by Mary Oliver
I looked up and there it was
among the green branches of the pitchpines –thick bird,
a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders and down the back –color of copper, iron, bronze –
lighting up the dark branches of the pine.What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.When I made a little sound
it looked at me, then it looked past me.Then it rose, the wings enormous and opulent,
and, as I said, wreathed in fire.
by Kathleen Stilwell
January 6, 2019
“The beyond is not what is infinitely remote,
but what is nearest at hand.”
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
You told me you don’t know where you are going, but soon you will know.
It’s too late to worry about such things anyway, you said. You are content with allowing the next adventure unfold in the same way your life did here.
Maybe we never need to know where we are going, because we are never really here nor there. And wherever we go, there we are. That sort of thing.
You know what I’m saying. If we know who we really are, wherever we find ourselves we will eventually do just fine.
I can feel you smiling as I sit here talking in circles. You pointed that out once. I follow every declared certainty with a question that challenges its certainty. I can’t let myself get away with thinking I know something, after all. What would be the fun in that?
You’ve stood by me as I repeated the same life lessons of the heart over and over. You know this describes me to a T and you’ve loved me anyway:
“I never make the same mistake twice.
I make it five or six times, just to make sure.”
~ Source unknown
This knowing we don’t know has been one of our strongest bonds as friends. We have always laughed at ourselves, at our endless questions, at our uncertainties, at our insecurities.
We’ve disagreed on many things over the years, but always things that never really seemed to matter outside of the moment. They were usually things about the structure of the external world or some perception of “reality”, and never about the need for and love of friends who genuinely care and will have our back when times get tough.
Dear loving friend, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out you’ve decided to try out being a fire bird for a while, letting your flaming body burn away any falseness from this world that tried to attach itself but was never really you. I wonder if that’s what you’ve been doing during these recent days of deep sleep as you slowly make adjustments for your shift.
You’ve been up to something for sure, and it’s undoubtedly something remarkable.
When you and your body part company, maybe you’ll just swim away, going deeper into a cosmic sea. You’ll be a lovely mermaid on an uncharted adventure, happy to forget for a while that you ever wondered who you were or where you are.
Or maybe you’ll become that magnificent red dragon you’ve been creating in fabric art. You’ll fly and fly and fly to your heart’s content. You’ll keep on flying until your soul calls you to a place that feels just like home.
But, then again, maybe the mermaid will decide to leave the sea for a while and be companion to the red dragon, learning to breathe in a new way, feeling the exhilaration of soaring through a different kind of sea.
Of course, there’s always that important question of whether or not you are really going anywhere. Maybe there never has been a veil between the worlds and we’ve always just needed to reset our reality detectors and clear the foggy lenses on our spirit eyes.
“Death is not extinguishing the light;
it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore
I remember, back in the day, when we talked about lifting that imaginary veil together. You on one side and me on the other. Of course, it wouldn’t work if we died at the same time. We could see ourselves using some sort of hocus pocus to break through something that seemed so dense, only to burst into laughter when we realized we could have walked right through it at any time.
We humans are so awkward about death. In rebellion against a culture that turned a sacred mystery into something to fear, we keep reaching for better language to pull us closer to what we imagine is really happening. We now pass over, we transition, we go back to source, and so on.
But we also die. We die in much the same way that we die every day, in the way the teenager dies to give way to the adult who insists on bursting out of the cocoon that ties him or her to youth.
I remember how, when Lukas was a child, I would long to keep a copy of him exactly as he was. Each moment was so perfect. His heart, his soul, his body. Every word he said, every movement he made. Yet I could never want him not to change. Each night the child I touched and loved would go to sleep and would awaken in the morning a new being. My beautiful son could never stay the same, nor could he stay near me when it was time for him to go away.
None of us can ever stay the same. Only love remains to remind us of how we know one another and what connects us.
We are all adventurers by nature. Fear might tell us we can’t survive death, but we’ve been surviving death from the moment we were born. Each new breath comes only as the old breath moves on. The old dies to the new but who we are remains in love — outside of life and death.
Some face the death of their body in resistance. They agree to cooperate only when they find themselves kicked out the door of this limited hangout. They are pushed or pulled into a new experience, ready or not.
But you, dear sister, have been ready for a very long time.
From the moment we first met those many years ago, you’ve talked about wanting to leave the planet, not via death but just wanting to leave all this behind. There are many, many here who share your sentiments. We all want to co-create a better world and there is talk everywhere about raising consciousness and awakening.
For a while now, you’ve sensed you were dying and, thus, in typical Patti style, took the bull by the horns and started seriously planning to leave.
You joked recently about all the lists and how-to notes you’ve written for your dear husband, Tom, to read when you are gone, because you worry he’ll be lost without you.
Tom, in humor blended with loving awareness and deep sadness, explained these are not just simple instructions, but details on how to handle every aspect of life, including the specific care of each room in the house. Volumes and volumes of practical advice from a woman who never could make heads nor tails of this crazy world.
But, you have been, beautiful soul, always organized in a way that escapes me.
Even when you were deeply depressed, you were organized. And, even when you were depressed, you could create gorgeous works of art. Even when you were depressed, you would reach out your hand to a friend or family member and welcome them in for coffee or wine or one of your delicious homemade meals or desserts.
Yes, in addition to being the most organized person I’ve ever known, you are a brilliant fabric artist, kindest of friends, magical “green thumb” organic gardener, wonderful cook and baker, lover of all animals and rescuer of several dozen stray cats over the years.
As you begin your passing, beautiful Patricia, our hearts are overwhelmed and our eyes flow with tears. We have no way of fully explaining why. Certainly, we will miss you, but the tears are much more than personal sorrow.
The tears flow as if from the deepest rivers beneath the earth, which carry the tears of our ancestors and of children yet to be born. They are tears of joy, of sadness, of deep gratitude, and they flow as sacred waters from a love without end.
The mystery and the love of who you really are and of what is happening right now are too deep to be defined. We are experiencing something breathtaking, a mystery and love that holds us in awe and we feel to the core of our being, yet cannot explain.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
~ Maya Angelou
Dear sweet soul, you and Tom have both always made me feel welcome, and not only welcome, but treasured as friend.
That’s a very profound thing in this world. To feel welcome. To be treasured. To be able to show up just as we are with no need for pretense.
I will always remember how you reached out your hand to me when my personal world was rocky and I had some soul searching to do about my own mistakes. We barely knew one another but you cared and, therefore, you intuitively reached out. Regardless of the physical distance between us, you’ve been there at my side, as my dear sister, ever since.
You, Tom and I have shared many wonderful times together. Most of them have been come-as-you-are parties where we just showed up, talked, shared food and wine, laughed, listened, sometimes cried, and learned more than we could ever say.
How do we ever thank those who show up in kindness, courage and love? There is no greater gift on the earth than a genuine caring heart. You and Tom have both been the truest of friends to me.
My precious friend, I am eternally grateful that you showed up and shared your heart and unwavering friendship with me.
“There is a sacredness in tears.
They are not a mark of weakness, but of power.
They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues.
They are the messengers of overwhelming grief,
of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.”
~ Washington Irving
As these days of your passing unfold, the tears that we share with you seem to flow from the depths of our being. They are tears of love, of awe, of gratitude, of mystery, of cleansing, of letting go and of holding on to all that is eternal. They are tears of knowing how deeply you are loved and will always be loved.
There’s nothing for you to soothe away or rescue here now, but there’s also no holding back our tears.
Go now with love under your wings, a John Denver song in your heart (yes, I remember he is your favorite), and have the time of your life.
Added 1/12/2019
Beautiful Patricia made her exit from this world on January 12, 2019.
The same deep love that escorted her in, escorted her out.
I heard the waters splash as she dove deeply into her new life.
I stand here now in her wake, feeling love for us all wash over me.
This article may be freely shared as long as the text is unaltered and the original author, Kathleen Stilwell, is clearly identified with a hyperlink back to the original article.
by Jon Rappoport
September 27, 2018
Source
The taboo against paranormal experience is a taboo against freedom
For those who want to examine a rigorous presentation of the paranormal, based on a long history of laboratory experiments, I recommend Dean Radin’s classic, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. (HarperCollins, 1997)
This article is not about that.
It’s about a taboo.
On the one side, we have people who denigrate the possibility of the paranormal. On the other side, we have people who, ungrounded in the physical world, try to stage what amounts to a paranormal escape operation, only to fall back into their increasingly chaotic circumstances.
In the middle are persons who have genuinely experienced the paranormal, know it, feel no obsession to shout it from the rooftops, and go on with their lives.
With the rapid decay of organized religion throughout the 20th century, huge numbers of people felt a need to attach themselves to new and old ideologies proclaiming The Extraordinary was at hand. Assertions of paranormal import accompanied this faux revolution.
At the same time, 20th-century life was shaping up in a world of National Security States, and was all about citizen behaviorism, repression, operant conditioning, and various forms of mind control—aimed at curtailing the freedom to experience whatever might lie beyond the prescriptions and slogans of governments.
What exists outside a psychic prison defined by rabid consumerism, limited and false science, and pressure from peers to accept idealized and cartoonish middle-class imagery without question, without deviation?
What is paranormal?
Is it, in childhood, an ecstatic hour’s walk through a park on a summer afternoon, when every leaf, flower, and cloud is irresistible? When space itself is so present that every shred and iota of anxiety or confusion disappears?
Is it the foreshadowing moment when you know what a person is going to say next, how he is going to say it, how he is going to move, how he is going to look as he says it?
Is it the sudden realization that the entire realm and round of emotions you have been experiencing has vanished, leaving in its place an escalating joy that can’t be contained?
Is it in standing at a window, late at night, looking out at a city, possessed of a vision of what you most profoundly want to do for the rest of your life, realizing that you will, in fact, do it?
Is it in standing in a room, where a researcher is showing you a pack of photos, one of which a person, in another room, six miles away, has just tried to send you, telepathically—and knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt which photo it is?
Is it in getting out of bed in the morning and becoming aware that you, non-material you, exist forever?
Is it in watching a cat walk away from you, across a carpet, sending him a silent message to roll over, and watching him do it?
Is it in the easy and majestic silence you feel, after sitting on the floor and breathing in and out for a half-hour?
