I’m meditating on drawing right now.

I’m glad the blog has created some helpful dialogue. I don’t want to answer each one, however in reading over your conversations, I hope that some of the questions and explanations will sink in and come out coherently.

I find the simplicity of what I have learned and study to be a great comfort because it makes it easier to remember.

Someone wrote questions about ‘detached.’ Without going back through my posts, and therefore leaving my self vulnerable to the possibility of contradicting myself, I relate to the word ‘detached’ in one of two ways. Either it has an emotional/judgmental dimension, or it is pure description of a simple action. Possibly the confusion comes from the former. By plugging into our awareness, we are able to observe/witness our sensory experience of existence. ‘Sensory’ includes emotions…the things that our mind attaches to events in our formative years. In those years we  feel fear, yearning, love. Fear that we are helpless, hungry for sustenance, and, love. Those are the feelings we first know as creatures. Primitive and simple and these three colors are then used by our minds to describe to itself, to  ‘know,’ and orchestrate the many complex scenarios that comprised our remembered and forgotten childhoods.

In observing/witnesssing our sensory experience of existence, we are still experiencing it because it is happening to a part of us. If it’s a good feeling, who’s going to questions that?

Puts me in mind of a documentary I saw on Bhuddist priests in Japan meditating  for great lengths of time. Periodically someone would come up behind them and hit their shoulders really hard with bamboo sticks. The point being, there are two extremes to which our minds go when confronted with hard feelings and easy feelings. They are aversion and attachment. When things are good, we wan’t to keep them that way.( Notice, the mind is talking about ‘control’ here…”want to keep them that way…”). When things feel bad, difficult…our mind goes full tilt into aversion. Get away. Run from that feeling, and if you can’t run, hide. There are many places to hide; anger, controlling, hating, jealousy, depression, sadness…but the BEST one is DENIAL.

When the young priest cracks the meditating priests on the shoulders, they’re saying ‘be here…be now.”

See, it’s a misconception, or rather the mind’s indulgence in giving some value to meditating by saying that if one meditates, then one arrives somewhere. Gets to peace…love, God….  The problem with thinking that is that the attendant question just will not go away; Are we there yet? And if we are, when are we leaving? How long are we staying. Are  you feeling anything yet?

Our ability to be present is inclusive of everything…all feelings, sensations, thoughts. Consciousness is our unique ability to be aware. Of everything that happens inside and outside of our bodies. From that place of awareness, we can experience our pain and fear AND we can also see it as just part of a larger experience which we are getting to watch…which we are choosing…to watch and glory in the experience of our oneness with everything that exists.

Definitions. Consider this: the dictionary is an edited/published book put together by a committee mentality that decides what best defines a word in terms of its history as well as its current use.  It’s interesting that ‘detached’ was reported to mean to disassociate from one’s feelings. I find that interesting, because it honors the mind’s need to know, measure, define the word, yet ironically includes consciousness and the ego; “disassociate from one’s feelings.” In a way, that definition and product of the mind is acknowledging that there is a ‘place’ from where one can see and execute disassociating from one’s feelings by choosing to be conscious. I bet if you put the mind on trial, it would completely deny the existence of anything so unmeasurable as consciousness.

Lastly, I want to re-visit my definition of ‘patience.’ I believe I have suggested that patience is the remembered experience of love. (I had said ‘hope,’ I think, but ‘love’ seems more inclusive).

I take issue with someone’s use of the word ‘remembered.’ Not because it doesn’t suit, but because if we’re not careful, when can look to one aspect of ‘remembered,’ and miss the other. The first aspect is remembered experiences. We can call up these remembered experiences, the one where we felt love, togetherness, joy, and that is one way to remember, albeit it comes with a whole world of experiences which our bodies remember but have been ‘un’remembered, suppressed as being too difficult. How do we selectively ‘turn on’ our memories and truly prevent them from visiting all those ‘subterranean’ places our more colorful religious figures describe as ‘hell?’

The second aspect of remembering is key; By exercising our ability to be aware, by meditating on the present with the help of all these sensations and feelings and thoughts that are there to remind us that we have a conscious place, we get to feel and nurture our sense of peace, love, oneness… and return to it whenever we want…and that, that is what we ‘remember.’ Our ability to experience the purest feeling of love gives us our understanding of faith…(that this ‘place,’ this one-ness exists), and that remembered feeling  give us patience and hope.

Wishing you every bit of all of it.

pmg

I’m put in mind of going back to basics. The comfort and simplicity of basics. Knowing that is where you need to go when the noise gets noisy.

I can see myself clearer when I can watch and not judge myself. I can see when I’m coming from my heart or when I’m protecting my heart.

I can watch my body, my posture and find the truth in my feelings in how I hold myself.

I can see my mind wanting to run here…run there, run into circles and little knots of fear…I can watch my body respond.

I can sit apart, while being a part of, and witness the flow and change of sensation in this journey called existence.

I will feel all that I feel, and remember…yes remember to thank those feelings, those sensations which exist to remind me of my consciousness, my knowing-ness.

That is why I am here. To go there. Where? Here.

