Feel Better, Be Better, Do Better

      I feel better when I sense that my life is improving in meaningful ways. This usually involves intentionally venturing out beyond my comfort zone.
     But the ego's only purpose is survival & reproduction, & resists everything else. And remaining in one's self-centered comfort zone is easy, familiar, cruise-control, highway-hypnosis. This is the land of the walking dead which most of us inhabit as our default mode.
     When - and only when - we intentionally, consciously, bravely step beyond this 'comfort zone' into the learning zone - 'the river of change,' a slightly scary 'liminal space' of infinite possibilities - are we truly actively living, creative, growing & maturing in exciting, meaningful ways!

     We drastically underestimate how profoundly meaningful & wonderful life can be and the fact that we CAN experience profound joy, peace, contentment, silence, timelessness, stillness, etc.
     Perhaps we first have to realize that there is only one real power - LOVE. The more completely we are filled with unconditional love, the more alive, energized, authentic, whole, real we are.
     Mostly, we anxiously anticipate one nightmarish future after another. We FULLY experience such worst-case scenarios as if they were really happening because our bodies cannot differentiate between events in our imagination vs reality. We endure the fires of hell mostly because of our fear (catastrophizing).

     “My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes – most of which have never happened.” Mark Twain

     “… it takes a bit of meditative presence to be with what is – just as it is – without being distracted by all the evaluations & comments that habitually arise about our situation. We suffer more from our stories than from the actual situation as it is.” Toni Packer

     So our negativity bias, deficit-framing & probable history of various traumas keeps our survival emotions going as if we were victims of an endless horrible emergency. Drowning in survival emotions: lust, competition, guilt, shame, fear, doubt, anger, hate, judgment - is grossly inappropriate in civilized society, where usually only our ego tends to get bruised (too easily). The long-term effect of being chronically flooded with survival emotions is not only social isolation, but also physical & mental illness.

     BUT IF we can repeatedly remind ourselves of our true nature, our outlook will be FAR MORE wise & optimistic with elevated emotions, using asset-framing, letting go of 'the story of me,' and focusing on our aspirations. Our elevated emotion of love, and closely-related empathy, nurturing, collaboration, peace, equanimity, joy, etc brings about an entirely different state of being and associated improved social relationships, physical & mental health.
     Joe Dispenza. "Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon." Hay House, 2019. POWERFUL

     "Resilience also requires love made manifest, love incarnated in all of its forms. In its call to the spirit, many of us have seen these images – a young child who walks alone across the border to tell the story of what happened to his family; a young 12 year old girl, singing at night in the subway to a crowded subway, which is a bomb shelter, and lifting their spirits with that connection. It is so inspiring, at these moments, to feel that palpable love in the world.
     We are releasing something that is extraordinary in this moment. A hundred and forty-one countries at the United Nations said to Russia, “No, that is not right. That is not the way to go.“ So have you also tapped into that love?
     I will leave you with an image a number of us saw live on the news. It was a moment when a Russian soldier in his twenties was captured by the Ukrainians and brought to the town square.
     The people surrounded him. And then one of the women in the crowd pushed forward and offered him soup. And then another woman stepped forward and offered a cell phone, and said, “Here, why don't you call home?” And the soldier started to cry. There are those tears again. The soldier started to weep."        James O'Dea https://pod.servicespace.org/118/doc?did=481 .

"Through violence you may murder a hater,
but you can't murder hate through violence.
I have decided to stick with love,
for I know that love is ultimately
the only answer to humankind's problems."    Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

      "I immediately relinquish any need or inclination toward conflict in my life or anywhere in the world. I align my heart and mind to the Divine Pattern of Cooperation and tolerance both in my personal life and in the world as a whole.
      I affirm and intend cooperation and tolerance between all peoples within each country, between nations, within each region of the world, and as one global human family.
     We pray that the leaders of all nations are drawn to feel the Divine Source of all and to take practical action to effect real and lasting peace." Adi Da

Neil Young - Imagine (from "America: A Tribute to Heroes")

 

Awakening A Little Each Day

      We all do our best to get by. Whether we realize it or not, we prioritize trustworthiness in ourselves, other people, animals, and even things such as cars & appliances. At the same time, we know that everything & everyone, including ourselves, changes constantly. We see this change whenever we look in the mirror. We see ourselves age, AND YET, somehow, the one who is aware of this feels somehow timeless.