Is it in your child’s face?
The truth is, paranormal experiences are everywhere, and people have them. The experiences exceed the ordinary boundaries material reality.
They tend to lead to a new view about life, and they certainly go beyond societal tenets about what one is supposed to know and feel.
And yes, the waters are muddied by people who feel compelled to chime in and report experiences they only wish they had, hoping for badges of honor. But no matter.
In certain respects, this is, in fact a prison planet. Through upbringing, education, peer pressure, training, indoctrination, propaganda, citizens are expected to maintain “normal status.”
Steady-state normal.
No leaking of fuel, no blowing of gaskets.
Functional.
People condition themselves with the goal of fitting in.
It’s a grand stage play, and one picks a role and lives it out.
But one day something happens, and if you admit it, everything has changed.
What then? Do you continue to obey and subscribe to the taboo?
Or confess that the true normal is paranormal?
Do you tighten your grip on the card that identifies you as a citizen of the realm? Or do you drop it in a waste basket?
Do you cling to the old? Or do you opt for possibilities wider than you previously imagined and shove in all your chips on a new life?
The taboo against the non-ordinary is as old as the hills. In many cases, the establishment was a State religion, and the priest-class labeled paranormal experiences heretical witchery. Why? Because, of course, free consciousness, unburdened of church doctrine, was a threat to priestly power.
Modern science, with ridicule as its primary method, attacks the paranormal because it cuts too close to home. It tends to expose what science cannot explain.
For example: freedom.
Nowhere in the lexicon of conventional physics is there room for such a concept. The predetermined and inexorable flow of tiny particles is assumed to be everywhere at all times, even in the composition of the brain…and therefore, all thought and feeling and action, which stem from the brain, are predetermined and inexorable as well.
No choice. No freedom.
The absurdity of this notion is plain to anyone who can think.
If the brain and the body are just another collection of sub-atomic particles, then the capacity to make a free and independent choice about anything is null and void—unless the entity doing the choosing, YOU, is beyond those particles, beyond matter and energy.
When I say paranormal experience is everywhere, this is what I mean. Freedom exists. Freedom is paranormal. It always was.
It takes a severely limited state of affairs not to recognize it.
It takes a long, long history of repressive societies not to recognize it.
It takes a considerable amount of indoctrination and mind control not to recognize it.
The notion that various key political documents established freedom is extremely short-sighted. Heroic though the efforts were, they only uncovered what was already there in a natural state.
That natural state is anything but normal. It speaks of the human ability to move out of the chain of cause and effect and make choices.
Changing lives, changing futures.
For most people, most of the time, the sense of their own freedom is a rather dull given. There is nothing thrilling about it. They choose A or B within a grossly limited context.
This fact is, in itself, an indication that a monitor has been placed on their own experience, on their own emotions.
If, however, this cover is blown, a transformation occurs; and then they know, in an entirely different way, that freedom is, and is supposed to be, the most natural kind of ecstasy in the world.
Paranormal.
by John Welwood
You are flawed,
you are stuck in old patterns,
you become carried away with yourself.
Indeed you are quite impossible in many ways.
And still, you are beautiful beyond measure.
For the core of what you are is fashioned out of love,
that potent blend of openness, warmth,
and clear, transparent presence.
by John Welwood
Forget about enlightenment.
Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, and the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be.
Not the saint you’re striving to become.
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You’re already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out, touch in, let go.
Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.~Hafiz
from The Subject Tonight is Love, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Forgiveness is the cash you need.
All the other kinds of silver really buy just strange things.Everything has its music.
Everything has genes of God inside.
But learn from those courageous addicted lovers
of glands and opium and gold —
Look, they cannot jump high or laugh long
when they are whirling.
And the moon and the stars become sad
when their tender light is used for night wars.
Forgiveness is part of the treasure you need
to craft your falcon wings
And return to your true realm
of Divine freedom.
~Hafiz, in The Subject Tonight is Love, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
by Zen Gardner
June 2015
We’re at an amazing and empowering juncture in humanity’s history. For each of us individually now is always the most profound turning point, as each decision we take directs our next step. But collectively there are extremely significant eras or epochs during our development and now is one of them.
It is during these times that a major conflux of influences takes place with which humanity is challenged to either respond according to natural instinctive and intuitive processes, or lie down and let whatever dominant forces at play take their course without resistance or conscious participation.
It is within such turbulent times we now find ourselves as conditions intensify in conjunction with an ever growing collective awareness of the realities with which we are faced. This trend towards higher vibrational realizations in the face of previous paradigms of control and subjugation now dismantling before our eyes is what we loosely term the awakening.
What is peculiar to this later stage we’re experiencing is the accelerating rate of unforeseen types of change we are embarking upon. And not only are our personal perspectives changing at an exponential rate both individually and collectively, but the outside realities that influence our lives at every level are also undergoing massive shifts affecting our evolving perspective.
Quite a fluid and potentially disconcerting mix.
What does this mean for us? As old paradigms crumble before our eyes, only a higher vibrational conscious awareness observing these dynamic interactions from a detached perspective will see clearly what is truly transpiring around us. This enables us to perceive clearly as well as respond consciously to these otherwise confusing shifting sands of changing perspectives and morphing realities. This increased divergence between those awakening and an increasingly comatose majority is both a wonderful opportunity as well as potential death knell, depending on our personal response.
This may sounds like a mouthful but bear with me; we’re undergoing conscious fluid dynamics such as humanity has never experienced before.
For awakened psychonauts traversing this ephemeral existence and longing to fulfill our role to help manifest Universal harmony via this ongoing revelation of Truth, there are very practical steps for each of us to take. This path cannot be taught, the mechanics are not set, and the personal method for navigating this maze is nothing less than experiential as well as deeply esoteric.
Yet all the while extremely practical.
This of course is all by design, as only a heart led soul can navigate its way through such a life experience and discover the many wonderful secrets patiently awaiting revelation. So called reason and mind understandings soon give way to much deeper levels of experiential knowledge that begin to direct our thoughts and actions.
Dispassionate arrows pointing the way borne out of sincere seeking appear along the path as hints to the awakening soul. Anyone or anything attempting to define the nature of what we seek is soon unmasked and eventually shunned by the awake and aware traveler who realizes the Unnamed awaits a much deeper level of realization, not a finite definition. We each find out we discover what we will by profound personal existential experience – never rote, dogmatic, hierarchical, defined or limiting categorizations and linguistic definitions.
Into this vortex of eternal knowing we march unafraid. But herein lies a major clue as to our role. If we are determined, sincere and well aware we are essentially empty vessels in this great play, within this understanding we’ll surely find what we should, and meaningful and profoundly effective courses of action soon appear as we continue this noble pursuit.
One very interesting question begins to arise and crystalize at this point. Once we’re locked into this search and commitment meets lifestyle and our voice becomes that of Truth and change, what role do we play? What and whom is Universe ultimately releasing in these living, confident voices actively interacting with the world around us in a continued unveiling of our true, inner truth-imbued selves?
I’m convinced we are evolving not only into a greater awakened and empowered state, but one of tremendous release of a new sense of identity as our unlimited talents and potential manifest. Be it for the revealing of empowering truths, spiritual and physical healing, or the immediate use of etheric powers for particular situations, the awakening warriors are commissioned to imbue others with a contagious sense of empowerment and confidence.
This time of manifesting is not only at hand, but now upon us.
It is a choice to step into these roles as those empowering this transformation. You know who you are. Should anyone seek such spiritual gifts and power for their own selfish benefit they are clearly not among those called as such. For those unawakened to the full sense of unselfish love this can be a stumbling stone, as power tempts and tests the best of us. It’s a fundamental filtration and purification process we all pass through. But keep going.
These “next generations” of spiritual and even physically empowered beings are not only coming, but already amongst us. And what activates them? Knowing – some call it faith – not belief or hope or any over spiritualized distraction. It’s a fact of which you are intuitively certain. More profoundly, we are now living in an epoch of awakening where such activation is desperately needed, and to my way of understanding, it is therefore available. The even more stark reality is that it is you and I who are next in line to step into this role. For the good of all.
It is no small thing and it will likely cost your life. But doesn’t any form of living cost your life? Why not live it to the full for something with profound meaning and importance for the good of all? As far as I’m concerned anyone with any sense of conviction that’s worth their salt has already crossed that irreversible rubicon. Even more directly, giving our all towards truth and right is what is immediately needed to remedy the dire circumstances that have been foisted on humanity that threaten our very existence.
This inherent urgency makes such seemingly drastic decisions to activate and take on the role of the conscious warrior a pretty easy choice in my book.
Moving into a new life is least of all physical. It is a process that begins in the heart and mind. Once the lower self is convinced by higher influences of greater realities and potential life paths, decisions naturally unfold and our ships start to turn. It takes miles for a freighter or cruise ship to come about in its course. What is amazing is how the rudder works on an incredibly small fulcrum, much like the switch of our personal will, which literally creates a vacuum that draws the mightiest of ships into a consciously steered course.
We’re each endowed with something so seemingly small yet boundlessly powerful called the majesty of free will that can activate and steer these massive ships called our lives embodies the magnificence of the human experience. In the shipping industry these tiny rudders that in turn move the larger ones are called “trim tabs”.
This for me is perhaps the most empowering metaphor there is that encourages personal activism and dispels all the blockages the naysaying, doubting mind and all of the inhibiting social conditioning memes thrown at us over the course of our lives.
You have a vision. As an individual or as a family, maybe you wish to communicate something about a burden you have. You care. You love. Maybe your concern is to find a cure for breast cancer. Maybe to save the whales. Or maybe it’s your church and you want to see people involved with your church’s mission. You want to build community around your vision with others that share that vision. And you want to see change because of this burden you carry in your heart. So you want a web site out there but you think you will be lost in all the web pages that are already out there. That isn’t necessarily true.
I like the quote from Buckminster Fuller:
Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.
It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, call me Trim Tab. (Source)
This is a very fresh and even raw revelation for me personally. Although I’ve known it intellectually for a very long time and it has directed my life to a massive degree over the years, it has never been as profound as this current stage of my life. I’ve often said, “If you’re not free to follow life’s signs and live in synchronicity, you’re not free”, and I’ve done my best to live by those words, as far as I could see. As my life has unfolded this has become more and more real, profound and somewhat disconcerting as each new phase revealed itself to me as I was guided, as well as prodded, to move on to the next level.