How quickly the clarity goes, vanishes in a forgotten twist, and I  notice how my mind and the rest of me is negotiating the change.  I am here again.

What about that great % of our mind that we ‘don’t use.’

Maybe we do use it. Maybe we use it when we sleep? Isn’t sleep our most ‘creative’ experience in our existence? Our awakened self exists only to thrive and procreate and goes to sleep when it gets tired. It raises a really interesting question about how we perceive ‘resting.’

Resting.

What happens to the innermost place of ‘muscle’ and ‘rests.’  Something’s going on…an exchange of some kind, some kind of chemistry, mini explosions that grow into what we measure as ‘energy,’ power, aliveness.

What is the ‘event’ of resting?

Is it like a line of ants forever traipsing for distant concrete horizons while their returning ranks file past with their information of what they’ve encountered?

Do we plug into the source of energy in our sleep and while we dream, our mind, half wakened tries to make sense of sounds, smells, feelings of energies. That is our re-charge.

Then of course, there is our waking state, in which we have evolved to be able to go to that place of re-membering, that place that re-minds us of our connection to everything that is. Our experience of the feeling of one-ness, belonging.

When we choose our awareness, our mind quite efficiently takes care of everything else. We can hang out in awareness as long as we like. Relax…stay awhile. I guess we could call it ‘paradise.’

Our opportunity is to practice seeing our sensations, emotions, thoughts, as experiences that are there to re-mind us of our conscious and aware state. When we can remember that, and we re-member the sensation of being plugged into, a part of the phenomenon of existence.

I don’t propose to know anymore than anyone else. I only know what I know and what I’m learning. It doesn’t make me good or bad or right or wrong. It’s just another reality…my reality which I choose to share with any who want to partake.

What would be cool is if those of you finding yourselves embroiled in this flap would  take a giant step back. (Take another, they’re free.), And from this wider perspective, where you can still see the other person, can you also see yourself taking yours position? See your mind preparing all those definitions and judgments to defend against your fear.

Fear of what? I don’t know. It just occurred to me, but I’ll take a guess with the option to delete.

Fear of being wrong…of not knowing…fear of being uable to trust your heart, your senses, your experience of your existence which tells you what you KNOW with your being, not what you think/believe you know in your mind. Yes, they are seemingly two different realities constantly at war with one another.

( I was having an interesting conversation with a friend and we were trying to identify that huge part of the brain that we don’t use. I thought, maybe that’s the place where we all dream…a portal into this multi-dimensional universe in which we exist. Maybe in other incarnations…in other ‘versions’ of us in other dimensions, this is the evolved part that communes with the waft and flo of existence. Was it Shakespeare who suggested that we spend this life like squirrels scurrying after nuts to store for the winter and it is only in sleep that we experience our connection to all that is? Maybe not Shakespeare…but he was going in that direction).

So we defend against that fear by forming judgments, alliances with others with common beliefs, (it helps if they look like us in some comforting way or other), and of course, identification with those beliefs. This is the mind’s way of rationalizing its relevance to these ‘serious’ conflicts.

Well, they are serious, aren’t they? They’re about what  you believe is important, true, right, wrong….oops…there’s that ‘judgment thing’ again.

Question; Does a belief linger? Does it resonate in the senses? Having a belief definitely resonates in the senses; pride, security, loyalty, honor,…but the belief itself? Is its life entirely dependent on our minds ability to repeat, enthrone, solidify and litmus test its existence?

What about what we experience with/in our senses?  Those stay in the tissue longer. A lot longer. Muscle memory? What about that which feels so good, so true, so comforting and reassuring, even eternal: love? Do we feel love in our mind?

We feel it in/through our senses. Our mind interprets it, maybe even gets a little drunk on the endorphin rush, or suicidal from the percieved loss of, but ask your mind where to go to find it and like a good dog after a buried bone, it visits all past and recorded occasions of bliss in an attempt to feel it again.

It doesn’t work that way.

Ah! I’m opening that damn can of worms again.

This experience of our existence has absolutely nothing to do with right,wrong, good, bad. Granted, because we are such dangerous beings to one another, we need a moral cage of rules and regulations to keep us under control…and we  have invented all kinds of cages…

Our experience of our existence…maddening as it may be to our minds…is to be experienced...or in short;to be…as in felt. Not known, or catalogged, measured and weighed…but felt.

So I ask you. In your deepest sense of yourself, of your hearts, after our minds have had their day judging and defending and labeling things right or wrong, fair or unfair and whatever, after that, when we ask ourselves what we really know that we want…and in that knowledge we also know that everyone at their core wants,…it is love. To be loved, to love, to belong eternally, to know that part of ourselves that goes on long after our bodies have called it quits.

We all want the same thing, same store. You take the high road, I’ll take the low road. You take your car, I’ll hoof it through the woods. Different ways of getting to the same place.

So, I propose that we view each others different ways, beliefs, ideas with more curiosity. Not just curiosity in all the different ways, but curiosity in ourselves and our own process of holding on, attaching, afraid to let go of any or all of the beliefs that our minds would have us identify with.

