think, that makes us human.

Hummm, the hypothetical? Seems to me I might call it the transcendent.
Literal to hypothetical, concrete to abstract, Relative to Absolute.
It’s all external to internal,
the Ephemeral and Eternal juxtaposed.

Poetry has been saying that for a few thousand years.
Seize the day.
Do it now.
The sense behind that imperative is that we don't have an unlimited number of days.
Television says the same thing all the time—'Everything's going to be OK.' Contemporary novels are saying, 'Things are not OK.'
What poetry is saying is 'Life is beautiful but you're going to die.'
So much of poetry asks us to look at life from the perspective that death enhances life.
Billy Collins

A Matter of Balance

momento scuro
Originally uploaded by krethiplethi

… mental labels obscure to you the depth that there is
and the aliveness
and the sacredness
that there is in every living thing.
And ‘living thing’ includes what the mind calls dead things.
Living things includes everything because everything is alive,
even the stone.
If you looked into the stone you could see that there's an intense aliveness there. …It looks to us as impenetrable, solid, and dead but its not.
So no matter whether we conventionally call it a living thing,
realize that whatever you perceive is alive.
Eckhart Tolle, transcript from Omega Retreat

And often as I have my breakfast on the back deck, and look into the tree tops as the rising sun peaks through, I remember that Tolle also described the morning light as Love the day that he awakened.
Light is Love.

It makes me smile, though I don’t really see it.
Sometimes though, I’m ready to just accept what someone else reports.
And so it goes with rocks.

I mentioned, last time, that my summer fun is expanding my flagstone patio
(A.K.A. an attempt to cut down on the mud and dust and dirt Bennie carries into the house.)
But, too, I want to stack some cairns and so have gone online to learn something about this new endeavor.

Googling so often brings delight.
And so it goes with rocks:

Everything, rocks and other solid objects or
anything else, have their inua (inner person).
Anything that is made or created has an inua.
Hubert Amarualik, Inuit elder

And then there were these photos of rather incredible balancing acts,
Like the BeBalance Gallery.
And the reports of what the “balancers” experience as they perform their feats:

There is nothing complicated about balancing a rock upon another.
It is child’s play.
Yet, just as a simple rock can change into something of grace and beauty upon being balanced, I believe the same type of transformations happens to the person doing the balancing.
Perhaps it is in the rapt attention and focus that is required to do a challenging balance.
Whatever the cause, invariably I come away from a session of balancing rock with a sense of equanimity,
a feeling of balance that does not leave, even when a rock, so delicately poised,
slips away at the slightest breeze.
It is just part of the process.
However, I speak only from my own experience.
Perhaps you would like to see for yourself. Anyone can do it.
As I said, it is child’s play.
Jim Morlock

I also came by this fellow, who probably doesn’t call himself a Taoist, but certainly might qualify:

In working with stone I have come to realize that even the most seemingly inanimate aspects of nature are very much alive with energy.
It's been an amazing realization.
One that has been validated time and again.
John Knight

Well, my rocks arrived last Thursday.
All 4,454 pounds of them are here on pallets, around the side of the house,
waiting for me to carry them into the backyard.
I moved six the first evening – and then didn’t sleep a wink all night as an electric jolt shot down my left leg about every thirty seconds.
I’m going to have to take this whole project very slowly.

Go stack rocks.
Be patient.

Look down at what is there.
Wait for the first one to call you. It will.
Look at what you've done with the first one and then look for its mate.
Repeat.
Go stack rocks.
Bigger rocks are easier, but work with what you can hold at head level for five minutes.
There is a vertical line.
See it. Put weight there.

Be patient.
Go stack rocks.
Buddy Smith

In Japan, Tibet, and South Korea stones are stacked as the embodiment of prayer.
In Canada and Alaska, stones were used to build free-standing totemic figures called inukshuk.
Just last week, a fellow down the block added one to his front yard.
I’m so glad he did.
It proved to me I needn’t do that. I am searching for something a bit rounder, The Cairn and Buddha Belly.