But the switch lays with me.
This has ultimately led to the realization I’m sharing here, that this activation is our true destination: in other words, being the warriors we were clearly called to be from birth. I know many of you will attest to this same innate conviction. It’s often labelled as a “calling” which is very interesting in itself, but it is a very apt term as it draws us, ever so gently usually but occasionally quite insistently, as I feel the case is right now for a large number of us.
We’re at the point of a kind of insistence by Universe. I know it’s not only me experiencing this compelling. And if you haven’t yet sensed it and you are called, you soon will be more or less confronted in some way. Words are like levers that open gates and doors, and this message just may be your gateway to recognizing the role you are intended to play and perhaps bolster your conviction regarding what you already know in your heart but are not yet allowing to be fully realized in your life.
It’s time for us all to step up.
In summary may I paraphrase, “Let those that have ears to hear, hear….and activate.”
It’s time to step into the role for which we came into this world.
Love and empowerment always,
Zen
Zen Gardner is an impactful and controversial author and speaker with a piercing philosophical viewpoint. His writings have been circulated to millions and his personal story has caused no small stir amongst the entrenched alternative pundits. His book You Are the Awakening has met rave reviews and is available on amazon.com. You Are the Awakening examines the dynamics of the awakening to a more conscious awareness of who we are and why we are here – dynamics which are much different from the programmed approach of this world we were born into.
by Alan Watts
transcript from an old radio presentation by Alan Watts
courtesy of Progress. Not Perfection
We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat. These people, usually of enormous creative power, are the envy of us all, and, by and large, man’s religions are attempts to cultivate that same power in ordinary people. Unfortunately, they often go about this task as one would attempt to make the tail wag the dog. I remember that when I was a small boy in school, I was enormously interested in being able to do my schoolwork properly. Everyone told me that I did not work hard enough, that I ought to work harder, but when I asked, “How do you work?” everybody shut up.
I was extremely puzzled. There were teachers who apparently knew how to work and who had attained considerable heights of scholarship. I thought that maybe I could learn “the secret” by copying their mannerisms. I would affect the same speech and gestures and, insofar as I could get around the school uniform, even clothing. (This was a private school in England, not a public school in America.)
None of this revealed the secret. I was, as it were, copying the outward symptoms and knew nothing of the inner fountain of being able to work. Exactly the same thing is true in the case of people who love. When we study the behavior of people who have the power of love within them, we can catalogue how they behave in various situations, and out of this catalogue formulate certain rules.
One of the peculiar things we notice about people who have this astonishing universal love is that they are often apt to play it rather cool on sexual love. The reason is that for them an erotic relationship with the external world operates between that world and every single nerve ending. Their whole organism—physical, psychological, and spiritual—is an erogenous zone. Their flow of love is not channeled as exclusively in the genital system as is most other people’s. This is especially true in a culture such as ours, where for so many centuries that particular expression of love has been so marvelously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable. We have, as a result of two thousand years of repression, “sex on the brain.” It’s not always the right place for it.
People who exude love are in every way like rivers—they stream. And when they collect possessions and things that they like, they are apt to give them to other people. (Did you ever notice that when you give things away, you keep getting more? That, as you create a vacuum, more flows in?)
Having noticed this, the codifiers of loving behavior write that you should give tax deductible institutions and to the poor, and should be nice to people, that you should act towards your relatives and friends and indeed even enemies as if you loved them (even if you don’t). For Christians and Jews and believers in God, there is a peculiarly difficult task enjoined upon us; namely, that “thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” not only going through the motions externally, but with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And that is, of course, very demanding indeed.
It is as if, for example, we admired the music of a certain composer and, having studied his style very thoroughly, we drew up rules of musical composition based upon the behavior of this composer. We then send our children to music school where they learn these rules in the hope that if they apply them, they will turn into first-class musicians, which they usually fail to do. Because what might be called the technique of music—as the technique of morals, as well as the technique of speech, of language—is very valuable because it gives you something to express. If you don’t have anything to say, not even the greatest mastery of English will long stand you in good stead.
So the question and the puzzle remain: You cannot imitate this thing . . . there is no way of “getting” it, and yet it is absolutely essential that we have it. Obviously, the human race is not going to flourish harmoniously unless we are able to love each other. The question becomes: How do you get it? Is it something that you simply have to contract, like measles? Or, as theologians say, is it “a gift of divine grace” which somehow is dished out to some but not to others? And if there is no way of getting divine grace by anything you do, as the Calvinists aver, then hadn’t we better just sit around and wait until something happens?
Surely, we can’t be left in that sort of hopeless situation. There must be some way of getting “grace” or “divine charity” or “divine love”—some sort of way in which we can, as it were, open ourselves so as to become conduit pipes for the flow. And so the more subtle preachers try to see if we can open ourselves and teach methods of meditation and spiritual discipline in hope that we can contact this power. The less subtle preachers say ‘you don’t have enough faith, you don’t have enough guts, you don’t have enough willpower…” If you only put your shoulder to the wheel and shoved you would be of course an exemplar and a saint. Actually, you will only be an extremely clever hypocrite.
The whole history of religion is the history of the failure of preaching. Preaching is moral violence. When you deal with the so-called practical world, and people don’t behave the way you wish they would, you get out the army or police force or “the big stick.” And if those strike you as somewhat crude, you resort to giving lectures—“lectures” in the sense of solemn adjuration and exhortation to “behave better next time.”
Many a parent says to the child, “Nice children love their mothers. And I’m sure you’re a nice child. You ought to love your mother, not because I, your mother, say so, but because you really want to do so.“ One of the difficulties here is that none of us, in our heart of hearts, respects love which is not freely given. For example, you have an ailing parent, and you are a son or daughter who feels dutifully that he should look after his parents because they’ve done so much for him. But somehow, your living with your father or mother prevents you from having a home and a life of your own, and naturally you resent it. Your parents are well aware that you resent this, even if they pretend to ignore it. They therefore feel guilty that they have imposed upon your loyalty. You in turn can’t really admit the fact that you resent them for getting sick, even though they couldn’t help it. And therefore no one enjoys the relationship. It becomes a painful duty to be carried out.
The same thing would naturally happen if, a number of years after having (at the altar) made a solemn and terrible promise that you would love your wife or husband come what may forever and ever “until death do you part,” suddenly you find that you really haven’t the heart to do it any more. Then you feel guilty, that you ought to love your wife and family.
The difficulty is this: You cannot, by any means, teach a selfish person to be unselfish. Whatever a selfish person does, whether it be giving his body to be burned, or giving all that he possesses to the poor, he will still do it in a selfish way of feeling, and with extreme cunning, marvelous self-deception, and deception of others. But the consequences of fake love are almost invariably destructive, because they build up resentment on the part of the person who does the fake loving, as well as on the part of those who are its recipients. (This may be why our foreign-aid program has been such a dismal failure.)
Now, of course, you may say that I am being impractical and might ask, “Well, do we just have to sit around and wait until we become inwardly converted to learn, through the grace of God or some other magic, how to love? In the meantime, do we do nothing about it, and conduct ourselves as selfishly as we feel?”
The first problem raised here is honesty. The Lord God says, at the beginning of things, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” What appears to be a commandment is actually a challenge, or what in Zen Buddhism is called a koan, a spiritual problem. If you exercise yourself resolutely, and try to love God or your neighbor, you will find that you get more tangled up. You will realize increasingly that the reason you are attempting to obey this as a commandment is that you want to be the right kind of person.
But love is not a sort of rare commodity—everybody has it. Existence is love. Everybody has the force running. Perhaps the way in which you find the force of love operating in you is as a passionate like for booze or ice cream or automobiles or good-looking members of the opposite sex, or even of the same sex. But love is operating there. People, of course, tend to distinguish between various kinds of love. There are “good” kinds, such as divine charity, and there are allegedly “bad” kinds, such as “animal lust.” But they are all forms of the same thing. They relate in much the same way as the colors of the spectrum produced by the passing light through a prism. We might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud’s libido, and the violet end of the spectrum of love is agape, the divine love or divine charity. In the middle, the various yellows, blues, and greens are as friendship, human endearment, and consideration.
Now it’s said that selfish people “love themselves.” I would say that that belies a misunderstanding of the whole thing: “yourself” is really something that is impossible to love. One obvious reason for this is that one’s self, when you try to focus on it to love it or to know it, it is oddly elusive.
Let me illustrate why. Once there was a fish who lived in the great ocean, and because the water was transparent, and always conveniently got out of the way of his nose when he moved along, he didn’t know he was in the ocean. Well, one day the fish did a very dangerous thing, he began to think: “Surely I am a most remarkable being, since I can move around like this in the middle of empty space.” Then the fish became confused because of thinking about moving and swimming, and he suddenly had an anxiety paroxysm and thought he had forgotten how. At that moment he looked down and saw the yawning chasm of the ocean depths, and he was terrified that he would drop. Then he thought: “If I could catch hold of my tail in my mouth, I could hold myself up.” And so he curled himself up and snapped at his tail. Unfortunately, his spine wasn’t quite supple enough, so he missed. As he went on trying to catch hold of his tail, the yawning black abyss below became ever more terrible, and he was brought to the edge of total nervous breakdown.
The fish was about to give up, when the ocean, who had been watching with mixed feelings of pity and amusement, said, “What are you doing?” “Oh,” said the fish, “I’m terrified of falling into the deep dark abyss, and I’m trying to catch hold of my tail in my mouth to hold myself up.” So the ocean said, “Well, you’ve been trying that for a long time now, and still you haven’t fallen down. How come?” “Oh, of course, I haven’t fallen down yet,” said the fish, “because, because–I’m swimming!” “Well,” came the reply, “I am the Great Ocean, in which you live and move and are able to be a fish, and I have given all of myself to you in which to swim, and I support you all the time you swim. Instead of exploring the length, breadth, depth, and height of my expanse, you are wasting your time pursuing your own end.” From then on, the fish put his own end behind him (where it belonged) and set out to explore the ocean.
Well, that shows one of the reasons it’s difficult to love yourself: Your “spine isn’t quite supple enough.”