I believe…yes I said it…that when, in the face of fear, we  identify with the fear, (and try to defend against it), we can also identify with  that part of us that sees us doing this and if we look closely, sees others doing it at the same time.

Sometimes we settle for the distraction of anger, hate, because we’re afraid to acknolwedge the root presence of our fear (underneath our anger, impatience…etc.).for fear that the fear will destroy us. But hey, didn’t we just say we were already ‘afraid’ to go there? Where? To ‘afraid.’ We’re already there!

Where?

Here.

And maybe the notion of a world without right or wrong is offensive, even threatening to some, however, I believe that anything that we can identify as being beyond our comprehension is where we really want to go.That’s the place we speak of most often; heaven, eden, paradise, eternal peace, unending love. That’s the place that  our minds can’t know and can only try to describe with words in an effort to quantify and qualify the experience of feeling.
The mind doesn’t feel.

It thinks.

That’s how it experiences itself. By doing. Its existence is entirely comprised of doing, judging, evaluating, ordering, controlling….not being.

And because it cannot feel, the mind creates with its definitions of sensation/feeling words, scenarios that defend and enrage, sadden and yearn in their complex stories of what happened or didn’t happen in the course of our conditioning in this journey of life.

The  experience of feeling, experiencing the senses is an unknown to the mind. It is the unknown.

If the mind can’t ‘know’ something, (it being one of its favorite ways of ‘Doing’ in order to support its pursuit of immortality…or at least the illusion of immortality), it has a vast supply of weapons to deal with the unknown.  At any time it can see it as horrible and dark and deathfull, exotic and mysterious, sometimes benevolent, and an ethereal spirituality to be adorned with all the gilt of honor, tradition, belief, philosophy and magic. It can defend against it with rage; rage at one’s self (read: ‘helplessness’: most commonly experienced as depression), hate,anger, killing, owning, controlling, obsessing, forgetting, DENYING any experience of the fear that always creeps in from the unknown.

Yet, we don’t experience life with our minds. We see it, measure it, etc, however we experience life through our senses. Our physical and by extension, emotional feelings.  We experience, know—its existence and ours by feeling them.

Our minds can editorialize and spin the story any which way, but hold the presses: how did it/being/life feel?

So here’s a question; If there’s something that we feel that our minds can’t understand or control, (and we’re only using what small percentage of our brains(?), then what’s the point of having a brain? I mean besides the cars and medicines and exquisite war machines, (can’t say ‘nice music, good food, good sex…’ they’re feelings/sensations), the rule of law and the dollar, and the edifices of  belief; the cathedrals, temples, and shrines,…good pizza…

It’s what we use the mind to focus on. We honor our senses within and without, as we honor our brains.

We enjoy our ability to exercise the muscle of thinking.

However when confronted with our inability to affect the outcome of something, like our lives, when that degree of helplessness paralyzes you or simply tickles you with some indigestion or rage, while  our minds may be able to create a bandaid to deny that horrible feeling of helplessness… the fact is that our minds fear that they can’t help us out. How do we know this? With our feelings. Listen to them. That’s what they’ll tell you.

What we can do, is to focus our minds on things that reaffirm and bring us to a more peacefull place. The more we do it, the better we remember to do it the next time. How do we focus the mind?

We ask it questions.

Questions such as; ‘what do you hear? what do you see? what do you smell? what do you feel on your skin,what are you thinking? RIGHT NOW. HERE in the Present? Which is ALL you can ever really know…

Can you see yourself thinking , feeling, smelling…? Can you see yourself sitting there reading this?

Get cooled out, you know, relaxed.

Be in a comfortable place.

Close your eyes so that it is just your space..

Ask these questions and simply watch. Watch yourself asking the questions and watch yourself as you are feeling all your sensations, watch your mind think its thoughts…

As you watch, you are plugging into the great ethernet of existence of which…(just contemplate this…don’t feel like you have to judge your feelings about this experience…) of which everything is thought, knowing.

Consider this experience of being with everything that exists, has ever existed, will continue to exist….forever, eternally, immortally…

You are experiencing the true meaning of ‘knowing;  ‘   Being one with. Belonging. Feeling a part of. Feeling as if when you leave this body behind, a part of  you keeps going…forever, (of course your mind wants to believe that it has a ‘structure’ to it, like  the Big Boss, and laws, and underlings, and people that deserve to be there and don’t.)

You don’t have to give it a name, because you already know it. It’s where you came from, it’s where you are going to, it’s where you are, right now, as you read this.

This is your truth.

You are everything that feels good and that doesn’t.

You are all of it.

You don’t have to judge it or identify it…that will not help control it or deny it.

Our experience of life is replete will all that we experience in pain and in pleasure.  We can choose to honor our consciousness, to honor this enormous and, yes sacred gift: our ability to be see ourselves exist, our awareness that allows us to honor that gift, for this is truly the only thing thing we want…to climb to our higher being, to find the chalice, the fountain of  youth, true love, God. You can call it what you will. This is home.

Just a thought..

J ust a thought.

Does the mind feel?

It thinks.  That’s how it experiences itself.