      "We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness.
We are not objects. We have no solidity. We are boundless.
The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us.
      We or rather our reasons, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in a lifetime.
     We are perceivers.
     The world that we perceive though is an illusion. It was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born." Don Juan

     “As I’ve discovered, awakening doesn’t belong to one teaching or tradition, and in any case, once you wake up, you actually awaken out of traditional frameworks. After all, if you’re awakening to your true nature, the one you’ve always already been deep down inside, how could one tradition or approach have a monopoly on it? This precious spiritual nature has always belonged to you, and, like one version of the proverbial prodigal son, you’re merely discovering the diamond that’s been hidden in your pocket all along.
     In fact, more and more people appear to be awakening to their inherent spiritual nature, whether or not they’ve been practicing meditation or some other prescribed technique. Perhaps it’s just our technological times, when experiences are shared so much more globally through cell phones, e-mails, websites, and blogs, but awakening seems to have shed the garments of religion and revealed itself for what it is – a universal human experience available to everyone right here and now. Despite what you may have been led to believe, enlightenment is your birthright, your natural state – you merely need to reclaim and learn to embody it.”
     Stephan Bodian. “Wake Up Now. A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening.” McGraw-Hill, 2008. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

      Please play Buffy Sainte-Marie's beautiful song today - September 30, 2021 - our first National Day for Truth & Reconciliation. We have SO MUCH to learn from our wise First Nations sisters and brothers. Thank you CBC Radio for playing this beautiful music!

Playing Small Doesn't Serve Anyone

Essence
Chelan Harkin
from: “Let Us Dance! The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved” Soulfruit Publishing, 2021

There's an Essence
within you
that can neither be
enhanced
nor diminished

it spans Universes
and embraces the minuscule
the infinitesimal

it is infinite
in the way that the numbers
between 0 and 1
are infinite
which is complete
and wondrously
eternally satisfying
and yet allows for infinitely more
infinities

it is the exaltation of the hermit crab
when it ceases to need
to scurry from shell to shell
to find respite

it dips into pools
of intergalactic radiance
for play and restoration

it tickles the stars
and high fives
the suns

it has no need to bypass
the trappings
of the small mind
but nor does it take them seriously

there is nothing to prove or do or please
to earn this --
this is your birthright
that I solemnly swear
no -- joyfully exclaim!

all humanity is growing into.

 

 DO watch / listen to an excellent, inspiring, energizing interview with this wonderful young poet / mystic Chelan Harkin: https://batgap.com/chelan-harkin/

 

     “One day, when working under guard in a grey dawn landscape (Nazi concentration camp), feeling somewhat numb, (Viktor Frankl’s) mind again questioning and resisting the apparent senselessness of his existence, he suddenly, as it were, ‘heard’, a triumphant affirmative: the word ‘Yes’, filling his mind and his entire soul. At the exact moment, a light was lit in a farmhouse in the distance, as if to confirm the fact of a sacred light ‘shining in the darkness’. This is the light, St. John tells us, that cannot be overcome; a powerful message of hope.
     You do not have to be a psychologist, or even an educated person, for such an experience. The knowledge it brings is beyond thought. The whole psychological being of the person is involved – senses, thoughts and emotions – and such experiences can happen to anyone. They are not accompanied by any impulse to act, because the entire experience is one of being acted upon by some great and loving power. The feeling is of being in a state of awe and acceptance, of surrender, of grace and gratitude, of insight and understanding, of peace. In an instant, life becomes full, complete, and bursting with meaning, with the significance of knowing oneself to be part of and at one with a perfect, timeless, infinite and eternal whole, an indescribably sacred unity, an infallible source of hope. The Hamlet question becomes redundant. Life is no longer about being or non-being. The two are subsumed into one: being and non-being. This works because having once been, we cannot be obliterated. We leave an indelible imprint, an ineradicably secure trace in the realm of the human spirit.”
     Larry Culliford. “Love, Healing and Happiness: In Search of the Flipside of Suffering.”
       https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/spirituality-special-interest-group-publications-larry-culliford-love-healing-and-happiness.pdf?sfvrsn=29f43365_2

