On blogging and shared thoughts…

Perhaps I presume too much. I  sail along as I share my thoughts and assume that if I write it clearly enough, it will be understood. I know better than that. What is clear to one may not be clear to another. So I will try to be clearer.

In the meantime, consider this: Not all of what I study and share is ‘understandable’ in the traditional way of wrapping one’s mine around it. Some, if not all seems to fall into that netherworld of experiencing it. I say ‘netherworld,’ because it is the ‘un’-known and the only way to ‘know’ it is to experience it, feel it.

Our minds would have us demand proof, measure and qualification of these ‘netherworld’ things before giving it them the seal of worthiness of faith. Because the mind thinks it can do that. It believes it can, has to determine what is true, what is not. And it’s not a question of the mind defending itself against something new. The mind is reasonable, it offers the unrealistic rationale that it can find faith – providing the information passes muster.

So, unless you give the mind something that it can ‘know’…ie. relate to in its memory as an  identifiable  religion or philosophy…..it balks. If you give the mind a truth that is old as the hills but seen from a new perspective and that perspective is either unfamiliar, (or too familiar in that it brings up feelings you’ll do anything to avoid),the mind will disect and measure  it down to the last inch and then, ironically, invoke the ‘I don’t know.’

Is it that we don’t know, or that we resist letting ourselves know? (These are dangerous semantics so let me be clear that I think of two kinds of knowing: That which our mind labors to achieve, and that which our being senses, feels, experiences. Now I’m speaking of ‘knowing’ as a feeling experience as in ‘knowing it with our body….which also happens to include the mind. Does that mean the mind feels? Where’s the connection between thought and feeling? Does one come before the other? Or visa versa? (Try to contemplate this question and resist the need to define, come up with an answer, judge in any way the thoughts and feelings that come up. The mind wants to judge. It thinks that’s its job)

I think ‘thoughts’ are our mind’s attempt to understand, and by understanding, control our feelings. Of course, fear is the hardest of the feelings to ‘control.’ Often the best way is at every turn to deny that fear exists in you. Denial is our mind’s greatest weapon of self-defense.

So how do we know when we’re in denial, and not that river in Egypt? There’s only one way.

After all the medicines to relieve stress and/or the pain and disease that come from stress (virtually all), have had their day, no matter how numb or dumb the medicines, intoxicants, mountains of food or guns of power have made us, we are still nagged at by our fear. Sometimes quietly, but always there, eating at the foundations of our mind. If you get really quiet and look at yourself objectively, you can hear it, however faintly…eating.

i have talked repeatedly about our powerlessness to affect our mortality. Again, it’s interesting how many people read ‘fear of helplessness’ as ‘fear of death.’  There’s a difference.

What we fear about death is our inability to ‘know’ it, or understand it.The mind’s idea that ‘knowing’ it provides the fantasy that we can then do something about it. We can have power over it because we ‘know’ it; what it looks like, where it’s located, (Heaven or Hell).

It’s a fantasy because any way you look at it, your mind still doesn’t know anything about death except that it, (your mind) ceases to exist. Or so your mind thinks.

What does this thought of powerlessness to ‘know’ anything about death bring up? Fear. Fear of being helpless.

For that, the great masters, students and teachers throughout history have come up with an answer; a way to use that fear of helplessness to  achieve the peace and clarity of Heaven. However, there’s a catch: You have to be able to identify when this fear of helplessness is happening. This is not easy. Our mind has seen to that.

We get angry with ourselves for being helpless, (old examples: caught in a traffic jam and late for an appt….a loved one who is suffering.) and that becomes depression. We seek a sense of ‘power’ in food…have another cupcake. We find that the easiest way to feel powerful is to be more powerful than someone else, (this also translates into knowing more than them, having more than them, making them accept what we believe, controlling them by lying to them, threatening their security, judging them as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, week or strong, right or wrong.)

All of this just to avoid that feeling of helplessness and the fear it induces. We navigate the world with our minds, building, owning, killing, and controlling, but when it comes to an answer to the deepest unknown, the mind fails us. (So we immediately try to do more of the same….and more and more….and hello war, famine, greed, avarice….all those guys.)

Okay. So say that I can get in touch with my helplessness when some guy slams into my car or some phone robot hands up on me, then what?