It is almost mystical… to feel a sudden realization of an
improbable equilibrium.
The most unexpected alliances can be
achieved, and as you gently move the stone on top you can somehow
sense whether the two can make a happy alliance.
You try one way,
then another,
you feel it might just be possible,
then the most tiny of adjustments and it suddenly locks into place.
You begin to set fresh challenges for yourself,
and look for bigger and more improbable
stones to try…

Rock balancers speak of this “click” when two stones suddenly align and lock.
Somehow, I know that click. It’s been replaying in my mind the whole past week.
Click. Not unlike a lock and load…

Once, I received a birthday card, or was it a Valentine, with the caption:
Two coyotes lost in the moment as love returns to the Land of the Rock Balancing Mountains.
It seemed so fitting of our lives that we framed it and hung it in the bath for years.
And again, I have to smile.
Rock balancing mountains and lifetimes…

The whole thing is so ephemeral, and yet it has an appearance of permanence.
Sometimes the equilibrium is so fine that if it has been achieved
when one of the stones has still been wet from the stream,
it can be lost as the sun dries out the stone,
and you hear one that ten minutes ago was standing quite firm
suddenly tumble into the water again.

The only thing for certain is that this unique display is transitory.
A balancer from Barga, Italy.

Prison or Paradise: Part Two

Red Poppy
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

I mentioned last time going to an Adyashanti Gathering and watching a DVD.
There was a woman talking with Adya. He asked her repeatedly and directly, “So, what happened? What simply happened?”
Amazingly, the woman was incapable of answering the direct question.
She had to spin a story.
Feeling somewhat savvy, she had ready explanations and elaborations.
At first, I didn’t like her. In time, I saw that we all spin out our stories.
We just do it a bit more subtlely.

Let's say you are living in an unpleasant place.
It's cold, it’s wet or damp, or noisy, or cramped. And there you are sitting on a chair. It is the form that this moment takes, and you realize the limitations of that form.
And yet, you allow this moment to be as it is.

Some people confuse that with accepting a story they are telling themselves in their head concerning this moment.
And that is a mistake that some people make, I have noticed that.
When we speak of allowing this moment to be
they confuse that with creating some interpretation of this moment which is a story…

… say the stock market has crashed and your wife has left you, a synchronistic event. And then the story comes in, in your mind which says:
‘Okay, you've worked for nothing for 25 years…you failed at your business and you failed at your marriage. There's no point in even carrying on now because at your age what can you do? Who would want you? You haven't got enough time to build up another business empire.’

The story goes on in your head.
It's an interpretation of this moment.
I failed.
It's been pointless.
My life has come to nothing.
(And this is a simple story. Most stories are more complicated than that.)

The story is not this moment.
The story is the story in your head. It is mind-forms. Object-consciousness.

So what is this moment? What is the form of this moment?
The form of this moment is not the story about this moment;
it is the simple appearance of this moment
which is chair, walls, window, cold, noisy neighbors, an unpleasant smell.
But even unpleasant is the beginning of a story.

Just sit. Just this.
This is the moment. This is Now.
And you are sitting (perhaps you still have a chair.)
You're sitting on a chair.
And that's a strange thing.

What happens if I allow this moment without the story?
And then, oh,
strange,
suddenly, by allowing the form,
suddenly, there's a peace that arises from a deeper place.

And you look around at the forms and it is that spacious Presence that is there then. When the forms are no longer obscuring that.
But, you can only get to that when you allow the forms...
that which appeared to prevent you from finding yourself is …actually the doorway…
Not the story, but the simple form of this moment…
Eckhart Tolle, notes from his Omega Retreat

So, by my count, Eckhart Tolle is telling us to stop the story telling.
So, is Adya.
So is Byron Katie.
And so was Epictetus ca. 100 AD.

We are disturbed not by what happens to us,
but by our thoughts about what happens.