 

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." Kahlil Gibran

 

Jackson Browne - "The Barricades of Heaven"

Our Sense of Lack

     What do we typically do when feeling anxious, lacking, hungry, empty, fragile, needy, inadequate, etc? 
     It's very practical to deeply investigate this BECAUSE, whether it's obvious or eating away at us subconsciously, we very, very often DO feel like this. But why? This is an important question. And we all need to find answers AND solutions - if there are any.

     From a Buddhist perspective, “we experience life as frustrating because our usual understanding of it is deluded. Buddhism holds out the possibility of an alternative to this, a liberation from delusion, but such liberation is not common and so cannot be derived from an analysis of everyday life.” Again, according to Buddhism, "we can end our sense of a lack and our flight from it into the future, by realizing that from the beginning nothing has ever been lacking." 
     According to Blaise Pascal, “ ‘We do not rest satisfied with the present, for the present is generally painful to us.’ … ten minutes’ meditation confirms it. If our root problem is not fear of death, which looms in the future, but an always gnawing sense of lack right now, the reason becomes obvious. Dwelling in the present is uncomfortable because it discloses our nothingness, our groundlessness, and time is the schema we construct to escape that sense of inadequacy. … the mentally ill invoke the past only as a substitute for the present, as a need to defend against the present, and that the past is realized only to the extent that it involves a de-realization of the present. In contrast, those usually considered well-adjusted use the future to defend against the present. Time allows us to flee into the future (when, we believe, our sense of lack will finally be resolved) or the past (when, as we recollect, there was little or no lack). … complete felicity [happiness] is discoverable only in our recollections or in our expectations. Each tends to feed on the other. Individually and collectively, we dream of the Golden Age to come, which will restore the dimly remembered Golden Age of the past (our childhood, Periclean Greece, the 1960s).
     In sum, time is the canvas we erect before us to hide the sneering skull, the bottomless void. On that canvas we paint the dreams that fascinate us, because they distract us from our immediate situation and offer the hope of filling up our sense of lack. But if our experience of time is conditioned by our fear of death and our denial of groundlessness, true acceptance of them should reveal something hitherto unrealized about the nature of time and the things ‘in’ time.

     Being-Time

          He to whom time is the same as eternity
          And eternity the same as time 
          Is free from all contention.                        Boehme”

     Avoiding the contents of our present moment - our actual life - causes suffering. Awakening, or liberation from suffering, is: "intimacy with everything" - an open-heart-minded acceptance of everything, right here & now - our actual life. 

     The quotes above are from the highly-recommended, but challenging book:  
       David R. Loy. “Lack & Transcendence. The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism.” Wisdom Publications, 2018.

Constant Change, Awareness & Timeless Kindness

     “Whatever you are willing to be with, you go beyond. Sensory impressions and habit patterns that you neither resist nor get involved in expand & pop, dissolve, & disappear, like bubbles rising to the surface of a lake. All movements of sensation, thought, and emotion expand as they come to the surface of your awareness. As they expand, they may appear to be momentarily troublesome. But they are simply seeking the surface, and, when you don’t resist, they disintegrate into the spaciousness of awareness. Whatever is allowed to merely be, as it is, in awareness, resolves, dissolves, and disappears. This truth pertains to your every experience.” 
     Richard Miller. “Yoga Nidra. A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing.” Sounds True, 2005.

     So when we meditate, we don't engage with thoughts, words, images. We're aware of them, but we let them be, letting them take the natural course (constant change) of all phenomena: arising, persisting a while, & disintegrating.

     "When you sit,
     you leave the front door open,
     you leave the back door open,
     and you don't serve tea."                  Shunryu Suzuki

     Resting in awareness - as described above - feels surprisingly liberating. Experiencing this repeatedly is transformative.
     When instead of letting them be, we hook onto thoughts, emotions & moods, we prolong their otherwise naturally brief existence, bogging ourselves down in sickeningly-familiar swamps AND repeatedly failing to vibrantly live our one short, precious life. 