And we’re right where we should be.

Seeing ourselves in that situation from that place of awareness, our human consciousness that is the same place from where we can choose to acknowledge or human struggle with helplessness. That placc of awareness from where we can  acknowledging it, finding compassion for ourselves for our courage and determination, for our yearning to be at peace…to truly ‘know’ in the biblical sense of the word. Then it’s a hop-skip- and a jump to our hearts, to our ability to love ourselves in our struggle, and by extension love others.

In that experience of love, we are feeling our connection to all that is and all that we belong to. It is an anthema to the mind that we have to surrender to being one with everything in order to ‘know’ it; the ‘answer.’………….

…to know,to  experience, to feel with your whole being that you are a continuation, not only of the light, sound, and all that exists around you including the air that envelops you, but a continuation of all matter, all thought, all sound that is always in motion, always changing…dying and being reborn eternally…changing.

We can use the ‘power’ of our mind to focus itself from its conscious place, to focus and witness without judging anything as right, wrong, good bad, true or untrue…and experience/feel and know ‘eternal change’ that we are a continuance of along with everything that exists.

Okay…I’ve gone off on this stuff again, but ‘all roads lead to Rome…and no matter how I slice it, bread is bread.

When you meditate on light with your third eye, it’s when  you don’t look for the light that the light comes. As does all the creativity and falling in love in our lives. It always comes from left field when you least expect it, or to be more accurate, when your mind least expects it.

pmg.

Ruminating on sound.

Consider sound; everything from music to noise, and how these sounds make us feel.

Noise makes us angry, music makes us fall in love. There are sounds that make us feel sad, irritable, scared, happy, young and old. How is that? How can sound evoke so many different feelings? Does it tap into all our memories and what we associate them with? Absolutely. Does it tap into something more, an even more basic experience of our existence that we have known from the moment of our conception, if not before?

Vibration is to sound what thought is to matter.

Contemplate where vibration becomes sound, or where thought becomes matter. The very act of contemplating this moment, of trying to imagine it puts us in that moment in that we are experiencing it and feeling it as it is happening. In our effort to contemplate where thought becomes matter, we become the ‘where’ because we are feeling it as we use our minds’ attention to witness how it manifests in our body. When our minds try to define or interpret the experience, we are no longer feeling it.  Interesting.

The mind creates concepts; of ‘infinity’ and ‘eternity’ as a way to understand and define that experience of change and becoming. It abhors witnessing without judging and seeks to define, quantify and qualify that experience because it needs to believe  it can. The mind needs to experience some power over this event of existence, this state of always becoming. It needs to see itself as ‘apart from’ and not’ a part of,’ because being ‘apart from’ implies some control, and acknowledging being  ‘a part of’ implies that the mind is in a state of change over which it has no power.

Everything vibrates. Every molecule, atom, every particle of energy that makes up thought which makes up everything that is, is in motion and at some moment in its transition to sound and matter, it experiences itself and that’s what we feel; the vibration of all existence coming into being and our belonging in its fabric.

As humans, we have the gift of consciousness and the ability to focus our minds on the act of witnessing our existence without judgement or the need to define or know. That’s when we feel God, truth, love…

Reactions.

I would like to thank those that have offered words of support and encouragement I would also like to thank those  who have found themselves reacting negatively, for I get to be reminded how difficult it is for all of us to acknowledge our fear and how we defend against it by judging and defining ourselves and others.  I don’t want to linger in the negative, I want to acknowledge how instructive it can be.

As any of us, I have received through my life lessons an experience that has come to motivate much of what I do. It has inspired my creativity and made me see the importance of reaching out and sharing. That is what I am doing. I am sharing what has come through me and my life. I am not proslytizing. I am not preaching. I certainly don’t want to preach.