Another reason is that “oneself,” in the ordinary sense of one’s ego, doesn’t exist. It seems to exist, in a way, in the sense that the equator exists as an abstraction. The ego is not a psychological or physical organ; it’s a social convention, like the equator, like the clock or the calendar, or like the dollar bill. These social conventions are abstractions which we agree to treat as if they did exist. We live in relation to the external world in just exactly the same way that one end of the stick exists in relation to the other end. The ends are indeed different, but they’re of the same stick.
Likewise, there is a polar relationship between what you call your “self” and what you call “other.” You couldn’t experience “other” unless you also had the experience of “self.” We might say that we feel that one’s “self” and the “other” are poles apart. Oddly, we use that phrase, “poles apart,” to express extreme difference. But things that are “poles apart” are poles of something, as of a magnet, or a globe, and so are actually inseparable. What happens if you saw the south pole off a magnet with a hacksaw? The new end, opposite the original north pole, becomes the south pole, and the piece that was chopped off develops its own north pole. The poles are inseparable and generate each other.
So it is in the relationship between the “self” and the “other.” Now if you explore what you mean when you say you “love yourself,” you will make the startling discovery that everything that you love is something that you thought was other than yourself, even if it be very ordinary things such as ice cream or booze. In the conventional sense, booze is not you. Nor is ice cream. It becomes “you,” in a manner of speaking, when you consume it, but then you don’t “have it” anymore, so you look around for more in order to love it once again. But so long as you love it, it’s never you. When you love people, however selfishly you love them (because of the pleasant sensations they give you), still, it is somebody else that you love. And as you inquire into this and follow honestly your own selfishness, many interesting transformations begin to occur in you.
One of the most interesting of these transformations is being directly and honestly “selfish.” You stop deceiving people. A great deal of damage is done in practical human relations by saying that you love people, when what you mean is that you ought to (and don’t). You give the impression, and people begin to expect things of you which you are never going to come though with.
You know of people to whom you say, “I like so-and-so, because with him or her, you always know where you are.” It’s impossible to impose on people like that. On the other hand, if you say, “Can I come and stay over night with you?” and they don’t want you, they’ll reply, “I’m, sorry, but I’m tired this weekend, and I’d rather not have you.” Or “Some other time.” Well, that’s very refreshing. If I feel the person hasn’t been quite honest with me, and I accept their hospitality, I’m always wondering if they would really prefer that I wasn’t there.
But one doesn’t always listen to one’s inner voice: we often pretend that it’s not there. That’s unfortunate, because if you don’t listen to your inner voice, you are not listening to your own wisdom and to your own love. You are becoming insensitive to it just as your hosts are trying to suppress the fact that, for the time being, they don’t want your presence. Likewise, let’s suppose that you are married and have an unwanted baby. It is profoundly disturbing to a child to have false love pretended to it. To begin with, the milk tastes wrong. The smell isn’t’ right. The outward gesture is “Darling, I love you,” but the smell is “You’re a little bastard and a nuisance.”
Very few of us can accept the idea that we don’t love our children, because it seems to be unnatural. We say that mother-love is the most beautiful an natural thing in the world. But it isn’t. It’s relatively rare, and if you don’t love your child, you confuse him or her. The child will respect you much more if you say, “Darling, you’re a perfect nuisance, but I will look after you because I have to.” Well, at least then everything is quite clear!
I found in personal relations of this kind a very wonderful rule: that you never, never show false emotions. You don’t have to tell people exactly what you think “in no uncertain terms,” as they say. But to fake emotions is destructive, especially in family matters and between husbands and wives or between lovers.
It always comes to a bad end. This, on the occasions when, for personal friends, I perform marriage ceremonies, instead of saying, “I require and charge you both that you shall answer in the dreadful Day of Judgment, etc., “I say, “I require and charge you both that you shall never pretend to love one another when you don’t.” This is a gamble. It is likewise a gamble to trust yourself to come though with love.
But there is really no alternative.
Now to trust oneself to be capable of love or to bring up love—in other words, to function in a sociable way and in a creative way—is to take a risk, a gamble. You may not come though with it. In the same way, when you fall in love with somebody else, or form an association with someone else, and you trust them, they may as a matter of fact not fulfill your expectations. But that risk has to be taken. The alternative to taking that risk is much worse than trusting and being deceived.
When you say, “I will not trust other people, and I will not trust myself,” what course remains? You have to resort to force. You have to employ stacks of policemen to protect you, and have to hold a club over yourself all the time, and say, “No, no. My nature is wayward, animal, perverse, fallen, grounded in sin.” What then happens? When you refuse to take the gamble of trusting yourself to be capable of love, you become, if you will excuse this extremely graphic but nevertheless relevant simile, like a person who cannot trust himself to have bowel movements. Many children learn this from parents who do not trust them, and think they ought to have these movements in rhythm with the clock, which is a different kind of rhythm from that of the organism. People who cannot trust themselves to do even this take laxatives endlessly, as a result of which their whole system gets fouled up.
Exactly the same thing happens with people who can’t trust themselves to go to sleep. They have to take all kinds of pills. And so also with people who can’t trust themselves to love, and have to take all sorts of artificial and surgical measures to produce the effect of love for saving face. They become progressively more incapable of loving at all, and they create turmoil and misunderstanding and chaos in themselves and others and society.
In other words, to live, and to love, you have to take risks. There will be disappointments and failures and disasters as a result of taking these risks. But in the long run it will work out.
My point is that if you don’t take these risks the results will be much worse than any imaginable kind of anarchy.
In tying up love in knots or in becoming incapable of it, you can’t destroy this energy. When you won’t love, or won’t let it out, it emerges anyway in the form of self-destruction. The alternative to self-love, in other words, is self-destruction. Because you won’t take the risk of loving yourself properly, you will be compelled instead to destroy yourself.
So, which would you rather have? Would you rather have a human race which isn’t always very well controlled, and sometimes runs amok a little bit, but on the whole continues to exist, with a good deal of honesty and delight, when delight is available? Or would you rather have the whole human race blown to pieces and cleaned off the planet, reducing the whole thing to a nice, sterile rock with no dirty disease on it called life?
The essential point is to consider love as a spectrum. There is not, as it were just nice love and nasty love, spiritual love and material love, mature affection on the one hand and infatuation on the other. These are all forms of the same energy. And you have to take it and let it grow where you find it. When you find only one of these forms existing, if at least you will water it, the rest will blossom as well. But the effectual prerequisite from the beginning is to let it have its own way.
An inspirational and profound speech from the late philosopher Alan Watts.
Original Audio sourced from: “Alan Watts – ‘Nature of Consciousness’ from Human Consciousness”
Produced and Edited by T&H Inspiration
Speech courtesy of alanwatts.org
by Hafiz, Persian lyric poet & mystic (1320 to 1389)
We
Are not
In pursuit of formalities
Or fake religious
Laws,For through the stairway of existence
We have come to God’s
Door.We are
People who need to love, because
Love is the soul’s life,Love is simply creation’s greatest joy.
Through
The stairway of existence,
O, through the stairway of existence, HafizHave
You now come,
Have we all now come to
The Beloved’s
Door.
from The Gift
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
by Zen Gardner
April 2013
There’s no looking for crowd validation. There’s no waiting for outside redemption. There’s no collective bargaining to rely on.
The awakening is you. Only you.
That’s what all this ruckus is about. The battle for your spirit and soul. And that’s the boat each of us is in. There is nothing more important in this life for you, or me, than waking up. Once that’s straightened out the rest will follow.
How we perceive the world around us creates and reinforces the world around us. Once we become conscious and aware that this existing matrix we’re witnessing is an arbitrary creation manipulated by power-crazed puppeteers, however you perceive them, that is when the change happens.
And the Universe will tell you what to do from there.
That’s what to respond to. Nothing else. That’s your job. That’s my job. Don’t shirk it when it happens.
Like me, you are sitting inside, or somewhat near anyway, the body you chose to be in. We’re looking through and freely operating these amazing biological machines on a fabulous planet. And, “Wow, there appears to be a whole lot of other beings like me walking around! Where am I? What am I here for? And what am I supposed to do?”
I know, jumped off the deep end there, but that’s exactly our predicament. And what immediately sets in once we arrive? As young children we have this abandon as we experience this incredible place and all its feelings, sights and sounds. We screech with delight, sing made up songs, swing our arms around wildly, and run in place. We just express!
Then what happens? We start to conform to what we’re seeing, as well as what we’re being told. We become more regimented and are herded into classrooms and categories. We start feeling social pressures and are then handed this fundamental doctrine of insecurity where fear and scarcity become our main drivers. Your purpose in life now is to “fit in and get a job” so you won’t run out of money or food. Your internal, conscious response? “This is strange. Everything’s a problem here. Sure didn’t feel that way when I arrived.”
The main trick of the illusory world around us is to make us think we’re somehow attached to it, and therefore dependent, and that we need to conform to this world we’re viewing. We tend to judge by the standards we’re exposed to, and act accordingly. We base our lives and actions around these perceived behavior patterns, which in turn gradually dull the voice of conscious awareness.
You might have noticed how blind people, such as entertainers Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, gesticulate totally freely, rocking their heads while singing or talking, and have wildly free facial expressions, almost as if they’re handicapped.
Obviously they’re not. But it strikes you. They’re free from visual conformity. They don’t know how everyone else acts. They’re free to physically express their emotions without having to conform to the suppressed, fearful conformist nature of our hung up society. They don’t know you don’t rock back and forth, shake your head and smile so broad your face almost cracks. How liberating!
And that principle can be applied across the board.
We judge so much by how we think it will measure up to the world around us rather than just express what we’re thinking and feeling openly. Whether with close friends and family, our peer group, or the message we pick up in public or from the media, we’re being programmed. Programmed to not respond to obvious needs, but to strange, shallow self-serving impulses.
Just like everyone else.
You can say that’s just natural, but it’s not. It’s induced behavior from a manipulated and self-regulating created collective. Natural for the matrix, but not for a conscious human being, especially when the crowd is clearly going the wrong way. But who’s looking when you’re sleep walking.
In the end most humans end up living a vicarious life, acting out the projection they think they’re supposed to live up to. That’s bondage. The yardstick is acceptance rather than truth or conscience. This is heavily reinforced through education, the media and the existing paradigm they’ve succeeded in creating. It appears to be the only option out there…but only to the unawakened.