His son is dead. What happened? His son is dead. Nothing else? Not a thing.
His ship is lost. What happened? His ship is lost.
He was carried off to prison. What happened? He was carried off to prison.
But the observation: 'He has fared ill,' is an addition that each man makes on his own responsibility.
(Discourses 3.8.1–5, trans. Oldfather)

I think it’s time I learn this lesson.

Prison or Paradise: Part One

Padma Padam
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

…it limits you tremendously to be trapped in the world of labels.
Eckhart Tolle

Becky and Pat are in Thailand – to be precise, they are on the island of Koh Tao, some 70 km from the Thai peninsula, in a tropical paradise.
Koh Tao has only recently become an “inhabited island” as people migrated there in 1947. Before that, from 1933 – 1947 it was used as a prison for political prisoners due to its lonely isolation.
Now, it’s a beautiful resort and a major dive site of Southeast Asia.

So one day the child is looking at the tree in openness and wonder.
That is still the state of oneness.
And the next day it has learned the word 'tree.'... "Oh, tree, tree!"
Yeah, that's right, that's what it is. Now let's go on to the next thing.
Many humans, from that moment onwards, they don't really look at the tree anymore because they think they know what it is.

And this is just one tiny example, of then thousands of concepts,
and then being imprisoned in that
and then having concepts about me.

Me? I’m in Atlanta.
I’m going to my job each day.
I’m not taking a vacation this summer. I’ve never been to a tropical paradise.
I’m shifting two and a half tons of rock from my driveway to backyard (well, actually – that’s my summer fun, creating a beautiful new rock garden… if my back holds.)

I got Becky’s email from Koh Tao last night after going to an Adyashanti Gathering.
On the DVD we watched, Adya was speaking of a man doing time in a prison in Florida.
The man had awakened while incarcerated.
He no longer thought of himself as being imprisoned. He’d found his monastery.

Adya said, “We’re all doing time.”
Do you think you can escape the planet?
Do you think you can escape your life?

Do you think you can escape your labels?

Koh Tao used to be a prison.
Now, it’s a paradise.

So our practice is meeting the Now fully.
We spoke of the possibility of allowing what is, to be.
And that means not imposing interpretations on it.
So let’s use where we are…
And see if we can meet Nature without imposing mental labels or interpretations on it…

This is a very important, very helpful way of stepping out of the stream of thinking. … The prison of your mind, the prison cell, the conditioned mind, that most people identify with as themselves, as me,
that prison cell has hidden little exits.
Easy to overlook.
But it’s not really locked, they’re open.
And one such exit is, quite simply, sense perception.

…most people don't know this because all they know is whatever they perceive is immediately interpreted through the conditioned thought processes.
It’s compared to something else,
you find some personal relationship to it,
it reminds you of that,
or you simply put a label on it
and then you think you now what it is
and you inhabit a flat universe.

It lacks depth because the mental labels obscure to you the depth
that there is
and the aliveness
and the sacredness that there is in every living thing…

And it has happened that the greatest criminal turned into a saint.
Eckhart Tolle, from his Omega Retreat

Silence, Part 2: in many guises

Japanese Feather
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

The Unmanifested is not separate from the manifested. It pervades this world, but it is so well disguised that almost everybody misses it completely…
Do you hear that dog barking in the distance? Or that car passing by? Listen carefully. Can you feel the presence of the Unmanifested in that?
... Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be…
The Unmanifested is present in this world as silence… All you have to do is pay attention to it…
You cannot pay attention to silence without simultaneously becoming still within. Silence without, stillness within. You have entered the Unmanifested.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Chapter 7, “Portals into the Unmanifested”

It is curious to me that Tolle doesn’t capitalize Silence, yet he does capitalize Unmanifested. I have always equated the two. Perhaps, I am wrong in this.