So does it, the mind, interpret the physical reactions of the body and try to describe the experience with no first hand knowledge of what it’s like to feel?  The mind measures and identifies with words it creates from sounds made by those physical reactions,  and gives the words their meanings so they can be utilized at a moment’s notice. The mind even attaches stories to those meanings. Some are stories that make you feel good, and some make you feel bad. Some take you by the hand through a dark forest, and when you finally get to the other side, the sun is shining and all is well. All feels good. If your mind could feel, it would like that result. All systems are a.o.k..

The world of feelings must be so alien to the mind. So difficult to understand, and understanding…knowing is the mind’s compulsion, it’s reason to exist: to do. How can it not know? How can it not measure and control, judge, amass and assert power and ascribe the most elaborate rationalizations to justify its need to do.

Feelings? The mind finds more stories than exist, more permutations in an effort to find a way to control those feelings. If that’s the only way the mind can ‘know’ those feelings, then control it will be. Anything to avoid having to experience something that even approaches that feeling of ‘not knowing.’

Enter ‘belief’s.

Belief is the mind’s answer to controlling what it doesn’t understand. How do you believe? ‘You just do it.’ Like in the Nike ad. Do what? Believe!! How?I dunno, keep saying it over and over and maybe you’ll begin to believe it.

Belief systems are a compilation of our history of story-telling distilled into tenets, or truths that you must either accept at face value, or dedicate your life and will to studying them.  That is the only way to believe and experience faith.

Or is it?

What’s faith?

‘It’s that feeling you get….’

‘Wait a sec…hold on…you’re talking about a ‘feeling?”

‘Okay, I won’t use the word,’feeling,’ okay? See, you get this sensation…’

‘Wait a sec…hold on… Isn’t a ‘sensation’ just a ‘feeling…?”

‘Shut up, or I’ll shut down!’

That’s the mind’s ace in the hole; shutting down, then it’s a hop skip and a jump to hate, greed, sloth…murder…sound familiar?

The mind cannot explain or understand the experience of faith. I mean, it can. It can explain what faith is supposed to act like, what it’s supposed to do, as the mind sees it.  It’s just that merely ‘being’ is an anathema to the mind. If it just ‘is’ then what does it do? It don’t do.

I learned a great meditation: ‘There nothing to do, nothing to change, everything is perfect just as it is.’

So, you guessed it…that takes us around and back again in this spiralling ride of life. Full circle.

How does the mind access faith?

It doesn’t. We do.

We have our consciousness that can watch our minds think, watch our selves feel every sensation  and emotion.

We can take that huge part of our brain that remains unused and use it to focus our minds from its witness, from its consciousness. Observe, not judge…and resist the mind’s need to say everything is so or isn’t so, is right, or is wrong, good or bad…and just watch your feelings as they pass by like leaves on a stream.

At some point, from your conscious place of awareness that is joined with all awareness of which all matter is made, you will experience and know when you experience it. You will ‘become’ the stream with the leaves/feelings floating on and through you. At that point you will know that  you have experienced yourself as the recipient of the entire ancestry of man because at that point, at that moment…you will recognize yourself in everything, and everything in  you. You will experience, as you have already experienced the love and peace and warmth, the connection to all that is. Call it God, Love, Truth, Beauty, it doesn’t matter. Whatever your belief system or religion calls it…isn’t important. Only that you feel it and understand that that is the only way you can ‘know’ it. That’s what we are here to do.

Experience it, ride it like a surfer on the waves, or an Eagle on the wind, fall in love, be one with it. That is our purpose. To sound, vibrate in, be with the harmony of the heavens, to be where thought becomes matter. Yup…at that very place, or ‘space’ as a friend of mine says.

Hope you’re having a good Spring.

pmg

We are not our feelings.

What makes us human is that we can ‘see’ ourselves thinking. To point: ‘I think because I am, or I am because I think: I am, because I am aware that I am. Thinking is something I, or rather, my mind does. What about that part of me that can see myseelf think, judge, feel? That part that can witness my existence, my judging.

Fear of helplessness is that fear that I,(this is the mind talking) am not. That I can’t know, or find, or do,  make, or change the course of the universe, or achieve stasis, (immortality). The only immortality I know is what I experience when I experience my connection to all that is.

All that is, is thought, consciousness.

What is a thought? It’s not an idea. Thought gives birth to ideas. If I accept that an ‘idea’ is a charge of electricity/energy,  is it then  measurable matter?What is the difference between a thought and an idea? We might say that ‘thought’ is  the whole of existence. It is beyond measurement in that it is seemless. It is not made up of even the smallest particles. Is it an energy? Could be. What is interesting is that our minds cannot define it or measure it…only experience it. The best our mind can do by way of definition is to use words like God, love, truth, paradise, nirvhana.