Perhaps what I have learned and what I study is not as easy to share as I had hoped. You will note that I did not say I was going to suspend all communication with my blogs, just that I found it impractical, given the amount of time in the day, to answer all. This is difficult, for it is in my nature, it is in all of our natures to want to communicate, to share. It’s part of experiencing ourselves as together in this journey of life. One of the recent blogs asks how we are to teach, or share and be of help to our children who are so innocent and open with their feelings. My first reaction is that we have more to learn from our children and being in their presence than we often admit. And while half of being a teacher is to acknowledge our desire to learn, the opposite is true. For what is teaching but a ‘sharing,’ a desire to communicate our life’s experience in an effort to help ourselves learn and recognize ourselves in each other, in order to experience/know our existence as ‘shared’…that we are not alone. So, as I share and teach, I study and learn. The best way to teach our children, (those inside of each of us as well), is to listen, hear and be taught by them in their yet to be inhibited ability to stay present. Then what we are teaching them mirrors the best in them and in ourselves, and gives them the reaffirming experience of being together. This experience, this ‘knowing’ of our one-ness constitutes hope and our faith that we can return to that knowing, that feeling.

I have to acknowledge that my innocence would have me believe that all will hear and understand what I share. The truth is that some will and some won’t. Some will feel what I share, not because of who they perceive I am or am not, but because what I share resonates in their own experience. For those that find my shared thoughts frustrating, confusing, pretentious, presumptuous or just plain negative, I would humbly ask you to try not to judge me or yourselves. Instead, you might witness your own reactions and words and the extent to which you need to define me.  It’s an interesting excersize, because as we witness our feelings and thoughts and don’t try to defend or justify them, but see them as something that is happening to us and something we are reacting to, we get to make the distinction between the part of us that is learned behavior/conditioning, and the part of us that transcends that behavior and allows us to recognize ourselves in each other.

I always find that I learn more from my negative reactions, (read: ‘expressions of fear’) and those of others when I am able to not personalize or judge them.

Someone wrote that this all seemed a defense on my part, a need to withdraw from people and from my feelings. This is not my intention, nor my need. On the contrary, it is to find and experience my connection to my humanity and the humanity of others. Celebrity is an odd experience in that the object of celebrity often becomes a canvas where others get to paint their needs, their fantasies.  We all have a need to ‘celebritize,’ to take someone we ‘connect’ with and see our own humanity in and make them more than human, make them more powerful than us. We make them our heroes who, we fantasize, don’t have to deal with the fear of powerlessness like we do. We then want to touch them, adore them, have something of them, an autograph, a ‘hello’ a photo. We need to put them there and we resent any effort or occurence that makes them  human. It’s as if we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want our ‘gods’ and at the same time we need them to be human, so we tear them down, or sacrifice them…(ie. the virgin thrown into the volcano), or take exception to their own human efforts to deal with powerlessness.

I remember when my t.v. series had taken off and I was being ‘celebrated,’ I was invited to a birthday bash where there happened to be a lot of celebrities. I was standing by the buffet, (there’s that ‘eating’ thing again), and I heard a voice that sounded really familiar, turned around and bumped into Cary Grant, one of my heroes.  I couldn’t speak. This man had come to represent so much to me as an actor, had become such a ‘god’ to me, that I could only look away. How is that different from someone idolizing Starsky and then trying to relate to me. They don’t really know me…any more than I ‘knew’ Cary Grant. Yet I had built a tremendous amount of fantasy about what Cary Grant was like because I had experienced a connection to him, something in him that I wanted to experience in myself. Had I ever met Cary Grant thereafter, I most likely would have been brought up short when I got close to him and saw the cracks, the foibles, his yearning, his humanity.

I do not find any strength in setting myself apart. I yearn for connection the same as any person. However I also have to take some  responsibility for this occurrence of celebrity and try to understand the nature of it and establish parameters that allow me to live my life and continue to learn. My life’s experience has accrued into these lessons that I seek to share through my ‘celebrity’ on this relatively new phenomenon, the internet. It does not mean that what I say is ‘gospel’ truth, only that it is my truth and has moved me to write two books, has inspired, I now realize so much of my creativity, and my celebrity or visibility gives me the opportunity to share what I am learning.

Perhaps this is too great an effort to answer the negativity I perceive while I try to understand it.

Okay, that’s my blog. Thank you for allowing me to share.

pmg.

On blogging.

I have to confess to something. I never thought answering these blogs would be so time consuming. To those that write of their anger and difficulties in accepting the possibility of what I’m sharing, I will still review the blogs and try to answer some, however I am going to limit myself to posting blogs and when I do, I’ll try to address some of the themes expressed in those questioning blogs.