When my consciousness first shifted, back in 1975, the shift (my awakening?) began with a sudden thundering of Silence. I was leaning over to whisper a joke to a friend, as we sat watching a video tape of Maharishi, played to a roomful of TM teachers in the midst of a six week retreat. I was midway through my lean, when Silence cracked so abruptly I jerked straight up in my chair.

I never finished my lean, nor did I ever deliver my snide comment.
Instead, I looked around the room absorbed by this all pervading Silence.
At that moment my life was changed forever.
Then, I got up and walked out.

I no longer recall why I felt so compelled to leave. It was night. We were in the country and being out under a brilliant canopy of stars, rather than in the confines of a crowded room, was probably my motivation.

By the time I was done walking, it was long past lights-out, and my new found friend (the course leader who’d accompanied me when I fled the meeting) was pretty much holding me up. My legs had grown wobbly. I’d become quite drunk on my new reality. Eventually, she dumped me upon my bed to spend the night totally Awake.
I slept one hour every other night for the next two weeks. It made little difference whether my eyes were shut or open, whether my body moved, sat still, or slept.
I was always Awake. … How I managed to go back to sleep is a story for another time.

Since then, Silence has broken in upon my ordinary awareness time and time again during the most mundane behavior.
It strikes suddenly, without preamble.
It always seems precipitated by some other simple sound: a fly pinging against a lamp shade, a dog barking in the distance.
It can be electrifyingly intense or have the strangest subtlety.

I’ve had Silence spin me almost off my chair while sitting in a coffee shop.
I’ve watched Silence roll across the room just as a wave rolls to shore, buckling my knees and felling those around me also, in something of a silent tsunami.
It feels as if I’m going to faint, but I never have. I simply lose thought and muscular control for some few moments.
This has even happened while working at the computer in the lab. I was startled to watch computer monitor go black in perfect synchrony with Silence descent upon me.
We had to reboot the system. After the third time, the monitor was dead.
I never mentioned my involvement to the others and the Department covered costs.

Silence is not simply about sound.
It is also about space and form, which is just a way of saying it is also about Nothingness.

Just as no sound can exist without silence, nothing can exist without no-thing, without the empty space that enables it to be. Every physical object or body has come out of nothing, is surrounded by nothing, and will eventually return to nothing…. The Unmanifested is not only present in this world as silence; it also pervades the entire physical universe as space - from within and from without. …Nothing – space – is the appearance of the Unmanifested as an externalized phenomenon in a sense-perceived world. That’s about all one can say about it, and even that is kind of a paradox. …Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same nothing.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Chapter Seven.

Silence is also about Love.
When Maharishi “made me a teacher,” I sat alone with him for sometime and we talked. As a final gesture, he gave me a picture of his teacher, Guru Dev, then said, “Now, you keep him happy.”
With those words, a wave of Silence, some “carpet flap” in an Ocean of Nothingness started at the far wall of the room. I knew it to be Maharishi’s love for Guru Dev and I watched it roll towards us. Even though I’d seen it coming, its splashiness of Love was beyond any expectation. Speechless and wide-eyed, I reached out with both my hands, clamped them hard upon the lithograph, bowed and backed out of there.

My Penguin paperback edition of the Bhagavad Gita is old and very fragile now.
But, I had it with me back when my consciousness first submerged into Silence.
These are the words that I underlined then.
I’m sorry that Adyashanti doesn’t speak about God more. Perhaps it is the Zen in him.
And I’m sorry that I couldn’t stay Awake. Perhaps it is the ego in me.

In cosmic consciousness silence and activity co-exist at the same level; whereas the level of God-consciousness is completely free of all duality; it is the living silence of eternal life, and Unity pervades all activity as water every wave…. When the awareness of the Self in cosmic consciousness develops into the awareness of God in God-consciousness, it develops on the level of silence; the whole process is one of the transformation of silence. At every step the quality of silence changes.… In transcendental consciousness, silence is devoid of any activity. In cosmic consciousness, the silence of Self-awareness co-exists with activity. In God-consciousness, the co-existence of activity and silence is transformed into oneness of awareness with God. This silence of God-consciousness is the most highly developed state of silence. It is all life on the almighty level of existence. It is the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient silence of Godhead. It is a completely different state of silence, which has nothing in common with the silence of cosmic consciousness or transcendental consciousness.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, On the Bhagavad Gita, A New Translation and Commentary, Chapter 6, verse 3.