Interesting that the human mind has defined ‘hell’ as that place where we find ourselves when we have ‘sinned.’ When I look at the seven sins, they all share in common one thing; the mind’s attempt to quantify, qualify and control our existence in order to assert some sense of power, anything to avoid feeling helpless. Helplessness is an anathema to the mind. Just look at all the ways in which we resist even contemplating it. It makes us angry, fearful, covetous, jealous, slothful, greedy, along with the rest of the aforesaid sins. We suffer from them and our minds envision a ‘place’ called hell to which we may go, or heaven if we follow the ‘rules.’ However, just as the mind can’t define thought, only experience it, how is it that the mind comes  up with the ‘idea’ of hell. It comes up with it because it experiences it…here, now, in this life that we spend so much time trying to control. The notion that hell, or heaven is a place ‘beyond’ to which we go after we die is the minds’ way of dealing with defining heaven and hell as some vague place that we can only know through ‘faith.’ Do this, practice that, believe what is taught and you will have faith…or so we’re told and threatened with punishment if we don’t.

How does the mind define faith? Isn’t faith something we feel…we experience?  And when we experience it, our minds describe it as freedom, ecstacy, love…But those are only words, because they may evoke feelings, but the thing that saves us is the experience of faith. We can’t define it. Describe it, yes.  Define it, no.

So if the mind’s strong suit is its ability to define, measure, etc…and it can’t define faith, only describe it. If its definition of ‘hell’ is to describe roasting in hell forever and ever…which, by the way is the epitome of helplessness, and its definition of heaven is a place we go to ‘after,’ which, in all honesty is at best a guess, (unless we acquire that thing called ‘faith’), then maybe all this story-telling and hypothesizing is a vain, (read: narcissistic) and futile attempt of the mind to get some control over that which it has no control; the experience of being.

So we experience on two levels:

1) We experience our existence through our senses; feel, sound, smell, sight…and, yes,  thinking, or the interpretation, description and measurement of what our senses tell us.

2) Our innate ability as humans to witness/see ourselves doing all this.

And when we witness, when we go to that place of awareness and recognize that we are not what we are experiencing through our senses, but rather there is another part/place in or of us that can see us experiencing this sensation and thought, and when we recognize from that place that we have a choice as to how we’re going to react, nor not react, (witness), then we experience something that is beyond our senses, beyond our thoughts. Something that is free off all of that. Something bigger…a ‘body’ of thought?

And that feels good. For a while, then we wrestle with our minds until we remember to re-attache, (re-member, as in; my arm is a ‘member ‘of my body and when I remember, I re-attache my arm to the rest of my body), and when we re-attache to that place of awareness, we rediscover the experience of belonging to something greater and we feel good again…until…

The waves come in, they go out. The moon waxes and wanes, the universe expands and contracts, our breath comes and it goes, as does our existence in these bodies. The constant is ‘change,’ and we swing like a pendulum from heaven to hell, back and forth and back again;  from our experience of being part of something that never dies, to our mind’s obsession with finding some control, some ‘understanding,’ some way to know and in ‘knowing,’ maintain the illusion of power over our existence.

We are in that we can see that we are.

Isness  is.

There’s one thing I find constantly interesting in reading these blogs and seeing how you respond to my ramblings, and I’m most impressed by all of our abilities to selectively read, or in plain words, see only what we want to see, hear what we want to hear.  When I am working on my book, I am amazed by what I don’t see when I read it. That is to say, unless I read it aloud and to someone, I know there are things I’ll miss time and again. Why is that? Part of it is because our pal the mind believes it’s already read it and there goes your focus and things gett passed over, etc.

Then, I ask; why can’t the all-talented brain, see something being said that is particularly uncomfortable for it, even threatening, and modify the offending idea so that it can be more comfortable. Editing, (‘read censoring’) on the fly by the subconscious.

Antidote? Reread aloud, preferably to someone else.

In this case, it is an interesting challenge to try to share something I have learned to experience that defies explanation. The mind can’t ‘grok’ it, plain and simple. And what’s also interesting is this ‘journey’ or meditation that I have learned that uses the power of the mind to do what it is best equipped to do, to focus on awareness, on that place of consciousness and from that place, experience the fear that lives in all our lives albeit damned and denied, and make the choice to be compassionate to ourselves in this amazing struggle called being human.

Here’s the trick: When we practice awareness of our existence in thoughts, feelings, sensations, try not to judge. Witness, but don’t judge. The minute you judge, your mind is having its way with you and you begin to identify with that judgement. Like that is ‘who’  you are. I hate this, love that, believe this, know that, own this, have power over that….all those become very vain efforts on behalf of your mind to quantify and qualify, define ‘who’ you are.

But are those things ‘who’  you are? No. They represent who parts of you are that have been conditioned by society, family, generational genetic disposition to react.

But they are no more ‘who’ you are than your screaming toe when you stub it on a doorsill.

The mind is equipped, using only a very small percentage of the brain to do two things: One is control, as in evaluating, knowing things, measuring, listing things to believe in…and the thing that’s so important to the mind is that it maintain this control, this power, because to be helpless is an anathema to the mind. It defines its very existance by what it can ‘do.’ To be helpless is death. (It is interesting to note here that even though I pointed out twice that our fear is not of death, but of our helplessness in the face of death, some bloggers continued to miss that distinction. A really important distinction, and missed I believe, because the mind wants no truck at all with even a discussion of ‘helplessness,’ unless it can reassert a belief or an action that proves that it is not, in fact…’in fact,’ helpless.