     We notice this, and with endless patience, kindness, gentleness & perseverance, we seamlessly let it be, and bring kind awareness back to just what the present moment holds, right here, right now.

Momentary? Timeless?

     We think BOTH as if we had all the time in the world AND as if our hair were on fire! 
     A bit of self-reflection reveals how obsessed we are about the relentless, irreversible passage of time. 

     and every flower a tiny tributary 
     that from the ground flows green and momentary              Alice Oswald

     Yet, on deeper reflection, when the anxious "me" has settled down, isn't the one who looks through these eyes outside of time entirely? Isn't this "one who knows" entirely free of personal concerns, abiding in deep silence, stillness & equanimity?

For Kate

I won’t die
I won’t go anywhere
I’ll be here
But don’t ask me anything I won’t answer             Ikkyu 

“In Ram Dass’s book Still Here, he describes a trip in India on a very slow train. He becomes impatient, thinking: ‘This trip is going to go on forever …. This present moment will never end. I’ve been on this train my entire life and I will never ever get off. Now what?'

Accepting and releasing into just what is …. Being willing to settle into just this experience – this is the teaching of saying yes to our life, not giving in to thoughts of another life.”

Katherine Thanas. “The Truth of This Life. Zen Teachings on Loving the World as It Is.” Shambhala, 2018.

Skillfully Responding to Aggression

     Fear, anger, & impatience to achieve a goal, which upon deep reflection is usually seen to be self-serving rather than altruistic, seem to cause violence.
     The ego is, according to Buddhist understanding, the very last thing we release before full awakening. The Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin-Luther King Jr. etc all seemed to have been consistently nonviolent, despite severe provocation. 
     A couple of old stories:

     “Once upon a time there was a conquering army going through villages, killing and pillaging as it went. The soldiers caused terror in the hearts of the people in the countryside, and were especially harsh with the monks they found in the monasteries, not only humiliating them but often subjecting them to terrible physical torture.
     There was one particularly harsh army captain who was infamous for his cruelty, and when he arrived in a certain town, he asked his adjutant for a report about the people who lived there. His inferior reported: ‘All the people are very frightened of you and are bowing down to you.’ This gave the captain great pleasure, of course. Then the adjutant continued, ‘In the local monastery all the monks have fled to the mountains in terror. Except for one monk.’
     Hearing this, the captain became furious and rushed to the monastery in search of the monk who dared defy him. When he pushed open the gates, there in the middle of the courtyard stood the monk, watching him without fear. The captain walked up to him and asked in his haughtiest voice, ‘Don’t you know who I am? Why, I could take my sword and run it through your belly without blinking an eye!’
     ‘And don’t you know who I am?’ replied the monk, gently. ‘I could have your sword run through my belly without blinking an eye.’ It is said that the captain, recognizing the greater truth of the moment, sheathed his sword, bowed, and left.”

~

     “A big burly samurai comes to the roshi (Zen priest) and says, ‘Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.’ 
     And the roshi looks him in the face and says; ‘Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you?’ The samurai starts to get purple in the face, his hair starts to stand up, but the roshi won't stop, he keeps saying, ‘A miserable worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?’ Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword, and he's just about to cut off the head of the roshi. Then the roshi says, ‘That's hell.’ 
     The samurai, who is in fact a sensitive person, instantly gets it, that he just created his own hell; he was deep in hell. It was black and hot, filled with hatred, self-protection, anger, and resentment, so much so that he was going to kill this man. Tears fill his eyes and he starts to cry and he puts his palms together and the roshi says, ‘That's heaven’."

     A skillful, evolved person may be able to disarm an aggressor, causing minimal harm, and ultimately even bring about benefit. If indeed "I am that" - how else are we to respond? If your left arm went into a spasm, wouldn't your able right arm treat it kindly?
     Coming from deep inner peace, awareness, silence, stillness, timelessness, patience, equanimity, and compassion, will result in a radically, qualitatively distinct response to aggression than when we were reacting from a fearful self-preservation reflex against "the other".