Waking Up each Morning

early incarnation
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
Adrienne Rich, Power

Or to put this in another way and on another level:
It is necessary that the Current be attuned to the resources of the body and particularly the nervous system. While in the Current, I feel exaltation and a sense of well being that reaches well down into the outer organism, yet this does not change the fact that the Current is a powerful energy and does tax certain powers of endurance… The physical body is clearly the weakest link…

if the body is thought of as something like a ten ampere fuse, while from the transformer, just beyond, there is being delivered a current on the order of one hundred amperes at high potential. One is constantly under a pressure to use more than ten amperes and thus strain the fuse close to the point of burning out.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy.

And in yet a third manner, this from Eckhart Tolle:
Chi is the inner energy field of your body. It is the bridge between the outer you and the Source. It lies halfway between the manifested, the world of form, and the Unmanifested. Chi can be likened to a river or an energy stream. If you take the focus of your consciousness deeply into the inner body, you are tracing the course of this river back to its Source…

You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms. This energy is much more vital than food….

…use your inner body as a portal through which you enter the Unmanifested, and keep that portal open so that you stay connected with the Source at all times. It makes no difference, as far as the inner body is concerned, whether your outer physical body is old or young, frail or strong. The inner body is timeless…
The Power of Now.

Most mornings, lately, I wake up with something of an elevator ride.
It begins from the ground floor of “Existence”- I guess.
No object. No thought. No dream. Still, there seems to be something to the Nothing, when I look back in time. A bit of light, something even though there’s nothing, it is certainly not empty.

A swoosh as if some elevator is rising, pulls “me” out of That pure being, into a tingling field of energy as simultaneously I regain the ability for thought and to notice what is going on.
The tingling energy of rather dingy light (I want to call it “golden” – but that’s too clean and clear) this electric tingling of dirty dish-water energy swells up and floods my physical body. Instantly, my physical body is racked by inner trembling and nausea, where previously body was just fine and resting quietly.

Now, I can notice that it’s morning and the bedroom is surrounding me.
The elevator ride is over, even as awareness of my inner body remains.
I lie there for a moment hoping things will settle, become less intense, before I venture reaching out a hand to Bennie.

He is such a happy fellow. By contrast, I am feeling fairly trashed.
The ride up into "awareness of..." is such an uncontrolled process and where I am deposited is so very disappointing.
It all ends up in an “Ugh” and nausea.

Becky and I used to laugh about a picture of me as a baby in my buggy, ca.1952.
We entitled it, “Patty, trapped in her body.”
We joked about the shock of incarnating and how I’d been blessed with one solid chunk of body. (“Ninety-fifth percentile in every grade school class and all of it was muscle, dense.”)

Waking up these days seems to be a small scale recapitulation of that incarnating.
Leave the Light, take on inhabitation of this dross, dross body.
I find it tedious.
I also think of Maharishi saying whenever we’d complain, “Something good is happening.”

But, I think Tolle has put it somewhat inaccurately.
It does make a difference what shape your body is in.
(Why else do people become vegetarians, especially while on spiritual retreat?)

Each morning's re-awakening leads me to all sorts of questions.
Why is my inner light so dingy? What inner alchemy is this?
Does the physical body pollute the inner? Or, does the subtle stir-up the gross?
I bet both sides can be to blame. So, which direction, out-to-in or in-to-out, is causing my particular malaise?
Is this dross of physical or psychological origin? What did I eat yesterday? What can I change today? Is this toxicity from this life? A past life?
…so many questions… I will stop here.

… Or, perhaps, I’d do well to rethink the fact I’m sleeping with a dog.
Oh! That is simply far too sad.