The only other  thing the mind is capable of doing (again, with only a small percentage of the brain), is to focus on what is, the present, the here and now. How focus? Simply by practicing awareness. What is happening right now? No judgement, or when there is you can actually note;’Look at that….I’m judging.’  And the reason you’re judging is that the mind doesn’t want to just be and observe its existence. It wants, needs to DO. And that’s how we’re trained.

So, what’s the point of this ‘consciousness?’ This ‘aware place and all this witnessing without judgement. Does it feed or clothe me? Can I taste, own, collect, buy and sell it?

Well, here’s the thing. When you are perceiving your existance: thoughts, feelings, sensations inside and outside of  your physical being, you are practicing your unique and god-like power of humanity, consciousness. And from that place,  you can see all these experiences as happening to part(s) of you and when you do that, you realize that you have the power of choice, you aren’t helpless, and you can choose to honor, have compassion for, yes, love youself in  your courageous journey through change and into death.

When we can acknowledge our mind’s fear of helplessness, we can choose to see it from our conscious place and remind us of our capacity for love.

On the other hand, if we don’t or are unable to acknowledge our mind’s fear of helplessness manifested in our daily lives any time we can’t control or know something, (knowing being another form of control), then we create patterns of behavior that defend against the fear of helplessness. So we have opinions, beliefs, biases, etc because our minds tell us that is how we are to know who we are…and in that knowledge there is power. How much power? Enough to find immortality?

I don’t spend the day asking what I’m afraid of, or looking under every nook and cranny for the old bugger. As my life has turned out, I’ve been introduced to a degree of helplessness that, in order to not self-destruct, I either was going to be a victim/bitter old man, or find my heart. When I learned about how to identify my fear of helplessness beneath my rage, sorrow, and pain, when I learned that I wasn’t those emotions or the thoughts that came with them, and that I could use their presence,( oftentimes so subtle as to be deniable) to find compassion for myself and by extension my fellow human, then I began to see all the ways in which the world around me was avoiding its fear and acting out its attempt to assert control. Most commonly  through denial.

“I am so angry I could…”

“What are you afraid of?”

“I’M NOT AFRAID, I’M ANGRY!!”     is an example of denial, because if you played ‘Twenty Questions’ with what’s making you angry, you’ll eventually arrive at ‘helpless.’

Another example of denial is seeing what we, (our minds) are comfortable with acknowledging. Reading what’s really there. All of it. (Assuming the person writing it is being clear enough – an ongoing challenge for me).I can do that maybe 20 % of the time.

As to the discussion of ‘same’ being more difficult to find than ‘different;’  What I”m trying to say here, is that while the mind finds its power, or illusion of power in its ability to quantify/qualify…judge…and maintains a fantasy, an ideal of sameness and always seeks it, (ergo our creation of the KEN and BARBY love fest), the mind holds that as a belief it can have control over only through judging. The irony is that only when the mind’s power is focused from that conscious place or awareness without judging, only then can we feel in our entire being the event of our sameness, that we’re all one. Not as an idea that the mind can romanticize about, write poetry, plays,songs, religions about, but rather as a known sensation that we feel when we are being love. (I have nothing against poetry, songs, etc…all story telling by the mind that glorifies in the best sense of the word our ability to love. The paradox is that while the mind can speak about it, paint it, sing of it, etc…it can’t, with its ‘power’ ever really know it…as in ‘define it,’ but can only experience it in the surrender to ‘being,’ and not the obsession of ‘doing.’)

In that our minds use such a small portion of our brain and ninety-nine percent of the time use it to create the illusion of power, it is therefore understandable that we would navigate our way though the crowd that is our fellow man and, while paying heed to the fantasy of sameness, seek difference as a way to establish sameness. As opposed to not going the ‘judgment’ route and experiencing sameness, one-ness, God, love….in the way in which we are all irrevocably similar, beneath all the differences.

pmg

my date of birth. I feel good about this birthday.  ‘Chrystallia is coming along. ‘Hope sooner than later. I hate to be vague, but the further along in this process I get, the further there is to go. Which isn’t bad at all when you consider that process is everything and while the result may be gratifying, (or not) for my ego, the true joy is in the creating. Therefore, I am giving myself as much time as I need to get it right. I believe it is that valuable a story for us to share. So, please be patient.

I have also heard rumblings of my blogging habits. While I would very much like to accomodate a schedule of frequency, that’s not who I am. I write as it moves me, but I’m here and I know your there and I don’t have any plans on going anywhere. I’ll  not forget, but there’s every possibility that’ll I’ll be late, (or early, depending on the person).

See that? Pretty fast, huh?

So I’m wondering about how living things communicate. There’s definitely an exchange in vibration that occurs, Then there are sounds created and languages formed of those sounds.

Different languages. The languages create sounds of their own as they’re interpreted in so many ways through so much emotion. The complexity of language is a mirror to the complexity of our emotions. It’s also the way in which we try to learn to listen to what we mean when we say  what we say.