But there’s a price to pay.
Everything. Waking up costs everything. So what? What are you saving up for? Aren’t you paying that price anyway even if you’re not waking up? Life always costs everything. You’ll leave here eventually, like me, and the cost will be your life. How did you spend it? Consciously, or trying to conform, and using that to hide behind to justify living as a comfortable, selfish, lazy brain donor to the system you’re too afraid to buck?
That’s the battlefield. You. Me. It goes no further. What we see playing out in the world is a bunch of you’s and me’s deciding if they’ll live consciously and truly respond to that still, small voice within them, or not. The sad reality is almost every one of them has been duped into being fixated on what all the other “me’s” are doing in order to keep up with the projected reality. It’s like a school of fish feverishly clinging together in response to a perceived predator.
The only thing is, for conscious, spiritual reality there is no predator. That’s the secret. We are eternal consciousness having an experience. The way to solve these problems is to re-create the perceived reality through conscious awareness and conscious actions.
We, individually, have to change first. We have to commit to consciousness, get free of entanglements and live a conscious life. The rest has little meaning until we get out of the matrix ourselves.
If each of us would get that message the phony world structure would crumble in a minute. Every soldier would drop his weapon and go home. Every politician would wake up as if out of a dream and go be with his family. Every policeman would lay down his gun, take off his uniform, and go help someone in need, smiling and greeting people on his way.
It’s you. It’s me. Your personal world and experience is the only one you’ll ever know. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Just let consciousness be your guide. But act on it.
And don’t fret too much about what it is you’re supposed to do. You’ll know it when you see it. It comes in the form of little things, little decisions, the rest follows. Learn to listen to that voice and act accordingly and it gets louder and louder.
Just walk away from what you know to be wrong, and do what you know to be right. It’s not that hard once you start. And again, once you get your boat in motion, the rudder will take effect.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu
…Now go for it. I can’t wait to hear about it!
Love, Zen
Zen Gardner is an impactful and controversial author and speaker with a piercing philosophical viewpoint. His writings have been circulated to millions and his personal story has caused no small stir amongst the entrenched alternative pundits. His book You Are the Awakening has met rave reviews and is available on amazon.com. You Are the Awakening examines the dynamics of the awakening to a more conscious awareness of who we are and why we are here – dynamics which are much different from the programmed approach of this world we were born into.
by Hafiz, Persian lyric poet & mystic (1320 to 1389)
How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?
It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,
Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened
from The Gift
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
by Robert Augustus Masters, PhD
originally published April 29, 2013
Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1984, is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is much more common than we might think and, in fact, is so pervasive as to go largely unnoticed, except in its more obvious extremes.
Part of the reason for this is that we tend not to have very much tolerance, both personally and collectively, for facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring pain-numbing “solutions,” regardless of how much suffering such “remedies” may catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely subtle.
Spiritual bypassing is a very persistent shadow of spirituality, manifesting in many ways, often without being acknowledged as such. Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s negativity or shadow elements, devaluation of the personal relative to the spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being.
The explosion of interest in spirituality, especially Eastern spirituality, since the mid-1960s has been accompanied by a corresponding interest and immersion in spiritual bypassing—which has, however, not very often been named, let alone viewed, as such. It has been easier to frame spiritual bypassing as a religion-transcending, spiritually advanced practice/perspective, especially in the facile fast-food spirituality epitomized by faddish phenomena like The Secret. Some of the more glaringly plastic features of this, such as its drive-through servings of reheated wisdom like “Don’t take it personally” or “Whatever bothers you about someone is really only about you” or “It’s all just an illusion,” are available for consumption and parroting by just about anyone.
Happily, the honeymoon with false or superficial notions of spirituality is starting to wane. Enough bubbles have been burst; enough spiritual teachers, Eastern and Western, have been caught with pants or halo down; enough cults have come and gone; enough time has been spent with spiritual baubles, credentials, energy transmissions, and gurucentrism to sense deeper treasures. But valuable as the desire for a more authentic spirituality is, such change will not occur on any significant scale and really take root until spiritual bypassing is outgrown, and that is not as easy as it might sound, for it asks that we cease turning away from our pain, numbing ourselves, and expecting spirituality to make us feel better.
True spirituality is not a high, not a rush, not an altered state. It has been fine to romance it for a while, but our times call for something far more real, grounded, and responsible; something radically alive and naturally integral; something that shakes us to our very core until we stop treating spiritual deepening as a something to dabble in here and there. Authentic spirituality is not some little flicker or buzz of knowingness, not a psychedelic blast-through or a mellow hanging-out on some exalted plane of consciousness, not a bubble of immunity, but a vast fire of liberation, an exquisitely fitting crucible and sanctuary, providing both heat and light for what must be done.
Most of the time when we’re immersed in spiritual bypassing, we like the light but not the heat, doing whatever we can to distance ourselves from the flames.
And when we’re caught up in the grosser forms of spiritual bypassing, we’d usually much rather theorize about the frontiers of consciousness than actually go there, sedating the fire rather than breathing it even more alive, espousing the ideal of unconditional love while not permitting love to show up in its more challenging, personal dimensions. To do so would be too hot, too scary, and too out-of-control, bringing things to the surface that we have long disowned or suppressed.
But if we really want the light, we cannot afford to flee the heat. As Victor Frankl said, “What gives light must endure burning.” And being with the fire’s heat doesn’t just mean sitting with the difficult stuff in meditation, but also going into it, trekking to its core, facing and entering and getting intimate with whatever is there, however scary or traumatic or sad or raw.
We have had quite an affair with Eastern spiritual pathways, but now it is time to go deeper. We must do this not only to get more intimate with the essence of these wisdom traditions beyond ritual and belief and dogma but also to make room for the healthy evolution, not just the necessary Westernization, of these traditions so that their presentation ceases encouraging spiritual bypassing (however indirectly) and, in fact, consciously and actively ceases giving it soil to flower. These changes won’t happen to any significant degree, however, unless we work in-depth and integratively with our physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and social dimensions to generate an ever-deeper sense of wholeness, vitality, and basic sanity.
Any spiritual path, Eastern or Western, that does not deal in real depth with psychological issues, and deal with these in more than just spiritual contexts, is setting itself up for an abundance of spiritual bypassing. If there is not sufficient encouragement and support from spiritual teachers and teachings for their students to engage in significant depth in psychoemotional work, and if those students who really need such work don’t then do it, they’ll be left trying to work out their psychoemotional issues, traumatic and otherwise, only through the spiritual practices they have been given, as if doing so is somehow superior to—or a “higher” activity than—engaging in quality psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is often viewed as an inferior undertaking relative to spiritual practice, perhaps even something we “shouldn’t” have to do. When our spiritual bypassing is more subtle, the idea of psychotherapy may be considered more acceptable but we will still shy away from a full-blooded investigation of our core wounds.
Spiritual bypassing is largely occupied, at least in its New Age forms, by the idea of wholeness and the innate unity of Being—“Oneness” being perhaps its favorite bumper sticker—but actually generates and reinforces fragmentation by separating out from and rejecting what is painful, distressed, and unhealed; all the far-from-flattering aspects of being human. By consistently keeping these in the dark, “down below” (when we’re locked into our headquarters, our body and feelings seem to be below us), they tend to behave badly when let out, much like animals that have spent too long in cages. Our neglect here of these aspects of ourselves, however gently framed, is akin to that of otherwise caring parents who leave their children without sufficient food, clothing, or care.
The trappings of spiritual bypassing can look good, particularly when they seem to promise freedom from life’s fuss and fury, but this supposed serenity and detachment is often little more than metaphysical valium, especially for those who have made too much of a virtue out of being and looking positive.
A common telltale sign of spiritual bypassing is a lack of grounding and in-the-body experience that tends to keep us either spacily afloat in how we relate to the world or too rigidly tethered to a spiritual system that provides the solidity we lack. We also may fall into premature forgiveness and emotional dissociation, and confuse anger with aggression and ill will, which leaves us disempowered, riddled with weak boundaries. The overdone niceness that often characterizes spiritual bypassing strands it from emotional depth and authenticity; and its underlying grief—mostly unspoken, untouched, unacknowledged—keeps it marooned from the very caring that would unwrap and undo it, like a baby being readied for a bath by a loving parent.
Spiritual bypassing distances us not only from our pain and difficult personal issues but also from our own authentic spirituality, stranding us in a metaphysical limbo, a zone of exaggerated gentleness, niceness, and superficiality. Its frequently disconnected nature keeps it adrift, clinging to the weight of its self-conferred spiritual credentials. As such, it maroons us from embodying our full humanity.
But let us not be too hard on spiritual bypassing, for every one of us who has entered into the spiritual has engaged in spiritual bypassing, at least to some degree, having for years used other means to make ourselves feel better or more secure. Why would we not also approach spirituality, particularly at first, with much the same expectation that it make us feel better or more secure?
To truly outgrow spiritual bypassing—which in part means releasing spirituality (and everything else!) from the obligation to make us feel better or more secure or more whole—we must not only see it for what it is and cease engaging in it but also view it with genuine compassion, however fiery that might be or need to be. The spiritual bypasser in us needs not censure nor shaming but rather to be consciously and caringly included in our awareness without being allowed to run the show. Becoming intimate with our own capacity for spiritual bypassing allows us to keep it in healthy perspective.
I have worked with many clients who described themselves as being on a spiritual path, particularly as meditators. Most were preoccupied, at least initially, with being nice, trying to be positive and nonjudgmental, while impaling themselves on various spiritual “shoulds,” such as “I should not show anger” or “I should be more loving” or “I should be more open after all the time I’ve put into my spiritual practice.” Fleeing their darker (or “less spiritual”) emotions, impulses, and intentions, they had, to varying degrees, trapped themselves within the very practices (and beliefs) that they had hoped might liberate them, or at least make them feel better.