Bennie stays.

PostScript:
And now I see. The physical body is the fuel. The inner body is the flame.
The inner body doesn’t care what the physical is like: strong, weak, pure, impure.
It’s all fuel for the fire and It will burn the dross until all the fuel is gone.
Nothing gross (including Bennie) can pollute this fire.
But, you can sure generate a lot of smoke, shakes, nausea, and more.

As with tending any fire, you want a clean and controlled burn.
And tending to the fire is a skill we each must master for our selves.

As for The Poet, Merrell-Wolff, and Tolle, they are right on – each in their own way.

You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down
the upbreathing air.

Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” The Dream of a Common Language.

Too Much Kissing

Too Much Kissing - Caught
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

When Little Bear’s Grandmother received the drawing he had made for her, she asked Hen to please give him a kiss from her. Hen said she would deliver the kiss, but when she ran into Frog, she passed the kiss to him asking, “Would you give this kiss to Little Bear?”

Frog agreed. But when he wanted to go swimming he passed the kiss on to Cat.
Cat agreed to deliver said kiss, but when he wanted to take a nap, he passed the kiss on to Skunk.
Skunk then saw this pretty little skunk and he gave the kiss to her.
She immediately gave it right back to him.
Skunk was in the process of giving the kiss yet again to the pretty little skunk, when Hen arrived upon the scene and declared,
“Too much kissing.”

I have always read this with an exclamation point,
though there is actually none in the text of this 1968 classic, A Kiss for Little Bear.

In the end, Hen delivered the kiss per the original plan.
Little Bear was happy. Grandmother was happy. Hen was relieved.
And the two little skunks got married which is the antecedent of course to, “happily ever after.”

Now, Why I am telling you this?

Turns out, “Too Much Kissing!” has become something of a shorthand to me for the spiritual exercise of simply stopping.
More recently, the words have evolved into the rather exasperated –
“Too Much Thinking!”

Stop.
Breath.
Feel.

I have become sick to death of Thinking.
I await some sort of epiphany in which I finally STOP.
Yet, I am still waiting. Day after day. Weeek after weeak. Pound head onto ground...

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction,
but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it,
so it is considered normal.

This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being…

The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone,
lives in a state of apparent separateness,
in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict…
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

I learned early on in life (and totally non-verbally, now That's Ironic!) that by being busy – thinking and working on my projects – I could momentarily escape the pain I felt inside.

Now,
I am noticing how I turn to use this escape valve moment after moment through the day.

I am noticing how thought is actually superficial behavior.
I am noticing how it takes me away from deeper truer feelings.
I am noticing how I am putting off the inevitable
And what I would actually prefer.

I feel the magnetic pull to sinking deep inside, even as I know it could mean feeling pain and grief at least initially.
I feel the pull even as the thoughts continue chattering somewhere on the surface, somewhere in the distance.
I feel a peace that calls.

So I’ve started honking on this horn of Hen’s admonition,
“Too Much Thinking!”

I invite you to do the same or at least to simply begin watching for a moment what you do with thinking. (Turns out it's not a new topic here.)

Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering
and of continuous conflict within and without,
but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

**************************************************
However, You may want to keep on thinking.
If so, you could go here: the Jazz Dispute on YouTube. (I especially enjoy the end of this video)

Or for you true intellectuals,
I have included a link to Maurice Sendak. I find his inspiration interesting.
He seems to paint straight from the pain-body, both child and collective.

Mario’s Question from Another Angle

Thibet Buddha with Kuba-tatoos
Originally uploaded by olivier gilet

When the Dalai Lama came to Emory last October he met with researchers and held a conference on depression. Scientists here at Emory have been working with people whose depression has been unresponsive to all other conventional treatments: antidepressant medication, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive therapy.
What they’ve shown is that intractable depression is immediately relieved when an electrode is used for deep brain stimulation of a very specific region of the brain.

