Your mind and...you

Your mind can’t take a walk, but it can think while you are taking a walk. It can’t make love but it can chatter away while you are making love. Your mind can’t hold a job, but it has lots of opinions and judgments about what you do for a living.

Your mind can’t really influence what will happen or what has happened but continually acts as though it is in control of practically everything. Your mind seldom shuts up!

Your mind doesn’t really ever do anything!

Thoughts create your world

Watch your thoughts, not like a laser, just gentle watch them come and go for a minute or so and get an idea of how many there are, just a sense. Now, adopt an attitude that your are going to welcome them. Just gently imagine you are welcoming them as an empty space for them.  The reason I am suggesting this is it's pretty subtle. I think you will observe that a gentle opening and welcoming will, counter-intuitively, reduce the number of thoughts that come up. Thoughts only appear, or become evident, when there is some resistance. You might experiment by trying to resist/stop them and see what occurs. You create your world by resisting and the first thing you need in order to resist anything is to become a something/somebody. You have a developed sense  of a 'me' and use it to resist the world.

After you have welcomed everything, try welcoming what you think you are. It's is only and always just another thought, albeit a sticky one and all it wants is confirmation and recognition. So... give it what it wants. Loads of it, tons of it. You are the most recognized 'me' in existence. Anywhere people look, even in Readers Digest, all they see is you. Google 'you' and there you are. Everywhere in the world when a person says 'I' they are referring to you. 6.5 billion people are talking about you, all the time. Wow, your identity is overwhelmingly popular. Fake as it is, love it, cherish it, embrace it and be endlessly grateful for it. Why? why not?

Stairway to haven

You are climbing a stairway to heaven, however, it is very dark. All you can feel is the next step as you place your foot on it. It is foggy and you don't know where you are. You sometimes feel that the stairway is moving down for that next step, a little contrary to what you might expect. You have done many methods, techniques, yantras, mantras, tantras and cerebral laxative, Christ! you have done them all. You have read hundreds of books on walking up stairs, but that next step is always a mystery, because you don't know if it is there or not in that dark mist around your feet. 

Family, friends and a well meaning waitress at Dennys are saying 'DON"T DO IT', but you feel compelled to take the next step. Phew! it's there, the support you continue to THINK you require is just underfoot.

ONE DAY, BANG, WTF... no step to support you and there is no way back. You tumble into everything and nothingness and mystery and knowingness.... it's all here....you look up, and order waffles with extra cream. Nothing special, but a strawberry on top would be nice. That's all folks, no... really..... that's all.

The secret ...

This is the same message as Jesus or Buddha or all the Zen Masters, but striped of any tradition, lineage, or dogmas. Once, this message used to be the secret mystical teaching that only those who had been practicing, or on the spiritual path for many years, and had attained certain spiritual qualifications to prove that he was ready, could have access to. It was greatly respected because it was understood to be truly dangerous to those who might misinterpret it. Now, in our modern age of technology this message is much more freely available (and more open to misinterpretation). However, this does not mean that it is not still mortally dangerous to what you think about yourself. If there is any kind of crack in your belief system, this message can really destroy your life as you think you know it. But if you already feel that the life you have been living, is only one pretence after another, then you are willing to risk it all, to wake up to what is true. This is the courage to stand alone.
I have no tradition. I have no lineage. I have no permission to speak from some nice old man. I stand naked with nothing to hold on to and no back-up. And yet, as Life itself, there is no way to prevent this pouring out of what is true.

How du you feel right now?

Often when you ask someone, 'How do you feel right now?', they will launch into a story ABOUT their feelings, a tale about the past and future, about who did what to whom and when, a personal narrative involving blame, justification and opinion.

A better question, perhaps, is, 'What's going on in your body right now?'. Feelings do not happen in the past and future - only stories do. Feelings, true feelings, always happen now, in the body. Feelings are alive, immediate, dynamic, and they ask for present-moment attention and exploration. The rest is a story about the past and future, and that story can so easily be a distraction from what's present...

It's helpful to distinguish between feelings (present, bodily, first-hand and alive) and abstract mental judgements, projections and opinions.

For healing can only truly begin when we dare to contact what is ALIVE.

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost

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We are all marked

 To enter into a person's difficulties is to enter into his family, to penetrate the psychological atmosphere of his domestic milieu. We are all marked, not to say contaminated, by the psychomental universe of our people.

 A number of people have associated with them a personality that is not theirs, one that is borrowed from one or more members of their emotional environment. To be born into a family is to be, if I may say it this way, possessed. This possession is transmitted from generation to generation: the enchanted becomes the enchanter in projecting onto his children what was projected onto him—unless an awakening comes to break the cycle.

For the awakening to become operable, I must make the person act, lead them to commit a very precise act, but I must do so without taking charge or assuming the role of guide regarding their life.

The very act of existence is consciousness

The universe spontaneously arises out of consciousness yet at the same time is itself consciousness. We must lose the idea of matter being observed by something we call consciousness, that is not true. Some teachers talk of the Witness, the ultimate passive mind that observes all things moment to moment. This implies some level of separation, a witness over here watching the universe over there. It's not like this, there is only the experience, universe. There is no observer. Even if there were no manifestation the feeling would be the same. Once again let me make this clear: consciousness is not aware "of" the universe, consciousness is aware "as" the universe.

Now don't mistake that last sentence. Don't think,- I get it now, consciousness is not aware of the universe from a vantage point separate from it, like a disembodied soul, consciousness is instead aware of the universe as one of the billions of beings in it, like man, or dog, or fish." No, Such thoughts are false. When I say consciousness is aware "as" the universe I mean the very act of existence is consciousness. A carrot is itself consciousness, is itself awareness. There is not carrot aware of itself as carrot nor disembodied invisible consciousness aware of carrot as carrot, there is only the experience "carrot" and that is consciousness and that is enlightenment. There is no observer.

There is no observer

The universe is perfect, no one exists, yet the experience "universe" persists. How can this be? Consciousness. Consciousness is aware. If it were not, then there would be no universe. The very nature of existence implies consciousness. One can not exist without the other.

There can never be a universe that does not involve consciousness. There are no universes or dimensions where there is no consciousness. Matter and form would never arise without consciousness. Universe/Consciousness, Mind/Matter, Wave/Particle, call it what you will, the reality is that the manifestation, the very appearance we call the universe, is consciousness.

Now don't mistake me here, there is no observer. There are no persons in existence experiencing the universe, but more than that there is no Ultimate Person, God, Mind, or anything else observing the universe. There is only the experience of the universe being there with no experiencer.

Life and Death

The fixed belief in a division between life and death, is a great misunderstanding. There is no identifiable location from which things are born, or to which they return and so, there is no place to die. Nor is there a human species or self who from out of nowhere becomes conscious. We are of the world.

There are relative, conventional differences between life and death, loss and gain, mind and matter, the animate and inanimate, that are of consequence. The issue is to note that these contrasts are dependently arisen, dependently identified and therefore without their own nature. The understanding of interdependence avoids the extremes that phenomena must either independently exist or not exist at all.

The appreciation that everything reflects everything else, is the undoing of the belief in inherent separateness and along with it, conflict and fear. Under these conditions, the heart opens. There is the recognition that even the autumn leaf is not fundamentally different from the spring leaf. The autumn leaf is life, in a borderless, impermanent flux of causal continuance. It never was itself, and so the appearance of its ultimate death is an illusion.