Even the most exquisitely designed spiritual methodologies can become traps, leading not to freedom but only to reinforcement, however subtle, of the very “I” that wants to be a somebody who has attained or realized freedom (the very same “I” that doesn’t realize there are no Oscars for awakening). The most obvious potential traps-in-waiting include the belief that we should rise above our difficulties and simply embrace Oneness, even as the tendency to divide everything into positive and negative, higher and lower, spiritual and nonspiritual, runs wild in us. Subtler traps-in-waiting, less densely populated with metaphysical lullabies and ascension metaphors and far more discerning, teach non-aversion through cultivating a capacity for dispassionate witnessing and/or various devotional rituals. Subtler still are those that emphasize meeting everything with acceptance and compassion. Each approach has its own value, if only to eventually propel us into an even deeper direction, and each is far from immune to being possessed by spiritual bypassing, especially when we are still hoping, whatever our depth of spiritual practice, to reach a state of immunity to suffering (both personally and collectively).
As my spiritually inclined clients become more intimate with their pain and difficulties, coming to understand the origins of their troubles with a more open ear and heart, they either abandon their misguided spiritual practices and reenter a more fitting version of them with less submissiveness and more integrity and creativity or find new practices that better suit their needs, coming to recognize more deeply that everything—everything!—can serve their healing and awakening.
In the facing and outgrowing of spiritual bypassing, we enter a deeper life—a life of full-blooded integrity, depth, love, and sanity; a life of authenticity on every level; a life in which the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal are all honored and lived to the fullest.
Connect with Robert Augustus Masters
Cover image credit: CDD20
Source: Kent Nerburn
by Kent Nerburn
November 30, 2006
Giving is a miracle that can transform the heaviest of hearts. Two people, who moments before lived in separate worlds of private concerns, suddenly meet each other over a simple act of sharing. The world expands, a moment of goodness is created, and something new comes into being where before there was nothing.
Too often we are blind to this everyday miracle. We build our lives around accumulation- of money, of possessions, of status- as a way of protecting ourselves and our families from the vagaries of the world. Without thinking, we begin to see giving as an economic exchange- a subtracting of something from who and what we are- and we weigh it on the scales of self-interest.
But true giving is not an economic exchange; it is a generative act. It does not subtract from what we have; it multiplies the effect we can have in the world.
Many people tend to think of giving only in terms of grand gestures. They miss the simple openings of the heart that can be practiced anywhere, with almost anyone.
We can say hello to someone everybody ignores. We can offer to help a neighbor. We can buy a bouquet of flowers and take it to a nursing home, or spend an extra minute talking to someone who needs our time.
We can take ten dollars out of our pocket and give it to someone on the street. No praise, no hushed tones of holy generosity. Just give, smile and walk away.
If you perform these simple acts, little by little you will start to understand the miracle of giving. You will begin to see the unprotected human heart and the honest smiles of human happiness. You will start to feel what is common among us, not what separates and differentiates us.
Before long you will discover that you have the power to create joy and happiness by your simplest gestures of caring and compassion. You will see that you have the power to unlock the goodness in other people’s hearts by sharing the goodness in yours.
And, most of all, you will find the other givers. No matter where you live or where you travel, whether you speak their language or know their names, you will know them by their small acts, and they will recognize you by yours. You will become part of the community of humanity that trusts and shares and dares to reveal the softness of its heart.
Once you become a giver, you will never be alone.
by Maria Popova, the marginalian
July 17, 2017
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of solid ground. What then?
“In art,” Kafka assured his teenage walking companion, “one must throw one’s life away in order to gain it.” As in art, so in life — so suggests the American Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön.
In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library), she draws on her own confrontation with personal crisis and on the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to offer gentle and incisive guidance to the enormity we stand to gain during those times when all seems to be lost.
Half a century after Albert Camus asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Chödrön reframes those moments of acute despair as opportunities for befriending life by befriending ourselves in the deepest sense.
Writing in that Buddhist way of wrapping in simple language the difficult and beautiful truths of existence, Chödrön examines the most elemental human response to the uncharted territory that comes with loss or any other species of unforeseen change:
Fear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
This clarity, Chödrön argues, is a matter of becoming intimate with fear and rather than treating it as a problem to be solved, using it as a tool with which to dismantle all of our familiar structures of being, “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.” Noting that bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear, she writes:
When we really begin to do this, we’re going to be continually humbled. There’s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.
In essence, this is the hard work of befriending ourselves, which is our only mechanism for befriending life in its completeness. Out of that, Chödrön argues, arises our deepest strength:
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
[…]
Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
Decades after Rollo May made his case for the constructiveness of despair, Chödrön considers the fundamental choice we have in facing our unsettlement — whether with aggressive aversion or with generative openness to possibility:
Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
To stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic — this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation — harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.
Half a century after Alan Watts began introducing Eastern teachings into the West with his clarion call for presence as the antidote to anxiety, Chödrön points to the present moment — however uncertain, however difficult — as the sole seedbed of wakefulness to all of life:
This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us.
[…]
We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.
Remaining present and intimate with the moment, she argues, requires mastering maitri — the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness toward oneself, that most difficult art of self-compassion. She contrasts maitri with the typical Western therapy and self-help method of handling crises:
What makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that’s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.
[…]
In the midst of all the heavy dialogue with ourselves, open space is always there.
Another Buddhist concept at odds with our Western coping mechanisms is the Tibetan expression ye tang che. Chödrön explains its connotations, evocative of Camus’s insistence on the vitalizing power of despair:
The ye part means “totally, completely,” and the rest of it means “exhausted.” Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say “totally fed up.” It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope — that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be — we will never relax with where we are or who we are.
[…]
Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.
Decades after Simone de Beauvoir’s proclamation about atheism and the ultimate frontier of hope, Chödrön points out that at the heart of Buddhism’s approach is not the escapism of religion but the realism of secular philosophy. And yet these crude demarcations fail to capture the subtlety of these teachings. She clarifies:
The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there’s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
[…]
Hopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we’re going to make the journey with the hope of getting security… Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.
[…]
When inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself… In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things.
Only through such active self-compassion to our own darkness, Chödrön suggests, can we begin to offer authentic light to anybody else, to become a force of radiance in the world. She writes:
We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.
Complement the immensely grounding and elevating When Things Fall Apart with Camus on strength of character in times of trouble, Erich Fromm on what self-love really means, and Nietzsche on why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, then revisit Chödrön on the art of letting go.
Larken Rose introduces conversation points designed to teach voluntaryists/anarchists how to be far more effective in talking to their statist friends, co-workers, family members, etc., using techniques that, by taking into account the quirks and complexities of human psychology, give a far better chance of getting others to understand and accept the concepts of self-ownership, non-aggression, and a stateless society.
About this Author:
Larken Rose
Larken Rose is an outspoken, nationally known proponent of individual liberty, self-ownership and a voluntary society. He lives with his wife and daughter in eastern Pennsylvania and is the author of several books, include The Iron Web and How to be a Successful Tyrant, (The Megalomaniac Manifesto). He just completed another book, The Most Dangerous Superstition. Visit his website for more info (Larkenrose.com).
“…while 15 years ago he was ridiculed for his prophecies about natural disasters around the world…now he has a controversial new view about who really is running the world… that interview at the time, it changed everything for you, didn’t it?” — Wogan
“Well, it changed everything in the sense that I couldn’t walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at by most of the people. Going in a pub there was uproar. A comedian only had to say my name to get a laugh. And what that does, it reveals to you the level of immaturity that passes for adulthood in this country…which gave me a real insight…about how easy it is for the few to control the many…We humans have out-sheeped the sheep because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line.” — David Icke
The Wogan Interview Nobody Mentions — David Icke (Dec 30, 2016)
video & voice by Patrick Willis
poetry by Les Visible
originally published December 11, 2005
Malachi 3:10
Possibly the emotion I experience most often is gratitude. Sometimes it goes on for a length of time and I discover many other things in the process. It is as if Gratitude is a room, dimly lit. As you stand there your presence begins to emit more and more light and to reveal more and more of the contents of the room. Gratitude has attendants and handmaidens; joy, serenity, a feeling of awesome protection. I don’t notice these things initially. If my gratitude goes away too soon I do not see to the further reaches of the room. It takes a while for the dynamo to wind up and bring on the full orchestra of sights and sounds.
I’ve been in the presence of realized masters and it is evident to me, as it is to most people in the room, that there is something different about them. Probably one of the finest talents a person can acquire is to become a ‘trained observer’. In order to be a trained observer one needs to relinquish pre-conceived assumptions and natural prejudice because they taint the quality of your research. It could be said that when the gravity of our assumptions begins to outweigh our capacity to learn, then we no longer grow. Since growth is an imperative, pain enters the picture to offset that gravity. It’s apparent to me that many people have a higher pain threshold than I do. I can’t take it. Why should I? Why should I, when there are so many more refined stations of being than that of being whipped along the way?
So in watching masters and in reflecting afterwards; where real learning takes place …because you can’t always remain objective in overwhelming presence. I have come to a conclusion about the way they breathe. The state of our minds and our emotions affect the regularity and depth of our breath. Alternatively, the way we breathe affects the quality of our mind and emotions. So I think about gratitude when I am breathing in and out. I am grateful when I eat and I imagine the food as being divine substance. I have to do this. It is a matter of self defense. If I am not eating and breathing consciously then some other agency may be doing it for me. Thoughts like this appear delusional to some and the example of new age mandarins also work against credibility on the part of those who have seen the naked emperor.
These masters didn’t get where they are in an afternoon or at a weekend seminar. Of course these things are advertised; like the Thighmaster and those round cages that do your sit-ups for you. My favorites are the patches with the electrodes that stimulate the muscles and turn you into Adonis while you are watching TV. The slenderizer creams are pretty neat and so are the space suits that eventually return you to needing only one airline seat. I haven’t seen Shamoo’s magic crystal and wealth amulets but I know they are around even if Shamoo is going by another name now.
It comes down to work and there is where problem #1 gives birth to a lot of other problems and the discouraging catcalls from the peanut gallery of entropic recidivism. There must be an easier way. And this is where gratitude comes in. Gratitude takes the inertia and resistance out of the ride. Gratitude promotes an eager willingness. Gratitude makes it feel good. We’ve no problem engaging in the things we love to do. If we don’t love it then it becomes work. I work all day long every day, a lot more than eight hours. I don’t get paid for my work in the way most people do but I do get paid. I get paid in gratitude; in the increased capacity to feel gratitude.