In a room filled with English speaking people from a block on the street you grew up on, the appearance of communication on so many levels is, in truth, gratifying for a fleeting moment. Then your auditory senses immediately upload to the keenest level of their ability to read intention, fear, or seduction in a voice. Because one word can be said so, so many ways. You may not know what you’re hearing subconciously.

Interesting notion; the sound(s) we do not hear…or don’t think we hear and most of the time don’t even listen for. Its  like ‘the tree falls in the forest…’…if you don’t see it happen, or hear it happen, then…did it happen at all?

I believe it happened, even if only as far as an idea happens. At least on this dimension, we know that an idea is energy that is manifested in an electrical pulse organized by your brain so that you can quantify the ‘reality’ of the ideas’ existence, or do everything in your power to deny it even exists.

In other words, all existence being composed of thought/consciousness, having a thought, or an idea is to even the smallest degree a cognisant manifestation of energy. It exists.

Anything the human mind can imagine exists on some dimension. Why? Because we’re all part of the whole of everything, which at our most primal level we know to be true, because everything is part of us and we are part of everything.

However, it’s easier to find difference than similarity. We covet that person, color, occassion, smell, addiction to power who best mirrors ours. She’s our dream girl, he’s our dream boy…Ken and Barb….

We spend the majority of our energy finding our differences. Why? Because first of all, our mind believes it is important. Very important. “I like to smell the leather before I buy it,” it says with heartfelt sincerity and believing every word of it, proud to be in control of everything everywhere, or at least proud to think that it could be in control….

It’s very comforting for the mind to apply differences. It’s right in its wheelhouse. And there’s so much to do! So many evaluations and definitions, likes, dislikes, do’s, don’ts,  this ‘type’ of person to love, that to hate. Learn as much as we can so we can someday bring Mother Nature to our knee,…I mean, there’s a lot and still more! The sky? The universe is the limit!

This is the way the mind thinks and does everything in it’s power to support and recreate that illusion that it can do anything, know anything…even when the fact that our bodies fail us and we leave this life still lurks in the shadows of our mind, always threatening to come out.

Difference to the mind isn’t candy. It’s heroin. To find similarity is, as far as the all powerful mind is concerned, is counter productive…(I’d say ‘counter-intuitive’ except the mind…yours and mine, has very strict rules regarding intuition, or sixth sense and quickly relegates all of that ‘unknowable’ stuff to the category of ‘what we’ll master some day, eventually’…control,control,control).

To find similarity, the mind must find how another mind is similar and the result is usually a perceived complete likeness, a la the love story of all time and the ensuing and all consuming drive to identify anything or anybody that threatens what the mind has interestingly identified as our ‘unique similarity,’ and either change them or own them and do what  you will with them.

Because the mind does not really like similarity, especialy similarity with seniority. the mind’s very existence, as far as it knows is entirely dependent on its ability to control, know,  be able to find, build, destroy, grow, and even approximate love is within its reach. There is no reason to ‘not know.’

Interesting that my mind would think of there being ‘no reason to not know.’ Interesting in that it seeks a ‘reason,’ as if knowing or not knowing is part of its kingdom.

Especially reading this, you get a good sense of how devious the mind can be. It can’t sit still. ‘Hates anthything it cannot sense, measure and control and therefore either subtley or overtly defends against it.

And how lucky are we that we have this thing called ‘consciousness?’ Where we can sit back and watch the show, take in a film.’This is your life__________________________  (Did you fill in  your name?)

We have this amazing ability to watch ourselves exist. See ourselves, hear ourselves, watch ourselves feel, and think. We have this clear, clear window into our mind that we can choose to look through or not. We can see and feel what feels good and what doesn’t, what is  our fear, to experience our courage and find compassion for ouerselves in our struggle and compassion for (yes, similarity) our selves in others.

There it is again: We’re all one.

To be conscious is, in truth to be with God, truth, love. It is our most sacred gift recieved from our own great power of consciousness and we have an obligation to pursue it, know it, and yes, love it. An obligation to our selves and everything that is a part of our selves, and all that is a part of everything that is.

pmg

Contemplate that. Everything is apart of me and I am a part of everything. (Don’t read any further. Just take a moment and contemplate that thought.  See where it takes you.)

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I like the act of contemplation, where you can allow yourself to let go of the where and when of it all and just sit with a thought and the endless broods of thoughts that come with it.

Another favorite contemplation is:  Find that place where thought becomes matter.

The only thing I can absolutely, positively and completely promise you is this; when you contemplate that place where thought becomes matter…you ARE in that place, you ARE the place.

We say one thing, mean another, describe one thing, ask another. We rarely reread what we have said, or if we do our eyes play tricks on us and our minds, thinking that we have already read this fails to really see what it is we’re really saying…or in some cases, asking. The fact that we have chosen the words and say/write them as we do and this act creates a window into our person… conveniently escapes us.

But we’re visible.

The computer, the act of communicating by word through air doesn’t really remove our vulnerability or visibility. It just creates that illusion. An illusion that we mistakenly inerpret as strength. So ironic, that we try to experience ‘strength’ in the fantasy of a non-intrusive, non-intimate relationship.