The patients’ responses, so very striking, have made it into the research literature:

All patients spontaneously reported acute effects including “sudden calmness or lightness,” “disappearance of the void,” a sense of heightened awareness, increased interest, “connectedness,” and sudden brightening of the room, sharpening of visual details and intensification of colors in response to electrical stimulation.

These changes occured so quickly, literally at the flicking of a switch, that scientists believe that the response by-passed both chemical (neurotransmitters, stress and the hormonal HPA axis) and cognitive (such as the voice internalized critical parent) patterns.
This was an electrically mediated event that suddenly made the brain function in a different manner.
A different neural circuit had been turned on and that changed everything.

All this brings to mind Eckart Tolle’s description of the morning he awoke:

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. I have no recollection of what happened after that…

I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window… I opened my eyes. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains…I knew that there was infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself… I recognized the room, and yet I knew I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence.

Let this be then, introduction to yet another way of answering Mario’s second question which I have paraphrased as:
Why does negativity keep arising in us?

It seems to me that spiritual seekers are somewhat analogous to depressed patients.

What the scientists found was that after the deep brain stimulation lifted the crushing darkness, patients still had to work their way back to lasting health via the usual and slower modalities of medication and talk therapy.
As dramatic a shift the deep brain stimulation provided, lasting change required the depression be “worked through” on the chemical and cognitive levels also.

There in lies the parallel.
That flicking of the electrical switch is like the “freebie” of awakening.
For even after awakening there is more work to be done:

Realizing who you are is a piece of cake compared to living it.
It is a freebie.
You don’t have to do anything for it. You don’t have to change…
All you have to do is stop trying… for just one second.

Realization is a freebie, even if you are holding on to regret, blame, and judgment.
But you’re going to have a hard time living that realization because the nature of truth itself is something without a past, without fixed points of view, and therefore, without blame…

When you awaken, those remaining personality traits, ego traits, and hidden places within you come to the surface one by one in the clear light of awakeness.
As each arises it offers you an opportunity to see through it.
But you cannot see through anything that you do not allow to arise.
Each time you allow this arising, you feel a deepening in the sense of spaciousness, presence, and openness.
You have the sense of a causeless love, a causeless happiness.
Adyashanti

Or, as Maharishi (and others) would remind us:
The world is as we are.

And how are we?
Even the Awakened are like little ponds of muddy water. The mud makes it impossible for the water to reflect the true brilliance of the sun. Our job is to quietly filter out all the muck and debris.

Maharishi called the muck “Stress” – abnormalities in the nervous system caused by either an overwhelming positive or negative experience. Regular meditation would un-stress the stress creating a normally function nervous system.
Then, you would see your true self and infinite nature, but ego would remain.
More meditation and normal functioning of a stress-free the body would lead to further refinement, a fuller awareness of God and one’s ultimate Unity with creation.

Tolle seems to suggest that the muck can be understood as the pain-body.
He explains that until Presence is fully maintained, we will from time to time slip back into “unconsciousness” and experience the pain-body once again as the ego thrashes about trying to maintain the illusion of its individuality.
Presence as it fully ripens will transmute the energy trapped within the pain-body into Consciousness.

And Adyashanti, in yet another terminology, speaks of what the Buddhists have traditionally called “conditionings” – all those negative (and positive) ego traits that persist like “grooves in a record” even after an awakening.

So Mario, Negativity continues to arise from within us – not because we harbor some inherent evil – but because the body has not yet finished the internal alchemy that purifies every single cell within our body after awakening.
Awakening can be thought of as that electrical switch, the deep brain stimulation that establishes a newly functional neuro-circuitry.

In an instant, the depression lifts.
“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,” (as the Bible says* and Handel composed in Messiah) - We see the Light.
And then, we are left with the rest of the process.
We have to rebalance chemicals and hormones, and even subtler energies, flushing out all the acupuncture meridians.

Or, at least, that is how I picture it.

*1Corinthians 15: 51-54