Gratitude changes you. It changes the cells in your body and makes you flexible and young. It neutralizes anger. Most people aren’t aware that depression is the result of turning your anger inward; turning it upon yourself. Most people also don’t realize that much of their anger comes from their sense of being denied something they insist upon having; whether that is an object, a world view, someone’s attention or their right of way on the way to whatever it is that they want or wherever it is they wish to be. Gratitude makes all of that unnecessary. The more grateful you are the more reasons you are going to have to feel that way. This follows observable laws of physics. As above, so below; what you observe taking place here takes place everywhere, whether you can see it or not. This is one of the scientific truths about faith. We take things that are only mathematical theory as everyday fact. We are probably unaware of this but we do. Many people would be quite surprised to find that they regularly practice things that they firmly attest they do not believe in.
If you would simply practice feeling gratitude, breathing it in and out, you would rather quickly become enlightened; or, if you prefer, more enlightened. As good as it feels, why would you want it all at once? Shouldn’t the increase in the increments of bliss take forever? Gratitude is a pair of rose colored glasses and a certain biblical coat. That’s what I call haute couture. Why wear sunglasses in a dark room? Because when you are cool the sun is always shining.
I don’t know it beyond a ‘shadow’ of a doubt but I strongly suspect that this is what masters do when they breathe in and out. Of course it may be Love and it may be Peace or Compassion but the origin of every virtue is in the ineffable, just as the colors, pre-prism, are in the white light. There isn’t any spiritual thing that can’t be understood in a practical, scientific way …if you are so inclined.
Gratitude greases the wheels of movement into a better state of being. It is a sort of cosmic three-in-one oil. In this time of spiritual crisis you need all the help you can get. I do anyway. But none of this is relevant to my feelings of gratitude; merely attendant to them. I feel grateful because I am grateful. Of all the things that I could be engaged in, of all the people I could have been; see, even now parts of me are departing and I speak of myself as if I were in the past. Of all the things I could have, to have gratitude, well… that makes me a hundred times more grateful just thinking about it.
I feel held. I feel something inexpressible and the very best part is that I know I am not nearly grateful enough. No, I’m just playing at the margins of gratitude. Further on, the room changes into a world of music; the sounds of planets rubbing together, the liquid radiance of stars pouring into an empty cup and over-spilling beyond boundaries and limits. And this is only what I can imagine from the margins. This is only what I can see in the lens of imagination. Once again, science tells me that it moves beyond that. We know a great many things about the universe that we cannot see. How did we come to know these things? Scientific inquiry and tools adapted to the pursuit made it possible.
Thinking about this has had the result of making me even more grateful than I was and so the room has gotten larger. That’s good, because my gratitude makes me want to dance and sing and I need the extra room for that. Every breath of gratitude alters my cells some infinitesimal amount so that critical mass gets closer. This seems to tell me that, “It’s getting better all the time.” Will shadows fall? Sure… just as darkness will turn into light when darkness falls. Be grateful.
Cover image credit: jobertjamis23
by Cnawan Fahey, Ethereal Nature
February 26, 2015
A friend of mine posted this image on Facebook. Such a fantastic concept!
Which prompted me to share this thought:
“How cool would it be to create a “living cemetery” of these that is a Food Forest — could literally feed one’s descendants, and they would be fed by their ancestors… [see the link below for a description of a food forest]
Then someone else made this comment:
I like to think of me as a tree !!!
Which inspired me to write this little poem:
I like to think of me
as a tree ~
with roots sunk deep
into ancestral dreams
and ever nurtured
by the fecund earth
with a willing embrace
of this world of form.I like to think of me
as a tree ~
with branches reaching
toward what is to be
and ever enlivened
by the radiant sun
with a willing embrace
of the Élan Vital.I like to think of me
as a tree ~
transmuting
past into future
heaven into earth
energy into form
dwelling within
the omnipresent.
And as long as I’m dwelling upon thoughts of trees, it feels fitting to share this talk that I delivered at a 911 Tribute in 2005. (I was speaking in front of 3,000 people, and was so nervous that my knees were wobbling the entire time.)
As we begin our program this evening and prepare for the invocation, I would like to first bring everyone’s attention to the tree festooned with ribbons and streamers that stands to the west of the band shell. This is a Valley Forge American Elm, a testimony to survival – it is naturally resistant to Dutch Elm disease, and it has just been donated by area businesses to serve as a living memorial to all those who died in the attacks on September 11, 2001.
Throughout time, trees have always served as inspiring symbols, symbols of hope, of strength, of peace, and even the symbol of life itself. And in our country specifically, trees have been a symbol of the political principles that we treasure so deeply. The first Liberty Tree, located in Boston, was an Elm tree, just as this one is. The Sons of Liberty gathered and held their meetings in the shade of its branches. They flew their banners from its branches. In time, all 13 colonies each had their own Liberty Tree, which served as rallying places for the ideals of the American Revolution.
The original Liberty Elm in Boston was cut down by British soldiers, as an act of war, in 1775. The last of those original 13 Liberty trees to die was in Maryland, in 1999. It died as a result of a hurricane.
So in trees we see living symbols of our guiding principles, and we also see how those principles might be lost. We find ourselves gathered here this evening with two events in our minds and in our hearts – one, an act of war, 4 years ago, the other, a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina, mere days ago. Both of these events have presented our country with immense suffering and sorrow. Both of these events have presented us with immense challenges. They have challenged us to respond in a fashion that maintains and upholds the democratic principles that we hold so dearly, “that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
It has been said that the true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit – to plant trees for generations that are yet to come. The founding fathers and mothers of this country planted many trees, in the principles they fought for and the institutions they created. We benefit from these trees which they planted so long ago. And so it is now our turn to plant trees. Thus, tonight we dedicate this Elm tree, as a living memorial, as a testimony to survival, as sign of hope for healing and peace. May we also plant trees of principles and institutions that will shelter and serve generations yet to come.
http://www.beaconfoodforest.org
The goal of the Beacon Food Forest is to design, plant and grow an edible urban forest garden that inspires our community to gather together, grow our own food and rehabilitate our local ecosystem.
A food forest is a gardening technique or [Permaculture] land management system, which mimics a woodland ecosystem by substituting edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals. Fruit and nut trees make up the upper level, while berry shrubs, edible perennials and annuals make up the lower levels. The Beacon Food Forest will combine aspects of native habitat rehabilitation with edible forest gardening.
by Cnawan Fahey, Ethereal Nature
December 28, 2014
Since the darkest of nights
the sun has not shone
overcast days
for overcast hearts
when at last the pale shroud lifts
that first ray of hope pierces the sky
as sifting through the ash
a glowing coal resurrected
from the bon fire of surrender
the sun emerges embryonic
from the womb of the earth
breathe into the spark
of one’s own inner sun
kindle this ember
coax it to waken
breath after breath
it burns brighter and brighter
breath after breath
it burns brighter and brighter
Tonight I am pondering some things I ponder quite often.
Things such as seeing all relationships as mirrors of oneself…
gratefulness for all of life — everything, without exception…
forgiveness of myself as a participant in all the pain that has ever existed in this realm…
returning to love again and again — and the way we get when we are disconnected from that love…
the great need we have for one another, and so on.
As I pondered, I stumbled into reading some Hafiz poetry which lifted my heart and called me to see from heaven’s viewpoint. Here are a few that I found myself reading again and again.
~ Kathleen
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is the cash you need.
All the other kinds of silver really buy just strange things.
Everything has its music.
Everything has genes of God inside.
But learn from those courageous addicted lovers
of glands and opium and gold —
Look, they cannot jump high or laugh long
when they are whirling.
And the moon and the stars become sad
when their tender light is used for night wars.
Forgiveness is part of the treasure you need
to craft your falcon wings
And return to your true realm
of Divine freedom.~Hafiz, in The Subject Tonight is Love, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
I Know The Way You Can Get
I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one’s self.O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love’s
Hands.That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering God,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love!~Hafiz, in I Heard God Laughing – Renderings of Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
A Great Need
Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.~Hafiz, in The Subject Tonight is Love, translated by Daniel Ladinsky
by Zen Gardner
August 23, 2013
We appear to currently be in a kind of vortex, or a roiling series of etheric vortexes and scattered eddies of changing, swirling currents, carrying newly manifesting energetics as well as debris of all types, sizes and dimensions.
It’s wonderful exciting energy but it can be disconcerting at the same time.
We need to be careful to dodge the spiraling flak while maneuvering into and even reveling in the energetic vortex. It’s nothing to fear as long as we’re aware of what’s going on around us and stay on our toes. The changes are changing and the winds are picking up.
A great time for letting go – but it will not be a pleasant ride for those who refuse to loosen their grip.
While this may seem “spacey” and weird to those not picking up on these new vibrations, this may explain the strange feelings many of you are having. But I’m convinced this is what is going on right now.
I’m certainly experiencing it and from what I’m hearing, it’s happening to a lot of people. People are wondering, “Why did I lose my job”, or “How come things just aren’t working out as I thought or hoped they would?” “Why this terrible issue with my dying relative?”
Easy.
The Universe is giving opportunities for change by nudgingly trying to change entire paradigms in our lives. And the only way to experience what Universe has for us is letting go into it and letting go of all the trappings. Old hangups, outdated understandings, wrong attachments, etc. Love is all inclusive, as well as all dissolving.
The fog in the heart must go.
And that takes commitment. Changing friends, locations, means of provision, trusting your new awake outlook, and…telling the truth. It means not going along anymore with the Lie and letting go of old habits and frames of reference. It’s imperative if we want to move on to the good stuff. Things are coming at us fast and furious and from strange directions so it’s get with the program or get knocked out of the game.
Once you get into it it’s like dodge ball in dance class with your fellow psychedelic mariners! A laughing, riotous mishmash of fun and creativity!
There’s a sense of movement and disorientation but there’s a stillness at the same time. Many are also having profound psychic or spiritual experiences; floods of dreams, waves of spiritual intuitions, rapidly changing emotions or sensations for no reason….and perhaps spiritual revealings and even visitations of varying sorts.
Those getting the heavier doses of these experiences know what I’m talking about. It’s nothing to fear. Draw close to Source most of all but also loved ones, share what you’re going through with those you love and trust.
And let go.