     An exceptional true story about the wise use of true power: http://www.johnlovas.com/2014/03/power-its-origin-how-to-use-it.html

Thus shall ye look on all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in the stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
Gautama the Buddha

Don't Let the Sound of Your Own Wheels Drive you Crazy

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity.
Life is eternal.
We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.
This is a precious moment.
It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

Paulo Coelho

Intimate Relationships & Realizing Our True Nature

     What happens when we recognize that we are awake loving timeless, limitless awareness itself?

     “The implications of this recognition is that the happiness – and by happiness I don’t mean that we always have to be smiling or laughing, it’s more like the peace, the sense of fulfillment, the absence of any sense of lack – the happiness that we previously sought in activities, substances, states of mind, relationships, and never fully found there, has now been discovered to be a quality of our essential nature – this sense of fulfillment, this sense of absence of lack. 
     The motivation to seek happiness in any kind of objective experience doesn’t disappear overnight, because there is a habit that we have been rehearsing for decades (seeking happiness in substances, activities, relationships). That habit doesn’t come to an end overnight, but it winds down, because the source of happiness in oneself or as oneself has been touched, known. And that has an impact on the desire to find happiness in any kind of objective experience. It winds down slowly. 
     That, for instance, has a profound effect on relationships. Anyone who believes or feels themselves to be a separate self is seeking one thing alone in life, and that is happiness. The reason, in relation to relationships, a separate self seeks relationships is not because they want the other. It’s because they want to be happy. If you knew the person you are dating was going to bring misery to your life, would we go on dating them? No way. It’s not the person that we want, or the activity, or the substance, it’s the happiness that we believe will be derived from them. So if we are no longer seeking happiness in activities, in relationships, does that mean that we simply stop having relationships? No, of course not, because we can have relationships either to fulfill our need for happiness, or to express and share and celebrate the happiness we already feel. We still have relationships, but we relieve the other person of the demand to fulfill our our sense of lack, to fulfill our sense of emptiness. So we’re not using the other as an object to continually fill up this sense of emptiness, which of course another can never do. And that is why relationships fall apart, because sooner or later we realize this other person is not fulfilling me, no person can fulfill us. As soon as we realize they’re not fulfilling me, the conflict begins and the relationship begins to fall apart. 
     But now, we don’t want to be in relationship with the other for the purpose of finding happiness. We relieve our friend of this impossible burden of providing happiness for an insatiable self. That attitude gives our relationship the best possibility of being truly intimate, truly loving, open, undemanding, and an expression of our shared being. It’s not a guarantee that an intimate relationship, for instance, will work, because there are many elements that go into the make of an intimate relationship, but this is the most essential part – the recognition that the other is not there to provide love for us or happiness for us. 
     That’s just one example of how it has a profound effect on relationships – relationship with our neighbors, with our children, with our parents, but particularly intimate relationships. I would go further and say that it was the prerequisite for true intimacy; that as long as we consider ourselves separate entities trying to derive happiness from one another, that position, and true intimacy are mutually exclusive. There cannot be true intimacy if we are demanding the other to fill up our sense of need, or lack, or want. 
     Isn’t true intimacy what everybody wants? Isn’t that why we have relationships? Because we all have this deep intuition of real intimacy – that’s what we’re looking for in a relationship. We all know deeply at some level the potential of a relationship. And over and over and over again we find that our relationships are spoiled by our projecting our needs and our fears onto the other person.”                 Rupert Spira

Above transcribed from this video:

Beyond Suffering

     Francis Lucille : “… to experience suffering is a trap. I agree. It’s a self-created trap into which we have fallen. But, it is at the same time, also the trap and the ladder by which we can escape the trap. Because what suffering does to us is give us a desire to get out of it, the energy to get out of it. 
     That’s the ancient truth of the Buddha – the Four Noble Truths: #1 there is suffering; #2 there is a cause for it; and (#3) there is a way out of it – the ladder, right? If we were in the trap of ignorance, and if we weren’t experiencing suffering, there would be no incentive to liberate ourselves from the trap. So in a sense, the suffering we experience in ignorance is the beacon that indicates the exit. So from my vantage point, there is no problem with suffering ... 