Thanks for understanding. There’s only so many hours in a day. For now, I have nothing new to post except what is in my responses to today’s blogs.  pmg.

a distinction between fear of death and fear of powerlessness inthe face of death.

I have read, and answered a few blog entries and it is interesting to me that there is a common thread running through many of the reactions to my thoughts. Oftentimes, the ‘fear of powerlessness’ becomes the fear of ‘death’ in many of the blogs.

I believe it is an important distinction. Animal and human equally share/experience the fear of death. The ANIMAL’S reaction is all about survival. The HUMAN reaction involves both our ego/mind’s experience of being HELPLESS  in the face of death, no matter what we build, own, believe, destroy, and our experience of our consciousness of our own existence at any point, (like right now, your ability to see yourself reading this).

While the experience of being powerless is an anathema to our mind/ego that experiences itself in its ability to create the illusion of being power-full…by what it can do, judge…yes, even deny , our ability to be conscious, to be able see this reaction in ourselves and choose to honor our struggle and choose compassion for ourselves in the face of this seemingly irreconcilable predicament/threat to our existence, gives us the experience of being one with all that is.

If we considers that everything that is, is made up of thought, and that consciousness is also thought. Then, in the act of acknowledging our consciousness, we are experiencing our ‘one-ness’ with all thought, with all that is…call it God, truth, beauty….or love.

When we experience our primal fear of being helpless, there is the opportunity to choose to employ that consciousness, to identify it and from that place choose to love ourselves rather than condemn our selves or others for experiencing and/or denying our  helplessness.

pmg

We have a choice

A friend was talking to me today about how he is looking for something he can be passionate about at this point in his life, and he was concerned that he wouldn’t find it. I replied that his concern was his passion and that his act of searching was something not to be judged in terms of whether he found or didn’t find, but rather his creative process which he could embrace along with his fear of not finding anything. The two can co-exist. The trick is allowing them to co-exist.

Imagine you are standing on the top of a double black diamond ski run. Are you scared? You bet. Do  you ski down it? When you choose to do so, you are acknowledging your fear and your ability to co-exist with it.  Your mind would have you believe that  you have defeated your fear, over come it. Rather,  your choice to acknowledge it and choose to ski down that slope with that fear, is your integrity; your sense of worth. ‘Who’  you are.

I find fear to be a very allusive thing. Often we don’t want to acknowledge it. We call it anger, or depression, (anger at ourselves for being powerless), or boredom, (a form of depression), or obsession, ( a grasping at control with the subconscious belief that what if we’re in control there will be no fear). Our minds/egos go to great lengths to deny the existence of fear for fear that fear will destroy us. Why? Because there is a real fear: that we have no control over our mortality. We have no power over the fact that we are going to die, (read: change). Actually, this is the only fear and it is an anathema to our mind which believes it should and has to be avoided at all costs.

‘The only thing to fear is fear itself,’ we tell ourselves. There is another reality.

When we can acknowledge this primal fear and the fact that there is nothing we can do to get rid of it, we then are given the opportunity to discover its purpose. Why is it in our lives? What did we do to deserve this? Have we been ‘bad?’ Are we being punished with this hellish feeling? Is there something we can take(food, drugs, alcohol) ? Someone who can make it go away, (Daddy, Mommy, religion, a lot of money, success, fame, power)? Is there a mantra, a prayer that we can say over and over?

If we are able to acknowledge the existence of our fear in all its subtle and not so subtle manifestations, and acknowledge that we are powerless to affect our mortality…if we are able to see that a part of us is scared, but just as with the ski run, that there’s another part of us that can choose to act, not in spite of our fear but in recognition of it,then from that same place of ‘knowing,’ we can honor our struggle as human beings, honor our courage and find compassion for ourselves in this seemingly irreconcilable predicament. We can find compassion for ourselves in our fear and by extension, compassion for others. We can find our hearts. We can find our capacity for love.

The purpose of our fear is to lead us to our hearts. It gives us the power to love. It’s what makes us human. It is not the anathema that our minds/egos and our conditioning would have us believe. It won’t kill us. It makes us stronger in our act of acknowledgment and our ‘knowing’ that we are all afraid, we all have courage, we all want love, we all are love.