And get to where you can dance to it. We can interact very consciously and poetically to anything and everything. The challenge is the changing tides of change coming at us right now. There’s not very much regularity, rhyme or reason, yet we feel called into the vortex despite the seeming chaos.
Actually, there is no choice as far as entering into the vortex. It’s here, like a massive, morphing yet loving spiritual hurricane. To handle it consciously and grow with it is the key.
The weather often parallels these changes for me. This inspiration came while weird gusting winds were blowing around our home and area, which they’ve done for days. In fact, in general the weather just feels different to me, like that expression “something’s in the air” – and it’s not just chemtrails and radiation, obvious assaults on human connectivity to consciousness.
Something wonderful this way cometh! But it ain’t anything we’ve seen before. And that’s a good thing!
So why not dive in and make an interactive dance out of it? Spiritual yoga, tai chi or a host of other rhythmic conscious disciplines. A perfect solution for releasing your ki and tuning into the essence as the changes whirl about you.
How beautiful to behold!
I’m just trying to lay out these etheric sensations that appear to parallel the increasingly nonsensical changes we’re witnessing. Hopefully it helps others grasp the nature of this experience, bu more importantly to help many people know they’re not alone in all of this. We’re all together here, and we have others involved in this apparent transcendence working and manifesting at many levels.
Be aware, awake, and awash in love and the innate knowledge that all is ultimately well and under control. We are unstoppable infinite consciousness. Bottom line. Stand with conviction, spiritual warriors.
But we have to do our part. More than ever. Never negate or minimize our role. There’s a type of cosmic directive that pivots on the state of conscious awakening and our response to it. That might sound a little strange, but responding consciously is our daily commitment and lesson in life. Just floating down river with all the flotsam and jetsam is not living consciously. Think of the receding tsunami in Japan and all it carried and that’s what the world is currently experiencing – a massive backwash of debris that’s heading out to sea.
To the conscious mariners who have prepared it’s game on. And we’ll be busy trying to awaken and rescue anyone we can.
What’s exciting is the spontaneity of our shared experience. We are encountering a time in our evolution that has perhaps never been experienced before. While the world may currently seem strictly suicidal in nature in the context of our current Machiavellian rulers’ agenda and their reign of terror, there is something wonderful happening at the same time that is much more profound.
There are many lessons to be gleaned during our stay here that are invaluable for eternity.
Number one: Our true state of being and who we are. The realization of our potential is the ultimate answer.
I realize finding our way is not a process that can easily be explained. We don’t clearly know where we are or where we came from other than by intuitive understanding and some pieces of difficult to find research. But one thing massive that we do know: we are conscious awareness discovering itself. That in itself is enough for the conscious voyager to keep going and experiencing.
Following that is truly manifesting…with great and profound assurance that we are the living and loving answer. Just as we are. We’re each becoming the world to be, as it already is, and we should continue do so with complete confidence and authority.
What beauty we have the privilege to live and participate in, no matter what the circumstances. Our lives during these temporal events are filled with wonder, excitement and change – expected in some cases, and unexpected in most. If we fearfully resist what’s swirling around us and drawing us into new realms of realization and experience we’ll only meet serious disappointment, followed by sadness, angst and frustration.
That’s exactly why our state of mind and heart and living in a higher vibrational state has become imperative. When we release our old ways in order to embrace the unknown with an attitude of trust and wonder it becomes the ride of a lifetime.
Dance with it! Let go consciously with spiritual awareness and enter in! Look around, find your way, make wise decisions, detach from attachments, and don’t be afraid, even if it seems to get a bit “freaky”.
We’re in this together. They try to make us feel alone but we are all connected. We always have been and we always will be – because we always are!
I’m having my own wild and wonderful experiences I’m currently tapping into – although it can be a bit daunting when these new spiritual sensations arise and manifest I’m having a blast. But hey – would you really refuse a ticket out of here that’s clearly a path to a wonderful new world of experience that can be shared with any and all?
Take all this on as you feel led. But most of all….turn it into a powerful, consciously aware dance!
We are all entering into new horizons of living consciousness, and should utilize and enjoy it!
Much love and empowerment to you all.
Keep on “wondering” and dancing to the tunes of the Universe….Zen
“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.”
― Rumi
by Adam Abraham, Phaelosopher
October 29, 2012
Excerpts from A Grand Time for Lovefulness
I don’t know about you, but in spite of all the perfectly valid reasons to be fearful about:
This is a GRAND time.
While I’m sure there are many who would beg to differ, It’s a grand time to be alive, present on Earth at this time in her history. Imagine, for a moment, that you have the power to re-create it in any way you want; what changes would you make in the world to make it a better place?
You need not tell me or anyone else your answer. Just imagine it sincerely, and love it into existence.
While I’m sure there are many who would beg to differ, It’s a grand time to be alive, present on Earth at this time in her history. Imagine, for a moment, that you have the power to re-create it in any way you want; what changes would you make in the world to make it a better place?
You need not tell me or anyone else your answer. Just imagine it sincerely, and love it into existence.
[…]
We are not, never have been, nor will we ever be the vehicle that is the physical body, itself a macrocosm to an ocean of microorganisms.
At death, for a final time, we “exit” the body through a stargate that is used over the entire course of the earthly lifetime while the body is in the state called “sleep.”
The stargate’s molecular form is the pineal gland. This gives new meaning to the idea of entering the “temple.”The only difference between our nightly sleep-time exit and final body dissociation is that at the final departure, the cord that persists during the physical lifetime between our Immortal Essence and the physical body, is cut.
[…]
The time for the end of the grand charade is nigh, not because “they” are ready to let you see, but because sufficient numbers of you are ready to know and live in truth.
What does knowing and living in truth mean? It means loving love enough to be it yourself under all circumstances, toward all people. It means loving peace enough to embrace it yourself under all circumstances, toward all people.
A loving, peaceful person becomes a harmless person. And while the “powers that were” would have you think that the only way to protect yourself from harm is to “bare arms,” as in weapons of harm and destruction, becoming harmless actually invokes a much more effective power, in the form of your own force field.
[…]
Our relationship to plasma, and more importantly, its ability work on our behalf, is largely unknown, and rarely consciously observed.
Better we think that we need guns to protect us, when in fact, a plasma field around us and within has been protecting us all along, that is, when we’re not believing in, or thinking of harmful methods so deeply as to bring harm to ourselves.
What we seek, we’ll find. What we fear will appear.
[…]
Fearlessness is not the same as Lovefulness. One can be fearless, while lacking wisdom. The loveful are wise. The loveful will melt hostilities because they value and respect the life, sovereignty, and kindredness of themselves with ALL of creation, whether “born” on Earth, or in the Heavens.
by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, 13th century Sufi mystic & poet
Don’t Sell Out to Fit In
A Parable
by Alan Cohen
A fellow once went to Zumbach the tailor to be fitted for a new suit of clothes. After Zumbach altered the suit, the man stood in front of the mirror to check the fit. At first glance he noticed that the suit jacket’s right arm sleeve was rather short, and too much of his wrist was showing. “Say, Zumbach,” the fellow noted, “This sleeve looks a little short. Would you please lengthen it?”
“The sleeve is not too short,” replied the tailor. “Your arm is too long…Just pull your arm back a few inches and you will see that the sleeve fits perfectly.”
The man withdrew his arm a bit, and the sleeve was matched with his wrist. But this movement rumpled the upper portion of the jacket. “Now the nape of the collar is several inches above my neck,” he protested.
“There’s nothing wrong with the collar,” Zumbach insisted. “Your neck is too low. Lift the back of your neck and the jacket will fit well.”
The customer raised his neck a few inches, and sure enough the collar rounded it where it was supposed to. But now there was another problem: the bottom of the jacket rested high above his seat. “Now my whole rear end is sticking out!” the man complained.
“No problem,” Zumbach returned. “Just lift up your rear end so that it fits under the jacket.”
Again the customer complied, which left his body in a very contorted posture. But Zumbach had convinced him that the problem was not with the suit, but him. So he paid the tailor for the suit and walked out of the shop in a most awkward position, struggling to keep all parts of the suit in their right places.
On the street he encountered two women who were walking in the opposite direction. After they had passed, one woman turned to the other and commented, “That poor man is really crippled!”
“He sure is,” the other replied. “But that suit looks fabulous on him.”
Our families, friends, schools, religions, and society prescribe many suits for us to wear. Some of them fit and many don’t. If a job, relationship, living situation, or spiritual path does not match you, others may try to convince you that you have a problem. A good, strong, wise, devoted, or mature person, they tell you, should be able to stay in this position and even enjoy it. Yet if such an arrangement does not bring you happiness, you only cripple yourself by trying to stuff yourself into it. Your problem is not that you cannot live up to the standard you have chosen; your problem is that you cannot live up to a standard others have chosen for you. You will never walk comfortably in an ill-fitting suit prescribed by a shortsighted tailor. Your inability to adapt is not a sign of your weakness, but the strength of your inner guidance to remind you where your passion lives. So what you thought was wrong with you may be what’s actually right with you.
When Dave Barry was in junior high school, he was the class clown and often got into trouble for cracking jokes during lessons. Dave’s teacher scolded him, “You’d better get to work, Dave Barry — you can’t joke your way through life, you know.”
Now, forty years later, Dave Barry is the most successful humor writer in America. With many popular books to his credit, he writes the most widely syndicated humor column in American newspapers. Oh, yes — along the way he won the Pulitzer Prize.
The junior high school teacher was way off the mark. Dave Barry is joking his way through life, and doing quite well at it. He is bringing laughter to millions of people, helping them lighten up about their difficulties, and earning a hefty income. What he was told was very wrong with him was very right indeed.
No one knows your passion and purpose better than you do, and no one has to live with the results of your choices more than you do. That is why you must be very honest about what fits you and what doesn’t. Seminar participants often ask me, “How can I find out what is my life purpose or passion?” I tell them, “Begin to tell the impeccable truth about how everything you do feels. Is it a fit or is it not? Be true to your inclinations on the little decisions, such as where you go to dinner and with whom. When your daily decisions reflect your intentions, you will discover the big picture for your life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson noted, “To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying, ‘Amen’ to what the world tells that you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.” Keep your soul alive, and you will be amazed at how easily and naturally your body, relationships, prosperity, career, and entire life follow.