     I define consciousness as that which is hearing these words in this moment. That has no states. That which perceives a state is not itself a state. That which perceives the states is itself not a state. That which perceives the phenomena is the noumenon, it’s not a phenomenon. [[ wiki: noumenon is a posited object or event that is known (if at all) without the use of ordinary sense-perception. ... generally used in contrast with, or in relation to phenomenon, which refers to anything that can be apprehended by, or is an object of the senses.]] So that which perceives a state is not a state. Of course if you read books on psychology, you will (read about) all kinds of states of consciousness. But here we’re talking apples and oranges then, because the way I define it is as that which perceives the states. And that which perceives the states - the perceiver-in-chief if you will - is not a state.
 
     Questioner suggests that when you speak of a perceiver and the perceived, there is dualism. 
     Francis Lucille : I would agree with that. The distinction between the perceiver and the perceived is, if you will, a pedagogical one. 
     If it is your experience that there is only one reality, then you are perfectly happy, at peace, there is no suffering, there is nothing to be sought, and there is nothing to be taught. 
     So the teaching only emerges when there is a student who emerges. And the student emerges as a separate entity. So then the teaching has to take the claim made by the student, of being a student & therefore a separate entity, at its face value, in order to be able to communicate. So then the teacher tells the student, ‘OK, you believe to be a separate self. What does it mean to be a separate self? You are that which perceives, right? Because you claim you are the body here, that perceives the world around you. Or you claim that you are the mind, this private, separate mind that perceives the thoughts. 
     But if you look more closely, the thoughts - you are the perceiver of these thoughts; this world, this body – you are the perceiver of them. Therefore, just as you claim that that which differentiates you from the world is the fact that you are the perceiver of it, and the world is the perceived. If I take you at your logic, following your logic, it follows that you are not your thoughts, your sensations, your perceptions, but you are the consciousness – whatever that is – that perceives them. 
     But then if you look at this consciousness, that perceives them and which defines you, which is really your centrality, this consciousness is devoid of any qualities because all qualities are perceived. Therefore you cannot any longer make the claim that it is separate, that it is limited. And then, once this is understood, this paves the way, makes possible the moment there is the understanding that that which we are - this consciousness - is devoid of any shape or form, or name, that makes possible the realization that it is universal.
     Because up until that moment, we were superimposing limitations onto it. At the moment we make this distinction between that which is perceived and that which perceives, that eliminates the possibility of any superimpositions, therefore of any limitations. That’s the theoretical aspect of it.
     But that points inwards towards an experience, which is real. Because the experience of consciousness is not a thought, it is an experience. And that’s how it gets started. Up until that moment, you are not on the way. You are on the way to the way, but you are not on the way. The point of entry in the way is through this experience of consciousness divested of any superimpositions, because then it knows its autonomy, it knows its reality. 
     Then you are told, ‘Wait a minute, now that you know you are real – as consciousness – that you are not making it up, that you as consciousness are real, you also have another intuition, which is that there is only one reality. Because everything is interconnected, everything is part of one single reality, therefore, this consciousness you know now to be real, must be this reality. So it must be the same consciousness that shines in all beings. And it must be the same reality-consciousness that we perceive as this universe. So then that’s when really non-duality really takes all its meaning – non-duality means there are not two realities. It means there is only one reality. Therefore, whatever is perceived, is consciousness and consciousness alone – or – reality and reality alone. 
     So my definition of consciousness, if you will, would be the reality that perceives, that which perceives reality, that which perceives in reality, that which truly perceives the reality it perceives. And there is only one reality. But what is important is the experience of this reality. And the experience of this reality is more readily accessible from within as that which perceives, than it is from without as that which is perceived. So we experience it first as that which perceives, and then we understand that everything that is perceived is nothing else than it. 
     And therefore the words from the Koran ‘Wherever the eye falls, is the face of God.’ Everything we see is divine reality, divine presence. But we cannot readily and easily go there through the external path. The teaching in a sense is accomplished through the teacher seeing the student as God, or as this reality if you will. And that in a sense communicates itself. That awakens within the remembrance of the divinity of consciousness. 
     There is this beautiful saying by Rumi ‘The gaze of Shams Tabrizi (Rumi’s master) has never contemplated an ephemeral mortal thing without making it eternal.’ In the Indian tradition there is also the saying ‘To see all beings in the self, and the self in all beings.’ All of that is the same and it is really the essence of the transmission - for those who are open to it, which is of course the precondition. 