So what are we looking for? When we say our ‘hellos’ and communicate our woes, write our headlines? What are we doing in this act of communication?

Trying o identify ourselves in terms of what we believe, know, have determined to be true?

However, we need someone there to communicate to and back with, someone in whom we can find ourselves, see ourselves mirrored beyond our standard humanoid features. Someone who is ‘like’ us. We like to memorialize our similarity by defining rules, rights, wrongs, what’s true, what isn’t, what’s acceptible, what isn’t. We take comfort in our similarity, we celebrate it by  flying flags, singing songs, worshipping agreed upon deities. We take care to teach our children to do the same.

In the name of what? Peace, Love, Contentment….Heaven? And the thing that’s going to get us there is what? Our ability to recreate that which we believe to be true? Our ability to control our lives and teach our children to control theirs? There are rules and they must be adhered to or else the ‘big bogeyman’…Mr. Fear, is going to eat you alive, forever…eternal damnation.

We know that adherence to the ‘rules’ is something we can control, so ‘control’ becomes the optimum condition, or status, and is equated with security, comfort, nurturing…no fear, no fear, no fear.

The problem occurs when things happen that we can’t control, when our minds/egos are submitted to the naked horror that there are things that we can’t control.

Our first reaction, either conscious or sub-conscious may be to rationalize that the ‘idea’ of controlling everything is absurd; obviously one can’t control everything we generously admit to ourselves while secretly harboring the believe that if we hold tight enough onto the illusion of power thru control, immortality will be ours.

There is one little thing, though.

Death.

Yup. We’re powerless over that. Big problem. Our minds’ first reaction is to try harder and so we hone our skills, (which are considerable) of denial. We become so good at denial that  we are even able to deny that we are in denial. Not everybody is in denial. Are they?Are they?

All of this thinking and over analying instead of just trusting what  you’ve been told.  Why complicate things? Not everybody has to see it your way. I don’t have to believe what you believe. Believe me, I know what I believe.

Remember that cousin to control; ‘belief?’  We seem to put more emphasis on ‘the act of believing,’ of commiting to ‘belief’  because we are told therein is our salvation, than to listening, really listening to our selves? Why?

Because  if we really listen to ourselves, there are some questions that have no answer…and our minds/egos abhor not having an answer….or at least the promise of an answer. (Call that ‘faith?).’

The fear that visits us in our dreams and our very private moments, or more dramatically in catachlism is to be avoided at all costs, even if you have to deny that fear is there at all?

Why do we go to horror films?  What is it that we are able to experience in the relative safety of a dark theatre that bears a striking resemblance to this  deep-down primal fear within us?

However, outside the theatre, it’s daylight and other people are walking around getting somewhere and there’s no place for fear out here. Not in a safe, comfortable society, right?

Before we know it, we’re in a traffic jam, we’re late, one of the kids is coming down with a nasty cold…you shouldn’t have even brought him to the movie and now you can’t control that he’s getting sick and will likely get everybody in the family sick….and doctor’s bills, missed work…nothing that we have control over. Why? What’s wrong with us? Are we weak? Stupid?

So we get angry with ourselves, but we can’t bear looking at what we’re angry about, (no control), so we get angry at others; for reminding us that we are feeling out of control. Or we become envious, or jealous, spiteful, hurtful, lose our feelings of insufficiency in eating, drinking to much, collecting and exercising power, …there are so, so many intricate and subtle ways our minds continue to glue together the experiences of our lives to help us avoid our fear. There are whole studies, schools of thought, phd’s, licenses provided to identify those that have become a mainspring in our society’s quest to better itself.

So, along comes someone who basically says what the very first caravans meeting in the Euphrates valley at the onset of worldly communication said after the necessary inspection that each was indeed human and not out to eat the other…tonight:  This is what I see, this is what I feel, this is what I think about, this is what my experience has meant to me, this is how I hurt, feel joy, feel pain and fear…what about you?

Well all’s fine as long as we stick to the rules. You can talk about all those other feelings with varying degrees of sensitivity as to who you show them to…however, fear …..we are very careful about how we even raise the issue. We have created whole mythologies built on belief that we can overcome fear. Our sports ethic is a test of how well we can maintain control, not succumb to your fear.

Talk about fear? Outside the accepted ways and means? Imply that because I feel fear that others must?

I’m not assuming that anybody has the same fears as I, except for one; fear of no control over mortality. That seems to be the human condition. A condition we all journey with.

And please know that I have no intention of claiming ‘the truth.’ I am claiming  A truth…that I have experienced, and upon examination seems to emanate from all humans.

Agree with me, or disagree…please. I’d only ask that you maintain your curiosity about the way that  you agree or disagree. It has nothing to do with how good or bad you or I may seem to the other. Even if we practice curiosity in the privacy of our minds, we may get a glimpse or two into how we really feel, or why we act as we do. Again, no judgment, because,whatever we find, we have the ability to remind ourselves that we are able to find it in others.

I am constantly astounded at the ways in which I go blind, in which denial has it’s way with me, or my mind’s protection against my fear of no control. Humbled beyond words.

pmg