Francis Lucille, 2 hour, unedited dialogue, Temecula, CA, March 22, 2014

Qualities of Authentic Experience of Consciousness

     We have to understand that the thought about our true nature is a happy thought. Why? Because it comes from happiness itself. So it’s like a fish coming out of the water. The fish is wet. So the thought that originates in happiness, is wet with happiness. It’s a happy thought. 
     In the same way, the body that originates in happiness is a happy body from the experience of happiness. It is still pregnant, if you will, with the presence from which it emerges.
     It is not any kind of thought that has this quality. Some thoughts originate from ignorance. Some thoughts are just old thoughts that just come back to the surface. They are not fresh, creative, new thoughts. So the thoughts that are really pregnant happy thoughts are the creative thoughts of understanding, thoughts of love – because thoughts of love come from the experience of love. The thought of understanding comes from intelligence. These are the happy thoughts. 
     Typically, as a truth-seeker, to be practical, I may be driving and all of a sudden my thoughts drift to something I’ve read, something I’ve heard in satsang, and I experience as a result a joy which is causeless in fact. It’s not like being based upon a Ferrari or something tangible, it’s just the joy to be, the joy that there is being. The joy that there is being is not related to me as a person.
     You can have it in the morning – you look at the sun, you look at nature, you look at the sky, and you feel this joy. This joy is not about you – this little ant in this huge landscape. The joy of marveling at all this extraordinary being that is deploying this extraordinary scenery. And you see that when there is true joy, true happiness, there is nobody in it. It is for the sake of itself. And as soon as little me comes in and says ‘Oh oh, I am here enjoying this thing, but unfortunately I’m not always going to be here enjoying this thing’ – it poops the party.
     The ‘I’ that experiences happiness is consciousness itself. There are not two consciousnesses – one to experience consciousness, and the consciousness which is experienced. It is consciousness that experiences itself – that’s a very important point. 
     We usually experience in terms of the senses, and mostly, in fact for most of us, in terms of the sense of sight. Of course some of us experience, if you’re blind or if you’re a musician, you tend to experience a little more in terms of sounds. If you are a dog, you tend to experience in terms of scent. But we experience in terms of the senses. 
     So when we try to experience consciousness, the natural tendency is to project a look-alike of consciousness in the mind, which is a concept, which is an image – perhaps something transparent, or a mirror, or a blackboard, or a white wall or something of that sort, - or a localization in a bodily sensation. So it’s something that has some kind of a shape, some kind of a structure, even if it is a vanishing one, it still has some content. 
     The experience of consciousness is not of the mind. And we know the experience of consciousness. We have not recognized that that which we experience as happiness, of love, or beauty, or understanding, or humor for instance – all of those are in fact the experience of consciousness. They have this quality of being impersonal, of being timeless. 
     How long does it take to understand a joke? You see what I mean? Jokes that are delayed – you can spend days before you can understand it, and all of a sudden, you’re walking down the street and ‘Ahhhhh’ and you start laughing. But it didn’t take days to understand the joke. These days, they don’t count, because during those days you were not understanding the joke. The only thing that counts is the very instantaneous moment when you get it, when you get the punch line and bingo. And so it is the same here. 
     So this experience of truth, of love, of beauty – it has this timeless quality, that first appears as instantaneous, no duration, but then appears as presence, as something that is always here – you know like consciousness is always in the background so to speak. It’s always in the background, but when you look at it, it takes no time to look at it. If you ask yourself ‘How do I know that I am conscious?’ – of course consciousness is in the background, but how long does it take to realize that you are conscious? No time – it’s an experience that is instantaneous. So it is analogous in this case to the experience of truth, love, beauty, understanding, being touched by love, being touched by beauty. 
     There are things that may happen before. You look at a painting, or you listen to music, and you are taken by it, and all of a sudden you cry. Or understanding, you look at this problem, you don’t get it, you don’t get it, and then, all of a sudden (snaps his finger) bingo, that’s it. 
     To go back to the point I was making, it is important to have been informed that the experience of consciousness knowing itself is not at all like a visualization of some blank wall, or like a feeling in the body like something which is here (pointing to forehead) or something which is here (pointing to chest). No. 
     It is more like the experience of love, of happiness, of understanding. If you think about it, every time you experience love, you’re happy; every time you experience understanding, you’re happy; every time you experience beauty, you’re happy. So what these experiences have in common is happiness. And what they have in common also is that they are the experience of consciousness. 
     So the experience of consciousness is identical to the experience of happiness. That’s important because then, we are not kidding our self as a truth seeker by trying to have the experience of consciousness, trying to visualize consciousness, to see it. No, no, no – that’s not what it feels like. It feels like happiness. So if there is no happiness, it’s not consciousness. You see, that’s important. If it is dry, if it has no flavor, if it has no perfume, it is not consciousness. It is something else. It needs to have this freshness, this happiness, this quality of perfume, to be the authentic experience of consciousness."         Francis Lucille

     Rupert Spira on this topic: http://www.johnlovas.com/2016/05/awareness-of-awareness.html 

Francis Lucille, 2 hour, unedited dialogue, Temecula, CA, March 22, 2014

 

Refugees & More - a Poem

Old song of a ship sailing from Scotland to Canada

People continue to migrate all over the world

Seeking better lives

Stories of stories of stories

From one generation to the next

Groundhog Day upon Groundhog Day

The timeless, endless, humanizing project

Emptiness exploring emptiness

What it means to incarnate

To be embodied in flesh

Form in endless variety

Appearances only

From holy perfection

To apparent depths of depravity

To be born, live, grow old, and die as a sentient being

The material manifestation of (don’t even attempt a name)

That which words, ideas & concepts can’t begin to describe.

Refugee by Davide Monteleone nationalgeographic.com

 

Between the Conscious and the Unconscious ...

"Between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing:
all earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees,
and it never winds down.

Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon;
ages go by, and it goes on.

Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire,
and the secret one slowly growing a body.
Kabir saw that for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life."

Kabir                                                          www.poetry-chaikhana.com


     “discussion of altered states of consciousness has been reduced to inaccurate homilies by both religious fundamentalists and the advocates of Scientism. … at least some of what we do and who we are is fundamentally and irreducibly anomalous, inexplicable, uncanny.”  
       Dana Sawyer “Huston Smith: Wisdomkeeper. Living the World’s Religions. The Authorized Biography of a 21st Century Spiritual Giant.” Fons Vitae, Louisville, KY, 2014.

     Role of Mysticism: http://www.johnlovas.com/2015/05/nature-or-nurture.html

Public Gardens, Halifax, NS

Waking Up

     "... more and more your life emanates from this place of clear awareness. When the seeing gets very clear and still, it is because 'you' disappear. The great Chinese poet Li Po expressed this beautifully:

          The birds have vanished down the sky
          Now the last cloud drains away.

          We sit together, the mountain and me,
          until only the mountain remains.

     Li Po did not rise up and leave the mountain scenery. His self-conscious mind has left him! He is describing a mind that has stopped churning out ideas, thoughts, feelings, and images. In his case, you might say that he no longer exclaims, 'Look at that gorgeous view. I'm so happy to be here. I can write a poem about this scene, and it will be remembered forever. Perhaps even anthologized.'
     None of that chronic mental activity remains. His poem implies that self-cherishing has fallen away, and what remains is simply clear seeing."

       Larry Rosenberg. Three Steps to Awakening. A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life. Shambhala, Boston, 2013.

Nicolas Le Boulanger, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

and www.nikcorbleau.fr